The Avenger- Thomas Bennet and a Father's Lament

by Don Jacobson

  “In me vero et vide.

  “In me you will see the truth,” her smoky Glaswegian alto profoundly intoned. She returned it to Richard who selected a fag and lifted it to his mouth. He snapped the case closed and slipped it back into his pocket, in turn removing a dented Zippo lighter. Spinning the striker wheel, he held the blue and yellow flame briefly beneath her smoke which she held between her rich red lips.

  Her first drag was a combination of noises—her intake of breath accentuated by the snapping and crackling of the filler as it ignited.

  Fitzwilliam lit his and flicked the lighter shut with its distinctive metallic clack. Noticing her raised brow, he reached back into his jacket and removed the silver case for a second time.

  “The Zippo and the case were my grandfather’s. My father recovered them from their—Lady Kitty and Lord Henry’s—desk in the Beach House library after Deauville was liberated. Grandmamma appropriated them both after the Earl died in 1930.

  “My father tells me that the inscription was engraved inside the case by its original owner, Sherlock Holmes, before he gifted it to the 11th Earl. Holmes was a long-time friend of the Five Families. He had performed a particular service for my Grandfather back in the Nineties, and the silvered case had some bearing,” Fitzwilliam explained.

  Eileen paused and then asked, “Do you think Mr. Holmes found some sentimental reason for this quote?”

  Fitzwilliam smiled and chuckled back, “I met him once or twice before he died in the Thirties. I assure you, there was not one sentimental bone in that man’s body.

  “No, Mr. Holmes picked that inscription for a very singular reason—something which meant everything to my grandparents. However, neither ever chose to tell the family, and the secret is buried with them.”[xc]

  Eileen tipped her head to one side and speared him with her sky-blue eyes before saying, “Thus, t’is up to us to decide what the great man meant.

  “I know it may be seen by some as the height of impertinence, but I would wish to offer my conjecture. Might I have the case again?”

  Richard placed it upon her upturned palm.

  Eileen flipped the cigarette case a few times, passing it from one hand to the other. Reflected stars triggered by Grill Room lamps exploded around the terrace, illuminating the stygian formalwear of the diners with diamond driblets not unlike the rising bubbles in a flute of freshly poured champagne.

  Then she opened the container once again, pausing to consider her image peering back at her, the engraved words scribed across the reflection, underlining and emphasizing her sky-blue eyes. A momentary cloud passed across her features before suddenly clearing in the face of a deep-seated resolution.

  Closing the elegant box with a decisive , Miss Nearne returned it to Richard.

  She spoke in a thoughtful tone, “You know, Richard, Miss Freud, once I had begun talking, brought a large mirror into the consulting room. That glass sat in the corner of the room for months. I never approached it.

  “I never had the courage to gaze into its silvery surface, so deep was my fear of what I would see.

  “Oh, not like the woman in the WC who catches her reflection when brushing her teeth or hair; that prospect did not frighten me.

  “Once the mirror became a topic of discussion, Anna submitted a proposition for me to consider. She opined that for most of us, reality is thin gruel: that our work-a-day world is rarely richly stimulating enough to satisfy our inner needs. Thus, we create fantasies—not unhealthy and dissociative alternatives, but rather lively and engaging scenarios—to allow us to cope.

  “She suggested that I was uncomfortable to the point of prostration at the prospect that the phantasm, the creature of my subconscious, Rose, would be looking back at me when I addressed the consulting room mirror.

  “However paralyzing my fear: however disturbing the prospect, the sense that Anna put her finger on something critical began first as a flicker and then, over the course of several sessions, grew into a bonfire.”

  Eileen smiled and ran her free hand through her hair, still speaking around her slowly burning cigarette, “Then, sly boots that she is, one day, in the middle of our session, one of the orderlies urgently interrupted us claiming that Fräulein Freud was urgently needed to calm a patient.

  “You must understand, Richard, that nothing, absolutely nothing, was, is, ever allowed to interrupt a session. I could bring one to a halt, but never Miss Freud.

  “I was still early in my treatment. I did not know the rules that were established precisely because of what patients like me were feeling: that we were not worthy of notice; that our behavior,” at this she glanced up at him, “put us beyond the Pale. Of course, as I saw it, somebody else was more important than me.

  “Miss Freud later apologized for her deception. That is of little importance here.”

  The entire world had dropped away around Fitzwilliam. So rapt was his attention, that he hung on Eileen’s every word. His concentration was so deep and obvious that the returning waiter, ever sensitive to the nature of the Savoy’s aristocratic customers, quietly deposited their drinks on a nearby table rather than offering them to the couple.

  She continued, “Five minutes went by, then fifteen. I lay quietly on the couch. Eventually, though, the silence throughout the room—the walls must be a foot thick—became disturbing enough that I rose and started to pace, if only to burn off some of the agitation roiling in my mid-section.

  “At first, I aimlessly moved about. Then a powerful compulsion urged me closer and closer to that great mirror. My fear pulled me away and dragged me back.

  “I now often think of how I must have appeared, akin to an unbroken colt seeing an apple in the groom’s left hand, but also aware of the bridle held in his right…temptation and terror govern the filly, much as it ruled me.

  “There came that moment when I slowly approached the mirror from one side and, closing my eyes, softly side-stepped until I knew I was directly in front of it.

  “I could feel my central awareness tip backwards as if I were seated in one of Mrs. Bennet’s rocking chairs on Longbourn’s rear veranda. Then a wonderful calming presence joined me, something, someone, I have felt before.”

  Her narrative of past events overwhelmed her present as Fitzwilliam watched. Her eyes drifted shut, and her body began to sway, ever so slightly, in time with the meter of her speech.

  “This apparition, thoroughly unthreatening, assuaged my troubled spirit. It spoke to me in great splashes and arcs of color.

  “It said, ‘What matters most is how you see yourself.’[xci] Fear not, our child. Open your eyes.

  “The last time I had experienced that voice was the day Rose tried to kill you,” she softly noted.

  Unbidden, Richard removed the cigarette from her fingers lest it burn the pristine alabaster skin. But, throughout this movement, his eyes never left her face.

  Like a shutter being pulled up, her lids lifted as she said, “And so I did…open my eyes, that is.

  “And, there for the first time in years, I truly saw myself…not the warped visage painfully created by the mind benders at SOE nor the fragment nurtured in that damn bunker!

  “Instead I beheld a woman of faults, but also one of dreams and expectations.

  “Rose was nowhere to be seen. I looked deeply into my eyes, and in the process, my soul, to seek her out. I knew I would recognize the vacant hardness that was Rose: hate and mercilessness without nuance.

  “There was nothing there. She was gone…or at least driven so deeply into my subconscious that she could not emerge unbidden.

  “And that was liberating! I began to laugh, to chuckle, to giggle.

  “I capered. I shouted at the top of my lungs ‘She’s gone! She’s gone!’

  “Anna suddenly re-entered the consulting room. What I did not know was that she had been secretly observing me all the while through a peephole.

  “I grabbed her about the waist and began to frolic around the room until s
he finally brought me back to earth with that sweet German accent of hers.”

  Then she lifted the smokes container up between herself and Richard, a space which had grown progressively smaller the more entranced he became in her tale. He had been drawn to her like filings to a lodestone.

  She concluded, “This container, Mr. Holmes’ saying, and Freud’s mirror are all part of the same parcel. The truth is always reflected back to those who have the eyes to see it: whether t’is a silver case or a silvered mirror.

  “I beheld my truth: that I was not Rose, but rather Eileen!”

  And then she looked, really looked, into his storm-grey orbs, and saw, for the first time, the truth of his love boring deeply into her soul.

  An unmistakable blush stained her cheeks a delicate rose, giving Richard the response for which he had been waiting since 1944.

  The moment was broken, but not forgotten, when Mrs. Bennet bustled over to share, “Richard! Eileen! I have learned that Netherfield Park is available to let from the National Trust for functions. We can hold a ball! Isn’t that wonderful?

  Chapter XXXIII

  Netherfield Park near Meryton, October 22, 1948

  Sol’s rays, burning now for only ten-and-a-half hours as the great orb took its ever-shortening transit across the southern skies, had played obliquely on the banks and barrows that lined many of Hertfordshire’s remaining farms. Late blooming purple Gentians angled their petals toward the increasingly scarce, yet still life-giving, liquid gold that poured down upon them. Hives sent out their riders to collect these last bits of Ceres’ pollen-laden bounty before the venti of the North brought the killing whiteness.[xcii] The county was lowering itself into its winter’s bed.

  T’was one of those rare autumn evenings where Nature’s perfume hung in the cooling night air. The warmth of the day had activated the aromas of now-fallow fields and rain-dampened soils lining the lanes around Meryton. The scent of dried leaves carried on the night’s zephyrs was accentuated by a smoky back tone carried by the thready columns of a hundred pyres fueled by the barley and wheat straw leavings after another successful harvest.

  The great drive winding from the London-Meryton Turnpike, long superseded by the great lanes of the A1, was well-marked in the traditional manner: pitch-fueled torches spaced every seventy-five feet or so. They flickered and guttered, creating giant orange splotches that left retinal after-images hearkening to night-blooming sunflowers beaming from atop six-foot stalks that might have been laid down by Oberon to lead his Titania home.

  Yet, none of this was the work of wood sprites or faeries, but instead the product of the combined efforts of two Countesses, a Gräfin, and a baronet’s wife.

  While any of the four ladies might have planned this by herself, the women found pleasure in the shared activity, jointly digging into bags of individual accomplishments to bring them to bear on problems not dissimilar to what Overlord’s planners faced, albeit on a smaller scale.

  For example, food supplies were a great concern in rationing-era Britain. Lizzy Schiller leaned on dozens of school friends for leftover coupons. The year since Princess Elizabeth’s wedding, a national event which had employed a similar appeal for her wedding dress and cake, had seen a reappearance of partially-used ration books. Like loose pence and shillings gathered in a saucer in a dressing room, these flecks of gold dust were once again piling up in the kitchens and pantries of Austerity Britain’s upper-class homes. Unimportant and of little use when taken individually, these remaindered points collectively were destined to be turned into salmagundi salad, white soup, collar’d beef, raised pies, shining galantines, crystalline bowls filled with trifle, and, for the sweet lovers, mounds of rout cakes and marzipan.[xciii]

  However, her stroke of genius came when she realized that she could command a great draft of ration points held by members of the Five Families if she could discover a way to get enough of them out of Britain for at least a month, allowing a legal bequest of entirely unused coupon books. In pursuit of this idea, Lizzy contacted a Bingley cousin in Florida who readily agreed to host a month-long house party at her Palm Beach mansion. The Hollywood branch of the Gardiners opened their Bel Aire home with the additional promise of a week taken at the new Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas. A Family-chartered section of the Canadian-Pacific’s Dominion run enticed the travel-minded with a trip across the northern nation, kicking off in Vancouver and broken by multi-day sojourns at the Banff Springs Hotel and Le Château Frontenac, ending in the Maritime Provinces.

  The triumph of this unique strategy was realized when a courier delivered what Family money could not purchase: fifty pristine coupon books for meat, fats, and sugar.

  The two Countesses conspired to manage personnel…in other words, they handled the guest list. Their combined decades at the top of British society gave them a clear perspective of the A- and B-Lists that delineated and filtered interactions in class-conscious Britain. While Labour had been in power for over three years, the long-held, if not cherished, distinctions that had defined the British Body Politic for 450 had yet to be erased.[xciv] Mrs. Cecil-Darcy and Mrs. Fitzwilliam, in their guises as the Countesses of Pemberley and Matlock, navigated the perilous shoals that could have led to the foundering of the enterprise by basing their campaign upon the recognition that there were social sparrows and eagles. While eagles were certainly fearsome birds of prey and needed to be carefully massaged, a flock of agitated sparrows could be equally dangerous.

  Thus, Georgiana and Anne mobilized their London townhomes and great houses at Pemberley and Selkirk for teas, dinners, soirees, musicales, and house parties. Assiduous application of notices in the agony columns of a dozen DBE British and continental newspapers along with Mr. Fleming’s intervention with his master’s print holdings, inflated bruised egos and soothed jealous outrage over sad discoveries that the morning post did not include the most coveted invitation of the season.

  The most common reaction was one of appreciation that the Countesses and their husbands, long acknowledged as among the wealthiest after the Crown, none-the-less cared enough to show more distant connections a level of notice that others might not have. Their four-week operation cemented their place as leaders not through the application of fear, so often used by the successors of the Patronesses, but rather through the demonstration of a solicitude and social consciousness worthy of Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt.

  Yet, if there was a first amongst equals, t’was The Founder’s wife. Into her hands the other three entrusted the critical decision of the theme for the ball. All agreed that logic called for a harvest-centered festivity. Beyond that, though, few suggestions piqued the interest of anyone…until Mrs. Bennet looked at the others and exclaimed, “It must be a costume ball!”

  That outburst did little to excite until Fanny explained herself to the nonplussed group.

  “Ladies, I am not suggesting dress-up as children might do to entertain themselves of a summer’s afternoon or even what the Americans do on All Hallows’ Eve. And no masks. Our guests must not be like those decadent Venetians. They must know with whom they are dancing!

  “No, I am thinking of something which will have meaning to us as the Five Families. And something with which I can assist because of my discerning eye.”

  Georgiana, Anne, and Lizzy all chuckled into swiftly raised teacups, so familiar they had become with their Grandmother’s idiosyncratic outbursts.

  Mrs. Bennet then settled them with a quelling glare saying, “Oh, you three may laugh, but think for a moment where all of your wealth and privilege found its roots: back in my day after my Mr. Bennet created the Trust!”

  Her enthusiasm took root as she warmed to her argument, “I know…I know. The Darcys were already amongst the richest landowners in the kingdom. And, yes, the Matlock earldom traced back to the War of the Roses and enjoyed great wealth, too.

  “However, without the unification of Darcy—land—and Bingley—trade—money in 1812 in the Trust under my brother Edward’s guidan
ce, t’is possible that all of the Five Families would have faded into obscurity. They would have pridefully clung to the old ways of wealth: even Bingley who, after all, was struggling to become part of the landed gentry. Little did he realize that he was not dissimilar to the last few first-class ticket purchasers on the Titanic.[xcv]

  “Thus,” she said with a winning smile, “as I am the oldest and the only one of this group who has had to find the ready for not one, but five gowns while fending off the predations of Lady Lucas and Mrs. Long who had their own females to parade in front of the men of the neighborhood, I get to decide the theme!

  “And, the prospect of showing that upstart Caroline Bingley how to decorate Netherfield Park is a prospect which has me simply salivating.”

  This last exclamation had her comrades once again finding their teacups to be of enormous interest.

  “The Netherfield Harvest Ball must be a Regency gathering, as if the brightest jewels of the ton had launched it in the Little Season!”

  Mrs. Bennet took a refreshing sip from her own cup and set it down on an adjacent table before continuing in a determined voice. She was all-business without any of the legendary foolishness and nerves so often described in a particularly-popular and well-read family history.[xcvi]

  “Now that the theme is settled, you and our guests must consider me a resource. While my husband frequently has despaired of my exhortations about lace and fashion, he would, I imagine, not argue that I always have had excellent taste especially when considering women’s clothing of my time.

  “Who amongst you have any knowledge of what we wore during the Prince Regent’s reign? Georgie, Annie, and even you my impertinent Lizzy: I would wager that the best you could do would be to dash into your portrait galleries. Even then you would only be able to see what your ancestors chose to wear for a sitting with Sir Thomas Lawrence and not something they would have had made up for a ball.

  “Do you have any idea how I would have arrayed my daughters if we were in Town for the Season? For that matter, how would Mr. Darcy or Colonel Fitzwilliam have prepared themselves?