Chapter Twelve
Roli?a
Jane woke before the light had properly come, out of a sleep that had not been sleep so much as a long series of startlings, one thought giving way to the next before either had settled into anything like rest. She lay still a moment, trying to work out what had woken her this final time, and understood, listening, that it was not any particular sound but the absence of several sounds she had grown used to without noticing she had grown used to them, the tramp of boots in the yard below, the low continuous murmur of men readying themselves for something, all of it gone quiet at last, because there was nothing left to ready. They had already gone.
She did not know what to expect of the day ahead and found that not knowing was its own species of exhaustion, worse in some ways than knowing the worst might have been.
The camp itself, when she finally rose and dressed and went down, wore the same strange stillness.
Whole rows of tents stood empty where yesterday there had been men cleaning muskets and mending kit and calling out to one another across the lines, and the quiet that had replaced all of it was not peaceful, precisely, but held, as though the whole place were listening for something it could not yet hear.
The morning passed in a waiting that Jane found harder, in its way, than any of the tasks that came after it.She tried to occupy herself with the household accounts and found the figures would not hold still in her mind.
She tried to write to Elizabeth and found she could not get past the first line.
Prudence, watching her attempt both, took the account book from her at last and set it aside.
“You will not manage either today,” her aunt said, “and there is no shame in that. Come and help me instead. I find the body occupies itself rather better than the mind does, on a day like this one, and there is always linen wants rolling for bandages, whatever else there is not.”
They rolled linen through the better part of the morning, a great quantity of it, more than Jane would have thought a household could produce, until her fingers ached from the folding and rolling of it, and it was not until past noon that word came at last, carried by a boy who had run the whole way from the direction of the fighting and arrived at the house gasping and unable, for a full minute, to get any words out at all.
“Wounded,” he managed finally. “Wounded coming in. They want the women who’ll help at the church.”
The church Sir Arthur’s people had commandeered for the purpose stood a little inland from the camp, a plain whitewashed building that Jane had passed a dozen times without particular notice, and by the time she and Prudence arrived there, having walked as fast as decency and the heat would allow, it had already begun to fill.
She had thought herself prepared for it.
She understood, afterward, that nothing could have prepared her for it, that all her aunt’s plain warnings and all Mrs Carey’s careful honesty had described a country she was now, for the first time, actually standing in, and that the description and the standing were as different as Prudence had always said they would be.
?∞?
There was a smell first, before there was anything else, blood and sweat and something under both of those that she did not have a name for and would come, over the following hours, to associate permanently with this kind of suffering.
There was noise, men calling out, some of it words and some of it beyond words entirely, and there were the surgeons, two of them, working at trestle tables set up near the altar with their sleeves rolled and their aprons already dark, moving from one man to the next with a speed that seemed, at first sight, almost brutal in its haste, until Jane understood, within the hour, that the haste was itself a mercy, that a wound cleaned and closed quickly cost a man less suffering than one attended slowly and carefully.
Prudence took her by the arm the moment they were inside and steered her, without ceremony, toward a row of men laid on straw along the north wall, men whose wounds had already been seen to and who wanted now only water, and comfort, and someone to sit with them a while.
“Start here,” Prudence said. “This is the kindest work in the building, and I want you to have an hour of it before you see anything harder. Talk to them. Give them water. That is all I ask of you just now.”
Jane knelt beside the first man, a private no older than she was herself, his arm bound tight against his chest, and gave him water from a cup she had been handed, and he thanked her in a voice gone thin with pain and told her, unprompted, about a sister in Yorkshire he had not seen in two years, and Jane listened, and said what comfort she could find to say, and moved on to the next man when Prudence’s hand touched her shoulder and told her, gently, that there were others waiting.
She did this for the better part of an hour, and found that Prudence had been right, that this was the kindest work in the building, and found also that even the kindest work here was harder than anything she had done in nineteen years at Longbourn, harder than any quarter day at the tenant cottages, harder than sitting up with a feverish child, because there was no end to it in sight, only more men, and more water to be fetched, and more small comforts to be offered against a suffering too large for any of them to properly address.
?∞?
It was past three in the afternoon, the light coming hard and yellow through the church’s high windows, when she saw the first amputation.
She had not meant to see it. She had been sent to fetch more water and her path took her nearer the surgeons’ tables than her earlier errands had, and she stopped, for a moment she would later wish she had not, because a man was being held down by two orderlies while a surgeon worked at his leg with an instrument Jane did not let herself look at closely, and the man was making a sound Jane had never heard a human being make before and hoped, standing frozen there with the water jug still in her hands, never to hear again.
It was over in perhaps two minutes. She understood, watching it, that two minutes was fast, that the surgeon’s speed was itself the whole of the mercy available in that moment, and that the alternative to this brutal swiftness was not some gentler process but a slower one, and worse.
She turned away before it was quite finished and was sick, quietly and thoroughly, in the shadow of the church’s north porch, and stood there afterward with her back against the cool stone, shaking, and did not immediately trust herself to go back inside.
Prudence found her there some minutes later.
“You saw it, then.”
“I did not mean to.”
“No. Nobody means to, the first time. It generally finds you regardless.” Prudence stood beside her, not touching her, only present, in the way she had of being present without crowding a person’s grief.
“You may go home, if you wish it. Nobody here will think the less of you for it. I did not manage a full day myself, the first time I stood in a place like this one, five and twenty years ago, and I have never been ashamed of that, and I would not have you be ashamed of it either.”
Jane stood a while longer, breathing, feeling the stone cool and solid at her back, and thought of the man on the table, and the sound he had made, and thought, too, of the private with the sister in Yorkshire, and the water she had given him, and the small, real comfort that had passed between them, however small it might have seemed against the whole vast suffering of the day.
“I do not wish to go home,” she said at last. “I wish to be of use. I only needed a moment.”
“Then take your moment,” said Prudence, “and when you are ready, come back in, and I will keep you to the water and the talking a good while longer before I let you anywhere near the tables again, if that is any comfort to you.”
It was some comfort. Jane took perhaps ten minutes more, standing in the shade of the porch with the sounds of the church still reaching her, muffled but constant, and then she straightened her dress, and wiped her face, and went back in, because there was water still wanted, and men still waiting for it, and she found, walking back through the door, that whatever else the day had cost her, it had not cost her the wish to be useful, which she understood, dimly, standing there, to be its own kind of answer to a question she had not known she was asking.