The West African Squadron is charged with patrolling the coast, principally from Cape Verde to Benguela—I know my dear sister will consult an atlas—and stopping any English or French ships carrying enslaved Africans. We cannot stop ships under other flags, you see, because our English laws do not apply, but we can stop English ships and the Frenchies as well because we are at war with them. This is why, do you know, that so many traders are using American ships now-a-days!
You can imagine my surprise when your letter informed me that we had a common acquaintance on board ship here. To think, you were in Portsmouth and never knew that your friend Mr. Gibson was also there! He has been pressed into service—in fact, Lt. Bayly told me all about this curious fellow he had assigned to the Solebay, before I ever knew he was your friend! He—Mr. Gibson that is—says you are a very thoughtful person, and said much in your praise. He’s a splendid chap, good-natured and curious about everything but I have been at some pains to teach him that he must not talk or ask questions when he is on duty. The other able-bodies were hostile to him at first, but he has won them over—as he is so friendly and obliging and does not hold himself out as better than the others—he will write a letter home for any sailor who only knows how to mark his ‘x’ and, what do you think? He has offered to give me private lessons in Latin for free, or rather, gratis. I dined at the Captain’s table for the first time last week, and rather wanted to crawl away and hide, as half the time the other officers were speaking to each other in Latin tags, and then the chaplain would turn to me and say, “Ain’t that so, Price?” so I rather think he was trying to score a point off me. Gibson says he can teach me so I can quid nunc and quid pro with the best of them soon….
We should make the Isle of Gorée (no, I never heard of it before, either!) by the middle of May, if all goes well…
Fanny had decided against engaging a lady’s maid because she had come to regard her bedchamber as a sanctuary where she could retreat from the servants, drop the mask of being the chatelaine of Everingham and become just Fanny Price again. It was there that she read and re-read what little private correspondence she did receive—from her brother or Mrs. Butters, for, though she daily hoped for a letter from Edmund, none arrived.
She was therefore alone in her room when she opened a note from Henry Crawford which brought the news of the union of Edmund and Mary.
While I was not myself at the ceremony, I can answer your undoubted anxiety about that most essential point—the radiance of the bride. The bride herself assures me, she was a vision of modesty and beauty, all in white with a veil to match. The happy couple are now residing in Thornton Lacey….
Fanny had again that strange floating sensation she had experienced the morning she quit Mansfield Park—she could see herself, as though from a great distance, standing in her bedroom by the window, holding the letter, looking out across the fields. She thought to herself she might faint, and when she didn’t, she thought, I am glad I never told him.
Chapter Twenty-One
The day that Edmund Bertram took Mary Crawford to wife was the happiest of his life. Mary had declared she cared not a fig for a fashionable wedding at Hanover Square, as it would be injurious to the feelings of poor Maria and further, neither her brother nor the Admiral would attend; she was, against all expectations, a country bride in Mansfield with her sister, Mrs. Grant, as her only attendant. Nor did she condition for a bridal trip to Brighton or the Lake District; her new husband handed her into their smart new gig, a gift from Sir Thomas and his lady, to travel the short distance from Mansfield Park to take up their new lives in Thornton Lacey.
Nor did any special ceremony attend the Reverend Edmund Bertram’s maiden sermon in his new parish. At his request, the family stayed away, but the pews were full of the curious, of course. Those of the congregants who preferred their clergymen to be tall, dark-haired, and handsome found nothing to complain of in the Reverend Bertram. His wife won general approbation for her pretty looks and her ready smiles.
“I am conscious of being far better reconciled to a country residence than I had ever expected to be,” Mary wrote to her brother shortly after her wedding. “I can even suppose it pleasant to spend half the year in the country, under certain circumstances, very pleasant. An elegant, moderate-sized house in the centre of family connexions; continual engagements amongst them; commanding the first society in the neighbourhood; looked up to, perhaps, as leading it even more than those of larger fortune, and turning from the cheerful round of such amusements to nothing worse than a tête-a-tête with the person one feels most agreeable in the world. There is nothing frightful in such a picture, is there?
Alas, while it was no small source of gratification to know herself to be the first lady of refinement and gentility in her neighbourhood, Mary Bertram soon discovered that she had
