Chapter Twenty-Two
Vimeiro
The wounded began arriving before noon, sooner than Roli?a’s had come, and in greater number, and Jane understood, within the first hour, that whatever scale of suffering she had thought herself prepared for after the previous battle, this one exceeded it considerably.
She worked without properly marking the passage of time, the morning bleeding into afternoon and the afternoon into evening with no clear boundary between them, only the steady, unbroken stream of men brought in on litters or walking, supported by comrades, or carried by whoever happened to be nearest when they fell, and Jane moved among them with a competence that felt, by now, almost automatic, the water and the talking and the careful, honest comfort she had learned to offer, and beneath all of it, unspoken, unrelenting, the single question she did not allow herself to ask aloud.
Prudence worked beside her, steady as ever, though Jane caught her once, in a brief lull, standing very still with her eyes fixed on the church door in a manner that told Jane her aunt’s composure, however well maintained, was costing her every bit as much as it appeared to cost nothing at all.
“Any word of the General?” Jane asked, in that same lull, unable to hold the question back any longer.
“None yet. There will be none until the fighting is properly done, and I have learned not to expect it before then, however much the waiting wants filling with something.” Prudence’s voice was steady, but her hands, Jane noticed, were not quite as steady as her voice, folding and refolding a length of linen that did not require folding at all.
“We shall know soon enough. There is no profit in wanting to know it sooner than the knowing can properly arrive.”
?∞?
Word came at last in the late afternoon, carried by a rider who arrived at the church with his horse lathered and blowing, and the news he brought, delivered first to the surgeon and then, by degrees, through the whole exhausted room, was better than Jane had dared to hope for, though it came wrapped, as such news generally did, in a great deal of loss that made the better parts of it hard to properly celebrate.
The French had been broken. Sir Arthur’s men had held the ridge against every attack thrown at them and had, by the day’s end, driven the enemy from the field entirely, a victory as complete, the rider said, as any this army had yet managed, and General Blythe’s own brigade had performed with particular distinction, holding a critical point of the line through the worst of the afternoon’s fighting.
Prudence, hearing this, went very still, and then, in a manner Jane had never once seen from her aunt in all their months together, sat down rather suddenly on the nearest bench and put a hand briefly over her own mouth, composure cracking for the space of perhaps ten seconds before she gathered it back into place and rose again to continue her work.
“He is well,” she said, to Jane’s unspoken question, her voice not quite steady even now.
“The rider confirms it. Unhurt, and mentioned already, he says, in the first reports for his conduct on the ridge.” She took a breath, visibly settling herself.
“I shall permit myself exactly that much relief, and no more, until I have seen him with my own eyes, for I have learned, over twenty years, that a rider’s report and the truth of a battlefield are not always the same thing, however well the rider means it. ”
?∞?
There was no word of Fitzwilliam.
Jane asked, carefully, of every fresh arrival who might plausibly know something of his particular unit, and received, each time, either a shake of the head or an answer too vague to properly settle her, the fighting having been general enough along the whole line that no single account could speak to every part of it, and she carried the not-knowing through the remainder of that endless afternoon with a weight that made the ordinary work of the hospital, hard as it already was, harder still to properly attend to.
It was past seven, the light beginning at last to fail, when a column of returning men came into view along the road that led back from the field, and Jane, hearing the commotion, went to the church door with a dozen others and stood scanning the approaching ranks with an intensity that made her chest ache from the holding of her own breath.
She saw the General first, at the head of a smaller party than had ridden out that morning, dust-covered and weary but unmistakably, gloriously whole, and Prudence, beside her, made a sound Jane had never heard her aunt make before and was across the ground toward him before Jane had properly registered her moving.
She kept scanning the column, her eyes moving from face to face with a growing, desperate urgency, and it was several long minutes, minutes that felt to Jane considerably longer than the whole exhausting day that had preceded them, before she saw him, on horseback, which told her something before she had even properly made out his face, for a wounded man walked or was carried, and a man on horseback was, whatever else the day had cost him, a man who could still sit a saddle.
He saw her at nearly the same moment, and something in his dust-streaked, exhausted face eased entirely, and he swung down from his horse before it had properly stopped, and crossed the remaining distance between them at something very near a run.
Jane did not wait for him to reach her. She went to meet him, and found herself, in the next moment, gathered against him with an entirely improper disregard for whoever might be watching, his arms coming round her with a fierceness that told her, more plainly than any words could have, exactly what the day had cost him in fear as well as in fighting.
“You are unhurt,” she managed, into his coat, which smelled of horse and smoke and the exhaustion of a day she could not properly imagine, having only tended its consequences rather than lived through its cause.
“I am unhurt.” His voice was rough, worn through with the day’s shouting and strain.
“I received your letter, Jane. It reached me before we marched, and I carried it with me the whole of today, and I will tell you plainly that I do not know that I have ever gone into a fight so thoroughly determined to come back out of it again.”
She drew back enough to look at his face properly, dust and exhaustion and something underneath both that had nothing to do with either, and found she had no words adequate to the moment, and so she said nothing at all, only reached up and touched his face, and he closed his eyes a moment at the touch, and neither of them, for a long moment, said anything further, standing there in the dust and the fading light with the whole exhausted, grieving, relieved camp moving around them, entirely, gladly forgotten.