Merriment & Wisdom
A Mansfield Park fanfiction
Part Three:
Chances, Slightly Better Than None
After dispatching a letter homeward, Tom made quick work of integrating himself as a near regular within the Price household.
The first week, he made merry with the little boys – delighted to find that one had the same namesake as himself and equally delighted to fill in the gap left by their two elder brothers, William and Sam, who were away at sea – and regarded the ever-watchful Fanny from the corner of his eye. Did she know what he was about? It was difficult to discern. Although, to be sure, it was plain enough she saw everything he did in her presence, that no action, for good or for ill, could avoid – at the very least – her passing gaze; even when she was too fatigued to come downstairs, her gentle footsteps could be heard under the din, by way of creaking, if one listened closely enough. And if he took her brothers down to the harbour, she watched them go from the window.
Betsey did not take to Tom at first, a seething childish resentment of his presence always burning within her, until he began – to the small girl's great astonishment – to bring small, pretty presents with him when he came, enough for them all, which he doled out generously. She began to see the pleasanter side of having a rich relation come calling and was thus satisfied.
Susan was pleased, too, because Betsey's passion for her new playthings kept her from stealing the silver knife given to her by their late sister Mary.
Tom became quite accustomed to the greeting, "What did you bring me?" from Betsey whenever he entered their house, as well as to immediately having his pockets pawed at, despite Susan and Fanny repeatedly reprimanding her for it.
The second week, Tom – already having won over Mr. Price, despite the considerable odds, by proving himself unafraid to get his hands dirty playing with the boys – moved smoothly onto Mrs. Price. Eldest sons, heirs, are raised to be charming. It came as natural as swimming would do for a fish. He made pointed enquires as to if her elder girls got out very much, if they shouldn't like a gentleman to escort them on a nice walk the next time there were errands that needed doing.
And thusly was Mrs. Price won twice as quickly and with twice as much good will as her husband.
Soon Tom was to be seen strolling about Portsmouth with Susan on one of his arms and Fanny on the other.
Fanny said very little, but she seemed glad enough to take the air and to be released from the cramped house.
Susan said rather a lot. Relieved that Tom did not think himself too good for them after all, that he was not horrified by the state of their living and their father's slovenly drunkenness, she revised her opinion of him, and was doubly cheerful so as to make up for lost time.
"I have heard a most dreadful rumour, Mr. Bertram," she said merrily.
"If it's that nonsense about myself and Yates again," laughed Tom, tossing back his head, "let me only say that had I been inclined that way I could do a great deal better than John Yates." He glanced over his shoulder – Yates, though he would not go near the Prices' house again, had no objection to walking a few steps behind his companion's relations when they were out of doors – and called, "No offence, old bean!"
"None taken!" Yates called back over the wind. "Indeed, I've no need of you in such a regard – I'm quite in love with another. Or very nearly."
"You don't say! First I've heard of it – you've been keeping secrets from me!" exclaimed Tom. "Who is it?"
"A young woman."
He rolled his eyes. "Yes, I took as much for granted, John."
"A most handsome girl I met at a masque party in London thrown by the Rushworths – not a jolly lot, but very wealthy – I say, one of them is married into your family, is he not, Tom?" He blew on his hands and rubbed them together. "At any rate, she was very fair, dressed like one of those exotic tropical birds with a feathered mask."
Tom halted. "Oi, hang on! Blonde, about middling height, big nose?"
"Yes, that's the lassie!" Yates beamed. "What I love best about her is her large..." He lifted his hands in a cupping gesture close to his chest, about to finish his sentence, when Tom cut him off.
"That happens to be my sister, you idiot!"
"...nostrils," he came up with, colouring. "I do so love large nostrils on a woman. Makes them look regal."
"You're most fortunate I hold you in fair regard and it takes too much effort to break in a new acquaintance," chuckled Tom, beginning to walk again.
"That is not," said Susan, when she could, "the rumour I heard."
"Ah – so what was it? I am keen to know now."
"They're all saying that when you were in Antigua, you were driven near mad by the culture shock, and your father's dealings with slaves – that you keep a sketchbook with drawings of all the ghastly horrors you encountered abroad."
Shaken with laughter, Tom nearly had to let go of them both in order to bend over and gasp out in his merriment, "Can you be serious in this?"
"You do keep a sketchbook," Susan remarked coyly. "I have seen you with it."
"Do you really wish to know what manner of things I have sketched out?"
"I expect it cannot be as exciting as the stories spread, and we're sure to be disappointed, but yes – curiously does burn within me."
"Come..." Tom escorted the girls to a low stone wall where they might sit and, reaching into a satchel he'd carried along, lifted out a leather-covered sketchbook filled with thick, unlined cream-coloured paper. "See for yourself."
Fanny scooted closer; Susan leaned sideways over his arm to better view the pages.
They were landscapes, mostly.
"I had a bad time of it in Antigua," Tom admitted, "but that was because I was homesick – for England, if not for Mansfield itself – because I despised being in a muddy hut living a life I still deem fit only for elephants; I was not traumatized by seeing any slave trading – the only former slave I even met there was an aged, long-retired house-servant who, between ourselves, spoke rather good English."
Fanny smiled. "These are quite good."
"She speaks!" cried Tom with a playful inflection in his risen voice, turning a few pages. "Here, let me show you another and perhaps, my little creepmouse cousin, you shall be moved to speak to me again."
The following drawings, none of them full pages, were of a young man and two girls wearing filly bows and looking very prim about the mouth.
"My siblings," Tom told them. "Your other cousins – none of which are at Mansfield at the moment. Maria has married; Miss Julia Bertram – the one our own Mr. Yates has suddenly proclaimed his partiality towards, and my father will no doubt blame me for making a match of, though, with God as my witness, I had not a thing to do with it – is with her in London. They live on Wimpole Street."
"Your brother has a very kind face," Fanny remarked softly.
"I was trying to draw him looking cross," laughed Tom, "but I quite failed to capture it – this is his usual countenance, at any rate."
"This one is of you," said Fanny, at glimpsing the next page.
"Yes, a self portrait, I'm afraid." A guarded pause. "There's enough likeness, eh? I consulted a mirror several times to be sure of my own features."
"You do not draw yourself with a very forgiving eye," Fanny noted sombrely, seeing – drawn out bleakly across the page with an obvious heavy hand – only the grimmest assessment of Tom's most severe features and very little of his actual character. "Perhaps you were feeling melancholy when you did this one."
"Oh," Susan cried, an idea coming to her, "you should sketch Fanny. When you see our other cousins again, as you must do, even if it is not until you are next in London, you can take out your book and show them all how pretty she is."
Fanny looked away.
"She turns away," Susan went on earnestly, "because she thinks her illnesses make her an unfit subject – but she has always been beautiful, really. I've told everyone she would be so beautiful if she were not so often sick."
"Susie, pray," she managed, with a little rasp in her cracking voice, "don't. I cannot endure it."
Alas, the damage was quite done – Tom was resolved to draw Fanny at once if she could be made to pose for it.
Susan helped smooth out her sister's dress, while Yates remarked, unheeded, that it was a shame it was so 'damnable windy' and wouldn't it make Tom's eyes water if he attempted the sketch today and didn't settle on some other afternoon instead.
Fanny put her hands in her lap, resigned.
Before beginning, Tom came over and reached to unfasten the ribbon under her chin.
She flinched and gawked at his proximity, wide-eyed.
"Come now," he said, securely grabbing onto the ribbon and pulling it until it was undone despite her meek protests. "Don't be so shy."
"I do not think I can pose – indeed, now I say it aloud, I know I cannot."
"Oh, you can do well enough for this." And he lifted her bonnet from her head and handed it over to Susan, who was still rather giddy her suggestion was being so readily taken up.
"Perhaps we have been too long away from the house," she tried.
His thumb stroked her chin; his eyes stared unrelentingly into hers. "Don't you trust me?"
Part of her did, for – indeed – she sensed no wickedness in his nature, but the thought of him staring at her, seeing only her, so long as he worked on this little picture he'd set himself to doing, was mortifying. She was accustomed to looking more than she was to being looked at. There was also the most wretched sensation that she was being looked over, somehow, for more than just a drawing – for what purpose, she could not imagine, but Tom was gauging her. He was inspecting her as he might inspect a fine horse he was thinking of betting on. The lack of malice made it only worse, for it prevented her from having any right to rebuff such attentions.
His hand dropped, the tips of his fingers trailing along the amber cross just above the swell of her bosom. He pulled away before it could be considered too improper, and all he'd done was straighten the cross slightly, but Fanny's scarlet face could not be blamed entirely on the salty sea air or the cold.
Looking up from the drawing he'd done earlier, Tom sighed in a way that told Mr. Yates he desired conversation.
"I've quite decided I want her, Yates."
"Oh, yes?" Yates poured himself a drink and offered one to his companion, who accepted the outstretched glass eagerly.
"It cannot be wrong, can it?" Tom's little finger trailed the line where her cross met the start of her dress, accidentally smearing it. "Damn." Then, "I should be far more wrong if I was looking to like her only for the sake of showing my father what I think of him, and did not feel any real desire for her, should I not?"
"Indeed – your feelings and conduct are above reproach, especially in such a place as this."
"But poor little Fanny is like a skittish colt, too timid to allow me near her for very long – if it were not for the pleasure of taking her walking and a pitifully few innocent liberties I've seen fit to take, I should scarcely get to touch her at all." He sipped his drink and set the glass down again with a sigh. "John, you see a man before you who hardly knows what to do with himself."
"Buck up, my fine man," – and he clapped Tom's shoulder with one hand and raised his glass with the other – "you're sure to come out on top in the end. What woman worth having is going to reject Thomas Bertram?"
Tom's next visit to the Price household coincided with a most unpleasant torrential downpour. Everyone was kept inside, and none of them were in good spirits, each finding some grievance with another member of the family, which made them feel justified in laying the blame for the ill-fated day on the conscience of whoever was deemed most irksome in that grey hour, though none of them could rightly be accused of controlling the weather and bringing such misery as they all suffered together indiscriminately. But Tom's arrival single-handedly livened up their afternoon. It was he who suggested, despite the cramped quarters, a game of hide and seek. And – as it was quickly agreed to – Mr. Price was left, unharassed, to sleep off the effects of strong drink in his chair and to dream of the sea as the rain pelted the windowpane. Rebecca was not to be found, but Mrs. Price did not feel as overburdened as usual, as even Betsey had gone upstairs to play and was not tugging at her skirts or hanging off of her neck.
While they were all seeking hiding places, wedging themselves behind broken banisters, into cupboards and amongst the rubbish in cluttered corners, and Charles counted to one hundred rather faster than any of them deemed fair, Tom had a run in with Fanny, both of them making for the same little closet space that adjoined the girls' room to the boys'.
Creeping up behind her, he placed his hands over her eyes, and she nearly cried out, but he silenced her quickly, showing his face and putting a finger to his lips.
"Come," he whispered, offering her his hand. "We will hide together. And if good old Charlie should find us, we'll both jump out at him from either side and give the lad a funny little shock."
They soon heard Charles finding Betsey, who screamed that he had not found her, and the two then teaming up to find Susan and the rest.
All the while, Fanny became increasingly aware of Tom leaning over and fiddling with her hair, twisting a curl around his index finger, tucking another curl behind one of her ears.
"Tom," she whispered urgently, her tone low and breathy.
"Yes?" he murmured, inching nearer to her, the back of one of his hands brushing lingeringly against the thin sleeve of her dress as he breathed heavily down her neck.
"Charles is nearly to the door – you need to be over there, if you want to surprise him."
Even as he dutifully stepped apart from her in the darkness of the closet, she could sense his dejection, could be uncomfortably certain that he was not so keen on the prank now as he had been when he first suggested it.
Early evening ought to have brought a break in the clouds and a ray of faint pink sunlight to see Tom back to the inn. Instead, waiting outside the house was only the same heavy rain as had been pouring down on him when he arrived. Noah's flood itself, however, could not have prevented him from avoiding the possibility of spending a full night on whatever couch Mrs. Price might clear for him. The thought of being eaten alive by bugs and picking lice from his blankets put him too much in mind of Antigua and made him desperately homesick, as only the relative cleanliness of his and Yate's rooms at the inn might alleviate.
So he departed from them all, with the little ones hanging off him, begging him to stay for just an hour longer and ignoring their mother's pleas to 'pray not smoother their cousin and leave them with a suffocated gentleman on the rug for Rebecca to drag out later, to consider the dreadful inconvenience that would be for them all'.
Betsey surprised everyone by wanting to kiss him goodbye and urging Susan to lift her up so she might do so. And, laughingly, Tom kissed the little girl back with good will, declaring her his favourite darling of the whole family, and also gave Susan a brotherly kiss on the cheek.
Fanny was hanging back.
His eyes twinkled, settling on her over the heads of the others. "Have you no kiss goodbye for me, Fanny?"
Timidly stepping forward, she inclined her cheek slightly, with the vague expectation of the same manner of kiss he'd given Susan.
"No," he said lightly, a single eyebrow quirked, "but I think – given I am the one leaving your house – you ought to kiss me."
He had stooped slightly so she might easily reach his cheek, and she – resignedly – went to kiss him when he – at the very last moment – turned his head and kissed her full on the mouth in sight of everyone.
It was, in Tom's defence, a quick, harmless kiss lacking any obvious passion – so sweetly benign that even Mr. Price, staggering into the room still sloshed, could not be worked up into an alarm over it.
Entirely undisturbed, Mr. Price actually clapped his hands together and laughed, as if it were the funniest punchline to an unexpected joke he could have imagined, and was wholly ignorant of poor Fanny's complete mortification over this dreadful scene.
Shaking, she drew the back of her wrist to her mouth and emphatically wiped, looking at him reproachfully.
Tom, stung, rushed the last of his goodbyes and hurried out.
Hardly knowing what she was doing, Fanny followed.
Hearing her footsteps behind him, he stood in the narrow road – which was filled with enough water to cover the top of his boots – and turned.
Unable to bring herself to speak, she stared and finally croaked out something that might have been "Why?"
He seemed not to hear her, only taking in the cold distance in her expression. "Fanny, I–"
Whatever manner of explanation or apology he might have been about to utter was interrupted by Susan rushing from the house with a coat and throwing it over Fanny's shoulders, crying that she would catch her death out here on an evening like this.
While Fanny sat at the table that Rebecca (who had turned up at some point, and then gone away again, despite the weather) had only half cleared the dinner things from, Susan stood behind her and dried her hair with a slightly sooty towel (it was the cleanest one to be found at the moment and Susan was keen that her elder sister should not go to bed with wet hair and wake with a sick headache in the morning).
Mr. Price was by the fire again, slightly more clear-headed than he'd been only a few minutes before, and he grunted, "Fan?"
"Yes, Father?" She inclined her head while Susan rubbed at the dripping ends of her hair.
"You be careful with that fancy cousin from your mother's people, d'you hear?"
She nodded; Susan sighed and tossed the towel away.
"He's all right, good enough for what he is, I'spoose" – he burped – "but remember he's only slumming it up with our lot; he's not a Portsmouth man."
"It's a good thing," whispered Susan, meaning no harm, "that you don't fancy him, dearest one."
Fanny cried herself to sleep that night, and kept Susan from it for several hours (Betsey could have slept through a hurricane and was preoccupied with dreams such as little girls her age have, of satin slippers and a great deal of pink-coloured things and shiny little objects of silver and gold).
Rolling over upon the mattress, Susan put a consoling arm around her sister and squeezed gently. "Oh, Fanny, you do fancy him, don't you?"
"I wish I didn't," she sniffed miserably. "I ache to dislike him, to never think of him. I could bear all his teasing easily enough if I did not like him."
"Poor Fanny – you resolved to dislike him and couldn't manage it," she said sympathetically. "Your good heart won't let you, especially not when he's been so merry a playmate with us all."
"I could have," she sniffed again, swallowing back a sob, "my heart wouldn't have held me back – I wouldn't have let it – if only I felt I had a true reason to dislike him, some unbearable knowledge about his character." She rolled over so that she was facing Susan. "But he is not a rake, Susie, he's only Tom Bertram. Playful, harmless Mr. Bertram."
"Our wealthy cousin Mr. Bertram." She gave her another gentle squeeze. "He should not have kissed you – that was cruel."
"No."
Susan took this to be agreement, but that was not where Fanny's thoughts were.
It was not cruelty; it was thoughtlessness, she privately concluded and resolved to keep to herself, which was worse.
Drinking in the common room of the inn, Tom was speaking to Yates despondently about what he judged must only be considered a failure with Fanny Price.
"Perhaps I have dodged some unpleasantness – it cannot be all bad that I repulse her so. Better to know before I declare my intentions, is it not? She's made her decision, made her lack of interest for myself quite clear. All that is left for me is to accept it." He tossed back the contents of his glass and snapped his fingers at the innkeeper for a refill. "I mean, by the time I returned to Mansfield, I would have been somebody's husband. That's quite a step, you know. I was going to marry her."
"You were going to marry who?" snorted a rather greasy-looking young man a few cushions down from where Yates was dully reclining.
"Fanny Price," Tom admitted, as the innkeeper placed a fresh pint of ale down in front of him.
"Fanny Price?" the man laughed incredulously, slapping his knee and nearly choking on his own saliva. "That insipid little prude is unattainable."
Tom peered over at him with cool disgust. "Oh, for you, definitely." He gestured down at himself. "But it's me we're in the process of discussing here, so please remove yourself from this conversation. When John and I want your viewpoint, we shall send for it posthaste. Until then, do shut up."
The young man cursed, then returned to conversing with his own companions, who all readily agreed that Fanny Price was insipid and – really – quite ugly. And it was very good fortune for them that Tom did not happen to overhear the latter, as he might have taken offence despite himself, despite his being more the teaser than the fighter by nature; for sweet little Fanny was both family and potential lover and – especially while intoxicated – there could be no standing for that sort of disrespect levelled against her by such men who were not worth looking at themselves.
"And here I thought," said Yates, smiling a little, "that you'd given your timid little love up for lost."
"Good heavens, no," declared Tom, quite changed. "Give up? When I've just been reminded how greatly the odds are stacked in my favour? Don't be such a fool, Yates. There's still a chance." He grinned to himself, taking comfort. "D'you know John, recalling what women are – I've got two sisters, after all – I should have thought before now how likely it is she will yet change her mind." And signalling to the innkeeper once again, he asked a pointed question about when the next Assembly Night was. "Many a formerly scornful young lady," he added to Yates, after his question was dutifully answered, "falls in love at a dance; all the more so if she has the attentions of an agreeable partner. What say you?"
A/N: reviews welcome, replies could be delayed.
