Chapter Twenty-One
The Eve of Vimeiro
The larger action everyone had spoken of in low voices for weeks came at last in the third week of the month, word reaching the household by the same hurried, half-organised channels that had carried news of Roli?a, though Jane found, receiving it this time, that she met it with a different quality of dread than she had the first time, less the raw terror of the unknown and more the settled, weighted fear of a person who now knew, in exact and unwelcome detail, precisely what a battle cost.
“You will not sleep tonight either,” Prudence said, finding Jane at the window some hours after the news had come, the camp below them already stirring with the movement that preceded a march.
“I did not sleep the night before Roli?a and I do not expect to sleep tonight, and I have given up, over the years, expecting it to grow any easier with practice.”
“I thought it might,” Jane admitted. “I thought, having been through it once, I should know better how to bear it a second time.”
“That is not, I have found, how it generally works. Knowing better how to bear a thing and finding the bearing of it easier are not the same, and I do not know that I have ever met a woman honest enough to admit the difference, until I met you.” Prudence came and stood beside her at the window.
“If anything, I find it grows harder rather than easier, the more a person one loves has survived one battle already, because it teaches you precisely how much there is to lose, in a way the first battle, mercifully, does not.”
Jane thought of Roli?a, of the sabre cut and the four days of recovery, of the fire and everything that had passed between them since, and understood that her aunt had put into words exactly the shape of the dread she had been carrying since the news arrived, sharper now than before, because now there was so plainly more to lose.
?∞?
Fitzwilliam did not come this time. There was no leave to be had before a march of this scale, no half hour in the courtyard, no careful, unfinished parting, and Jane found, in the absence of that parting, a different kind of difficulty than the one Roli?a’s eve had presented, the difficulty of a goodbye that had to be said, if it was said at all, only in the writing of a letter that might or might not reach him before he marched.
She wrote it that evening, sitting at the small desk in her room with the candle burned low, and found the words came harder than she had expected them to, not for want of feeling but for an excess of it, a dozen beginnings crossed out and begun again before she settled at last on something that felt honest without tipping over into the sort of declaration she still, even now, was not entirely certain either of them was ready to make plainly.
I do not know if this reaches you before you march, she wrote, and I find I do not know, either, precisely what I wish to say in it, beyond this.
I am thinking of you tonight, and I shall go on thinking of you through whatever tomorrow brings, and I find I have stopped pretending, even to myself, that this thinking is the ordinary sort of thinking a person does of a friend.
Come back to me, Richard. I do not ask it lightly, and I do not think you will mistake my meaning.
She sealed it and sent it by the same boy who had carried word of Roli?a, not knowing whether it would reach him in time, or at all, and sat a long while afterward in the candlelight, turning over everything she had not managed to say even in the writing of what she had.
?∞?
The General left before dawn, Prudence seeing him off with a composure Jane understood, by now, cost her a great deal more than it showed, a brief embrace, a few words too quiet for Jane to catch, and then he was gone, riding out at the head of his own staff toward whatever the day held, and Prudence stood in the doorway watching the column move off until the dust of it had settled entirely before she turned back into the house with her face arranged into something steady.
“Come,” she said. “There is work waiting, and I find, as I have told you before, that the body manages a day like this rather better than the mind does, left idle.”
They went to the church together, though there was, as yet, nothing for the hospital to do but wait, the wounded not yet begun to arrive, and Jane found the waiting itself a species of work, readying linens and instruments and water in a grim, methodical silence broken only by the ordinary sounds of a hospital preparing itself, and it was in that silence, moving between the rows of empty cots that would not stay empty for very much longer, that Jane understood something of what her aunt had meant, weeks before, about not knowing growing no easier with practice.
She had learned, since Roli?a, exactly what these cots would soon hold.
She had learned the sound a man made under the surgeon’s knife, and the particular grey stillness of a face that had stopped, in the night, without anyone’s noticing until morning, and she carried all of that knowledge with her now, moving between the empty cots, and found that it did not steady her at all, but made the waiting harder, sharper, weighted with a dread that innocence, whatever its other costs, had at least spared her the first time.
She thought of her letter, somewhere on the road ahead of the column now, and hoped, with a fervency that surprised her in its intensity, that it had reached him before the fighting began, that whatever tomorrow asked of him, he asked it knowing, plainly, exactly what waited for him if he came back to claim it.