All’s Fair in Love and War and Romance

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 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 she 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.” She 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. She 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, 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.

© 2019 Anne Morris