At which point Edmund proceeded to relate a tale that took Fanny’s mind quite off her homesickness and her beloved siblings and family back home and fixed her attention firmly to the present spot, sitting as they were on the attic stairs.

“Mansfield Park,” spoke Edmund, “ is quite infested with all manner of Wonder. Some might not call it such, and some would call it Abomination, but I believe—firmly, with all my faith in the Lord’s will—that it is all here for a reason. To test me maybe, the depths of my moral character and veracity, my integrity and inner peace—”

“Pray, cousin, enough, speak!” cried Fanny, beginning to tremble somewhat, but trying to conceal any semblance of such unfortunate weakness or palsy, “tell me of this!”

“Indeed, tell it I must, else you will never understand the hoary depth of us, this house, or this family, Fanny. Now then—It started about five years ago, when I was rather younger than I am now—”

“Were you a suckling infant, cousin?” said Fanny, considering his present considerable youthfulness.

Edmund laughed. “No, not quite so young. It was then that my dear mother attended a series of exhibitions and lectures at the grand museum in London, presented by a visiting gentleman, a doctor of Egyptology or other some such, one Georg Ebers, and a team of his associates. They were deep in the process of Digging up all of Egypt, you know, and were responsible probably for more discoveries and more holes in the sandy landscape of that fair and sun-drenched distant land than anyone else in Europe or Asia or the Americas put together—or so it seemed. Mother was bewitched by Ancient Egypt, by the gold and the mystery and the ritual glamour, struck up a correspondence with the whole lot of them, and started acquiring mementoes of their Egyptian adventures: at first, discreetly, then with complete abandon and disregard for cost or normalcy—as you can see by the state of the large drawing room which now resembles the great temple at Karnak more than it does a British parlor.”

“I see,” said Fanny. “But—a Curse? Pray, continue.”

And Edmund did.

“At some point, Fanny, when various large boxes began to arrive by post on a daily basis, it seemed, and mother spent more time upstairs in the attics than she did grooming her pug, I took it upon myself to observe things closer, and this is what I learned—”

“How brave of you, cousin!”