The Avenger- Thomas Bennet and a Father's Lament

by Don Jacobson

  Eileen’s voice bore more than a smoky trace of heather and peat, betraying her Glaswegian origins and denying any from further south. Her countenance seemed much like the senior Bennet daughter. Yet, as Fanny looked past the sheaf of grain-colored tresses and the sky-blue, near to purple, eyes, subtle differences became visible.

  Jane’s nose, a delightful aquiline prominence descending from her even brow, now was marred by a scar and an uneven jog. This recalled to Fanny the time she had encountered Mr. Hill’s cousin, Ezra, in the Longbourn kitchens. That worthy, as t’was explained to her by Mrs. Hill, was a bare-knuckle bruiser, known as the Hertfordshire Hammer. She had shrunk from his cauliflower ears and battered brows. But, t’was his flattened nose that appeared in her mind’s eye as she assayed Miss Nearne’s face.

  The woman before her, while of Jane’s height, was not of her weight. Where Jane had been pleasantly curved, Miss Nearne was lean, still clearly feminine, but whip-like would be a better term to describe her. Not that Miss Nearne was malnourished, but her physique hearkened to that of Miss Bingley. Even then, Eileen tended more to firmness than the somewhat sticklike, no, stork-like, redhead whom, from what Jane had told her, now resided in Bath “for her health.”[lxv]

  Her carriage, however, also was different from the angelic Jane Bingley. As Miss Nearne stood before Mrs. Bennet, she appeared to be slightly twisted as if her shoulders—the left one was held slightly higher to Fanny’s motherly eye, always alert for errors in posture requiring correction—and hips had been rotated in opposite directions. The variance was modest, though, and, to Mrs. Bennet’s mind, something which could be cured by a few exercises along the hall stretching between Longbourn’s front portico and rear service areas.

  As Fanny scanned downward, she realized that the young woman towered head-and-shoulders above the diminutive Bennet biddy. Miss Nearne had likewise removed her shoes, all the better to stride through the alabaster grit between the water and the dunes. That was not unusual; in fact, she would have exposed herself to questions about her sanity if she had not removed her footwear. And, truth be told, despite her protestations, a part of Mrs. Bennet embraced the idea of modern shorter skirts that offered a view of a lady’s leg from below her knee to ankle.

  However, the expanse of skin thus exposed on Miss Nearne revealed a livid white scar blazing diagonally across her right calf.

  No…she may have begun like my Jane, but life has molded her into someone who is Janelike. I would imagine that this Miss Nearne has been shaped by similar forces that turned my Kitty into The Countess. I would know this young lady more.

  Chapter XXI

  Much of the time Eileen Nearne had spent with Anna Freud had been used to find ways to reintegrate the healthier fragments of the Rose personality back into the now-dominant Eileen. As she had discovered in her conversations with the psychiatrist, the trauma in the bunker had forced the protective hibernation of much of who she had been. Since her captor simply desired her to be a weapon, the parts of her psyche most suited to the darker aspects of her wartime duties jumped to the forefront. The rest had been shielded behind powerful barriers to protect against the violence that naturally grew from the plot against Richard Fitzwilliam.

  Without the Fitzwilliam mission as the overwhelming stimuli, Rose could not survive on her own. When she comprehended her failure in the moments before Richard’s fist had slammed into her jaw, Rose had unshackled Eileen. As Dr. Wilson weaned her from the potent drug cocktail that had kept somnolent and calm, Eileen asserted her dominance even more.

  However, the memories formed when Rose was in control did not disappear. Eileen had been a discreet observer during the journey from Swabia to the Orkneys, always on the edge of consciousness, and thus aware of everything, but not necessarily influenced by all that transpired. Eileen had begun to absorb anew the impact of the events that had formed those recollections. During her sessions in Miss Freud’s consulting room at the Institute, she had spoken of the deep regret and guilt that she had been experiencing in the preceding months as she re-emerged.

  Then came the arduous work, always five-days-per-week, and sometimes six, of rifling through the pieces of her mind and, like a Japanese master potter repairing a damaged bowl, piecing her self back together. However, like delicate lacquerware subjected to kintsugi, the cracks and wear spots were highlighted with gold and celebrated.[lxvi] The Eileen who stepped out of the Hampstead offices in the spring of 1947, after she and Miss Freud had agreed to suspend her intensive therapy, was thoroughly different from the young woman who had been bundled into the Nursery, utterly insensible, during those dark days in late 1945.

  In fact, the vale through which she had passed, the manner in which she had been broken, and the methods used to recreate her had brought Eileen into a new appreciation of that which she had been before, during, and after the War. Where before the SOE had given her a purpose and had focused her energies, now she discerned that her inner well-being opened new vistas beyond any she had previously imagined; her beauty and strength reposed in the deep understanding that she had been shattered and lovingly reassembled by her own hand!

  Yet, there was a loss, an awareness that she was bereft: no kin had visited her during those long months when she had been reminded that she had not the freedom of the city, but rather, behind locked doors, had awaited the periodic arrival of grey-faced men in grey suits with their clipboards and their questions. No, they never accused her, but instead found ways to ask the same question three—or ten—different ways.

  She had assumed that her debriefs had met their measure; in some manner providing the essential breadcrumbs that proved her fidelity. Eventually they stopped calling on her, and the restraints against her freedoms had been relaxed. Even so, one of Freud’s orderlies accompanied her as she walked out on the heath, protecting her from the city’s dangers: more prevalent now that class antagonisms had reappeared in the face of continued privation now unobscured by a faded wartime sense of mutual sacrifice. However, the unspoken subtext to his attendance was to ensure that she returned to her compact second floor chamber above the consulting room.

  Eileen’s new awareness of her inner self made her realize that she was preternaturally suited to exist in the smudged regions between polite society and Britain’s enemies. Where before she had unaccountably gravitated to espionage, she now found that there were aspects of the work which she found to be most satisfying.

  Her recent German outing with Fitzwilliam, Robard, and Schiller had been her probationary return to field operations. The assault on the Swabian redoubt was the result of eighteen months work starting with her clues and adding material from files culled from around the Continent. The brief sharing of time and space with Richard, unsettling in a manner which hearkened back to their wartime closeness, was tempered by the awareness that if the enterprise uncovered a trap, she would be close at hand to suffer a traitor’s final consequences. As it was, Schiller and Robard discovered seven die-hard SS storm troopers holed up in the trees surrounding a disused bunker which she later identified as the location she had been held and from which she had decamped. The encounter had been brief and brutal, only ending when a full company of American paratroopers reduced the black helmets’ position.

  The school of piranha had been exterminated. The shark, however, had evaded capture.

  

  Now on the beach at Deauville, Eileen tightly clasped her mother’s locket, her only remnant of her girlhood, preserved by the SOE Housekeeping wallahs throughout her years in the field and, later, the months in the bunker followed by purdah in the Nursery and Hampstead. As before, she assumed the latch to be irretrievably frozen, preventing her from opening the jewelry. Yet, despite her ignorance about what was inside, Eileen cherished the talisman.

  Mrs. Bennet broke through young woman’s reverie saying, “Please forgive me, Miss Nearne, but you must understand that I was somewhat surprised to discover you standing above me. I did not hear you approach.
>
  “However, my dear, you seemed to be a hundred miles away just now. About what were you thinking, if I may be so bold to ask?”

  Eileen ran the fingers of both hands through her short cut blond hair, emitting a large sigh as she did so. The action, perforce, caused her to release the locket which, as it dropped free to hang between her breasts, glinted in the sunlight and caught Mrs. Bennet’s eye.

  The lady pounced, instantly quizzing, “Where did you find that locket?”

  Puzzled, Eileen replied, somewhat diffidently, “T’was my mother’s. She passed it to me on her deathbed.

  “When you mentioned the name ‘Bingley’ earlier, I was confused for I vaguely recollect seeing that name in our family, my mother’s family, that is, Bible…something about a Frances Bingley deep in my mama’s lineage…sometime over 100 years ago.

  “But, that Good Book is long gone, destroyed when the warehouse where all my parent’s goods were stored burned during the war. This is literally the only item I have left of my heritage.

  “And, t’is broken. I have never been able to open it. As far as I know neither could my mother.”

  In an almost dreamlike voice, Mrs. Bennet said, “On the back: is there an engraved J-H-B?”

  Stunned, Eileen replied, “Indeed! But, how could you know that?”

  Under her breath, Fanny whispered, “Because her name was Jane Hadley Bennet, later Bingley.”

  And then louder, “Hand me your locket, child. I would wish to show you something.”

  The old Eileen would not have easily relinquished her treasure. However, the new iteration had learned to trust once again. She reached behind her neck and released the clasp. She lowered the piece into Mrs. Bennet’s outstretched palm.

  The elder lady began talking almost as soon as her fingers closed around the item.

  “How remarkable all this is. I thought that traveling forward to go on vacation was unusual. How much more extraordinary for me to come across a stranger who bears my dear Jane’s coming-of-age memento.”

  As she spoke she gripped the chain loop at the top of the locket and the stem that protruded from the bottom.

  “The craftsman we visited—Cheapside has the most remarkable jewelers, you know—was so clever. He created a special mechanism that would prevent the locket from falling open, especially when more conventional closures would eventually break or wear out.”

  Saying that, she gently pulled the two posts apart with an opposing rotation. A slight snick indicated that the lids were released. Fanny gently separated them, taking care not to stress the delicate hinge, stiff after decades or longer of disuse.

  She gazed down at the opened ornament and smiled. Then she handed it back to Eileen who looked down at the two portraits—one of a gentleman and one of a lady, probably his wife—somberly gazing up at her.

  “I imagine you might like to see your grandparents of I am not sure how many ‘greats,’ Miss Nearne.

  “And then I would hope you would give one of them an embrace.”

  Eileen did not waste a moment clasping her lost family to her chest as tears of joy freely flowed down her freckled cheeks.

  Chapter XXII

  “We had long suspected that she was a lost Bennet,” the voice crackled in the receiver held closely to Richard’s ear, “You may recall when Wilson examined her aboard the Ulysses that we both noted the unusual shape to her eyes. However, Bennet Eyes are not unique to our family.

  “Her possession of the locket combined with her assertion that it was given to her by her mother is surely compelling evidence,” the Earl continued.

  Fitzwilliam looked across the room at the rest of the Anubis team and nodded.

  His father continued, speaking elliptically for security purposes, from his London offices using a dedicated telephone line which connected Lincoln’s Inn to Deauville, “I took my Grandfather’s suggestion and compared Agent Rose’s file photograph with my Great Aunt’s portrait in the hallway leading to the Trust’s boardroom. The resemblance removed any doubt.

  “The Mistress of Meryton is absolutely correct. Miss Rose is a member of the Five Families. I would suggest that you include her in your Anubis deliberations from this point forward. Her talents and her experience with your target should prove to be most useful. Bring me up to speed when you return to London after Schiller is fit for duty.” With that, M rung off. Richard nodded at his great-grandmother who stood and glided over to the door which she opened and beckoned Eileen to enter.

  Endearingly hesitant, the young woman, an orphan until only an hour ago, entered the bookroom full of new-found family. Tears once again sparkled on her lashes as Letty, Lizzy, and Fanny clustered about her to give her sisterly and motherly support as they guided her first to Schiller, who attempted to struggle to his feet, only to be pushed back by a glare from his wife, and then to Robard who happily greeted her with kisses to both cheeks in the Frankish manner.

  The last introduction was made wordlessly as the Master of Longbourn, unsettled as his wife had been when she first had beheld his eldest daughter’s twin, albeit one separated by several generations, standing before him. He stared and then he opened his arms into which Eileen flew. She cuddled deeply into his embrace, nestling herself beneath his chin.

  As he stroked her back, Bennet planted a kiss of blessing in her hair.

  He spoke softly to her, “You are home, child, after a great journey through the wilderness. You will never be alone again. Know how proud Mrs. Bennet and I are of you.”

  Then he looked up at his grandchildren of a variety of vintages and their brave spouses and realized that he had been granted a boon by the Wardrobe and, perhaps, its divine operator. Once again, after years of an empty nest, his parlors would sound with joy of clan Bennet as it marched forward with great purpose.

  

  The younger crowd had long since fled the library. Mrs. Bennet had accompanied Eileen and Lizzy as they moved Schiller back to his bed for a pre-dinner nap. Richard, Denis, and Letty had changed into bathing suits for a splash in the Channel.

  Thomas Bennet smiled to himself as he filled two snifters with generous measures of Monsieur Monnet’s cognac. While he had appropriated Lord Tom’s bookroom for his meetings, t’was more his humidor than drinks cart that Bennet truly coveted. He had only smoked cigars as fine as these when Darcy had presented him with the fruits of Spanish Cuba’s fields.

  His ruminations were disturbed by a knock on the door. Bennet looked up to see the grizzled head of Feldwebel Liebermann (ret.) peer around the edge.

  He called out, “Ah, Liebermann. We are all clear now. Come in, come in. The brandy has been poured and the cigars await. Have you managed to escape your good wife’s clutches?”

  Liebermann straightened, his broad shoulders leading him through the door. He always impressed Bennet as an arrow flying backwards, so wide he was at the top and narrow at the bottom even after two years of the former Madame Villet’s best efforts to fatten him up. The Sergeant crossed over to where Bennet stood and accepted the offered glass.

  His bass voice rumbled from deep in a chest hidden beneath a flowing, multi-hued silk chemise à rayures,[lxvii] another of Monsieur Jacques beachwear fashion statements, “Ach, mein Herr, Bennet, I mean…t’is très difficile, as my wife would say it, to fly free as a man must, ja? But, I have persisted thanks to superior Prussian strategy!"

  Used to the Schiller retainer’s sometimes tortuous combinations of his native German, his wife’s Bretagne/Norman French, and the King’s English, Bennet guffawed, “In other words, you told her you smelled something burning in the oven and fled the area before she could either put you to work watching her grandson bébé Robard or beg you to test another sweet treat. Misdirection, I would inform you, Sergeant, is a time-honored husband’s prerogative…and one which I have used countless times to fly away from Mrs. Bennet’s former nerves!”

  The two then shared a laugh as they performed the male ritual of lighting a fine cigar: gently ro
lling it between palms to break the filler, snipping the end of the brown tube, and then fired the panatela using not a match—for the flaring phosphorus would taint the Havana’s flavor—but rather a slender maple split ignited from a candle lit expressly for that purpose. Each man stood silently savoring the first draw of richly-aged smoke before filling the room with a blue cloud as they exhaled with a satisfied sigh.

  With drinks and cigars in hand, they then repaired to the veranda overlooking the beach where the Robards frolicked in the shallow surf while Richard, in deeper water, swam laps between two buoys set expressly for that purpose. His powerful strokes pulled his surging body half out of the water; the water sheeting from his arms catching the titian rays of the setting sun, suggesting the delicate plumage of an aquatic angel. The metronomic precision of his exertions seemed to belie any residual weariness from his Swabian ordeal.

  Bennet and Liebermann settled into two robin’s egg blue Adirondack chairs, each graced with a small brass plaque indicating their provenance.

  Gift of T and E Roosevelt, 1912

  The following few minutes were spent as the Trappists would: silently quaffing the amber liquid, long a French favorite, and savoring the delicate aromas of vanilla, nuts and dried fruit as they exploded on their palettes. These draughts were followed by the slow but steady building of an ash head atop their cigars until one or the other would break the mood by tapping it off in the hammered brass ashtray set upon a low table between the chairs.

  Bennet spoke first, poking his cigar out toward the waterborne threesome, “We are engaged in a long game, Liebermann, and t’is, I fear, going to demand much of the youngsters we have come to love. They do know their craft, but do not have yet the wisdom to allow them to hold back when every fiber calls them to charge forward.