“Of course, Miss Price, but I can just as easily take you to her door. It’d be no hardship.” Jackson looked again at his passenger and observed with alarm that she was wearing, in addition to her travelling cloak and bonnet, two dresses, one on top of the other, and any quantity of petticoats.
“Why Miss Price, for all the world, you look as though you was planning to…”
Fanny could say nothing but looked straight ahead, her face shielded by her bonnet.
Jackson whistled thoughtfully and the pair proceeded in silence for some minutes. Finally, he spoke to her in an undertone:
“Miss Price, we folk who serve your family may be silent but we’re not blind. We know what a life you lead. That lady, who out of respect to you, I will not name”—and Jackson spoke with angry emphasis—”insulted my son, my own little boy, as much as calling him a thief—just because he was bringing a piece of lumber to me, at my bidding, at the same hour the upper servants were sitting down for their dinner. He had no more idea of what time it was than any boy of his age, but she must scold him in front of everyone, call him a sneak and a sly fellow trying to cadge a meal and tell him to run home again! A lady who has eaten how many fine dinners at your uncle’s table? A lady who, let me tell you, never leaves her sister’s house for her own with empty hands! Who walks through the kitchens as she goes, supposedly to bring instructions from my Lady Bertram, but really to help herself to anything she pleases out of the pantry and larders, so Cook tells me! To accuse me and mine of taking advantage of your uncle’s generosity!” Jackson recollected himself and urged his pony on a little faster. “It may seem a small thing, to be spoken to in such a manner, but one small thing builds on another, I know all too well, and—and I reckon you do, as well. And I’ll say this—if you are going away, then it’s nobody’s business, as I reckon, but your own.”
Fanny could only nod her head in acknowledgement and thanks. She half felt that she was dreaming. They passed by the Parsonage, and her luck held; the windows were still dark; Mrs. Grant and her servants were not yet astir. They passed by the hedges, trees, fences, and scattered dwellings she had passed hundreds of times before, usually on some errand for her Aunt Norris. She had seen the trees clothed in the tender green shoots of spring while she tottered on her pattens through the mud, seen the fences lined with hollyhock in the height of summer, seen the winds of autumn toss the dry leaves before her down the road, and reveled in the beauty of new-fallen snow on the meadow, but never had she beheld these familiar scenes in the earliest light of dawn, through the tendrils of an October fog. She had the sensation that everything and everyone she knew was dissolving into a mist, leaving only her, Christopher Jackson, and the sound of the pony’s hoofs on the half-frozen road. The enormity of what she was doing, actually doing, made her feel oddly detached from her own body. It was as though she could see herself in the wagon but yet it was not herself, it was some other person.
“Mr. Jackson, you will not speak to anyone about this?” she finally ventured.
“Well, I’ve been thinking on this, Miss Price, as we were getting along, and I believe I have hit on it. I would never tell your uncle, Sir Thomas, a falsehood, were he here, nor out of respect to him, any member of his household. If someone was to tell him that you was seen in my cart this morning, I would never deny it. But all I know is, I offered you a ride to your Aunt Norris’s door, and you rode with me so far as the crossroad and you bade me not to go out of my way, but to let you down. And so I will and that’s all I need say about the matter. So God bless you and keep you safe, Miss Price.”
Fanny thanked him fervently and they maintained a companionable silence for the rest of the journey. Fanny had lain awake half the night, wondering if she had the strength to carry her portmanteau to the village, not daring to arrange a ride or to borrow Edmund’s pony, which she knew not how to saddle—oh, was there no end to her ignorance and helplessness! But the ride with Christopher Jackson had saved her a quarter of an hour and she walked as swiftly as she could through the quiet streets to the coach house well in time for the early morning mail coach to Oxford. Her luck held there, as she was able to obtain the last empty inside seat. Her name was entered in the station master’s book, who evinced no surprise that a genteel young lady was travelling alone, without a companion or servant, and if he knew of her connexion to the great house on the hill behind the village, he betrayed no sign of it, or indeed any interest whatsoever beyond collecting her fare.
* * * * * *
Tom Bertram could not long endure being the only soul, apart from Julia, who knew what evil the day must bring. He woke his brother Edmund before six o’clock and gave him enough information to comprehend that Maria and Henry Crawford had secretly formed an understanding while Maria was still pledged to Mr. Rushworth.
“What would I not give to escape this interview with Rushworth, Edmund. I would almost condition for my father to be here, rather than have this
