At Barton Cottage
Chapter III
A most shocking thing it is to be sure for a woman, who has spent most of her life looking with fine scorn on some of her near relations, to have to join some of the very ones to whom she has paid such homage.
The death of her late husband, Mr. John Dashwood, brought about great changes in the life of Frances Dashwood. Mr. John Dashwood had, after a long and troublesome illness done his wife the greatest service by dying and thus leaving her in sole possession of the family estate and fortune. He had done it in a handsome style.
Many professions of regard, affection, and farewell to which Fanny unfortunately had been unable to much attend due to calculations on just how much longer before Mr. Dashwood would pop off and exactly how much the man had to leave her and Harry.
After all life must go on; one must not be over set by every little thing. His professions of fondness and affection and his reluctance to leave them was all very well and she was comforted by it she was sure.
But the will which left the whole of the Estate to young Harry (to Fanny in a word) was of the greatest comfort in the world. Norland Proper, Norland Cottage, the White House, and the Village of Norland were now solely in her possession.
She could therefore dismiss her husband to the confinements of his tomb with lamentations and tears of so singular a nature that they dried up miraculously the instant the funeral was at an end.
Yes, the whole of Norland was now all her own! Mistress of an entire Village…
Or so she thought.
For of all the misfortunes Mrs. John Dashwood had been forced to endure still more shocking had been the accidental death of Mr. Harry Dashwood. Horses and hounds had been his passion with no small amount of gaming and horse racing into the bargain. All of which had been complicit in comfortably settling the boy into an early tomb not many years after his father.
Still Fanny could dismiss him with composure enough had there not been a still greater shock to be borne thereafter: Norland Park in Sussex, which had been the seat of the Dashwood family for many generations, was entailed away from the female line. With the death of Master Harry came the inevitable entailing of it away from Fanny to a Sir Basil Morley—next of kin to the Dashwoods.
With no protector, and no nearer connections than her mother and sisters-in-law, as these four women had once been at her mercy so Mrs. John Dashwood now found herself at the mercy of persons who were equally magnanimous as she had been.