he didn’t think of himself at all.”
“But who among us has the nobility of spirit to do that?”
“Very true,” agreed Lizzy with a laugh.
Caroline Bingley drifted up to them, looking and smelling expensive. “Ah, Charlotte, Elizabeth Bennet,” she said, doing them the honor of remembering their names. “What a mob this is. I certainly hope not everyone plans to read, or we’ll be here all night! And what do you suppose they are doing here?” she demanded, indicating a pair of Mexican men, standing apart in a corner looking stiffly awkward. “Are we going to have Spanish poetry as well as English?”
“Neruda has some beautiful poems about love and loss,” Lizzy couldn’t resist saying.
“I heard that they worked for Evelyn Bennet in her garden,” said Charlotte.
“In that case, I should go speak with them,” said Lizzy promptly, seizing her chance to escape Caroline Bingley.
She was rescued at length from her laborious attempts in halting Spanish to make the men feel welcome by Mrs. Gardiner’s calling the group to order. “Thank you all for coming this evening to honor our dear friend Evelyn Bennet. As most of you know, many years ago she created a forum for her friends and neighbors to enjoy the companionship of the mind—the group of readers we have known as the Live Poets Reading Society. We’ve gathered each month ever since and read aloud to one another from works serious and frivolous, in poetry and prose, anything that inspired us, intrigued us, entertained or enlightened us. Our group has no assignments, no deadlines or rules to follow—we simply get together to enjoy the fellowship of the written word.
“It is difficult to imagine our circle of friends without her in it, but equally difficult to imagine a better way of honoring her than by meeting to read in her memory. We hope these readings will bring her among us once again.
“But we know our meetings will never be quite the same, so those of us who have participated in the Live Poets for years spoke over the weekend and decided that we can be Live Poets no longer. We will go on meeting and reading together, but henceforth we will be known as simply the Poets—for the heart of the Live Poets is gone.”
She paused to collect herself, and continued: “Before her voice was silenced but when she knew she had little time left, she asked me to read something to you after she was gone. So here are the last words of Evelyn Bennet, as composed by Christina Rossetti.” And she recited Rossetti’s “Remember”:
Remember me when I am gone away
Gone far away into the silent land . . .
The readings ranged over a wide variety of styles and reflected many tastes. Some evoked personal details of Evelyn Bennet’s life, while others were more universal expressions of death and loss. For Fitzwilliam Darcy, who had known her only slightly, the evening began with feelings of discomfort and regret that he should have yielded to Caroline Bingley’s insistence that they attend. He felt himself to be intruding on others’ grief, and was wary of the danger that the occasion might revive his feelings about the loss of his parents, which he had struggled always to keep under regulation. And it was as he feared: the language of the readings worked a transformation on him as he listened, opening his heart to the commonality of bereavement and requiring the utmost self-control to maintain his outward composure.
Having observed enough of the Bennet family at the Red and White Ball to anticipate their contributions with little enthusiasm, he was pleasantly surprised by Mr. Bennet. He liked the dry reserve with which he read some lines of Swinburne’s:
From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives forever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
Darcy wondered if the man realized how many different ways those words could be taken, and thought with wry amusement that he did.
But the simple lines of William Penn’s “Union of Friends,” read by Edward Gardiner, effected his undoing: “Death cannot kill, what never dies . . . Death is but Crossing the World, as Friends do the Seas; they live in one another still.”
Darcy was thus experiencing an unfamiliar state of emotional vulnerability when one of the Bennet girls arose to speak. He recognized her vaguely as the one who had danced with George Carrillo, and prepared himself for inanity. She named the author of her selection, a poetess he had never heard of, and the name—Pattiann Rogers—did not inspire him with optimism.
Lizzy stood before the group of strangers a little breathless, concerned to do proper honor to her aunt and her own feelings, and unsure how her reading would be received. But there was nothing for it but to forge ahead.
All morning long
they kept coming back, the jays,
five of them, blue-grey, purple-banded,
strident, disruptive. They screamed
with their whole bodies from the branches
of the pine, tipped forward, heads
toward earth, and swept across the lawn
into the oleanders, dipping low
as they flew over the half-skull
and beak, the blood-end of one wing
lying intact, over the fluff
of feathers scattered and drifting
occasionally, easily as a dandelion—
all that the cat had left.
Darcy lost the thread of the poem for a moment in his astonishment. What could this girl be about? What had this folderol about a dead bird to do with anything? But even as he told himself of his outrage, he could not take his eyes off her, the way her whole body vibrated as she plunged through the words. He dragged his mind back to attention.
Mothers, fathers, our kind, tell me again
that death doesn’t matter. Tell me
it’s just a limitation of vision, a fold
of landscape, a deep flax-and-poppy-filled
gully hidden on a hill, a pleat
in our perception . . .
Darcy felt the turn in the poem, and unconsciously leaned forward to meet what was coming.
