The Avenger- Thomas Bennet and a Father's Lament

by Don Jacobson

  Thomas Bennet was discovering just how ardently he loved his wife.

  As such, he was loath to continue to deceive her.

  Bennet had thought long and hard about the Kitty situation and how to address it with his wife. He cast his thoughts back to when Kitty, as the Countess, had visited with him after the weddings in 1811. They had never touched on her mother, but Kitty did leave him with the impression that she missed Mrs. Bennet.

  Kitty had also revealed that the Wardrobe had been kept under considerable security since her journey ended in 1886.

  The germ of a plan began to form in the fertile and capacious mind of Thomas Bennet. Only a modest deception combined with some laudanum would put Mr. and Mrs. Bennet in the presence of their daughter.

  What Bennet did not consider was what Lydia later always asserted…except that she had yet to utter it for the first time…The Wardrobe has a nasty sense of humor.

  

  “Fanny, love, would you care to take tea with me in the library?” the Master of Longbourn gallantly asked.

  Mrs. Bennet’s head snapped around, her greying blonde hair tucked away under her work-a-day lace topper. Her husband frequently had sat with her in the parlor over tea and cakes…more often now than in any time since they were first wed. But, he had never asked her to join him in that male preserve of his—one that was traditionally barred to any distaff members of the family, although Fanny Bennet had been taking liberties in recent months. She had avoided any effort to inspire him to impose organization upon the chaos that was Longbourn’s book room. She secretly harbored some jealousy that he was comfortable in the library’s disarray where she could never have abided such clutter if it had found its way to her private sitting room.

  However, she would not hesitate at this invitation. No, indeed, as it was a rare example of complete gentility on the part of her casual husband.

  Perhaps watching Darcy involve himself at Pemberley or Darcy House has left an impression on Thomas Michael Bennet!

  Mrs. Bennet calmly placed her needlework in her sewing basket, smoothed her skirts, and rose from her chair. She virtually floated across the room to meet him at the doorway, halting to take his arm to be guided across Longbourn’s entry hall into the library.

  Which was spotless!

  Bennet’s usual book shelving system was wall-to-wall. Now, however, every tome was stowed with as much care as if the librarians at the Bodleian had been employed for weeks! The dark stained shelves glowed from all the elbow grease applied by Mrs. Hill and her maids. The fireplace’s andirons shined under new blacking and a cheerful fire spluttered behind a gleaming brass screen.

  Mrs. Bennet’s newest tea service, a gift from the Darcys, sat on the low table between the two leather upholstered wingback chairs.

  She looked around the room, admiring a large portion of her home she had rarely seen. Everything could not have been more ship-shape, or as Will Rochet would have said, Bristol fashion. Her heart swelled at the respect her husband was showing her.

  One might think Tom Bennet was wooing me all over again!

  Guiding her over to the chair nearest to, but with its back also to, his wardrobe, Bennet gently handed her down to the seat.

  “Now, Mrs. Bennet, Fanny, you must allow me to serve you today. Then we can talk of some travel plans about which I have been hoping to gain your advice,” Bennet said.

  Intrigued, the lady asked, “Travel plans, Thomas? Are you suggesting that we are going to Salisbury? To Bodmin? To see Kitty?”

  She fairly bounced in her seat, her excitement turning her from a mature pillar of Meryton’s society into a young lady barely out. She calmed when her husband handed her a cup of tea. In her enthusiasm she had not noticed Mr. Bennet carefully adding several drops of clear liquid to the brew as he prepared hers.

  Bennet replied, “I am hoping to include Kitty in our itinerary for I am certain she would thoroughly enjoy seeing you. However, Mrs. Bennet, I must remind you to keep your emotions under the strictest regulation.

  “Act with her as if you are having dinner at Matlock House. In fact, that must be the image you carry in your mind.”

  As they continued to converse, Bennet subtly trying to prepare her for what was to come, Mrs. Bennet began to complain about a sudden onset of weariness. Her husband continued to divert her attention that might otherwise have led Fanny to ascend to her rooms for a restorative nap. Eventually, the woman’s chin dropped to her fichu, and she began to snore lightly.

  Mr. Bennet waited a full five minutes to allow Morpheus to fully envelope Mrs. Bennet in his grasp.

  Rising, Bennet scooped her up.

  She is still a slip of a woman. All I need to do is look at her to know how my girls will appear when they are her age. Thank goodness she does not tend to stoutness like Lady Lucas or Mrs. Goulding. Fanny Bennet is one of the handsomest women of my acquaintance!

  Stepping around the furniture occupying his path to the Wardrobe, Bennet carried his burden until they were in front of the cabinet. Holding one arm around her middle, he set her feet on the floor, her face nestled into his cravat. He pulled out a long linen sling he had previously hidden in his waistcoat. Draping it over his head and then hers, he maneuvered her unresponsive arms through the opening until her upper body was suspended in tight proximity to his own.

  He murmured, “Forgive me, Fanny, for the unladylike way you are being supported. If I knew a better way, I would have used it.”

  Bennet closed his eyes and chased every thought from his mind. Upon its vacant contours, he scribed in bright letters:

  Kitty. I want to see my daughter.

  Thomas Bennet, the Founder, planted his hands on the Wardrobe’s front.

  A thousand bees buzzed…and the pressure built until…

  

  Matlock House, London, July 13, 1947

  Lord Thomas Fitzwilliam, the 12th Earl of Matlock, crossed and uncrossed his legs as he waited impatiently for that which he knew was ordained to happen.

  He knew that which he knew because of a Founder’s Letter written in a shaky hand that had been delivered to him by a uniformed messenger from the Trust Offices in Lincoln’s Inn. The writer had neglected to be terribly specific about the time of arrival: he only indicated “in the afternoon.”

  I could have dealt with any of several issues over at the “Circus” if I had only known the actual when of the where/when.

  He reached over to the table next to his chair and lifted a burning cigar to his lips taking a long, exaggerated drag. His eyes never left the Wardrobe where it rested, immobile, across the chamber from him. Nearby was what the writer of the Founder’s Letter had quaintly referred to as a ‘Bath Chair;’ or in modern parlance, a wheel chair.

  More minutes passed. The H. Upmann continued to burn, filling the room with an aromatic haze.

  With no preamble, a loud thump inside the Wardrobe broke the silence.

  The double doors popped open.

  Two persons—a man supporting an apparently comatose woman: both wearing garb Matlock had last seen in the Victoria and Albert collection—wavered in the entrance. Quickly placing the cigar in the ashtray, the Earl moved across the room, cursing his fifty-two-year-old knees for their arthritic complaining. He collected the woman from the sling around the other man’s neck and lowered her into the chair.

  The gentleman stepped away from the Wardrobe and smoothed his waistcoat with both hands as he looked at the man who had most recently handled his wife with all the propriety the situation could afford.

  It is as if I am looking in the mirror after Hill has administered my morning shave. This fellow could be my twin! Except for his steel-grey eyes!

  Lord Thomas was experiencing the exact same emotions.

  Except, he recognized the man before him, he of the hazel eyes—Bennet Eyes—from the painting that dominated the Board Room at the Trust.

  Throwing position and status to the wind, Thomas Fitzwilliam blurted, “Hello,
Grandfather. Will Grandmother require any medical assistance?”

  Thomas Bennet smiled and impudently replied, “So you must be Kitty’s oldest. Looking at the thinning thatch atop your pate, I would imagine that the Wardrobe has carried us further along than I had planned.

  “However, that said, could you fetch my daughter? I would wish to greet her.”

  Fitzwilliam’s face fell at his grandfather’s request.

  “Oh, Grandfather. We lost Mama over three years ago. You are too late!”

  Chapter IX

  Der Schwartzwald, 7 km below das Wildschweinhaus, July 31, 1947

  The speeding open-topped Kübelwagen hit another rut hidden in the darkness swaddling the road snaking down the rugged slope beneath the craggy overhangs. This section of the Jura had swallowed armies from the Romans nearly two millennia before to those the Americans had thrown against the Nazis in the most recent spasm besetting humanity, ending just two years ago. The jolt sent the yellowed cones spilling weakly from filthy headlamps ricocheting around ancient conifers leaving the road surface, such as it was, hidden in the post-midnight gloom.

  Another juddering crash shook the vehicle as an alluvial chasm grabbed first the left front wheel and then, after releasing it, the right. The car pitched violently, its real wheels leaving the ground for a moment, but long enough to send the engine racing; its screaming revolutions ascending the octaves until the tires slammed back down making the entire vehicle groan in protest as the added torque threatened to twist the war-weary chassis around the drive shaft. The driver, though, navigated the obstacles steering with only his left hand. His right was feverishly trying to keep a blood-soaked battle dressing clamped against the seeping flow running from the side of the soul slumped in the passenger seat.

  Denis Robard shouted over the sounds of kicked-up gravel exploding against the rusted floorboards, “Damn you, Allie. Don’t you dare die on me!”

  

  In the nearly two years since Eileen Nearne had made her attempt on Richard Fitzwilliam, the resources of the Five Families, channeled through the Government in the form of M and the Ministry, had been exclusively set to the process of tracing the breadcrumbs that charted her trail to the cliffs above the Atlantic. While the actions of Rose against The Preacher might have been laid against the accounts of a wartime love between agents gone bad, the other event of that October day, the wreck of the Persephone, convinced all concerned that much, much more was afoot.

  Yet, even now, only the dimensions of the attack made at the heart of the Five Families was apparent. The reasons behind it were still obscure. However, the consequences were clear to all.

  The butcher’s bill in the Persephone disaster was long…and personal. The vast explosion that ripped at her bowels that sunny autumn day caught nearly every crewmember and passenger in their berths or at their tasks preparatory to the morning meal. The bridge crew were trapped when the decks collapsed beneath them. They joined the Viscount, Michael Fitzwilliam, his wife, Marianne, and their two children, babes, really, Will and Margaret beneath 120 feet of grey English Channel in the reaches leading to the French resort town.

  The only survivor, contrary to earlier reports that there had been none, was one of the Selkirk Hills, a youngster of seventeen, an assistant gamekeeper, who had been assigned to straddle the bowsprit and keep a watch for any derelict mines which had escaped the clearing efforts at war’s end. The blast blew him clear: his kapok life belt keeping his unconscious form afloat until HMS Salveda pulled him from the oily waters.[xxvii]

  His testimony was critical to the beginning of MI6’s efforts to untangle the ball of yarn that presaged the deeper understanding which still was driving events two years later. Battered and singed, Silas Hill refused any morphine until he could relate that the passage fore and abeam had been clear. He asserted that he had scanned the waters up to about 1,000 yards ahead of the steam yacht and saw nothing. Likewise, he vowed that he could not have been fooled by any residual morning mist. Hill asserted that he could discern the Deauville jetty and breakwater from his vantage point in the bow chains.

  Both the Earl and Richard, having been acquainted with young Hill from infancy, knew that the reason he had been handed the Barr and Stroud CF41 binoculars on morning watch was that he boasted uncommonly sharp eyesight. His loyalty, now either eight or nine generations deep, was unquestioned. Whatever had sunk Persephone had not come from without, but rather, more likely, from within.

  The Salveda proved to be of invaluable assistance on this front. While there was no hope of any survivors, the RN Leftenant-Commander, having been made acutely aware of the VIP nature of the victims thanks to several rockets from the Admiralty, quickly situated his ship above the remains of the Persephone. By this time, Hill had been recovered, and his story was known to the Salveda’s master. He, too, believed the young seaman’s story; that no mines had been near the ill-fated ship. Master divers dropped down, two-at-a-time, to probe the wreck and supply Whitehall with the grim assessment.

  An ultra-Top-Secret Board of Inquiry later concluded that the murder of the Fitzwilliam family had been accomplished through the detonation of nearly 100 pounds of high explosives placed adjacent to the diesel tanks. The ship’s keel had been snapped like a matchstick and the residual momentum toward Deauville, estimated at about 11 knots, had forced the bow and stern up out of the water as the ruptured midships dropped toward the bottom. The blast simultaneously ignited the nearly-full fuel bunkers, whose further detonation ripped the yacht into two pieces which settled into a concentrated debris field on the muddy Channel floor.

  Hill’s survival was now counted as a miracle nearly beyond comprehension, so complete was the destruction. His life apparently had been spared due to the overwhelming success of the attempt. If the blast had been slightly less powerful, Hill might not have been blasted from his exposed position and would have risen with the bowsprit to then plunge beneath the Channel’s surface.

  That the Earl, himself, had not been taken was through failure…that of Rose. If she had concluded her appointment with Preacher in the manner she desired, no signal would have been sent to pull M away from his voyage to France with his family.

  Both success and failure, thus, suggested that a grander design was in play, although little had been discovered to reveal the boundaries of that plan.

  The mission this July night was the result of the gentle sorting of the hash that had been made of Eileen’s mind during those dark days in early 1945. Another family retainer, Anna Freud, had been instrumental in helping Eileen reintegrate the Rose personality, allowing the younger woman to reconcile herself to the awful crimes committed by her hand, but not her soul.

  While Freud specialized in the treatment of children, she suggested that adults with multiple personality disorder might well respond to the same protocols undertaken with younger patients. Given her family’s history with the Fitzwilliams, M turned to the Austrian émigré. As with her father’s treatment regime with Lady Kate, Miss Anna also turned to the keeper of the Freudian flame in London, Dr. Weisblatt.

  Between these two worthies, Eileen began to rediscover herself. Always a quiet woman, more apt to tend toward self-sufficiency, Nearne adopted one of Anna’s favorite epigrams as her own for it truly defined her path to a recovery.

  “I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence, but it comes from within. It is there all the time.”

  Eventually Eileen was able to once again find her inner confidence as she recognized that Rose had not betrayed her, but rather had acted as her savior. With that, she began to supply the seekers with recollected tidbits that illuminated her path back into the Black Forest and eventually into the subterranean chamber beneath the wooded hillside above the dilapidated guard camp.

  While the Earl had desired an all-out frontal assault with a brigade of infantry supported by a tank company, Richard, now his adjutant, argued for something a little less impressive. Over the course of two weeks
of argument, Preacher had calmly dispatched every attempt by his father to promote activities that would probably leave a black smoking hole in the Swabian Jura.

  He finally whittled down the vengeful aristocrat’s dream campaign against his family’s attackers to a surgical reconnaissance conducted by trusted forces…Schiller and Robard…supported by an American infantry company to prevent any breakout by their targets. Young Fitzwilliam would have accompanied his cousins into the target zone, but, his father, exercising a bit of disgruntled authority, barred him from doing anything more than serving as a field commander…at a distance; that being in the hospital ward at the base of the mountain. Thus, the Preacher, Viscount Richard Fitzwilliam, fumed as he watched the sweep hand make pass after pass around the wall clock’s perimeter.

  

  Robard grunted as his left hand, slick with blood from his own wound, a slash across his forearm “lovingly” administered by a glistening SS Ehrendolch,[xxviii] slipped over the cracked Bakelite rim of the steering wheel. He struggled to keep the weaving car out of the ditch and headed down the mountain before once again risking a rightward glance to see how his brother-in-arms and cousin by marriage was faring.

  The stroboscopic rays of the full moon flared as the tree canopy opened and closed above the fleeing auto. What Robard caught as his friend’s face was alternately illuminated and darkened was the sight of half-opened ice blue eyes surrounded by grayish skin. A small trickle of blood, chocolate black in the neutral radiance of that cold-hearted orb,[xxix] ran from the left corner of his mouth and dripped onto his camo blouse, itself cast only in hues of grey and black. Alois Schiller was in desperate straits and needed every ounce of the treatment available at the base infirmary now within 4 kilometers.