Getting Ready for Surgery

Time to get a wheel changed

Original Equipment isn’t what it used to be. Actually, a better way of putting it is that I’m not what I used to be. A short bit of inventory…one hip already replaced, and one knee is also titanium.

This time tomorrow, I will be proving to the recovery room staff that I am well enough to go home with a brand-new right hip. Then my wife Pam will turn into John Mortimer’s She Who Must Be Obeyed! For the next several weeks, she’ll be my chauffeur and general nurse while I become more able.

One thing that will not be happening much is writing. Sitting at the computer is out. My desk can adjust to standing height, but how long I can be on my feet will be a moving target.

I am literally 2 pages from the end of the main part of The Ambassador’s Wife: A Lessers and Betters Pride and Prejudice Variation. Finish that and lay down the epilogue to allow the book to undergo a second draft hot read.

As for more editions of Austenesque Thoughts, I will run into the same problem. However, I am putting together an upcoming edition based around my own reading of the classics and reflecting on the well-read and educated nature of Austen, her characters, and her audience. Look forward to What Did Darcy Know and When Did He Know It?

But let’s look backward as we look forward.

Last year was an excellent one for Austenesque lit and for my specific Austenesque practice.

I published a complete novel as an experiment, set in the World War II era and shifting Darcy and Elizabeth into it. Ghost Flight: A World War II Pride and Prejudice Variation considered how Darcy and Elizabeth would have done their bit in the war.

ANNNNDDD: Ghost Flight has just been named a finalist in the 2025 CIBA Hemingway Awards for best 20th Century Wartime Fiction.

https://mybook.to/GhostFlightPandPVar

I also released two short stories.

The Last Gift considered the end of Austen’s life as a beginning. It was my tribute to the good Lady on her 250th birthday. Available as an ebook or on Audible.

https://mybook.to/A7Ayt4

The Gamekeeper’s Cabin was a Christmas tale inspired by O. Henry’s magnificent Gift of the Magi. Available as an ebook.

GameKeepersCabinShortStory

I plan to release The Ambassador’s Wife in late Spring.

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Needless to say, I am overjoyed and humbled to have been honored by CIBA.

Please enjoy this excerpt from Ghost Flight.

This excerpt is ©2025 by Donald P. Jacobson. All rights reserved. Reproduction is prohibited. Published in the United States of America.

Chapter Fourteen

The bald above la Ferme de la Boissière, March 3, 1944

The Lysander bobbed and weaved like a prizefighter avoiding an onslaught of jabs from a superior gladiator. The light aircraft dropped into invisible troughs, slamming into the bottom and rattling Elizabeth’s teeth before skyrocketing upwards on another draft. She twisted and turned with each gyration. Only Eileen—also crammed in the cockpit’s narrow rear seat—prevented Elizabeth from being tossed about even more.

They had taken off from RAF Tempsford in Bedfordshire after sunset, disappearing beneath Bomber Command’s titans circling above the shire, hundreds of planes aiming their arrows at Germany’s heart. The lightweight aircraft was tiny compared to the gigantic four-engine machines—an advantage, for ’twas a flyspeck well hidden from German radar by the elephants stampeding through the night twenty thousand feet overhead. Night fighters and anti-aircraft batteries would never look for the Lysander, much less see it, cruising toward France at low altitude.

Of course, its virtues also contributed to its shortcomings—at least, that is what Elizabeth thought. Its broad wings let it stay airborne at exceptionally low speeds, as slow as 65 mph. But they acted like sails, so the Lysander rode even weak cross drafts like an American cowboy atop a bucking horse. A heavier beast would slice through the currents. Its lower weight allowed the Lysander to land and take off from a grass field the length of a football pitch. That made it perfect for clandestine operations, except that it could only lift slightly over three tons, including its own four thousand pounds, along with fuel, pilot, passengers, and gear. Pilots had told her that it handled like a pig when fully laden.

Tonight’s flight tested the limits of the aircraft. Climbing away from the station had been a slow affair, something Elizabeth felt as England’s forests seemed too close to their wheels for too long. The aircraft struggled as it attempted to take on a bird’s characteristics. Although her ear was more attuned to the intricacies of Morse, even a novice like Elizabeth could sense that the Lysander would have been happier reincarnated as an American deuce-and-a-half.

The weather had held—no rain but complete cloud cover that kept the black plane well hidden from the quarter moon’s searching rays. While good ears might hear the Bristol engine rumbling over the bomber stream’s background burr, the craft’s silhouette would have been indistinct at best but likely invisible to any spotters. Darkness was their best friend.

Another patch of rough air jumbled the Lysander. At least her kit was in the cargo hold. She could not conceive of a six-odd stone radio set and her painstakingly aged cardboard suitcase jumbled in the rear cockpit with Eileen and her identical baggage.

Once they left the bombers’ protective umbrella, they made a lazy loop several miles out into the Channel. Searchlights speared up from Cherbourg, not seeking the modest airplane but hoping to pin one of the great Lancasters like a green butterfly on a naturalist’s wax board. The German ack-ack gunners were doomed to be disappointed; the tortured French harbor town was not tonight’s target.

The turbulence settled, and Elizabeth spotted white-capped combers breaking against the Cotentin Peninsula. Their course had taken them south from Bedfordshire and across the Channel before turning toward a lightly defended section of Biscay’s northeast shore. From there, the planners had promised, twenty minutes would see them above Lisieux, unloading themselves and their supplies into the Maquis’ waiting arms.

The Lysander climbed over the bluffs and settled in on its northeasterly course, staying around seven hundred feet to avoid any inconvenient encounters with the terrain. Their briefer said their landing ground was about 580 feet. The neighborhood’s high point topped out at just over six hundred. Lizzy hoped that the altimeter was truly calibrated. Even an error of five feet could spoil their entire night.

With the ocean left behind, they floated through blackness. Outside, there was nothing, in fact, less than that. The nullity pushed into the cabin and surrounded Elizabeth and Eileen, Madeline and Rose—a void without the canopy and little within. The instrument panel’s dim light outlined the pilot’s form, giving shape without detail. Time lost meaning as they floated weightlessly above countryside reputed to be France. Doktor Heisenberg’s two measurable but conflicting variables—position and speed—lost meaning in this universe divorced from Man’s influence.[i]

The moment fractured, and the world again spun on its axis when a “T” of flickering lights appeared beneath them.

Elizabeth smiled at the accuracy of their arrival, no blind tapping around France’s north wasting fuel. I have heard that old barnstorming pilots make the best navigators, having to depend on dead reckoning and intuition. I wonder if I would recognize the gentleman on the stick from one of the air shows that amazed Meryton fairgoers before the war.

The pilot waved his hand to warn his passengers to brace themselves. The Lysander floated toward the line of lights, dropping like a leaf falling from an oak. The plane drifted along at just above stall speed, but the ground dizzyingly rushed past when it became visible. The wheels sank into the turf, the gentlest event of the entire flight.

Hands at the end of unseen arms undogged the rear cockpit’s door latches and guided the radio operators to the ground. Both immediately pushed aside gallant efforts to help them further. Even wearing RAF-issue coveralls over their French street clothes, they were clearly women. Male solicitude was the last thing they needed.

Opening the cargo hold, each took charge of her kit and radio. The squad—a varied crew of Frenchmen of all shapes and sizes, young and old—bundled the gear onto the bed of an antiquated truck. Then Madeline and Rose peeled off their coveralls and tossed them onto the empty rear seat, much as if they would have buried parachutes if arriving from a Dakota.

One tall fellow broke free from the crowd and handed a dispatch case to the pilot. He turned and barked a command, inarticulate in the backwash of the propellor. His order became clear when other men hurried to the Lysander’s tail and began pushing to face it in the opposite direction. Chocks blocked the landing gear, and the pilot revved the engine to takeoff power. With the wedges pulled, the butterfly leaped free to rejoin its natural element.

As the Lysander’s thrum faded into the distance, a deeper rumble replaced the high-pitched Bristol radial. The glint of the marker lights reflected off the fuselage and wings of a black-skinned Dakota as it roared overhead. The transport crossed the field once and returned at a higher altitude. Three dark cylinders dropped free, and parachutes eased their grounding. The waiting men swarmed the containers, opening them and parceling out the cargo with trained movements. The aircraft made one more pass, and a man’s figure hurtled from the Joe Hole, the white canopy snapping open.

The trooper executed a textbook landing, absorbing the shock with bent knees and rolling onto one hip. Unclipped from the harness, he bundled his parachute before handing it off. He removed an old-fashioned pilot’s leather helmet, shoved it and his goggles into a coat pocket, and ruffled his dark hair. He walked toward the two women and spoke in French. “I am convinced that jumping from a perfectly good airplane is the height of insanity.”

Although his face was in shadows, Elizabeth instantly recognized the voice. “Colonel Bar..”

“Preacher,” he corrected, “Work names only in the field, Madeline. Good to see you made it safe and sound. We had to do a double drop because throwing radios out of an aircraft at four hundred feet leaves nothing but the tinkling sound of glass shards.

“At least packed in a Lysander, the valves have a better chance of survival. With luck, once you check them, you’ll only have to replace one or two rather than the whole lot!”

Abandoning bluff and bluster, the colonel became positively human when he looked at the other radio operator. “Rose.”

In the night’s dimness, Elizabeth thought a telltale stain appeared on the woman’s cheeks. “Preacher: I had...had not expected to see you after I left...”

Preacher coughed into his hand, hiding feelings best left unvisited, and looked around. “Our reception committee seems occupied, although I thought a certain someone would deign to greet us.” He sighted a tall, spare figure striding from the men crowded around the supplies. “Ahh...Maxim! I expected Jeeves to climb up here and meet his radio operator.”

The commandant pumped Preacher’s outthrust hand. “It is good to see you again, mon ami. Monsieur Jeeves is still recovering from his injuries. He remained at the farmhouse with Monsieur Jacques and Madame Brouillard. He mumbled something about not wishing to disappoint by being clumsy on his feet.”

Preacher tipped back his head and laughed. “Our friend has the soul of a sensitive artiste. I’ll wager he has never forgotten—nor forgiven—any slight, however lightly meant.”

Emotion’s serpent lifted its head in Elizabeth’s breast. She could not understand how anything Preacher might have said could have set Jeeves’s teeth on edge. She worried she would be hard-pressed to like the man who was to be her circuit’s leader.

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[i] Werner Heisenberg articulated his “uncertainty principle” after correspondence with Pauli and basing his work on that of Schrödinger, Dirac, and Jordan. He focused on the uncertainty of accurately measuring position and speed (notably of electrons, but the theory also applies to other quantum particles).