Chapter Fifteen
Four Days
He was brought to the household the following morning, against, Jane suspected, a good deal of his own protestation, the surgeon having declared that a shoulder wound properly dressed wanted quiet and clean linen rather more than it wanted the crowded, imperfect conditions of a church still serving half the wounded of the brigade, and General Blythe having offered, without much need for persuading, a room in his own house for the purpose.
Jane found herself, over the four days that followed, thrown into his company in a manner that would have been entirely improper by any measure her mother would have recognised, and that Prudence, watching the two of them with an expression of carefully suppressed amusement, made no particular effort to prevent.
“He is recovering in my house, under my roof, with my own presence in it a good deal of every day,” Prudence said, when Jane raised the question of propriety once, tentatively, on the second morning.
“I do not think even your mother could object to that arrangement, whatever else she might find to object to in the general shape of things. And I confess I have rather better use for my mornings than sitting in a sickroom myself when I have a niece who appears entirely capable of managing the reading aloud and the general conversation without my supervision.”
So Jane read to him, in the mornings when the heat had not yet properly settled and the light through the shuttered window was still gentle enough to read by, and talked with him in the afternoons when reading grew tiresome to a man confined to a chair with his arm bound against his chest, and found, over those four days, that the ease that had grown between them at Falmouth and on the ship and in the courtyard under the stars had, if anything, deepened further, stripped now of even the small formalities that had governed their earlier conversations, until what remained between them felt less like courtship, precisely, and more like something already settled that had simply not yet been given its proper name.
?∞?
He told her things, in those four days, that she suspected he would not have told her under ordinary circumstances, his guard lowered by pain and fatigue in a way that made him, if anything, more honest than his usual careful good humour generally permitted.
“I had thought, before I met you,” he said, on the second afternoon, when the light was going gold through the shutters and the worst heat of the day had finally begun to ease, “that I had a rather clear notion of what my life was to look like. A younger son’s life, you understand.
Not a grand one. I was to make what career I could of soldiering, and I was to marry, in time, some woman with money enough to make up for what I lack of it, since a younger son’s pay does not stretch very far, and I had made my peace with that arrangement some years since, in the way one makes peace with a fact rather than a preference. ”
“And now?”
“And now I find myself considerably less at peace with it than I was a twelvemonth ago,” he said, with a small, rueful laugh that turned, halfway through, into something more serious.
“I have been making rather a poor job of the sensible arrangement, Miss Bennet, and I find I have been making a poor job of it since approximately the third day out from Falmouth, in a bookshop, over a disagreement about the second canto of a poem neither of us has since managed to agree upon.”
Jane felt her colour rise, and did not trust herself, for a moment, to answer him directly.
“You need not say anything,” he went on, more gently.
“I do not say this to press you for any answer, particularly not now, with my arm in a sling and my judgment, I am prepared to admit, not entirely to be trusted after four days of laudanum and poor sleep. I say it only because I find I have grown tired of pretending, even to myself, that the matter is other than it is.”
“I do not think you owe me any apology for it,” Jane said, when she had found her voice again, “whatever the matter actually is.”
“No apology,” he agreed. “Only an honesty I find I have been rather too careful to offer you before now.”
They did not speak of it further that afternoon, the conversation turning, by unspoken consent, to lighter things, but Jane found, walking back to her own room that evening, that she carried the exchange with her a long while, turning it over the way she turned over most things that mattered, and found that what she felt, examining it honestly, was not alarm, nor even surprise, but something closer to recognition, as though he had simply said aloud a thing she had already, in some quiet corner of herself, long since understood to be true.
?∞?
On the fourth day the surgeon pronounced him fit to return to his own quarters, the wound closing cleanly and the fever that had troubled the first two nights having passed off entirely, and Fitzwilliam took his leave of the household with rather more formality than the previous four days had generally required, as though both of them understood, without either saying so, that something had shifted between them in that time that the return to ordinary circumstances would want some careful navigating around.
“I have been very poor company, I expect,” he said, at the door, “for a man laid up with nothing better to do than talk a great deal more than is usual for him.”
“You have not been poor company at all,” Jane said. “I have found these four days considerably more interesting than I expected a sickroom to be, and I do not say that lightly.”
Something passed across his face, brief and unguarded, and he took her hand a moment, as he had at the church, though there was less of pain in the grip this time and rather more of something else that Jane did not yet have a name for and suspected, standing there in the doorway with the evening light going long across the courtyard, that she was not, in fact, very far from finding one.