Chapter Eleven
The Eve of Roli?a
The order came on the fourteenth of August, carried through the camp by a great deal of sudden movement, men striking tents and wagons being loaded and a general quickening in the air that Jane had not seen since the confusion of the landing, and Prudence, hearing it from the General before anyone else in the household had properly understood what was happening, went very still for a moment in a way Jane had not seen her go still before.
“They march tomorrow,” Prudence said, when Jane found her in the small room they used for linens, standing with a folded shirt in her hands that she did not appear to be aware she was holding.
“The whole army, or the greater part of it. There is a French force some way inland and Sir Arthur means to bring them to battle before they can fall back on Lisbon in any better order than they are already in.”
“Major Fitzwilliam goes with them.”
“Yes, Fitzwilliam goes with them,” Prudence agreed, and set the shirt down at last, and looked at Jane with an expression that was trying, Jane could see, to settle itself into something steady before it was properly ready to.
“As does your uncle, and as do a good many men we have dined with these past weeks, and I will tell you now, since I think you are old enough to hear it and I would rather you hear it from me than discover it unprepared, that this is the part of the business I have never once found easier for the doing of it more than once.”
Jane did not know what to say to that, and found, after a moment, that nothing needed saying, and simply came and stood beside her aunt while the household went on being packed and readied around them.
?∞?
Fitzwilliam came that evening, later than his usual hour, and Jane understood, seeing him in the doorway still in his working dress rather than having changed for dinner, that he had come between duties rather than for the ordinary business of a call.
He was received formally, as the occasion seemed to want, the General shaking his hand and saying something low that Jane did not catch, and Prudence embracing him briefly and telling him, in a voice pitched for lightness that did not entirely succeed in being light, that she expected him back to argue with her niece about poetry again before the month was out, since she had grown rather fond of watching the two of them disagree about Scott over her own dinner table.
It was only afterward, when the General had drawn Prudence a little aside to discuss some final matter of the household’s own removal, that Fitzwilliam came to where Jane stood near the courtyard door, and the formality that had governed the rest of the evening eased somewhat between them, though it did not disappear entirely.
“I did not know how to say goodbye to you,” he said, without any of his usual ease. “I have been thinking it over most of the afternoon and have not managed to think my way to anything that seemed adequate to the saying.”
“You need not say anything adequate. I do not think there is such a thing, for an evening like this one.”
“No,” he agreed. “I do not think there is either.” He looked at her a long moment in the fading light, and there was something in his face she had not seen there before, not quite fear, but something adjacent to it, the gravity of a man looking at something he did not wish to be parted from.
“I will only say that I have found these past months considerably more agreeable for your having been in them, Miss Bennet, and I find I mean to come back and go on finding them agreeable, if the matter is left to my own choosing in it.”
“I hope it will be left to your own choosing,” Jane said, and found her voice was not quite as steady as she would have wished it to be.
He took her hand then, not with any particular ceremony, only holding it a moment in both of his, and said nothing further, and Jane understood that whatever might have been said, in a different evening, in a different set of circumstances, was not going to be said tonight, and that this was, perhaps, its own kind of answer.
He left within the half hour, the General walking out with him to see to some last arrangement, and Jane stood in the courtyard a while after they had gone, in the stillness that settles over a place once the business of departure has finally departed.
?∞?
Prudence found her there some time later, and did not say anything at first, only came and stood beside her, and after a while, when the light had gone properly down and the first stars were showing, she began to talk, not of the battle, nor of what tomorrow might bring, but of small things, an evening much like this one five and twenty years before, her own husband young then and going out on some campaign she no longer entirely remembered the details of, and how she had stood in a garden very like this one and not known, in the way one never knows, whether she would see him again.
“I do not tell you this to frighten you further,” Prudence said.
“I tell you because I think you are frightened already, and I would rather you be frightened in company than frightened alone, thinking yourself the only person who has ever stood in a garden the night before a battle not knowing what the morning would bring.”
“How did you bear it? The first time, I mean. Not knowing.”
“Badly,” said Prudence, with a small, dry laugh that held very little humour in it.
“I bore it very badly the first time, and the second, if I am honest with you, and I do not know that I have ever learned to bear it well, precisely. I have only learned to bear it; it never stops being hard.” She was quiet a moment.
“You will not sleep tonight, I expect, or not much. Neither shall I. There is no shame in that. Tomorrow we shall go about our business, whatever that business turns out to be, and the not sleeping tonight will not have stopped us from doing it. That is, I think, the whole of what courage is, when you strip away everything people like to say about it. Not the absence of fear. Only the doing of the necessary thing regardless of the fear being there.”
Jane thought of that, lying awake a long while after, the household finally quiet around her and the strange sounds of the camp beyond it, men’s voices carrying faintly on the night air, a horse somewhere restless in its picket line, and found that she did not, in fact, sleep very much at all, and that when the first grey light came up over the dry hills she was still awake to see it, and rose, and went down to find her aunt already dressed and already at the day’s business, exactly as she had said she would be.