by Anne Morris
The pair drew near her, then passed down the road in front of Elizabeth. It was only as they walked by (walked by without acknowledging her), and as Elizabeth turned her head to watch them pass, that she noticed something. It was something to be seen out of the corner of her eye; there was a cloudiness about those figures. If she looked properly at them, they seemed solid, real, corporeal. Elizabeth was afforded an even better chance to look at the figure she had first mistaken for her sister, Jane, and realized it was not Jane.
There was some instinct inside that put a label on that face as Grandmother Gardiner, her mother’s mother. Her grandmother had been just as much of a renowned beauty in her day as Jane was now (and as Mrs. Bennet was known to have been). Mrs. Gardiner had died in childbirth before she even saw her thirtieth birthday, that child had died with her. Lavinia Gardiner left behind three little children without a mother. Her early death was likely the cause which, Elizabeth thought, contributed to Mrs. Bennet’s nature being so fleeting and fickle. Elizabeth wondered if what she had just witnessed walking in the woods, were the figures of her departed grandmother and her now departed mother.
CHAPTER THREE
Elizabeth turned to follow the pair. It seemed as if all sound had stilled on that gray and blustery afternoon though there continued to be the sound of wind in the trees. But there were no signs or sounds of life (the chittering of squirrels or the calling of birds) as those two figures walked down a path in the woods. Elizabeth followed, her footsteps muffled.
It was cool as was found on an October afternoon, a chilliness driven into her by the wind as she watched two figures who appeared solid, corporeal creatures, though she knew were not. She could assuredly turn her head to the side, and when she did (looking out of the corner of her eye), they would become blurred and vapor-like.
Elizabeth wondered where the pair was going. Wondered where their journey would take them and how long she would be able to keep up and follow behind them with darkness creeping around her. Would Elizabeth find she needed to turn around, but would those figures be able to carry on? She thought that the longer she followed them, the more they seemed to be tracing a small footpath in the woods which marched beside the River Ver, but the more the path became covered over with tree branches. In the darker lighting, those figures gave off a slight glow as if they had an illumination within: one which shone out of them.
Elizabeth continued her pursuit with soft footsteps in that murky wood. There had been that initial leap of joy that her mother had recovered, but when she realized it could not be true, it was not despair which had taken hold, it was something else, not numbness, but astonishment which lit up inside her as she followed behind.
There was a little bridge over the river up ahead, and the two figures walked without making any sound, close to the side of the river before making their way across the footbridge. They vanished from view. Elizabeth hurried then to catch up. It was a small pedestrian footbridge with a knee-high railing; the river was not very wide or deep just there, and the bridge was for foot traffic, nothing more. But she could not see the two she was following anymore. As Elizabeth stood and stared, it looked like there was an archway over the bridge. Curiosity inspired her feet, and she stepped across its small width to the other side.
Elizabeth was suddenly struck by how much colder it was on the west side of the bridge, a stinging cold. She pulled her shawl a little more snugly up over her shoulders as she cocked her head to look at her surroundings. The landscape did not quite match what Elizabeth was expecting. The trees were in the places she envisioned, but other items were not. It was as though the bushes had moved or were nonexistent now. As though a logger had come in, gotten confused, and removed the undergrowth, and left the trees. Other than that, she could not quite voice what was wrong. Elizabeth turned to look back over her shoulder and noticed that slight archway over the bridge was more distinct on this side. There was a brighter light showing through from the east side which illuminated the portal she had just passed through.
Elizabeth realized what was bothering her, what was really wrong. There was no sound. There was dead silence all around. Even though it was cold (and colder here than it had been on the other side), it wasn’t cold because the wind was blowing (there was no rustling in the trees)—there was no movement anywhere; there were no sounds of life. There wasn’t that hum that exists everywhere whenever you’re outside. One hears it all around, that overall thrum even though one may claim it is silent outside; there is still an underlying quiver as though the earth is a single entity and its heart is always beating. One is always aware of it.
But Elizabeth was no longer aware of any life here. She turned around and noticed those two figures were far in the distance, walking away from her. The little pathway they were on wound its way into Meryton proper. Part of her wondered if Grandmother Gardiner wasn’t taking Mrs. Bennet home somehow. Elizabeth felt like she was right in that sense. It was probably a quarter mile, a little more, from that small footbridge to the outskirts of Meryton.
She hurried to catch up, then walked behind those figures in this quiet place. It was piercing cold now, and felt like a winter’s day, though there was no snow on the ground as evidence that it was a different season. Elizabeth wondered if she might catch a cold as she followed her mother and her grandmother. The intensity of the chill slowed down her feet as she walked. This was not Elizabeth’s usual road to Meryton. Typically, she took the Hill River Road which ran from Longbourn past Lucas Lodge. Sometimes, though, Elizabeth would take this one the Old Waiting Road, to add time to a walk before calling on her aunt or a friend in Meryton.
But walking had become a chore since crossing the footbridge. Elizabeth was dressed for an autumn afternoon, not a frigid winter’s day. She walked without seeing anyone else as they approached the town and the High Street.
Then a thought in her mind blossomed, and Elizabeth realized that there were no other signs of people besides her two family members. Usually, though Meryton was a small village, it was bustling with people. But there was no one to be seen as they approached the High Street. The Three Blackbirds tavern sat, ironically, at the edge of the property where the church lay. There were often men in front. So long as the day was fair enough, men lingered before the tavern. But there was no one about. Elizabeth followed her ancestors as they passed the corner of the High Street, knowing for sure now, that they were going to Grandmother Gardiner’s house.
Mrs. Bennet had always been embarrassed by the smallness and the meanness of the house where she had grown up. Mrs. Bennet’s father had only been a country attorney (an occupation her brother-in-law performed now). Once her father had died, the house had been sold. Mrs. Bennet’s brother, Mr. Gardiner, had been just old enough to establish himself in business. It was a house which Mrs. Bennet did not wish to visit as she felt she would be stepping down in the world if she did. As Mrs. Bennet (Miss Gardiner that was) she had stepped up in the world. Her beautiful face had landed her one of the richest gentlemen in town: Mr. Bennet. She did not want to revisit the scenes of her childhood; she was not sentimental. Mrs. Bennet had not shed a tear when the house was sold.
Elizabeth hung back a little, right at the edge of The Three Blackbirds, as she watched her mother and her grandmother approach the Gardiner’s old residence. The door was open, though it was not as if it was a regular door thrown open in welcome. The door was missing entirely, and there was a vast black void in its place instead. The two figures stopped in front of the house and that dark abyss.
She stood behind by the tavern; there was something menacing about that black void of a doorway. It was both enticing and disgusting. But something also pulled at Elizabeth as she looked at it. It tugged at her and yet repelled her as she watched her mother and grandmother turn to look at it.
As Elizabeth had followed and watched them, she had not felt that they had spoken to one another. There had been that over-riding deadness and an absence of sound, but now the two turned to each
other, embraced, and then appeared to be sharing confidences. There was no whisper of sound that wafted through the air back to Elizabeth, so she propelled her feet, despite the ugliness of that door, to move closer so she could hear what they had to say.
Elizabeth both hurried and dragged her feet though, as she approached that ancestral pair, because that void terrified her. They definitely were speaking to one another; Grandmother Gardiner was doing the talking, and her mother was listening for once, a rare event indeed.
Still, the words were not carried in the dead, dull air across to Elizabeth. Her muted footsteps brought her nearer, and she watched as the two embraced again. Mrs. Bennet stepped back and waited as Lavinia Gardiner turned and walked with eager footsteps up the two stone steps and into the Gardiner house, crossing through the void. Her grandmother walked without any hesitation. It was not as if opening a door and being able to peek inside a room. No small crack gave a glimpse as to what was there; Mrs. Gardiner merely walked through and disappeared. It swallowed her up, absorbed her.
Elizabeth moved the final ten feet to stand next to her mother as they stood and stared wide-eyed at that dark void.
In synchronicity, they then turned to look at each other. Mrs. Bennet did not seem surprised to see her second daughter next to her. Elizabeth returned her mother’s gaze, though Mrs. Bennet’s eyes had a glazed look to them. Elizabeth felt that she was viewing the mother that had been left lying in her sickbed in her chambers back at Longbourn, a frail thing who had been dosed with laudanum, confused. At Longbourn, Mrs. Bennet had not been conscious, but here she seemed barely aware, disoriented, and not understanding where she was, or what was happening.
Elizabeth wanted to reach out to her, and though she had seen those two women embrace, Elizabeth knew she would not be able to touch the figure in front of her. Though Mrs. Bennet looked solid (frail, but solid), her mother was not built in the same manner as Elizabeth. Mrs. Bennet was not flesh and blood. There was a sense that she was powered by light (or perhaps by feelings). It was more pronounced now that they were here, wherever here was, this cold, dark, and silent place—beyond the footbridge.
Elizabeth felt it was not Heaven, was it a Purgatory of some sort where you waited before you moved on? Was that what Grandmother Gardiner had just done? Moved on to the next place after having waited for her daughter Frances? Elizabeth did not know.
“Oh, Lizzy. I am…” stuttered Mrs. Bennet.
“Yes, Mamma,” she answered. She wasn’t quite sure what her mother was saying or what Elizabeth was agreeing with. She did not wish to confirm to her mother that she was dead. Perhaps her mother was merely wishing to say she was confused. That Elizabeth could agree with.
A hand came up to Mrs. Bennet’s cap to right it, though it seemed to do no good, it was as if it were permanently stuck. As if a painter had taken her likeness with that cap askew, the sleeve of her gown hanging long over one hand and that Mrs. Bennet could never right either. “I am…frightened Lizzy.”
“I am frightened too, Mamma,” declared Elizabeth. “We are here together.”
“I have had the strangest dream.” Mrs. Bennet took a step and started to walk back towards the High Street. She seemed to have no purpose, no conscious intention of where she was going, and yet Elizabeth almost felt as if she saw a thread which was pulling Mrs. Bennet on some specific path.
“I am having the strangest dream,” Mrs. Bennet repeated. “I do not often think of your grandmother, Grandmamma Gardiner. It is like I have just seen her now, Lizzy.” They kept pace together. “It is cold, Lizzy.”
“It is cold, Mamma,” agreed Elizabeth.
“I forgot how pretty she was. Jane looks so much like her. I always thought Jane had her beauty from me, but truly she looks exactly, almost exactly like my mother, Lizzy. It is most unfair.” Mrs. Bennet sounded almost like her old self with this speech.
They walked by The Three Blackbirds and back up the Old Waiting Road.
“She told me that she had been waiting for me,” explained Mrs. Bennet.
“Did she Mamma?” urged Elizabeth.
“Yes. She’s been waiting for me all these years.” The confusion lessened, and her voice sounded clearer.
“What does that mean Mamma?” prompted her daughter.
“I am so cold, Lizzy. I am confused, and I don’t understand. Why am I here? And it’s dark! Where is everyone? Why is it only you? I am not supposed to escort you. She explained that.”
“Escort me?” questioned Lizzy.
“Yes. Mamma escorted me. I am to wait, and then I am to escort…” Mrs. Bennet cut off mid-sentence and looked at Elizabeth. “I think I should not tell.” Elizabeth could hear how scared her mother was then as the disorientation returned.
“I think you should not tell either, Mamma.” Elizabeth’s insides twisted in a knot at all of this.
They had just left the last of the houses in Meryton behind as they headed towards the small footbridge that crossed the River Ver.
“But I have to get back, don’t you see?” insisted Mrs. Bennet.
Elizabeth looked again and saw how frail, small, and wizened her mother looked. Her mother had aged, and the walk seemed to be weighing on her as if pushing down, a great burden bending her over as if a much older woman. Yet there still seemed to Elizabeth the idea that there was a thread pulling Mrs. Bennet along, pulling her mother back towards Longbourn. Elizabeth felt (it wasn’t a place for thinking it was a place for feeling), she felt the dead must somehow need to linger near the place they died.
Grandmother Gardiner had died at home in bed. Hence they, her mother and grandmother, had traveled from Longbourn to Meryton to her old house to see Grandmother Gardiner off through that void. But now her mother needed to travel back to Longbourn because that was where Mrs. Bennet had passed away.
That nameless footbridge came into view, and there was that faintly shimmering arch over it. Elizabeth could look east and see the welcoming twilight of her home country, of her reality, beckoning to her. She wondered if she would not be able to see or speak to her mother once she crossed the footbridge.
“Mamma,” she said. Mrs. Bennet did not answer; her mother kept trudging along, that rope, whatever was tied to her, and kept pulling her back to Longbourn—it surely did its job. “I love you, Mamma,” declared Elizabeth with her voice breaking a little at the end.
“Thank you, Lizzy,” stated her mother, who did not seem to be a being of emotion or feelings then, but was as though a laudanum-induced creature, confused, stupid, and intent only on her task.
Elizabeth wondered if this was to be the last memory of her mother. Though as she would later consider, it was better than the creature who laid in a stupor for three days in her bed, insensate and unresponsive, or that waxy and gray figure that would lie in state in a coffin in the best Longbourn drawing-room.
Elizabeth slowed her footsteps as she neared the bridge, but Mrs. Bennet kept trudging on. Elizabeth stopped, a mixture of emotions suddenly, not wishing to say a permanent farewell to her mother as she felt for certain that she would not see Mrs. Bennet on the other side of the bridge. It was so cold now that Elizabeth felt she could not draw breath as she pulled her shawl up over her head. The shawl did little to stave off the biting cold, her short coat felt but a thing of gauze, and that archway beckoned: a thing of light and relief.
Frances Bennet continued her pace up to the bridge; she stepped across the river and disappeared from her daughter Elizabeth’s view once her feet touched the other side.
Elizabeth ran then, up the path, across the footbridge, and into the light and warmth of the east side. She felt as if it was balmy and warm after her experiences on the other side, and Elizabeth pulled her shawl back down off of her head. She could feel her skin warm. It was twilight, the sky darkening quickly as it did, almost as if the sun were running away. Elizabeth thought about the image of the Roman god Apollo in his chariot riding away with the sun, and of his sister, Diana, bringing forth the m
oon as Elizabeth paused to look up at the sky above.
The pathway back towards Longbourn was empty. Mrs. Bennet did not walk in front of her with that slow and deliberate pace she had shown on the other side. Elizabeth squinted as though that might help her to discern a shimmering figure, but there was no one. She set to, walking quickly to march back to Longbourn.
The enormity of what had passed engulfed her mind, but it did not overwhelm Elizabeth. Such an experience was something that needed to be considered thoroughly but was not something to be shared quickly. The household would have other considerations, another focus besides listening to Elizabeth speak of what she saw and experienced in the Hollybush Woods that day.
Mrs. Bennet had lingered for three days after her fall in the graveyard before she finally succumbed to apoplexy. She left behind five grieving daughters, and a slightly distraught husband right at the start of autumn. Daughters who were right at the brink of womanhood. Elizabeth was eighteen years old when her mother passed over.
CHAPTER FOUR
Mrs. Bennet was honored with all the appropriate rites. The great bell up in the ancient tower at St. Alban’s Church tolled her fate, and Mrs. Bennet was laid to rest in the graveyard beside ancestors and neighbors to await her husband.
The family was in mourning for a time. It was what consumed the Bennets of Longbourn through the New Year and on into the spring. Formal mourning required Mr. Bennet to sport a black crepe armband for one full year. The daughters had to go about in black for six months at least (though some daughters wore it for a year).
Three of those daughters had been presented into society; two had yet to be launched. While the family dealt with its grief, there was the question as to what was going to happen once mourning was over.