Chapter Fourteen
Word from the Field
It was on the third day after Roli?a, when the worst of the flood into the church had begun at last to ease into something more like an ordinary, terrible routine, that word came to the house in the middle of the afternoon, carried by one of Fitzwilliam’s own men, a young corporal with a bandaged hand and a face that told Jane, before he had said a single word, that he had not come on a pleasant errand.
“Major Fitzwilliam asks that you know he is not dangerously hurt, ma’am,” the corporal said, addressing himself to Prudence, though his eyes went, once, to Jane, who had gone very still by the window.
“A sabre cut to the shoulder, taken in the skirmishing after the main action, not the battle proper. The surgeon has seen to it and says it is clean, and the Major bid me tell you particularly that it is nothing to be alarmed over, though he thought you would wish to know regardless.”
“Where is he now,” Prudence asked, in a voice Jane recognised as the same steady, practical voice her aunt used for every crisis, the voice that asked the useful question first and left the feeling for afterward.
“At the church still, ma’am, though the surgeon means to have him brought back to quarters within the hour, there being little more to be done for him there that cannot be done as well in a proper bed.”
Jane found, standing by the window with her hands gone suddenly cold despite the day’s heat, that she could not immediately account for the quality of what she was feeling.
She had spent three days now among wounded men, had seen injuries a great deal worse than a sabre cut to the shoulder, had learned, or thought she had learned, some manner of professional composure in the face of it.
She discovered, in the space of the corporal’s few sentences, that whatever composure she had built these three days simply did not extend to this particular piece of news, and that her heart was beating in a manner entirely disproportionate to a wound the messenger himself had called nothing to be alarmed over.
“I should like to go to him,” she said, before she had properly decided to say it.
Prudence looked at her a moment, and something in her aunt’s face was careful, assessing, though not unkind.
“Then we shall go together,” Prudence said, “since I find I have rather more experience than you at seeing a man in this condition without making either him or myself a spectacle of it, and I think you would benefit from the company, whether or not you feel presently that you require it.”
?∞?
He was still at the church when they arrived, propped against the wall in the row Jane herself had spent three days tending, his coat gone and his shirt cut away at the shoulder, the wound beneath it cleaned and bound in linen already showing a small dark stain through its centre.
He was pale in a way she had not seen him before, and his eyes were half closed against what she understood, from three days’ experience, to be the exhaustion that came after pain rather than during it.
He opened his eyes properly when she knelt beside him, and something in his face changed, not surprise exactly, but a kind of relief that he did not appear to have the strength, just then, to properly disguise.
“You should not have come,” he said, though his voice carried none of the conviction the words wanted. “I sent word particularly so that you would not need to.”
“I did not come because I needed to be told to. I came because I wished to.”
“That,” he said, with the ghost of his ordinary dry humour showing through the exhaustion, “is a distinction I find myself entirely too tired to properly appreciate just now, though I promise you I shall appreciate it a great deal once the tiredness has passed.”
She took his hand, the one on his uninjured side, without thinking very much about whether it was the sort of thing a young woman ought to do in a church full of watching eyes, and he let her take it, and held it with a grip that told her, more than anything the corporal had said, that whatever he claimed about being nothing to be alarmed over, the day had cost him a good deal.
“I am glad it is your shoulder and not something worse,” she said, and heard her own voice shake slightly on the words.
"As am I, though I confess the shoulder has made a rather better case for itself than I would have credited beforehand."
He closed his eyes a moment, and when he opened them again something had changed in his face, the humour gone out of it entirely, replaced with something rawer.
"I thought of you," he said. "In the middle of it, with the whole of the fighting going on around me, I thought of you, and I have never in my life understood so quickly how little the rest of it mattered by comparison."
His hand tightened around hers, a small, sure pressure, as though he needed the plain fact of her presence confirmed by something more certain than sight.
"I know I ought not to say such a thing to you.
Not here, not with your aunt not four feet distant and my own judgment thoroughly addled by laudanum.
But I find I have spent rather too long saying nothing at all, and I begin to think that has cost me more than any wound the French have yet managed to inflict. "
His thumb moved once, lightly, over her knuckles.
"So, I shall say it plainly and let the impropriety fall where it will. You were the thought I held onto. Not my men, not the ground we were meant to be taking, not even whether I should come out of it whole. You."
Jane did not trust herself to answer that directly, and held his hand a moment longer, and it was Prudence, watching them both with an expression she was making no particular effort to disguise, who said, gently, that the surgeon wished to have him moved within the quarter hour, and that perhaps this was not the moment for a longer conversation, whatever either of them might presently wish otherwise.
Jane released his hand, and stood, and found her legs were not entirely steady beneath her, and understood, walking back out into the hard afternoon light with her aunt’s arm through hers, that whatever she had told herself these past weeks about the particular nature of her feelings for Richard Fitzwilliam, she was no longer able to pretend, even to herself, that the word she had been avoiding did not, in fact, apply.