Merriment & Wisdom
A Mansfield Park fanfiction
Part One:
Beginnings, Such As They Are
Tom Bertram was not altogether certain by what mad bewitchment or bizarre turn of fate he had found himself in Portsmouth on Assembly Night. If anyone was to be prevailed upon in blame for enticing him hence, however, certainly it was the damnable Mr. Yates, his particular friend of the moment. Although – to be quite sure – why Yates should have dragged him along to this backwater, he could not fathom. Everyone they met was far below their station, for one thing.
Luckily, the poor can drink and make merry as well as the rich (given they've saved their last coin or have generous credit stored up with the right person at the right establishment).
For this reason, Tom was not unduly distressed at finding himself within this most rustic of dance halls.
Besides, poor girls, too, are – generally – just as pretty as the wealthy ones, even if they cannot dress to show it.
Though, in truth, it is a surprising fact that most females dress only for themselves and for the envy of one another, rather than for the proper notice of a man, whatever they think they are about when preparing themselves; because even a well-to-do heir like the eldest Mr. Bertram could not readily tell the difference and would not have known fine muslin if it were waved under his nose.
Suddenly perturbed, Tom halted in his merrymaking, setting aside his drink and stretching out a hand to snap for Yates' attention – or that of anyone, really, though it was Yates who finally responded, and so that was well enough.
"Good God, man, are you seeing this?"
Yates blinked. Then he squinted. "I do not notice anything amiss."
"For mercy's sake, are you blind, my good fellow? Her!" He pointed emphatically. "The little stunted creepmouse clutching at her heart and breaking away from the dancers, poor wretch."
"I do not–" he began uncertainly.
Tom sighed with exasperation. "She has light hair in ringlets and is wearing an amber cross on a bit of ribbon the same ghastly colour as the ribbon on her bonnet for her ornament, simple thing." (Jewellery and bonnets are not muslin.)
"Ah, yes, I see the unfortunate creature now – she is wearing a crummy dress, is she not?" (Yates is an exception to the general rule, thus providing sure proof of it.) "Worn out dancing shoes as well." Tsk, tsk. "Look at the state of those sorry things."
Indeed, the soles did flap some. But they had been good shoes once, perhaps. Nay, undoubtedly. Foolish Yates was unkind to imply otherwise, but we shall herein put it down to ignorance and forgive him. His opinion does not, after all, matter.
"Yes, yes, Yates – but that is not what I was about in pointing her out to you." Tom rolled his eyes. "It is simply that I think there may be an incident. Our new acquaintance made of a single chance glance is clearly unwell. I make it my business, as you know, Yates, never to take notice of anything that should disturb my pleasure – but having seen her distress already it is, I fear, too late for me." He appeared greatly put upon, preparing to make a martyr of himself. "She is ill. There is no mistaking it. No colour in her face and such a weariness of step."
"Shall I find out who she is for you, then?"
"Oh..." He pursed his lips and slipped his hands behind his back. "You mustn't put yourself out, Yates." The gleam in his eye was playful, but there was still no telling if he was or was not being a bit sarcastic in this out of delayed spite over his spoiled evening. "I shall go and speak to her, all on my own, with no introductions, making any arrangements with my hard-won money for her immediate care if she should seem likely of dying right in front of me, and perhaps I shan't have any further enjoyments for the remainder of the night – fretting over the wheezing, scarcely breathing girl – but you – having taken no notice on your own of her and not so distressed as I – need not fret as I do."
"Jolly good." And Yates fled before Tom could even dream of changing his mind.
"Well," he muttered, "he didn't take much convincing, did he?"
And then he excused himself from the party and ducked into the low-ceilinged antechamber which was adjoined to the cloak room. There, on a low wooden bench, was the gasping maiden wearing the amber cross. She'd undone her bonnet and set it down beside herself.
"What's amiss, then?"
She started, staring up with eyes that were light and soft.
Two things struck Tom at once, then, despite his not being particularly perceptive by nature.
One was how odd it was that, though raised in Portsmouth, her expression was not hardened like the other ladies – the eyes of the women he'd met here were, if not exactly haughty, at least saucy – even calculating. And why not? They were counting their chances of getting out of poverty – what should be more natural? It was a local thing, as expected as an accent. Yet there was no such look in her eyes. She was wearied, yes; hardened, no, not so much – very little, if at all. It was enough to make him wonder how she survived here, looking like a little prim madam, how she endured the teasing which must surely result.
The second was that she was unexpectedly pretty.
Not, however, in the usual way of prettiness that Tom came to expect simply because most women allowed within his family circle were of the sparkling, dark-eyed variety. This was – though Tom had not given the matter enough thought to reach this conclusion himself, being a man, and not a very sombre one at that – because his Aunt Norris did not care to have women around who might rival the beauty of her favourite of his two sisters, Maria. Maria was fair, and so only dark women were deemed suited to be in her presence. The younger sister, Julia – though also fair and willowy and almost as graceful – was no threat, on account of her nose.
Tom's younger brother had recently been disappointed in love by a young dark-eyed woman who he'd pined over at great deal, desperately wanting to marry but finding it quite impossible on the young lady's end of things. Dark-eyed, merry, and musical – played the harp. Nice enough, if you liked that sort of thing.
Tom had long since taken for granted by the demeanour of those around him that one was to purposefully look for dark eyes in a beautiful woman if she was worth having. He was not, understandably, typically drawn to features which put him in mind of his sisters. So he surprised himself a great deal by decidedly liking this girl's looks, now that he saw her close up.
She was not – despite the fairness – very like his sisters, after all, though she was – oddly, he thought – quite the image of the younger-than-she-was-now mother he remembered from his earliest childhood days.
Lady Bertram had not possessed much energy even back when he was small, but she'd had more of it. These days she was forever half-asleep and she spoke more to her pug – and if in desperate need of something and unable to find her husband in the large house, Tom's younger brother – than she spoke to him. She did not mean to be cruel – if asked, she might even have said, with sincerity, Tom was her favourite, as he was her first; she was simply not the sort of woman who knew how best to indulge her favourites if they were not babies or dogs. She had said something, once, of giving his bride – if he married someone gentle who would appreciate the gesture – one of Pug's puppies, should their wedding coincide with the birth of a litter. In the love language of Lady Bertram, there could be no higher compliment. No truer gesture.
Tom, for his part, had not replied; he was privately convinced he was extremely unlikely to marry before his brother (the dark-eyed girl had not yet refused the poor sap at this point, and hope was still to be had) anyway.
This girl could, in face and form, be his own mother's daughter, even if she was not much like his mother's actual daughters in looks or – presumably – in speech.
"I did not mean to startle you."
She shook her head. "You didn't," she gasped out. "That is... I am all right. I am not alarmed."
"I'm glad to hear it." He sat down beside her with a light groan, nudging her discarded bonnet aside so carelessly he nearly knocked it off the bench. "You looked unwell, running from the dancing as you did. How does someone so young get knocked up so easily?"
"I'm often tired," was all she could be made to say on the subject.
"Does your physician worry about it?"
She blinked at him, a grave little subject with her hands folded in her lap.
"No money for a physician, then."
A flush of pride came into her expression at last. "No, no – not for me, because I am too often..." She shivered. "And it amounts to nothing, you know, when I'm really all right, just not very strong. But when my sister, Mary, was..." She'd come to be out of breath again and needed to pause before speaking further. "When Mary was very sick, we had a very good doctor then."
When Tom was later to learn that 'little sister Mary' did not recover, and had survived under the doctor's care only long enough to pathetically bequeath a silver knife her godmother gifted her with to another sister, his opinion of her family's monetary woes was sharper, and probably closer to the truth, but he took her at her word for the moment.
Her family would doubtless do something for her, he concluded, if she were in any real danger of collapsing as he had at first supposed her to be.
Tom was then spared from either making an awkward excuse or else attempting to continue speaking to the little thing who, really, did look so pale still, by a girl – of perhaps fifteen years to the sickly one's presumable eighteen – coming over and crying, "Fanny! There you are! I've been looking everywhere for you."
She was a pretty girl, in that same willowy golden way as his sisters and mother, but her constitution was stronger than her weak companion's, her cheeks rosier, and her general air more of the expected sort as well. If there was some mystery to the manners of her wheezing friend, there was little to none worth noting in her. Beautiful, yes, but she was too young to tempt Tom Bertram, and he found introductions between women exceedingly dull, and so left them to each other as hastily as he could manage it.
He glanced, in parting, over his shoulder, and the sickly creepmouse whom her companion called Fanny was giving him a look.
A look that said, unmistakably, his manners – while not wholly ungracious – might still have been vastly improved.
Indeed, he did think afterwards he might have given her his surname, or even deigned to ask hers, if not that of her companion.
But, dash it, he'd taken a moment to ask about her well being, had he not?
Yes, he had.
And when he might have ignored her altogether – all the other gentleman had, after all – so she ought not to look at him with quite so much condemnation.
Quickly, though, she glanced away and was so focused on reassuring her companion that she was all right but shouldn't they start back for home now, that he could almost wonder if he'd simply projected his own guilt onto her, onto an innocent near-invalid, and it had not been a look as such.
Perhaps it was badly done on his part.
"Badly done?" laughed Yates as they walked the harbour the afternoon of the following day (neither had been in any state to walk about in the blazing sunshine during the morning hours, both too busy nursing their sore heads and lolling about on the furniture of the inn they were residing at). "You were the only one to say a word to the poor, crummy creature. Your conduct was surely above all reproach, my good man. Particularly in a place such as this."
Tom nodded. "Indeed, I thought as much – I simply wished for a second opinion." He paused. "I suppose it is too early to adjourn to a tavern for a drink?" There were any number of decent places to go for ale around the dockyard, and it was not as if Portsmouth was a hotbed of other pleasant diversions. "For shame, Yates, I don't believe it!"
"What?"
He pointed to a rosy-cheeked girl of fifteen. "It is the little companion of our creepmouse friend from last night – let's make ourselves scarce before she speaks to us and we are inflicted for the next few hours with a child's company. Children ought to be enjoyed in moderation, you know, and I don't think I've come all the way to this nothing place to be moderate."
"She will only wish to thank you for looking after her companion, I'm sure."
"Oh," he waxed, rolling his eyes, "I can see it now – brokenly thanking me for..." His mouth remained parted, hanging agape now. "I say! She has just walked by us without a second glance. What can she mean by it?"
"She did not see us, then," concluded Yates, not unhappily.
"John, you fool, she did see us. She looked right at us." Tom was indignant, caught between scowling and laughing, whirling on his heel breathlessly. "Come. We must circle around and go after the ungrateful stinker to learn why we are thus snubbed."
They had to go rather out of their way to head her off, and she was carrying a basket of something or other, which she nearly dropped in her exasperation at not avoiding them.
"Huuuuulloooo, dear girl!" cried Yates, quite ridiculously, hands cupped over his mouth as if he were standing a mile off from her, rather than a couple feet. "What-ho!"
Tom nudged him. "She's a child, Yates," he hissed. "Not deaf – there's no need to shout."
She readjusted the handle of the basket in the crook of her arm. "Yes? May I help you?"
"We met last evening, at the assembly," said Tom, smiling charmingly.
"Did we?" Her pale eyebrows raised. "I do not recall us being introduced. Or any exchange of words passing between us."
"He was the gentleman sitting with your companion," said Yates, still rather too loudly, as though he still thought he was talking to a being of less intelligence than himself.
"The grand gentleman who left without saying goodbye to her – or speaking a greeting to her sister," she amended sardonically. "Yes, I remember that much."
Sister. Ah. Quite right. That explained the resemblance between their looks apart from the creepmouse's obvious low spirits and this one being as merry and healthy as a horse.
The thought of horses – even being recalled to mind only for the sake of comparison – reminded Tom, in passing, that he ought to see about getting the latest racing news as soon as possible.
Someone at the nearest tavern would have a newspaper about them, perhaps?
Er, what was he about now? Yes, it began to come back to him, slowly but surely – the child who snubbed himself and Yates for no reason at all.
"No offence was meant."
"Then none was taken, was it?" she muttered, and tried to get around him. "Excuse me."
"Hang on. Why are you cross with me?" Blocking her way again, Tom looked genuinely wounded.
"For one thing, sir," she snipped bitterly, glancing up into his – admittedly – guileless face, "you have not even asked about my sister's health."
He considered this, twisting his mouth pensively. "It has not – in the hours between last night and this very afternoon – taken a bad turn and become very poor?"
"No more than usual."
He stood with his hand behind his back, causally shifting from one foot to the other. "Then why should I waste my time asking after it?"
The girl scoffed, and this time successfully manoeuvred around him.
He followed, trotting to keep himself at her side, Yates scuttling doggedly along just behind him, puffing slightly.
If Tom were a different, more attentive, sort of person at this point in his life he might have inquired as to if she should like him to carry the basket for her. But, then, the thought – along with a great many others in those days – never entered his head.
Susan Price, having finally shaken the company of the two fancy gentlemen (indeed, they were not so hard to lose as the more persistent, and far more crass, local boys, and she took only so long as she did in order not to cut them too much deeper than was necessary – she wanted to make it clear she disdained the leader of the pair for his near-abandonment of her sister the night before and his careless attitude towards her well-being upon being granted a second chance to make amends, but she did not wish to inflict any sort of permanent emotional scars or to part with strong ill-feeling), made her way into the little house.
She inhaled sharply as she opened the door with her elbow and quickly pressed her back against it to avoid being trampled by two of her younger brothers – she was pretty certain it was Tom and Charles, though they passed in a muddied blur – and an unfamiliar boy they'd obviously brought home for a playmate as they ran outside chasing an enormous snorting pig.
Susan's brow creased as her eyes followed them. They did not own a pig.
Then, shrugging, she made certain the eggs in her basket were not broken – her mother would have had a fit if they were.
Truly, it sounded as if Mother was already in the process of having one regardless. She was screaming the name of their servant-girl – Rebecca! – in frantic short – nearly yapping – tones which ranged between angrily desperate and the sort of noise one might employ when calling a goose.
"Mother?" called Susan.
"Rebecca!"
"No, Mother, it's me – Susan – I'm back with the eggs."
"Oh, and about time, too – your brothers will be wanting to eat."
"Aye, Richard and John perhaps – if they're still within." And she told her mother she had just seen the other two (she was almost sure it was them) leaving. She decided not to mention the pig.
There was a great deal of cursing, followed by another sharp, "Rebecca!"
"Mother, where is Fanny, for mercy's sake?"
"Where do you think?" huffed the harried woman, nudging her daughter aside to reach for the handle of a wooden spoon half stuck in something bubbling on the stove which did not – in truth – smell very nice. "She is upstairs with one of her headaches. I knew I shouldn't have let you both go dancing last night. You, I especially should not – fifteen is too young to be out. You should not be out. Not in any sense of the word. Not out. Not when you ought to be making yourself useful at home. But to let someone so prone to falling ill out alone..."
"You know William thinks Fanny ought to dance more – it is the only decent exercise to do her any good apart from occasionally walking. And you know what the dockyard air is to her lungs."
"I let her and you go, did I not?" Her expression was stern; it would have been sterner still if Susan had not invoked William, their eldest brother, whose feelings their mother was a great deal more keen on than those of her daughters'. "And where is my little slug-a-bed now? Graciously helping me as she should?"
"She's ill," protested Susan, convinced by the knowledge of her sister's character that Fanny would not only be helping if she could, but making herself entirely indispensable in the extremity of her helping. It was not her fault her head sometimes began to throb and her eyesight blurred and made her unable to lift her head very easily.
"She's well enough to be up by this hour."
Susan set down the egg basket. "I'll go up and check on her."
"No, you won't either! You'll stay here and–" But Susan had fled; her galumphing footsteps could already be heard on the stairs. "Oh! Am I to do everything? Susan! Susan! Come back down here at once!" The odour from the pot she stirred reached her nose and she winced. "Ooh! Rebecca!"
Susan groaned as she entered the room the girls of the family shared on the upper floor and found it flooded with sunlight. Fanny had an arm over her face and was turned away from the window, for whatever little good that would do in easing her suffering.
"What ninny opened those?" demanded Susan.
"Me!" cried a little pipsqueak voice almost level with the mattress Fanny was sprawled across limply. "I like it bright inside!"
Their little sister Betsey was marching around with... Susan momentarily panicked at the flash of silver, convinced Betsey had stolen the silver knife Mary gave them upon her deathbed – again. She was always after that knife, like a magpie. But it was not the knife. Still, what it was was almost as bad. A copper pot with a tarnished silver handle, taken from the good lord only knew where. Possibly it did not even belong to them at all and she'd borrowed it from an absent neighbour's home. And a dirty wooden spoon. That would be one of theirs, for certain. What spoons they had were always dirty.
The beaming child began – as she had obviously been doing prior to Susan's entrance – banging the pot with the spoon.
Fanny groaned but did not move.
"Betsey – you wicked thing! You wild beast!" Susan lunged forward and pried the spoon from the – now screaming – little girl's fingers. "Stop it at once! Think of poor Fanny!"
The little girl finally fled, wailing for their mother.
Slowly, Fanny sat up. "Mother will be very cross, Susan."
Indeed, for all the affection their mother withheld from the two of them for the unforgivable crime of not being one of her precious boys, she doted on Betsey. Perhaps losing Mary had caused this, somehow. Or Mrs. Price saw something of her own child-self in Betsey. Whatever the cause, she was particularly fond of the tiny girl these days, no matter what mischief she caused.
Susan stomped over to the windows and drew the curtains emphatically. "And you just letting her bang like that."
"Well..." Fanny pressed a hand to her forehead, pushing back a few pale curls. "I thought she'd grow tired of it."
"Betsey, grow tired of making nose?"
"Wishful thinking, I suppose."
"Oh, Fanny, you look so pale." It was apparent, even in the freshly restored darkness of the room.
"I'm all right." But she would have said as much if she were bleeding to death, and believed it, too.
Downstairs, they could hear their mother loudly consoling Betsey and screaming for Rebecca in turns. Doors slammed at every pause and interval. There was creaking and wind and hardly two blessed seconds of peace to follow every unpleasant sound. And here was Fanny enduring her agony without a word of protest as she always did.
"You won't guess who I saw when I was fetching the eggs."
"Father, coming out of the tavern?"
Susan made a face. "See? I knew you wouldn't guess."
She sighed softly and leaned back. "Please – my head. It's all right, really, but I can't think. Just tell me, dear."
"The young man who sat with you last night, and I let him see exactly what I thought of him."
Fanny looked at her sister, eyes briefly losing a little of their glassiness and focusing. "Oh, Susie, I hope not exactly."
"Oh, yes, indeed – I snubbed him. Or tried to. Cut him dead without a word when we met near the harbour."
"That wasn't very good of you."
"Nor was it good of him to abandon you the moment I turned up."
"No, but he was attentive in his way, and he meant to be kind – you could see it in his face." She sat up again with some difficultly. "Susan, he's obviously not from here; he's a guest and someone important, and your elder, it wasn't right of you to disrespect him."
"You're only worried he won't ask you to dance, come next assembly night – not if he's cross with me," Susan teased cheekily, in order to hide the rising guilt she felt.
The truth was Fanny's good opinion meant everything to her, and she'd wrongly anticipated a sort of sombre praise for her actions, not a reprimand.
But she was always wrong when it came those things, and Fanny, though of a more gentle disposition and finer (if not refined, poor soul) character than their mother, did share one grating thing in common with the woman who'd birthed her beyond an obvious namesake – she also loved their eldest brother best. Even the amber cross she always wore on a bit of ribbon was a gift from this favourite oldest sibling. Whenever William was here, safe at home, Fanny's affections were all employed towards him with everyone else cast out onto the fringes of her strained, dutiful love. She did not mean to leave Susan out, perhaps no more than the gentleman from earlier meant to be cruel in his ignoring her at the dance.
But whatever stuff people were made of, William and Fanny were created from the same stock, save that the one had good health and the other poor. They gravitated to one another, innocently immune to the – quite often desperate – pull of those whose souls were made of something else entirely yet longed to be part of them.
Anyway, William was away at the moment – he was a midshipman now, gone off to sea – and Susan had been gradually wedging herself into his normally occupied place beside Fanny; when she was not invoking their absent brother's name to her elder sister's advantage with their mother, she was trying to pretend he did not exist within the shallow oasis she tried to create at the centre of their little noisy world.
This was a dreadful setback for her.
A sob escaped Susan, and Fanny reached for her, pulling her down beside herself and slipping her arm around her sister consolingly.
"Perhaps I just did it because I knew I'd never be in a position where what I thought mattered to anyone important – not again," she murmured into the flat, musty pillows. "I'll have no one worth snubbing in Portsmouth after this. I can't make the same mistake twice in that case, can I?"
"It's all right – the fault was on both sides," murmured Fanny. "He might have been more genteel himself. But you shouldn't go about cutting people dead on my account."
Susan rolled over so that their noses nearly touched and placed a hand over one of Fanny's ears, hoping to muffle the endless noise for her.
And they rested there, together, for a while, breathing slowly and trying to find tranquillity in each other's comfort amidst the further slamming of doors, the younger brothers returning and – it sounded like – bringing the pig back with them, which their mother threatened to make into bacon for Mr. Price's breakfast if Rebecca would ever turn up and help her.
And it might have ended there.
But it didn't.
Because Tom Bertram, despite himself, after getting his fill of the racing news and concluding there was nothing to do about getting wagers placed just then, that it might have to wait a little while, inquired after the girl with the basket, and her pale elder sister.
Price was the name he was given, for his pains (and unhappily parted with coin, in one case); he judged it to be familiar to himself but could not place it. Not quite.
Then the subject of the mother of the family came up. And who was she before? To which family had she belonged? Was she local? The question was natural enough.
And the answer made Tom start.
Ward.
She'd had the same surname in her maidenhood as his own mother!
But surely... There were other Wards, presumably, out there, someplace or other...it could be...
Alas, no, because even from people who did not know Mrs. Price very well, or think much of her, Tom could – and did – gather enough basic information to conclude without shadow of doubt she was sister to Mrs. Bertram and Mrs. Norris.
They'd simply wed in an upwards direction and she had gone farther down in the world.
The sickly creepmouse who'd snagged Tom's sympathizes was a relation.
He had a cousin.
Actually, it was probable, he had many cousins – they were said to be a large family.
Armed with this new knowledge, he ran into the room where Yates was dozing in a upholstered chair with a copy of Lover's Vows in his lap and a line of drool running down his chin.
"Yates!" he cried, reaching down to grab the man's knee and roughly shaking his companion. "Wake up."
He sniffed. "What's amiss?"
"I have relations I have never met."
He blinked pleasantly. "So've I, my good man; they live in Scotland. The family doesn't talk about them much, except at Christmas."
"No, I mean here, John, in Portsmouth – the child we encountered this morning on our walk is the daughter of my mother's sister."
"We should drop in and take tea with them tomorrow, perhaps."
Tom halted – the idea had not crossed his mind, but now that it had been suggested it seemed rather a decent one. "Yes," he said, slowly warming to the notion. "I don't suppose it would be too difficult to find out where they're living."
"Will they be glad of your coming, do you think?"
Even after being snubbed that morning, he honestly couldn't for the life of him imagine why not, and said as much to Yates.
Imagination was decidedly not – at least in those early days – Tom's strongest attribute.
A/N: Reviews welcome, replies may be delayed.
