A Contrary Wind: a variation on Mansfield Park (Mansfield Trilogy Book 1) by Lona Manning

Author:Lona Manning [Manning, Lona]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-01-12T06:00:00+00:00

* * * * * *

“Only three months more, Maria,” Julia said consolingly. “It is now April, and surely father will relent by July, if not earlier, and allow Dr. Grant to publish the banns.” And then she carelessly added, “any man who truly loved would not object to waiting only three months.”

A heavy rain having suspended all plans for an outing, the Bertram sisters were passing a dull and seemingly endless afternoon in their bedchamber. Mrs. Norris was muttering over her needlework in the parlour, their brother Edmund was in his father’s study, puzzling over some ambitious drawings from Henry Crawford concerning alterations that Mary wanted done at the parsonage at Thornton Lacey, and the servants were keeping themselves well out of sight below stairs. Something of an unhealthy east wind had made both sisters feel dissatisfied and anxious, too restless to choose some useful pursuit but too troubled by a prickly conscience to abandon themselves to doing nothing at all. Julia’s pianoforte sat untouched, Maria’s embroidery lay in a tangle, and the letters they had promised to their Mansfield friends would go unwritten another day. Maria in particular only wanted to sit at the window and watch and wait; Julia felt morose because she had no one to wait for. And yet, she acknowledged, she no longer envied Maria. What happiness had her sister’s passion for Henry Crawford brought her? Maria was impatient and cross, jealous and fearful, when she ought to be radiant, cheerful and glowing. Julia could truly pity her.

“You suppose, because he has seldom called upon us here, that he is growing indifferent to me,” Maria rejoined coldly. “You do not know the whole, so do not presume to judge of his affection.”

“And you suppose that I would rejoice to see you miserable and thwarted at last, because I once harboured a foolish little liking for him! Believe better of me than that, Maria! If he is to be my brother, I will learn to love him as a brother, but as for—as for thinking of him as I did last autumn, that is all over and done with.”

“It is not the delay which frightens me, it is the disdain our father now shows him,” Maria confessed. “Henry is a proud man—why should he not be proud? Why should he not resent our father’s unwillingness to give his blessing?”

“A sensible man would put it down to a father’s affection for his daughter. Is any man worth the name to be frightened away by this little difficulty? Why then, you are stauncher than he, for you know that Admiral Crawford despises marriage and will not even attend your wedding, when it takes place. Why should the disapprobation of his relations be less of a hindrance than the reluctance of yours?”

“Men are more proud, that is all,” Maria replied simply. She could not confess the whole—they had quarreled, she had behaved like a common fishwife—or so she supposed, for she numbered no fishwives among her acquaintance—she and Henry had parted coldly and in silence, and now he was gone.

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