There is an upcoming film I am eagerly anticipating: The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. Now, this has nothing to do with me..well, maybe massive. I am arrogant enough to believe that my stories rise from a competence that may lean toward talent, but I am also humble enough to understand that I am, at best, a teller of workmanlike tales. No, the reason I mention the movie is a snippet found in a trailer. One character asks Nicolas Cage his favorite movie in which he has acted, and he replies that it is an impossible question to answer.
And I agree with Cage. I would have a difficult time of it if you tasked me to pick which of my eleven books stands above the rest. Each was written with a specific intent, and each offers deeply personal insights into my characters that find roots in my personality. Whether you read The Keeper: Mary Bennet’s Extraordinary Journey or The Grail: The Saving of Elizabeth Darcy, there are elements that rise from deep inside of me.
However…that noted, perhaps the sixth volume of the Bennet Wardrobe Series—The Avenger: Thomas Bennet and a Father’s Lament resonates the loudest. We can surmise that Mr. Bennet was in his early fifties and Mrs. Bennet in her early forties in Pride and Prejudice. I was at least a decade older than him when I wrote Avenger, however, not so far removed that I could not identify with Thomas Bennet at that age. As an aside, when I wrote a seventy-one-year-old Fitzwilliam Darcy in Grail, I found much that spoke from my soul.
Returning to Volume Six: it is a bit of an espionage book wrapped in love stories. Not only will there be romance, but also there will be a ball at Netherfield, albeit in 1947. For those on the younger side, there is the romance that springs back to life between Eileen Nearne (Agent Rose) and the Reverend (and Lt. Colonel) Richard Fitzwilliam (Agent Preacher). But the most important romance will be the rediscovered fervor between the elder Bennets…that which flared brightly in 1789 and slowly dimmed. (((NOTE: The picture below is from Lost in Austen which casts Hugh Bonneville and Alex Kingston as more age-appropriate than either the 1995 or 2005 versions of Pride and Prejudice.)))
Miss Austen did not fill out either of the elder Bennet’s characters. A fluttering and loud Mrs. Bennet and a reclusive and indolent Mr. Bennet served her literary purposes. If I were to be able to use them to advance the Bennet Wardrobe arc, I would have to build plausible pasts and realistic futures for both partners in the marriage.
There is a plot reason for this beyond the fact that I believe that Elizabeth Bennet’s observations of her parent’s loveless marriage—which shaped her firm resolution to only marry for the deepest love—were those of an adolescent girl who is utterly convinced of the veracity of her own conclusions (and who has met a teenager who was not that?). Austen never really explored the actual reason why Mr. Bennet (I have named him Thomas Michael) was attracted to Mrs. Bennet (Frances Lorinda Gardiner in the Wardrobe’s Universe) in the first place. We know that he was assumed to be a highly educated and bookish man. Are we to believe that he was also so socially inept—as is the trope of geeks, ancient and modern—that his head was turned by an opportunistic solicitor’s daughter? No, there had to be something more…her manner, her eyes, her joie de vivre. Admittedly, I stole this from Lydia because she has always been offered up as the daughter most like her mother.
Using an author’s authoritative voice, I decided to let my readers know that I believe that Mr. Bennet—and Mrs. Bennet—married for love and not infatuation.
While it would have been logical to have Fanny Gardiner seeking to improve her station by snagging a landowner, that would have put her in the class of Caroline Bingley. Mrs. Bennet, while annoying, was never consciously despicable.
Would Edward Gardiner’s sister, the daughter of a sober legal man who somehow left for his son the impression that marrying for love was to be desired, have sought less than love in her own? As a daughter of a country solicitor—who, none-the-less, had to have received a lawyer's education at one of the Inns in Town, although he may have clerked in St. Albans—the young woman could have focused her physical charms on a son of one of her father’s professional colleagues without being seen as a social climber. Certainly, her mother would have been urging her father to place her in front of suitable men, if Fanny’s exhortations about Bingley and Netherfield grew from her own juvenile experience. That individual could have been a London barrister or solicitor, either of whom would have been well-off and steps up from young Miss Gardiner's rusticated roots.
Tom Bennet would have been a reach for young Fanny even if his mother, who likely would have objected to such a match even though she was a country rector’s daughter herself, had not died in the fever of ’77. I note that many Austenesque writers have had Fanny entrapping Thomas through a staged compromise. These stories tend to cast Mrs. Bennet in an avaricious light. I have never been satisfied with such a characterization because I wonder why Jane and Lizzy, the daughters most exposed to her nature, are shown to be paragons of gentle womanhood in these same works. It is inconsistent.
However, my Bennets live in the Wardrobe’s universe.
And so, using an author’s conceit, I have concluded that Frances Gardiner married for love. I determined that the young lady with the sky blue, near purple eyes, was entranced by the wry man with the hazel orbs.
Early on in Avenger, I took the Canonical elder couple and turned them into humans with foibles rather than being served up as caricatures. I spent some pages creating a backstory of their lives after 1800. Mrs. Bennet’s story is found in the latter pages of Volume Three—The Exile: Kitty Bennet and the Belle Époque. Mr. Bennet changed his behavior (withdrawing into his bookroom) as his wife became progressively more depressed after the awful summer of the Year Zero. Then he responded to the instructions (take Lizzy in hand to obscure her memories of the future) he received in the “reverse” Founder’s Letter delivered in Lizzy Bennet Meets the Countess.
To rebuild Mr. Bennet’s respect for Fanny, I sought to portray the lady as a clever and practical observer of the world around her. Her fears of society's treatment of her unmarried daughters after Mr. Bennet’s oft-anticipated death had by 1814 calmed with the three weddings in 1811 as well as Mary's betrothal to Mr. Benton. Now, only Kitty remained to be settled. And that, of course, is the underlying plot mover: Mrs. Bennet’s desire to see her daughter conflicts with Mr. Bennet’s knowledge that Kitty lives well over a century in the future. What he discovers within moments of their arrival in 1947 sends everything down a new channel.
In order for Bennet to give Kitty, Jacques, and Schiller justice, he needs to have a confederate who knows him beyond words. This individual also must be utterly committed to the task. While Lord Thomas, Earl of Matlock, has every motivation to avenge his mother, he only met Mr. Bennet in July of 1947. While the two men are of an age, Lord Matlock does not appreciate the vagaries of Bennet’s weltanschauung. Likewise, he is in awe of this man, his grandfather, who has stepped across over fourteen decades to stand before him. Even though “young” Thomas is the Twelfth Earl of Matlock, the Managing Director of the Trust, and “M," he will never be more than a lieutenant to The Founder.
Who better to serve as co-consul than someone who shares the same Regency discursive context—in addition to the deeper reaches of a spousal relationship? And, to do that, as I repeat myself, Tom Bennet needs to regain his respect for his wife as well as win back her heart.
This he accomplishes, I believe, in the early chapters The Avenger: Thomas Bennet and A Father’s Lament.
Please enjoy this brief excerpt.
Dear friends: If you subscribe (it is free) to Austenesque Thoughts, I will be happy to send you an Audible promo code for the sixth volume: The Avenger: Thomas Bennet and a Father’s Lament. I will reach out via email when I receive notice of your subscription. Note that Avenger is the sixth volume in a series, so if you would prefer the Audible for Volume One, please advise.
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This excerpt is ©2018 by Donald P. Jacobson. No republication or other use of this material without the expressed written consent of the creator of this work is permitted. Published in the United States of America.
It is August 1, 1947. Mrs. Bennet has destroyed Mr. Bennet’s prevarication about her current where/when. He has decided to read her into the secrets of the Wardrobe and the situation in which they find themselves. Mr. and Mrs. Bennet have left Longbourn House to seek privacy atop Oakham Mount.
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Chapter 13
The path up Oakham Mount’s slope was not taxing as it gradually rose away from Longbourn’s fields and wound gently through the ancient deciduous woodland. The undergrowth along the rolling slopes bore testament to the benign neglect that had been the watchword for the last two decades. The economic calamities before and then after the most recent war had dictated different priorities for the current master of Longbourn. That six-year long cataclysm had, itself, been a great winnowing that had stolen away and never repatriated tranches of young men who might otherwise have been put to work by a competent forester clearing away the brush and juvenile trees that burdened the hump. Thus, the timberland had undertaken that which it always had: exercising its wooded privilege of entropy by reclaiming what Man had sought to turn to another purpose.
The two figures toiling up the slope would have appeared, to a twentieth century observer, to be play-actors stepping directly from the sound stages at Gainsborough Studios in Shepherd’s Bush. Their quaint and stifling garb—she in a long-sleeved muslin gown, gloves, and a broad-brimmed straw sunbonnet and he decked out in pantaloons, waistcoat, and topcoat as well as his planter’s hat—were redolent of a sesquicentennial celebration honoring Jervis’s great victory. The summer heat simmered in full intensity above the leafy canopy. However, the couple was shielded from its glaring worst by shadows thrown by massive branches flying up and away from equally colossal trunks. The air beneath eased and freshened as the pair moved further away from the manor house now hidden by thickened forest. The great arbor dwarfed both the master and his mistress in all but the enormity of their contemplations.[i]
“I always wondered how Lizzy could possibly wear out boots and slippers at the pace that she did,” gasped Fanny Bennet. “And now I know. That girl was up top of this knob at least five days out of seven! And this trail: ’tis new to me, but—and please correct me if I am mistaken—’tis also surely age-old when you consider how deeply it has been worn through that ledge up ahead.”
Bennet marveled at Mrs. Bennet’s powers of observation for he had never considered her able to leap beyond household matters. There her knowledge and management skills were unparalleled. Here again, she offered another compelling argument against his earlier estimation of her capabilities. This was no foolish female but, rather, someone with a laywoman’s appreciation of natural philosophy and longue durée history.[ii]
He, himself, had penned a monograph in which he had employed the findings from excavations of the ruins atop Oakham. His colleagues at Cambridge had been perplexed to find old strongholds or watchtowers using even older stockades as foundations. The fortifications were stacked like so many griddlecakes. Bennet had demonstrated—using recovered artifacts—that the Romans and predecessor Celts had taken advantage of the full-circle field of vision afforded from the crest, effectively pushing the history of the Meryton region back by two millennia.[iii]
Thus, Fanny had the right of it—almost as if she had read his essay. Not only had the dainty booted feet of Elizabeth Rose Bennet trod this path, but also those sporting medieval English clogs and imperial Roman sandals. Perhaps the leathery bare feet of Wessex warriors were the first to ascend the chalky slopes. Oakham’s prominence above Longbourn’s rolling fields gave its owner control of the reaches of the Mimram Valley as it coursed through the alluvial deposits between the shire and the Lea.
Bennet stopped for a moment—as much to catch his breath as to respond to his wife. “Have you been listening at the door when Lizzy and I talked about archaeology?”
At his wife’s look of reproof, he raised his hands in defense. “I was simply teasing, my dear. I was offering what turned out to be, I am afraid, a backhanded compliment. I am afraid, Fanny, that I shall have to relearn proper behavior. I have been lax, and you have been the victim.
“Let me try a ‘forehand’ compliment.
“As you said, you have never climbed Oakham through all the years of your life. Yet, you just offered a sophisticated reading of the antiquity of the path beneath our feet.
“You may recall my journey up to Cambridge in ’03. ’Twas then that I delivered my paper Considerations on the History and Pre-History of the Mimram Valley in Roman and Celtic Hertford to the fellows at Trinity. You may have heard me mention the late Professor Gibbons. I thought to revise his assessment of the historiography of the scholars of the last century…”[iv]
He almost heard an audible click as she rolled her eyes in response to his rambling soliloquy. Bennet glanced expectantly at her. Those blue to near-purple orbs peered up at him from beneath the brim of her hat, its lip fetchingly bowed down beside her ears by a broad azure ribbon tied neatly beneath her chin. A small smile played across her lips and showed a hint of even teeth.
She asked coquettishly, “And the compliment?”
Bennet stammered, having lost his ability to speak when she had speared him with those sparkling beams emanating from her orbs. “Uh…I meant to say…that…you sounded just like Elizabeth. Oh, no, not that…rather that Lizzy sounded like you! No…uuuh.”
He stopped talking, and, using his long legs, loped up the hill a few paces, leaving Mrs. Bennet standing where she had halted. He then arrested his flight, and froze in place, his back to the lady, one fisted hand planted in the small of his back, the thumb worrying the forefinger as he sought to regain his composure. Mrs. Bennet, using the wisdom earned through a quarter century of managing her husband, awaited his assured return.
After two or three minutes, during which she closed her eyes and focused on the sounds of the birds calling to one another across the forest, he rejoined her.
At first, a solemn Bennet faced his wife. Then the façade cracked to allow the wry Thomas to escape. He had begun to smile before long. Finally, he spoke to her. “I thought I had become immune to your arts and allurements, so long has it been since I have appreciated you as an object of desire. Yet, when you turn those lighthouses of your soul—your incredible eyes—my way, I forget how to breathe.
“Miss Frances, for now I address you as such because you sparkle much like the girl who poured my tea in her mother’s parlor facing out onto Meryton’s High Street, you are nonpareil. You are an original. You are the woman without whom I would not have become half the man I am today.
“Wait, that statement is not well put for you may believe I am implying that I became the indolent man I am because of you.
“On the contrary, I would have only become more lackadaisical and more withdrawn in my own anguish and pain if you had not found your way Home from whatever ring of Hades where you had found yourself after that horrible day. Only the good Lord knows what would have happened to our girls if you had withered like a bloom way past its prime.
“Even though you were distracted, you found the path back to becoming the mistress of my house and the truest, fiercest, and—might I suggest—only defender of our daughters.”
He paused, grief coloring his hazel eyes, as he recalled all of the years he had closed his heart to the woman he had loved for nearly a dozen before. “As you so aptly noted earlier, I have the ability to convince myself of the veracity of my acts. And, upon reflection, that is what I did with you.
“’Twas easier to ascribe your uneven moods to nerves or silliness. That allowed me to ignore my responsibility to you. Did I not vow to protect you the day you changed your name to mine? However, what did I do to help you ride the waves of loss? Nothing, absolutely nothing!”
He shook himself like a sheepdog as if doing so would rearrange his turbulent feelings around his longish frame. “Frances Lorinda, you are the soul that makes my life meaningful. I had forgotten that singular fact and, instead, began to find all the ways I could moderate and diminish my respect for you. Why? Because I had lost my own self-respect. And convincing myself that you had a second-rate mind was the worst of my transgressions!
“True, you are unschooled as are almost all women in England. And, unlike Madame de Staël, you never had the advantage of a parent who would see to your informal education. That you, the younger daughter of a country solicitor, bravely entered Longbourn, the estate of a Cambridge don, and meekly submitted to instruction from first Sally Hill and then our current Mrs. Hill speaks volumes about your modesty and self-effacement.[v]
“Every step of the way you never asked what was best for you—only your family and Longbourn. I could not be prouder of you or your list of accomplishments that, I assure you, would put any female of the ton to shame. I imagine they would succumb to fits of the vapors if they had to undertake half of what you have done since ’89!
“Now, all that remains is for me to beg your forgiveness and pray that I live long enough to earn it.”
There, amongst the softly swaying blades growing beneath Oakham’s boughs, Mrs. Bennet forgave Mr. Bennet in the tenderness of her wifely embrace.
[i] From the filming of, perhaps, The Young Mr. Pitt (1942). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Young_Mr_Pitt accessed 3/31/18. The Battle of Cape St. Vincent (February 1797) is considered to be one of six fleet actions (the others being the Glorious First of June—1794, Howe; Camperdown—1797, Duncan; The Nile—1798, Nelson; Copenhagen—1801, Parker/Nelson/Graves; and Trafalgar—1805, Nelson) across the 25-year long war that confirmed British naval supremacy and enforced the Blockade against Napoleon’s Continental System.
[ii] See Fernand Braudel who argued that the regularities of social life altered almost imperceptibly except over vast stretches of time: centuries or even millennia. http://www.sunypress.edu/pdf/62451.pdf
[iii] Please see Lizzy Bennet Meets the Countess, chapter 12. Stacked ruins are not unusual in human construction. See the ruins of Troy discovered by von Schliemann in the 1870s where he found over one dozen distinct cities built atop the ruins of the previous town.
[iv] T. M. Bennet, MA, unpublished mss, 1803, Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge University.
[v] A leading French intellectual of the Napoleonic era. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germaine_de_Sta%C3%ABl