Chapter Eighteen
Fitzwilliam Fights Himself
He did not write for the better part of three weeks.
Jane told herself, in the first several days, that this meant nothing beyond the ordinary business of a campaign, that a man on the march had neither the leisure nor the means to send letters with any regularity, and she believed this quite sincerely for perhaps a fortnight, until word came, through the General, that Fitzwilliam’s own commanding officer had found occasion to send a dispatch back to headquarters, and that dispatches, evidently, found their way through when a man wished them to.
She did not say anything of this to Prudence, not wishing to sound as though she were counting the days, though she suspected, from the careful way her aunt watched her some evenings, that counting was precisely what she had been doing, and that Prudence had noticed it regardless of Jane’s efforts to disguise the fact.
He wrote at last from a village whose name Jane did not recognise, a short letter, correct and careful, that told her a great deal about the state of the roads and very little about anything else.
He hoped she was well. He hoped the household was well.
He remained, her most obedient servant, R. Fitzwilliam.
Jane read it twice, standing in the small room where the post was brought, and felt something in her chest go cold in a manner that had nothing to do with the letter’s actual content and everything to do with what it so plainly, so carefully, did not contain.
?∞?
She did not understand it, not at first, and spent a good part of a week turning the matter over without arriving at anything she found satisfactory.
She had not imagined the fire. She had not imagined his hand round hers, nor the things he had said, nor the particular quality of the silence that had followed, and she could not reconcile any of that with a letter that read as though it had been composed for the benefit of a stranger.
It was Mrs Carey, of all people, met by chance one afternoon at the market stalls, who gave her the beginning of an answer, though she had not asked for one and Mrs Carey had not, so far as Jane could tell, meant to give it.
“Men do this,” Mrs Carey said, when Jane, without quite meaning to, had let something of her trouble show in her face.
“I do not say all men, but a good many of them, particularly the sensible sort, the sort who have spent years telling themselves a thing cannot be done and then find themselves rather closer to doing it than they meant to be. My own captain did something very similar to me, before we married, three weeks of letters so stiff I nearly gave the whole business up as a bad job. It is not that the feeling has gone. It is that the feeling has frightened him, and he has retreated to see whether he can talk himself out of it before he does something he considers imprudent.”
“That seems a very poor way of managing a feeling.”
“It is a very poor way,” Mrs Carey agreed, with a small dry laugh.
“I have never yet met a man who managed one well, in my experience. But I will tell you what I told myself at the time, for whatever comfort it is worth. A man does not withdraw from a woman who means nothing to him. He has no need to. It is only the ones who mean a great deal that require managing at arm’s length for a while, until he has either talked himself out of it, or talked himself into accepting that he cannot. ”
Jane thought about this a great deal in the days that followed, and found it did not entirely ease the particular ache of receiving letters that told her nothing, but it gave her something to set against the ache, a small steadying certainty that the distance, whatever else it was, was not indifference.
?∞?
Mr Graves called during this same fortnight, having returned from one of his own absences, and Jane found herself, for the first time since his proposal, genuinely glad of his company, not for any romantic reason but simply for the ease of a friendship that asked nothing complicated of her.
He noticed, of course. He noticed a great deal, being the sort of man whose trade depended on noticing, and though he said nothing directly, Jane caught him once or twice watching her with an expression that suggested he had drawn his own conclusions about the source of her low spirits and was choosing, out of what she understood to be genuine kindness, not to press her on the matter.
“You are distracted today,” he said, on his third visit that fortnight, when Jane had twice lost the thread of a perfectly ordinary conversation about the state of the Lisbon markets.
“I am sorry. I have not been very good company.”
“You need not apologise to me for it.” He was quiet a moment, turning his cup in his hands.
“I will say only this much, since I think I have earned some small right to say it, having once asked you a question you answered with more honesty than I strictly wished to hear. Whatever is troubling you, I do not think it will be mended by worrying it over alone. You are a person who does better, I think, when she has somebody to say the difficult thing to plainly, rather than turning it over silently until it has worn a groove in her.”
Jane looked at him a long moment, and found, to her own surprise, that she trusted him enough to say at least a part of it.
“I have received letters,” she said, “that tell me a great deal less than I had hoped they would.”
Something in Graves’s face showed, briefly, a kind of rueful sympathy that Jane understood came from his own recent experience of disappointment, though he did not say so directly, and he did not press her further, only nodded, and said, after a moment, that letters were poor vessels for the things that mattered most, being written by men who had a great deal of time to reconsider every line before they committed it to paper, and that Jane ought not to judge the whole of a man’s feeling by the careful, cautious version of it that survived the reconsidering.
Jane found that observation more comforting than she had expected it to be, and thanked him for it, and the visit ended on rather easier terms than it had begun, though the ache of Fitzwilliam’s silence did not, in truth, lift very much for the comfort offered.
?∞?
She wrote back to him regardless, in the same careful, correct register his own letter had used, telling him of the household, of the hospital work, of small things, and did not write any of what she actually wished to write, some private stubbornness in her insisting that she would not be the one to break the careful distance he had apparently decided, for whatever reason, that they both required.
She sealed the letter and gave it to the post and stood a while afterward in the small courtyard where the fire had, weeks before, burned away every careful distance either of them had thought to maintain, and found she could still, if she closed her eyes, feel the particular warmth of his hand closing over hers, and wondered, with a stubbornness of her own that surprised her, how long a man could go on fighting a thing before the fighting itself became more exhausting than simply giving way to it.