Merriment & Wisdom
A Mansfield Park fanfiction
Part Five:
Guides, Wherever We Might Find Them
Upon awakening to find himself in strange (not to mention foul-smelling) surroundings, Tom Bertram's first thoughts, such as could be put into an approximation of words, were something akin to, "What the–?" followed by an ejaculation of what was perhaps not the most diplomatic word he could have employed but certainly not the choicest he might have said unwittingly in the company of children.
His second thoughts, which arrived in his heavy head around the same time as he managed to ascertain where he was, were all vehement curses for John Yates.
What did that foolish friend of his think he was doing, abandoning him to be picked up by his poor relations?
The problem with Tom – which he himself never acknowledged as a problem (and that was a problem all its own, if one should choose to explore the rent in the matter more closely rather than to digress for efficiency's sake) – was, while he thought himself up to the task of moulding his companions into something steadfast in his favour, he was dreadfully lazy.
And this laziness of a mental sort, in turn, made him indolent and lax in morality if not in manners.
A frustrated tutor (who had irately entered the downstairs drawing-room in Mansfield dripping from head to toe and angrily flapping the soaked pages of a submerged textbook he'd rescued) once told (a then adolescent) Tom's father, Sir Thomas Bertram, "The reason your eldest son does not aim towards a higher morality, most regrettably, is because it would take effort – he thinks himself naturally 'good enough' and 'good within reason', is content in being stagnant, and assumes all potential friends that come his way to be much the same, and so he only half-heartedly influences them at the start of any acquaintanceship. Then he quickly loses interest in anything save his own amusement.
"If he does not change his ways, mark my words, sir, he will sooner or later be corrupted by the company he keeps – he will not have any success in elevating them, and will allow himself to be dragged down. As you can see by my state, he is already a little devil, and I am sorry for it. Good day to you!"
To be fair, Mr. Yates was the best of Tom's circle of friends, the least backwards and probably the most well-meaning, but that was not saying much. Tom had never required him to be anything other than merry and to listen to him; he had broken him in, he thought, the same way one would break a colt or train a dog, with pleasant reward or severe reprimand and then laughter and indulgence the rest of the time. But what Tom never understood, as many rich boys do not growing up, was that – when it came to his stables and kennels – he'd always had someone trained and diligent going after whatever he should leave behind in a moment of frustration or boredom, and it was they who were constant enough to get the results he basked in and took credit for.
Interestingly, perhaps the only thing he'd ever stuck with so stubbornly as to leave some hope of unaided success was his current pursuit: his struggle to win over the resistant heart of Fanny Price.
His head ached. The pulse behind his eyes throbbed. The light from the open doorway was nauseating.
A little finger – belonging to Charles Price – poked at his cheek.
"Mmm, stop that," he grumbled through dry, cracked lips.
"Everyone else is downstairs – there won't be any breakfast for you if you don't get up."
"You go on without me."
Charles poked him again.
His head, feeling as if it were filled with wet sand, seemed to actually – no word of a lie – slosh and squelch.
"Charlie, if you stop poking me," promised Tom, resorting to bribery in his desperation, "I will give you the half sovereign I've got in my pocket. As soon as I can get up, it's yours."
"Ohhh, 'bout that, see... Pro'bem is, Richard already took that while you were sleeping – and then he dropped it and it bounced on the floor – like ping, ping, piiiing – and the pig ate it." The boy's eyes were wide. "N'he ate the half guinea from your other pocket, too."
"Did he now?" Forehead tight, turning awkwardly upon what he judged to be the world's flattest pillow, Tom arched an incredulous eyebrow, having noticed that Charles patted his own pocket when he spoke of the half guinea.
This little cousin, he thought, would make a terrible card player.
Lifting himself up with a groan, Tom suddenly realised one of his shoulders was absolutely killing him.
What he felt was not a bruise; he had not been bumped being brought into this bed, nor injured accidentally by its other occupants. It felt – if it felt like anything he could remotely put a name to – more like what had resulted from the one night in Antigua he had decided he was too wearied to put up his mosquito-netting before going to sleep.
His father, his expression merciless, had told him it was all his own folly, that a few red bumps on the arms and legs was the least of the injuries his laziness could have caused, and he ought to count himself most fortunate if he did not die of malaria.
"I despair of you, Tom," Sir Thomas Bertram had finished, stomping out of their hut in a grand huff.
Tom had then, cheerfully enough, concluded that the likelihood of death from the swollen bites was not too high; otherwise, surely not even his own cold father could have spoken with so little feeling, disappointment in him notwithstanding.
It was a vaguely similar stinging and swelling sensation he felt on his left shoulder now.
With a muttered curse, Tom undid his greatly rumpled cravat, which he really thought someone might have thought to loosen for him before dumping him in a strange bed, then – tossing it aside – pulled back the collar of his shirt to check.
Some manner of bug had indeed feasted on him last night.
"Do me a favour," sighed Tom, wincing and rotating his shoulder, perhaps milking it a bit though – by God's own truth – he honestly believed himself afflicted, looking imploringly to Charles, who'd begun – most unbecomingly – to pick his nose with the same little finger he'd previously been poking at his cousin with, "and fetch one of your elder sisters to me. I would prefer Fanny – she seems, despite her coldness last night, to be the more likely nurse. But Susan will do well enough if Fanny will not attend to me."
"What'll you give me?"
"I'm afraid, Charlie boy, you lot have quite robbed me blind already – I've nothing left to give you but my everlasting good will."
Charles removed his finger from his nose and pulled a face which displayed, very plainly, how little the boy considered mere 'good will' to be much of a reward worth earning.
It was Fanny after all who was brought to Tom's side, and who wordlessly led him into a corner and bid him to sit on a cracked, three-legged stool, offering – without properly meeting his eyes – to take a look at his shoulder. Susan had been otherwise employed when Charles came searching for one or other of them.
Tom lifted his shirt over his head and waggled his eyebrows teasingly at her gawking expression.
Blushing crimson before regaining a small measure of composure, Fanny focused with an exaggerated intensity on wringing out a compress for his swelling.
Tom remarked that it was a nice enough morning, given the location and state in which he'd awakened and the splitting headache he was currently having, and that seeing a pretty face so early in the day made it very nearly worth it.
He was feeling so good-humoured at the sight of her, he added, he might not actually kill Mr. Yates for having abandoned him last night.
Fanny muttered something about having a headache herself, which from anyone else might have sounded passive aggressive rather than timidly conversational. Then she started to bring the compress to his shoulder with a shaking hand, recoiling just a little as she came close to him.
"I don't bite, Fanny," he laughed, wrinkling his nose. "At least not very hard."
She pressed the compress down and patted it gently, keeping her body as far from his as she could reasonably manage.
"You needn't be so shy with me," he said, reaching out to stroke her chin and finding himself immediately rebuffed with a sharp head-turn and needing to settle for the silky tip of a tousled golden curl before it, too, was pulled beyond his reach. "Really, Fanny!" The compress slipped off his shoulder and landed on the floor with a splat. "Are we never to move beyond this?"
Fanny's eyes closed, and she inhaled a low, pained breath as she bent over to pick the damp cloth up and drop it back into the bucket of water at her side to rinse it off before wringing it out again.
"You forget, Mr. Bertram" – it was as if she was resolutely not calling him Tom to make her point – "that our acquaintanceship is not so intimate as you make it out to be and that what amuses you..." She choked off for a moment, swallowing hard. "What amuses you, Mr. Bertram, can so easily be distressing on my account."
"Why should my attentions distress you?"
She did not reply.
"And no more of this Mr. Bertram nonsense between us, please – I'm Tom, am I not? Have I not been Tom to you and yours for many visits now?"
"Please," she said at last, rising up and staggering away from him. "Please. I cannot bear it."
He pulled his shirt back on over his head and rose from the stool, eager and quick to follow her desperate retreat.
Seeing his eldest daughter come down the stairs, followed by a dishevelled Mr. Bertram, who – for his part – was wearing neither shoes nor cravat, Mr. Price's eyes narrowed, and his countenance darkened in a way it had not when he'd seen this same cousin kiss her the other day.
He clearly did not assume the situation to be wholly innocent this time.
Susan saw his face and – heedless of the fireplace soot dripping down the front of her dress and smearing her already dirty-looking apron – at once rushed over to step in front of them both, holding out her hands, gesturing earnestly in her father's direction to divert his attention.
For the smallest second, the shortest of heightened heartbeats, the noisiest house in all of Portsmouth seemed to inexplicably go silent.
"Mr. Bertram spent the night with the boys, Father," Susan insisted, breaking the silence. "Fanny was with myself and Betsey in our own bed. Mr. Bertram took ill last night and, when we couldn't find his friend or learn where it was they stayed, we put him in with our brothers."
"Ill, was it?" Mr. Price was grinning now, showing the worst of his teeth – the danger had quite passed, as had the cloud in his expression. "Aye." He guffawed and coughed simultaneously. "I know what malady he must have suffered." And he performed a crude pantomime of filling a glass and downing it, followed by a hearty wink. "Heh. Good man."
Throughout breakfast, of which Fanny managed to eat very little (more so even than usual), Tom hardly took his eyes off her, and she could barely look his way without a lump in her throat and a trembling lower lip.
Mr. Price had lost interest in them, while Mrs. Price was too busy yelling for Rebecca, coddling Betsey, and seeing her boys off to bother taking notice of him at all – indeed, she could only just manage to weakly scold her girls for their late night and drop a few idle threats in the process – but Susan watched them both with trepidation.
She knew Tom's feelings, such as they were, and she knew Fanny's. And she knew they were the sort of feelings which ought to be be complimentary, except that they were clearly not. Fanny considered fancying Tom an affliction, much like one of her headaches, which needed to be suffered through, and she was trying to do so stoically – she was trying to be a heroine about it. But Tom seemed to think his intentions towards Fanny both a grand lark and the most serious of endeavours at the same time.
Poor Tom. He'd only made things worse by getting drunk last night. Fanny's expression when her brother compared him to her father... It had frozen her feelings and made her double up on resisting him.
Susan almost wished he would stop looking so pathetic and just ask Fanny to marry him already. If he did, if Fanny knew he was not simply playing, it might change things. She could not be sure, but no other hope for either her sister or her cousin seemed very likely.
It was Susan who saw Tom to the door, as Fanny would not follow him from the table; Susan who gave him his shoes and wished him luck as he backed out into the narrow street.
"If Fanny..." he began before the younger Miss Price could close the door. "If she..." His voice halted, cracking slightly. "Could you tell her I... That I'm..." He shook his head. "Hang it all! She must know. She must know and be indifferent to it."
"Don't be hard – on her or yourself – I think you've simply frightened her, Mr. Bertram," was all Susan could manage, before shrinking back into the house.
Tom looked out at the harbour, watched a boat rock in the wind. He was seated on a low stone parapet. "John, I confess myself to be wholly out of ideas."
Mr. Yates, at his side, reached down and patted his right arm. "Have you considered a grand gesture? Girls tend go in for that sort of nonsense, in my experience."
"Such as?"
After a few moments of false starts and dithering, Mr. Yates finally came up with, "You could hire someone – a young boy perhaps – to light fireworks off at her house."
Turning at the waist, Tom gave him a look of withering scorn. "Oh, that's brilliant," he snipped sarcastically. "I don't need to hear any further suggestions on the matter."
"A simple no would have sufficed."
"No, no," he went on. "I believe there's truly something to this. Putting explosives into the hands of an inexperienced child and potentially blowing up her family's home is certain to make Fanny Price fall madly in love with me!"
"Now, see here, old chap–"
"And perhaps, when her family has no place to live, on account of the smoke show where their house used to be, she'll have to marry me whether she can stand the sight of me or not."
"Steady on."
"The only problem with that," he continued mercilessly, "is it will make for one very frigid wedding night – given she'll be too coldly furious with me for displacing her family – my own cousins – for either of us to enjoy ourselves very much."
"I simply meant," Yates forced out doggedly, shoulders slumped, "a little firework show – set up around a sort of big hamper, which could open up and white birds could fly out. The boy could be paid a little extra to quote a poem about starlings or something."
Sucking in his lips, Tom forced himself to refrain from pointed remarks about hampers being flammable and the nature of birds being unreliable, white or otherwise, and hired errand boys being rather rubbish at reciting as a general rule, a little afraid of sounding severe and as such too much like a certain younger brother of his, and simply said, "What manner of backwater idiot would think that romantic?"
"You could dive into a pond in your skivvies – then sort of spring up when she comes around."
Tom's mouth parted slightly, brow furrowing. "Listen. Don't take this the wrong way, but I don't think I want you anywhere near my unattached sister."
Yates pretended not to hear that. "Girls tend to get all flustered and lean towards swooning over such a dramatic manner of meeting."
"Wha–" he started. "Never mind – I don't want to know." He rolled his eyes. "There aren't any ponds around here at any rate."
"There's always the harbour."
"That water is filthy." Tom was aghast, pointing with empathic disgust. "I'm not even sure I want Fanny to marry me that badly."
"Well, can you write poetry?"
"Sure." Nearly anyone could.
"Good poetry?" Yates double-checked.
Tom shook his head and, exhaling heavily, blew out his cheeks. "Middling at best – and nothing suitable rhymes with Fanny anyway."
"You're quite sure springing out of the harbour in dripping undergarments wouldn't help matters any? Even a little? It does seems to assist greatly with the wooing of fragile maidens in certain stage-plays."
"Well, given she's already seen me without a shirt, I'm going to have to guess, no – it will not help. Now, if you have any advice which pertains to the current century, the times we're actually living in, let me know of it."
"Has she completely refused you? What did she say to your proposal? She must have been sorely tempted by your superior wealthy and position, if nothing else."
"I haven't asked her," Tom confessed, his countenance suddenly having become discomfited. "Not directly." He fiddled with his fingers. "Not in so many words. But she must know – she's a shy little creepmouse who never thinks of herself, but she's not stupid."
"The very worst she could say, Tom, is no," Mr. Yates gently reminded him. "Do buck up. Other pretty women in the world, what.
"D'you know, Bertram, I always thought privately – on the rare occasion I thought of you at all – you'd go after an Amelia Wildenhaim type, have your head turned by someone small, dark, and bright. Someone set on reforming you, no doubt; someone who wouldn't care for my company. But now you've quite gone to pieces over a brittle, light-eyed waif who won't look at you and – when she bothers to reprimand – leaves you entirely to your own conscience." He tsked. "My fine, fine fellow! What has gotten into you?"
Tom sighed and turned away, blinking, the wind blowing back his hair as he leaned forward and unhappily inhaled the low, rather ripe, scent of the low tide.
Tom Bertram had never before met any acquaintance – man or woman – he could not forget in lieu of the eventual comforts of home; someone who he could not readily shake from his mind once securely within the luxury of his own large bedroom at Mansfield; someone whose absence could not be washed away by a glass of his father's best port; someone whose name and face could not be hastily erased by the pleasure of billiards or a brisk afternoon visit to the stables.
But he greatly feared that timid little Fanny Price was exactly such a person.
"She has," he whispered.
Fanny and Susan reclined upon their sides on the mattress with Betsey snoring between them and clutching some recent bauble given to her by their fancy cousin.
While Fanny affectionately stroked Betsey's hair, Susan watched her elder sister's grave, preoccupied expression. "What if he asks you?"
She knew who was being referenced at once, and what he was suspected of possibly asking – Tom was quite right about one thing: Fanny Price was not stupid. "He won't."
"But what if he does?" she pressed, privately certain he would.
"Susie..." With her free hand, Fanny fiddled wretchedly with the amber cross dangling near her throat.
"You can't really think of refusing him if he asks nice and proper?" Susan propped herself up on her elbow. "If he even gets father's blessing?"
Fanny's miserable face showed she very much could think of that, and had, many times over, and was made greatly unhappy by the thought.
"I don't understand – you like him."
"Yes."
"He likes you; he isn't just playing."
"It would seem so, despite the unlikelihood of his affections being thus engaged."
"He's rich and charming and an heir."
"Yes."
"You've said yourself before he's no rake – you don't suddenly doubt him?"
"Not in faithfulness, no." Fanny had to confess that, for all his absent-minded ways, she thought Tom loyal enough generally. "But he has other faults."
"Hmm." Susan mulled over what she herself had seen of those unspoken faults for a moment. "But you can change him."
Part of Fanny wanted to point out, rather bitterly, that their own mother hadn't succeeded in changing much about their father's less than appealing habits, but such a remark was so far beyond the crux of the matter she felt no true need to put voice to the comparison.
Instead, she said what she was really feeling most keenly at the moment. She said, very quietly, "I don't want to."
"You don't want to marry him?" checked Susan, uncertain. "Or you don't want to change him?"
Eyes closed, she inhaled deeply. "Change him."
"Why not?" Susan's head lolled to the side quizzically. "Isn't that a good thing for a wife to do? Shouldn't a wife guide her husband? Make him behave better?"
Fanny shook her head, loose blonde curls shaking vehemently in front of her pale face. "No. I can't guide him." She stopped stroking Betsey's hair and flopped delicately onto her back, gazing up at the ceiling. "We all have our best guides within us, my dearest Susie. If only we would listen."
A/N: It was pointed out to me that a certain typo when I first posted this chapter actually seemed to be a funny play on words. Sadly, I'm not that clever/witty, sorry to disappoint; LOL.
It was in fact a typo and has been fixed now.
Reviews welcome, replies could be delayed.
