A smell of damp wafts through many of the pivotal scenes and plot cruxes in my #Austenesque stories. My wife (or as Horace Rumpole would say about Hilda “She who must be obeyed) has offered that is frequently because I am all wet. My father, who often despaired of me ever being ready to launch, would have amended that to a more anatomically specific wet behind the ears.
All joking aside, I believe there is a very sound basis for authors to use water in the center of #Austenesque stories. After all, humans create what historians call riparian civilizations. This definition takes humanity past the elementary need for potable water into a realm where the nature of water contributes useful properties to emerging societies. Information is more readily transmitted between human groups along waterways than over ridges or the rocky tracks that overtop those cornices. Cultures from Egypt to Rome, from England to Benin grew up along waterways that fostered trade and travel while also providing power and security.
The political anthropologist, Karl Deutsch, in the mid-1950s explored the idea of how the idea of nationality was transmitted through social communication. It is not within the scope of this contemplation to review Deutsch’s seminal work Nationalism and Social Communication. However, his ideas about the distance between central nodes of national myth feed into my ideas about riparian communication. To explain Deutsch in a sentence or two is difficult, but here goes:
Imagine a line between Paris and Madrid. Somewhere along this line—in the Pyrenees, to be specific—the attraction to the stories of Charlemagne and Roland becomes so weak that the mythology of the Conquistadorial Spaniard overpowers it. This is a simplistic interpretation because there is a point where neither myth governs. That my friends is my explanation as to why the Basques (see Navarre) seek their own independent homeland because they identify neither as French nor Spanish.
I have been fascinated with the idea of how water transmits imagery, information, and myth. In the Canon, too, we find a lot of water, although rarely as a plot mover. Yes, Jane Bennet is caught in a drenching rainstorm. However, Wentworth is a man of the sea, Barton Cottage overlooks the water, and Tom Bertram apparently is laid low by a waterborne illness (malaria? dysentery?). Austen used, in my opinion, water to set the scene and supply a well-understood (for the Regency) context.
Whether it is the Bennet Wardrobe stories (see Darcy and Elizabeth on the Briare Canal in Lizzy Bennet Meets the Countess) or my first Elizabeth/Darcy standalone novel, In Plain Sight, water has a way of seeping into my plots. Usually, it flows along in the background, powering waterwheels and lifting barges to send money into beleaguered Meryton coffers. At times, though, it surges to the forefront as an essential element. I am not suggesting that the near drowning in the Mimram that is In Plain Sight’s first plot crux is as important as the boating party in Persuasion. However, making water a character without dialogue seemed to complete the allusion to one character struggling to shore after a perilous journey while another looks deeply beneath the surface to discover treasures long hidden from the light.
My mind kept coming back to water as I worked on In Plain Sight—has it been three years? I find that I tend to grasp onto evocative icons—art, music, places, dates—to help me frame the themes which flow through the books. In Plain Sight was guided by water throughout. No spoilers are coming, believe me, but here are some of the water references from Chapter Four in the book.
1. The Lea-Mimram Canal is being dug by convict labor to connect Meryton to the world. At the same time, it suggests a modernity that gouges a chasm through the old ways of life.
2. Sweat trickles down a young lady’s face—that of Mary Bennet, trapped inside with her mother and sister—in the suffocating heat of the family carriage. Another reading of the conditions, though, suggests the stultifying nature of gentle life in agrarian England.
3. Brackish pools are seen in the unfilled ditch hinting at Blake’s reptiles of the mind. They also represent barriers that must be shattered if the observer—Elizabeth Bennet—is to move forward into a new world of clearer vision.
These three certainly perform the function of adding texture to the scene. Yet, I intentionally focused on such seemingly unimportant (except for the fact of the canal being constructed) factors because they answered some metaphorical questions.
Deeper in the book, a silvan glade surrounds a small creek and pool. This idyllic setting will frame the most essential love scene in the book. The penultimate confrontation finds its location moved because the Derwent River had shifted its channel to render the original site untenable.
Ultimately, the gentlest and most fraught water of all—tears—takes center stage.
I hope you will enjoy reading the following excerpt from In Plain Sight which explores a relevant element that brings our two leads together for the first time.
Please enjoy the following excerpt from In Plain Sight, published by Meryton Press.
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This excerpt is © 2020 by Donald P. Jacobson. Any reproduction aside from sharing this column is prohibited. Printed in the USA.
Chapter 34
…
Smith juggled their lunches, the jug of ale, and Elizabeth’s arm all at the same time as the couple picked their way beneath the trees and through the thickets surrounding the creek. Twigs caught in the folds of their clothing as they passed. Lizzy clasped a bundled lambswool throw that Smith had collected from Mary’s gig. As she clutched William’s arm, she felt corded muscles shift as his body moved along the uneven trail. His head constantly scanned the deeply rutted path that cut through the hillside. Dirty patches of snow pockmarked the slope; a late-spring melt sent muddy rivulets toward the larger stream.
A few dozen steps along the creek bed led Will and Lizzy to a glen where the brook swirled into a pool trapped in a natural bowl before tumbling out through a cut in the age-blackened granite. The primeval scene was accentuated by the overhanging evergreens that dipped their tips in the crystal-clear liquid. The rest of the world was banished. All that remained was the gurgling of the water, the gushing of the small cataract on the far side, and the sound of each other’s breathing.
The level space high on the bank above the eddying water invited the pair to repose and enjoy their picnic. Elizabeth released Smith’s arm and spread the blanket atop the mossy undergrowth, burying soft tufts and spiky gorse beneath the throw’s weave. She gracefully lowered herself onto her haunches and tucked her gown around her legs, situating herself demurely. Smith chose the Indian fakir pose with legs akimbo. Words were foregone as two work-sharpened appetites demanded immediate attention.
To help wash down a mouthful of bread and cheese, Lizzy tipped back and drank her fill of the nut-brown ale from the wide-mouthed container. As she lowered her head, she caught sight of Smith staring at her.
She lowered the jug. “What?”
William said nothing. Rather, he reached across with the red-checked serviette that had held his lunch, finished now, and carefully wiped off the foamy mustache that had accumulated on her upper lip. His finger’s gentle pressure was felt but, cloth-cloaked, left untouched her naked face, much to Elizabeth’s disappointment. Yet, even that near contact unsettled her in that deep recess of her abdomen.
An embarrassed laugh preceded her riposte. “Oh, so now you presume to put me out of employment by acting the lady’s maid.”
A deep baritone chuckle rumbled up from Smith’s middle. His reply brought the claret to Elizabeth’s cheeks.
“All I did was to remove that which had not been as God intended. I could not hope to improve upon perfection, madam.”
Lizzy rolled her eyes and jousted back. “Oh, but you are a practiced flatterer, are you not, Mr. Smith? I could well imagine your haunting some drawing room in Grosvenor Square. There you would turn the heads of impressionable young ladies with your sweet-sounding words.”
The invisible fiber running from behind her breastbone into the chalice of her hips twanged in disconsolate discord when she saw his face fall at her pert speech. Lizzy leaned across the space that separated them and spoke gently. “What is it, Mr. Smith? Why have you suddenly gone into a brown study?”
Smith stirred and clambered to his feet, raking his hands through his long hair and pulling it away from his face. He paced back and forth before turning to her. “Miss Elizabeth, please know that I reserve my pretty words only for you. The idea that you could even consider my throwing blandishments at another woman—because I could not truly mean them—is repugnant to me.”
Lizzy quailed before his intensity.
He held out both hands in a calming motion and quickly moved on. “No, please, I do not mean to criticize you. You naturally seek to tease those who engage your attention. I have seen you with Mrs. Wilson and your sister—”
“And, I have watched you with Mr. Wilson. You are far more comfortable with persons with whom you are acquainted,” Lizzy interrupted.
He soldiered on. “You have sketched my character with a skilled hand, Miss Elizabeth.
“In my life before, I was often considered prideful. My behavior led others to believe that I saw myself as far above the company in which I found myself. In reality, I was withdrawn—my more charitable critics would have said shy—to the point of unsociability.
“There came a point when society determined that I was a prime cut for the marriage mart. I used my mask of inscrutability as a shield against importuning women. I am not proud to say it, and I would hope you could find humor in a man behaving ridiculously, but my glare could have stopped a clock on the far side of a drawing room.
“The grasping, venal nature of the ton poisoned my spirit. That very quality exacerbated the worst aspects of my character. As a child, I was taught what was right, but I was not taught to correct my temper. I was given good principles but left to follow them in pride and conceit. I cataloged every offense and ignored all evidence of goodness.
“I was judge, jury, and executioner. I found every person who crossed my path wanting.
“At one time, ladies great and small would have fallen all over each other to lead me to the parson’s trap. They did not want me for who I was but rather for what I represented and could bring them. Their fluttering attention left me cold.
“I no longer have that problem. Its absence and the gift of time—yes, it does seem queer that I could call being sentenced to toil far from all I loved a reward, but it is—in a world where my lineage is meaningless has led me to the inescapable truth.
“My heart is now prepared to accept love. Where before it was parched ground upon which the blood and tears of poets’ contemplations sizzled and burned away, now I cannot imagine a life lived without the most glorious of emotions.”
Elizabeth was mesmerized. She could not tear her eyes from that face so high above her: its clefts, crevices, and planes being burned into her memory.
In a move that shouted of youthful joy, Smith strode past her and hopped atop a stump as if he were a Member of Parliament on the hustings. He threw his arms out from his sides and tipped his head back to gaze up through an opening between the treetops.
He loosed a single, long baritone note to the heavens. Lizzy could never quite recall its exact timbre. To her, ’twas as if Maestro Mozart had awarded him the singular sound of male joy, something heard only by the object of his affections. The rich sound bounced around their refuge and flowed over her, lifting her on its crescendo.
Will looked down at this young woman, his cherished treasure, her hopeful brown eyes staring up at him. The air crackled around her. His sight dimmed until nothing remained but her haloed being. Then it all exploded, filling him to overflowing with coruscating energy. The French called what he felt in that instant, that which had jolted him every day for months, un coup de foudre.[i]
Without pride, but rather displaying complete vulnerability, William continued his monolog in a voice suffused with wonderment. “You must forgive my frankness, Miss Elizabeth. I am like a blind man granted his sight through a touch of healing waters. All that I once believed is now withered and blown away like the dust that it was.
“’Tis impossible to hold me back. My feelings will not be repressed!”
Then he whirled and stumbled off his pedestal. He dropped to his knees next to Lizzy.
“I cannot rightfully discuss my feelings. The state has yet a great hold over me. It is not fair to you, Miss Elizabeth…”
“Lizzy: just plain ‘Lizzy’ will do, Mr. Smith. You forget that I am a disgraced woman, reduced to working as a parlor maid on the other side of the country, far from my home,” she faintly intoned.
Smith’s face softened, and he splayed his fingers on his thighs displaying scarred knuckles. This made a counterpoint to the way Elizabeth had hidden her stained hands beneath the folds of her skirt.
Words of regret came next. “Your reputation has been tarnished because you chose to do your Christian duty by me. If I could erase the moment your path and mine intersected in that sump to spare you the obloquy, I would. Honestly, mayhap it would have been better if I had never survived my baptism in the Mimram.”
Elizabeth’s hand flew out of its own accord and caressed his cheek. She urgently replied, “No…never…Mr. Smith. I would not wish my standing left unsullied at the cost of another’s life. You, sir, survived for a reason.”
Smith nodded. “I have been coming to that conclusion these past several months. My conviction is that the universe, in its eternal game of chance, decided to bring the two of us together. I pray that you will not think me impertinent.
“I wish I could lay my life before you like an open book. As I have said, I cannot.
“Here is my confession…but there is not much to it.
“I have laid what history I can before you. My name is not Smith. However, I cannot tell you more. I am bound by law and my honor not to speak my true name until I am released from my obligation to society,” he quietly said.
Elizabeth was rocked back on her heels. Her conclusions about Smith’s nature had been confirmed in a few simple sentences.
Chapter 35
As epiphanies went, Elizabeth would have to ask Mary or Edward whether William’s pronouncements in the glade were on par with Saul of Tarsus’s visions on the road to Damascus. Like the original, they resonated with such power that her world tilted on its axis. She felt slightly blasphemous as a result.
As a young girl, she had entertained notions of love at first sight. Lizzy was too much her father’s daughter to view such fanciful inclinations with anything but the deepest skepticism.
I do believe that Papa considers himself a victim of “instant infatuation.” That, sadly, has fed five-and-twenty years of cynical behavior on his part. What my heart is telling me now is that this is something thoroughly different. There is a bubble of happiness that has unsettled my core. Perhaps…perhaps…
Here before her knelt a man who, by every measure she had ever been taught, was a danger to her person and an insult to her station. William Smith was not just beneath her but as far from Lizzy’s original class as the distance from the moon to the lowest level of a Welsh tin mine.
None of that mattered.
What had begun in the Netherfield barnyard and renewed itself on the Mimram River Road had evolved during those Dower House days into something more burnished. Like a bronze battering ram, that understanding crashed through Elizabeth’s last reserves.
There was a goodness about William Smith that shone through the scales of his crime—the contours of which she did not know. His nobility, his honoring of her shabby virtue, led her to try to see beyond easy labels.
His earnest gaze swept away all notions, all bias.
Her awareness faded as she replayed each interaction from that first through the waltz to their flight to Egypt beneath the straw piled atop Longbourn’s wagon. Flashes of his jawline as she had nestled in his arms during their dance, his profile as he stared out the window at Longbourn’s fields, and his natural scent redolent of musk that weakened her knees—all carried her from this plane.
The rest of her world receded.
Elizabeth needed to understand this new state of being! How had she arrived here? She felt as though great slabs of a snowy cornice had fractured and slid down to bury her in an avalanche of emotion. Even more profound was the grainy bedrock that was left exposed on the steep pitch above, a new foundation for her future.
She had been stripped down to her essentials. No longer was she Elizabeth Rose Bennet, gentlewoman. She had been broken and reshaped to a mighty purpose, finally to be that which she was destined to be and not what others insisted she should be. She was now simply Lizzy Bennet, a woman in love with a man. That defined her.
Through those sennights of uncertainty in the Dower House to that awful moment when everything collapsed around her head the night of the Netherfield ball, William Smith had been the glue used to bind her together. The scars that crisscrossed her heart were glorious, highlighted in gold, the result of the tender hand of a kintsugi master. All could see and understand the woman she was now.
The purity of her comprehension was glorious!
She pulled in a vast draught of air, so full of the land’s freshness that it was fairly bursting with life itself. ’Twas as if she were a babe, freshly birthed! Fresh from the womb, her eyes opened and her ears unstopped. She saw and heard as if for the first time!
Smith had watched those chocolate pools as they lost focus when her contemplations turned inward. Elizabeth stood and floated on elvish feet across the dell to stop and stand above the limpid pool, arms wrapped around her narrow waist, head dipped, hiding those incredible eyes beneath her bonnet’s brim. Her study was so immaculate that Smith assayed that he could have crossed to her side without her noticing, to tuck back in place another errant tendril that had escaped her chapeau’s confines.
At first, William feared that her reverie might lead her to slip and fall on the foam-dampened tufts that lapped over the lip. Yet, he allowed her to be the mistress of her fate, tamping down his old inclinations to protect one and all in his circle.
Time slowed as the woodland sylph inhaled a massive breath.
A single leaf broke free of a branch high above the pool, rode along invisible currents swirling above the waters, and landed on the membrane that separated the two elements.
Its brown spikes shivered reality before the sprig disappeared into the small flume leading down toward the Derwent. With its passage, the universe that surrounded the two poles had forever changed.
Her sigh drew his attention.
Elizabeth had turned to him, her rosy lips parted to reveal perfectly shaped, pearl-bud teeth. Her soprano laughter bounced around their paradise.
All pain, all fear, flowed away in the face of her happiness. Smith immediately understood that she had broken free of the last chains that had bound her to her ancient life. With that, he knew that she had accepted who he had been, how he had been broken and reshaped, and that she would have to wait for him.
That she would wait for him.
…
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Here is the universal link for In Plain Sight: A Pride and Prejudice Variation. The book is available on Amazon in E-book, Print, KindleUnlimited, and Audible.
mybook.to/inplainsightPandPvar
[i] Something unexpected like love at first sight.