Chapter Eight
Lisbon
They did not go into Lisbon at once, the town itself being still held by the French when the convoy stood off the coast, and Jane learned, in the days that followed, that the whole of the fleet’s business lay some way to the north, at a wide sandy bay the sailors called Mondego, where the disembarkation was to begin.
It was nothing like arriving anywhere Jane had imagined arriving.
There was no quay, no proper harbour at all, only open beach with a heavy surf running, and the soldiers were put ashore in flat boats that pulled in through the breakers with a good deal of shouting and no little danger, several boats overturning in the process, though by good fortune, the General told her afterward, with only the loss of some baggage and no lives that he had heard of.
Jane and Prudence went ashore two days later, once enough of the business was settled that women might safely be landed, and Jane’s first sight of Portugal at close quarters was not a city at all but a great sprawling camp risen up out of dry brown country, tents in their hundreds stretching away along the coast, and everywhere the particular chaos of an army only newly landed, wagons stuck fast in soft sand, mules braying, men shouting orders that other men were only half attending to.
“It is always like this at the start,” Prudence said, watching the scene with the calm of long familiarity while Jane stood rather overwhelmed beside her.
“It will settle. It always settles, eventually, into something that at least resembles order, though I will grant you it does not look much like order today.”
They were to lodge, for the present, in a house some way back from the beach that the General’s people had commandeered from a Portuguese family who had, Prudence explained, been paid a fair rent for the inconvenience and had gone to stay with relations further inland until the business of the war had passed them by.
It was a plain, whitewashed house with a courtyard and a well, and it smelled, when Jane first stepped inside it, of some herb she did not recognise and of dust, and very little else, the family having taken most of their own goods with them.
“We shall make it comfortable,” Prudence said, looking about the bare rooms with the same brisk assessment she brought to everything, “though I will not pretend to you it will feel like home, because it will not, and there is no use pretending otherwise. It will feel like a place we are staying, and then one day we shall pack it up again and go somewhere else, and that is simply the shape of this life, and you had better make your peace with it now rather than later.”
Jane found, within a few days, that she was making her peace with it rather more easily than she had expected.
There was a great deal to do, linens to be found and beds to be made up and a cook to be engaged from among the local people, a task Prudence undertook with a fluency in halting Portuguese that surprised Jane considerably, until her aunt admitted she had picked up scraps of a dozen languages over twenty years of following the drum and understood perhaps one word in three of what she actually said, and relied a good deal on gesture to make up the rest.
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The heat was unlike anything Jane had known.
It came down at midday with a weight that made the whole camp go quiet, men seeking whatever shade could be found, and Jane learned quickly to keep to the house in those hours and save her walking for the cooler edges of the morning and evening, when the light went gold over the dry hills and the air carried, faintly, the smell of the sea.
She wrote to her father in her first week ashore, a long letter that tried, and largely failed, she felt, to convey any true sense of what she had seen, the beach and the surf and the tents stretching away in their hundreds, and found herself, rereading it before she sealed it, wishing she had her father’s gift for saying a great deal in very few words, rather than her own tendency to reach for description and find it always somehow smaller than the thing itself.
Elizabeth’s answering letter, when it came some weeks later, having chased the convoy halfway round the Portuguese coast before catching up with them, was four pages of Hertfordshire news, their mother’s health, which had improved considerably once she had discovered that a general’s wife could be spoken of at Meryton assemblies with a certain particular relish, and Kitty’s new bonnet, and a description of the Norris farm’s roof, still leaking, which Elizabeth reported having gone to see about herself, with a briskness that made Jane smile and feel, at the same time, a small pang of guilt for the burden she had left behind her.
Jane folded that letter away with more care than she generally gave her correspondence, and thought, not for the first time, that she had been fortunate beyond her deserving in the sister she had been given.
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She met, in those first weeks, a good many of the other women who had come out with the army, wives of officers chiefly, some of whom had done this before, as Prudence had, and bore the whole business with a seasoned calm that Jane found she admired greatly and did not yet share, and others newer to it, young women not much older than herself, married in haste before their husbands sailed and now finding themselves, as Jane was finding herself, in a country and a climate and a manner of living entirely unlike anything their girlhoods had prepared them for.
There was a Mrs Carey, wife to a captain in Fitzwilliam’s own regiment, a cheerful practical woman of perhaps five and twenty who had already buried one infant on campaign and spoke of it, when the subject arose, with a plainness that startled Jane at first and that she came, over time, to understand as its own kind of strength, the strength of a person who had found there was no profit in pretending grief away and had chosen instead simply to carry it forward, alongside everything else that wanted carrying.
“You will find your feet,” Mrs Carey told her, one hot afternoon when several of the women had gathered in the shade of the courtyard with their sewing, escaping the worst of the midday sun.
“Everybody says the same in the first month, that they cannot conceive how they shall manage, and then a season passes and they find they have managed after all, without quite noticing the managing happen. It is not bravery, whatever people say of it at home. It is only that a person does what the day requires, and then the next day requires something else, and eventually enough days have gone by that you look back and find you have become someone rather more capable than the girl who landed on that beach.”
Jane thought of that remark a good deal in the weeks that followed, turning it over the way she turned over most things that struck her as true, and found that she watched herself, sometimes, with a kind of curiosity, as though observing from a small distance the particular ways in which Mrs Carey’s prophecy was proving itself out.
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Fitzwilliam she saw with some regularity, the General’s household and the officers of his brigade being much thrown together in the ordinary business of the camp, dinners and the passing of messages and the general small courtesies that kept the whole tangled machinery of an army moving, and she found that the ease that had grown between them at Falmouth had not diminished with the change of country, but had, if anything, deepened, settling into something that felt, to Jane, less like the excitement of a new acquaintance and more like the comfort of an old one, though she could not have said when precisely the change had happened.
Mr Graves called also, having business of his own in the camp that Jane did not fully understand and did not press him on, some matter of supplies, he told her once, when she asked, that occupied him rather more than his ordinary trade in Lisbon itself, though he said it lightly and moved the conversation on before she had thought to wonder at it further.
It was Mr Graves, in fact, who brought her, in her third week ashore, the first real understanding of what lay ahead, the army’s business being, as he explained it over a dinner at which the General was much occupied discussing matters with his own officers, to move south and east from the coast, toward wherever the French forces under General Junot could be brought to a proper engagement, since Lisbon itself would not be won by sitting on a beach admiring it.
“There will be fighting, then,” Jane said, “and soon.”
“There will,” Graves agreed, without any drama in the saying of it, which Jane found she was grateful for.
“I will not pretend to you it is otherwise, Miss Bennet, for I think you are not the sort of person who wants pretending to, and I have come to know you well enough these past weeks to be confident of that judgment. There will be fighting, and soon, and it will not be pleasant, and I think the General means to keep his household somewhere within reach of it, close enough to be of use should use be wanted, and far enough, one hopes, to remain reasonably safe.”
Jane looked across the room to where Fitzwilliam stood in close conversation with two other officers, his face serious in a way she had not often seen it, and felt, for the first time since she had made her choice in that London breakfast room, the full weight of what she had actually chosen settle properly into her chest, not as regret, but as something graver and more real than anything the choosing itself had contained.