Chapter Twenty-Eight
Coming Home
The recommendation came through in the early spring, carried to General Blythe by dispatch from the Horse Guards, and Jane understood, watching her uncle read it over breakfast with an expression she had learned, by now, to interpret rather better than most people managed, that this letter, unlike so many that had come before it, contained news he had been quietly hoping for rather than merely bracing himself against.
“They want me for a senior appointment at home,” he said, setting the letter down with a carefulness that told Jane he was working to keep his own reaction properly measured before he had fully decided what that reaction ought to be.
“A staff position, training and organisation rather than the field. It would mean England, and it would mean, I think, that my soldiering days in the proper sense of the word are very likely concluded.”
"There is more," he added, setting a second, smaller letter beside the first. "This one concerns Fitzwilliam rather than myself. His conduct at Vimeiro has been properly noticed at last, and not merely by his own colonel. He is to be made Lieutenant Colonel, with effect from the New Year."
Jane felt the news land somewhere warmer than mere satisfaction.
She thought of the sabre cut, and the four days of fever, and the note he had left her before Vimeiro that she had been so angry about, and understood that whatever price he had paid for that particular fortnight, the army, at least, had finally reckoned it properly.
"He has said nothing of it to me," she said.
"He would not have. I do not think he knows yet himself, unless his own letters have reached him faster than mine reached me, which I rather doubt, given the state of the roads out there.
" The General's mouth twitched, the closest thing to a smile he generally permitted himself before breakfast was properly finished.
"You may have the pleasure of telling him, if you like, when next you write.
I daresay he will pretend to be entirely unmoved by it, and I daresay you will not believe him for a moment. "
He looked at Prudence as he said this, and Jane, watching the exchange, understood that whatever else the letter contained, its real weight lay in that look, and in whatever answer Prudence’s face gave back to it.
Prudence did not say anything at once. She took a full week, in fact, before she properly believed the appointment was settled and not some administrative possibility that might yet be withdrawn, a caution Jane understood, by now, to be entirely characteristic of a woman who had learned, over five and twenty years, not to trust good news until it had proven itself thoroughly durable.
It was on the eighth day, when a second letter arrived confirming the appointment beyond any reasonable doubt, that Jane found her aunt alone in the small sitting room, sitting very still with the letter in her lap, and understood, seeing her aunt’s face, that whatever composure Prudence had maintained through the week of waiting had, at last, properly given way.
“Twenty years,” Prudence said, when Jane sat down beside her, “of waiting for a letter I did not entirely allow myself to hope for, and now that it has come I find I do not quite know what to do with the having of it.” She wiped her eyes, briskly, in her ordinary practical manner, though the practicality did not entirely disguise what lay beneath it.
“I am not sorry for the twenty years, Jane. I want you to understand that plainly. I would not trade a single posting, however difficult, for a different life that never knew your uncle at all. But I find I am permitted, I think, to also be glad that the difficulty is, at long last, properly behind us, and I do not intend to apologise to anyone for the gladness.”
“You need not apologise to me for any of it,” Jane said, taking her aunt’s hand. “I think you have earned every particle of that gladness, several times over.”
?∞?
They sailed for England within the month, the arrangements moving with the particular speed that attended a senior officer’s recall, and Jane found herself, packing her own trunk for the crossing, in a position she could not quite have imagined a year before, sailing home not as the girl who had fled a baronet’s dinner table but as a married woman, settled and certain, returning to a family who did not yet know the whole shape of what had happened to her in the months since they had last seen her face.
Fitzwilliam had his own business that required him in England, a matter concerning his father that he mentioned only briefly and with a carefulness Jane had come to recognise as characteristic of him whenever the subject of his family arose, and she did not press him on it, understanding, by now, that he would tell her the whole of it in his own time, in his own way, and that pressing at a thing he was not yet ready to say plainly rarely produced anything beyond a more determined silence.
“You are thinking very hard about something,” he observed, on the second day of the crossing, finding her at the rail watching the grey water slide past.
“I am thinking about arriving home married, with no warning to anybody, and trying to imagine my mother’s face when she understands what has happened in my absence.”
“I confess I have been avoiding thinking of that particular meeting in any great detail,” Fitzwilliam said, with a small, rueful laugh. “I find I have faced French cavalry with rather less trepidation than I presently feel about facing your mother.”
“You need not fear her,” Jane said, though she could not entirely keep the amusement from her own voice.
“She will be delighted, in her own fashion, once she has properly understood the situation. I only cannot predict how long the understanding will take her, nor what she will say in the meanwhile, while she is still working out precisely how delighted she ought to be.”
He laughed properly at that, and took her hand, and they stood together at the rail a while longer, watching the grey Atlantic swell carry them, by slow degrees, back toward a country and a family that had, in the eight months of Jane’s absence, gone on entirely without her, and that she found she was, despite every uncertainty the homecoming presented, genuinely, warmly eager to see again.