Words and their Messages

Haunting and writing

I just began reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s latest book The Message. I am on the third page and already the author (by the way, you need to know that his work has been banned in South Carolina) has gripped me unlike any other. This is a book about words, writing, and the messages our experiences and those of our readers understand the words to carry.

Haunt. You’ve heard me say this word a lot. It is never enough for the reader of your words to be convinced. The goal is to haunt—to have them think about your words before bed, see them manifest in their dreams, tell their partner about them the next morning, grab random people on the street, shake them, and say, ‘Have you read this yet?’

I have yet to move further than this third page. The above quote was so compelling that I had to stop and write. Coates’s words made me ask myself if my words haunt my readers. Do they elevate them to a new level of consciousness that forces them to ask uncomfortable questions about their existence? Does my work, my efforts to compose with words, shake my readers’ foundations to the point where they stop and splay their fingers across the pages as if to hold the book still so full of power it is?

My friend, Barbara Tiller Cole, in her preview of my recent book, A Bennet Wardrobe Christmas Miracle, experienced the haunting I hoped for when I wrote.

I would love to have the grandmother of my childhood back, on sober day, because she was great fun during the day time hours.  But dinners are usually at night, so many it is better not to invite her.'  These and other questions were the kind of things that popped up unrequested while reading Don's latest offering.

Barbara Tiller Cole  https://darcyholic.blogspot.com/2024/11/what-if-time-was-not-issue-you-could.html?

These are not spun sugar memories, ones of the nature found in many Christmas books. Uncomfortable thoughts, suppressed memories, and revealed motivations fill the holiday season.

 A Bennet Wardrobe Christmas Miracle reunites the Bennet family, just not the group frozen in time at the end of Pride and Prejudice. Instead, every member is older—Jane, Lizzy, Mary, and Lydia by some fifteen years—living nearly ninety years down the timeline—Kate now fifty years old—or appearing after having left this plane—Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, although not wraiths just in their latter years. All have questions of their own. All find answers behind the doors of the Wardrobe. Yet, while their path of discovery is important, that of the readers surpasses it and fulfills my purpose as a writer.

I have little hope of being the type of thinker Coates is. I place him and his criticism on a par with Hannah Arendt and Reinhold Niebuhr—a historian and theologian. However, I will be satisfied if I can transport readers to a new understanding of themselves and how they might fit in the world.

Bennet Wardrobe Christmas MiracleUS

BennetWardrobeChristmasMiracleUK

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This excerpt of A Bennet Wardrobe Christmas Miracle is © 2024 by Donald P. Jacobson. Reproduction is prohibited.

Entr’acte

Darcy House, London, January 16, 1828

Few were ever permitted to see Fitzwilliam Darcy’s emotions. Those he allowed to glimpse behind his granite mask enjoyed his true feelings in measured doses. From the moment of his father’s demise twenty years ago, Darcy protected his core, wary of revealing too much and, thus, exposing himself to loss’s pain. This caution led to a life of pendulum swings, from finding happiness his lot to worrying about the loss of that blessed state.

Those who knew Darcy best—Georgiana, Richard, and Elizabeth—could read the signs of a slide into one of his famous funks. He would prowl the room's edges, avoiding contact with all and sundry. Other clues were tightness in his shoulders at dinner or the minute jiggling of a bent leg if forced to sit amongst polite company. Even the dullest in a crowd could sense that Darcy preferred to be anywhere but here. The same people who could not claim his friendship were the first to lay his behavior at arrogance’s doorstep. They would never discover how wrong their picture of the Derbyshireman was.

Elizabeth understood that little of Darcy’s conduct at present came from pride. Throughout their marriage—from the joy of the birth of George William and Maddie to the chasm of her loss in the Year Fifteen—Elizabeth had watched Darcy fight his inclination to huddle behind his heart’s walls. Over the years, she had learned that when he retreated into his fortress, there was little she could do to pull him from his den. Like a gopher, he would first have to know that no barnyard cur waited. Then, he would stick his nose out to sniff the spring air before clambering clear to enjoy the sun.

What triggered her husband’s moods was mysterious to Elizabeth. He had remained on edge over the past month since he had fumbled his anniversary compliments. True, he had apologized for his inattention to her appearance, but Elizabeth knew that his spousal blindness was a symptom of something deeper, something she could not quite fathom.

This disturbance remained even as they organized themselves to travel to Kitty’s for one more Christmas feast.

 How remarkable is the Wardrobe! The last of Twelfth Night’s decorations—Lydia’s ball was its usual impressive spectacle—are barely cold in the dustbin, and now we are jumping into another festive season somewhere, somewhen. If I slip onto the plane of the Guides, I can hear calendar pages rustling in faerie breezes!

Elizabeth closed her eyes and slid into the Realm of the Guides. The infinite gray plane stretched before her and flickers across the spectrum splashed the heavenly sphere.

She sent her appeal upwards.

No time to spend. Stretch your hand over our heads. Help him to find joy again.

***

Darcy poked his cheeks with stiffened forefingers. Were they sagging? Had they fallen more than usual? He lifted his chin and tapped his jowls. Was he looking like he was soon to be forty-five? His mane was showing salt and pepper. Bingley, only two years Darcy’s junior, had changed little since the wedding sixteen years ago. Marriage and fatherhood agreed with Charles, and his shock of reddish-blond hair was still in full bloom. Richard, now forty-seven, had earned his weathered look on a dozen battlefields at the Duke’s side.

If Elizabeth had one refrain, ’twas for him to spend less of his energies on everyone else’s lives and more on his own. He was making himself old before his time.

William’s penchant for managing everything had recently returned with a vengeance after Maddie’s thirteenth birthday: her graduation from girlish pinafores into a young lady’s frocks had tipped his world. She was no longer the little girl who could fit on his lap and snuggle beneath his arm as he read a bedtime story.

Her departure for a seminary near Sanditon—one of many throughout the country organized to educate Dissenter young ladies—had tilted his life’s axis. He worried that a wastrel like Wickham would turn her head. His family reminded him that the only similarity between the Ramsgate of 1810 and today’s Sanditon was that they were waterfront towns. Madelyn was not in her own establishment but instead was pinned beneath the disapproving eye of Mrs. Mallet like one of Erasmus Darwin’s insects on a wax display board.

Closing in on fourteen, Miss Darcy still was a gilt-edged heiress. Her dowry was worth a duke’s ransom—60,000 pounds—more than enough to attract the worst fortune hunters. William worried that honeyed phrases of undying affection would blind his daughter to danger. Gretna Green’s blacksmiths were not known for their moral steadfastness; instead, the clink of coin smoothed over all sins, including a tender-aged bride.

That led Darcy to hire several Bow Street Runners to create an umbrella of safety. However, no shield was perfect. If a dangerous type threatened Miss Darcy, the watchers’ instructions were unequivocal: summon Sergeant Major Wilson and his associate Mr. Foote. To Darcy’s knowledge, that happened only once. The headlines about a viscount’s disappearance had died down after a liberal application of DBE largess.

George William’s matriculation at Eton had not given Darcy a moment’s pause. However, if he was honest, Elizabeth seemed more than a little bothered by her son’s absence. Her good fortune was that Jane lived at Thornhill, on the other side of the western ridge. The two could commiserate with each other because Tom Bingley was in young Will’s form.

He focused again on the pier glass and looked below his cravat. Still firm around his waist, Darcy had not succumbed to male stays or whatever they were called. Tomkins had never suggested such extreme measures—at least not yet—as his master’s midriff changed with age and prosperity, although Darcy had noticed that the new waistcoats in his changing room featured a small belt low on the back. Over time, these were loosened, never tightened. That, if anything, was a gauge of Time’s toll.

Darcy was feeling his age. His mother had died when she was barely thirty. His father never saw his fiftieth. Darcy was consumed with thoughts of mortality, for was he not both his parents’ son? His end could be near.

And with his awareness of the brevity of the mortal coil, of its finite nature, so rose his fears for Elizabeth’s well-being. He had watched his father waste away after his mother died. His wholeness had been torn apart, and he was never a complete man again.

William would not wish that fate upon anyone he loved, let alone his dearest heart. No, there was nothing for it: he must protect Elizabeth even if it meant pushing her away for her own good.