by Don Jacobson
If only we can get there in time. Campbell must have at least one more miracle left in his bag of tricks, even though it has been sorely depleted by these infernal pitched battles with die-hard black helmets. Will this war never end?
Robard caught sight of a pair of headlights cutting through the overnight mist. The MPs had waited, idling along the side of the road against this eventuality. Robard remembered that the Jeep was equipped with a 50-caliber mount that could easily riddle both him and Schiller with half-inch holes if the private manning the weapon got nervous. But, Denis could not release the wheel to flash the pre-arranged recognition signal. He would have to count on the fact that the sergeant would overlook that missing element and connect on the fact that a car noisily racing down the mountain was not trying to sneak past and effect an escape.
Robard grimly hissed between clenched teeth as the gap closed between the two utility vehicles, “Just remember that if you die, your Lizzy will kill me. And, if she doesn’t punch my ticket, my Letty surely will close out my account!”
The surprised faces of the two Americans flashed brightly as one of the KW’s headlights caught their features. The three-striper reacted first, playing a spotlight that lit the cab of the tub car as it flew by. Instantly recognizing Robard and seeing that Schiller was badly injured, the sergeant grabbed the microphone dangling by his right leg. Radioing ahead, he alerted the guards to clear a path straight to the base hospital. Then he hauled the Jeep in a gravel-blasting U-turn and chased after the other car.
The remaining klicks passed quickly—barely more than four minutes were required—and without any further violent bounds as the road moved from a water-worn bare track to packed gravel and then new tarmac. Shepherded closely by the Jeep, the Kübelwagen flashed beneath the raised barrier, roared onto the base past the original barracks erected in 1892,[xxx] and skidded to a stop by the double doors leading to the infirmary’s Emergency Ward.
A grim-faced burly redhead dressed in the pristine white uniform of a chief surgeon supervised two orderlies who gently lifted Schiller from his carmine drenched seat and placed him on a wheeled cart. A stolid nurse, her greying hair telling a tale of years spent bringing men back from the precipice, slashed the wounded man’s right sleeve and jabbed his arm with a needle trailing from a tube leading down from a bottle of plasma held high by a third orderly. Robard raced around the front end of the still vibrating car, its engine spluttering and smoking from the past half hour’s abuse. He grabbed the doctor’s arm and shot a worried inquiring look into the other man’s eyes.
Dr. Campbell growled, “Nae now, son. As my bless’d grandfather would’a said, ‘ther’s a wee bit ‘o hard work yet ta be done.’ But, my family’s been sewing up yours for more’n a century, so we got some experience.
“I’ll do my best and will let ye ken when I myself ken more. But, ye’d best be prepared for the worst, though I think we can hope for the best. Young Schiller is his father’s son. There was a strong man from what my Gramps tol’ me, standing up ‘side the Countess that day. Our Mr. Schiller’ll have ancestors workin’ ta keep the boy ‘mongst the livin’, I think.
“Now are you going ta get on the blower and call the Earl an’ your da’? Best they not be getting’ the news from lips other ‘n yours. Then I suggest y’ud be wise to hie ta my office where your cousin has been eating th’ upholstery.”
With a swirl of his gown, Campbell turned and strode into his surgery.
Longbourn Estate, Hertfordshire, August 1, 1947
The late afternoon storm had rumbled its way off to the northeast leaving behind bright green, freshly mowed lawns surrounding the ancient manor house. The building’s central wing had been especially situated nearly three centuries earlier by a master and mistress looking across the Mimram Valley from the raised seat of their rented carriage. The couple, he of nut-brown complexion and she of the milkiest of sun-protected skin, had enjoyed the way the setting sun dipped behind the Chiltern up-thrust and had desired to enjoy that view over the anticipated decades of their residence as newly-minted gentry. Now, some 250-odd years later, Longbourn’s window-punctuated western front glistened as the droplet-dappled ivy overgrowth reflected Sol’s rays, brightened in their passage through an atmosphere swept clean of the noxious fumes of an industrial age.
A carriage, most assuredly an anachronism in this age of automobiles, turned off the lane shielded from the mid-summer swelter by stands of sentinel oaks and transited between the great granite pillars before moving onto the grey and white river stone drive leading up to the home’s front portico. No footman raced out to greet it, rather the driver hopped down from his box to open the door and lower the step. This lack of hospitality played poorly with the watcher looking down from a window opening onto the living quarters. That omission, that clear evidence of poor household management, rankled; for such would never have happened under her guidance. That laxness also served to confirm in her mind the fixed sentiment that something was not according to Hoyle.
She observed her husband, wearing a suit cut in an island style favoring lighter colors with a lightweight topcoat, tan waistcoat, and matching wide-drop trousers, step down from the vehicle. She snickered as he planted his straw plantation hat atop his thinning thatch of greying brownish hair. He suddenly glanced up toward where he knew her to be. He raised his right hand in greeting before striding up the weathered limestone steps and into the house. As he vanished from her view, she turned away from the portal and crossed to a workspace where she settled into an overstuffed armchair to await his ascent to her cell.
For his part, if he had known of her feelings, Thomas Bennet would have told his spouse that her discontent with the situation was matched…and likely exceeded…by his own. Bennet’s naturally somber and introspective mood, having become progressively browner over the past two weeks as one revelation after another impacted him, turned inward as he placed his summer straw on the table adjacent to the front entry.
This had been a day of contrasts for the venerable Master of Longbourn. Awakening early as he had for nearly every day of his four-and-fifty years, Bennet had bid his wife farewell before softly turning the key in the lockset gracing the white enameled oak door, thus confining her to her chambers. Then he had mounted the waiting chaise for the brief transit to a small warehouse/stable located off Meryton’s High Street where the coach and its equine power plant were to be hidden away.
Swiftly peeling off togs that could have been made by his own Meryton tailor, Bennet donned a lightweight tan linen double-breasted suit appropriate for the humidity that bedeviled Town during the summer months. A nameless assistant had easily knotted the patterned silk necktie beneath the starched collar of a shirt that hugged his middle-aged frame in a manner unlike any other he had ever possessed. That same serious-faced attendant handed him his double-belted leather briefcase and his snow-white Panama hat graced with a black silk hatband. Then Bennet dropped into the backseat of a non-descript maroon Rover 16 saloon for the twenty-mile drive to the Bennet Family Trust.
On this first Friday of the month, he had hoped to meet with his grandson to sort out Mrs. Bennet’s status. However, the moment the Founder stepped off the lift from the subterranean garage, he found himself amid a maelstrom of activity. Earnest young men and women, many of them bearing that distinctive mark of Bennet Eyes, hurried along the corridors before swiftly vanishing behind frosted glass doors to the sound of ringing bells and raised voices.
A curious Bennet handed his case and hat to his assigned factotum, a young fellow by the name of Annesley, and continued past his office to the Managing Director’s suite, two doors down the portrait-lined hallway. Earl Thomas’ personal private secretary, Mr. Hastings, was so busy that he barely looked up from his telephone and notepad. He simply waved Bennet on through in response to his elder’s raised eyebrow and nod toward the great double doors.
Stepping inside, Bennet came upon a scene of
controlled chaos. At the center of the cloud of bobbing and weaving men stood Earl Thomas Fitzwilliam. He was poring over a map of Western Europe unrolled across the expanse of his mahogany worktable. From time-to-time an assistant passed a document to him. Fitzwilliam absorbed it and either scrawled his initials in red pencil indicating his approval or muttered a quick instruction. That act caused another lieutenant to bend over one of many telephones—Thomas had learned the purpose of that miraculous device early on—arrayed on shelves and tables around the margins of the spacious chamber.
Coming up to the desk opposite the aristocrat, Bennet simply extended his right hand until his own signet ring moved into his Doppelgänger’s field of vision. Matlock froze and quickly looked up into his grandfather’s hazel eyes. His steel grey orbs swiftly refocused on London rather than a map coordinate located somewhere between the Jura and Alps upon which his finger rested.
Loath to give away too much about either the present or the past in front of a rapidly mutating audience, the Managing Director elliptically addressed Bennet, “You will have to forgive me, Mr. Bennet, I realize that we had an appointment today. However, we encountered a situation in the early hours this morning —a state of affairs that has necessarily demanded ‘all-hands-on-deck.’ I regret that I will have to ask if we might defer our meeting until next week.”
The Earl paused, considering his next words carefully, and then continued with a knowing look at his ancestor.
“Perhaps, if you can find a way to soothe Mrs. Bennet’s concerns, we could all enjoy the privacy of our Beach House. The Five Families traditionally spend August in Deauville en famille …both present and past. The last time we had a visitor from your branch of the family was exactly 40 years ago.[xxxi]
“I imagine that your wife would find sea bathing a pleasant experience. And she could meet all her relations.
“Perhaps you might finish up that which you were working upon this morning and make an early day of it? Send a wire to Hastings or Annesley with your decision. They will be able to coordinate travel arrangements.”
With that last statement, the Earl bowed back over his work, effectively dismissing Bennet from his ken.
Chapter X
Thomas had retreated to his own chamber and stood gazing out the window toward where the Thames split the city in twain. He remained thus for maybe five minutes, emulating Lizzy’s beloved husband by holding one clenched fist behind him in the small of his back as he mulled possibilities. If the Earl had observed him, he would have immediately recalled his mother’s famous reveries.
However, considerations of Darcy or Kitty were as remote from Bennet’s mind as his body was from the Prince Regent and Carlton House. The Founder’s thoughts were weighty, indeed, and involved his faith in the woman he had married…not as she had been from 1800 to 1811, but rather the one she had grown into after the girls had wed.
Then he had grunted assent with himself, having arrived at the only possible conclusion. Within minutes, he was back in the Rover and headed back out of Town on the road to Meryton.
As the brief journey unwound along the crumbling greyish tarmac—his driver had explained that road was suffering the results of six years of wartime overuse and two years of national bankruptcy following victory—Bennet continued to organize his thoughts.
Unlike some men of his immediate acquaintance, those who moved softly through the carpeted corridors of the Trust’s offices in Lincoln’s Inn and were engaged in Lord Thomas’ other endeavor, Bennet was uncomfortable with prevarication and, like his son Darcy, abhorred disguise in any form. What he had offered to Mrs. Bennet as a plausible explanation for their combined presence in this world was pure fantasy. He had accepted it as a necessary untruth to protect both the Wardrobe and his wife’s sensibilities.
Fanny, my dear, you were discovered wandering about the garden in your night rail. You had come down with a frightening fever. But, we never could determine if the illness that caused your delirium was the result of something communicated to you from a visitor to Meryton whom you encountered on one of your visits there with Lydia or something more local in origin. Since so little was known about the source and nature of your ailment, I decided to protect our daughter and sent Lydia off to stay with Lizzy and Darcy at Pemberley.
Mr. Jones surely despaired of your survival. Once you, brave girl that you are, had fought past the worst of the malady, we discovered that your memory had been profoundly affected. You recognized nobody…neither the Hills nor myself. In fact, it has only been in the past few days that you have shown an awareness that I am your husband of five-and-twenty years. All else has remained obscured.
That story had worked well for the two weeks since their relocation from the Wardrobe’s sanctuary in Matlock House. However, Thomas knew that his wife was not a simpleton. On the contrary, she already had been slyly probing the walls built into the tale.
“How long was I insensible?”
“Why is it that I do not recognize my own clothing?”
“My tea does not taste like the Longbourn blend that my brother created.”
And so on.
Ah, Thomas thought, as Robert Burns expounded
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy![xxxii]
And, so it is with us here at Longbourn, the Bennets of the Wardrobe.
The extended presence of Frances Lorinda Bennet in this proximate present was a complication that Bennet had not contemplated when he carried her across the library a fortnight… and 133 years…ago. His plan, seemingly well-crafted to avoid any untoward hiccoughs, fell apart as no plan survives contact with the enemy or in this case, the Wardrobe.[xxxiii]
Rousing himself now as he stood in his…yes, as long as I live, no matter the date, I will always see Longbourn as mine…front hall, Bennet smiled wryly as he recalled another famous saying. As with much that he had learned over the past several days, this, too, brought both a smile to his lips and a tear to his eye.
Members of the Five Families often bandied about a cautionary tale, one that was attributed to the famous Dowager Countess of Matlock, Lydia Fitzwilliam, who had been a force to be reckoned with in Victorian drawing rooms. Whenever a young Family member would joke about the powers of the Wardrobe in the grand lady’s hearing, the Dowager would reach out and fasten the miscreant’s arm in her right hand’s iron grip—for her left was made of deeply polished oak—and fix her luminous emerald green eyes upon a paling visage. Then she would utter in a voice better suited to an old-time Dissenter Preacher forecasting eternal damnation to his congregation, “Child, you know not of what you speak. The Wardrobe has a particularly nasty sense of humor. Trust me, I know!”
Such was the case in this here/now. Bennet had planned a brief sojourn in the company of his fourth daughter, the Countess. With a somnolent Fanny firmly planted in a Bath chair, he would have engineered a meeting with Kitty in a chamber that would have been devoid of any indicators attesting to the where/when. Then, after the administration of another dose of laudanum or whatever was medically sound in the timeframe, he would bear his unconscious wife back through the portal and home to Longbourn. She would surely attribute visions of the journey to her weariness and account them as pleasant dreams, much as Lizzy eventually had done after she had tumbled into the Longbourn bookroom back in the Year One after her own visit with the Countess.[xxxiv]
Reflections, though, would not lead to solutions. Bennet had to deal with the world as it was, not the way he had thought it might have been…or wished that it could be. There, gently incarcerated in the Mistress’ chambers above his head, was the mother of his children, Frances Lorinda Bennet.
The fever story could not survive much longer, and he was faced with a single option based upon what he had discovered both within and without himself. The knowledge of the manner of his daughter’s demise had awakened an emotion that he hims
elf had never felt before…yet his wife had always known in her own breast based upon her staunch defense of each of her five girls…a parent’s righteous anger at a wrong committed against his child. And, that fury had at first smoldered and then blazed, consuming much of the indolent fodder he had spent a decade scattering about his soul.
He was resolved to remain in this time until Kitty had been avenged. But, he could not keep Fanny drugged to the gills for the months or years that would be required to fulfill his mission. Worry about his wife would detract from his quest.
Bennet also recognized that he while he would necessarily mount his operation with the aid of the Trust and Fitzwilliam’s organization, he could not venture forth without a partner equally committed to seeing justice done. There was only one candidate. And that filled him with a powerful resolve.
Here in the middle years of the 20th Century, the superfine of the newly tailored, but archaically patterned, suit hugged his frame with a fit he had never achieved with his Meryton cloth cutter. He looked down at his hand resting next to the wide-brimmed sunhat so recently deposited on the hall table. Then he glanced upward along the staircase that had been the center of Bennet life since the early 1690s.
His wife awaited him past the top tread and slightly off to the right in the sunny corner suite she had occupied all the years of their marriage. He began the climb toward a session that would change the flow of time itself.
Chapter XI
A gentle knock presaged Thomas’ entry into her room. She could not help but notice his well-shaped shoulders—and his modest paunch—as her husband crossed the threshold. Mrs. Bennet also apprehended that he did not close the door behind him: the first time since this unusual situation had begun. She rose from her chair in recognition of the apparent change in her status. She assayed the man she had previously thought to know well, but was questioning now, having revealed a mysterious side to the bookish mien he had normally assumed.
