Family and Home

Themes in A Bennet Wardrobe Christmas Miracle

Nov 12, 2024

New subscribers to Austenesque Thoughts will receive an Audible code (US or UK Audible only) for Volume One of The Bennet Wardrobe Series, The Keeper: Mary Bennet’s Extraordinary Journey performed by Amanda Berry. As a special bonus, new subscribers will also receive an epub copy )suitable for emailing into your reader of my 2023 Christmas offering, Holiday Visions. This book includes my CIBA Longlisted short story (what a combo!) The Gamekeeper’s Cabin.

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The tale behind my Christmas offering goes back years. Describing what got me to the point where I wrote the story may not take years, but it is complicated.

The writing of the main arc of The Wardrobe took seven years. Across eight volumes, I explored how the Bennet Family was central to the underlying power of the entire universe—Love. Thus, the quintessential love, the agape shared by Fitzwilliam and Elizabeth, had to be kept in balance. That it teetered meant that The Old One, the great force behind the Wardrobe, needed to intervene using the other members of the Bennet family. This did scatter them about the timeline, some forever alienated from their loved ones.

My mind began asking about how they might be brought back together. Then came the when. I ignored the nagging for a few years until I had completed some of my post-Wardrobe standalone projects. Then the voice became too loud. Thus, the birth of A Bennet Wardrobe Christmas Miracle.

Motivation for the plot:

The core of Volume Six—The Avenger: Thomas Bennet and a Father’s Lament—is the search for the lost Bennet daughter, Kitty. She, in a fit of teenage pique after learning she was to be sent to a seminary in Cornwall, accidentally used the Wardrobe while thinking I want to be anywhere but here. I need to be away from all of these people! The Wardrobe—throughout her life, Lydia warned that the Wardrobe had a nasty sense of humor—sent Kitty forward to 1886.

Mrs. Bennet, missing her daughter, always wanted to ‘go visit Kitty.’ Mr. Bennet finally bowed to his wife’s maternal need—although he, too, needed see Kitty once again (Recall that she had visited him several years before). Carrying a sleeping Mrs. Bennet through the Wardrobe, Mr. Bennet transitions to Matlock House in 1947, three years too late to see Lady Kate. The unrequited parental longing is only resolved in the book’s Epilogue.

Now to the new novella The Bennet Wardrobe Christmas Miracle.

As the parents miss the child, now we see the mirror of that in Lady Kate/Kitty.

Another accidental use—this time by one of Lydia’s seven-year-old twins—awakens Kitty’s homesickness, dormant for over thirty years. While she has her family (in 1919), she aches to see her sisters and parents. That longing spurs the Wardrobe to open another probability bubble in which a most unusual Christmas dinner can take place.

This book continues my exploration of the Bennet Wardrobe Series’ exploration of the concept of Home: its meaning to people and what creates that sentiment. However, I have now added the element of Time, for without that healing of wounds cannot take place nor can words be said that need saying.

Thus, the Miracle is the gift of Time: for Kitty, for Darcy and Elizabeth, and for Thomas and Fanny.

As I noted on the print edition’s back cover:

The Greatest Gift is Time

The Darcys know the changes age brings. Now, as birthday candles for Darcy multiply, how will time affect Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam’s love?

Time is painfully short for Fanny Bennet as she faces the loss of an ailing husband she dearly loves. Another hour or day with Thomas Bennet would be a treasure.

Thomas Bennet left Longbourn one last time to find a long-lost daughter. Now wearing a countess’s tiara, Kate Fitzwilliam has needed her family for decades, especially during the festive season.

The remarkable Bennet Wardrobe has its say in a most unusual Christmas dinner, mending hearts and giving that wondrous gift to the Bennets of Longbourn—Time.

The story moves the reader back and forth on the timeline to allow the underlying logic of a Wardrobe story to develop. Rest assured that these are not lurches as if you are being shunted about as if you are in an action film car chase. There are three distinct frames:

1827: Middle-aged versions of the Bingleys, Darcys, Bentons, and Fitzwilliams (a timeframe from within Volume Seven’s Epilogue)

1919: Lady Kate and Lord Henry—both in later middle years—the Countess and Earl of Matlock (About four years after the conclusion of Volume 2’s main action)

1814: Thomas and Fanny Bennet (After they return from 1951 London in Volume Six)

All are brought together for dinner at Selkirk Castle, the Matlock’s country seat during the 1919 festive season.

Family and Home: which shapes which or are they all in the Wardrobe’s control?

A Bennet Wardrobe Christmas is in pre-order through November 26, 2024. It is available on all Amazon platforms worldwide in e-book, print, KindleUnlimited, and Audio Book (12/24).

US Link

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UK Link

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Please enjoy this excerpt from A Bennet Wardrobe Christmas Miracle.

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Chapter Twelve

When a child, Darcy always loved how Selkirk’s greenery made him feel. His mother would remind him that if her childhood home had not been named Selkirk—indeed, if it had been a manor rather than a castle—it would have been called Evergreen House for all the trees. The rich tang of spruce and pine filled the air. That scent again washed over him, leaving a peace as he had always felt when arriving with his parents. Now that calm settled around Darcy, wrapping him in its arms, ancient and familiar, although not redolent of Home, for Pemberley was that. Echoes rumbled through his mind, speaking of ancestral roots in this place, old beyond Time, muttering that he was meant to be here.

He would follow the Wardrobe's lead if this were where he was supposed to be.

Liam Wilson had helped him tie his bowtie, putting the finishing touch on his evening wear, a tailless dinner jacket called a tuxedo. Darcy surveyed his image in the glass attached to the back of his changing room’s door. This outfit had been one of the many suits of clothes the men from Bond Street had made up for him while he and Elizabeth resided at Matlock House. He could see the jacket’s antecedents in his regular dinner dress. However, the black tie was worn in a simple bow instead of a snowy neckcloth finished in increasingly complex falls.

After nodding Wilson onto his other duties, Darcy went to a table by the fireplace to collect a glass of well-aged whiskey. Then he turned back to the hearth, watching the flames dance, his thoughts revisiting the changes of the modern age.

Even something as simple as home heating had been transformed in ninety years. For millennia, humans not living in balmier climes had huddled for warmth, no, survival, around blazes large and small. At first, they could not bring the fire inside; the hard-learned penalty—Darcy snorted—was suffocation. Then chimneys were discovered, but while they pulled the smoke out of the house, a fair amount of heat vanished up the stack. As Henry explained, twentieth-century furnaces fed radiators throughout Selkirk to keep Derbyshire’s winters at bay. Fires, the earl asserted, were practical only to set the atmosphere in vaulted halls and chambers: nothing better than coal’s orange glow to color to steam heat’s invisible radiation. Darcy had no cause to repine the loss of clothing needed to protect against glacial outer reaches in parlors designed more to impress than to use.

Darcy did not know how long he played with these thoughts. While his reverie was nothing like Elizabeth and Lydia’s trances, he was far enough afield that he did not hear his dressing room door open. A soft hand caught his shoulder, kneading the muscles bunched there. The other snaked around his side to relieve him of his drink.

He heard her sip as she leaned into his back. “Do you find the Fitzwilliam spirit cart,” Darcy asked, “to be as well-curated today under Henry’s tutelage as it is under Richard?”

Elizabeth gave a throaty chuckle. “Remember that Richard’s father invigorated the family’s distillery in Speyside. New copper stills and French oak casks make Matlock Òir the smoothest Scots whiskey available. Of course, it is my favorite, so my opinion may be biased. This tastes akin to the thirty-year-old that Richard opened at Christmas.”

Darcy forgave her modesty. Richard sought her palate when his master distiller brought samples south to Selkirk, and Elizabeth was usually the final word before a batch was released. “As always, your nose is most discriminating.”

Gently disengaging, Darcy moved to the sideboard and poured a fresh goblet, raising an eyebrow in the marital signal, ‘We need to talk.’ He used his chalice as a pointer to suggest they sit in front of the fire.

Anthracite’s sizzle and snap created the soundscape for a companionable silence. Wrapped in the auburn pulse from the grate, the couple pulled their contemplations cloaklike about their shoulders.

Since he had called the impromptu conference, Darcy made the first representation. “I learned something today.”

Elizabeth chuckled, her humor at being reunited with Kitty leading to gentle teasing. “You make this sound as if you are surprised, although I am unsure if it was because your big brain had thought it had learned and seen everything. Perhaps it was the fact that it could absorb more knowledge.”

“Then again, if the past week did not disabuse you of the notion,” she paused to quaff, “that there was nothing new on God’s green earth, then it must be the second, although I have never considered your brainpan full.

“Maybe it was not something external that piqued your interest, but a synthesis of what you had already known throughout your life.

“I hope it explains why you reverted to your but not tolerable enough to tempt me manner.”

As with all men convinced of their superiority—not rising from Greek hubris but instead rare encounters with other men of equal acuity—Darcy never ceased to be amazed at his wife’s understanding of the world in general and him specifically. “Which book am I, my loveliest Elizabeth? You read me so well!

“I have not been myself these past months…”

Elizabeth interrupted him again as she rose and glided over to the sideboard to pour another draught. “Gently, dearest, lest someone think you are turning into Richard, the realm’s master of the understatement.

“Although you have barely begun your declamation, Will, I must offer one correction.

“You said that you were not yourself. I'm afraid I must disagree. I have known you for seventeen years and have seen these mood swings up close. I have been the unfortunate observer of dark looks, glacial stares, and how you withdraw into your carapace!

“I cannot say if it was our anniversary that was the trigger—likely not—but being thoroughly human, I must be able to put a mark on the calendar as an anchor for my understanding of your latest black dog.

“Whatever the date, since we first met—an unhappy moment given your foul mood—you have alternated between happy caperings at Pemberley and retreating into your dour tower, locked away behind an impenetrable portcullis. It takes weeks and months of digging parallels to get close enough to breach your walls. Eventually, my Forlorn Hope takes your citadel.

“So, Mr. Darcy, you have not acted out of character! You have entirely been yourself. This is just the latest instance of a familiar pattern.”

He took her chiding in stride. Her teases were old friends. “There are philosophers, Elizabeth, who suggest that our childhoods govern all behavior after that. They consider it nigh unto impossible to inure us to its effects.”

He snorted, as much at himself as the shades who had molded him. “Death, Elizabeth, death and the pain it brings is at the bottom of my temper.

“Three types of death hover over me, gnawing at my soul, torturing me as Zeus’s eagle did Prometheus: physical, spiritual, and social. I have painfully learned what all three mean.

“My mother was taken from me too soon by the Reaper. I was denied her love and left alone in a desert, denied a father's affection. He mourned her departure by depriving his children of notice, ignoring their pain in favor of his own, and finding surcease in the honeyed phrases of a deceiver. He allowed flattery to fill his emptiness rather than offering Georgie and me what we desperately needed and would have returned tenfold to him.

“He had given in and become a hollow shell.

“That was death’s second form—drawing breath but only considering what was lost, not living in the present to appreciate what remained. My father had become a man uninterested in living and waiting for the end. His agony was so profound that my aunt would bring Georgie to Selkirk so she could escape Pemberley’s unremitting bleakness. I had Richard and school.

“As for the third type of death—social— at the Meryton Assembly, you were the recipient of my worry about how Ramsgate would touch Georgie. If word had spread, her fate would have been an arranged marriage to a young man in New York or Philadelphia, where an adolescent’s peccadillos would excite no one’s curiosity. We avoided that, thank God.”

Elizabeth reached over and rubbed his knee. “It must be so tiring to be you, especially when you do not allow me to help. But this is the distant past. The events that roiled your life before you met me were foundational. What about today?”

Darcy’s sigh bounced around the room. “Perhaps it is the season. I cannot say. This is my second Christmas in as many months! Maybe the Wardrobe forces me to repeat the festive season until I get things right! In any event, I am feeling my years more now than before, and with that, the specter looms over me.”

Taking a deep pull of whiskey, Darcy looked at his wife, sadness reshaping his eyes. “I fall prey to the idea of what misery you will know when I am gone. Am I become my mother, and you emulate my father? I would do anything to spare you those years of wandering Pemberley’s halls like a phantom unable to move on.”

Elizabeth held up a hand. “At least we have no scandal hanging over us. But you are the healthiest man I know. Why are you preoccupied with death? Have you had some premonition?”

“My father and yours were of an age. My papa died when he was forty-six. I am forty-four. My brown studies have had me calculating the months, days, and hours remaining. Fight it as I try; I see you pale and wasting away in widow’s weeds,” Darcy intoned.

He shook himself. “That thinking is designed to sow discord, especially between you and me. It is a perversion of Life’s lesson—that if we focus on what might happen in the near or far term, we will never live and cherish what exists in the moment. That is what I learned, and it will serve me as a model moving forward.”

He dropped to his knees and rested his hands atop hers where they lay motionless on her thighs. “Elizabeth: I doubt if I will ever stop trying to protect you from pain. It is not in my nature. I love you too much to see you hurt.

“But I will redeem myself, to be the best version of Will Darcy and allow you the power to decide your outcome.

“Age is a condition, not an illness. I mentioned Mr. Bennet. Despite some justified criticism about how he managed his family and estate, your father aged gracefully. Adopting little Eddie in the Year Eleven may have had something to do with that. Your brother kept him young until his precipitous decline before Elba.

“My father loved my mother too well and could not find room in his heart for his orphan children once she died. Thus, he became old before he reached forty.

“My father was convinced that since his wife died young, he lived on borrowed time.

“Watching your parents then and the Matlocks now has taught me that becoming old is not necessarily associated with additional candles but with how we think.

“My father had placed my mother on a pedestal like a goddess. What chance did a mere mortal have if a deity could die when Hades came calling?

“I have been guilty of the same thinking. My love for you led me to imagine that you, too, would wither and perish once I fell. The only way I could spare you that fate was to push you away, to harden your heart against me so that my departure would be less taxing.

“I can only beg you to forgive me. Time will be required for me to amend my thinking…”

Her enthusiastic kiss stopped any further comment and released weeks of pent-up longing. Restoration of their garments would be required before they could answer the dinner gong.