Chapter Twenty-Six
The Wedding in Lisbon
They were married on a bright morning in October, at the small chapel the British chaplain had made his own in a quiet corner of the city, the Convention having by then sent the last French troops away and left Lisbon itself, at last, properly and peaceably British in its occupation.
Jane had thought, in the weeks of preparation, that she would want something grand, some proper reflection of the momentousness of the day, and found instead, standing in the chapel’s plain, whitewashed interior with the morning light coming soft through its single window, that she wanted nothing of the kind.
She wanted precisely this, small and real and built entirely from the world she had made for herself these past months, and she understood, dressing that morning in a gown Prudence had helped her have made from the best silk Lisbon’s remaining merchants could supply, that grandness would have felt, to her, like a kind of falseness, a performance of a happiness that needed no performing at all.
The chapel was not empty, for all its plainness.
General Blythe gave her away, standing in for the father who could not be there, and did it, Jane thought, with a pride that sat rather closer to his own heart than he generally permitted himself to show.
Prudence sat in the front pew with an expression she made no effort to compose into anything steadier than it wished to be.
Mr Graves had come back from Lisbon specifically for the occasion, and sat among Fitzwilliam’s brother officers with an ease that told Jane, more than any words could have, how thoroughly and honestly, he had made his peace with the whole matter.
A good number of the officers Jane had come to know through the hospital work attended regardless, along with several of the nursing staff, women who had become, over these difficult months, something nearer to friends than Jane had expected a war to produce.
And there was Amália, the cook, standing at the very back of the small chapel in her best dress, having declared, when Jane attempted gently to suggest she need not trouble herself with the whole ceremony, that she had watched the young miss become a proper woman these past months and would not, on any account, be excluded from seeing the proper conclusion of it.
?∞?
Fitzwilliam waited for her at the front, in his dress uniform, and Jane, walking up the short aisle on her uncle’s arm, found she could not look anywhere else at all, his face doing something she had not quite seen it do before, all the careful composure of the past months simply given way entirely to something open and unguarded and, she thought, rather closer to wonder than to anything she had words for.
The chaplain, an elderly man who had married a great many soldiers to a great many women in his years of service and had long since stopped finding any particular novelty in the proceedings, conducted the service with a plain, unhurried warmth that suited the day perfectly, and Jane found, saying her vows, that her voice did not shake at all, steady in a way she had not entirely expected it to be, as though the whole of these past months had been quietly preparing her for exactly this moment of certainty.
Fitzwilliam’s own voice caught, once, on a word, and he did not seem embarrassed by it, only paused a moment, gathered himself, and went on, and Jane thought that she would rather have that small human catch than any smoothly delivered speech, for it told her, more plainly than perfect composure could have, precisely how much the moment meant to him.
?∞?
Afterward there was a breakfast, modest by any English standard but generous by the standards of a household still finding its footing in a foreign country, and General Blythe rose at some point in the proceedings to offer a toast that began, in his usual dry manner, with some remark about having finally, after considerable patience, seen the matter properly concluded, and ended, rather to Jane’s surprise, with his voice not quite steady either.
“I have watched a great many things in twenty years of soldiering,” he said, “battles won and lost, men I have cared for lost to causes I could not always properly justify to myself, and I will tell you plainly that I have not, in all that time, watched anything that gave me quite the satisfaction of watching my niece become, this morning, precisely the woman I always hoped she might become, married to a man I am genuinely proud to call my nephew. To Jane and Richard.”
The toast was drunk, and Prudence, beside her husband, was openly crying by this point, and made no particular effort to disguise it, and Jane, watching her aunt’s unashamed tears, thought that she had never in her life felt so entirely, completely surrounded by people who loved her plainly and without complication, a feeling she had not, she realised, properly known before this whole difficult, transformative summer had taught her, by degrees, exactly what it felt like.
Amália, cornered by Jane near the end of the breakfast, pressed a small carved wooden bird into her hands, saying something rapid in Portuguese that Jane did not entirely follow, though Prudence, translating with some amusement, explained that it was meant for luck, and for children, and for a long and happy marriage, roughly in that order of importance, and Jane thanked her, in her own halting Portuguese, and found the cook’s eyes had filled to match her own.
?∞?
It was evening before Jane found herself, at last, properly alone with her husband, the two of them standing on the small balcony of the rooms they were to share, looking out over a city that had, for Jane, come to mean considerably more than she could ever have imagined it might, back in a London breakfast room when she had first heard her uncle’s proposal.
“I did not think, six months ago,” Jane said, “that I should end this year married, in Portugal, to a man I had not yet met.”
“I did not think, six months ago,” Fitzwilliam said, “that I should end it married at all, having made rather elaborate plans to remain a bachelor a good deal longer, out of what I now understand to have been nothing more than a want of proper courage.” He put his arm around her, and she leaned into him, the evening air still warm and carrying, faintly, the smell of the sea.
“I find I am very glad both our six-months-ago selves were entirely wrong about the shape of their own futures.”
“As am I,” Jane said, “more glad than I know how to properly say,” and stood there with him a long while in the gathering dark, watching the lights of the city come up one by one below them, and thought that whatever came next, whatever postings and partings and uncertainties a soldier’s life still held in store, she had, at last, precisely what she had come here looking for, though she had not, at the start, quite known how to name it.