Chapter Seventeen
The Week After
He left the next morning as planned, before the light had properly come up, and Jane did not go down to see him off, having said what needed saying the night before and finding she had no wish to perform a second farewell in the grey ordinary business of a camp morning, with orderlies and pack mules and all the noise of departure crowding out whatever quiet the moment might otherwise have held.
She heard the column move out from her window instead, the tramp of feet and the creak of wagon wheels, and stood a while after the sound had faded, her hand still resting where his had been the night before, and then she went down, because there was work waiting, and work, she had learned by now, was the surest remedy she knew for a heart that wanted steadying.
The week that followed taught her something the battle itself had not.
?∞?
The men who had come through Roli?a whole, or near enough to whole, began, in the days after, to fall ill in a manner that had nothing to do with any wound a surgeon could set right.
A private named Dawes, whom Jane had sat with the very first afternoon, giving him water and hearing him talk of a sister in Yorkshire, took a fever on the fifth day that the surgeon called by a name Jane did not recognise and explained, briefly, was a common enough companion to any wound left too long before the cleaning of it.
“He seemed to be mending,” Jane said, standing by his cot with a cloth she had been using to cool his forehead, now grown suddenly, alarmingly hot beneath her hand.
“He was mending,” the surgeon said, not unkindly, but with the flat weariness of a man who had explained this a great many times before and expected to explain it a great many times again.
“That is very often how it goes, Miss Bennet. A wound heals over on the surface and festers beneath it, where nobody can see, until the man who looked fit to walk out in a week is the man who does not walk out at all. I wish I could tell you differently.”
Dawes died two days later, in the night, quietly, and Jane learned of it in the morning from an orderly who delivered the news the way such news was delivered here, plainly, without much ceremony, because there was no time in a place like this for ceremony and everyone had long since learned to do without it.
She grieved him properly, in the small private hour she allowed herself before the day’s work began again, and found that this grief was different from the shock of the amputation she had witnessed, quieter and somehow worse, because Dawes had not died of the violence of the battlefield but of something that had crept up on him afterward, something that had let her believe, for five whole days, that he was going to be one of the fortunate ones.
Jane wrote to his sister of his death, and of how he had spoken of her with love in his final days, hoping it might bring the poor woman some small comfort.
?∞?
There was a boy, a drummer no more than fourteen, who had been brought in the day of the battle with no visible wound at all, and who had not spoken a single word since.
He sat, when he was made to sit, and lay, when he was made to lie down, and ate what was put in front of him if someone held the spoon, but his eyes, Jane found, watching him on her second visit to his corner of the church, looked at nothing in particular, fixed on some middle distance that held, so far as she could tell, no comfort in it at all.
“Shock,” Prudence told her, when Jane asked.
“I have seen it before, though not often in one so young. Something in a man, or a boy, simply stops, for a while, when what he has witnessed is more than his mind knows how to hold. I do not know that there is a remedy for it beyond time, and kindness, and someone willing to sit with the silence rather than press at it.”
Jane sat with him. She did not know his name for the first several days, nobody in the confusion having thought to record it properly, and she talked to him regardless, of small things, the weather, a book she had been reading, anything that did not require an answer, and on the fourth day, without any particular warning, he said a word.
“Tom,” he said, very quietly, not looking at her.
“Is that your name?”
He nodded, once, and said nothing further that day, but the following morning he said a little more, a village in Kent, a mother he had not seen in above a year, and Jane wrote to that mother that same afternoon, a careful letter explaining as gently as she knew how what had happened and what had not, and promising that her son was safe, and cared for, and beginning, slowly, to find his voice again.
She thought, writing it, of Elizabeth’s letter asking for the real of it, not the sort of thing meant for a mother’s comfort, and understood, with a kind of sorrow that had nowhere particular to go, that there were two different truths a person might tell about a war, the one that comforted and the one that was entirely accurate, and that she had just spent an hour choosing, quite deliberately, to write the first to a woman who had every right to eventually learn the second.
?∞?
“You have saved his life,” she told the surgeon, of a corporal whose arm he had managed to save where another surgeon, she understood, might simply have taken it. “That must be some comfort to you, in the midst of so much you cannot save.”
The surgeon looked at her for a moment with an expression she had not expected, something between weariness and a kind of gentle correction.
“I have saved his arm, Miss Bennet. Whether I have saved his life is a different question entirely, and one I shall not know the answer to for some weeks yet, until we see whether the wound holds clean or turns, as poor Dawes’s did.
I have learned, in this work, not to claim victories before they are properly won.
It is safer for the soul, in the long run, though I will grant you it makes for very poor comfort in the moment. ”
Jane turned this over a good while afterward, sitting alone in the courtyard once the day’s work was done, and found that it had altered something in her own understanding of what she was doing here, some earlier, simpler notion she had carried without quite examining it, that a wound tended was a life saved, and a life saved was the end of the matter.
It was not the end of the matter. She understood that now, in a way the amputation alone had not fully taught her.
Saving a man’s life and saving his future, she thought, turning the corporal’s careful, still-uncertain recovery over in her mind, were not always the same act, and she did not yet know what to do with a truth so much less tidy than the one she had arrived in Portugal believing.
She thought of Fitzwilliam, somewhere out with his column, marching toward whatever waited next, and found that the week’s small griefs had not driven the thought of him away but had, if anything, sharpened it, the particular clarity that comes to a person who has spent a week learning exactly how much a life can cost, and finds she wants, more urgently than before, to hold on to whatever of it she has been given the chance to hold.