Chapter Ten
Mr Graves
He came earlier than usual on a Tuesday, before the worst of the heat had settled over the camp, and found Jane in the small courtyard seeing to the marketing accounts, a task she had come to prefer doing outdoors where there was at least the illusion of a breeze, and he stood a moment in the gateway watching her work before she noticed him there.
“You look very serious over a column of figures, Miss Bennet.”
“Amália has been buying oranges from a man who charges her considerably more than his neighbour three stalls down, and I am attempting to work out whether it is honest confusion on her part or something rather less honest on his, before I say anything to either of them that I cannot properly account for.”
“That is a very careful sort of justice you are dispensing.”
“I find careful justice is generally the only sort worth dispensing,” Jane said, setting down her pen, “though I own it is a great deal more tiring than the careless kind.”
He sat down across from her at the small table, uninvited but not unwelcome, and there was something in his manner that morning, a particular deliberateness, that told her, before he had said very much of anything, that he had come with more purpose than the ordinary social call generally carried.
“I have brought you something,” he said, and produced from his coat a small package, wrapped in paper that had plainly travelled some distance to get here, and set it on the table between them.
“Sweetmeats. There is a shop in Lisbon proper, run by a Frenchwoman who has somehow contrived to keep her trade running through every change of occupation the city has suffered these ten years, and I confess I have never yet worked out how she manages it, but her sugared almonds are worth the working out regardless.”
Jane opened the package and found, indeed, a quantity of almonds done up in sugar, and thanked him properly, and offered him one, which he declined, watching her instead with an attention that made her, for the first time in their acquaintance, faintly uncertain of her own footing.
“You have been very good to me these past weeks, Mr Graves,” she said, when the silence had gone on a moment longer than was comfortable. “Better than I think I have properly thanked you for.”
“I have been glad to be good to you. I want to say that plainly, before I say anything else, because I think you are the sort of person who prefers the plain saying of a thing to its being dressed up in more ceremony than it wants.” He turned his hat in his hands a moment, a small nervous gesture she had not seen in him before.
“I have thought a good deal, these past weeks, about what I mean to say to you, and I find I have not managed to think my way to anything cleverer than the truth of it, which is that I have come to admire you a very great deal, Miss Bennet, more than I have admired any woman in some years, and I find I would like, very much, to know whether that admiration might in time be returned.”
Jane sat very still. She had known, in some part of herself she had not troubled to examine too closely, that this conversation was coming, had known it perhaps since the first evening in London when he had watched her across a dinner table with a particular steady attention, but knowing a thing was coming and having it arrive were, she found, two rather different experiences.
“I am very sensible of the honour, Mr Graves.”
“That is the sort of answer a lady gives when she means to say no,” he said, not unkindly, watching her face with the same careful attention he brought to most things. “I have had a good deal of practice reading people, in my trade, and I think I read that correctly.”
“I do not wish to hurt you.”
“You will not hurt me by being honest with me. You would hurt me a good deal more by pretending to a feeling you do not have, out of some notion that pretending would be kinder, and then having me discover the pretence some months hence when it was a good deal harder for either of us to undo. I would rather have the truth now, however plainly it comes.”
Jane looked at him a long moment, this steady, careful, genuinely kind man who had done nothing whatever to deserve anything less than complete honesty from her, and found that she owed him exactly what he had asked for.
“I like you very much, Mr Graves. I like your company and your conversation and I have been glad, these past weeks, of your friendship in a country where I had very few friends of my own choosing. But I do not think I could ever come to feel for you the thing you are asking whether I might feel, and I think you deserve to know that plainly, now, rather than have me allow you to hope for something I cannot in honesty promise.”
He was quiet a moment, and something moved across his face that he mastered quickly, a man long practised, she understood, at mastering his own face for a living.
“May I ask,” he said, carefully, “whether there is a particular reason, or only the ordinary reason, that a heart does not always choose where a sensible woman might wish it to choose.”
“I do not think I owe you the particular reason, if there is one, Mr Graves, and I hope you will not press me for it.”
“I will not press you.” He smiled, a small, rueful thing, entirely without bitterness so far as Jane could see.
“I confess I had rather guessed at the particular reason some weeks since, watching you at Falmouth, though I will say no more of it than that, since it is not mine to say and I think you would rather I did not.”
Jane felt her colour rise and did not trust herself to answer that directly.
“I hope,” she said instead, “that this need not be the end of our friendship.”
“It need not be, so far as I am concerned, though I will own I may want a little time before I can be easy in your company again exactly as I was. That is not a reproach, Miss Bennet. It is only the ordinary cost of these things, and I would rather pay it honestly than pretend it costs nothing.” He stood, and bowed over her hand with rather more formality than he generally used, and held it a moment.
“I wish you very happy, whatever comes of it. I mean that entirely, and I hope you will believe me when I say it.”
“I do believe you.”
He left shortly after, and Jane sat alone in the courtyard for some time with the sugared almonds untouched on the table beside her, turning over the conversation and finding, beneath the discomfort of it, a curious steadiness, the particular clean feeling of having done a difficult thing honestly rather than having avoided it out of kindness that would only have cost more in the end.
?∞?
She told Prudence that evening, finding her aunt alone in the small sitting room with her own correspondence, and Prudence listened without interrupting, in the way she had of listening to things that mattered, and when Jane had finished said only,
“You did right to be honest with him. I have known women who could not manage it, who let a man go on hoping for months out of simple cowardice, and it never once made the eventual pain smaller, only longer in the making.”
She set down her letter.
“Andrew is a good man. He will mind it a while and then he will not, because that is generally the way of these things, and I do not think you need trouble yourself further over it beyond the ordinary kindness of not making it worse than it need be.”
“He guessed something,” Jane said, “about the reason.”
“Did he.” Prudence did not look up from her correspondence, though something in her voice suggested she was rather less surprised by this than she might have pretended to be.
“Andrew has always had a good eye for what is happening in a room, rather than what is merely said aloud in it. It is rather useful, in his particular trade.”
Jane did not press her aunt to say more, understanding, by now, the particular shape of the things Prudence would and would not discuss even with her, and went up to bed that night with the conversation still sitting somewhere in her chest, not painful exactly, but weighted, the way any true thing honestly done tends to sit for a while before it settles properly into place.