by Don Jacobson
Swiftly pushing those thoughts aside, Bennet gently guided Fanny’s hands away from inside his waistcoat and into her lap. He did not release them, but rather imprisoned them between his larger pair.
Never much of a narrative speaker, Mr. Bennet did outshine any of his previous efforts—with Jane, Lizzy, and Mary—as he began to relate the story of the Wardrobe later immortalized by 19th Century Bennet descendants as The Keeper’s Talk. Yet, neither the speaker nor the listener knew it as such.
The Keeper, for such he still was as the title, honor, and burden was only ever relinquished at death, wisely recalled that every Bennet who ever had been settled in the Longbourn bookroom by his or her father on the day of their majority was as innocent of understanding as was Mrs. Bennet. While he might choose to keep Lydia in ignorance when she became one-and-twenty, much as his Grandfather Richard had resolved to never reveal the wonders of the Wardrobe to his middle child, Maude, because of her alliance with the Collins family, Thomas decided to trust his newfound sense of Fanny’s stability.
He also reasoned that a promise made by one man to another…that of his Great-great grandfather to Gibbons…in the late 17th Century might well be reviewed and revised in the mid-20th Century.
That will, I imagine, demand a meeting of the Life Trustees of the Trust.
With that decision by The Founder, the tale unspooled itself beneath the boughs of Oakham’s trees. Bennet quietly related the history in the same tones his own father had used with him back in the mid-80s. While he did not have the documents that had long served as proofs, for these had vanished from the slender drawer secreted in the Longbourn bookroom’s great work table, he described them to Mrs. Bennet.
Fanny could sense the enormity of what was being revealed by her husband. The way his eyes bored into her soul convinced her that he was sharing information known only to a select few. This was no tidbit of idle gossip suitable for re-transmission over tea and cakes in the Philips parlor. While sensational, there was nothing salacious in his dissertation. Instead she could see the potent currents marshaled by the Wardrobe…on behalf of what greater purpose she could not know.
Her inner being trembled, feeling much as she did when she had first heard Tom offer for her hand in ‘89. The surge was palpable. True, there was excitement; however, there was an even deeper sentiment of the honor being paid her. This remarkable sharing was beyond anything with which he had graced her in a quarter century of marriage.
However pleasurable was the understanding that Bennet trusted her with this monumental secret, a sense of disquiet grew the closer he came to the present. By the time he had turned to the events of late 1811, the great wash of knowing threatened to overwhelm her. She bolted to her feet, momentarily cutting off her husband’s story; she could no longer sit still. Not that she wished to flee, but the need to move as if in sympathy with the five-and-seventy-year translation undertaken by her fourth daughter became paramount.
Buried deep within Bennet’s relation of the history of Catherine Marie Bennet Fitzwilliam, the Countess of Matlock, rested an enormous but. The pain of its potentiality was not assuaged by the knowledge that, in addition to Lizzy’s and Jane’s babes, she had grandchildren and great-grandchildren from Kitty to dandle on her knee should she choose to know them.
Fanny wrapped her arms around her middle knowing without hearing that the next stage in Kitty’s progression from young girl to elderly lady could be only to one final sad stepping stone.
I will not wail. I will not! I will maintain my composure. Tom does not need a watering pot, let alone a cracked one, to put the lie to his confidence in me.
Pulling in great draughts of air tinged with the hillside’s prevalent greenish traces, Mrs. Bennet tipped her head back and focused on the leaves gracing a solitary twig about eight feet above her head. The soft green of the semi-translucent oak leaves varied as the zephyr passing over the site shifted them from side to side in the sunlight. The torrent that had earlier rushed from her head down through her heels subsided. The deeper her concentration on the leaves became, the less the outside world impinged upon her consciousness. Her husband’s voice receded into the background, not into unintelligibility, but rather in its dominating importance.[liv]
She still understood that which he was saying; the words, though, simply had lost their power over her.
Her eyes drifted shut as she slid down through the layers of noise that had impeded her mentalitée until she arrived at a space so familiarly quiet that an ineffable sense of peace flooded over her. T’was then that she felt the other…one particularly familiar in her ancient comfort yet having not been called upon for decades.
Is it you? I thought you had abandoned me.
>could not rise past lace, children, confusion, anger, fear
Why now?
The form/not form/color/arc shot throughout the vault, as if rejoicing in its liberation. In its passage, a calming smoothed the matte surface that was the slate of her inner being.
>exagoras agapis[lv]
Exagoras agapis? What is that? From where did it come?
>the love that redeems
>given you by the Bennet, grasped by your soul
>the desire to be the better version of self
But why now?
>Founder needs you, your strength. but I cannot…
>too new…draw closer for help
At this, a great china-blue strand whipped across the field. With dread, Fanny observed a night black blade drop and cleave it in twain. One portion shriveled and vanished, the other floated, unanchored.
>take it
As the viable strand passed into her possession, she was surrounded by dunes covered with carpets of roses…of all colors. The sound of the sea swished in her core, and she sensed another approaching, sweeping down from behind the crest of the sandy mounds. Then all sound was cast in the richest of green hues.
>mother Gardiner-Bennet
Do I know you?
>i am of yours…not the Countess, but her guide…here for moment.
Are you suggesting that you are “neither Kitty nor Kate” but are like mine, but hers?
>yes…ask…
Where is my girl?
>…not here…gone out, above plane…ask
What happened to her?
>blackness…around…suddenness…noise…pressure…release
What???
>
The flower? There are no roses that bloom in winter.
>truth…browned canes…waiting pruning…even now…black flower.
>rosa chinensis will triumph…ask
Rosa Chinensis like what I introduced from Mama’s garden into Longbourn’s?
>…Gardiner is mother bush from which all Bennet roses bloom…
>…Founder cannot succeed without the rosa merytonensis…
>…help him, mama…ma…ma………..ma….
A great wind arose and swept the emerald filament off into infinity…and silence resumed.
A tear slid down from beneath a closed lid as Mrs. Bennet realized that, for all the abuse and disquiet she had absorbed over four-and-ten years in the wilderness, she was the missing link.
Chapter XVI
Bennet had slowly ground to a halt as his wife had subsided into a deep silence; no tears, no protestations, just a gentle rise and fall of her shoulders as she slowly breathed. He had brought his story to 1944’s mid-summer days. He had yet to reach those awful final moments before he realized that Mrs. Bennet was attending to something other than he.
He waited, but not for long.
Then she turned to face him and dropped back onto the trunk by his side.
She queried in a low tone, “Tom, are you known as ‘The Founder?’ T’is an unusual styling, and I have not heard it before, but I have just had the most remarkable experience. So, please tell me.”
Bennet took her question in stride, wondering at the source of her knowledge, but he did not hesitate.
&
nbsp; “It seems that our descendants have started to refer to me as such. Perhaps it came from my establishment of the Trust. I am not certain.
“But, my dear, how did you uncover that term?”
Fanny was momentarily embarrassed; not by his question but rather that he might consider her reply to be unschooled and mired in superstition. Yet, deep in her heart, she knew that bridges had been built this day, and now t’was up to her to trust in them. And, thus, she forged ahead.
Squaring her shoulders, she spoke in a low, but firm voice, “You saw me just now. You may have thought I was not attending to that which you were saying. I assure you that I was…on one level.
“However, most of my senses were elsewhere. T’is akin to a trance, I imagine. I fall into it when I clear away all distractions and carefully focus my eyes on something like the leaves above us or the upper corner of a room where two walls and the ceiling meet. That permits me to separate myself from my cares and concerns, something I wish I had done these four-and-ten years past.
“As my concentration deepens, my eyes eventually drift shut, the outside world vanishes, and, with my mind clear, I find myself able to commune with…with…oh, I do not know with what or whom. T’is a force, a power, a being. I have always called her my Guide.
“We have conversations. I ask her questions, and she helps me find true solutions to my problems where, in my consciousness, I would seek to derive emotional comfort from false or partial solutions. These invariably lead to nowhere.
“Consider the ultimate false solution.
“I forced you to bow to my demand that each of our beloved girls come out when she reached five-and-ten. I wanted each to steal a march on other young ladies in her cohort; to attract the attention of a marriageable man and secure her…my…future.
“While the first four avoided disaster, we now know what my need to protect the girls from the entail led to with the fifth. Lydia will enjoy none of the perquisites relished by our other girls who waited until after their twentieth year to wed.”
Fanny had once again clambered off the fallen tree trunk, so comfortable for her long-legged husband, but a bit elevated for a woman who barely troubled five feet when measured in her satin dance slippers. She stood facing Bennet and made her case with hard-edged hand gestures and broad arm sweeps as if the bowl of Oakham’s slope rising above was home to benches filled with eager students. From time to time her sky-blue eyes would settle on Tom’s hazel orbs and her voice dropped as she sought to drive home her points.
“False solutions, Tom, are the path to ruin,” she continued. “I know.
“T’is not that I had forgotten about my Guide or what I could accomplish with her aid, but rather I was so disturbed after…after…well…the babe…that I could not have settled myself long enough to seek her out.
“I became more and more like my sister; concerned about fripperies and gossip and not on our family. Would that I could have modeled my comportment after Edward.”
Throughout her oration, Bennet had scarcely shifted. At this point he raised a hand to interrupt with a question.
“I have never heard what you offer from any other person. I would imagine that if this were a widespread talent, natural philosophers would have declaimed upon it before now. My old colleagues at Cambridge would have been in a fever to examine the proofs of what you have told me.
“That said, there are other talents, particularly amongst our daughters, which offer evidence that there are more mysteries than certitudes when one deals with the human condition.
“Fanny, what you suggest sounds eminently feasible and similar to that which the Orientals have proposed about the layers and stages of the human mind. At some point, according to their mystics, adepts have tunneled down until they have reached the very wellsprings of the universe and have tapped into the elemental forces that bind Creation together and apparently can be found in each of us.
“How came you to learn this technique?” he gently quizzed.
Mrs. Bennet answered quickly, “My Grandmother Gardiner taught me. T’was something that my family has used since my Great-great Grandfather, the first Edward Gardiner, left John Company and followed Christopher Bennet to Meryton. He must have picked it up in Madras where he served as a factor.
“My sister could never sit still long enough to achieve anything.
“My brother, on the other hand, goes so deep with such unbelievable concentration that he is virtually impossible to disturb. His interactions are so profound that his Guide can control Edward’s body and write messages! I have seen them! The answers which I fight to remember, for they fade so quickly when I return, are there for him to consult. Edward has these missives written in his own hand—the results of automatic writing as he calls it—for posterity.
“I was with my Guide these past few minutes. What I learned in that time has confirmed what I have long suspected…that Jane and Lizzy had the right of it: love governs all. Your love for me will hold me safely. And mine for you will see us through the darker days ahead as we sweep away the falsehoods ten or more years in the making,” she concluded.
Mr. Bennet had heard every word she had uttered. Whether he comprehended them was another question. Much amazed him, but his skepticism, hardened over more than ten years of outrageous behavior, left him less than fully convinced that the woman facing him was different from the one who had held court all those years in Longbourn’s parlor.
He began to probe her foundational understandings.
“But, my dear, do you grasp all that which I have told you? That we are over 130 years in our future…that Kitty came here before us…and has lived out her span only to have gone on before we even arrived?” he nervously asked.
Mrs. Bennet looked at her husband with a raised brow that bespoke more of impatience than anger.
The words rushed out, “Mr. Bennet; I am not overset by your revelations if that is your concern. Yes, I am clear that your family and, apparently our, offspring has been blessed with the ability to use your clothes closet, silly as that may sound, to travel forward in time.
“Yes, I do comprehend that various members of the Bennet family have used the Wardrobe and that there does seem to be a deeper purpose behind how the mechanism functions.
“Yes, I understand that you abducted me from our home and tried to meet my fondest wish—to see our girl.
“T’is equally clear, however, from your complicated conduct over the past fortnight, that you, yourself, did not possess any foreknowledge of what became of Kitty…or at least the when of it.”
Her voice began to shake as she finished, “And, yes…yes…yes, I distinctly heard you tell me that she has passed on…without me being able to comfort her and soothe her worries as a mother must do if she otherwise can only watch the awful event of her child sliding—or being pushed—toward the abyss.”
Fanny tried to gulp back the sob which bubbled up from her midriff. Finally, she gave in and allowed the saltiness of her profound sadness to roll down her face.
She collapsed back to the mossy seat that pressed her thigh hard against her husband’s.
Her small shoulders shook with a mother’s grief. She reached across and clutched Thomas’ waistcoat, buried her face in his shirtfront, and allowed herself to be transported by her emotions; so honest they were.
Bennet stroked her back, making the low murmurings that all humans instinctively know as sounds of safety, security, and surcease. Perhaps such ululations remind those in difficult straits of the low rumble of a mother’s heartbeat as heard by her babe floating in the peaceful chalice of the womb.
After a few minutes, Mrs. Bennet’s sobs quieted.
Then, in a watery voice, she spoke again to her mate, “Lest you consider this outburst as a return of the old me, Tom, please know that I have held these specific waterworks tightly for longer than our Kitty has been away.
“These are as old as the century…oh, not this one, but rather our own. From that awful day in the Y
ear Zero, I have hidden my real tears. I did not want you to see them: for I knew that you were as sorely distressed as I, and my emotions would have added to your burden.
“However, when I sought to protect you from feeling the same bereavement as me, I not only lost our babe, but also set you adrift.”
With that single sentence, Bennet’s worldview was knocked askew.
He had always accepted that Fanny had been laid low by the miscarriage. Furthermore, he had come to believe that she had transferred her distress into a decade-long quest to secure their daughters’ futures through matrimonial schemes both sublime (rarely) and ridiculous (most often). A sour taste flooded his mouth as Thomas recalled that his disdain of his wife’s famous nerves was legendary throughout the Meryton area. Not only had he rejected her, but he had made her an object of scorn throughout the neighborhood.
That she wanted him in her bed—whether out of love or duty—had never crossed his mind.
The Master of Longbourn had pulled away from the one person who acutely understood that which he was experiencing. In his own pain, so unmanned he was and fearful that she would spurn his advances, he withdrew.
Oh, Bennet had made his excuses to himself.
He did not want to place her in a position where she could experience another such tragedy.
Unlike far too many women of their time, Mrs. Bennet had avoided all the normal dangers of increasing. He could not have subjected her to yet one more confinement which might have been the death of her.
Her flighty, no, thoroughly irrational, mannerisms bespoke to him of a woman on the edge of her sanity.
He had been loath to impose upon her in pursuit of his marital rights; such demands might very well have driven her to her chambers and deprived their daughters of motherly companionship. Although, as he considered this last, he realized that his true motivation lay somewhere between this more altruistic cast and the cynical concern that with his wife laid low, he would, perforce, have had to undertake the management of the girls.
