Chapter Nine
The Household
Within a month the camp itself had begun, exactly as Prudence had promised it would, to resolve into something that at least wore the appearance of order, streets of a sort worn between the rows of tents, a market of local people who had discovered, with the quickness of people accustomed to occupying armies, that money was to be made selling fruit and bread and small comforts to soldiers who had been at sea a good deal too long to be particular about the price.
The General’s household settled into its own rhythm alongside it.
Jane found she had a use in it almost from the first week, her aunt discovering, with evident satisfaction, that a niece who had kept accounts at Longbourn since she was fifteen was not a niece to be wasted on ornamental tasks alone, and within a fortnight Jane had taken over a good part of the household’s own accounting, the marketing money and the servants’ wages and the small constant business of keeping a house running in a country where nothing, from the currency to the calendar the local priests kept by, worked quite the way it worked at home.
“You have a very useful sort of mind,” Prudence told her, looking over a page of figures Jane had set right after the cook, a cheerful woman named Amália who spoke perhaps a dozen words of English, had made some error in the marketing that would otherwise have gone unnoticed for a week.
“I do not say that as the sort of compliment people pay a young woman when they can think of nothing prettier to say. I say it because it is true, and because I think you have not been told it nearly often enough.”
There were calls to be made and received, the officers’ wives keeping up, even here, something of the social business that would have governed their lives at home, though stripped of most of its ceremony, a call generally meaning no more than an hour’s sitting in whatever shade could be found, with tea if tea was to be had and something else if it was not.
Jane found she was good at this too, the years of managing Longbourn’s own small society having given her a fluency at easy conversation that served her rather better here, among strangers thrown together by circumstance, than it had ever served her at home among neighbours she had known her whole life.
Mr Graves called at the house with some regularity, and Jane noticed, without at first understanding quite what she was noticing, that his visits did not keep to any pattern she could easily account for.
He would come three days running and then be absent above a week, and when she asked him once, lightly, whether his trade kept him so occupied, he said only that Lisbon’s business was a demanding mistress and left it at that, in a tone that closed the subject rather more firmly than the words themselves quite accounted for.
She mentioned it once to her aunt, not from any particular suspicion, only from the ordinary curiosity of a person noting a pattern, and Prudence’s answer, when it came, was careful in a way that told Jane, without quite telling her anything, that there was more to the matter than she had been given.
“Andrew is useful to your uncle,” Prudence said, “in ways that are not entirely my business to explain, nor yours to ask after, if I am honest with you. I will say only this much, since I think you are owed something for your trouble in asking so gently rather than prying, which I have noticed you generally do. There are men in this war who fight it with a musket, and there are men who fight it in other ways, quieter ways, and Andrew is one of the second sort, and the less either of us says about it, even to each other, the safer he is likely to remain in the doing of it.”
Jane turned this over a good while afterward, and found it altered, somewhat, the ease with which she had come to regard Mr Graves’s company, not lessening her liking for him, but adding to it a small undercurrent of concern she had not felt before, the particular tenderness one feels for a person one has only just understood to be in more danger than they let show.
?∞?
Fitzwilliam, she saw perhaps twice a week, the ordinary duties of his position keeping him occupied a good deal of the time with matters Jane understood only in the vaguest outline, the moving of stores, the drilling of men, the endless correspondence that seemed to attach itself to an army even before it had properly begun to fight.
When he did come, generally to dine, or to walk with the General on some errand that brought him near enough to the house to call, Jane found she had begun, without quite deciding to, to arrange her own small errands so as to be somewhere he might reasonably encounter her, a fact she did not examine too closely and would have been embarrassed to have pointed out to her.
There was an evening, some five weeks after their landing, when he came to dine and stayed on afterward in the courtyard while the General and Prudence retired early, the day having been a long one, and Jane found herself alone with him for the better part of an hour under a sky gone deep and thick with stars in a way she had never seen at home, the air finally cool after the day’s heat, and the two of them talked, as they had fallen into talking, of nothing in particular and a great deal at once, books and Falmouth and his brother, whom he spoke of this time rather more freely than he had before, a man some years his senior who would inherit what there was to inherit and had, Fitzwilliam said, without any apparent bitterness in the saying of it, always been rather better suited to the business of inheriting than Fitzwilliam himself would have been, had the situation been reversed.
“You do not resent it,” Jane said, “being the younger.”
“I did, a little, when I was very young myself, in the way boys resent things before they properly understand what the resenting is worth. I do not now. I have made my own way of it, such as it is, and I find I would rather have made my own way than have the other sort of life handed to me without my having earned a scrap of it.” He looked at her a moment in the starlight, and there was something careful in the look, as though he were weighing whether to say more, and then, apparently, deciding against it.
“It is not a fashionable opinion. Most men in my situation would tell you otherwise.”
“I am not certain I count myself among people overly troubled by fashionable opinions,” Jane said, “having spent this last twelvemonth demonstrating as much rather thoroughly.”
He laughed at that, properly, and the careful look eased out of his face, and they went on talking of smaller things until Prudence’s voice came from within, gently reminding them both of the hour, and Jane went up to bed that night turning over, as she had begun rather often to do, the particular quality of an evening spent in company that asked nothing of her and gave, in return, considerably more than she had thought to look for.