Chapter Four
London
The house in London was tall and narrow and full of a great many things Jane had never seen before, maps chiefly, framed and hung in the hall and up the staircase, of places whose names she could not have said aloud with any confidence, and a quantity of curiosities from foreign postings arranged on shelves without any apparent scheme beyond her aunt having liked the look of them.
It smelled of beeswax and, faintly, of pipe smoke that nobody troubled to apologise for, and it was quieter than Longbourn had ever once been.
She had a room at the top of the house with a window that looked over the mews, and on her first morning she woke and lay a long while simply relaxing, letting her mind wander.
There were no accounts waiting on the little desk downstairs that only she and Elizabeth had ever troubled to keep.
No longer any need to worry over the upkeep and running of Longbourn, and she breathed a small sigh of relief at the thought of it.
She got up eventually because the light had gone properly bright and she was hungry, and found her aunt already at breakfast with a newspaper folded beside her plate, she smiled as Jane sat down.
“You slept well,” said Prudence, by way of greeting, in the tone of someone confirming a fact rather than asking a question.
“I thought you might not, the first night in a strange bed, but you have the look of a person who slept properly, which I am very glad to see. Sit down and eat something. Edmund has gone out already, he is forever going out to see about something or other, and I have the whole of the morning to myself, which I intend to spend showing you a little of the city if you are not too tired for it.”
Jane was not too tired for it, and found, over the following fortnight, that her aunt’s idea of showing her the city was a great deal less exhausting and a great deal more interesting than anything her mother would have arranged.
There were no calls made purely for the sake of being seen to have made them.
There was a bookshop near Bond Street where Prudence was evidently known, and spent above an hour turning over volumes with a concentration Jane’s mother would have called eccentric in a lady of any age, and a concert one evening that was not fashionable enough to require a great deal of dressing for, and a great many quiet mornings simply walking, her aunt pointing out this house or that with some story attached to it, told briefly and without any particular effort to impress.
It was unfortunate, Jane thought, that the Gardiners should be away, since she could not call on them as she normally would have liked.
“You are very good to me, Aunt,” Jane said one such morning, when they had stopped to rest a moment in the Park, “and I do not think I have properly thanked you for any of it.”
“You have thanked me a dozen times already, which is eleven more than was required.” Prudence looked at her sideways.
“I will tell you something, since we are being frank with one another this morning. I did not offer to have you because I felt sorry for you, though I am sorry for the situation you were in, and I did not offer because your father asked me to, though he did ask, very properly. I offered because Edmund and I rattle about that house like two peas in a very large tin, and I had rather a lively hope that a niece of mine, being my brother’s daughter, might turn out to be good company, and I find my hope was entirely justified, and that is the whole of my reason, and I will thank you not to go about feeling grateful at me for it, because gratitude of that particular flavour is a very tiring thing to be on the receiving end of. ”
Jane laughed, properly, and found she meant it, and her aunt looked pleased in the quiet way she had of being pleased, which showed itself mostly in the corners of her eyes rather than anywhere a stranger might have noticed it.
Letters came from Longbourn within the week, Elizabeth’s first, four crossed pages that told Jane a great deal about Kitty’s new bonnet and Lydia’s opinion of it and rather less, though it was there if one read carefully, about their mother’s return from Meryton and the scene that had followed the discovery of Jane’s absence.
Mrs Bennet had been, by Elizabeth’s account, in alternating states of fury and collapse for the better part of two days, convinced by turns that Jane had ruined them all and that she herself would shortly die of the shock of it, and had been at last persuaded into a more settled misery by their father’s calm insistence that Jane was safely and respectably placed with his own sister, a general’s wife, which was rather better than Sir Walter Ashby in her mother’s eyes once she had turned the phrase general’s wife over a sufficient number of times.
Though it did little to soften Mrs Bennet completely, for she disliked Prudence with a passion, and Prudence, it must be said, disliked her every bit as much, perhaps more.
Mr Bennet’s own letter was shorter, and said less, and told her more, in the way his letters always did.
He hoped she was comfortable. He hoped his sister was not working her too hard at being entertained, since Prudence had never in her life understood that other people required rest from entertainment the way she did not.
He mentioned, at the very end, almost as an afterthought, that Sir Walter Ashby had called twice since her departure and been told both times that Miss Bennet was from home, and had gone away on the second occasion looking, in Hill’s private estimation, considerably put out, and Mr Bennet did not think Miss Bennet need trouble herself unduly over Sir Walter Ashby’s feelings on the matter.
Jane read this last part twice, and found she felt very little on Sir Walter’s account beyond a distant relief that the ocean, or at least the width of England, now stood between them, and wrote back to her father that she was quite well, and meant it more thoroughly than she had meant almost anything she had written to Longbourn in years.
There was a dinner in her third week, small by London standards though it seemed a great gathering to Jane, General Blythe having invited some half dozen men from his own circle along with their wives, and it was there she first properly met Major Richard Fitzwilliam, though she had been told his name once already in passing and had not thought much about it.
He arrived somewhat after the others, apologised briefly and without excessive ceremony for the delay, and was seated, by whatever accident of arrangement the table had fallen into, nearly opposite her.
He was not, she thought, a particularly handsome man, not in the way the neighbourhood at home would have judged handsomeness, being of no more than middling height and with a face too irregular in its features to be called strictly fine, but there was something easy and direct in his manner that she found herself noticing more than she noticed his face at all.
He spent the better part of the first two courses talking with the General about matters Jane could not follow, troop movements and supply and names of places she had never heard, and she found, rather to her own surprise, that she was listening with genuine interest, not because she understood a great deal of it, but because he spoke of it plainly, without the self-importance she had heard in Sir Walter’s account of his drains, as though the subject mattered a good deal more to him than his own cleverness in discussing it did.
It was over the second remove that he turned to her at last and asked, with no great ceremony, what she made of London.
“I have not seen enough of it yet to have formed a proper opinion,” she said, “though what I have seen I like a great deal better than I expected to.”
“That is the most honest answer I have had to that question in years of asking it,” he said, and something in the way he said it, a small dry amusement entirely without unkindness, made her laugh before she had quite decided to.
“Most people say they find it delightful, or dreadfully fatiguing, and either answer generally means they have not thought about it at all,” he went on. “You have thought about it.”
“I have had rather more time to think, lately, than I am accustomed to.”
He did not ask what she meant by that, which she was grateful for, and the conversation moved instead to books, he having noticed, or perhaps only guessed, that she had spent part of the afternoon in her aunt’s favourite shop, and from books to what she had read as a girl, and from that to what he had read as a boy, which appeared to have consisted chiefly of things his tutors had disapproved of, and by the time the covers were drawn Jane found the evening had gone a great deal more quickly than she had expected it to.
Across the table, later, while the gentlemen sat over their wine, Prudence observed to nobody in particular that Major Fitzwilliam seemed in remarkably good spirits this evening, and received no answer from Jane beyond a slight colour that her aunt was too well bred, or too amused, to remark upon further.
There was also, that same evening, a Mr Andrew Graves, introduced to her as the General’s nephew by his first wife’s family, established some years now in Lisbon in trade, home briefly on business of his own before he sailed back.
He was perhaps thirty, well made and well spoken, with the particular composure of a man who had lived some years among strangers in a foreign country and learned not to be surprised by very much, and he was, Jane found, entirely pleasant company, attentive without being forward, and she liked him at once, in the easy, uncomplicated way one likes a person who asks nothing difficult of one.
It was only going up to bed that night that she found herself turning the evening over and noticing, with some private surprise, that liking a person easily and wanting particularly to remain in a room with them were, it seemed, two rather different things, and that she had spent the whole of dinner rather more aware of where Major Fitzwilliam was sitting than she had been aware of anything Mr Graves had actually said to her.