Mrs. Dashwood, 3

Sorry to be short, chums, but that's the way it has to be, especially this week and next when there is No Time.

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Though long established in London, the family of Jennings was unknown to society, being notable only for happy marriages and a gift for trading. By means of both, they contrived to build up a minor empire, being of such a merry and forthright disposition as to win the good-will of their neighbors, without provoking the envy that wealth often breeds. When Ned Jennings, a man of no little ambition and foresight, took as his bride a robust lass from the house of one of his City competitors, he married for love as well as policy. And it was love, mostly, which compelled Ned, a man of business in death as in life, to advise his wife as he lay expiring, “Wait until war is declared, Nell, and then buy for all you’re worth.”

And so Nell Jennings, widow, poured out ready money on ‘Change at the trough of the stock market drop in 1803, and reaped the dividends when old Boney flouted the Treaty of Amiens in May. The family’s fortune was so firmly established that she could aspire to the pinnacle of parenthood: educating her children to be as decorative and unfunctional as any scion of nobility. Two handsome daughters survived childhood to be delivered to a finishing school, where the daughters of wealthy merchants and impoverished nobility studied French, manners, and each other’s elder brothers. Pretty Charlotte was married just this past winter (and already increasing!) to a political gentleman named Palmer, and they were an oddly-matched couple: she laughing all the day long, like her mother, and he saying nothing except to contradict, which was how you could tell he was in a good humor. Charlotte would have been better paired with jolly Sir John Middleton, but she was too young when he came courting, and and he was not too fine to refuse Mary, who was an uncommonly handsome girl in her way and always the pink of fashion. Her great school had taught her good-breeding and little else, and if she hadn’t much conversation, her manners were bought and paid for.

So Mrs. Dashwood learned from Mrs. Jennings, Sir John’s mother-in-law freshly arrived from her London house, before dinner was even served at Barton Park.  

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