Chapter Thirteen
What the General Asks
The General came to the church himself that evening, once the worst of the day’s business had settled into the quieter, grimmer work of the night hours, and found Jane and Prudence still there, Jane’s apron stained through in a way she had stopped noticing some hours before, and stood a moment in the doorway watching them before either woman saw him.
He said very little that night. He walked them home himself, an arm offered to each, and Jane understood, from the particular set of his jaw, that he had a great deal to say and was choosing, for the present, to say none of it, and she was grateful for the choosing, being too tired herself to have managed much conversation.
It was not until the following morning, over a breakfast none of them ate with much appetite, that he raised the matter properly.
“I have been thinking a great deal since yesterday,” he said, “about what I have allowed, and I find, on reflection, that I am not easy in my own conscience about it.”
“Edmund,” said Prudence, in a tone Jane had not heard her use before, quiet but with something unmistakably firm underneath it.
“Let me finish, my dear, before you tell me I am wrong, which I expect you mean to do regardless of what I say.” He looked at them both, his wife and his niece, with an expression Jane recognised, having seen something like it on her own father’s face, the strain of a man trying to protect people who had not asked to be protected.
“I saw what came through that church yesterday. I have seen worse in twenty years of soldiering, and I will not pretend to either of you that I have not, but I have never before had to watch my own wife and my own niece walk into the middle of it, and I find I cannot make my peace with having permitted it.”
“You did not permit it,” Prudence said. “I chose it. I have chosen it eleven times before yesterday, Edmund, and you have never once succeeded in stopping me, and I do not know why you imagine yesterday should be any different.”
“Yesterday was different because Jane was there also.”
“Jane made her own choice,” Prudence said, “the same as I made mine, some months back in a London breakfast room, if I recall her account of it correctly, and I do not think either of us requires your permission for it now any more than we required it then.”
The General set down his cup, and was quiet a moment, and Jane saw, watching him, that he was not a man accustomed to losing an argument, and was finding the experience of it, this particular morning, a good deal harder than she suspected he generally let show.
“I am not asking your permission, Uncle,” Jane said, into the silence, “though I am grateful that you have troubled to ask my feeling on the matter rather than simply forbidding it outright, which I think a good many men in your position would have done without a second thought.”
“I considered forbidding it,” he admitted.
“I considered it a great deal, walking you both home last night. I have not done it because I do not think it would answer, and because I have watched my wife manage her own conscience for five and twenty years without much reference to my opinion on the matter, and I have generally found her judgment sound, whatever it has cost me in worry along the way.” He looked at Jane properly then.
“But I will ask you plainly, since I have no right to forbid you and every right to ask. Are you certain? I saw your face yesterday, coming out from behind that church. I do not think you found it easy.”
“I did not find it easy,” Jane said. “I do not expect I ever shall find it easy, and I think if I ever do find it easy, that will be the moment to worry, rather than now, when it still costs me something to see it.” She thought a moment, choosing her words with more care than she generally troubled to bring to her own speech.
“I watched a man have his leg taken from him yesterday, Uncle, and I was sick behind the church for it, and I am not ashamed to tell you so. But I also sat with a boy from Yorkshire who wanted nothing more than water and someone to hear him talk of his sister, and I do not think I have ever in my life done anything that felt so plainly, so simply necessary. I do not wish to be protected from this Uncle. I wish only to be permitted to do it, and I think, if you are honest with yourself, you know that permitting it is exactly what you mean to do, whatever else you have said this morning.”
The General looked at her a long moment, and something in his face eased, the strain of the argument giving way to something gentler, an expression Jane thought looked rather like pride, though tempered still with the worry that had brought him to the table this morning in the first place.
“Your aunt has been telling me for twenty years that I married a woman I could not manage,” he said at last, “and I begin to think she has taught, her niece to be cut from the same cloth.” He picked his cup back up.
“Very well. I will say no more against it. I ask only this much, and I ask it of you both. If either of you finds, on any given day, that you have not the strength for it, you will say so plainly, and neither of you will go simply because you feel you ought to, or because you fear disappointing me or each other. That is the whole of what I ask.”
“That,” said Prudence, “is a condition I can agree to entirely, and I expect Jane can agree to it as well.”
Jane said that she could, and the matter was settled, and the three of them finished what remained of their cold breakfast in a silence that had, Jane thought, a good deal more ease in it than the silence that had begun the meal, and later that same morning, when the household’s ordinary business had reasserted itself and there was linen again wanting rolling and accounts wanting keeping, Jane found herself humming, very quietly, over the work, and understood, with some surprise, that she was, in her own tired and heartsore way, entirely content.