The Last Gift
Don Jacobson
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Sonnet 18, Lines 12-14
- William Shakespeare -
18th July 1817, Winchester
The damp cloth Cassandra gently laved across her fevered forehead called to mind a tidbit, almost a non sequitur if not for the fact that the day had dawned to the patter of raindrops against the panes looking down on her bed of pain.
This summer, like the last, was exceedingly rainy, although warmer.
For an instant, her habitual humor lifted its weary head and called across the tremendous gray plane stretching behind her lids its wish for no more summer, an oblique appeal for more of 1816’s uncommon chill.
She had no desire for the comfort of a cooler room for herself, but Jane -she was still Jane, was she not?
- would spare her dearest Cassandra and good-sister Mary the duty of changing sweat-soaked bedclothes and night rails.
However, the Lady was at peace knowing that the laundry maid would have much less in her basket soon -very soon.
Thoughts, always difficult since her trials began, came slowly.
Her mind struggled to offer anything more complicated than notices of sound, light, and smell.
Yes, she could sense the tincture of spruce’s spiciness from the bowls of sprigs Cassie had placed around her.
Academic Jane knew this was an effort to mask sick room odors.
Emotional Jane recalled a girl’s happier memories.
After Steventon’s oaks and elms had lost their leaves, conifers lifted her world on their shoulders to carry her toward her birthday.
Jane remembered a child’s excitement at the approach of her special day.
While the rest of the forest seemed not to care, she could count upon the needled giants to remain bright, matching her expectations.
Like every Advent bairn, Jane lamented her anniversary’s proximity to the Savior’s Natal Day.
Her mother’s parish duties and her father’s sermons often subsumed her fête.
Cassie, though, never forgot to carve out time for her younger sister.
Otherwise, the large-eyed girl felt the silent sentinels arching above Steventon’s lanes were the only beings with vision wide enough to include her birthday in their world.
And so, Cassandra’s desire to make pleasant the malodorous buoyed a fading Jane on its gentle waves.
There was slippage, a feeling of dry sand drifting from beneath her searching toes.
A sibilant hiss filling awareness’s vault pushed Mary’s reading of the end-of-days apostle into the background.
Jane’s writer’s heart found the last book’s imagery and storytelling closer to her taste than Old Testament thunderous pronouncements.
The world flattened around her. The pain was so great, and living through it was so hard. Unbidden, a moan escaped from her lips. Cassie was instantly in her ear. “Jane, Jane dearest, may I get you anything?”
Breath came with difficulty, but Jane found simple words, easy to say but hard to hear, to frame her last message of what she craved to relieve her loved ones’ suffering. “I... want... nothing... but... Death.”
Cassandra’s ragged gasp was the last sound of which Jane was aware.
***
The grass tickled her nose. A breeze rubbed her arms and legs.
Birds twittered. The air carried a sharp edge, reminding her of the fortnight surrounding her birthday.
With that came a feeling she had stepped into her girlhood neighborhood.
Although southerly, Steventon still enjoyed a clime that allowed year-end snow to whiten the bushes and trees surrounding the rectory.
This dream -for was not this the safe surrounding into which she slipped to escape her illness’s fell fingers?
- pushed vividly against her. Jane was sure this was a last reverie.
Tendrils of its images wound through her consciousness.
The air’s muted aroma was all that remained of her sister’s ministrations.
Had that brought her to this instant? She had heard ancient parishioners talk of your entire life flashing by in the moments before the spirit started its journey Home.
Old crones, she had scoffed, telling tales to comfort themselves.
To her, a youngster, such talk smacked of a wish to leap backward, spoken by people who saw the veil thinning.
Now, though, she yearned for this whatever-it-was to endure for more than a flash.
As her mind threw off the ailment’s wicked fingers, clarity shocked her.
Late autumn’s scent -dried leaves and fresh needles- pulled at her, demanding attention.
The early morning breeze spoke of damp and dew hiding yesterday’s trodden tracks, leaving a fresh, unmarked meadow akin to a quarto sheet anticipating her pen.
The zephyr dragged its feet across her, molding garments to flesh, giving dimension, and erasing thoughts that her lot was to be a wandering wraith, invisible and untethered.
This vision is too concrete to be anything but life. ’Tis madness, for I was preparing to meet my Lord. Am I dead, or have I lost what few faculties my disease had ignored?
Contrary to human nature, I pray for the former. Descending into Bedlam’s realm at this late date would be a destiny I could not bear!
I am outdoors, in the country. Sound and smell add their touches of verity. If I am dead, why can I feel the ground beneath my back?
So, I return to my original question: have I taken leave of my body or my senses?
Jane opened her eyes and gazed into the boughs overhead. Was this the Norway spruce on the rectory’s East front, the tree Papa claimed inspired him to write bucolic homilies for his congregation?
What is this? I was in Winchester, not Steventon, last I recall. Now, I find myself reclining under the pruned arbor where I would sit for an afternoon, my commonplace book on my knee. Here was the first space where I found refuge to set down my juvenile scribblings.
And why do I lay on the ground when my bench rests a foot away?
Embarrassed, Jane scrambled to her feet unhindered by objecting knees, brushed off the tails of her redingote, and dropped onto the painted wooden seat. From this vantage point, more of the unusual expanse became clear.
A lawn that had never existed outside her girlhood’s home carpeted a gentle slope before ending on a pond's banks, large enough to be charitably termed a lake -if you squinted.
She half expected to apprehend a fellow splashing about, his boots and topcoat on the shore.
How would the transparent, damp chemise draped over a manly torso reveal unseen mysteries as he rose from the water?
That, though, was a girlish fantasy about the male of the species.
While a gentleman on his property might engage in such antics, he would never abandon propriety so entirely as to allow anyone to imagine him in such dishabille -much less see him.
On an estate she was, although whose and where?
Although she knew it to be impossible because her brother’s freehold was dreadfully far from Steventon, Jane sensed that Godmersham Park -mayhap Pemberley or Netherfield- rested behind the familiar rise to her left.
If she walked along the path running up to the knob’s crest, she knew she would see a great house, smoke rising from its chimneys, nestled within lush fields.
However, that situation must be a bit of faerie dust clouding her sensibility.
Utterly inconceivable! Mayhap that is the rule in this place: that the most improbable becomes fact. I would wager a pound to a penny that Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park lie below Oakham Mount’s overlook. Oh my! Oakham Mount is its name!
How curious: such a world, created by my nib, is now nearby!
The happy sounds of a kitchen hard at work drifted through an open window.
Baking bread -or lemon bars- embraced Jane with its comforting aroma.
In waking dreams that chased her to the writing table, she had always imbued her heroines’ abodes with the comfort and familiarity of Steventon Rectory or Chawton Cottage.
Whether she called them Longbourn or Kellynch or Hartfield, they were as familiar to Elizabeth, Anne, and Emma as was Jane’s to her, warm and safe: Home.
Even Fanny’s aerie above Manfield Park’s eaves was a similar sanctuary, rarely breached by her tormentors.
There, she could retreat and mull over her observations.
As for her years spent in Bath, Jane smiled about how she enjoyed observing the follies of those trolling the town’s byways.
Their attitudes and dress -akin to Mr. Hogarth’s etchings- were the cloth she used to craft the caricatures familiar to her readers.
If the characters’ siblings were less congenial than her own, that, too, made a better story.
Further contemplation was interrupted by a woman hurrying up the sward from the lake.
***
Dark hair erupted from beneath a bonnet brim, and dark eyes dominated a heart-shaped face. Combined with a petite frame, these were the young lady’s most noticeable features, although Jane could well imagine others hidden from sight and unknown to none but her mama and maid.
An impertinent nature combined with a bit of pride makes her a most interesting specimen and instantly recognizable!
Marching up to Jane, she stopped, and her gaze swept from head to toe.
Then, she graciously curtseyed. “You must be the latest member of our company. Misses Elliot and Dashwood told me a short time ago that you are Miss Austen, although Sir William assured me you are also known as the Founder. I hope you will not stand on ceremony and demand someone introduce us.”