A woman walks into an eighteenth century Inn adjoining Mansfield Park in Northamptonshire. A handsome regency rake sits dispondantly at a table, contemplating the glass of Hollands in front of him. Sitting opposite, the woman waves at the surly barman who after eying up her clothes in digust slides over a noxious looking glass. She sniffs experimentally and grimaces, pouring it into the cat's waterbowl when no-one's watching.
"Good morning, Henry."
The man raises an eyebrow at her fowardness. "Do I know you, Madame?"
"Nope, but this is my 'never-happened' vingette, you'd better play along before I turn you into a labourer or something, Mr Crawford."
He gives a well-bred shudder, "That would be a fate worse than death. You do seem to have the advantage, Miss Quisalan."
"Quite. So, why the long face?"
"I'm struggling with my motivations."
"In what way?"
"Well, I was a bit of a flirt. I admit it. And I did toy with women's emotions, but that was before I met my dear Fanny and fell in love."
"As in Fanny Price? As in the woman who if she entered a battle of wills with a wet haddock, would be having the vapours within five minute whilst the fish did victory laps?"
"I'd rather you didn't speak of my beloved in such depricating terms, but yes. It was almost like one of your films: handsome, popular boy at school heads out to seduce the class geek and ends up head over heels for her instead."
"So what happened?" The woman pretends to ignore the cat investigating its waterbowl in bemusement, before it adds a paper cocktail umbrella.
"Well, I'd decided she was the one. I spent months trying to win her affections. There were chapters devoted to it in the book. I perservered. I tried. I was quiet and gentle as she prefered. I pulled strings using nepotism to get her brother promoted, and please don't pull that face at me, I know it's different in your time. I didn't balk in horror when I went to her parents' horrible, low class house in Portsmouth and was pleasant to all her ill-bred relatives when all I wanted to do was run screaming. I asked for her hand in marriage up front so she knew I was serious. I wanted to prove my sincerity and I knew it was a waiting game and it just needed time. Even Austen admits it that if things had gone their natural course, she would have accepted me and we'd have been married."
"So what happened?"
"Right at the end of the book, off-screen in about three pages, I go to London and run off with Maria Rushworth, you know, Fanny's married cousin who I had a flirtation with when she was engaged at the start of the book."
"Wow. That was... unexpected."
"You're telling me. Months of work ruined and I lose the love of my life to go off with a woman I wasn't that bothered with in the first place, who I'd been flirting with for less time than I spent chasing Fanny and deliberately didn't make an offer for even though she was panting for it. And I don't even know why I did it, apart from Austen mentions it hurt my pride that Julia ignored me, so I decided to charm her. And somehow, charm become elope. In God's name, how? Elope, I tell you! I'm too well bred to elope, especially with a married strumpet! And Austen even says at the time that it was mainly Maria making it happen, and I was thinking of Fanny the whole time. I don't know how she made me do it." He eyes the cat merrily lapping at the bowl before adding darkly. "I suspect rohypnol."
At that moment, an attractive, vivacious woman woman enters the bar, carrying a portmanteau. Spotting the pair at the back, she does an elegant redirect and joins them at the table. A small glass of sherry appears at her elbow by the smitten barman.
"Hello Henry. What is the cat doing?"
All three look at the hiccupping cat, one paw slung across the dog's shoulders as it meows out eternal friendship.
"Errr... working on interspecies boundaries? Anyway, hello, Mary,"
"So what are you doing?"
Henry shrugs as he looks at his sister. "I'm drowning my sorrows at accidentally running off with Maria, and the general unfairness of Jane Austen to the Crawfords."
"Ah. I think I may join you."
"Not over Edmund Bertram?"
"Not in the slightest."
"Ah."
Their visitor looks at them both quizzically. "Edmund?"
"Edmund Bertram of Mansfield Park. I loved him, he loved me. We had our differences. We were from different worlds; he was practicality, pragmatism and morals..."
"Boring and selfrighteous, I call it" mutters Henry under his breath.
"... and I am more of the world in understanding its intrigues and class politics, and able to navigate them," she continues, ignoring Henry's interjection. "Yet were making it work. Despite his firm assertion that I would have to completely change to accomodate his views, he was bending slightly, such as when he decided to be in our play rather than damning it, and I was coming around to the idea of being married to a man of the cloth. It would be hard, but we could do it. Even Austen said that in the natural course of events we would have been married and happy."
"I'm getting deja vu and a sense of 'but' here..."
"Maria ran off with Henry, so he decided we couldn't be connected anymore. Which was sort of expected by his moral code, but deeply annoying. However, I still can't wrap my head around why Maria would run off with Henry."
"Maybe she really loved him?"
"Possibly, but even if she did Maria loved Society more. Austen states it a number of times about how they desperately wanted a Ball in the house, about how she loved London and being in the centre of it all. She would have known that to run off with another man when married would ruin her and she'd lose everything. She wasn't stupid and she certainly wasn't ill-bred enough to not realise the consequences."
"So?"
"There's no way Maria would have run off with Henry. Had an affair with him, certainly, but not run off with him." She pats Henry on the hand sympathetically as he nods. "Terrible state of affairs."
"What do you think happened?"
Henry and Mary Crawford exchange glances, before Mary answers. "I think that Austen had decided Edmund and Fanny would end up together at the beginning, and when the story just wouldn't make it happen naturally, she applied a sledgehammer to the plot to make it happen that involved a number of parties acting out of character."
"That's... not great."
"Neither is the epilogue. Austen skims over the fact it takes Edmund a long time to get over me, falls in love with Fanny, and then marries her. Oh, and her uncle decides that she's his favourite daughter after all by taking out Julia by the expediant of making her elope off with someone too, Mr Yates. That little drama only gets about two paragraphs, and again is completely ridiculous. I don't think she even liked him that much, but he's about the only male character mentioned earlier that she could run off with that wasn't the aged Admiral or Fanny's sainted naval cousin William Price. It's like Shelob making it onto the top five hot females of Middle Earth simply by existing."
"Ah."
Mary snorts inelegantly. "I tell you, this one'll never be a classic. It's not a patch on Pride and Prejudice."
hopeful
accomplished
guilty
thoughtful
dorky