Murder at Mansfield Park

Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram received her very kindly, and Mrs Norris was all delight and volubility and made her sit on the sopha with herself. Their visitor took care to shew an appropriate gratitude, as well as an engaging submissiveness and humility. Sir Thomas, believing her quite overcome, decided that she needed encouragement, and tried to be all that was conciliating, little thinking that, in consequence of having been, for some years past, Mrs Price’s constant companion and protégée, she was too much used to the company and praise of a wide circle of fine ladies and gentlemen to have anything like a natural shyness. Finding nothing in Fanny’s person to counteract her advantages of fortune and connections, Mrs Norris’s efforts to become acquainted with her exhibited all the warmth of an interested party. She thought with even greater satisfaction of Sir Thomas’s benevolent plan; and pretty soon decided that her niece, so long lost sight of, was blessed with talents and acquirements in no common degree. And Mrs Norris was not the only inmate of Mansfield to partake of this generous opinion. Fanny herself was perfectly conscious of her own pre-eminence, and found her cousins so ignorant of many things with which she had been long familiar, that she thought them prodigiously stupid, and although she was careful to utter nothing but praise before her uncle and aunt Bertram, she always found a most encouraging listener in Mrs Norris.

"My dear Fanny," her aunt would reply, "you must not expect every body to be as forward and quick at learning as yourself. You must make allowance for your cousins, and pity their deficiency. Nor is it at all necessary that they should be as accomplished as you are; on the contrary, it is much more desirable that there should be a difference. You, after all, are an heiress. And remember that, if you are ever so forward and clever yourself, you should always be modest. That is by far the most becoming demeanour for a superior young lady."

As Fanny grew tall and womanly, and Sir Thomas made his yearly visit to Cumberland to receive the accounts, and superintend the management of the estate, Mrs Norris did not forget to think of the match she had projected when her niece’s coming to Mansfield was first proposed, and became most zealous in promoting it, by every suggestion and contrivance likely to enhance its desirableness to either party. Once Edmund was of age Mrs Norris saw no necessity to make any other attempt at secrecy, than talking of it every where as a matter not to be talked of at present. If Sir Thomas saw anything of this, he did nothing to contradict it. Without enquiring into their feelings, the complaisance of the young people seemed to justify Mrs Norris’s opinion, and Sir Thomas was satisfied; too glad to be satisfied, perhaps, to urge the matter quite so far as his judgment might have dictated to others. He could only be happy in the prospect of an alliance so unquestionably advantageous, a connection exactly of the right sort, and one which would retain Fanny’s fortune within the family, when it might have been bestowed elsewhere. Sir Thomas knew that his own daughters would not have a quarter as much as Fanny, but trusted that the brilliance of countenance that they had inherited from one parent, would more than compensate for any slight deficiency in what they were to receive from the other.

The first event of any importance in the family happened in the year that Miss Price was to come of age. Her elder cousin Maria had just entered her twentieth year, and Julia was some six years younger. Tom Bertram, at twenty-one, was just entering into life, full of spirits, and with all the liberal dispositions of an eldest son, but a material change was to occur at Mansfield, with the departure of his younger brother, William, to take up his duties as a midshipman on board His Majesty’s Ship the Perseverance. With his open, amiable disposition, and easy, unaffected manners William could not but be missed, and the family was prepared to find a great chasm in their society, and to miss him decidedly. A prospect that had once seemed a long way off was soon upon them, and the last few days were taken up with the necessary preparations for his removal; business followed business, and the days were hardly long enough for all the agitating cares and busy little particulars attending this momentous event.