Chapter Seven
The Crossing
They went out with the tide in the last hour of daylight, a convoy of transports and store ships with two frigates standing off to windward of them, and Jane stood at the rail as long as Prudence would let her and watched Falmouth go small and then smaller, the customs house and the chapel and the steep street where the chandler’s shop stood all folding themselves together into a single grey smudge against the hill, until at last there was nothing to be seen of England at all but the last low line of the coast, and then not even that.
She had expected to feel something great in that moment, grief perhaps, or fear, or some proper mixture of the two, and found instead that she felt chiefly tired, and a little cold, and that her stomach had already begun to make its opinion of the ship’s motion known to her in a manner that left very little room for grander feelings.
“It will get worse before it gets better,” said Prudence, not unkindly, taking her arm and turning her from the rail.
“Everybody says the same thing the first evening, that they cannot conceive how anybody manages a sea voyage, and everybody manages it regardless, because there is nothing else to be done. Come below. You will want to be lying down before it grows dark.”
Jane was very glad, within the hour, that she had been sent below in good time, for the small cabin she shared with her aunt, no larger than a good closet at Longbourn, began almost at once to describe a motion she had no name for and no defence against, and she spent the better part of the first night wretchedly, miserably ill, with Prudence sitting beside her in the dark holding a basin and saying very little, which Jane came to understand, once she was capable of understanding anything at all, was itself a kind of kindness, since there was nothing useful to be said and her aunt did not waste breath pretending otherwise.
?∞?
The sickness plagued her for four days.
She kept nothing down the first two, and very little the third, and lay in the narrow berth listening to the ship’s constant creaking and the tramp of feet on the deck above and the occasional distant shout of an order she could not make out, and thought, in the brief clear moments between one wave of misery and the next, that she had perhaps been a great fool to think herself equal to any of this.
On the fourth morning she woke to find the sickness had passed off, quite suddenly, the way Prudence had promised her it would, and lay for a while simply grateful for the plain fact of being able to lie still without the world tilting under her, before she found the strength to sit up and discover that her aunt, far from having been laid low herself, had spent the four days going about the ship with perfect composure, visiting the other officers’ wives, seeing to the General’s linen, and appearing, generally, entirely unaffected by a motion that had reduced her niece to something very near despair.
“You did not tell me you would not be ill,” Jane said, when she was strong enough to be a little indignant about it.
“I have crossed this stretch of water eleven times, Jane, and I was sick as a dog the first three of them, and I have simply, over time, become used to the motion that makes you sick. I do not think it is a virtue. I think it is only repetition, and I did not mention it because there seemed no kindness in telling a girl in the middle of her first crossing that it would one day cease to trouble her, when at that particular moment such a promise could have done her no earthly good at all.”
Jane found, dressing that morning with hands still not entirely steady, that she was glad to be told the truth of it even a few days late, rather than have been given false comfort at the time she could not have used it.
?∞?
The days that followed settled into a pattern she came, gradually, to understand as the ordinary shape of the voyage.
The convoy moved at the pace of its slowest ship, which meant it did not move very fast at all, and there was little to do beyond walk the deck when the weather allowed it and sit below with her needlework when it did not, and grow, slowly, accustomed to a world that had shrunk to the size of a single vessel surrounded on every side by grey water.
She saw a great deal, in those weeks, that she had not thought to see.
She had imagined, that a fleet carrying soldiers to a war would present some picture of order and purpose, and found instead a crowded, difficult, makeshift sort of existence that put her in mind, more than anything, of a very large and very uncomfortable house party that nobody had properly planned for.
The water, drawn fresh at Falmouth, went brackish within the first week and worse after, until it had to be doctored with vinegar before anybody could bring themselves to drink it, and even then, it tasted, Prudence said with the flat authority of long experience, of the cask it had been kept in rather more than of anything a person would choose to call water.
The meat, salted hard as wood, wanted soaking half a day before the cook could do anything useful with it, and the biscuit, when Jane first broke a piece of it open, proved to contain a small dark weevil that she stared at for a long moment before her aunt, without any particular ceremony, took the biscuit from her, knocked it twice against the table, and handed it back.
“You tap it out first,” Prudence said. “Everybody does. You will grow used to it.”
Jane was not certain, in the moment, that she would ever grow used to it, and found, some days later, that she had.
She saw, too, something of how the soldiers below decks lived, glimpsed rather than properly witnessed, for she had no business among the men and knew it, but even a glimpse was enough to unsettle the picture she had carried from home of a soldier’s life as something bright with scarlet coats and music.
The space allotted to each man was smaller than she would have believed possible, hammocks slung so close together that a man could not turn in his sleep without disturbing his neighbour, and the air below, when a hatch was opened for some purpose and she happened to be near it, came up thick and close and altogether unlike anything she had breathed before.
“It is not a pleasure excursion,” the General said one evening, finding her thoughtful after such a glimpse, and not unkindly.
“I have told you that already, and I will not pretend to you now that the telling of it and the seeing of it are the same thing, for they are not. You are seeing it now. I am glad of it, in a way, though I would not have wished it on you for the world. A person who has only heard a thing described understands a good deal less of it than a person who has stood near enough to smell it.”
?∞?
Fitzwilliam she saw less of than she might have expected, the ship’s arrangements keeping the officers largely to their own quarter of the vessel, and when she did see him it was generally at a distance, on deck, occupied with some duty she did not understand the particulars of, and she found she minded the distance rather more than she would have owned to anyone, even Prudence, even had Prudence asked, which her aunt, with what Jane privately suspected was considerable restraint, did not.
There was one evening, some ten days out, when the sea had gone unusually calm and the ship’s motion had eased enough that a small gathering was got up on deck after the officers’ dinner, and Jane found herself, by whatever accident arranged such things, standing near the rail with Fitzwilliam while the General and Prudence talked with the captain some distance off and Mr Graves, who had joined them at Falmouth and travelled in the same convoy, was engaged elsewhere.
“You have grown thin,” Fitzwilliam said, without much ceremony, looking at her properly for what she realised was the first time in above a week.
“I was very ill the first four days.”
“I heard as much. I am sorry for it, and sorrier still that there was nothing to be done. The Major’s berth is not so very far from the ladies’ quarter and I confess I listened for you rather more than I should admit to, the first night or two, and was glad when the sounds stopped, though I did not know then whether that meant you were better or worse. ”
“Better,” she said, “though it did not feel like better for a day or two afterward.”
He was quiet a moment, looking out at the water, which had gone the deep colour it took on toward evening, neither blue nor grey but something between the two that Jane had not troubled to notice before this voyage and now found she watched for.
“I did not think, before I saw a woman go through it,” he said, “how much courage a thing like this actually wants. I have crossed this water perhaps six times now and never once thought of it as requiring any courage at all, because it did not, for me, it was only unpleasant. I begin to think it is a different matter entirely for a person who did not choose a soldier’s life and has come to it anyway. ”
“I chose it,” Jane said. “I want you to know that I chose it. Nobody made me come.”
“I did not mean to suggest otherwise.”
“I know you did not. I only wished to say it plainly, because I have found, since we sailed, that people are inclined to speak of me as though I had been carried along by circumstance, my aunt’s circumstance, my uncle’s, and I find I mind that rather more than I expected to.
I chose it. I weighed it very carefully, and I chose it, and whatever comes of the choosing, I would rather it be understood as mine. ”
Something in his face changed, a small settling, as though she had answered a question he had not asked aloud.
“Then I stand corrected,” he said, “and I am glad to be corrected in this particular instance, gladder than I know quite how to say.”
They stood a while longer at the rail, not talking a great deal, and Jane found the silence entirely comfortable, in the way she had begun to notice silences with him generally were, and it was only when Prudence’s voice called her name from across the deck, wanting her opinion on some matter of the captain’s, that the evening properly ended, and Jane went to her aunt with the particular warmth still sitting in her chest that she had, by now, stopped trying very hard to name.
?∞?
The convoy made land at last on a grey morning some sixteen days out from Falmouth, the coast of Portugal rising up out of the haze first as a low uncertain shape that might have been cloud, and then, as the ships stood in closer, resolving itself into hills, brown and dry-looking even at this distance, quite unlike anything green and soft that Jane had left behind her.
She stood at the rail with Prudence beside her and felt the ship’s motion change under her feet as it came in toward the anchorage, and thought, watching the strange coast draw slowly nearer, that whatever she had imagined of this country in the quiet evenings at Longbourn, turning the name Portugal over as an abstraction, a word in her father’s newspaper, bore very little resemblance to the actual dry brown hills now rising in front of her, and that she had, in sixteen days at sea, already become someone rather different from the girl who had left England not knowing what any of it would look like at all.