NORTHANGER ABBEY: A Short Story
Catherine Morland, a girl of seventeen from Fullerton, glanced around the Lower Rooms and frowned. Her companion, the fashion conscious Mrs Allen, opened her mouth to speak but a young gentleman with bright eyes appeared by her side and asked Catherine if she'd object to a dance. The two twirled across the polished floor, engaged in a witty conversation which pleased both participants immensely.
"Mrs Thorpe." Mrs Allen's childhood school friend smiled and the two ladies embraced.
Brushing her cheap muslin, which brought a smile to Mrs Allen's face, Mrs Thorpe spoke.
"Have you met my daughters? They are the finest girls in Bath." She gestured to a gaggle of women snickering by the door, the eldest a blonde with vulture eyes that surveyed every eligible bachelor in the Pump Room.
The girls were summoned by their mother and the blonde, like a leech, attached herself to the naïve Catherine, eager for a submissive audience to smother in her supposed radiance.
"Forty! My horse could ride fifty miles without a lick of sweat!" The pig-headed John Thorpe clambered from his carriage like a bear disturbed from hibernation and tweaked Miss Morland on the nose, ignoring her brother's disapproving glare. "My girl, you speak like a worthless novel."
Reminiscent of two daffodils swaying in the breeze, Catherine and Henry Tilney swept across the floor, their motions perfectly synchronised and perfectly graceful. Miss Eleanor watched from her group's table, two businessmen attempting to re-capture her attention. When a buffoon with bulging eyes interrupted the beautiful sight, she was most displeased. As he began gesturing wildly, any measure of composure lost to him, her heart doubled in pace to mirror a hummingbird's and she quickly dismissed herself to locate Isabella Thorpe, who was conspiring with James Morland, her fiancé, and Eleanor's own brother, Captain Frederick.
"Engaged! Yes, we are." A taunting tap to Mr Morland's cheek. "But darling, that does not mean I should limit my affections to one gentleman." She hooked her elbow through Frederick's, eyes a gleam with gold.
Glancing at the couple and John in the middle of the room, Eleanor fanned her face and appealed to Isabella's pride. "Miss Thorpe –your brother is most out of line."
"He has made his affection for Miss Morland glaringly obvious. They are to be married."
Perhaps in his imagination. And in Isabella's.
But most certainly not in Henry's or Catherine's.
"Miss Thorpe, please."
But the scene, it appeared, had accordingly resolved itself. Mr Thorpe blundered away like a lion with a thorn stuck in its paw while Henry and Catherine began their dance anew, oblivious to Eleanor's father's eyes, which sparkled with greed, as sharp a gold as Isabella's own.
"Northanger Abbey: it is a modern wonder. Not a speck of history in its walls." Attempting to hide her disappointment, Miss Morland encouraged the General to continue with his explanation, despite every painful detail he deigned fit to include. The absence of the Gothic elements which Catherine had so endeared herself too had manifested in her habits –her slumped sulk and her sour lips.
Attuned to the perils of womanhood, Henry set about lifting the child's spirits with tales of wonder and intrigue straight from turreted castles and hidden passageways lit by flickering candlelight and haunted by ghostly wisps of air. Inspired by Radcliffe and Udolpho and Henry's finely woven tale, Catherine conjured a reality better suited to her expectations –where cabinets hid ancient manuscripts and where husbands murdered their wives in bloody chambers, or locked them in attics with chains and narrow, glassless windows which broadcasted a thin strip of the world outside their ivory towers.
Such a world, however, has no place in reality, as Miss Morland realised during a frightful, tearful confrontation with the clergyman Tilney. Sometimes mothers die of illness unexpectantly, and sometimes children miss their final moments, and sometimes, cabinets hide nothing but receipts and old, moth-eaten hats.
Does she think me a fool? Thought Catherine Morland, crushing Isabella Thorpe's letter in her hands. The elegant shark had moved on to her next meal: Frederick Tilney, but he'd slipped through her opportunistic fingers. What a lucky fish.
Now she wrote, with her practiced calligraphy, in lies and spiteful pleas: James is my love. Help me retrieve him. My affections wane but my need for wealth does not. (That last was not an admission by Isabella's hand but rather a revelation of Catherine's mind).
"The family are paupers. Penniless mice. My escape was timely, General Tilney and I wish you the same luxury." Swollen with mortification (on behalf of his sister, and his own ego) and green-eyed envy, John Thorpe whistled to his servant, pleased with the havoc he'd wreaked on Catherine's heroic journey.
That next day, while dawn was cracking and the rooster squawked, Miss Morland was banished from Northanger Abbey like a nun rejected from the convent. Eleanor watched with trembling tears, clutching to her heart the promise of written correspondence, while Henry Tilney, twenty miles away in Woodston, brushed a fist over his heart and wondered about its sudden ache.
"You act as if the world has ended with your return." Mrs Morland consoled her daughter, oblivious to her missing heart, stolen in the months she'd been away by a young gentleman with bright eyes. "Read my darling. One of your fanciful novels. It'll lift your spirits."
"Novels are silly." Dear Catherine cried. "They tell tales of love and innocence, of medieval abbeys and hidden passages. They do not tell tales of reality." In the absence of her love, Catherine removed herself from those notions that had given her joy: how could a girl of seventeen, who'd handed her heart to a man of God, ever hope to feel anything of equal ecstasy again? "Novels are worthless mother. The daydreams of an innocent."
Two days passed. Through the course of each, Catherine surrendered a portion of her childish innocence to the wind and took up a dose of harsh reality, until a horse and rider appeared on the horizon, backlit by radiant sunlight and the gleaming North Star.
When Henry stopped outside her gate and asked for fair Catherine's hand in marriage, the heroine called to the winds and hugged her newly returned childish innocence, and cast out the harsh reality that had set up an unpleasant booth in the cavern which her heart had vacated. Such reality was better suited to vultures and bears like the Thorpe siblings, and gold diggers like the General anyway.