Snowbear

A Mansfield Park and Pride & Prejudice fanfiction

Chapter Nineteen:

One warm spring evening when Mrs. Norris was detained at the White House, dinner was served late, and nobody felt much like lounging about in the drawing-room Tom happened to – rather languidly – follow his mother, who was in pursuit of Pug, the little dog having taken it into her head to elude her mistress, into the silent and unlit breakfast-room.

Pug darted underneath the tablecloth, collar jangling.

"If you'll go to one end of the table, ma'am," suggested Tom, "I'll stand just here, at the head, and we shall capture Pug that way."

The attempt was successful, and Lady Bertram soon stood with her darling pet in her arms, peering out the large window which – in the morning – always flooded the room with light.

Tom stood behind her and looked out for himself. Despite the dark, he could see the shapes of Fanny and Edmund (Mary was somewhere else, inside, perhaps at the pianoforte or in the library) searching for glowworms on the lawn.

"Some things never change," sighed Lady Bertram, smiling contentedly at the pair. "Very strange how it all turned out, though, is it not?"

Tom confessed he did not understand her.

"Oh, don't you, my dear?" she turned to look at her son, who was blinking at her from behind the slits of his mask, his lips pursed. "I only meant it was strange Edmund should be married to Mary, and Fanny should have married you." A pause. "To be sure, I am glad of it – for when Edmund took orders, Fanny should have to of gone away to live with him, and you know I cannot do without her. And Mary is such a useful girl, too – she reads very well, though her voice does not send one off to sleep so comfortably as dear Fanny's."

"What I cannot comprehend," tried Tom, still baffled, "is why you would think of Edmund's marrying Fanny at all."

As if it were the most natural, obvious thing in the world, "Fanny has been in love with Edmund since she was a little girl."

Tom staggered back as if he'd just been dealt a physical blow. In the dark of the room and behind the concealment of his mask, it was not readily apparent, even if his mother had been looking at him, but he went very, very white.

"Did you not know?" asked Lady Bertram, when he was silent for some long minutes.

"No" – looking out onto the lawn again at the two of them laughing as Edmund attempted to nudge a stubborn glowworm into a jar – "I did not even suspect it."

"Truly? How curious. I always thought it quite obvious."

This was too much; Tom retorted, rather angrily, "You can't imagine I would have married her if I'd known she was in love with my younger brother!"

"Darling, there isn't any need to shout – I'm right here."

"Forgive me, ma'am." He inhaled sharply. "I fear I am overtired this evening – pray excuse me." And he bowed quickly and left the breakfast-room feeling weak and raw, a gnawing ache taking hold in the pit of his stomach.

A thousand stricken looks passing across Fanny's face over the years suddenly were fraught with new meaning, and Tom could scarcely credit how stupid – how very dull in the head – he had been! His mother was quite correct – Fanny had been in love with Edmund since childhood, had held it in and suffered in silence all the while he'd courted first one Mary and then the other. It was plain now how things ought to have been – Edmund should never have offered to Mary Bennet after realising Miss Crawford would never suit a clergyman; he should have married Fanny.

The more Tom thought on the matter the more obvious it became that they would have been perfectly matched, in mind and in heart, and happier than possibly any other beings on this earth if so united.

If he'd truly wanted to help her – rather than thinking, as he had been, of helping himself, of ending his curse – in offering her release from Crawford's unwanted proposal of marriage, he should have done everything in his power to promote a match between her and his brother.

It was, of course, too late for such action now, but the knowledge of what should have been marred his recent happiness.

This wasn't something Tom could shrug off and pretend ignorance of – once his eyes had been opened, he could imagine no means of returning to the comfort of his former blinders, more was the pity.

Poor Fanny, having no notion of Tom's present turmoil, came into their sitting room very merrily, a handful of pretty weeds in one hand and a glass jar with three glowworms in it in the other.

Her expression fell, however, when she saw Tom seated – in a position somehow both defeated and tense at the same time – by the fire, taking long sips from his wineglass.

"Sit," he said, waving wearily to the chair across from his own.

Setting down her jar and the tangle of dead plants she'd forgot, already, needed to be placed in water or set upside-down to dry, she made, first, an attempt to seat herself in his lap.

"No, Fanny." He sounded hollow and would not look at her until she moved. "Over there, please."

She obeyed, but with a furrowed brow. "What is the matter?"

"There's something I need to ask you." He took another sip of wine. "I request, if you care for me at all, you answer the question with complete honesty."

He was frightening her, and Fanny sat with her eyes wide and her hands – knuckles splayed and white – in her lap.

"When you married me, were you in love with Edmund?"

Fanny felt weak and ill, as if some vital organ had just been ripped from her, as if the air had been stolen from her burning lungs. She was also struck quite dumb – as though by an unexpected slap across the face – over the lack of fairness in his putting the question to her in such a way that there could be no answer which would not wound both sides.

Yes, she'd loved Edmund then – part of her would always love him, though her romantic inclination was, in truth, a good deal more taken with the memory of what her Edmund had been prior to his marriage to Mary Bennet than what with he was at present, as a real man she saw every day and in practise now viewed almost entirely as a brother, and her feelings having changed so fundamentally while away in London into such tender affection for Tom, these were no longer thoughts she dwelt upon without provocation – but she knew Tom, though not secretly pining for another himself, had not loved her on their wedding day, either.

She had Edmund feelings, and Tom feelings, and did not know what to do with herself thus put upon.

"Yes," she said at last, the blood draining from her lips.

"You damn well ought to have said something." His voice was almost a whisper.

"Would you have listened to me if I had?"

A small snort, faintly muffled by the lip of his wineglass, then, grudgingly conceding, "Probably not."

"I am very sorry."

He stood up and began to walk the length of the sitting room. "It isn't that I blame you, Fanny, pray don't think it – I do feel for what you must have suffered – but this–"

"Mr. Bertram–" If she had used his Christian name, she might have succeeded in giving him pause, but this only fuelled the distance he felt was required.

"I have been second to my brother in everything but birth my entire life." Tom stopped pacing and leaned on the nearest furnishing. "My entire life! Everybody looks at me – with all these great lofty expectations – first, before they realise he's the one they want. Edmund is certainly the heir my father desires – he would have never gotten himself cursed by a witch." He sniffed. "I guess I was fooling myself in hoping – hoping that with you..."

"That isn't fair," Fanny choked out, pained – she'd barely known Tom for who he really was when this all began, despite growing up together.

"I know it isn't – believe me, I know." A sigh. "But this isn't something I can ignore – I cannot see any way of getting beyond it, can you?"

Fanny could see – and did – but how was she meant to express these feelings?

"I have no desire to be the lover you settle for because you missed your chance with him." Righting himself, Tom added, "I think, perhaps, it might better if we went back to how it was at the beginning of our arrangement."

It was as if he had dumped a bucket of cold water over her head. Could it truly be so easy for him to pretend what had transpired between them – so many times she had, by then, quite lost count – never occurred, to have been so impossibly close to her and then cast her back into the role of a convenient temporary partner? He, who had told her she must never leave him, was so coldly willing – after a single disappointment – to draw away from her entirely?

Part of her understood – part of her blamed herself even if he did not.

Another part of her, an indignant part which had always suffered the most at being the lowest and the last, at being so easy to dismiss when no longer needed, wanted to cry out, to demand of him how he could use her so ill, but this part was a silent minority.

It was no good to plead with someone to love you.

If discovering she had loved Edmund had made Tom, in turn, cease to love her any longer, Fanny knew arguing and crying wouldn't change his mind. Moreover, she should be very ashamed – both of herself and of him – if such pitiful tactics could weaken his resolve.

"Rest assured," Tom went on, "I shall always see to it you're cared for – you are my wife as well as my salvation from the curse. Such was always our deal. Nothing there is to change."

Fanny nodded, feeling as if she had gone entirely numb from the inside out.

He studied her face a moment. "Is there anything else – apart from your feelings for my brother – you haven't told me? Anything else I ought to be made aware of?"

Mr. Crawford's ugly offer in the Bingleys' house came to her mind immediately, and she coloured and said, "No," so quickly he knew it could not be a truthful answer.

"I can see there is something." He sucked his teeth. "Well. As you like, then, keep your secrets – I'm not such a tyrant as to force them from you if you refuse to tell me willingly." He began to walk towards the door to the bedroom. "Come to bed whenever you're ready."

As soon as he had vanished from her sight, leaving her alone in the sitting room, Fanny thrust her face into her hands and remained thus for several miserable minutes.

In the nearly two weeks following this, it was evident Fanny was far from herself.

Although she did everything which was asked of her, her movements were automatic and listless, and she seemed not to eat much at any meal. Her stare grew vacant and, despite keeping up her toilette so irreproachably even her aunt Norris could find nothing to say about it, she gave off – somehow, quite inexplicably – a general air of being unkempt as well as unhappy.

Both Edmund and Sir Thomas applied to her, in all gentleness, to enquire if there was anything they could do to raise her sinking spirits – Mary, too, was on hand, waiting in vain to become a confidant – but she denied anything was the matter.

No, indeed, she was well, thank you; she did not need nor want for anything.

Not if it meant her very life would she have owned to being made miserable because Tom had loved her and did so no longer because he knew, now, the secret she had held since childhood and could not forgive her it.

But if he had robbed her of her joy, Tom had robbed himself doubly into the bargain as well – bitter over what he felt he had lost, he was irritable with everyone, as well as rather childishly terse and monosyllabic towards Edmund, who failed entirely to make the slightest sense of his brother's sudden alteration in demeanour and wondered if he wasn't going a little mad.

Only once did Fanny – when they were alone and readying for bed – attempt to ask her husband not to behave so towards his brother for her sake.

Tom's mask, for all it did to hide so much else, failed to conceal the sharp look of cold, withering reproach he directed at her from behind it, and Fanny faltered and turned away immediately.

He made it rather worse by adding, at her back, "I cannot imagine, Fanny, why you always suppose everything I do is because of you – I do have plenty of other motivations in my life, you know."

"I never said" – truly, she never thought – "you didn't."

"Then let us have an end to it, all right?" He added, perhaps aware how nasty the last remark came across, "And for pity's sake, don't look at me so from the corner of your eye! I can always tell when you're thinking me an ass, so it's no good your pretending." He reached out and – grasping her arm a little tighter than he strictly needed to, spinning her around to face him – urged her to take his hand. "We'll shake on it and go to sleep amiably, friends again. Do call it pax."

He pretended to fall asleep quickly, and she knew perfectly well he must be pretending, simply because he wasn't talking or rolling over every few minutes.

Everything about their present arrangement, nothing like what it had been at the start, was abhorrent to Tom – he wished it away as fervently as she did – but in his mind it was unavoidable. This was not at all the same thing as Miss Crawford preferring Edmund to himself. If every other woman in the world loved his younger brother best and Fanny alone had loved him better, had truly preferred him, he should have been contented. If he could have made himself indifferent to the sting of being a second choice, if he was a choice at all, he should have been reasonably satisfied. But neither was possible, so he wallowed in his own sullen self-admonishment. He had done this – he had been a fool not to see sooner where Fanny's true feelings lay – an utter, inexcusable fool to let himself fall in love with her, and a greater fool yet to have wooed her in town, to have let matters progress so far as they had done.

What was it Fanny said, the night of Bingley's ball – that she did not imagine what happened between them to be the sort of thing which could be undone?

Then there was the chafing fact she was undeniably keeping something from him – something beyond just a childhood infatuation for his brother, something she blanched and turned ill at the merest suggestion of telling him.

He could only think the worst, despite not quite certain what the worst even was.

It had all been too good to be true – too pure and perfect to last – and he ought to have known it and never let himself hope.

Clearly, whatever she felt for him – and he did believe she felt something, for she was a great deal too gentle and guileless to have been pretending through all they had shared – Fanny never loved him as he did her.

He had simply refused to see the truth. Even when he opened his heart to her in town, asking her if it was possible to be so happy, she'd not been able to answer him unreservedly – instead, she'd said something or other about servants knocking and breakfast to change the subject.

If he loved her less, if the wound were not so deep, he might have been kinder and inflicted little further pain, but he was too selfish to manage it in spite of what he believed – perhaps quite wrongly – to be his most valiant efforts.

Certainly he did not seem to be trying to think of her feelings when, after an invitation came from the parsonage for himself and Fanny to dine with the Grants and the newly arrived Crawfords, he showed remarkably little interest in discovering why she coloured and exclaimed she could not go – could not go for anything!

"I know Crawford plagued you rather abominably at Bingley's ball," he sighed, scarcely looking at her as he spoke from the corner of his mouth, reading a newspaper at the same time, "but as there's no reason in the world to suspect Dr. Grant of having hired a violin player for the night, and thus there won't be any dancing – I certainly can't envision anyone dancing a jig to Miss Crawford's ridiculous twanging upon the harp – I don't see why you're making such a tiresome piece of work about it."

Fanny had to swallow her spleen, feeling a rush of uncharacteristic anger towards him – she reminded herself Tom didn't know.

She hadn't told him, at the request of the Bingleys.

No doubt, even if he could love her no longer, even if she repelled him, his care to her honour was complete; if he knew, knew what Crawford had said and done while he was a drugged bear entirely out of commission, he would not be speaking to her in this manner.

"I don't understand what they mean in inviting us at all," Fanny tried, when she could speak again. "They haven't invited Edmund and Mary."

"Well, of course they haven't! Naturally, they haven't!" he snorted, dampening a finger and turning a page of the paper. "Bleh. The ink runs something frightful. Phoo. What the devil was I saying?" Fanny reminded him. "Ah, yes, that. Well, certainly they haven't invited Edmund and his wife – Miss Crawford can have no wish to see the deliriously happy couple at her sister's table."

"And Mr. Crawford has a wish to see me?" she pressed. "Or to see you, after–" She broke off.

"It's queer, I'll grant you, but one can only hope it is a sign he's putting aside all his romantic nonsense and being civil again. Or else the invitation is Miss Crawford's doing entirely – aren't you supposed to be her particular friend?"

Fanny's face, unguarded a moment, gave her away.

"Yes, yes, I know you don't love her half so well as my brother imagines, and, I daresay, never did; you have such a way of making people think you care a good deal more than you do" – and, here, he happened to glance above his newspaper pointedly enough to break her heart all over again, little though he imagined that was what he was doing – "but I should think you capable of enduring her company for a few hours without melting under the table or bursting into flames."

"I do not wish to go, Mr. Bertram."

"And I do not wish to stay here night after night, suffering indigestion from our cook, when we have an offer of dining out."

"You shall be stuck with Dr. Grant at your elbow all evening, and he always makes you sit with him and listen to him." It was Fanny's last resort, and she felt wicked in using it, but did so, nonetheless. "I know how you dislike it."

Poor Fanny, alas – if she had not been the one to bring this up, Tom might have thought of it himself, by and by, and on his own concluded they should decline after all, but he was feeling needled and – to his great discredit – spiteful, so her presumption – her, of all – to know him as well as that made him dig his metaphorical heels in.

So, the parsonage for dinner it was.

Too honest to play at taking ill, and too fair even to own to the headache beginning at the side of her temple as she readied herself, pinning her hair up, Fanny screwed her mouth, gulped, and prepared to face dining out as stoutly as William should have faced cannon-fire if called upon to do so. She told herself, to keep her hands from shaking, it mightn't be so wretched as she thought. It was only dinner, and she would not be alone – with Tom at her side, Mr. Crawford surely wouldn't try anything, much less attempt to renew the disgusting sentiments he professed in Mr. Bingley's library. She might be seated nowhere near he who she dreaded seeing most, either at dinner or when they all sat and talked after. He might have said it in the most dismissive of manners, but Tom was not mistaken about the unlikelihood of any dancing, any occasion for Mr. Crawford to place himself close enough to put her in any real danger from him.

The reality, for all her bravery, proved worse than anything a fevered, fearful imagination could dredge up.

The Crawfords had not returned to the Grants alone, but with a handsome companion from town – a Miss Arnold – who proved, much to Fanny's disappointment, not to be there as Henry's guest, though by all appearances and subsequent accounts she was dying for him as much as anyone else in their circle, but as a friend for Mary.

Not only did this seem all the more reason to suppose she was invited here for Henry's sake, clearly not needed to rescue Mary from country-wrought loneliness, but it was an added vexation simply because Miss Arnold, unlike any other friend Miss Crawford might have dragged to the country by her curling rags kicking and screaming, did not give off the impression of being distressed at the change of surroundings – Mrs. Fraser she certainly was not.

No, she was all amiableness and delight, and she would speak of having seen the stables through the carriage window as they came – they were Mr. Bertram's stables, were they not?

Tom, who happened to be seated beside her rather than by Dr. Grant, by some stroke of blessed good luck for himself, asked her whether she was fond of horses – did she ride?

She did, and had won some trifling prizes for it, and her cousin was a well-known horseman – having made a name for himself impressive enough to capture Tom's full attention when she uttered it and to set him off into any number of cheerful enquiries. She knew the best breeders, and – looking forward to the day when he would return to regular riding after the curse was ended in seven years – he had a thousand and one questions about getting hold of these traders and breeders; could she assist him in reserving a certain horse he had long desired?

And if Miss Arnold was indeed dying for Henry, these feelings did not – to Fanny's eye, jealousy making it unforgiving – prevent her from spending all evening with her head bent close to a masked gentleman already wed.

If she was attempting in fawning over Tom to make Mr. Crawford jealous, she succeeded not at all. He saw only a chance to whisper to Fanny – who was seated on his right all evening – how her husband neglected her and he, if she should think of his offer again with more kindness, would never flatter another woman in her presence while she sat unengaged.

Under the table, Henry's hand placed itself over her own.

She ripped it away and glanced – her expression tight as she struggled not to cry – to Tom for help, but her husband was preoccupied with getting Miss Arnold's opinion of one of his hunters who had been giving the groom some trouble as of late.

"I cannot say," Miss Arnold told him, shaking her head. "This goes beyond my own understanding, I confess. But I will write to my cousin – describing the symptoms as you've told them to me – and ask him for you. If it would please you, sir."

"Indeed, it would!" he cried, beaming behind his mask. "Circumstances at present leave me with so little time to be with my horses in person that–" A noise made him start. "I say, Fanny, are you the one making such a rattle down at the other end of the table there? Have you swallowed your wine in too much haste? You cough abominably."

"Mrs. Bertram will be wanting her shawl," said Miss Crawford, setting down her cutlery. "She coughs because she is chilled. Henry, be a lamb and fetch it."

Through her continued coughing, Fanny tried to make it plain she did not require her shawl. She did not think, until well afterwards, when it could do no good, perhaps she ought to have let Henry fetch the shawl for her and have – in turn – enjoyed a few moments of being free from him while he was about it.

After dinner, they listened to Mary play upon the harp.

All except for Tom – who, unlike Edmund, did not have an especial fondness for the harp as instrument in its own right, and should have liked the performance a good deal better if Miss Crawford had sung as well as played – still engaged in a lively discussion with Miss Arnold.

"The proof is before you," whispered Mr. Crawford, leaning so near to Fanny his lips almost brushed her hair as he spoke. "You cannot see your husband as he is at present – you cannot observe his manner to Miss Arnold – and fail to realise he will take a mistress one day. He did not appreciation you as a cousin – he does not appreciate you as a wife. Should you not be afforded the same happiness he would allow for himself?"

If Fanny were inclined to take a lover to soothe away the pangs of rejection (not, of course, that she believed even for a moment Tom loved Miss Arnold), if she were not morally repelled by the very notion, Henry Crawford was hardly the kind of man she would select for the purpose. Perhaps he imagined she would love him simply because he was the only one among those she knew corrupted enough in mind to make such an offer to her to begin with!

Her fingernails dug, deep and sharp, into the palms of her clenched hands.

Henry was unhindered by her lack of response; he attributed it to her natural modesty, rather than her anger, which was become warm enough that if a sharp object were presently put into her hand, she just might have stabbed him before her rational mind and timidity had time to warn her off it.

Angels did not get angry, and Henry Crawford quite refused to see Fanny as capable of anything less than angelic. Once he had seen her as having only 'touches of the angel' but his mind had built her a higher pedestal yet since then. Perhaps it was exactly this – the lure of seducing an angel, of being the only man deserving of such a conquest through sheer perseverance – which kept pushing him on and on.

One might, with some right, blame Henry's religious tutors, from his early youth, whoever they had been, considering how appallingly little he knew about real angels. He apparently had never heard of an avenging angel and plainly thought all guardian angels perfectly benign and more like sympathetic fairy godmothers with fluffy wings and sweet smiles than as religious texts present them.

He produced, while Fanny remained seething, a small quality of (very) early wild cherries bound in a handkerchief and offered them to her.

She accepted with a grateful nod, thinking he would hand a portion over and there would be an end to it, but he – meaning to be playful – insisted upon giving them to her one by one, and upon not letting her take them in her hand for herself, holding them to her mouth and pulling back the stems and pits with agonising slowness after every bite she took.

The whole display was degrading and mortifying.

Her whole face was scarlet; much, much redder than the cherries themselves, redder than the sticky juice pooling at the corners of her mouth.

Worse was how it was being accomplished right under her husband's nose – Tom some few measly feet from them, too absorbed in his conversation with Miss Arnold about some 'ghastly high hedge' she had cleared on horseback in a park he was evidently familiar with to notice his wife was practically being force-fed cherries by a would-be seducer.

Finally able to disentangle herself from him, and not bothering to cast her look of vexation upon either Mary or Mrs. Grant, though she longed to frown very hard indeed at them both for their lack of assistance (at least Dr. Grant had the excuse of having fallen asleep and not seeing it), Fanny made her way with feet like lead to where Tom was.

"Mr. Bertram, I am unwell and wish to go home, if you please."

"D'you mind?" he sighed with aggravation, and without turning his head to see her, for she had come in at the part he had been most eager to hear (for all he found pleasant about her, he did not see much conciseness in Miss Arnold's ability to relay a story and had been waiting to learn how it ended). "Miss Arnold was on the point of telling me–"

Stung, Fanny did not remain at hand to hear what it was Miss Arnold was on the point of telling him. She did not care. Marriage to her cousin was supposed to protect her from Henry Crawford, but clearly it hadn't, not so much as a whit.

Tom would not rescue her from him, so she must try to rescue herself.

Although she would have told him she meant to walk if he would not take her in the carriage, in spite of everything she would not have had her husband worry if it could have been helped, she was too afraid of Mr. Crawford hearing – he was watching them very intently – and making an offer of seeing her back to the house in such a way she could not refuse.

And if he got her alone on a night like this, already worked into a passion, Fanny didn't like to think what might happen.

It made her chest ache to leave without formality, without expressions of gratitude for the meal and the invitation, however little she had actually enjoyed herself, having been brought up to manners, but she ignored the pangs and saw herself – as soon as Mr. Crawford finally chanced to look away in order to address some comment to one or the other of his sisters – to the door and out into the cool spring night.

Tom had a dreadful time of it when he realised she was gone.

Mr. Crawford noticed first, started the hue and cry, but Tom's suffering was more profound simply because it was based in reality. He knew he had wronged Fanny, been short with her, and now she was missing. Henry suffered only the imaginary alarm of a jilted lover whose object has flown – at least at the start, at any rate; to his credit, when it seemed she was not merely misplaced like a glove laid upon the wrong end-table, his better nature (such as it was, quite under-nourished) did come over him and he wanted her found again from a more genuine place of concern, one having only minimally to do with his romantic feelings for her.

Tom was in true agitation and was more to be pitied, even if he had brought it upon himself.

Two separate search parties were formed but Miss Arnold – for all she would have no doubt proven very capable if a horse had gone astray – was so utterly useless at looking for Mrs. Bertram, Tom lost his liking for her very rapidly and was twice upon the point of asking she be moved into the other party, because her never-ending chatter was more of a hindrance than anything else.

But Dr. Grant, when Tom got him and his lantern at his side, was almost as bad. The doctor kept thinking everything – without any notable discrimination – they went by in their search must be Fanny in a wounded state.

If he mistook even one more damnable root for the shape of an injured woman splayed across the ground, Tom was prepared to fib him. His nerves couldn't handle it.

Tempers were almost lost, cooled and brought back under control only when they got word from the big house vouching that both Baddeley and Lady Bertram had seen Fanny come in some time ago, though they hadn't heard a sound from her or seen a hair of hers since.

Tom went home and up to his sitting room, then, expecting to find Fanny therein, but did not.

He checked their bedroom – and asked Smith if he was sure she hadn't been in to change and then gone downstairs to sit with his mother after all and the good lady simply hadn't noticed, since Fanny could be very quiet if she did not wish to make herself known – and then the East room.

He'd half decided to give the search up, expecting she was somewhere or other within the countless rooms of the house being a quiet, sulky little creepmouse and would find her way back to him in time for bed, when he thought – for some reason he couldn't be sure of – of the cold, poky attic bedroom that had been hers before their marriage.

He didn't think, unless he was forgetting, he had been up there since the night with Smith, hiding from his father who had believed him to be away.

"What the deuce would she want there?" Tom muttered to himself, but climbed the stairs to check anyway.

And there she was, visible by the light of a single candle.

She was seated, cross-legged, upon her old bed, in the same clothes she'd worn to dine at the parsonage, including her pelisse, which she had not bothered to remove, her face rather pinched and blue except for her lips, still stained from wild cherry juice, and her eyes which were red (it was obvious she had been crying, though they were visibly dry now and she'd stifled any remaining sobs upon hearing the door-latch).

"What's all this?" snapped Tom, shutting the door very indelicately behind himself. "I declare it was a merry chase you've led me on tonight!"

His unfriendliness struck her like a blow. She gave him one wretched look, and said, with no suggestion of melodrama or passion, only the slightest catch in her hoarse voice, "I wish I were dead."

"Oh, come now, I didn't mean to scold." And he sat beside her on the bed and put his arm around her. "Well, perhaps I did, but I take it back now. Do not talk so, Fanny, I'm sure you don't mean it." But he spoke these words with a catch in his own voice simply because he wasn't sure – she'd frightened him twice tonight, more somehow with this single remark than by disappearing to begin with. "You cannot be so miserable as all that simply because I neglected you – yes, I admit it freely, so you needn't censure me with your eyes – for the length of one dinner."

His kindness felt worse, though she could scarcely credit how, than his previous harshness and she broke down in a fresh fit of sobbing.

Tom's intention, seeing her seized thus, was only to comfort her, stroking her arm and holding her close and placing a few chaste kisses on her brow and cheeks, murmuring, "Shhh," in as soothing a tone as he could manage, but it quickly escalated beyond simply what a brother would have done for a weeping sister.

His kisses moved to her mouth and, after he had removed her pelisse and pressed her back into an old pillow, to her throat.

Fanny didn't protest when he began to pull her dress from her shoulders; he didn't even have to tell her to close her eyes, for she anticipated the exact moment when he would remove his mask and, turning her head, blew out the candle to oblige him.

The only strangeness about the whole affair – the only sensation she found odd and could not fully shake off – was the fact she was with Tom like this in her old attic bed, the same bed she'd cried herself to sleep in countless nights as a child, as well as the same bed she'd fallen asleep happily in after some unexpected kindness, the bed filled with a thousand interesting remembrances already – and now Tom was in it with her, kissing her breasts and running a hand down her belly and folding one of his legs around one of hers...

After, curled against his bare side and covered in sweat despite the lingering chill of the attic room, Fanny choked out, "I love you."

"I didn't mean for this to happen again, mouse." But he did not seem entirely sorry it had.

She was caught between sinking back into misery – he hadn't said it back, perhaps he really and truly no longer loved her – and feeling elated – he'd called her mouse, an endearment he hadn't used very often since things began to go wrong between them, and it must surely mean something – and she buried her face in his chest, overcome.

"But perhaps," he continued, after a pause, his voice vibrating through her, "I've been mistaken, and it is better to be loved second-best than not to be loved at all. Still, I would be more like him for your sake, if I could, as it's what you deserve; oh, Fanny, I'm simply not capable of it."

Fanny thought back to the dark days when she had been convinced Edmund would marry Mary Crawford – recalled being Edmund's second dearest object on earth – and had to admit, even if it was to her detriment, Tom probably had it right the first time. To be second-best was not the worst fate for an ardent lover, second attachments did not always consist of one partner being happy while the other secretly pined, but it undeniably left a painful bruise upon the soul.

But the point was moot, regardless.

She lifted her head.

"I do not love you second-best." As succinctly as possible, Fanny made it – now she had his attention – very plain her first inclination did not factor into her love for him. "You're my husband, Tom, and you are what you are – and that isn't a bad thing. I should be very sorry if you became anyone else. Very sorry indeed."

"I have been a right bloody fool, then," he whistled. "Damn. I daresay we've both suffered needlessly. I thought – dash it all, I scarcely know what I thought – and believed you were keeping secrets and–"

Fanny's conscience could hold out no longer – she was sorry to break her promise to the Bingleys, but this was unendurable. "There is something – something very dreadful – I have to tell you."

A/N: Reviews welcome, replies could be delayed.