Which is worse? No story or not knowing which to write?

A quandary after the release of "In Westminster's Halls"

Three weeks. It has been three weeks since my Pride and Prejudice Variation speculation about the Bennets, Darcys, and the abolition of the British slave trade was released. Blog tour. Giveaway. Advertising. All the blocking and tackling required to bring a book to market. Yes—self-publish: it’ll be fun, they said—and I have been doing that for nearly nine years.

I am not complaining—at least not about this.

No, dear reader, I am experiencing that peculiar ennui authors know—our own form of postpartum depression. The book is out there garnering readers and reviews. And I sit here staring at the computer screen. What to do next.

In truth, I have that answer in the short term. I am writing a Christmas story (or trying to write one). The Bennet Wardrobe Christmas Miracle is a plot concept that has existed since 2018—the idea that a Bennet Family reunion could be coordinated and held down the timeline to allow them to be together once again. Remember that Kitty translated from 1811 to 1886. Elizabeth vanished from the timeline in 1835, Mary translated in the 1850s. Bennets were sprinkled throughout the universe. Suffice it to say that other projects interposed themselves…and I needed a reason to write a story that would take the reader to a different understanding of the Austenesque universe. See the end of this newsletter for the opening salvo. The book will be released at the end of November.

Back to not knowing what I feel—or not sensing a driving urge to tackle a particular major project. I tend to look at one major project (full-length novel of 100,000 or so words) per year. In 2023, The Sailor’s Rest answered that requirement. In Westminster’s Halls was the 2024 standard-bearer.

But, what of 2025? We are not dealing with an Oh-mi-gawd situation. I tend to begin the next novel around the beginning of November, so I have time.

My problem is that I am not short of ideas; rather, I am faced with three of them. I need to pick one.

That is where you come in. I am soliciting your input on which of the following three ideas you would like me to attack next. All you need to do is comment below.

And—without further ado:

©2024 by Donald P. Jacobson

Idea #1: Mrs. Bennet’s Daughters

The Bennet ladies are forced to leave Longbourn upon Mr. Bennet’s death. However, Fanny is determined to keep her family together. She takes her portion and, with Mr. Gardiner’s help (he purchases Mr. Bennet’s book collection), purchases a large slightly decrepit home at 43 Fenchurch Street near India House. She sets up housekeeping as a boarding house for merchants and gentlemen. Each of the daughters finds something to keep themselves occupied. (Think You Can’t Take It With You) Jane assists her mother. Elizabeth catalogs the library. Mary writes tracts on social questions (which she prints in the cellars with the assistance of an unemployed clergyman, Edward Benton). Kitty pursues dance and painting. Lydia has fallen in love with raising chickens. A young refugee—Georgiana Darcy—fleeing a kidnapping attempt by George Wickham—sneaks into the house (Goldilocks). Mr. Darcy comes searching for her but arouses Elizabeth’s suspicions because of Georgie’s brief description (a dark-haired man had taken her—she was being circumspect). Madness ensues. Caroline Bingley somehow ends up in a closet—tangled in coats—with Wickham.

Prologue   

Longbourn, July 17, 1810

They thought she could not hear them: her little blackbirds clustered around the window seat. Their whispers were balm to her senses, at their rawest now that the hearse had rattled its mournful way down the drive and toward the chapel. The riverbed pebbles had been raked smooth this steamy morning. Mr. Hill had shooed away the grooms from their daily duty and took the tool himself. The chief servant painstakingly performed this final service before Thomas Bennet began his long journey to the high meadows.

Now, Longbourn’s ladies were alone in the front parlor. Mrs. Gardiner sagely had ushered the other women onto the veranda overlooking the rose beds. Their absence eliminated hospitality’s burden that would divert energies best employed navigating sorrow’s dark waters. In many ways, sadness was a dish shared only between intimates. Even then, each tasted the potage in her own way. 

Jane, of course, took the tack that saw their bleak situation in the best light. “I do not doubt that once the men return from…from the funeral, they will have come up with a plan for our care and comfort. We are loved, and our family will take care of us.”

Lydia’s soft reply was nigh unto inaudible, but it brought tears to her mother’s eyes, reddened by three days of mourning. “Yes, Jane, but which family will that be? If I am sent away with Kitty to Aunt and Uncle Philips, how will I see you and Lizzy when you live in Gracechurch Street?

“And, what about poor Mary? She is always caught in between—neither fish nor fowl—where will she go?”

The rest of her thoughts were swept away in a hiccoughing cascade of fresh tears punctuated by words muffled into a sisterly shoulder. “I…miss…Papa. Why…did he…have…to…leave…us?”

Neither fish nor fowl, indeed! Who would have thought my fifteen-year-old listened to her father deeply enough to pick up one of his favorite catchphrases?

Lydia’s questioning lament began to chip away at Fanny Bennet’s decade-long defensive lines, her Linhas de Torres,[i] behind which she had hidden since her great disappointment in the year One. She had been unable to face any reduction in her children’s circumstances. Malicious gossip had it that she was frightened of her own poverty after years as queen of the manor. The entail and its faceless beneficiary had terrified her. Every evil she could imagine ate away at her spirit. To replace those fractured foundations, Fanny had built upon her dread and hid behind a haze of nervous prostration. She had had that luxury up to three mornings ago when a broken Mr. Hill knocked on her chamber door to whisper that Thomas had never awakened.

Now that she had met William Collins and suffered under his solicitous platitudes, oily and slick with salacious undertones, she knew they could never coexist beneath the manor’s slate roof. That he entertained the idea that a mother would willingly act as a procuress to guarantee her comfort, while one of her daughters ensured his, confirmed the worst. Their time at Longbourn would be brief after she delivered her coldest rejection.

Idea #2: The Governor’s Wife

This Lessers and Betters story takes place on the Island of Malta. General Fitzwilliam, his wife Lady Kate, Henry, and Annie Wilson, along with James Foote, have come to the crossroads of the Mediterranean to find and plug an intelligence leak. A murder mystery and an espionage story, TGW is populated by denizens from Paris, St. Petersburg, and Istanbul. Set in the early 1820s, the head of British Intelligence does battle with representatives of the Holly Alliance determined to weaken the realm. All begins at a dinner and remains contained in The Governor’s Palace in Valletta. Has elements of a Nero Wolfe story.

First Words

You know death when you see it. A dead body cannot really be duplicated. We have this image from the stage where Hamlet reclines with a fading voice and a languid droop of his head. The audience all knows this is death, and the death they all pray for…without struggle, fear, or pain.

But come across a freshly killed soul in one of London’s seedier warrens, and everything is different…and impossible to duplicate. The closest Wilson had come to an explanation was that someone newly murdered assumes the quality of a marionette with its strings cut. As the brain objects to encroaching darkness, it loses control over limbs and trunk. There is no peaceful repose, only the higgledy-piggledy collapse of nerveless joints no longer able to support their host. Only later comes that rigor that forces mortuary men to break bones to fit the corpse into a box for families to weep over before removing the remains from their sight.

The blood seeping onto the flags beneath Lady _________ had yet to congeal, and so was of the newly deceased. As she expired, she stumbled forward, not looking back at her assailant, only trying to reach the safety that her instincts had told her was in the opposite direction, away. But oblivion was too quick. She had folded earthward, too suddenly. Her head was twisted on the stone pathway. Her eyes, pupils blown wide, unseeing through Death’s glaze, gazed at the decorative border, still in bloom here in Malta’s Mediterranean warmth. Bloodied lips showed the force of her uncushioned landing. Arms and legs were awkwardly splayed. One shoe had come unmoored and hung imprisoned by a stockinged toe.

The way she had died was no mystery, for the shank of the throwing knife that delivered the death blow stood pitching a shadow in the torchlight across her richly brocaded gown. Wilson imagined that it still quivered as its fatal force was spent slicing through the fabric and stays that held this society dame’s backbone straight. Next to the column it went, scraping along the bone, using it as a guide to point the tip at the great blood vessel, to transect it, pooling her body’s blood in the cavity, leaving enough force to spurt and then, in reducing pulses, flow along the blade to escape from the wound in her back.

Idea #3: Ghost Flight

The World War II story immerses us in the world of Great Britain’s hidden war against Hitler. Darcy and Bingley both worked in the Special Operations Executive’s air arm delivering supplies and agents into occupied Europe—until disaster struck. Unable to fly any longer, Darcy takes an Irish passport to allow him—Mr. Fitzgerald—to travel as a neutral citizen. He will assume ownership of the Beach House at Deauville as the last remaining member of the clan—Fitzwilliam Darcy having died in battle in Burma—although his scars will be a thin disguise when Wickham appears. Elizabeth trained as a radio operator and was dropped into Normandy in 1944 to operate a clandestine set transmitting agent reports back to London. To hide her from the Gestapo, the Commandant will bring her to Darcy when she is betrayed. Virginia Hall (GdG, DSC, OBE) was my inspiration for Elizabeth’s character and exploits with Darcy. Working with the Commandant, they will raise an army of the Resistance.

First Words—

A forest of rattling leaves surrounded him as the Dakota’s skin peeled away. Wounded sheet metal rattled like the woods carpeting Derbyshire’s slopes as September aged into October. The sounds assailed him and the wind pelted him. The ground bucked and rolled beneath him recalling a blanket when he and his cousins would toss one another.

He could feel the North Sea calling it to his torturd beast. He fought the siren’s song as he drifted in a world hazed milk-white.

The voice snapped in his ears. “Captain, wake up! Wake up!”

Her tone cut through and forced him to drag his lids open. The bird dipped low to the right fighting his attempts to keep the transport on an even keel. On some level he understood the Hun nightfighter had done them dead. There was no question of ‘if’ but rather when. The Me 110’s 20 mm cannon had torn into the right wing, shredding the engine. The hunter’s machine gun chewed up the windscreen and cockpit. Darcy felt something warm running down his side under his flight suit. Only limited fuel had probably kept the German from finishing them, or perhaps he had some perverse sense of chivalry that had him turn away to leave the black-skinned transport to its own devices: to die or to beat the odds and survive.

The yoke was slippery and from the blood leaking from his gloves. He could not drop his eyes to assess how deeply the shattered Perspex had torn his hand; it still worked, unlike one eye.

Her voice, strident in his ears, returned. “Now, you must stay awake Captain.”

Darcy keyed his microphone, knowing he had to speak, but his words struck a part of his mind as nonsensical. “I would never wake up from this dream as I hear angels calling me home. Oh, that’s Bingley.”

She sounded snappish. “I am the only voice calling you home. Who is Bingley?”

Darcy cast about his befuddled brain. Oh, yes, Bingley lolled in his seat on the right side of the cockpit. But for the fact that his wounds continued to bleed, showing his heart still beat, Bingley might have already, as the Americans so quaintly put it, bought the farm.

But, the lady required an answer, if only that it was polite to make conversation as they moved through this dance with lines separated by miles. “My first officer. Always going on about angels. You though, do not sound like one of his. You sound darker…alto…Bingley likes blondes.”

A pause and then a confidence. “That would be Jane, my sister.”

Darcy struggled to keep in this world. “You read a lot from your headphones.”

The vibration returned as the cliffs grew in his windscreen. The nose kept dipping below that fatal demarkation. “May I know your name? If it would not compromise operational security?”

“Elizabeth.”

I look forward to your thoughts on which you would like to see me address first.

&&&&

In Westminsters Halls Amazon USA

Now, please enjoy this excerpt from A Bennet Wardrobe Christmas Miracle. This excerpt is ©2024 by Donald P. Jacobson. All rights reserved. Any reproduction is prohibited.

Prologue

Selkirk Castle, Matlock, December 12, 1827

Spice’s sharpness filled the air and rubbed its wispy shoulders against his nose. His home always smelled of something: Papa’s leather tack, his gun cleaner, Mama’s favorite perfume—roses over cut grass, —or the oil rubbed on acres of wood paneling. Selkirk Castle’s air was filled with aromas. This time of the year, though, looping evergreen garlands, plump baked goods, and steaming warm drinks colored the scent-scenery through which the youngster moved.

 ’Twas easy for a resourceful child, used to making his own fun, to picture himself a knight wending his way through a cathedral of towering trees, their bark-covered columns disappearing in the milky mists overhead. One of Derbyshire’s great houses, Selkirk’s cavernous depths were nearly impossible to warm during December’s dim days. Hearths filled with buckets of sea coals or split oak barely kept pace with what inevitably snuck past double windows, shutters, and thick drapes. The enforced closure against northern frost turned great hallways into subterranean passages and captured every smell, sweet or sour, to be spread along unstoppable drafts from cellar to cornice. His imagination was fired by Sir Walter’s Ivanhoe, first read to him by the author himself. Thus, adventure beckoned around every dark corner in a world easily built from blocks made of every sense he owned.

Deep runners cushioned the youngster as he crept along the dim corridor. Henry Fitzwilliam pretended he was a Spartan boy or perhaps an Anglo-Saxon squire sent to sneak into the enemy camp. Success would bring food, but failure’s humiliation would be driven home through an empty bowl and a severe beating.

Down such channels a rambunctious boy’s fancy ran, especially that of a child who lived in a bonafide castle. Henry, forced into snowbound entertainment as the Five Families gathered in Matlock for the festive season, had been left to his own devices while the earl and countess did whatever adults did when their brothers and sisters descended upon their home.

Henry’s transit, though, was not solitary. His squad attacked their objective from multiple directions. Henry’s twin George, along with cousins Ellie Fitzwilliam and Carrie Bingley, worked their way through Selkirk’s passages. Carrie—Caroline Jane—although a girl, was a dab hand at rangering as the earl called it. George’s interest in all things military had grown past toy soldier armies. Ellie was, well, Ellie.[1]

Wearying of governesses, the quartet had escaped Mama’s rule that seen and not heard was the appropriate way to behave. She could be touchy about what was right and proper. At seven—all born in 1820’s lambing season before the fever time—they were too young for the parlor and too old for the nursery’s playroom and preferred to adopt Sergeant Wilson’s dictum that unseen and unheard was the way His Majesty’s scouts put paid to crapaud pretensions. Henry took puerile pleasure in rolling that word over in his mind.

Grown-up activities held little interest for children born in the late spring of their parents' marriage. Their older brothers and sisters found refuge away from the small fry, although only four were out of leading strings. The older boys down from Cambridge or Eton—George William Darcy, Rory Benton, Tommy Bingley, and Eddie Gardiner—joined their fathers at the Fitzwilliam hunting lodge in a glen above the castle. The young ladies—Henry’s sister Annie, Maddie Darcy, Bridgie Benton, Lou and Lizzy Bingley, and Emmy Gardiner—would be sitting near their respective mamas in the countess’s private parlor. Missing were Maria Rose Collins and Eddie Bennet. The distance from the ancestral home in Hertfordshire was too great for a wintertime trip to Derbyshire, or so deemed Aunt Charlotte.[ii]

None of the girls were out. Louisa Jane was the oldest at fifteen. Henry’s Mama, as the highest-ranked lady of the four remaining Bennet sisters, had forbidden any females of the clan to make their curtseys before age eighteen. ‘Your grandmother, God rest her, insisted that country girls came out at fifteen. Look how that worked out for me!’

Henry knew his mother had another husband before Papa—how or why remained closely held by his aunts and uncles although Henry suspected it had something to do with being out. That man, Captain George Wickham, now lay in a hero’s grave in Pemberley’s cemetery. The family visited the gravesite every year on Waterloo’s anniversary. Mama became very quiet as Papa laid a large wreath at the base of the obelisk. She, though, always took a small bouquet of the cardinal roses—tangerine, blush, white, yellow, and crimson—and laid it next to a tiny heart and the script GHW engraved on the plinth invisible to all except who knew where it was. Her sad contemplations were curious, but not particularly so, although Henry’s mother normally was an energetic lady. Perhaps when he was older.[iii]

Their goal was Aunt Mary’s suite. Her lair held secrets unimagined, mystic riddles that entranced the boy. Curiosity overwhelmed well-learned strictures about the sanctity of other people’s chambers. However, the special injunction against entry into Aunt Mary’s rooms was a red flag for adventurous offspring. Of his aunts, Mrs. Benton was held in deference by all adults in the family. Even his mama, one of the Patronesses, went silent when Aunt Mary took the floor. For the corner of Henry’s mind rose a term—Keeper—that floated about his mama’s sister’s shoulders like a robe of state.

He pushed his musings aside. Unaware of what he had been doing, the Matlock heir, fully half Bennet, owned the family talent to split his mind and focus energies on questions unlinked to the task at hand. Setting aside those considerations was the matter of a moment.

The great gateway to the Regent Queen’s apartment lay ahead.

***

Gathering around the portal, the youngsters looked at each other. Henry, the acknowledged leader, nodded and gripped the brass handle. As with everything at Selkirk, this bolt was just so, kept that way by a fleet of maids and footmen. The latch slid silently from its seat, and the door whispered back smoothly. Four figures slipped into the darkened sitting room, the only light cast by the sputtering remnants of the blaze. The youngsters needed to be careful lest they were discovered by a maid entering to top up the firebox.

There, in its special niche, hulked their objective—Aunt Mary’s Wardrobe. Why she and Uncle Edward always traveled with the massive cabinet piqued young minds. Adult eccentricities were always the stuff of imagination. Henry had settled on his aunt’s attachment to Grandfather Bennet, a legend—the Founder—who left this world twelve years ago, as being the motive. Otherwise, why would anyone have a special crate built to protect and transport something that graced every dressing room?

But all Five Family homes—Pemberley, Thornhill, Longbourn, Darcy and Matlock Houses, even Aunt Georgie’s Beach House—had an alcove that fit the wardrobe like a glove. Even the Gardiners had removed a section of bookshelves in Rosings’s library for the wardrobe, preparing for the eventuality that the Bentons would come south to visit their goddaughter’s inheritance. That intentional feature said much about the cabinet and Aunt Mary.

The viscount was too young to think it odd that his Mama’s older sister would haul an old-fashioned clothes wardrobe about the country whenever she visited family. He did not understand exactly what Rory and Bridget’s mama and papa did when away from Kympton. He had heard some of Papa’s friends—usually the Duke and Marquess, old enough to make Papa appear young—grumble about Aunt Mary’s “damnable campaigns.” Henry was not sure what his aunt did to earn their anger, they were always so nice to him and George. The Marquess seemingly found Mama’s company particularly pleasing, and the family had visited several Paget homes in the past few years.

Henry’s mama said even more, though, throwing the wardrobe into a sinister and intriguing light. She would grip a youthful arm with her warm hand and intone, ‘Beware of the Wardrobe. Do not touch it for it has a nasty sense of humor.’ The Countess’s favorite epigram did nothing but fire her son’s imagination making the Wardrobe a temptation that rivaled Pandora’s Box.

A siren’s song drew the children to the great cupboard. Inlaid wood strips created an intricate pattern—the countess called it marquetry—that shimmered in the dying fire’s orange glow. Two great gauntlets were draped over the pulls calling out to be worn to shelter the wardrobe from careless handling—or were they to protect the wearer? Not fingerless, but thick like the mitts Cook used when pulling trays of biscuits from the oven, these were more like Papa’s riding gloves which he had seen the Duke wear along with the Marquess of Anglesey.

George bravely reached out. The pattern shivered as his hand came near and their ears hummed. The girls gasped and clutched each other’s hands, Ellie leaning into Henry for security. For his part, Henry reached out and grabbed his brother’s shoulder, as much in caution as support.

“Careful, George,” Henry whispered, “If anything happens to the Wardrobe, we will never see Christmas! Papa will send us off to be cabin boys in Uncle Will’s West Africa Squadron.”

George gamely replied, nervous at violating his mother’s command, but refusing to admit that anything could possibly go awry, “I only want to peek inside to see what Aunt Mary hides in there, probably nothing more than her bonnets, gloves, and slippers. But I will be careful since I am looking forward to seeing your face when Black Pete leaves you a pile of coal.”

The boy’s chin firmed, and he grabbed the gloves, tossing them aside before he leaned toward the cabinet. George planted both hands on the door handles and made to pull.

A thousand bees buzzed and the pressure built…

---

[1] Anne Eleanor Fitzwilliam (1820-1877) was the daughter of Earl Richard Fitzwilliam’s older brother, Viscount Reginald Fitzwilliam (1780-1820) and his wife Eleanor (1797-1820). Lady Anne married Viscount Henry Bennet Fitzwilliam (1820-1871) in 1842 and bore a son, Reginald, in 1843. She succeeded Countess Lydia Fitzwilliam as the ninth countess upon Old General’s death in 1857. For more see Epilogue One in The Pilgrim: Lydia Bennet and a Soldier’s Portion. George Thomas Fitzwilliam (1820-1863), the Young General, never recovered from the shame of the disaster in Crimea. His descendants stepped back from participation in Five Family activities although some did serve on the Board of Life Directors of the Bennet Family Trust.

[ii] Anne Elizabeth Mary Fitzwilliam (1814-1867) was the daughter of Brigadier Richard Fitzwilliam (1781-1857) and Anne de Bourgh Fitzwilliam (1784-1814). Heiress of Rosings, upon her mother’s death, “Annie,” later wed Sir Edward Gardiner Jr. Bart. Their son married Francine Bennet, the daughter of Edward Bennet (adopted), and Maria Rose Collins Bennet, bringing Bennet eyes into the Gardiner line.

[iii] Georges Henri Wickham (1940-1943) was Lydia and George Wickham’s only child. Please see The Pilgrim.

---

[i] Line of Torres Vedras, constructed in 1809-10 to deny the French Army Portugal’s capital Lisbon.