Chapter Twenty-Three
Prudence
The days that followed Vimeiro passed in a strange, suspended quality that Jane had not expected, the relief of the victory sitting alongside the ordinary grim business of tending its cost, the hospital work continuing much as it had after Roli?a, though with rather more of it, and the household itself settling, by slow degrees, into something that felt, for the first time since the campaign had properly begun, like it might hold steady for a while.
There was talk, in those days, of matters Jane understood only in outline, some negotiation with the defeated French forces that struck her, hearing it discussed over dinner, as strange and unsatisfying, an arrangement that would see the enemy carried away on British ships rather than properly beaten into surrender, and General Blythe, asked his opinion of it one evening, gave an answer so carefully diplomatic that Jane understood at once he thought considerably less of the arrangement than his words permitted him to say plainly.
It was on one of those quiet evenings, the household settled and the General retired early, exhausted still from the battle’s aftermath, that Prudence found Jane alone in the small sitting room and sat down beside her with the particular deliberateness of a woman who had come with something specific to say.
“I have been thinking,” Prudence said, “that I owe you rather more honesty than I have generally troubled to offer, on a certain subject, and I find tonight seems as good a night as any for the offering of it.”
“You have always been honest with me, Aunt.”
“I have been honest about a great many things. I am not certain I have been honest about myself, particularly, beyond the practical business of packing trunks and managing households, and I find, watching you these past months, that I should like to remedy that, if you will permit me the indulgence of an old woman’s reflections. ”
Jane said she would permit it gladly, and Prudence was quiet a moment, gathering her thoughts, before she began.
“I was one and twenty when I married Edmund, against, as your father will have told you, a good deal of family opinion. My own mother thought me quite mad. A soldier, she said, with no fortune and no prospects beyond whatever he might earn himself, when I might have had a clergyman, or a lawyer, some sensible man who would have kept me safely at home and given me a settled, ordinary life.” She smiled, faintly, at some private memory.
“I did not want a settled, ordinary life. I did not entirely know, at one and twenty, what I did want, only that it was not that, and I have spent five and twenty years since discovering, by degrees, precisely what I traded for the choosing.”
“Was it worth the trading?”
“That is rather the question I have come to answer, and I find the answer is not so simple as I might once have given it.” Prudence’s hands, folded in her lap, went still.
“I have followed my husband through three wars now, Jane, and I have buried friends made and lost within the space of a single posting, and I have lived in more houses that were not my own than I could easily count, and I will tell you plainly that there have been nights, a great many of them, when I have lain awake wondering what my life might have looked like, had I chosen the clergyman, or the lawyer, and had children of my own, and a garden that stayed the same garden year upon year, rather than a different garden every eighteen months.”
Jane, hearing something in her aunt’s voice she had not heard there before, reached over and took her hand.
“I do not say this to distress you,” Prudence went on, “nor to suggest I regret my choice, for I do not, not in the whole of it, whatever the nights of wondering might occasionally suggest otherwise. I say it because I think you are standing, just now, rather nearer to a choice of your own than either of us has yet said plainly aloud, and I should like you to make it with your eyes as open as mine were shut, at one and twenty, when I made mine.”
“You think Major Fitzwilliam means to ask me.”
“I think Fitzwilliam has meant to ask you for some weeks now, and has been prevented chiefly by his own sense of what he can and cannot honestly offer, which I confess I find rather admirable in him, whatever inconvenience it has caused you both in the meanwhile.” Prudence looked at her properly.
“I have watched you become someone this summer, Jane, that I do not think Hertfordshire would have made of you, not in a hundred years of quarter days and tenant visits. I do not say Hertfordshire is nothing. I say only that I think the woman sitting beside me now would fit that life a good deal less easily than she once might have, and I think, if you are honest with yourself, you know that already.”
“I have thought of it,” Jane admitted. “I have thought, some nights, that I do not know how I should go back to Longbourn now, and be simply Jane Bennet again, managing the accounts and keeping the peace between Mama and everybody else, as though none of this had happened to me.”
“Then do not go back to being simply that,” Prudence said, “whatever comes of Fitzwilliam, or does not come of him. You have already become someone else, Jane, whether or not you marry a soldier, and I should be sorry to see you fold that someone away again simply because Longbourn does not yet know what to make of her.”
Jane sat with that a long while after her aunt had gone up to bed, turning it over the way she turned over most things that mattered, and found, examining herself honestly in the quiet of the sitting room, that she was not, in fact, waiting for Fitzwilliam to decide anything.
She had already decided. She had decided, she thought, somewhere between the fire and the fever, and what remained was not a question of her own choosing but only the practical business of two people finding their way, at last, to saying the thing plainly that both of them had known, for some time now, to be true.