Merriment & Wisdom

A Mansfield Park fanfiction

Part Thirty-One:

Newmarket, An Extended Stay

After breakfast the following day, Fanny Bertram was in a state of full-on collapsed – near-lethargic – misery.

Although it was impossible – wholly outside of her nature – to resent William for anything, she came as close as she might ever come when Tom – who barely spoke a word to her throughout the meal, still sour over their exchange the night before – announced he was taking William as far as Cambridge, from which he would make his own way to Portsmouth.

His brother-in-law he would take from this place – a fellow man he would not desert.

Whereas she...

Whereas she–

Whereas she must remain here under the forever staring, dancing, teasing eyes of the Crawfords and the forever biting tongue of Mrs. Norris.

Tom wasn't even being spiteful, which made it worse – he thought he was granting her a boon, doing something which might make her like him again, bringing his wife's most beloved brother partway home.

He was so confident in this belief he did not even flinch when Henry Crawford made a somewhat underhanded remark about how – if it were himself taking William home as a brother – he would have gone all the way to Portsmouth.

But it was only natural, he supposed aloud, bringing a cup of tea to his lips and arching an eyebrow in Fanny's direction, a sick horse should take precedent over such a trifle, over such minor niceties.

Mr. Bertram was only doing as he thought best, certainly.

Susan, seated to Fanny's left just opposite of Mr. Crawford and gripping her sliver knife under the table, had to repress the urge to stab him in the upper-leg at this remark (notwithstanding that it completely went over Tom's head by all visible evidence) and – flush-cheeked and buggy-eyed with rage – rather looked as if her own tea had quite gone down the wrong way.

And Fanny endured worse than sore, clenched fingers.

She had to smile while William showed her the papers, the letters from last night, all the while too keenly aware it was all owed to Mr. Crawford – the same Mr. Crawford who slighted her husband and proved, to her growing dismay, even now, he could not be counted as a real friend, and whose spoiled sister had broken Edmund's heart all over again at the ball – and force herself not to look at Tom, because they were so angry with one another, all the while thinking, perhaps a touch melodramatically, though she could not help it, "God only knows when we shall see one another again, husband."

What if he should not come back as soon as he promised and here they were leaving with hardly a fare-thee-well to be spared between them?

Her only – and rather unexpected – consolation apart from dear, steady Susan, was Sir Thomas.

Her father-in-law was fond enough of her now that – apart from what moments Mrs. Norris could endeavour to spoil – she could no longer dread being left with him in Tom's absence. She was happier than she might have expected, under all her misery and weary slumping shown in her all too visible low spirits, to hear his voice and even answer his questions should he ask any.

She was no longer wretched in the baronet's company, provided it was not simultaneously shared with the Crawfords.

And that was something.

He truly seemed, for all that he was strict with her husband, with the elder son who daily disappointed, to have become truly soft with her, more so than he'd managed with his natural daughters whose natures were less open.

Rather than scold at catching sight of her swimming eyes, Sir Thomas patted her hair affectionately and informed her how he missed William and Tom, too, and was looking to the near future of Edmund's departure with equal sorrow.

"We miss our three young men," he sighed, and Fanny had never loved – nor thought to love – him so well before he uttered those words.

"Yes," said Lady Bertram, with a little sniff, overhearing, "they are all going away – all the boys – I should like to have kept William, if my Tom could not stay; William looks so like Susan and Fanny" – she associated them, dearest girls, she explained, as an aside, with absolute comfort and tranquillity respectively – "that seeing his face made me very happy before ever he said two words."

And Fanny's heart ached. She sat on the drawing-room sofa and stared and forgot her needlework in mid-stitch and – for lack of a better term – moped.

(It is worth noting how Edmund, for his part, was entirely unsurprised by the way his father took to Fanny in Tom's absence; he only remarked, once and very quietly, that she was Sir Thomas' comfort now, and she could not be spared in the same way Susan would not be pried from the side of his mother – the daughters of Mrs. Price of Portsmouth were to his parents what Julia and Maria ought to be but never truly were.)

Before departing, Edmund asked if she would not prefer him to stay.

Should he, he wanted to know, feel obliged to ask Mr. Tilney (he spoke no more of Mr. Elton, there had been some trouble with him, apparently) to keep watch over Thornton Lacey a little longer? Until Tom's return? Should she be more comfortable if he did that?

She longed to take his hand and cling to it like a small child, grateful for his staying, and to accept the offer without hesitation. But Fanny could not bring herself to be so selfish; seeing Mary Crawford near-daily after what transpired at the ball would only wound Edmund further, and he had his own life to return to which had already been put on hold – perhaps far too long – for her sake. Moreover, Tom – though he said he would return soon, in a general manner – had not given an exact date when they might expect him back; he might be gone a for week or for many months. To ask Edmund to remain at her side, a begrudging protector and unknowing buffer between herself and the brother of the woman he'd loved and lost, for some indeterminate amount of time would be a great cruelty on her part.

Still, it took everything in her to refuse and she cried herself to sleep – quite bitterly, as she had not cried even for Tom – the first night she knew her favourite cousin was no longer in, nor very near, Mansfield Park.

She tried to pretend – to lie to herself – that Edmund was visiting Mrs. Norris at the White House and could be back in a twinkling if need or whim encouraged him, but it was a dreadfully shallow imagining and she failed entirely to delude herself.

And Tom?

He found it exceedingly difficult to be cheerful, given the state of mind he'd left home in and the knowledge that he was en route not to some gaiety or other but to check on a sick horse, but he managed it for the sake of William and Mr. Yates, since they were sharing his carriage. (Leaving Yates at Mansfield while Tom was departing from it had not been an option Sir Thomas permitted, as John Yates – while deemed marginally acceptable in small doses – was hardly his favourite guest, and there was little enough to make him wish to stay anyway, because Julia had gone back to London with Maria before the family even breakfasted.)

If William wondered, however, why Tom could hardly look at him, despite being most amiable otherwise, he didn't bring it up. Perhaps he guessed, somehow, that it was the similarity in his features to Fanny's which pricked at Tom's conscience and tore down his natural defences. For all his rough-and-tumble upbringing, for all that he should have been a clueless and coarse sailor, he was a very perceptive young man in his way.

Perhaps the perceptive Mr. Price guessed quite rightly, for Tom felt unexpectedly forlorn when he and William parted as planned; it was as though he were losing his last thin connection to Fanny and being cast out into the world on his own as only half a person.

He almost regretted not allowing her to come when she'd had her heart so set on it – almost.

His stubbornness that he was in the right buoyed him and kept him from becoming too maudlin, even when he drank rather a lot during an overnight stop at a posting-house and Yates had a great deal of trouble rousing him in the morning when they were to leave.

Upon arrival at Newmarket, Tom was greeted by a panicked, flustered, and downright terrified groom with wide, blood-shot eyes, who informed him his horse had died only an hour before.

Tom raged at the groom, every bit as harsh as the man anticipated, uttering all manner of oaths and insults, and there ensued a nasty quarrel which Mr. Yates tried and failed to break up, and Tom's proxy (perhaps the only one with real brains of the lot, after all) refused to show his face and was called a coward and worse by them all – even Yates, who was quickly losing his temper as well after failing to deescalate the situation – in their mounting frustration.

Then they – all sour and put-out – went down to the tracks to see Francis in action, now Tom was there, so they could try to work out why the horse wouldn't run.

A practice race had been set up for the amusement of a few gentleman, which they were not supposed to wager on although Tom knew from personal experience many of them did anyway, and he saw his horse standing dumbly while the others took off at top speed.

The jockey turned and, goggling helplessly in Mr. Bertram's direction, gave a little shrug.

Tom swore again. "Even those bone-setters on the left, at least two of which I'm quite certain are half-lame and should be taken apart and shot before Christmas" – he hated to see horses suffer, and the poor creatures were clearly in pain – "are running as though horsey heaven awaits them at the far end" – or perhaps just oats – "whereas my Francis – my beautiful-stepper without a blasted thing amiss – isn't budging a bloody inch!" He pressed his hand to his forehead, groaned, and pushed back his hair, all but literally tearing at it. "Damn, damn, damn!"

Someone at his side coughed – a nasty, raspy cough that sounded phlegmy and bloody (as far a thing described as 'bloody' can be a sound) – and gasped out, in a voice which was probably meant to be teasing, "Is that any sort of speech, Mr. Bertram, to use in front of a gentleman's daughter?"

Starting, Tom whirled, spinning to his left, and recognised the woman standing there. "Anne?"

Indeed, it seemed to be her – it was her voice under the rasp, and her eyes and general countenance – only she did not look as she had when he'd last seen her in Weymouth.

The thirteen years (give or take) between them was more plainly visible now – one could easily, quite easily, believe her old enough to be his mother.

Or very nearly, at any rate.

Her face was pale and haggard and sickly, her hair a great deal shorter and less luxuriant. She was thinner and more bow-legged; her fine posture, the way she'd held herself, was a thing, evidently, of the past.

The past.

How strange to put it thus.

They'd not been apart so long as that, so as to make such a dramatic change seem feasible.

How could life – any life, regardless of its morality or physical demands – catch up with a person so suddenly?

Tom was taken aback, and it seemed to him Anne – as he now saw her – was more an omen of death to be feared than any silly, drink-induced dream in which a robed figure carried a scythe and spoke cryptically, blithering out nonsense of falls and neglect.

It was far more frightening to see familiar eyes behind such a worn face as this than it was to see none at all.

There was a choice to be made here; he might ignore her, might pretend even after addressing her, to have been mistaken, to have taken her for someone else entirely, and nobody witnessing his slight would judge him. She was only a whore, after all, even if the story she'd told him about being a gentleman's daughter wasn't a complete fabrication, and not a particularly well-looking one at the moment. If he so decided, he could turn away in horror and cowardice and never acknowledge her again.

He might have done just that.

He might have, but he didn't.

Instead, he took her apart from the others, neglecting even Mr. Yates (who, stunned in his own right at Anne's dramatic alteration, was silent and still and unable to speak for several minutes), leaving his companion with naught but a brisk – and vague – over the shoulder promise of meeting up with him again later.

They walked – Anne and Tom together – the length of the track and the stands, and she, after coughing blood into a ratty handkerchief drawn from a frayed reticule and wiping it away from her chin before it dripped down towards the low collar of her dress, with rather an air of embarrassment, said, "It's good to see you again, Mr. Bertram – I hadn't expected, nor looked for, the honour." There was a little flash of condemnation about her eyes. His fellow gentlemen here might not judge him, regardless of his actions, but she would, where she saw fit. "Whatever are you doing away from home again? Isn't your wife well?"

"Fanny's well, happy as the day is long; I've just left her the other day." But he stiffened and slowed his gait. "Really, Anne, there's no need to look at me like that. She's fine – my parents just held a ball in her honour. Now, might we please change the subject?"

"Mmm, as you like." She blinked at him. "So Francis the Frigid is your horse, is he?"

"Sweet lord, tell me that's not what they're calling him now," groaned Tom, lifting a hand to his face.

"He's becoming quite the local legend." She smirked, not unkindly. "I should have known he was yours. He's a true marvel as far as beauty is concerned, but he's stubborn and a little bit stupid – just like you. And no three guesses who he's named for."

"And here I was, jolly near pitying you, thinking you so changed," he laughed. "You're exactly the same after all."

"Just so."

"Anne... What happened?" And he tried, then, to gauge – without prodding too much – if she had lost favour with his former commissioner, or if some other misfortune had cast her off into this state of apparent misery she could hide with her words but not her body, or even her voice, which came and went traitorously.

If her tongue had, in the past, been a good weapon for her, if it had protected her in her dicey choice of lifestyle, it was reliable no longer; her clever mind did not always have as ready access to it as once it had.

She would not tell him, for all his best wheedling and cajoling. She would not waste her breath or be induced to speak much of herself when a little of it could be spared. She conceded to lean on his arm, when it was offered, to listen to his questions, to then give them no answer, and to – in turn – ask her own, about his life. She wanted to hear everything. He'd said Mrs. Bertram had just had a grand ball at Mansfield, hadn't he? She'd rather hear of that than talk of herself.

So he talked, and she listened.

The conversation gravitated from Mrs. Bertram and Mansfield Park to horses again, and she gave her opinion on Francis, as well as her truly heartfelt condolences regarding the other horse who had died. He then managed to get from her, by taking advantage of her moment of unguarded sorrow over the dead horse, where she was staying, and – having heard of it through word of mouth – declared it, through lips pursed with utter contempt and disgust, entirely unfit and spoke of setting her up some place else.

"You're plainly ill," he said, when she looked at him in surprise, "you should be somewhere you can rest and recover."

She shook her head. "Mr. Bertram, I'm not going to recover – that is, I'm not expecting to."

"Nonsense."

It wasn't nonsense, and she told him as much, yet – over a plate of sweetmeats they shared, his treat, at a coffeehouse he'd ushered her away to, ignoring her half-hearted protests – he still insisted on setting her up.

There was a suitable inn which he knew to be reasonably tranquil even during the racing season.

"Of course," he laughed, picking up one of the sweetmeats and bringing it to his lips, "I always thought of it as the 'boring' inn, but it will suit for your recovery."

Anne studied his face.

"What's that look?" he asked self-consciously. "Have I got sugar stuck to the corner of my mouth or something?"

"Why are you doing this, Mr. Bertram?"

"I do not understand you."

"I've known men," she began to explain slowly, "and I do mean in the Biblical sense of the term, who wouldn't throw so much as a half guinea my way while they laughed, shoved me aside, and moved on."

"That is rather unfortunate, I grant you, and not very sporting of the gentlemen in question" – he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, just in case – "but, and pardon me for not following, what's your point?"

"You never touched me – we are not family nor intimate acquaintances – yet you wish to render me this service. Why?"

He shrugged, then – with a twinkling eye – teased, "Well, luckily for you, Anne, I come from the older breed of gentlemen; I will insist upon setting up all the women I've seen unclothed."

She bit back a smile and forced herself to remain serious, not yet allowing him to conceal his kindness within the comforting folds of a full-on jest. "Is it for the same reason you assisted Sophie? Because you wish to be like your brother?"

"Oi, come now, that wasn't the exact manner in which I worded my reasoning to you," he grumbled defensively, pressing his knuckles against the side of the table and cracking them. "But you are correct in one respect."

"Yes?" Her tone was even, almost sweet, but voice was cracking, growing hoarse, again. "Which one?"

"We are not intimate acquaintances, in any sense of the word, and we never can be friends – even if that story you told me about your past is true – but I can do this for you." He grew momentarily withdrawn and pensive. "This is the only service I'll ever be able to render you" – he could not know then, poor Tom, as he sat across from her speaking those words, how he was mistaken; that one final service to her, a far larger one, one which would prove to be a greater sacrifice despite being very voluntarily bestowed, one which would change the coarse of everything, awaited him, looming on the near horizon – "and I don't begrudge it."

She was in no position to refuse – dying, as she knew herself to be, desolate as she had been – and so she permitted him, in the end of all their talk, pride no longer a feasible option, to do as he would.

"Baddeley," began Fanny, hands clenched and fingers entwined as she approached, swallowing hard and preparing to draw another breath before continuing with her question.

"No letters today, Mrs. Bertram," said he, in his dutiful distance, but with the faintest hint of true regret and disappointment on her behalf he was not able – not quickly enough – to fully conceal.

"Oh." Fanny deflated. She'd once sworn she would never wish for another letter again – and she and Tom had not parted happily – and, still, here she was, desperate as ever. "Yes. I see. It is too soon, after all, to be asking. I thank you all the same, Baddeley."

I shall never learn, she thought, turning aside and walking down the stairs with – though she might conceal it should anybody prove to be looking – the wounded expression of one who has been struck across the face.

After spending his mornings with his horse, still trying in vain to work out why the devil Francis would not run, Tom got into the habit of visiting Anne – usually beginning his visit at the same hour as the physician he'd paid to examine her near-daily when he realised rest alone was doing very little for her condition save slowing it slightly and not ending the visit until several hours after the physician departed, when it had grown quite dark.

Tom had never been a frequenter of sickrooms before. Even with Fanny's various symptoms – all those ghastly headaches and freaks of short breath – and often unspoken complaints that were never really made known until she could bear them no longer and must say something, it was usually Susan or else a servant who nursed her through the worst of the pain. Tom might bring her something practical he'd known to be helpful; he might even sit at her bedside for a bit and hold her hand very willingly until she gave him leave, with her merciful little smile, to go on and be out of doors for a bit. She'd assure him she'd be quite well, with only a little rest, and he would go.

His mother – with all her endless docility and lack of energy – was much the same. Following any bad spell, she needed only time to recover from whatever plagued her.

Time and quiet.

That and, since they'd brought her to Mansfield, the reassuring company of Susan Price.

Tom Bertram was a man who'd always been made, it seemed, for the house of feasting over the house of mourning – the last funeral he'd attended had been his Uncle Norris', and though he'd liked the man well enough in an abstract, dutiful kind of way he remained perfectly dry-eyed throughout the whole of the service. In all honesty, he'd thought more of his recent ill-luck gambling and how much his feet hurt that day (his narrow, unbroken-in, shiny black boots had pinched his toes something dreadful) than he had of the life the sombre family were all gathered to recall as his uncle's body was lowered into the ground.

In Anne, he found himself faced with an illness he could not wait out in the usual sense. She was right, apparently, when she said she would not recover.

All he could do was watch her grow weaker every day and visit regularly with the vague knowledge that, one day, in all probability, he would walk in, set his gloves down and kick off his boots, already beginning to grumble about his morning at the stables by force of habit, and find Anne departed from the world.

Waiting for death instead of waiting for improvement was a sensation entirely new to him – even Uncle Norris had died suddenly. It was true enough he often predicted Doctor Grant would someday pop off without warning, but he felt little obligation to see Doctor Grant every day and speak to him and entertain him because of this general assumption on his part. There was not enough money yet minted in the world to induce Tom even to willingly play cards with Doctor Grant without his Aunt Norris first twisting his ear into submission and leaving no way out. Doctor Grant could have been run over by a carriage and be bleeding from the head and not inspired in Tom the feelings of mortality and dread and pity Anne's unrecoverable state brought to his heart.

These feelings – her suffering – were forcing him to learn to think as he never had before; it was a sensation like being a great lump of silver held over a fire for refining, but the image, the shining reflection, of the mysterious refiner, the giver of life's hardest lessons, holding him thus was still a long way yet from winking back.

Daily seeing Anne in growing pain was only part of it, of course, and was difficult enough on its own.

There were some things the physician could do, loose bandages over an open wound though they metaphorically were, following the odd little extra coin from Tom slipped into his pocket.

"Mr. Bertram" – the physician clicked the snaps of the buckles on his leather bag closed before grasping the handle, preparing to leave them for the day – "have you considered opium? It might be something for the bad patches – it's done wonders with women who suffered from lesser complaints and may well take the edge off our patient's pain."

Tom didn't pretend to be unfamiliar with it – he was not, by any means, having tried it a couple of times more from boredom than anything else, though it had never truly appealed to him on the basis of pleasure, drink and snuff being his vices rather than a lot of smokes and vapour – and he did not expect Anne to be any less forthright than himself.

Indeed she was not.

It was Anne, in fact, who mentioned, looking up at him questioningly from under lidded, dark-circled eyes, they hadn't a pipe – a detail which had gone over Tom's head entirely.

"You'll just have to breathe in the smoke without one, then," he said nonchalantly, preparing at her bedside to administer it. "It ought to still do the trick, I'd imagine."

The opium smoke put her into a peaceful daze, and she sank her head back gratefully onto the pillow.

Growing woozy from the bit of it he couldn't help inadvertently inhaling at her side, Tom's head slumped forward as well and he soon found himself asleep.

He dreamed of the figure with the scythe again, waking with a near-violent start, his head now on the foot of the bed and being jolted by by Anne's knee under the blanket.

Anne smiled down in his direction.

The shadows in the room had changed; they were dark and, where light sliced through the curtain, pale blue-white from the moon's glow. He blinked blearily and shook his head in an effort to clear it as he lifted it.

"Welcome back to the world, Mr. Bertram – you're not going to ask me if you incurred any expenses from me this time, are you?"

Tom laughed at that, perhaps harder than he meant to, and needed to wipe tears from his eyes when he'd finished. "Not unless you're keeping secrets, my dear."

"You could leave me," she said, after a pause. "You've hired the physician and set me up here – you don't have to stay in Newmarket and come to see me every day." She turned her head on the pillow. "It's not as though I'm your mistress, Tom." She refrained from adding that many a gentleman in his position wouldn't do this much even if she was.

"Of course not," he replied, stretching his arms over his head, refusing to be serious. "You're old enough to be my mother. Which is one reason why, I might add, I don't object to your usage of my Christian name."

"Doesn't your wife miss you?"

Tom pushed back his chair with a noisy scrape and, stumbling to his feet, began to pace the length of the room.

"Oh." She watched him pityingly. "What happened?"

"I lied, all right?" he groaned, stopping in his tracks, still facing the wall. "All that nonsense I said about her being fine and happy – about the Mansfield ball. We quarrelled, at that ball, and I still don't know why. But I had a sick horse and I had to come here. There was no time to make it up again. We parted on unhappy terms."

"You're an idiot, Mr. Bertram."

He turned to look at her. "That really isn't news to me, there's no need to be quite so emphatic."

She closed her eyes and breathed slowly. "From a selfish standpoint, however, Mr. Bertram, I'm glad you're still around."

"Newmarket is always most accommodating at this time of year."

"Mmm," she sighed. "So I've been told; it's why I slipped down here for one last season myself. But this was beyond my wildest expectations."

Over the weeks which followed, Tom and Anne's relationship developed oddly, apart from the underlying friendship which (for all accounts and purposes) did not exist simply because by all logic and reason it couldn't and the bond of patient and nurse, far too new to Tom, so previously used to living only for himself, for him to have any real understanding of, they were uncannily like a gentleman and his mistress of the older variety who have outlived their passion.

Passion which, in their particular case, was never experienced to begin with.

They were securely on the other side of their mutual bond, contently dwelling at its end in pleasant domestic harmony, without having known – or having any desire to have known – its beginning.

Tom provided for her as if he were bound by the vague moral obligation of a lover – not only by paying for the physician, but also bringing food and gifts and arranging for her continued comfort in several dozen other small, practical ways, slowly adding up to what was near the running of a miniature household from Anne's sole room in the inn. He gave up, without saying a word about it, his own nearby rooms and ceased to leave at night, only being away from her to purchase necessities and in the mornings to witness Francis' continued lack of progress. (Blasted horse still wouldn't budge a damned inch, and here the season was nearly over!) He slept in the chair a couple nights, then – when a sore back and stiff neck could bear it no longer – paid the innkeeper to have a sofa brought in.

With no alternative for locations in which to visit his friend Mr. Bertram, Mr. Yates began to frequent Anne's sickroom, too, and – though he had no direct hand in caring for her, as Tom did, found a slight change in his character caused by the overhanging solemnity.

And yet they were, in speech and practice, as a general rule of thumb – as a little group of social castaways stranded in an upper-room in the middle of Newmarket – very merry.

Mr. Yates, positioning himself before the window, sang bawdy songs he'd memorised from those song-sheets that had not suffered the unfortunate fate of Blow The Candles Out at Sir Thomas' hand, warbling dreadfully until Anne was doubled over laughing from her place on the bed.

"Oh, if Mr. Yates were speaking," she rasped out in a fit of giggles, "I should call what he does now ranting, plain and simple. I somewhat regret the part I played in giving him those songs."

"John, for mercy's sake, stop making a grand exhibit of yourself," said Tom, rolling his eyes even as they sparkled with amusement. "I know you can sing – you had a fine baritone back in Mansfield."

Another person, currently in Mansfield herself, was remembering Mr. Yates' baritone as well, for it was wrapped up in her memory of Tom's singing and playing the pianoforte.

Fanny still had had no letter.

With no other way besides her relentless memories to connect with her absent husband, she took up the charcoal sticks he'd left behind (he had his sketchbook with him, but many of his superfluous drawing supplies had not been taken along to Newmarket). At first she only held them between her fingers and thought about Tom, but after a while she mustered the courage, though the thought of the presumption robbed her of sleep the night before she managed it, to ask her father-in-law for some paper and began – with no training nor idea of what she was doing – to sketch out smeary lines on the page.

She tried, once, to do a likeness – thinking to draw William as Tom had done for her before their wedding – but the result, looking more like an uneven pear on a set of broken stilts than a person, embarrassed and disheartened her.

She gave up the idea of attempting further likenesses before she could think of trying one of Edmund or Tom or even Susan.

Still, she dragged the charcoal across the paper, which she had asked for after all and felt she must use even if she'd lost her initial inclination, and worked herself up to slightly less awkward attempts to draw plants and parts of the house.

Susan found her sister in one of the gardens early one morning – before the heat of the day would make her fear a headache's onset – trying to sketch out some crude caricature of a weed the groundskeepers and gardeners had missed or else neglected in their uprooting.

She caught an unguarded wistful expression upon Fanny's face as she scribbled and struggled and bit her lower lip, and Susan's heart broke as she finally understood exactly what her elder sister's recent fixation with drawing stemmed from.

It was more than her simply missing Tom.

Fanny had learned – after saying she did not want to – to ride, and afterwards Tom had come home and been happy with her for a time. They had shared something which had previously only been his, and it played its part in binding them together anew.

The two things did not properly correlate, really, they were only happy facts which overlapped one another, but it was understandable that a girl like Fanny, with maybe just a little of the sailor's superstition running in her blood, from their father's side, might subconsciously connect the two.

"Fanny." Susan sat beside her and loosened the ribbon of her bonnet as she eased down. "It won't bring him home – Tom Bertram's coming back to Mansfield Park doesn't depend on you learning to draw, or developing an artistic talent. You understand that, don't you? Please tell me you know it."

And Fanny let her incomplete sketch fall from her lap and flutter down towards her feet before placing her charcoal-stained hands over her face and sobbing quietly.

Because she knew it, of course, Susan was not mistaken, but she herself had not understood what it was she was doing – that is, why she was doing it – until her sister came out and spoke so plainly.

Now she knew, and she was subsequently ashamed of her stupidity and overwhelmed with the feeling of being trapped more firmly in her misery without the reassuring pinprick-sized flicker of hope darting in a nonsensical manner about the back of her unwitting mind.

Susan took a faded shawl which had once belonged to Julia off her own arms and wrapped it around Fanny's shoulders, helping her sister to her feet and guiding her inside. "Why don't you come sit with me and our Aunt Bertram in the drawing-room for a while? You've been out here too long. Besides, your puppy is out of hiding and misses you terribly; the silly little thing keeps yapping at the walls and whimpering."

A/N: Reviews Welcome, replies may be delayed.