As I reflect on the tenth anniversary of the opening stanzas of the Bennet Wardrobe Series, I have been considering how the nine volumes reflect much of my philosophy, gleaned from a lifetime of experiences at both ends of life’s emotional spectrum.
Pleasure and Pain are essential aspects of life and must be understood in relation to one another. No life is unremittingly happy. And, as the trials of Job showed, pain is a vale through which, if we remain steadfast, we will pass.
Pain and pleasure exist together. No life is without pain. No life is without joy. Read Zeno or Marcus Aurelius for the Greek and Roman approaches to Stoicism.
I will admit to idealizing the joy—see the beach scene in Lizzy Bennet Meets the Countess (Volume Four) where the boys terrorize the girls with lobsters while the mothers watch. There is an authenticity in the scene that comes from a version of my truth, one I would love to have watched, much as the Countess and Maggie observed their children romping.
However, the deepest truths in my writing rise from my pain. That is what drives me to explore the biographies of Mary, Kitty, Thomas, and Lydia Bennet in the Wardrobe’s Universe. Pain, and how we respond to it, what we learn from it, molds the people we become. I can only hope that I have learned something through nearly seven decades on this earth. The Wardrobe anneals these persons into the tools required to set the Universe straight.
Austen knew this. Look at her development of the Darcy character. Pain of the deepest sort chipped away at the sandstone to uncover the granite beneath. Even Lady Catherine’s behavior was to be found in her pain at being born the eldest child of the Earl of Matlock. Even though she would have inherited all if she had been a man, as it was, she got nothing but a marriage to a minor aristocrat. Is it any wonder that she was bitter at her lack of agency?
My own pain informs my writing…as does my pleasure. For instance, while my body never suffered a miscarriage, my one degree of separation from it instructed my treatment of Thomas Bennet in The Avenger, who absorbed Fanny’s pain. Likewise, there are central events in The Pilgrim that forced me to reach into the darkest places of my being to inform Lydia’s behavior.
As I constructed the stories within the arc, I sought to ensure that every element was credible.
Thus, for me, Mary’s character was most fully formed early on as she was well-established, albeit as a caricature, by Miss Austen. However, as a writer, I had to answer several essential questions about why Mary Bennet acted as she did before Lizzy and Jane married. I had to consider what her life must have been like for her to have acted as she did. I also had to find a way to have her evolve without becoming another caricature.
Hence, her early sense of liberation, the day her older sisters married, followed by her discovery of love in the ashes of The Great Meryton Fire. Please see the opening book of Volume One, The Keeper: Mary Bennet’s Extraordinary Journey.
Thus, while it may have been tempting to have Mary remain a moralizing shrew, I decided that she would discover the roots of her own pain and grow beyond it to become the best person she could be. While the former might have been a useful plot device, the truth of Mary’s character would have, thus, remained fixed from the age of thirteen. That seemed utterly unrealistic to me. Convenience in character development is not a virtue. I chose the latter path to allow readers to examine the grain that shaped the sapling that grew into the Great Keeper.
That was my first articulation of the Fifth Love—the love that is redemptive and allows persons to become their best versions. I found it interesting that when I was composing (if you have read the book, you will understand why I chose this verb) The Avenger in 2018—where I expressed the Fifth Love as an extension of C.S. Lewis’ Four Loves—was that I was already toying with the idea two years earlier in The Keeper (2016).
One other point: was George Wickham without redemption? Or, could he have grown when inspired by love to make himself into the best man he could become?
In The Keeper, we learned that he had been the true hero of Waterloo, driving the French forces back in Hougoumont Woods until the Old Guard broke its back on the British infantry squares atop Mount St. Jean. Wickham’s heroism is a recurring theme. I used it in The Keeper. However, not until The Exile: The Countess Visits Longbourn (Volume Five) were the roots of his earlier execrable behavior explained. His subsequent manner could be shaped by his encounters with Captain Richard Sharpe and the Countess.
This treatment answered a core question about Austenesque fiction written since 1996 that seemed to defy John Locke’s Tabula Rasa idea of an empty cabinet waiting to be furnished. Locke refuted the notion that behavior was innate. Essentially, a butcher’s son and a young viscount, given the same experiences and opportunities, should turn out remarkably similar.
I asked myself, “How could Darcy and Wickham, essentially raised and educated together, become such different people?”
Certainly, Wickham was disillusioned by the fact that he had to return to his father’s house after a day with young Fitzwilliam. But the steward of a great estate would not be wearing rags nor living in a hovel. Yes, there were social distinctions that Wickham could not overcome.
What was it that gave us the damaged, hateful Wickham who led Georgiana to nearly elope…and Lydia actually to do so?
I entered his mind and considered what shaped Wickham and Darcy. Questions of id, ego, and superego were examined. The role of Lady Anne Darcy and her understandable inability to love George Wickham as a son were also significant.
I had gained an understanding of my personality after many years of analysis, during which I addressed grandiosity arising from a period of my life (ages 4-1/2 to 7). That was a time when my own mother battled post-partum depression and was utterly incapable of offering any love whatsoever as she lay on a chaise in our dining room staring out a window.
My own Freudian Weltanschauung is informed by my need to understand why I respond as I do to external stimuli. This derives from the previously noted period of analysis, my own readings of Greek and Roman philosophers, and the more modern philosophers Kant, Nietzsche, and Freud.
For myself, the most profound understanding comes from the Fifth—Redemption—Sixth—Forgiveness—and Seventh—Sacrifice—Loves. They form the basis for everything I live—and write.
Please enjoy this excerpt from Volume Seven of the Wardrobe—The Pilgrim: Lydia Bennet and a Soldier’s Portion—where the Bennet daughter discovers that her headstrong actions, years after her marriage to Wickham and into a double widowhood, lead to an elevating forgiveness.
https://mybook.to/BennetWardrobeSeries
In honor of the Tenth Anniversary of the Bennet Wardrobe Series launch, here is the original cover for Lydia’s book.
This excerpt from “The Pilgrim: Lydia Bennet and a Soldier’s Portion” is ©2019 by Donald P. Jacobson. Any reproduction without the expressed written consent of the author is prohibited.
This chapter follows Lydia’s wounding during the Peterloo Massacre.
Lydia’s toilette fell between her usual—brief—and the Elizabeth-level preparations she assumed her sister was undertaking. After about 45 minutes beneath the hand of her maid, Mrs. Wickham, modestly clad in a simple muslin gown patterned in blue and yellow—she did not seek to detract from the attention to be paid to her two eldest sisters or visiting aristocrats of varying stripes—came down the stairs and approached the saloon’s double doors.
A woman knowing her mind, Lydia had forgone the cap favored by married ladies and widows. Her short-cut blonde tresses, now accepted by her family and friends as her fashion affectation suitable for an original, glinted in the late-afternoon sunlight. A blue-silk shawl, fringed in gold tassels, was her one concession to finery. Her only jewelry was a gilded locket resting atop her lace fichu. Inside the small case were miniature photographs of Richter and Georges Henri.
Her left arm nestled in its sling, hidden beneath her shawl.
Pausing by the richly stained oak panels, she inhaled deeply to settle the butterflies batting about beneath her ribcage. Then she smiled and breathed five words to the waiting under-butler, “No introduction if you please.”
One door opened on well-oiled, silent hinges. Lydia slipped into the room, hoping to blend in along the figurative chair rail and escape notice and the complications of social interaction.
Sidling into one of the far corners, she gazed around the chamber, seeking to strategize her movements over the next few minutes. One footman, a man she knew, slipped up to her side and offered a coupe of champagne. He then stationed himself to obscure her presence slightly.
Hill’s masking—for he was of the Longbourn Hills, many of whom had followed Lizzy and Jane to Pemberley and Thornhill—allowed Lydia to assay the guests who had already arrived for the house party. To her great joy, she sighted family—Jane and Charles, Lizzy and Darcy, Edward and Mary—and near-family—Henry and Laura Wilson, Annie and James Tomkins, Marty Smithvale and Angus Campbell. There, too, was Georgie—returned from her Paris residency under Monsieur Pleyel’s aegis—at the pianoforte, weaving classical airs as background for her aunt’s reception.
Lydia heard Richard’s rolling baritone filling the chamber, but could not see him amidst the crowd in the center of the room. The earl also seemed to be holding court below the tree line in that grove of quality. The countess floated from lady to lady, hosting this glittering multitude. Lydia recognized a smattering of the others arrayed around the parlor: one or two lesser viscounts, a few naval barons, and several of Edward’s brethren, all of whom had been part of his social justice ministry. Each of these men had the security of a stable life within the Five Families’ protection. Father John Newman of St. Titus in Kympton quaffed from a tumbler of amber liquid, his own position secured by his prodigious intellectual capabilities that had him half a step away from monsignor.
The rest of the crowd was thoroughly unfamiliar to her. A quick scan of the shoulders rubbing against one another told Lydia that tailoring establishments from London up through the Midlands had been working overtime to outfit the men. She smiled, thinking that if she approached these newly minted gentlemen, she would discover more than one loose thread that had escaped the eye of an equally novice valet.
As the champagne warmed her, Lydia began to consider what she would do as the entry of fresh guests reduced to a trickle. A clear resolve began to form as she saw her three sisters bunched together, their elegant necks bowed to dip their locks into close concert.
Hah! One more could join that gaggle and be well disguised beneath their plumage. All I need to do is put Jane between the rest of the crowd and me!
She giggled and downed the rest of her champagne. Tapping Hill’s elbow, she raised an eyebrow and nodded toward where her sisters stood. While she may have desired invisibility, young Hill did not play along. As she moved toward them, the young man kept pace until he suddenly veered off toward the seating area grouped in the center of the room.
No! What are you doing? Traitor!
The footman bowed his way into the company and lowered his head. Suddenly, Fitzwilliam stopped talking, and his head shot above the massed bodies.
His storm-gray eyes enveloped her shrinking figure. Lydia accelerated, trying to reach Jane’s protective shadow.
She had taken but two steps when a deeper voice, clearly of another used to bellowing commands across a battlefield, froze her where she stood. “What is that you say, Fitzwilliam? Is she here? Why has she not been presented to me?”
Richard’s equally loud and clear reply resonated throughout the room, stopping the conversation in its tracks. “I am sorry, my lord. Mrs. Wickham is of a peculiar nature. She travels in disguise better than most and hides her virtues beneath a wicker basket.”
The aristocratic owner of the potent voice was having none of it, let alone Richard’s feeble pun. “This will simply not do. I insist that she be brought before me immediately.”
A cane’s ferrule rapping firmly on the wide boards stretching from wall to wall punctuated the demand.
Lydia, although she knew the witch was red shreds these past six weeks, imagined that she was hearing Darcy’s aunt lording over her sister’s party. However, this exemplar of British aristocratic hauteur had a tincture of humor coloring his call for her presence. She resolved not to wilt beneath whatever censure she, the deformed widow who had eloped, would bear.
Beneath the stares of her sisters and their husbands, Lydia thought, I am a Bennet of Longbourn! My family can trace its gentle roots back over a century. While this man may be someone high-and-mighty, my heritage, too, has been proud. My grandfather fought with Braddock! My great grandsire with the old King himself!
Every eye followed the countess as she glided toward the solitary lady standing in the no-man’s-land between the room’s outer reaches and the center of attention.
Lydia squared her shoulders and lifted her chin, not challenging Lady Matlock but making clear that she would not be intimidated.
“Relax, my child,” the countess said, “He is a sweetheart despite all his gruffness. You will find that he and Richard are two peas in a pod.”
She took Lydia’s arm and led her toward the gathering at the room’s center, the crowds parting like the sea before Moses’s staff. At the end of the void were a pair of chairs. In one sat Richard’s father. On the other hand, though, reposed a man who, even sans regalia, was one of the leading men in the entire kingdom.
As the two women approached, he fixed Lydia with a hard stare and planted his cane upright between his feet before clasping his hands atop its head to lever himself into a standing position. The stick then flowed smoothly to rest against his right leg, where it subtly supported his weight.
The countess, at his nod, initiated the British tradition. “My lord, may I present Mrs. Lydia Wickham of Longbourn and Pemberley to you? Mrs. Wickham, may I present Lord Henry Paget, Marquess of Anglesey? You may know him by his ancient title: the Earl of Uxbridge.[i]
“My Lord, Mrs. Wickham is the widow of Captain George Wickham of the Thirty-Third Foot.”
Anglesey nodded. “My condolences on your loss, madam. As the duke said, Wickham saved us all.”
Lydia felt Richard arrive by her side. His presence was comforting, although she was quite taken with the handsome, if older, aristocrat standing before her.
Then the marquess genially snapped, “I fear I am still uncomfortable on my feet for too long.
“Matlock, get yourself off. I would speak with Mrs. Wickham, but I need to sit. As yours is the only other seat up for bids, I declare the auction closed! Mrs. Wickham will join me—only those who have marched to the drum need to be here for some private conversation. General, you may stay.
“The rest of you: begone!
“Maybe Miss Darcy might turn her mind to some lighter Scottish airs.”
Lydia smiled her thanks at the earl, who grinned back at her as if he owned some juicy secret.
The marquess pointed his stick at Fitzwilliam and added another command. “Have your giant of a sergeant bring two chairs over. He should be here as well.
“Unless you object, Mrs. Wickham.”
Lydia moved to the chair to the left of Paget and gracefully lowered herself onto its front edge before replying. “Oh, my lord, I could not object to my Wilson coming to my side. He and I have been fast friends since the year twelve when he joined Mr. Wickham’s family. I am godmother to his daughter.”
The older warrior, now in his fifty-second year, chuckled. He sat silent, watching as Wilson flowed across the chamber bearing two side chairs. The impossibly large man, his head adorned with short-cut, white-blond hair, towered above those who studiously turned away to disguise ears attentive to any scraps of conversation that might drift their way. Even if they could be counted as friendly, they were nonetheless creatures of the ton who survived on gossip, or they were acting under strict orders from uninvited co-conspirators for the latest on-dit that affected the great and the good.
As the sergeant entered the circle, placing one chair for his general and one for himself, the marquess looked up and speared him much as many a French lancer tried in the late festivities, only this time with a long look rather than a length of polished steel. Then he offered rhetorically, “Someday, Sergeant Major—and if you did not retire as one, you have just been made—you must regale me with how you managed to escape Prinny’s grenadier recruiting sergeants.
“I would have thought your broad shoulders perfectly suited to hold up Carlton House’s decrepit walls. Although I imagine our rotund Regent is ready to promote his accommodations to something with more room, the weaker his father becomes.”
The marquess adjusted his seat, grimacing as he reached down to slide his right boot into alignment with his missing knee. That June evening four years ago was in another world, and even now, his stump still bothered him. Lingering pain aside, Anglesey was proud of his fully articulated prosthetic limb. With the knee joint unlocked and pantaloons—the modern styles were much to his taste—draped outside his boot uppers, he could sit in company without anyone being forced to notice his amputation.
His bluff yet comfortable demeanor riveted three pairs of eyes as they awaited whatever pronouncement he would make.
He rested his left forearm on a cushioned rest and considered Lydia, who maintained perfect posture as she inhabited half of the universe that had formed. All other persons had vanished from their ken, so enveloping was the marquess’s examination.
“Mrs. Wickham, I have studied what makes men behave bravely. Those musings also, I am convinced, allow me to comprehend what turns their bowels to water.
“You have offered up an interesting proposition. You see, men would have it that they are the sole repositories of courage, ignoring, of course, Queens Judith and Boadicea. All too often, these same deep thinkers seek to ascribe the success of our greatest monarch, Elizabeth, to Drake, Exeter, or Salisbury rather than to her political genius and ability to persuade the people of her cause.
“You, my good woman, have reminded me—no, all of us—through your selfless act of saving General Fitzwilliam that the uniform color neither defines courage nor whether a uniform is worn at all.
“Brave acts may be committed by the young or the very old. Here you are, a lady of but twenty-three, yet you acted without fear and comported yourself like your late husband on that awful June day in Belgium.
“Yet, you also have shown that one can do one’s duty without referencing the body within which the bravest of hearts resides.
“You have destroyed the myth that only men can commit daring acts and alter the flow of history.”
By this point, Lydia blushed fiercely and averted her eyes as Paget’s praise flowed deeply around her. She demurred, saying, “My lord, I wish you would temper your compliments. They are undeserved. I acted without thinking, not heroically like you, who sat in the line of fire all afternoon. I remember little of what happened on St. Peter’s Field this past August.”
The marquess stopped her by grasping her right hand. “Enough of that, Mrs. Wickham.
“I am no hero. Perhaps one could argue that I behaved like one because I did not flee the moment the Tyrant’s le brutal fired. But remember that young Fitzwilliam and the duke were equally exposed. Neither moved.
“However, I repeat, I am no hero because I sat on my horse and watched my troopers ground up between the lines. That image of all those beautiful men vanishing into the smoke and never returning will haunt me to the end of my life.
“I am no hero. I sat and watched—watched men like your husband; long may his name rest upon the lips of Britons far and wide—put down that French dog once and for all.
“’Twas hot work at Hougoumont, madam, and George Wickham did his duty without flinching, knowing that ’twas his portion to hold that end of the line. He moved into the mêlée, crossed it, and drove his files of men deep into the crapauds’ guts, fully aware that there was little likelihood of returning home to you.
“Me? When the ball took my leg at Waterloo, I was immobile, atop my beast
“You, in Manchester, showed that you were a queen defending her realm: regnant and glorious, shaped by Lord knows what forces.
“You say you acted without thinking. The greatest champions act without thinking and, in those unconscious moments, show the depths of their character.
“But, whether reasoned or not, your actions saved my comrade-in-arms, my dearest warrior friend, and my brother.
“Your modesty does you credit, but do not debase your achievement. Like your sister, Mrs. Benton, you bear scars honorably earned.
“Just as King Harry said before Agincourt…
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian:’
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day:[ii]
“And you, Mrs. Wickham, will quietly bear up under the scrutiny of those who have no idea what it means to feel the ground tremble beneath the hooves of cavalry. Yet, every year on the anniversary of Peterloo, you will nod to Mrs. Benton and then take a moment to reflect on all that you gained, not lost, on that August day in your youth.”
The marquess ceased his speech and lifted his head to include everyone in the room. Throughout the past few minutes, he had raised his voice until no other person dared speak. He quaffed his brandy and affectionately patted her arm.
Including the entire assemblage in his ken, Lord Anglesey pronounced the equivalent of a Red Judge’s decision, although addressing the ton at Selkirk and elsewhere. “I would have it known that I heartily approve of Mrs. Wickham. Her late husband saved the nation. His widow saved one of our greatest paladins.”
Anglesey stood again, leaning heavily upon his Malacca cane. After bending to lock his knee, he extended his left hand to Lydia to help her gain her feet gracefully. Paget, still one of the most handsome men in the kingdom, rapped his wooden leg with his stick, the drum-like sound echoing across the parlor. “Just as you ignore my leg, I would have you look at the whole woman standing beside me. Mrs. Wickham should be an example to your daughters—and your sons—for she has shown that the willingness to sacrifice is not limited to one sex.
“Here is a promise made before all of you assembled here.
“’Pon my honor, Mrs. Lydia Wickham will be welcome at any Paget home anywhere in the realm. Our bed and board shall be her bed and board. I would enhance her dowry if she were not already honored by His Royal Highness with a widow’s annuity.
“If Mrs. Wickham so wishes it, and if the Countess of Matlock and Mesdames Bingley and Darcy countenance this next, my wife, the marchioness, will sponsor her when she makes her curtsey before the Queen.
“In all of this, I will not be gainsaid.
“Oh, and Mrs. Wickham”—at this, he speared Fitzwilliam with an icy stare that bespoke of get on with this, man—“our hospitality is not contingent upon the presence of any slow-witted, addlepated man in your party.”
Richard was astonished at the marquess’s declaration.
Lydia blushed again.
[i] Henry William Paget (1768–1854) was Earl of Uxbridge when a bounding French cannon ball struck his right leg near the end of the Battle of Waterloo. He had been in command of Wellington’s cavalry, much as Major General Richard Fitzwilliam was leading the Allies’ massed infantry squares. Uxbridge was elevated to Marquess of Anglesey (1st) upon his survival and served a long career in the Army (ultimately as Field Marshal) and the Government.
[ii] William Shakespeare, Henry V, act 4 from scene 3
Leave a Reply