Mrs. Dashwood, 1

I will live to regret this, but here: Nano 2021, Day 1.

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The silence of the carriage was bliss after the strain of the past weeks. Her dear girls, so busy until the last moment with the final details of closing out their life at Norland, were each sunk in her own familiar reverie. Elinor, worn with grief and responsibility, watched the September sky through ever-guarded eyes. Marianne, her eyes ever unguarded, had already dismissed the passing landscape as an outrage to the picturesque, and abandoned herself to the private consolations of bitter memory. Margaret, exhausted with excitement, drowsed the unaccustomed weight of womanhood full on her mother’s shoulder. Mrs. Dashwood refused to resettle her daughter’s heavy head. Each maternal ache and pang was positive comfort after the cold luxury of Fanny’s reign at their beloved Norland.

Tears, never far off these past six months, sprang anew to her eyes at the enormity of her loss. Her faithful, generous, cheerful Henry, who had married once for prudence and once for love. Prudence had produced John, whose main accomplishment in life had been to enrich his mother’s fortune with his wife’s. Love was all the dowry of Elinor Middleton, love her greatest wealth. Fortune had ever smiled on her. She was charming, fresh, and penniless, a younger daughter of a younger son, when Henry Dashwood, a confirmed widower with a little boy, finally overcame the caution taught by his first advantageous marriage enough to dance with her at the assembly. He was a mixed catch, the old gossips warned — heir to Norland when the old man passed, which could be never; only a lifetime interest in his late wife’s fortune, all secured to her son. But Elinor did not weigh estates and incomes. Her first love was born of her first conversation with Mr. Dashwood. They were alike in in the generosity of their impulses, in the delicacy of their tastes, in the hopeful nature they shared. Her youth gave him new vigor; his experience steadied her. Never, never were two souls so nobly entwined! Their marriage had been bliss upon bliss, only augmented by the arrival in due time of each precious girl: Elinor, named of course for her mother; and Marianne, born during a thrilling mania for all things revolutionary; and Margaret, named in honor of old Mr. Dashwood’s maiden sister,  his companion and housekeeper — and a year later the aged lady passed on, leading Mr. Dashwood to invite his nephew’s family to move from cramped Stanhill into Norland, their eventual possession. 

For ten years all the Dashwoods had lived at Norland in perfect familial harmony, with pleasant visits from young John during the holidays. Perhaps if John had been more with them he would have resisted being captured by the glossy likes of Fanny Ferrars. Fanny appeared all that was amiable at first, and Mr. and Mrs. Dashwood were eager to love her for John’s sake. Sweet Marianne, with the fervor of her eleven years, had greeted Fanny with an impulsive embrace, quoting, “A sister! You are she!” Elinor, already the gracious hostess at fourteen, curtseyed gravely and presented Fanny with a fresh bouquet of Norland’s old roses. Fanny smiled becomingly and said, “Yes, of course, you cunning little loves!” and had instantly turned her charm on old Mr. Dashwood, dropping the bouquet in the unprepared arms of Chambers as old Mr. Dashwood gallantly escorted her to the sitting room. Marianne was in high color and Elinor grave with mortification, but both were desirous of John’s happiness and looked anxiously for qualities to love in their new sister. Alas, Fanny gave them little enough to work upon; she laughed and flattered when she spoke to the girls, and immediately dismissed them from her mind the moment she turned away. Mrs. Dashwood was always relieved when she could, in all sincerity, kiss Fanny goodbye and offer her best wishes for a safe and comfortable journey home, with compliments to her dear mother. 

The arrival of little Henry offered new sources of distraction, both pleasant and otherwise. Fanny was a most attentive mother, and could not bear to hear her precious child in distress. All comforts that could be secured to the young man were demanded with maternal urgency. Fanny could hear no reason, and as John’s one matrimonial object was the good humor of his wife, one could drop no hint in his ear. In his early infatuation he had given Fanny free reign, and he had now neither the practice of authority or the true basis of friendship to urge her to moderation.

“Good fortune does not equal good sense,” old Mr. Dashwood used to say, and in his case it had proved only too true. John and Fanny were proof enough of Old Mr. Dashwood's maxim, but in the end he himself had been captivated in his dotage by the small fat grandson of Henry’s first marriage, securing his estate to the little boy in such a way that the children of Henry’s second marriage, the loving family that given every attention to the old bachelor that good cheer and true affection could suggest, were left destitute, poor fatherless girls! 

Of course Norland was Mr. Dashwood’s to live in for the rest of his life, but he had no power to provide for his wife and daughters beyond his own seven thousand pounds, and the thousand pounds apiece old Mr. Dashwood had left his devoted nieces. They were to have improved Norland out of the proceeds of the estate, and set aside enough to provide for wife and daughters after the eventual death of their father. They were to have lived a long and fruitful life in their beloved home, secure in the knowledge that their daughters were as happily married as their parents. In time young Henry would grow to manhood, against all expectation wiser and and with more developed taste than either of his parents, and would come into an estate that had profited from years of attentive management. Mrs. Dashwood, a venerable widow, would remove to the comfortable home of one of her daughters and live out her remaining days amid a passel of grandchildren. 

A year to the day after his uncle’s death made him nominal master of Norland, Mr. Henry Dashwood expired, bathed in the tears of his wife. Dear Fanny had swept in the day after Mr. Dashwood’s funeral, with son and lapdog and other accoutrements of her position as the rightful mistress of Norland. She would never dream of turning them all out, although they had no claim on her, being only Mr. John Dashwood’s step-mother and half sisters. Mrs. Dashwood was to receive every civility in her, except the civility of advance warning of her arrival. Mr. John Dashwood looked on sheepishly as his angel swept through the front rooms, fingering the brocades and eyeing the articles of furniture as Marianne glared eloquently and Elinor stood prudently impassive. Fanny was in a rapture of calculation, speaking now of her delight in being able to give the proper attention to the heirlooms of the Dashwood family, now of sending to London for someone to effect a few minor improvements, encompassing nothing more than a complete alteration and refurnishing of the major apartments in an style elegant enough to require the superfluity of her husband’s increased income. That gentleman was fond enough of his gentle mother and pretty sisters, but he was a man easily mastered. Fanny’s ambition had long supplanted any former moral guide. Dear, dear Fanny, such a suitable wife for poor weak John! Dear, dear John, so like his father in appearance!

If only Elinor had secured Edward Ferrars! Fanny’s visiting brother (invited as soon as she had power of invitation) was nothing like herself: kind, self-effacing, gentle where Fanny was brusque, with the amiability and gentle manners that mark a true gentleman. This alone would have been enough to secure him a place in Mrs. Dashwood’s heart, but the similarity of his disposition to quiet Elinor’s, and the attraction that quickly sprang up between them, filled Mrs. Dashwood with the hope that she thought had died with Henry. She opened her maternal arms to Edward, and he, poor lamb, responded as one who had all his life been deprived of a mother’s kind attentions. And Elinor’s cold reserve was becoming warm spring. Many evenings Mrs. Dashwood and Marianne had withdrawn with significant smiles to the far corner of the room as Elinor and Edward conversed with rational blushes. Marianne, her mother’s child in all but name, now entered fully into her mother’s hopes. Where they had urged each other to greater grief, now they spurred themselves on to matrimonial raptures. Dear Elinor deserved every happiness, and it was inconceivable that two hearts so formed for companionship could be delayed by any bar. 

Bar there was, however. Elinor had made no better use of her time than blushing rationally. Edward had made no declaration. And Fanny, who could notice what pertained to what was hers, believed her brother destined for greater heights than a fortune hunter such as Miss Dashwood. She didn’t use those words. She didn’t need to. Mrs. Dashwood was alive to every nuance of Fanny’s glib remarks. She had only stayed at Norland these six months, dining morning and evening on Fanny’s hostile courtesies, for Elinor’s sake. She would not have her insulted. And see! Here in the post this very day was a letter from dear John Middleton, a cousin whose joviality was undimmed in the fifteen years since he’d last visited her, offering her the rent of his cottage at his estate called (Mrs. Dashwood turned the letter to read the direction) Barton, in Devonshire. Devonshire, Southampton, Worcester — no matter, so long as it was where Fanny was not. Edward would find it in his power to visit, and once the Dashwoods were settled in a charming cottage (with flowers by the door, and perhaps a ruined folly nearby where lovers could find the ardor of their nature enhanced by the gentle melancholy of nature), matters would quickly be resolved away with no interference from his sister’s unkind eye. 

As for the situation of young Mrs. Dashwoood — but she checked herself. Fanny was young Mrs. Dashwood now; her mother-in-law (and not even that, for John, as circumstances had proved, was only her stepson, though she did believe he had some true affection for her despite all Fanny’s machinations) was now simply Mrs. Dashwood, married at eighteen, and now widowed by forty, with three daughters to provide, and only ten thousand pounds between them. There was romance to be found there, if she could grasp at it, but in the constant jolting and tedium of the carriage, she was sensible only of the twinge in her back and the weight on her shoulders.

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