In halting words, for she had not the vocabulary for such things, she explained what Miss Bates had said about her father.
“Gnosis,” Mr. Knightley said finally.
“What is that?”
“The Greeks wrote of it. I yawned over these matters as a schoolboy, scarcely comprehending anything. Consider it the divine spark. You and I can read Plato and Aristotle together, perhaps, if you’ve a mind. It might be we will both come to comprehend the state a little better.”
“I would like that very much,” she cried, and looked down at little George. She could not grasp vast alterations in modes of civilization, but she could see how individuals change, decision by decision. “Maybe it is my duty, for if George grows up friends with little Frank, will these questions arise? Or must we leave such questions to Miss Bates?”
“We will take our lead from Miss Bates. If she speaks of the matter, we will listen. If she does not, we will bide quiet.”
“And if young Frank should some day show signs of this talent?”
“Then we help the Churchills as we can. Is that not the fundamental truth of civilization, that each teaches the next as he can?”
“Or as she can,” Emma said, smiling as she thought of Miss Bates. She laid aside the slumbering infant, then stretched. “But now I want to get up and walk about. I must be doing. How is the weather?”
Mr. Knightley pulled aside the curtain. “A fine morning. We can take a turn in the shrubbery before breakfast, then I had better get over to Donwell, for there is a deal of work awaiting my attentions, but Master George and his mother must come first.” He smiled across the room at her.
Emma smiled back and swung her feet outside the bed. A walk would do her good.
But her busy mind was not yet done. “It seems odd to me that Mr. Bates, though as near a saint as can be, could not answer these questions that insist on flying through my mind. For surely, if he could have explained, he would have to his daughter, if to no one else.”
“He was a main of great faith,” Mr. Knightley said from the window. “But faith does not answer questions. All it does is sustain our belief that one day we will find the answers.”
He flung the casement wide to the morning air.
THE ABSENT HARP
The inspiration here was the pairing of two of Austen’s characters I thought would genuinely like one another, guaranteeing happiness for both . . . even though they happened to appear in different books.
Mary Crawford was not prepared for the pain that darted into her heart when she walked into the parsonage drawing room at Mansfield.
She was not aware until that moment that she had somehow expected to find the room exactly as she had left it ten years previous.
It was absurd. Of course Mrs. Grant had taken all of her furniture to Westminster. Mary had even lived with some of it, when she had rejoined her sister, after the doctor’s death.
But though the rational mind makes its claims on consciousness, the heart follows its own logic. She must acknowledge the absurdity of her expectation that Edmund Bertram would preserve the drawing room exactly as she had left it ten years before—that she would find her harp standing in the corner, silent testament to what might have been.
She had expected to find no sign of Fanny Price as mistress of the house.
The reality was a very different room between those four familiar walls, beginning with the hangings, which had been new perhaps five years previous and were now smudged by small hands, to the embroidered Bible verse in its homely frame on the wall where once had hung an elegant French watercolor that Mary had bought for her sister. The other framed object (Mary was reluctant to term it art) was a badly drawn, boyish sketch of a sea-going vessel labeled ANTWERP.
In the place of Mary’s harp sat a little table with a scattering of children’s books lying upon it, and opposite that table, a pretty little escritoire which gave evidence that Mrs. Bertram sat here when the weather was fine, attending to her letters when she was not hearing her children’s lessons.
Mary’s gaze wandered from object to object, each a fresh hurt where she had thought herself strongest. I should not have come.
The door opened, and there entered a woman wearing a morning gown in what might best be thought of as country fashion.
“Miss Crawford?” It was Fanny’s voice.
Mary stared, all in a maze. Fanny Price had once been generally accepted as a pretty girl, in a quiet way, albeit much too thin. Now, where another woman might be written down as stout, she was charmingly filled out, especially her face, a perfect oval, a pair of clear, steady eyes meeting Mary’s gaze with that sweet, sober expression Mary knew instantly. Except this Fanny did not shy off, looking otherwhere; she gazed back with a calm assurance that testified to ten years well spent.
Ten years well spent.
Fanny observed the blank look in her unexpected guest’s eyes, and was trying to recover, to think what must be done, when the glass door to the garden banged open, and here was Susan.
“No, Tom. You may not go riding in those wet clothes. Your new horse will wait, and so will Uncle Thomas. Come in and shift into dry things.” Speaking over her shoulder to Young Tom, Susan dashed into the morning room. When she beheld the stranger seated with her sister, she stopped dead. “Forgive me, Fanny, I did not know you had company.”
If she could have prevented this meeting, Fanny would have spared no pains. She performed the introduction, and no sooner did the words “Miss Crawford” pass her lips than Susan gave as great as start as had Mr. Yates, that long-ago day in the theater at Mansfield.
As then, the urge to laughter had to be controlled, especially when Susan exclaimed in accents of horror, “Not the Miss Crawford . . .”
This flagrant evidence of notoriety caused Miss Crawford to put up her chin, rain-damp as she was. “My brother and myself seem fated to appear in country rumor as marriage wreckers, but as this fate is no choice of mine, I will make my departure.”
Susan silently held open the door.
A decade ago, the eighteen-year-old Fanny might have stood by, watching helplessly as the awkward moment turned farcical or tragic. But ten years as a clergyman’s wife and the mother of a lively brood had taught her how to act.
“Miss Crawford,” she said quickly. In calling the lady’s attention thither, she shielded Mary from seeing Susan’s unkind gesture.
Fanny understood Susan’s partisanship as well as she trusted her better feelings; she also remembered how very quick Mary Crawford had been to observe. “Miss Crawford,” she said again, “please sit down. As you see, it is coming on to rain again. Neither you, the coachman, or the horses will experience any good by going out again in this weather.”
“I shall see that Young Tom goes straight to the nursery,” Susan said. Very much on her dignity, she dropped the smallest of curtseys in Miss Crawford’s general direction, and closed the door behind her.
Though the day was not cold, Mary found herself shivering. “I trust you are all well?” she said, in an effort to retrieve her amour-propre. “Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram? Thomas? I wonder if he is married at last, to do his duty by the estate? My guess is one of the Miss Maddoxes. They tried so very hard to get him.” She heard her tone of false gaiety, and closed her lips.
“We are all very well, thank you,” Fanny said, not answering the last. The glance she sent Mary’s way was the same acute observation that Mary remembered, and had so comfortably dismissed ten years ago, assuming no taxing degree of penetration behind it.
Fanny said calmly, “I have been thinking what is best to do. Unfortunately, the three spare bedrooms upstairs are all in use, between my children and the two belonging to my sister-in-law, Emily. You might remember my brother William. He is a first lieutenant now, away at sea somewhere in the Indian Ocean. His wife is living with us until such time as he is able to get a home of his own.”
“This was an abominable idea,” Miss Crawford said, almost under her breath.
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Fanny saw her wretched expression, and said with gentle insistence, “Come to my room. Edmund always insists on my having a fire when it is wet, though I scarcely want it. By its warmth my maid will soon put you to rights. Before the rain begins I will walk up to Mansfield with Susan, and beg an extra bed of Lady Bertram. You will remember her, I am certain, and so you will know that there will be very little trouble at all.”
Mary’s protests were talked over with quiet assurance as they walked upstairs. Fanny handed Mary over to her maid and excused herself before the latter could find anything to say to the matter.
Fanny ran downstairs and into the kitchen, where she discovered the butler Elkin in conversation with Miss Crawford’s coachman, who was in the midst of addressing a sizable meal, a tankard at hand.
At her appearance, all conversation ceased, and the coachman rose to his feet, hand going to his forehead in salute.
“Please sit down,” Fanny said. “Resume your meal, pray. I only wished to learn what happened. Is there something amiss with the carriage?”
The butler and the coachman exchanged glances, giving Fanny a notion she might be hearing a mended version of the truth as the coachman said, “It was nothing at all, ma’am. Leastways, nothing until Miss took it into her head she knew a shortcut, which mired us good and proper. Though I will say this for Miss Crawford, she nipped right out and tried to pull the leader free with her own two hands. We had to leave the coach there, and walk.”
Fanny turned to the butler. “I trust someone’s been sent to rescue those poor horses?”
“Sent Ned and James, ma’am,” was the reassuring reply. “They ought to be along soonest.”
“Then I will leave things in your capable hands, Elkin,” Fanny said.
She paused long enough to take her bonnet and cloak from the hook by the door, and, swinging the latter about her shoulders, she set out at a brisk pace through the garden. As she tied on the bonnet, she peered anxiously at the sky overhead. While she was not afraid of a summer rain, she knew it would disturb Lady Bertram if she appeared drenched, and she would avoid that if she could.
The rain obligingly held off until she reached Mansfield shrubbery, big drops splattering her bonnet as she passed the roses. She was safely inside the French doors before the first crack of thunder.
She crossed the room, expecting to find Lady Bertram slumbering upon her couch, and was surprised to discover that lady was not alone, and that she had become as agitated as it was possible for her to be. “Bless me, here is Fanny. She will put us to rights, sir,” Lady Bertram said. And to Fanny, “Tom is in the barns, looking out something with that yearling he bought for Young Tom, and Sir Thomas is closeted with the solicitor, yet here is this Colonel, I didn’t quite catch his name—something about the Crawfords, but I have been telling him that the doctor is gone these five years and more. Can you make it clearer, Fanny?”
Fanny must set aside her own business and disentangle Lady Bertram’s first, as once she had disentangled her yarns.
As Fanny advanced on the gentleman, holding out her hand, Lady Bertram got to her feet and wandered to the door. “I shall see where Pug has got himself off to. I hope he is not outside eating the cabbages again. They do so disorder his internal arrangements.” She shut the door behind her, leaving Fanny alone with the strange gentleman in the red coat with the epaulettes of a colonel.
“My name is Fitzwilliam,” he said, shaking her hand. “I am come in search of Miss Crawford, Miss Mary Crawford. I was told she was come into this neighborhood. Is she here?”
o0o
‘Edmund.’ The name had tripped so easily off Fanny’s tongue, with the ease of long habit, whereas Mary had been given no leave to such intimacy. He must be ‘Mr. Bertram’ to her—he had not even attained the relative dignity of ‘doctor,’ as he easily might have.
Mary examined the gowns the maid laid out for her, discovering much about Fanny’s life thereby, if little of her tastes. The best of these gowns was last year’s fashion, but well made and modest, as suited a clergyman’s wife.
Mary turned away. Even in a country vicarage, she told herself, she must not make a burlesque of herself dressing like a married woman. But she knew there was something else, that the wearing of Fanny’s gown cut too near.
She sent the maid away, grabbed up her sodden cloak, and with her dress still clinging damply to her, shoes squeaking at every step, she ran downstairs again, no thought in her head beyond getting away.
Old habit drew her into the drawing room, her intent to escape again through the glass doors. Surely she would find the coachman in the barn, and could order him to put the horses to.
But she came to a halt halfway in the room when she discovered it already occupied.
Edmund stood between her and escape, as rain sheeted down in a roar; Edmund bent over the desk, sorting through some papers there.
He was of course the same man. He had not even the grace to evidence the thinning of hair at the temples that so plagued Henry. Mary stared, trying to find in those often dreamed-of features the weightiness of Sir Thomas, but she was not granted the satisfaction of a paunch, or a jowl, that might testify to her dire predictions about clergymen.
Edmund gazed back, tranquil as ever, though perhaps increased in gravitas; she felt his gaze take in her wet head, and the damp gown that she knew outlined her form.
She straightened her spine.
“Miss Crawford,” Edmund said, as if it had been ten days, and not ten years, since they had parted in that wretched London drawing room. “This is a surprise. Has Fanny seen you? I am certain she can find something dry for you to shift your clothes.”
Mary found her voice. “She did that, but I—” She stopped, and drew a breath. She watched his eyes, knowing her power to draw that gaze, to cause the tranquility to alter to something else. Then she colored, though she had thought that the ability to blush had vanished with her girlhood, and she hurried into speech. “Fanny—Mrs. Bertram—stepped up to Mansfield, having insisted I stay. I—my coach was mired near here. I walked, remembering the way.” Every word opened her up to questions she did not want to answer, even to herself.
But because she was here, because she knew she had waited ten years for this moment—to be alone with Edmund once again—she took a step toward him. “Edmund Bertram,” she said. “Do you regret that last conversation? Deny it if you dare. I admit that I have come to regret it—that in fact, every day of my life, I have regretted it the more.”
“But I do not deny it,” he said.
o0o
Here was a situation Fanny had never encountered. Good manners required her to be helpful, but delicacy demanded she make no present of a lady’s name or whereabouts to a man hitherto unknown.
This colonel appeared to discern Fanny’s dilemma, or perhaps he had thought out what he might say, for he followed his remark with, “I came to find out the answer to my proposal of marriage.”
Here was a dilemma indeed!
The situation now felt unreal, almost as if she had walked in upon another stage. Once again Fanny was an unwilling player upon this stage as she begged the gentleman to be reseated. A secret flutter of laughter accompanied the wish that she might not be the unwilling auditor to a ranting lover as she said, “I beg your pardon, but would it not seem that her absence is in some wise your answer?”
Colonel Fitzwilliam did not stamp or rant. He answered like a well-bred gentleman struggling under strong feelings. “One might be forgiven for thinking that.” He made an effort at smiling, his tone as rueful as it was rational. “Until the day I spoke, I had thought us affianced in all but name. The lady in question encouraged me in every way—we shared so many tastes, and I was every day invited to dinners and glees and soirees.”
Fanny said something polite but noncommittal.
The colonel stroked his gloves absently with his thumb, his countenance unhappy as he went on, low-voiced, “You might be familiar with her sportive ways.
So witty! Especially on the subject of marriage, but one hears that sort of thing everywhere. I thought nothing of it.”
This was indeed beginning to sound familiar.
“We had such a good understanding that I felt certain my words would be welcome. I am not such a coxcomb as to make a proposal lest I thought it fairly safe she felt the same way.”
“Excuse me if I trespass, but she clearly made no answer?”
“She said she would think it over, she pressed my hand when I departed, and when I returned the next day, her sister told me she believed Miss Crawford had fled into Northampton. Those were her exact words. ‘Fled.’ As if I were the sort of rascal one finds in the bad novels one sees everywhere these days.” His smile was pained; he was not handsome, but an upright figure and a pair of intelligent, speaking eyes encouraged Fanny’s good regard.
Fanny felt herself on surer ground. “Might the cause not be you at all, but the question of marriage?”
“That is what I came to find out,” he replied. “A single word will see me gone. I was convinced that I owed it to the both of us—to our future happiness—to require her to speak that word. If there is misunderstanding, I must endeavor to resolve it. If she does not want me, then there’s an end to it.”
o0o
“At one time, as we both know,” Edmund said, “I wanted something very different. But it did not take long to comprehend that it would never have done.”
Mary scarcely heard the words. It was the steadiness of his tone, the tranquility in his gaze, that sounded the death knell to her ten-year-old dreams.
He went on, still in that steady voice, “Why are you here?” With a faint irony that she had once believed him to be incapable of descrying, much less using, he added, “I trust it was not with the intent of breaking my marriage.”
“Why not?” she declared, her chin elevated. “I might be perceived as your savior, or your devil, anything you like. For marriage is so very brittle, I find it is relatively easy to break.”