Chapter Six
Falmouth
The coach took two and a half days to bring them down into Cornwall, changing horses so often that Jane lost count somewhere past Exeter, and she spent a good part of the journey with her forehead against the glass watching the country grow steadily stranger, the hedges lower, the lanes narrower, the sea appearing at last in grey glimpses between the hills that made her grandmother’s talk of oceans seem, for the first time, like something that might actually exist rather than a word in a geography lesson.
Falmouth itself surprised her. She had pictured, without quite meaning to, something grand, a proper harbour full of big proud ships riding at anchor, and found instead a working town smelling powerfully of tar and fish, its streets steep and narrow and crowded with sailors and soldiers and the wives and daughters of both, all of them, it seemed, waiting for the same thing.
“The wind,” said General Blythe, the first evening, when Jane asked why the transports had not simply sailed.
He said matter-of-factly. “It has sat in the west these three days and shows no inclination to shift. We may sail tomorrow. We may sail in a fortnight. Nobody in this town, from the harbourmaster down to the smallest boy who carries messages for a penny, would put money on which.”
They took rooms above a chandler’s shop on a street that ran down to the water, three rooms and a parlour that Prudence declared, on inspection, would do very well provided nobody minded the smell of tar coming up through the floorboards, which nobody appeared inclined to mind after the first evening, being too occupied with the general business of a port town suddenly full to bursting with people who had nowhere else to be.
There was, Jane discovered, a whole society of the stranded.
The officers’ wives who had done this before and knew exactly which inn served a decent dinner, and which was best avoided after dark.
Younger officers with nothing to do but walk the quay a dozen times a day, watching the weathervane above the customs house with an attention that would have looked, in any other circumstance, like devotion to something rather more interesting than a piece of ironwork.
A clergyman going out to a chaplaincy who had brought, by his own cheerful admission, entirely the wrong quantity of luggage and spent most mornings attempting to have some of it sent home again.
Major Fitzwilliam and Mr Graves were both among the stranded, and by the second day it had become, without anybody’s particular arranging, a settled thing that the four of them, the General, Prudence, Fitzwilliam and Graves, along with Jane, should dine together most evenings, since there was little enough else to occupy the hours and considerably worse company to be had elsewhere in the town.
?∞?
On the third morning the wind was still contrary, and Prudence, declaring that she had packing enough to occupy her without an audience, sent Jane out to walk, with the General’s man to accompany her as far as the decencies required and no further, since Prudence held the view that a girl of nineteen who had crossed half of England already was quite capable of walking the length of a harbour without being lost to it.
She found, coming round by the fish market, a small shop with books in the window, English books mixed in among French and Portuguese ones for the officers who thought it wise to arrive with some acquaintance with the language, and stood looking at them a while before she went in, more from a wish to be somewhere out of the wind than from any particular intention.
Fitzwilliam was already there.
He had a book open on the counter and was arguing, mildly, with the shopkeeper about the price of it, and looked up when the bell over the door sounded and, seeing her, abandoned the argument entirely, to the shopkeeper’s evident relief.
“Miss Bennet. I had not looked to find company in a bookshop at this hour.”
“I might say the same of you, sir, though I confess I am less surprised to find you here than I should be to find you anywhere else.”
“That is either a compliment or an accusation and I cannot for the life of me tell which.”
“Perhaps a little of both,” she said, and he laughed, a short surprised sound, as though she had said something he had not expected a lady to permit herself to say.
He showed her what he had been arguing over, a volume of Scott’s poetry that the shopkeeper wanted rather more for than Fitzwilliam thought it worth, and Jane, looking it over, said she had read it, or part of it, at her aunt’s insistence, and had found the second canto tedious beyond anything.
“Tedious,” he repeated, with the offence of a man whose favourite has been criticised. “The second canto is the whole reason for reading it at all.”
“Then we are very differently made, sir, for I found it the one part I was glad to have done with.”
They argued about it, in fact, for the better part of an hour, standing at the counter while the shopkeeper, who had long since given up any hope of selling the book to either of them, went about his other business and left them to it, and it was only when the light through the window had shifted a good deal that Jane realised how much of the morning had gone, and said she ought to be getting back before her aunt sent someone out looking for her.
“I shall walk with you as far as the chandler’s,” he said, “if you will permit it, since I find I have nothing better to do with the rest of my own morning and considerably worse company available should I go looking for it.”
She permitted it. They walked back along the quay with the wind still coming hard off the water, and talked, in the way people talk when a conversation has already found its own footing and does not require much managing, about Scott, and then about what each of them had read as children, which led, by a route Jane could not afterward entirely trace, to Fitzwilliam telling her something of his own family, an elder brother he plainly admired without quite being able to say so directly, a father he mentioned only in passing and with a carefulness that told her, without her being able to say exactly how, that the subject was not one he cared to linger in.
She did not ask. She had learned, growing up in a house where her own father’s silences meant a great deal more than his speeches, that a person’s reluctance to speak of a thing was itself a kind of information, and that pressing at it rarely got you anything but the reluctance shut more firmly away.
At the door of the chandler’s he bowed and said he hoped the wind would hold contrary a while longer, purely, he added, for the sake of the second canto’s reputation, which he intended to defend at length before she left England’s shores still thinking so poorly of it, and Jane went up the stairs smiling in a way she did not examine very closely.
?∞?
Mr Graves called that same afternoon, finding her alone in the parlour with her needlework while Prudence slept off a headache and the General was gone to the harbourmaster’s office to enquire, for the fourth time that week, after the wind.
He was, as always, easy and pleasant, full of small observations about the town that made her laugh, having evidently spent his own idle days making a study of its more absurd corners, the alderman who had built himself a house shaped like a ship, the innkeeper who kept a parrot that had learned, from some previous sailor guest, a quantity of language no respectable establishment ought properly to permit.
“You are very good company, Mr Graves,” she told him, meaning it entirely.
“I have had a great deal of practice at being good company in places I did not choose to be,” he said, with a small self-deprecating turn that she had come to recognise as characteristic of him, “which I find is rather easier than being good company somewhere one actually wishes to remain. There is less at stake in it.”
?∞?
The wind held contrary nine days in all.
By the end of them Jane had come to know the town rather better than she had ever expected to, the slant of light off the water in the late afternoon, the bell that rang from the customs house each time a vessel came in from the Packet service with letters, the small chapel down by the old quay where the General took her once on a Sunday and where the sermon, delivered by a very old clergyman with a voice like gravel, concerned itself chiefly with the virtue of patience, which struck Jane, glancing sideways at her uncle, as either a very great coincidence or the direct result of the harbourmaster’s having complained to the vicar about the general mood of the town.
On the ninth evening the wind turned in the night, and word went round the lodging houses before Jane was properly dressed the next morning, carried by the General’s man with an excitement he was trying and largely failing to keep out of his voice. They were to embark that afternoon.
She packed quickly, with Prudence directing the business in the brisk, unhurried way that told Jane her aunt had done this so many times the doing of it required no particular thought at all, and it was only once the trunk was shut and corded that Jane found a moment to stand at the window and look out at the harbour, where the ships that had sat at anchor for nine days idle were already showing signs of the bustle that meant they would not sit idle much longer.
She thought of the second canto, and the bookshop, and the hour that had gone by without her noticing it going, and found she was glad, in a way she had not quite expected to be glad, that the wind had held contrary as long as it had.