Chapter Twenty-Four
Talk
Mr Graves called two days later, in the late afternoon, and Jane understood from the quality of his manner, gentle but somehow final, that he had come to say a goodbye of his own, though not, this time, the kind that wanted answering.
“I am for Lisbon again tomorrow,” he said, when they had settled in the courtyard with the last of the day’s heat easing into evening, “and I do not know when my business will bring me back this way. I find I wanted to see you before I went, and to say something I have been meaning to say for some weeks now, if you will permit me the saying of it.”
“You need not ask permission, Mr Graves. You have always been welcome to speak plainly with me.”
“I know it, and I have valued it more than I have properly told you.” He turned his hat in his hands, a gesture she remembered from the afternoon of his proposal, though his manner now carried none of that day’s careful hope, only a settled, easy warmth that told her, more than any words could, that whatever the proposal had cost him, the cost had properly healed.
“I have known for some weeks that your heart is given elsewhere, Jane. I do not say I have known it comfortably, for I will not pretend the knowing cost me nothing, but I have known it, and I find I have made my peace with it, and I wanted you to hear that from me directly, rather than have you wondering, every time we meet, whether some old awkwardness still sits between us.”
“I have wondered it, a little,” Jane admitted. “I have valued your friendship too much to wish it spoiled by what came before.”
“It is not spoiled. I will not say it cost nothing to arrive at that, for I am not in the habit of telling you less than the truth, and the truth is that it cost me a difficult month or two, turning the matter over. But I find, arriving now at the other side of it, that I would rather have your friendship honestly than any warmer feeling dishonestly held, and I think, whatever else you take from this conversation, you ought to take that.” He smiled, properly, the first entirely easy smile she had seen from him since his proposal.
“I wish you very happy, Jane, whatever comes of Major Fitzwilliam’s evident and rather poorly concealed devotion.
I have watched the two of you these past months with something that started as envy and has settled, I am glad to say, into something considerably more like simple gladness on your behalf. ”
Jane found her eyes had filled, unexpectedly, and reached over and took his hand a moment, in the same easy manner she might once have taken Elizabeth’s.
“You have been one of the best things about this whole difficult summer, Mr Graves. I hope you know that, whatever else was or was not between us.”
“I know it now,” he said, “and I find that knowing is rather more than sufficient.” He rose, and bowed over her hand with his old easy grace, entirely restored.
“Take care of yourself, and of him, when he finally works up the courage to say what I think we both know he means to say. I have found, in my own trade, that the men most careful about a thing are generally the ones who mean it most seriously, and I do not think Major Fitzwilliam is any exception to that rule.”
He left within the half hour, and Jane sat a while in the courtyard after he had gone, turning over the conversation and finding, beneath the small ache of any parting honestly felt, a clean and settled gladness that the matter, at last, sat properly closed between them.
?∞?
Fitzwilliam came two days after that, in the late morning, on some pretext of army business that Jane understood, from the very first moment of his arrival, to be considerably thinner than he perhaps believed it to be, and she found Prudence, encountering him in the hall, developed a sudden and urgent need to see about some matter in the kitchen that kept her occupied for a period of time rather longer than any kitchen matter had previously required in the whole of Jane’s acquaintance with the household.
“Your aunt is very transparent,” Fitzwilliam observed, watching Prudence’s hasty retreat with an expression that held equal parts amusement and gratitude.
“She has been rather transparent about a great many things, this past week,” Jane agreed, and led him out to the small garden behind the house, where the afternoon light fell soft and gold through a stand of olive trees the previous tenants had planted some years before, and where, she understood, without either of them saying so directly, the conversation they had both been circling for months was finally going to be permitted to properly land.
He was quiet a long while, walking beside her along the garden’s single narrow path, close enough that his hand brushed hers once, twice, before he seemed to notice himself doing it and simply took hold of it properly, lacing his fingers through hers without asking leave, and Jane, watching him, saw a man gathering himself for something that plainly cost him a good deal of nerve, however many battles he had faced with rather more outward composure.
“Do you know,” he said, at last, stopping beneath the olive trees and turning to face her, still holding her hand, “I have imagined this conversation perhaps a hundred times since the fire. I had it beautifully composed, at one point, somewhere round about the third week of trying and failing to stop thinking of you. I had a very fine speech, Jane, full of everything I meant to say and the exact right order to say it in.”
“What became of the speech?”
“I find I cannot remember a word of it, now that you are actually standing in front of me.” He brought her hand up, slowly, and pressed it against his chest, where she could feel his heart going considerably faster than the stillness of his voice suggested.
“So you will have to forgive me the plain version instead, since it is all I appear to have left.”
“I think I should like the plain version rather better than any speech.”
“I have no money worth speaking of,” he said, his voice low now, and rougher than before.
“I am a younger son, and I will very likely remain a soldier for the whole of my working life, moving from posting to posting with whatever pay the army allows me, and some of those postings will carry me away from you for months together, with nothing to offer you in the meanwhile but letters, and I have already shown you exactly how badly I can manage those, when fear gets the better of my good sense.” He touched her face then, his thumb tracing, once, gently, along her cheek.
“I have told myself, every day for above four months, that a woman like you deserves a man who can offer her rather more certainty than that. I find, standing here under these trees with your hand over my heart, that I have entirely run out of the capacity to care about the certainty I cannot give you, because I find I would rather have an uncertain life with you in it than any settled, comfortable life without you.”
Jane looked at him, this careful, honest, thoroughly unglamorous man who had ridden against his own orders to sit by her sickbed, and burned his hands beating out a fire, and fought some private battle with himself for three miserable weeks rather than say what he plainly felt before he was ready to say it properly, and found she had never in her life been so entirely certain of anything.
“I did not come to Portugal for certainty,” she said, her own voice unsteady now, and stepped closer, close enough that she could feel the warmth coming off him, close enough that his free hand came up almost without his seeming to notice and settled at the small of her back.
“I came because I could not marry a man who looked at everything except my face, and I found, instead, a man who has looked at nothing else since a bookshop in Falmouth, whatever he told himself about the sensible course in the meanwhile.”
Something in his face broke open entirely then, all the careful gathering of the walk giving way at once, and he bent his head and rested his forehead against hers a moment, both simply breathing, before he drew back just far enough to look at her properly.
“Jane. Will you marry me?” His voice cracked, very slightly, on her name, and he did not seem to mind that she had heard it crack.
“I ask it plainly, because I have had rather enough of not asking and because I find I would rather spend the whole of my life uncertain of my pay and entirely certain of you, than have things the other way about. I love you most ardently my dearest Jane and I cannot bear another moment without you by my side.”
“Yes,” she said, and found the word came without any hesitation at all, as though it had been waiting, fully formed, for exactly this moment to finally be spoken. “Yes, Richard. I will.”
He kissed her then, in the golden afternoon light under the olive trees, with none of the carefulness he had brought to everything else in these past months, and Jane, kissing him back, thought that whatever uncertainty lay ahead of them, postings and pay and a soldier’s unpredictable life, she could not, in that moment, have wanted anything else in the whole world half so much as this.
When he drew back at last, he did not let go of her. He kept both arms around her, his forehead resting against hers, and Jane felt him take a breath that was not quite steady.
“I love you,” he said, and there was nothing careful in it now, nothing held back or weighed first for its sensibleness.
“I love you with the whole of my heart, Jane, and I think I have loved you a good deal longer than I have been willing to admit even to myself, and I find, now that I have finally said it plainly, that I do not know how I managed to go a single day without saying it before this.”
“You managed it very badly, if I am honest,” Jane said, though her voice was not quite steady either, and she was smiling.
“I managed it appallingly,” he agreed, and something in his laugh caught, halfway through, on something closer to feeling than amusement.
“I do not intend to manage it so badly again. I love you with everything I have, heart and soul and whatever else a man is meant to offer when he has run entirely out of sensible reasons not to, and I find I cannot bear the thought of another day, another hour, without you properly beside me, not as something I am working my way toward, but as something already, entirely mine.” He pulled back just far enough to look at her face, his own so open now that it startled her a little, this careful man laid suddenly, gladly bare.
“You are the whole of what I want, Jane. Not the sensible arrangement I once thought my life required. You.”
Jane reached up and touched his face, and found she had no words steady enough to match his, and so she simply drew him down to her again, and kissed him, slowly this time, unhurried, the olive trees stirring faintly overhead and the whole golden afternoon standing still around them, and understood that whatever words either of them found or failed to find, this, at least, needed none.