Chapter Twenty
Departure
She was three days properly recovering before the surgeon would permit her from the bed at all, and a further week before he judged her strong enough for anything beyond a short walk in the courtyard, and Fitzwilliam, having overstayed his leave by rather more than the single night he had originally intended, was recalled to his regiment on the fourth day with a curtness that told Jane, without anyone needing to explain it plainly, that his colonel had not been pleased.
“You will be in a great deal of trouble,” she said again, sitting up against her pillows with more colour in her face than she had managed in a fortnight, watching him gather the few things he had left scattered about the room in his days of near-constant attendance.
“I have already told you I do not regret it, and I find repetition has not weakened my conviction on the matter in the slightest.” He came and sat on the edge of the bed, which he would not have done a month before, and took her hand in the easy, unthinking way that told her more plainly than any declaration how far they had travelled together in these past weeks.
“A reprimand is a small enough price. I have paid worse for considerably less.”
“Still. I do not like to think of you answering for my fever.”
“Then do not think of it,” he said, “and think instead of the fact that you are sitting up, and arguing with me, and looking rather more like yourself than you have in a fortnight, all of which I find I would happily answer for a second time, should the occasion require it.”
She looked at him a long moment, this man who had ridden against his own orders to sit by a sickbed and had not, in all the days since, once retreated back into the careful distance of his letters, and found she wanted, quite badly, to ask him plainly what now stood between them, whether the fever and the fire had settled the matter for good or whether some new distance might yet find its way back once he had returned to the ordinary business of soldiering.
She did not ask it. Something in her held back, not from doubt exactly, but from a sense that the asking wanted its own proper moment, and that a sickroom, with her still weak and him already late in returning to his post, was not that moment.
“You will write,” she said instead, “and I do not mean the sort of letter you sent me these past weeks.”
Something crossed his face, a flicker of genuine shame that told her he understood exactly what she meant.
“I will write,” he said, “and I promise you the letters will bear no resemblance whatever to the wretched things I sent you before. I am not proud of them, Jane. I was fighting myself rather harder than I was fighting the French, and I fought badly, and I am sorry for every cold line of it.”
“I forgive you the letters,” she said, “though I will own I do not intend to let you forget them entirely, since I think a little proper remorse is good for a man’s character.”
He laughed at that, properly, the sound easing something in her chest that had sat tight there since the fever’s worst days, and he bent and kissed her hand, lingering over it rather longer than the gesture strictly required, before he stood at last and gathered the rest of his things.
“I do not know when I shall see you again,” he said, at the door.
“There is talk of a larger action coming, and I do not know how soon, nor how long I shall be occupied once it comes. I ask only that you take care of yourself properly this time, and not go working yourself back into a fever the moment my back is turned.”
“I make no promises,” Jane said, “beyond doing my best, which I think is all either of us can honestly offer the other, in a place like this.”
“That,” he said, “is very nearly the wisest thing anyone has said to me in this whole campaign,” and he went, and Jane lay back against her pillows once the door had closed behind him, and found that the parting, unlike the one before Roli?a, carried no dread in it at all, only a steady, settled certainty that whatever distance the war put between them now, it would not put the old distance back, the careful, guarded distance of the letters, and that this alone was worth a great deal more than she had thought, a month before, she would ever be given.