Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters

Chapter One

The family of Dashwood had been settled in Sussex since before the Alteration, when the waters of the world grew cold and hateful to the sons of man, and darkness moved on the face of the deep.

The Dashwood estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park, in the dead centre of their property, set back from the shoreline several hundred yards and ringed by torches.

The late owner of this estate was a single man, who lived to a very advanced age, and who for many years of his life had a constant companion and housekeeper in his sister. Her death came as a surprise, ten years before his own; she was beating laundry upon a rock that revealed itself to be the camouflaged exoskeleton of an overgrown crustacean, a striated hermit crab the size of a German shepherd. The enraged creature affixed itself to her face with a predictably unfortunate effect. As she rolled helplessly in the mud and sand, the crab mauled her most thoroughly, suffocating her mouth and nasal passages with its mucocutaneous undercarriage. Her death caused a great change in the elderly Mr. Dashwood’s home. To supply her loss, the old man invited and received into his house the family of his nephew Mr. Henry Dashwood, the legal inheritor of the Norland estate, and the person to whom he intended to bequeath it.

By a former marriage, Henry had one son, John; by his present lady, three daughters. The son, a steady, respectable young man, was amply provided for by the fortune of his mother. The succession to the Norland estate, therefore, was not so really important to John as to his half sisters; for their mother had nothing, and their fortune would thus depend upon their father’s inheriting the old gentleman’s property, so it could one day come to them.

The old gentleman died; his will was read, and like almost every other will, gave as much disappointment as pleasure. He was neither so unjust, nor so ungrateful, as to leave his estate from his nephew-but Mr. Dashwood had wished for it more for the sake of his wife and daughters than for himself or his son-and to John alone it was secured! The three girls were left with a mere thousand pounds a-piece.

Henry Dashwood’s disappointment was at first severe; but his temper was cheerful and sanguine, and his thoughts soon turned to a longheld dream of noble adventure. The source of the Alteration was unknown and unknowable, but Mr. Dashwood held an eccentric theory: that there was discoverable, in some distant corner of the globe, the headwaters of a noxious stream that fed a virulent flow into every sea, every lake and estuary, poisoning the very well of the world. It was this insalubrious stream (went Henry Dashwood’s hypothesis),which had affected the Alteration; which had turned the creatures of the ocean against the people of the earth; which made even the tiniest darting minnow and the gentlest dolphin into aggressive, blood-thirsty predators, hardened and hateful towards our bipedal race; which had given foul birth to whole new races of man-hating, shape-shifting ocean creatures, sirens and sea witches and mermaids and mermen; which rendered the oceans of the world naught but great burbling salt-cauldrons of death. It was Mr. Dashwood’s resolution to join the ranks of those brave souls who had fought and navigated their way beyond England’s coastal waters in search of those headwaters and that dread source, to discover a method to dam its feculent flow.

Alas! A quarter mile off the coast of Sussex, Mr. Dashwood was eaten by a hammerhead shark. Such was clear from the distinctive shape of the bite marks and the severity of his injuries, when he washed up on the shore. The cruel beast had torn off his right hand at the wrist, consumed the greater portion of his left leg and the right in its entirety, and gouged a ragged V-shaped section from Mr. Dashwood’s torso.

His son, present wife, and three daughters stood in stunned desolation over the remains of Mr. Dashwood’s body; purpled and rockbattered upon the midnight sand, bleeding extravagantly from numerous gashes-but unaccountably still living. As his weeping relations watched, astonished, the dying man clutched a bit of flotsam in his remaining hand and scrawled a message in the muddy shore; with enormous effort he gestured with his head for his son, John, to crouch and read it. In this final tragic epistle, Mr. Dashwood recommended, with all the strength and urgency his injuries could command, the financial well-being of his stepmother and half sisters, who had been so poorly treated in the old gentleman’s will. Mr. John Dashwood had not the strong feelings of the rest of the family; but he was affected by a recommendation of such a nature at such a time, and he promised to do everything in his power to make them comfortable. And then the tide swelled, and carried away the words scrawled in the sand, as well as the final breath of Henry Dashwood.

Mr. John Dashwood had then leisure to consider how much there might prudently be in his power to do for his half sisters. He was not an ill-disposed young man, unless to be rather cold hearted and rather selfish is to be ill-disposed: but he was, in general, well respected. Had he married a more amiable woman, he might have been made still more respectable than he was. But Mrs. John Dashwood was a strong caricature of himself-more narrow-minded and selfish.

When he gave his promise to his father, he meditated within himself to increase the fortunes of his half sisters by the present of a thousand pounds a-piece. The prospect of his own inheritance warmed his heart and made him feel capable of generosity. Yes! He would give them three thousand pounds: It would be liberal and handsome! It would be enough to make them completely easy, and offer to each the prospect of making a home at a decent elevation.

No sooner was what remained of Henry Dashwood arranged in some semblance of a human shape and buried, and the funeral over, than Mrs. John Dashwood arrived at Norland Park without warning, with her child and their attendants. No one could dispute her right to come; the house with its elaborate wrought-iron fencing and retinue of eagle-eyed harpoonsmen was her husband’s from the moment of his father’s decease. But the indelicacy of her conduct, to a woman in Mrs. Dashwood’s freshly widowed situation, was highly unpleasing. Mrs. John Dashwood had never been a favourite with any of her husband’s family; but she had never before had the opportunity of showing them with how little attention to the comfort of other people she could act when occasion required it.

“It is plain that your relations have an unfortunate propensity for drawing the unwelcome attentions of Hateful Mother Ocean,” she muttered darkly to her husband shortly after her arrival, “If She intends to claim them, let Her do it far from where my child is at play.”

So acutely did the newly widowed Mrs. Dashwood feel this ungracious behaviour that, on the arrival of her daughter-in-law, she would have quitted the house for ever-had not the entreaty of her eldest girl induced her first to reflect on the propriety of going and second on the sadness of taking leave before an armored consort could be assembled to protect them on their journey.

Elinor, this eldest daughter, possessed a strength of understanding which qualified her, though only nineteen, to be the counselor of her mother. She had an excellent heart, a broad back, and sturdy calf muscles, and she was admired by her sisters and all who knew her as a masterful driftwood whittler. Elinor was studious, having early on intuited that survival depended on understanding; she sat up nights poring over vast tomes, memorizing the species and genus of every fish and marine mammal, learning to heart their speeds and points of vulnerability, and which bore spiny exoskeletons, which bore fangs, and which tusks.

Elinor’s feelings were strong, but she knew how to govern them. It was a knowledge which her mother had yet to learn, and which one of her sisters had resolved never to be taught. Marianne’s abilities were, in many respects, quite equal to Elinor’s. She was as nearly powerful a swimmer, with a remarkable lung capacity; she was sensible and clever, but eager in everything. Her sorrows, her joys, could have no moderation. She was generous, amiable, interesting; she was everything but prudent. She spoke sighingly of the cruel creatures of the water, even the one that had so recently savaged her father, lending them such flowery appellations as “Our Begilled Tormentors” or “the Unfathomable Ones,” and pondering over their terrible and impenetrable secrets.

Margaret, the youngest sister, was a good-humoured, well-disposed girl, but one with a propensity-as befit her tender years more so than the delicate nature of their situation in a coastal country-to go dancing through rainstorms and splashing in puddles. Again and again Elinor warned her from such childish enthusiasms.

“In the water lies danger, Margaret,” she would say, gravely shaking her head and staring her mischievous sister in the eye. “In the water, only doom.”