A/N: Friendly shout out to the kind anon reviewer for the last chapter! I'm so glad to hear you like the story so far!
Snowbear
A Mansfield Park and Pride & Prejudice fanfiction
Chapter Twenty:
"And, where – if it won't distress you, telling me over again, as I fear I might have missed it the first time around – was it Mr. Crawford spoke of establishing you? I mean, what was the name of the place?"
They were in their sitting room now, in their chairs (pushed close together) by the fire; Fanny had told him what occurred in town, what Crawford had wanted from her, while they'd still lain abed in the attic room, and he had gone so quiet it frightened her but said little until they'd dressed and removed themselves. She'd been on the point of supposing he meant to say nothing at all about it; in this, she saw, or imagined she saw, the oddest and most unexpected resemblance to his brother he'd ever displayed – a tendency to become unable to speak when enraged.
It had been almost a relief when he spoke, rather than the cause of distress he evidently feared it would be, because it seemed much more like himself.
"H-he did not speak," answered Fanny, looking up from the wineglass filled with watered-down Madeira Tom had put into her hands before posing the question, "of establishing me any place at all."
"You said he asked you to be his mistress."
Her cheeks heated. "Oh, he did, but he made it clear it shouldn't be in name." She coughed. "I-I daresay he only intended I should be... Should be... Well, you know, a" – she lowered her voice rather pitifully – "whore."
Tom sucked his teeth. "He offered to pay you, then?"
She shook her head. No, no – he'd not offered to pay her. He'd seemed to think his company payment enough.
"Whores get paid, Fanny, it's their sort of protection – just as mistresses have their establishments – trust me, strumpets and lightskirts who aren't ape leaders cost a lot of money."
She stared at him.
Behind the slits of his mask, his eyes rolled. "I know because of Wickham – pray don't look so reproachful at me, mousy."
Her gaze dropped, both her cheeks yet remaining a very deep pink.
"My point is neither term – mistress or doxy – applies to Mr. Crawford's suggestion."
"You aren't going to fight him," said Fanny, a trifle shakily, hoping for reassurance here. "Mr. and Mrs. Bingley were afraid of your calling him out."
Tom gave a long, aggrieved sigh. "No, I don't imagine I shall – it isn't in my plans at present – although I have already thought up several ways I should like to go about rearranging his mean little face. Two of these do involve taking my favourite hunting rifle and shooting him directly in it. Although, truthfully, I should have preferred, if violence was my goal, to plant a facer with my own fist. Much more personal, you know."
"I wish now I had told you sooner," Fanny confessed. "But, you see, I did promise the Bingleys."
"Yes, yes, well, what's done is done – but you have my word Crawford will not bother you again."
But, however much she steeled herself against accepting obtuse answers and tried to implore him to tell her what he planned to do, Fanny found she could get no more out of him that night.
Indeed, she heard nothing further about Crawford – though, knowing he was as near as the parsonage, she put off her walks in the shrubbery and would only ride within sight of Mansfield Wood (and therefore of Tom in his bearish form) for her daily exercise – until some days later when, while changing for dinner, Tom told her she wouldn't be joining them downstairs.
"I'm afraid you're frightfully indisposed, and Smith will be serving you your meal in our sitting room tonight."
Fanny wrinkled her brow. "I am not indisposed." She had been feeling rather well all that day, if she were being truthful.
"You jolly well are indisposed if I say you are," he told her, pointedly.
"But to what purpose?"
"Crawford is dining with us tonight."
"Oh." And she blanched. "Your father–" She broke off. "Or Edmund?"
"I invited him."
She looked at him as one betrayed but without anything like full understanding of the betrayal in question.
"Trust me, mouse; his attacks on you end tonight."
"You..." Her lips pursed worriedly. "You aren't intending to poison Mr. Crawford, are you?"
"What? And blacken our cook's name? A pretty trick that should be, upon my word! No, indeed. Not unless my initial scheme fails, then perhaps I will say hang the cook, dash it all, and try out your idea after all."
"Oh, but it isn't my idea – not at all – really, you mustn't do that!" she protested, then struggled against laughter when Tom's smile gave away how severely he was teasing her. "Mr. Bertram!"
Smirking, he kissed her hand in parting, deliberately, with a flourish, as he might have departed from his mother a thousand times before.
His high spirits encouraged Fanny somewhat. Never had she heard of a gentleman with murder on his mind grinning and making so merry, excepting he was also a madman.
She granted, honest with herself, Tom was a good many things, and rather too much at times of whatever he was, dear as each facet of the man had become to her objectively, as his wife, but he was probably – she was almost certain – not mad.
Therefore, she could consent to eat her little dinner as served by an absent – and so mostly benign – Roger Smith without showing any signs of agitation herself.
All the same, she couldn't help wondering – oh, how she did wonder – what it was he meant to do!
What he meant to do might have gone through several revisions between the sitting room door and his eventual arrival at the dinner table, such rapid and at times erratic alterations being fairly characteristic of Tom's usual way of making up his plans, but what he did was this:
He seated himself directly across from Mr. Crawford – despite this resulting in a bit of a side-scuffle with a very puzzled and subsequently knocked-about and elbowed-aside Edmund, who'd wanted the place for himself, because by pure chance it was also close to his wife without being directly beside her and so rather ideal for him – also making certain it was in the plainest view and within clear hearing of his father at the head of the table.
And, once seated, Tom began – as if casually – to lament on its being only 'too bad' Mr. Crawford would not be able to visit them again tomorrow for a drink in the drawing room and perhaps a game of billiards after, as well as dine with them tonight, for he was leaving Northamptonshire for Bath or Weymouth or somewhere – oh, yes, he had got it now, perfectly recollected where Mr. Crawford had told him he was going, it was that new up and coming place, Sand-something-or-other.
"Sanditon." He dragged his fish-knife across his plate very pointedly, making a long scrapping sound. "That's the one, isn't it? Frightful pity it's so far off, and then – when you've finished there – I expect you'll be heading back to Everingham."
Mr. Crawford could not have been more astonished if Tom Bertram had arrived at dinner and coolly declared he had it on good authority he was to spend a year in Africa.
"No, indeed, there has been some miscommunication somewhere here, sir," protested Henry, in the tones of one stunned. "I quite planned to remain–"
"No, no, you are going – and that is the reason, you see, you cannot visit tomorrow and share with us fascinating tales from the time of our theatricals before my father came home." He grinned very slyly and then looked – with a heavily exaggerated boyish innocence his mask could not conceal – at Sir Thomas. "There is a delightful anecdote you have not yet heard, sir, regarding this gentleman and Maria – most amusing." His head was turned back to Crawford again and his eyes behind their silver slits seemed to be saying, I have you and you know it, you bastard; yield to me. "But I'm afraid it's not worth telling in the gentleman's absence – the humour is lost without his interjections and comical looks – and it's much too long for tonight. He shall have his packing to oversee, the parsonage housekeeper will get the details wrong if unwatched, and his sister – dearest Miss Crawford – will want the last few hours with him. It would be selfish to keep our friend here at the house past eight or nine."
Henry tried the only weapon at hand, despite knowing it to be a weak one. "Mr. Bertram, your father cannot like to hear of our theatricals – you know he was made unhappy when he came home to them. Hadn't we better show him respect and never speak of what was so disagreeable to him, now it is over with?"
"As you say, it is over and done with – such a good long time ago, it seems – and were it not – were I afraid of wounding my father's pride thus – I could scarcely credit you with knowing his mind when he returned home." His smile was tight as he directed his next comment to his father. "Crawford, you'll recall, made himself scarce and did not present himself to you that night." His mouth parted and he wet his lips. "That is part of the story about Maria, actually. As I said, it's most amusing."
Sir Thomas lifted an eyebrow, then – when he received no explanation from either gentleman, both staring very hard at one another (Henry at last understood he was being threatened, chased off from the county) across the table – he asked about Fanny's not joining them.
"Oh, some trifling aliment, coughing up blood or else a headache or something of the kind."
Edmund was alarmed. "Coughing up blood?" cried he, nearly upsetting his cutlery. "Tom, that is not a trifling aliment. Have you sent for a physician?"
"Well, perhaps it wasn't blood," he sighed airily, signalling for the nearest servant to refill his wineglass. "Or if it was, it may have been a nosebleed and was not being, as we might say, properly coughed up after all. You do make it a point to miss the object of a man's speeches, Edmund. As a future clergyman, you ought to improve there – your congregation won't thank you for not taking up their meaning. But, at any rate, and in any case, Fanny is indisposed for the evening."
Mary had been quiet up until this point, none of the gentlemen apart from her husband were paying her much attention, and the exchange between her brother-in-law and Mr. Crawford was almost as good as a play, besides, but she pipped in – then, feeling it to be her sisterly duty – with some truism about damp spring weather and weak chests.
None responded to this remark except for Edmund, who – understanding her meaning to be pure, if a little garbled – gave her a kind, encouraging look and would have patted her hand if they'd been seated closer to one another.
Henry could see a retreat might be inevitable, at least for the time being, and began – however reluctantly – to play along with Tom's assertion he was leaving Northamptonshire in considerable haste and for an indefinite amount of time.
"I must confess myself sorry to hear, Mr. Crawford," Sir Thomas said, when it had been affirmed by all appearances, "you will be leaving us so quickly after only having just returned to the county."
"As am I, Sir Thomas, though I'm pleased and greatly honoured to dine with you tonight before I must depart," said Henry, and acted demure. "How good and generous it was of Mr. Bertram to think of inviting me for that exact purpose when I'd nearly forgotten it myself." This forced play-acting rankled him dreadfully – he felt very like a cheap puppet Tom Bertram was yanking the strings to in an obscene and cruel manner – but he could see no other immediate way of preventing the eruption of a very warm scene.
The worst of it was not even being able to see Fanny tonight before he must be driven out.
He thought he must, following dinner, catch Tom alone and – with all the civility and charm he could manage – talk him round to the understanding that he needn't threaten him; reason with him as with any other piqued gentleman until, bristles brought back down, ill-feelings soothed, he understood what was required in company.
But when he'd got the gentleman alone, Tom wouldn't hear him out, not a word, would only say from behind clenched teeth how he knew – and Crawford must be aware exactly what he alluded to in this unless he was the stupidest man alive – and if he tried anything of the kind again, he would face far worse than being urged out of the countryside and into a vacation destination.
"Mr. Bertram," he tried, levelly.
Tom raised his chin, folded his arms across his chest, and gave a dark chuckle. "Oh, Henry, Henry." He managed to make his use of the Christian name sound like the drollest of insults. Poor, small, middling, little Henry. "I do hope you had more sense than to imagine I would stand by like a good little cuckold and let you take her from me. Because that would be rather an insult to my intelligence – I am not Rushworth."
Henry stiffened and began to step back.
Leaning forward, closing the gap between them again momentarily, his height giving him rather the advantage, Tom put his mouth close to Mr. Crawford's ear. The cold metal edge of his mask almost brushed the gentleman's cheekbone in the process. "And d'you want to know the best part? She loves me." Pulling away, he added, "I hope you have a jolly time in Sanditon, Mr. Crawford. Pray, do not hurry back to us. We're all getting on quite well without you."
"Well, mousy," said Tom, when he returned to their sitting room to find Fanny employed in some light needlework by the fire, Smith having cleared the dishes away, "and what do you think?"
She raised her head. "I cannot guess."
"Our false friend Mr. Crawford has just recollected a prior engagement at Sanditon."
Setting her sewing into her lap and wringing her hands, she asked, "Where's that?"
"Hang me if I actually remember," he laughed. "But the point is – the point is – it's not here in Northamptonshire."
"And what did you say to him?" Fanny breathed, rising from her seat and – in so doing – carefully moving her unfinished sewing from her lap and onto the cushion she vacated.
"Not much." But his smile suggested otherwise. "That is, I told him you loved me." Saying this, he came over – seeming to cross the length of the room in less than two strides – and put an arm about Fanny's waist, pulling her to him. "Poor Mr. Crawford, alas. No chère-amie for him." His hand slid up her back and began to feel for the little row of cloth-covered buttons on her dress.
"Mr. Bertram!" she squeaked, turning her head and gesturing a little anxiously in Roger Smith's direction. "We aren't alone."
"Oh?" He was puzzled a moment. "Oh! Right. Smith. Yes, I confess I'd quite forgotten you in all this excitement and scandal." He indicated the door beyond with a careless toss of his chin. "Thank you – you may leave us to ourselves for the rest of the evening."
Despite making it plain – to the housekeeper and his sisters alike – he was departing before breakfast, Mr. Crawford failed to leave the park the following day.
His luggage and carriage were kept out of sight – his valet and coachman were well-paid to see to this – and he stealthily roamed different parts of the park on foot for hours, deliberately choosing places he imagined Fanny might come for a walk by herself, including the shrubbery closest to the house, dreadful risk as that was for him to take.
He could not be certain he had really convinced Mary, as he had Mrs. Grant, of his early departure; she alone he had confided the previous night's happenings to, and he'd watched her regard him with a mixture of annoyance and sisterly pity.
"Mrs. Bertram," she said, deliberately not calling her Fanny to suit the purpose of her admonishment, "is far from the unsullied little virginal creature you make her out in your head. No, Henry, do not tense and look at me so! Listen. I cannot say if she loves Mr. Bertram as he claims – I own I never saw any proper symptom of it myself – but I promise you she's been with him since becoming his wife. There's been a sure change in her look. Ask Mrs. Grant" – she knew, of course, he would never ask her any such thing – "if you doubt my guess. Another married woman would know."
Henry had been nonplussed and refused to respond.
Part of him was afraid Mary might be right, but he told himself – even if she spoke truly, if there was something to be said for a woman's intuition towards her own kind – then Fanny was only all the more a victim of Tom Bertram's selfish manipulations.
Regardless, he decided he couldn't bear going away with no plans of returning without first saying some sort of goodbye to her.
And so he schemed, and made as if to go, and waited, but she never appeared.
He wondered, growing in alarm, if she really was ill – he had taken it for granted Tom kept her from dining with them all last night out of pure husbandly spite, leaving the poor creature shut up in their rooms upstairs, no doubt, but as the hours passed and there was no sign of Fanny coming out of doors – not even with a riding crop in her hand, as if she would take her exercise that day upon horseback – the worry he imagined he felt began to increase.
Despite haunting the parts of the park with a view to front of the house from an early hour, Henry had not been anywhere near early enough to see Tom depart and head for Mansfield Wood before dawn, but he did see him return alone, from the direction of the woods, after the sun had set.
The future baronet was whistling to himself and – though he wore his mask and carried a bundle of what must have been his proper clothing – by all appearances had on only his cotton drawers and a loose shirt rather open at the front. His feet were bare, which – considering the day was unseasonably warm – perhaps wasn't so odd in and of itself; he only looked as if he'd come back from a swim, but if he'd been swimming, he ought to have been wet – his hair at least might have been damp. Further, there were no suitable bodies of water for swimming – no lake or quiet, reedy pond sparkling gold-and-blue under the glare of the spring sunshine – in the direction from which Mr. Bertram had come.
There was some mystery here, but Henry could make nothing of it. He could only inwardly berate himself for missing his chance.
If he'd known Mr. Bertram had gone out, he might have gone in and asked to see Fanny.
Now it would be impossible.
At least, by the front door.
He waited some hours more – the night air remaining warm, almost hot, as though they were having an early summertime – and finally, after what he judged must be a good while after the whole family would have had their dinner and spent their usual time in the drawing-room before going their separate ways, let himself into the house by means of a servants' entrance round the back.
Staying hidden was no great difficulty – the warmth which had lingered all day meant very few fires were lit, and with the bustle of dinner and the washing up mostly completed, there weren't many servants with cause to go back and forth regularly enough to spot an unexpected visitor in the hallways.
The real trouble was the niggling thought of how he was meant to get Fanny alone without running into her husband. He couldn't simply walk into Tom Bertram's rooms in the hopes of looking for Fanny and not expect to see the gentleman himself in the same place.
However, the hallway where he judged Tom's rooms to be located was quite opened up, the main doorways all left ajar, as if for an airing, and everything appeared to be dark and – for the moment – unused.
The only person Henry discovered there was Roger Smith, Bertram's valet.
As Smith saw him almost at once, the servant's eyes seeming almost (though he told himself it must have been a reflection in the dark playing with his own vision) to glow faintly green and to dart in his direction the moment he stepped into the open hallway, Crawford thought he had given the game up and would be in for it, but to his immense surprise, the valet didn't seem in the least troubled by his appearance.
Then he thought, well, and why not? There was – when one considered it – no real cause for assuming Tom would bother informing his valet he had threatened a family friend and made him unwelcome in the house; Smith must simply assume he was invited here. He might even believe he was an overnight guest.
Still, there was something eerie about the perpetrating way Smith looked at him when he said, in a voice free of anything like emotion, seeming to know exactly who Crawford was looking for without being told, "Mrs. Bertram isn't here – she's in the library."
(As an aside, whether this was a betrayal of his master or not from Roger Smith is quite unknowable. Yes, he told Henry where to find Fanny, but he also probably knew – as Henry could not – what the gentleman would see when he got there. And this is rather more in favour of his being against Crawford than for him, when considered in that light.)
The library was mostly dark – there was no fire lit there, either, and whoever was reading within read only by candlelight – when Henry entered as silently as he could manage and tried to make his way to where Fanny must be.
He followed the distant ebbing and flaring twinkle of candlelight, then stopped in his tracks – he was still a good distance off.
Fanny was there, but she wasn't alone.
Henry heard Tom's voice before his eyes adjusted and allowed him to see where the gentleman was situated, sprawled comfortably on a carpet between the shelves; he was reading aloud.
"Amidst such giddy and thoughtless extravagance," Tom read (in Henry's opinion, buoyed by his ready vanity, by the knowledge he could have done it far better, very poorly), "it will not seem strange, that I was often the dupe of coarse flattery."
Positioned so he could see – and so read – by the candles, which were lit around the couple in what put Henry in mind of an occult circle, but so that his face was not illuminated by them in turn, Mr. Bertram's whole countenance and shape from the neck upward was shrouded in total shadow (he seemed to have removed his mask, because there was no tell-tale glint of winking silver coming from his dark corner); Fanny's head was in his lap.
Unlike her husband, her lovely, rapt face was perfectly visible, especially as she lifted her head a moment to smile – such a smile, bright enough to send shivers of pleasure down Henry's back even though it was not for him – in the general direction of Mr. Bertram before setting it back down with the wholly contented countenance of a church-window Madonna.
An illusion certainly helped along by the pure whiteness of her nightdress.
Tom stopped reading a moment and reached down to stroke her curls – to twine his fingers in her hair and give those well-loved yellow locks a single, playful tug – before resuming. "Where was I?"
"I believe you were about to begin upon, I thrust quart over arm better than any man in England." This being one of her favourite books, she knew it very nearly by heart and might have – with sleepy ease – picked up the narrative from any place he left off.
Faced with this scene, even a man so determined to think what he would as Mr. Crawford was at present could not deny the obvious signs of affection on display. Fanny was not being put upon or being ill-used; she was not being sinned against. She might have very voluntarily done anything for someone she could bestow such a smile upon! Here was more than simple angelic good nature.
He tried to envision – rather frantically – if, even just once, Fanny ever looked at him the way she had at Tom Bertram while he read Samuel Johnson and had to admit to himself – painful as it was – she never had.
There was nothing for him here.
"I was bound for a thousand pounds to Tom Trippet, because he declared" – Tom continued his reading, his voice, encouraged by Fanny's pleasure in the piece, gaining such speed as he pressed ahead, that if his wife had not known the book by heart, his enunciation must have been unintelligible – "that he would dance a minuet with any man in the three kingdoms except myself."
Fanny sighed – a little sigh of complete comfort.
And Henry, unseen by either the husband or the wife, left them to their present felicity and closed the library door, with relative quietness, bestirring the candle-flames as indiscernibly as a household ghost securely on its way to giving up haunting over lack of attention from the living, behind himself.
The days passing after this were the happiest Fanny had ever known, jollier even than her week in London; because her time in town had begun to feel like a nice dream she'd once had while her present was, blissfully and inexpressibly, real.
(That she could be so contented, even without daily sight of Edmund, who was joyously ordained at Easter, finding himself to be with opportunity and without objection from his chosen wife, and moved in all proper ceremony into Thornton Lacey, is especially telling in its way; her devotion to her husband, while it never could erase what was a permanent, set fixture for always, lodged firmly in her heart for her whole life through, came at last to gently eclipse the long-held devotion to her favourite cousin and friend.)
She had never tended towards plumpness, a sickly child grown up into a pale moon sickle of a woman, but her continued felicity in marriage must have altered her, she began to suppose, because she couldn't deny she was gaining a wider girth and deeper dimples.
The change, while surprising, didn't distress her overmuch, because Tom barely seemed to notice it, much less to be put off by it.
If she was growing more stately than delicate, more rounded than graceful, the only remark her husband ever made acknowledging any notable difference in her shape was – cupping one of her breasts at the time and granting her a teasing smile – that she appeared to be filling out her dresses extremely pleasingly these days.
It was the sort of comment which, spoken before others, would have been an unbearable trial for her, but spoken in private only resulted in her colouring and glancing away from him, smiling a little in spite of herself.
Besides, the current fashion in dresses did wonders with hiding enlarged bellies – most people couldn't tell how much you'd gained there unless they made a determined point of looking to notice or if you sat down very quickly in a thoughtless manner which gave it away.
In practice, the only thing she greatly disliked about having gained weight was how certain parts of her body – including the increased bosom Tom was so taken with – seemed to have gotten much tenderer and sensitive in response to the slightest bump or jolt or shock of cold than when she was slender.
Then there came the first in a series of odd mornings Fanny woke feeling unwell and, by the time she'd had her breakfast, was taking sick wherever she could find a place to retch.
She meant, initially, to ask Sir Thomas if he thought she ought to be examined by a physician, but recollecting she was always feeling better by the afternoon – and not wishing to inconvenience her uncle or have him pay a doctor's fees for a little passing aliment, when she'd always had so many little afflictions on and off her whole life, anyway – she gave up the idea.
Telling Tom, just so he might be aware of it, naturally occurred to her as well, but he was only there in the evenings and by then – when the sun set at last (later and later in the summertime) – they always had so much else to speak of and she didn't want to mar their contentment for no other reason than being a trifle unsteady in the stomach after breakfast.
Taking her tea with Lady Bertram one afternoon, however, and helping herself to rather more biscuits than usual, she happened to vex her aunt Norris, also present, though Sir Thomas was not (and it was very plain she wished Fanny away, too, so she could be alone with her sister and complain of her White House woes without the presence of an insipid spy to check her tongue).
"For pity's sake, Fanny! I am ashamed of you!" she snapped, setting down her teacup and saucer with a rattle-rattle-rattle. "Must you gorge yourself so? It's an unsightly, disgusting habit you've taken up. I never saw such shameless greed in a girl of your age. If you were ten again, I should take a switch to you."
Lady Bertram smiled indolently. "Oh, do not be too harsh on her, sister – you know Fanny is all moderation under normal circumstances. But being with child does give one such an increase of appetite! The other three weren't too taxing in that regard, but when I had Tom, heaven help me, I could scarcely carry myself from one room to another without becoming hungry all over again."
Both Mrs. Norris and Fanny stared at her in amazement.
For once Mrs. Norris was at a complete and utter loss for speech, and "Ma'am?" was about all Fanny could manage, not without great difficulty.
Lady Bertram, yawning and regarding the gaping girl seated across from her through heavily lidded eyes, blinking owlishly, murmured, "Why, my poor dear! Didn't you know?"
A/N: Reviews welcome, replies may be delayed.