Merriment & Wisdom

A Mansfield Park fanfiction

Part Six:

Proposals, Such As They Are

He did ask her.

It happened like this.

The set up was very much that of Tom's earlier days with Fanny and Susan, taking them out walking along the harbour and the dockyard because their mother would send them on some errand and wouldn't have them go unescorted.

After all which had occurred, Fanny was hesitant to be so very near Tom Bertram, but she conceded on behalf of her younger sister's plea both for her health – certainly she did need to take the air – and their mutual amusement, subdued as it must be, muted by Tom's presence.

After all, one could only be shut up in the Price household and keep one's sanity in tact for so long.

Mr. Yates was walking behind them again, but this time – at Tom's signal, some nod or small twitch agreed upon between the pair that Fanny and Susan themselves were not cued into – John found some excuse for politely taking the younger Miss Price by the arm and leading her ahead. Perhaps he pointed to some seagull and declared she must see it, despite her having seen many a seagull in her fifteen years of life and one seagull being very much like another. Or he might have asked, apologetically, for some help with a task a five year old could have carried out unaided. And Susan must have guessed what they were really about, after a moment's confusion and subsequent hesitation, because she permitted it with a meekness that was uncharacteristic of herself, managed only by mimicking Fanny's usual demure mannerisms.

For his part, once all seemed in place, Tom stepped before Fanny. He even kneeled, taking her hand and kissing it, gazing up at her imploringly.

Fanny's eyes filled with tears – they were not happy ones. She did not want to injure either his feelings – which she judged to be true and fine despite everything – or cause grief to her own persistent lingering affection for him, but she could not forget the sort of husband she was convinced he would make.

A well-meaning but airy and preoccupied gentleman, who might have time and affection for a wife, and be truly wonderful for a while in expressing such tenderness with the most amiable of manners, so long as the racing season had not yet begun.

Worse than the preoccupation, his habit of drinking.

Fanny was no teetotaller. If it could have been afforded as a regularity in her household, she would have had no objection to wine or cordial for herself. But the snippets of Sunday sermons she'd managed to hear every week once her mother got them all into the church pew at the rear and quieted their complaints with hissed threats and sharp shushing, had put into her head moderation as key. And if the raspy preachers had not quite managed it in the short time they were allotted in her life, the frequent sight of her intoxicated father would have done the same trick well enough.

How could she consent to a life like her own mother's? Did she truly want to spend her nights listening for Tom's drunken footsteps when he returned home in the evening?

She couldn't imagine what their home would be like, never having seen Mansfield, but it scarcely mattered to her. She envisioned a house like their own Portsmouth home, only bigger and cleaner, and still cringed at the thought of waiting up for a sloshed husband to be dragged inside by blushing companions, who doubtless would not be the portrait of sobriety themselves, weakly apologising in broken, incoherent terms for 'disturbing the lady so late'.

But there was so much good in his character when he was not drunk or thinking about himself. Fanny should be very sorry to forever lose such a merry companion over her refusal, when they had found each other so terribly recently.

Must she really give him up?

She suffered, too, at the thought of – a few years from now – when he might have found his own inward guide and perhaps matured, and long forgotten Fanny and Portsmouth, his meeting someone else and marrying them instead.

Equally grim was the thought that he should never change, and should find someone willing to overlook the worst of his habits, to fawn and compliment him over the tiniest display of goodness, for the sake of his inheritance, in hopes of being the next Lady Bertram.

Why should some dishonest girl entirely ill-suited to him be rewarded for irrevocably spoiling what might have been a very admirable, clever sort of gentleman under better circumstances?

And beyond all the things which might or might not occur in the future, there remained the fact that now – as he asked the fatal question – he was looking at her in such a way as to make her heart feel too large to be contained in her poor, weak chest.

Fanny could not bear to disappoint all his hopes at once, though she wondered if it mightn't be the kinder course of action and was cross with herself for not simply making a clean break of it, for being so unable to tear herself away from him.

"M-might," she began, wiping at her eyes with the back of her wrist. "Might I have some time to think it over?"

Registering, with some visible relief, that she was not saying no – not in so many words, not yet – Tom recovered himself. "Yes, of course. If that's what you need."

Fanny exhaled.

"But–"

Her heart sank; her mouth and throat had gone dry and the tears had come up into her eyes all over again.

"If you mean to accept me" – he gave her a cheery little grin, genuine in its intentions if a little forced in action – "I hope you'll do it soon. It's not that I'm in a dreadful hurry – no need to rush, of course. I know you must have your moment to decide." He patted the hand he'd kissed. "Take your time. Naturally you must do that. It's just... Well, if you're going to be my wife, I don't want to return to Mansfield without you."

"You..." stammered Fanny. "You do not mean to have a long betrothal, to go home and come back..." She did not know why she thought such would be the case, given her familiarity with his rashness, but she had. "That is... Come back to fetch me later for the wedding?"

"Certainly not." He snorted. "What a damnable waste of time and sending carriages that would be! We'd be married here."

"I don't... I don't know if the local clergyman would... I mean, perhaps not so quickly as..."

"Oh, you needn't bother your head about that, dearest Fanny." His eyes were sparkling as he spoke, alight with hope, and it made her stomach ache. "If you agree, I'll send for Edmund. I shall tell him he has to come at once."

"Edmund?" she repeated, her pale brow knitting.

"My younger brother," he explained airily, waving it off. "The one you thought had a kind face when you saw my sketches. After all, whatever is the point in having your own personal priest in the family if you can't get married when you want to? I can think of no other reason the world has arranged matters so that younger brothers generally go all out for ordination."

Fanny privately suspected lack of funds for both eldest sons and their younger siblings to be proper heirs had rather a lot more to do with it than mere convenience towards an elder son who wished to be wed in a hurry, but she did not say so.

She found she could say very little, that her breath was caught within her throat, with Tom looking at her the way he currently was.


The next time Tom came to call, he found Fanny indisposed, and – hearing she should not come downstairs to see him – he lamented that no one had told him that – while she was making up her mind – he would not be permitted to see her and put further weight to his cause.

"An unfair trick, on my word," he said rather despondently, with a hint of sulkiness about the mouth.

"I'll marry you," Betsey put in, reaching up and squeezing his hand. "If Fanny doesn't want you."

"Thanks, Betsey." Tom visibly struggled to keep a straight face while her tiny one stared up adoringly into it. "I will most certainly remember that."

"That is very sweet of you, little Betsey," said their brother John, leaning against a wall and looking up from a paper he was reading – left unattended by their father earlier, no doubt – with an indolent smile.

"If Fanny doesn't want to be rich," she added pertly, stomping her little foot, "I don't mind it."

Tom bit down onto his lower lip to avoid bursting into riotous laughter in spite of himself. He knew once he began, he'd be rolling over in unrestrained mirth, unable to stop. It shouldn't be nearly so funny as, indeed, it was.

"That was almost nice," grumbled Susan, prying Betsey away from Tom. "Fanny isn't well, Mr. Bertram. She's not avoiding you."

"Tom, please," he corrected her, appearing unconvinced of her words.

"She's having one of her headaches," she went on, "and it's very bad this time."

It was only then that Tom seemed to realise how pale and harried Susan looked, despite her generally rosy cheeks and good health. She appeared exactly as someone who had been running back and forth from ill sister to demanding mother all day would.

"Well, well," said he, a touch shakily. "How long has she had it?"

"Since yesterday evening – she was too long in front of the window and then the stove."

He seemed to be thinking. "I will return within the hour – and I would like either your father's permission or your mother's to go up to see her when I do."

Susan's brow furrowed. "I don't think–"

"Then pray don't – no one is requiring it of you – just ask one them for me, all right?"

She had never heard Tom speak so snappishly before, and considered telling him off, or simply not doing as he asked, but she did neither of those things and – when he did indeed return as he'd promised, bringing something with him – Susan's understanding of the matter improved, seeing what he was about, and her good opinion towards him was not only restored but bettered.


Fanny generally had a very meagre appetite. She was picky and uneasy when it came to food. And even her small wants and preferences and lack of quantity in her eating habits were rarely satisfied, the little biscuits and things she preferred often seeming be the first things to vanish at the table between so many hungry children and a hungover father.

The exception to this was whenever she first woke up from a particularly bad headache.

Whether or not she could do anything about it, she would find herself ravenous and longing to eat something. An unusual craving for salt or fruit or citrus tended to accompany this gnawing, uncharacteristic hunger as well. Sometimes Susan could add her own allotment of butter onto Fanny's small piece of toast, or part of a bruised plum that had not gone entirely bad yet could be spared for her – Rebecca had once, feeling badly for Fanny, given her almost an entire pear that was only partly mealy – but most times she simply needed to make do, to ignore the hunger until it – like the headache which preceded it – passed on its own.

She awoke, head still feeling feeble, eyes unfocused and stomach empty but also unbearably sour, to find a three-legged stool placed beside the mattress and a little bound-up handkerchief (of a kind far too nice to belong to anyone in her family) balanced on the cracked seat of it.

If it had only been the stool, with nothing upon it, Fanny would have naturally assumed Susan had been sitting there earlier, watching over her. Even though Susan usually just sat on the mattress beside her.

Taking up the handkerchief, she undid the knot at the top and, as it fluttered open, beheld a handful of the most beautiful red raspberries she'd ever seen. She couldn't remember the last time she'd even tasted raspberries, let alone seen so many in one bundle.

The closet door creaked and Susan came in. "Tom left that for you."

She knew Susan could not mean their little brother, that she must mean her own suitor, and blushed. Tom had been in here? Alone? While she slept?

"He came in for only an hour, and he got Mother's permission first," Susan explained. "He sat with you until the time was up, then said something about going to meet Mr. Yates at the dockyard for a drink, and he left those behind. He said not to let Betsey get at them, that he'd bring some for her next time if she wanted but those were for your head.

"Said his mother – our Aunt, Lady Bertram – swears by eating those after a headache; it's supposed to help with the pain."

The tears in Fanny's eyes could not all be blamed upon her headache as she spilled the brilliant red berries into her lap and studied the little embroidered initials on the now-empty handkerchief.

The elegant T and B were joined together with a flourish of shimmery grey thread.

Who had sewn these for him, she wondered. His mother? Her other aunt? One of his sisters?

Would she be sewing and embroidering things for him, if she accepted his proposal?

Supposing he did not think her work fine enough? He might be careless in manner, but he was also fussy. He might think her needlework crude, or subpar compared to what he was used to. Even her mother had never found fault with Fanny's tiny, neat stitches, but the thought of his – despite him being a man – disapproval on the matter made her feel uneasy.

And if not him, then perhaps Lady Bertram would not like her work – and a mother-in-law's disapproval must be as unsought as a would be a husband's.

She shook herself out of it, and brought a raspberry to her mouth, popping it in and chewing slowly, enjoying its sweet juice and decadent taste. It could not matter what he thought of her sewing, because she still could not bring herself to imagine accepting him.

Despite everything, despite this unexpected kindness, despite how it was killing her inside, despite knowing no one half so dear to her as he'd become would ever ask her again, she could still see no other way through this but to give him up.

The tears coursed down her cheeks.

"Oh, Fanny," said Susan.

"It's nothing – only my head," she croaked out, after swallowing.


Susan observed Fanny – slow and wearied, pallid and brought down to a state such as even the worst of her headaches had never left her in before – over the next few days, and feared greatly for her elder sister.

Supposing, she fretted, sitting up one night and pacing the baseboard floor and tapping her fingertips on the side of the closet door anxiously, that Fanny's upcoming rejection of Tom Bertram should destroy not only the delicate girl's happiness but also whatever remained of her fragile health?

The next morning, watching Fanny pack away some sewing things so they could make up the mattress before going downstairs, Susan saw that she'd kept Tom's handkerchief as well as two or three of the smaller, older gifts of his Betsey had discarded in favour of newer ones. She noticed their neat little places fixed so sweetly in Fanny's personal workbox, between her best pair of scissors and the little – nearly bare – bobbins of sparse thread, the places her sister usually had reserved only for things given to her by their brother William – her amber cross, on the extremely rare occasion she was not wearing it, tended to occupy the same space.

It was then she decided she must do something. Susan was never one to go to her mother for help – she and Fanny were not much to her, for starters, and the exhausted, worked-to-the-bone, impatient woman did not usually have much advice to spare them, even if she had loved them better than she did. If they had been boys, considering going off to sea or taking up employment, she might have had something more to say to them. But, as they were not, when it came to important matters, so long as they did not break the rules of the house or cause shame to the family, they were very much on their own.

But, at a loss, fists clenched at her side, throat and mouth full of gall, Susan went to her about this matter.

Mrs. Price barely glanced up from the pot she was stirring, and Susan found herself wondering, perhaps uncharitably, whether her mother – save for when she was mending things or screaming – was ever not bent over the stove like a fairy-tale witch and – in an ill temper – insisting, upon catching sight of any of her girls besides Betsey, they join her.

"Mother, did you hear me?"

"Susan," she sighed with exasperation, "it's a good offer – your father and I have no objections – but if she doesn't love him, I don't see what–"

"She does love him," Susan interrupted, heedless of the smack she might get if Mrs. Price decided she was being rude, cutting her off and speaking to her in such a tone. "I know it."

Mrs. Price did not strike her daughter. Instead, she dropped the wooden spoon and stared at Susan with something that might have been actual interest. "Then why do you think she will refuse him?"

Susan inhaled deeply, closing her eyes and taking a step back from the heat of the noisy old stove. She was not, she thought, out of the way of that possible smack just yet. "Don't you know?"


When Mrs. Price asked – though it was not a question, not the way she phrased it, nothing to which a yes or no might be put up – her eldest daughter to come out and take a walk with her, through Portsmouth, rather far into twilit, hazy evening, an hour at which none of them ever went out except for when William was home and cajoled his doting mother into letting him take his sisters on a stroll down towards the harbour, Fanny thought her mother might actually have gone mad. Perhaps just a little bit.

She wouldn't even let Tom Bertram take them out at this hour, Fanny was fairly certain, especially not now that he had declared himself a suitor rather than merely a cousin. So what could she want – just the two of them – mother and daughter – with a walk together now? What about all the things Rebecca hadn't done? Didn't Betsey need something or other? Or Father? Where was Father? When had Fanny last seen him? In his usual place by the fire? Or had that been one of her brothers sitting in his chair while he was still out drinking? When he came home, at any possible moment, if he wasn't within the house already, wouldn't he ask where his wife was?

The boys...they... Had they had their supper yet?

But Mrs. Price silenced her timid objections firmly, and almost gently, too. They needed to go. They needed to have a talk, just the two of them.

Never in Fanny's life had there been a need for them to talk alone. She racked her mind, struggling to think of anything that might warrant a private conversation between herself and her mother.

Finally, she thought, her light eyes wide and brimming over with tears (as they always seemed to be those days, despite her best efforts), William. Something has happened to William at sea, some misfortune, and Mother has got word of it first and she's–

"Mother..."

"Let us go a little further away from the house, Fanny – then we'll talk."

When they had gone several steps, turned a sharp corner off their own narrow street, and were walking – rather precariously, Fanny thought, given the growing darkness – in the seaward direction, she finally burst out, "William–"

Her mother was perplexed. "William?"

"Isn't..." She swallowed. "Hasn't... You haven't gotten any word...from...?"

"This has nothing to do with your brother, Fanny."

Relief washed over her, bringing a flush to her cold, pinched cheeks. So long as William was all right, she felt she could endure nearly anything else.

Mrs. Price looked at her askance. "Susan says you're in love with Tom Bertram."

Nearly.

Nearly anything else.

Fanny shook her head, the biting wind catching and tugging at her loosened curls like invisible brambles, but she did not mean no by the motion. She meant that she could not – perhaps could never – say.

She glanced down at her hands, entwining her cold, raw fingers. "Susan doesn't understand."

"There is no shame, none whatever, in marrying either for money or for love – both are parts of life, and these are the choices most women must make eventually."

Mustering a courage that nearly drained her, nearly made her feel like fainting to be so bold to say such a thing to her mother, even quietly and gently as she put it, Fanny whispered, "You married for love."

"Fanny," she sighed, "there are not so many men of large fortune out in the world as there are women who deserve them."

Fanny did not say her mother would have married her father regardless of this fact and, indeed, had. She did not need to say it, however, it was written all over her face – it was scrawled, in the clearest of hands, across her burning cheeks and her eyes which shone brightly with shame at their own shocking boldness.

"And you have seen what I got for it," said her mother, simply, as if her daughter had spoken the thought aloud, "and think it a very unhappy lot."

She didn't deny it.

"You've never had a life of even relative comfort," Mrs. Price went on. "You cannot know what you'd be giving up."

None of that mattered. Fanny didn't care about Tom's money, or being Lady Bertram one day, or living in a big house, nice as she supposed those things objectively were, in a distantly, logically acknowledged way – if that was all she would lose in giving him up, she could bear it easily enough.

"It's about more than luxury or vanity – you know you've never been very strong." Mrs. Price's eyes stared out sadly beyond Fanny's shoulder. "We don't speak of poor little Mary much, but part of me has always wondered that you've never understood how close you've been at times to joining her in the grave. Portsmouth has never been good for you, but it wasn't as if we had anything else to offer. I should not regret – not for an instant – his taking you away from this place."

"I think, Mother, that you've worried..." Her voice trailed off. Because, as she knew all too well, her mother was not one to worry about her unnecessarily. She was not a boy and she was not Betsey. If her mother had ever feared for her life, even when she did not say so, it had not been without cause. The thought was sobering.

"Have you considered what your other options would be?"

Fanny shrugged.

"I don't think you'd do well marrying a Portsmouth boy."

"I could–" Her voice cracked. "I could stay..."

"You can't stay home forever – we won't be here always. And you can't work long hours with your poor health. You'd never keep the house up on your own."

"William might send..."

"William is a midshipman, who has – as yet – not succeeded in making lieutenant. Can barely afford to look after himself, just too bleedin' proud to admit it, God bless him." And here Mrs. Price's eyes grew slightly reproachful in their regarding Fanny. "You can't be selfish enough to expect that poor young man to pay for the expenses of a spinster sister for his entire life?"

Fanny demurred, then conceded, unrealistically, at the tragic thought of putting poor William into poverty for her sake, that she might marry a Portsmouth boy one day, if one... Oh, it was laughable, if only the situation were not so grave! If one proved agreeable. And that was about as likely as the strange pig her younger brothers kept bringing into the house suddenly growing a pair of gossamer wings and flying off into the sunset.

Her wearied mother was not – she thought – taken in. "The walls in our house are thin – you know, you've heard, what it is to be married."

Fanny wished the ground would swallow her. It might be less mortifying if what her mother said was untrue. She'd been hearing those noises since long before she could understand them. When she was much younger, she had been afraid their father was hurting their mother, and had cried, and William – finding her sobbing on the other side of their parents' bedroom door – had had to explain as best he was able.

"I know we've never been close, child," – she almost sounded sorry for it – "but I do think of you. I do know you. It's not an easy thing to speak of, but it needs to be said, just once. I imagine, Fanny, that a gentleman might be more patient with you when it comes to such matters than a fishmonger would. Do you understand my meaning?"

She nodded miserably.

"And if you love Tom Bertram, well, so much the better." Her eyes took on that lost, distant look again. "Most girls are not offered both money and love in one proposal – count yourself fortunate for it!"

She could hold back no longer. "He drinks, Mother!" Perhaps her voice was too loud, yet she herself could hardly hear it – it seemed to ring, at far too low a timbre, in her cold ears.

If she had said 'he breathes, Mother,' she might have gotten a more concerned reaction. "A great many men are partial to that."

"That does not make it–" she began, her indignant voice coming out somewhat screechy.

"It's somewhat different in a wealthy man," Mrs. Price told her next, cutting her off. "There are servants to pull him off the ground when he makes a fool of himself." And, she added, with a meaningful side-eye, there were doubtless many rooms within Mansfield Fanny might retreat to if she had a headache or judged her husband's temperament after an outing to be too belligerent. "It's not like Portsmouth. The world – the world you haven't seen, child – is not like Portsmouth."

While this argument did not properly weaken her resolve to refuse Tom, Fanny had to confess she'd not considered that side of things. She had not considered the fact that, while her current home had no quiet places to slink off to, no way to avoid confrontation, Tom's home might have a great many inviting nooks and crannies.

"It's such a remarkable thing," Mrs. Price exclaimed, taking her child's arm and starting to lead them back in the direction of the house.

"What is?" Fanny asked.

"How timing can work out by pure chance."

Fanny did not understand; she furrowed her brow.

"If Maria's son had discovered we were here, and his own poor relations, only eight years earlier than this – he might still have been looking for a wife; he'd have been" – she thought for a moment, counting back in her head – "he'd have been seventeen. Which is a little young, perhaps, but not outrageous for an heir thinking of his future. But you wouldn't have been old enough for him to look twice at."

Fanny nodded. She would have been about ten years old. Not that she could imagine a seventeen year old Tom thinking about the matter as her mother did. He wouldn't have been looking for a bride. Indeed, she somewhat suspected the only reason he had begun to look at her, before coming to know more of her and deciding he wanted to marry her, was a sort of rebellion against what might be expected of him. It was the only explanation which made sense. Otherwise, he'd have gone to balls in London looking to take a liking to someone – not a dance hall in Portsmouth.

"You look a good deal like her."

"Like who, Mother?" She blinked rapidly, and nearly stumbled over a loose stone in the road.

"My sister Maria – Tom's mother."

"Did Sir Thomas look..."

"Like your Tom Bertram?"

He's not my Tom Bertram, Fanny thought, shaking her head for what felt like the thousandth time that night.

"Yes, indeed." Her mother went on as if she hadn't noticed – perhaps she truly hadn't; it had gotten quite dark. "But he had a very different way about his person. Much more sombre. He rarely laughed or cracked a smile. I often wondered how Maria could stand it! Your father was just the opposite! Always making jokes."

And for a moment, lost in reveries of the past, Mrs. Price was a young Ward girl again; her barely visible face belonged a sparkling young woman Fanny had never known.

Fanny had never thought twice about what her father must have been like as a young man, she knew from the manner of jokes he still made exactly what he was in youth; but she was amazed to discover she might have liked the younger version of her mother, Miss Frances Ward, if they met on the street, despite their stark differences. And that made her feel rather ungrateful as she realised she did not like her mother as she was now – a grumpy married woman who was worn out and did not do anything with most of her children – that she had no feelings for her beyond a familial love and a forced, begrudging kind of respect.

She wondered, in a strange moment of sad clarity, as they came in sight of the house and her mother returned to her usual preoccupied self now that she could cross her talk with Fanny off her list of chores that needed doing, if poor Tom might not – to a lesser extent, given she was a gentlewoman – feel much the same way about his own mother.

If they might not have that much, at least, in common.

A/N: Reviews Welcome, replies may be delayed.