Chapter Five
Orders
The letter came on a Tuesday, brought in by the General’s own man rather than the usual post, and Jane knew before a word was said that it was not an ordinary letter, because her uncle read it standing at the sideboard rather than sitting, and read it twice, and his face gave nothing away in the reading, and it was only when he sighed at last and turned toward them that she felt the first small twist of worry.
“Well,” he said, folding it once and setting it down beside his plate with a care that seemed at odds with how little regard he appeared to be giving it. “There it is, then. We are for Portugal.”
Prudence did not ask when, or how soon, or any of the questions Jane’s mother would have asked at considerable volume. She looked at her husband a moment, and something passed between them that needed no words at all, and then she rose from the table and said,
“I shall want the trunks down from the box room,” and was gone from the room before Jane had properly understood what had been decided.
“She has done this eleven times,” the General said, watching his wife go with an expression Jane could not entirely read, fondness and something graver mixed together.
“I daresay she could pack the whole house inside two days if I asked it of her, and be entirely composed about it, and only cry once everything is safely stowed and there is nothing further to be usefully done, which is her particular way of managing these things, and I have learned not to interrupt her at it.”
“When do you go, Uncle?”
“Within the fortnight, I should think, once the transports are properly assembled. Wellesley’s expedition has been some weeks in the preparing and I am ordered to join it at Cork.
” He looked at her then, and something in his manner changed, became more careful, the way a man’s manner changes when he is about to say something he has been turning over for a while and has not quite settled how to begin.
“Which brings me to a matter I must put to you directly, Jane, and I would rather put it plainly than dress it up in anything softer, because I think you are owed the plain truth of it and nothing less.”
She waited.
“You may not wish to hear this put so bluntly, but I find I have never been a man for putting things any other way, so you will forgive me if it comes out rather harder than a gentler man might manage it. Prudence and I are going to a war. I do not say this to frighten you, though I will not pretend there is nothing in it that ought to give a sensible person pause. I say it because you must choose, and choose within the week, what is to become of you while we are gone, and I would rather you choose it with your eyes properly open than have you discover the truth of it once you are three weeks out to sea and there is no going back.”
“I do not understand, Uncle. Am I not to come with you?”
“That,” said the General, “is precisely the choice I am putting to you. Your aunt goes. She has always gone, in five and twenty years of marriage, and I have long since given up any notion of persuading her otherwise, nor would I wish to, for she is a better campaigner in her own way than half the officers under my command. But you are not my wife, Jane, you are my niece, and I have no right whatever to carry you into danger simply because it is convenient to have you with us, and I will not do it without your having chosen it entirely for yourself, knowing the whole of what it means.”
Prudence came back into the room then, with a list already half written in her hand, and sat down beside Jane without any preamble.
“He has told you, then. Good. I would rather he told it to you plainly than have me soften it, for softening it would be a kind of lie, and I do not care to lie to you about this.” She set the list aside.
“You have another road open to you, and I want you to know it properly before you decide anything. Your uncle Gardiner is a sensible, good man, and his wife is sensible and good besides, and they have written already to say they are returning home by the end of the week, and they have offered you a home in Gracechurch Street, for as long as you should want one, should you prefer it. Quite a bit safer and more comfortable than being at war, and you would want for nothing there. It is a perfectly respectable thing to choose, and I will think no less of you whatever you decide.”
“You must understand what the other choice actually is,” the General said, “before you weigh it against the first. It is not an adventure, Jane, whatever your younger sisters might imagine of it from a distance. Bad water, more often than not. Food that does not keep, in heat that does not help it keep any better. Disease that carries off more men in a single season than the French manage to carry off in a year of fighting, and I do not say that to alarm you needlessly, I say it because it is simply the truth, and any officer who tells you otherwise is either a fool or has never actually served.”
There will be houses that are not your own,' Prudence went on,
“There will be houses that are not your own,” Prudence went on, “packed up and left behind at a moment’s notice, and sometimes nothing better than a tent when a house cannot be had.
There will be evenings when a man you know rides out in the morning and you will not know whether he will come back alive, and you must learn to deal with every loss, however many times it happens.
I will not pretend it is easy, there will be no relaxing, and your life may even be in danger occasionally. War is not glamorous by any means.”
Jane sat with her hands folded in her lap and found she was not, in that moment, thinking of danger at all, but of Gracechurch Street, which she could see very clearly in her mind, the comfortable rooms and her aunt Gardiner’s kind, unhurried manner and her uncle’s quiet good sense, a house where nothing difficult would ever be asked of her again, where she would be safe and warm and entirely, gently, forever unnecessary.
“I should like the night to think on it,” she said, “if that is not asking too much given the time you have.”
“It is not asking too much at all,” said the General. “Take the night. Take two, if you need them, Jane it is a decision not to be made lightly.”
She sat up a long while after the candle was meant to be out, turning it over in her mind exactly as she had told them she would.
Gracechurch Street was not a small thing to set aside.
She had spent years being useful to parents who never once thanked her properly for it, and here was an offer of a life in which nothing at all would be required of her, a life of being looked after rather than looking after, and she found, examining herself honestly by the last inch of candle, that some small tired part of her wanted very much to take it, simply for the rest of it.
She thought of her aunt saying it does not grow easy, it only grows familiar and found that she trusted a woman who told her the truth rather more than she would ever trust a room full of comfortable people determined to protect her from knowing anything difficult at all.
Toward two in the morning she stopped thinking it over.
She did not feel brave, exactly, lying there in the dark with the candle finally guttered out.
She felt only certain, in the same plain, unarguable way she had felt certain about Sir Walter three weeks before, and she held on to the certainty and slept.
In the morning she went down and found her aunt already at the breakfast table with the list from the day before spread out before her, and said, before either of them had said anything else at all,
“I should like to come with you, Aunt, if you will still have me.”
Prudence looked at her a long moment, and did not smile exactly, though something in her face eased considerably, and reached across the table and took Jane’s hand.
“Then eat your breakfast,” she said, “because I have a great deal for you to do this morning, and precious little time to do it in, and if you are going to Portugal with us you had better learn straightaway that I do not believe in idle hands the day before a departure,” and pushed the list across the table, and that, Jane understood, was the whole of her aunt’s welcome, and found she would not have wanted it delivered any other way.