Chapter Sixteen
The Fire
He was declared fit for duty within the week, and word came that he would rejoin his unit before the month was out. The army was already turning its attention past Roli?a, toward some larger engagement everyone spoke of in low voices without yet knowing where it would fall or when.
Jane found the days before his return to duty passed strangely.
Not happy, not unhappy, only heavy with the small private knowledge that each one brought the parting nearer.
She caught herself, more than once, simply watching him across a room, the particular way he held a cup, or bent his head over some paper, memorising it, she understood, without having quite decided to, the way a person memorises a thing they are afraid of losing.
It was the evening before he was to go back that the fire started.
?∞?
She was at the church, the hospital work having settled by then into something that no longer wanted the whole household but that Jane had kept up regardless, when the first cry went up from the east end, where the worst of the wounded lay, the ones too bad to move.
She smelled the smoke before she understood the shouting. It was already curling grey along the roofline when she turned to look, and for one long moment she simply stood there, unable to sort the danger into any order her mind could act on.
Then the moment passed, and she was moving, though she could not afterward have said she remembered deciding to move.
Four men in that room could not walk. Two ways out, the door she had come by and a shuttered window at the far end. The two orderlies nearest her were standing quite still, staring at the smoke the way men stare at something their training never covered.
“You,” she said to the nearer one, and something came out in her voice, not loud, but carrying. “Get those shutters off. Now, if you please.” And to the other, “Help me lift this man. Mind his leg.”
They moved. Between the three of them, and a fourth who appeared from somewhere in the smoke and simply started helping, they got all four out through the window, one after another, while the bell in the camp began ringing the alarm.
It was only once the last man had gone through that she turned back and found Fitzwilliam was there. She had not seen him come in. His coat was off, thrown over one shoulder, a scorch mark on the wall near the window where he had used it to beat down a lick of flame.
“Is that all of them?”
“That is all of them. I made sure.”
He looked at her a moment in the strange orange light, and something crossed his face that she had never once seen on it before, not the dry humour, not the sickroom carefulness, something rawer and more naked than either, gone almost before she had properly caught it.
Then there was still work, water to be got moving, and they both turned to it and fought the fire back with a dozen others until it went down to smoke and the flat exhausted stillness that follows.
?∞?
She sat afterward on a low wall apart from the bustle and found her hands would not keep still now there was nothing left for them to do. She pressed them together in her lap.
Fitzwilliam came and sat beside her without asking.
His own hands were black with soot, and there was a burn coming up red along one wrist he did not seem to have noticed.
She reached over, before she had properly thought about whether she ought to, and took that hand in both of hers, turning the wrist gently to the firelight to look at it.
“This wants seeing to.”
“It can wait.” He did not pull his hand away, and after a moment his fingers closed slowly round hers, as though he had only just remembered they were free to.
“I have seen a good deal in this war, Jane. I do not think I have been more frightened by any of it than I was watching you run to that room.”
“I was not frightened. There was no time to be.”
“That is very nearly the same thing, and considerably braver for the not noticing.” He was quiet a moment, his thumb moving once, absently, over her knuckles, and she felt the small motion of it all the way up her arm.
“I have spent a month telling myself this is not what it plainly is. I find I cannot go on telling myself so, not tonight, not with my hands still shaking and you sitting beside me as though nothing at all extraordinary had just happened.”
“Something extraordinary did happen.”
“Yes.” He looked at her properly then, and the firelight caught the side of his face, the soot, the exhaustion, and something underneath both that made her breath go short.
“I have nothing to offer you. A soldier’s pay and a soldier’s uncertainty, but I am sitting here with your hands wrapped round mine, and I find I have stopped caring very much what is sensible. ”
Jane did not trust her voice for a moment.
The night was loud still with the last of the camp’s noise, buckets and shouted orders somewhere behind them, and none of it seemed to reach the small space the two of them were sitting in.
She looked down at their joined hands a moment before she made herself go on.
"You ought to know, before either of us says anything further, that I have no dowry to speak of.
No money of my own, no expectations, nothing that would recommend me to a man in your position beyond whatever you have decided to see in me these past weeks.
You could do a great deal better than a penniless girl with nothing to bring you but herself. "
"Could I." He said it quietly, without any of the teasing she half expected, and turned his hand beneath hers so their palms lay flat together, fingers laced.
"I have just told you I have nothing to offer either, Jane.
A soldier's pay does not stretch far, and I have never once pretended to you it would.
I begin to think we are a very poorly matched pair by every sensible reckoning anyone could make of us. "
Something in his voice had gone warm despite the plainness of the words.
"And yet I find I would not want you thinking, going back tomorrow, that it meant nothing to me either," she finished, and felt him tighten his hold on her hand in answer, as though the words had settled something between them that neither of them had quite dared settle aloud until now.
“I do not ask you to say anything back tonight,” he said, gentler. “Neither of us is fit for large questions with the smoke still in our lungs. I only could not go back to my unit tomorrow with it unsaid.”
“I am glad you said it.” Her own voice came out low, unsteady. “I do not know that I have the whole of an answer for you yet. But I would not want you thinking, going back tomorrow, that it meant nothing to me.”
“What did it mean?”
She looked at him a long moment, at the soot on his jaw and the burn she still held cradled in her hands, and found the words came easier than she had expected them to.
“It meant a very great deal. It meant more than I know how to say properly, sitting here with my heart still going as it is.”
Something in his face loosened entirely then, all the careful holding back of the past month simply giving way, and he lifted his free hand, slowly, as though giving her every chance to stop him, and touched her cheek, his fingers rough with soot and warm despite it.
Neither of them moved for a long moment.
The fire behind them had gone to embers, and the noise of the camp had begun, at last, to settle, and Jane understood that if she leaned forward even the smallest distance, whatever question either of them had been too careful to ask outright would answer itself.
She did not lean forward. Not that night, with her aunt not fifty yards distant and his unit waiting for him at dawn.
But she did not draw back either, and let his hand rest against her face a moment longer than propriety strictly permitted, and when he finally lowered it, reluctant, his eyes did not leave hers.
“Tomorrow,” he said, low, “I go back to men and marching and none of this. I find I would like to carry something of tonight with me regardless.”
“Then carry it,” Jane said. “I do not think either of us is in any danger of forgetting it.”
He smiled then, properly, the first whole smile she had seen from him since the fire began, and kept her hand in his a good while longer, until the last of the embers had gone dark and Prudence’s voice, calling gently across the yard, told them both it was time, at last, to go in.