Chapter Twenty-Nine
Longbourn
The carriage arrived at Longbourn on a Tuesday afternoon in late spring, without any warning sent ahead, Jane having decided, after some consideration, that a letter announcing both her marriage and her imminent arrival would only give her mother a full week to work herself into whatever state such news might produce, and that it seemed kinder, on the whole, to all parties, to simply arrive and let the matter be discovered in a single manageable burst rather than a week of mounting anticipation.
Her mother was, unfortunately, at home.
Jane heard her before she properly saw her, the familiar voice carrying from the drawing room the moment the front door opened, some ordinary complaint about the state of the roads or the lateness of a delivery, and found herself, standing in the old familiar hall with Fitzwilliam beside her, suddenly and entirely unprepared for the strangeness of being home again after eight months that had changed her rather more than the house itself had changed in her absence.
Mrs Bennet came into the hall already talking, and stopped, mid-sentence, at the sight of her eldest daughter standing there with an unfamiliar gentleman at her side, and Jane watched her mother’s face move through several distinct expressions in the space of perhaps three seconds, confusion, recognition, and then, as her eyes moved to the gentleman’s uniform and back to Jane’s own composed, evidently married bearing, something that settled, with remarkable speed, into a calculating sort of alarm.
“Jane. Jane Bennet. What in heaven’s name—” She stopped herself, visibly gathering her composure, and turned her attention fully to Fitzwilliam, taking in the uniform, the rank insignia, the general bearing of a man accustomed to command, with the particular rapid arithmetic Jane had watched her mother apply to every eligible man who had ever crossed the threshold of Longbourn. “And who, may I ask, is this?”
“Mama, may I present my husband, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Fitzwilliam.”
The word husband produced, in Mrs Bennet, a reaction that Jane watched with something approaching scientific interest, her mother’s face working through shock and something that might, in a kinder woman, have been mistaken for joy, before settling, with visible effort, into a composure that fooled nobody in the hall, least of all Jane.
“Your husband. Well. Well, I am sure I do not know what to say, arriving quite without warning, married, to a gentleman none of us has had the pleasure of meeting, though I am sure he is very respectable, being a Lieutenant Colonel and all, though I confess a Lieutenant Colonel’s pay is not perhaps what I might once have hoped for you, Jane, given your beauty, which everybody always said would secure you the very best establishment in the county, but I daresay a Lieutenant Colonel is perfectly respectable, in his own way, and younger sons must make their way as they can, I suppose, and I am sure your father will have a great deal to say about the whole business, arriving quite without warning like this—”
She continued in this vein for some minutes, Fitzwilliam receiving the whole performance with a composure Jane found herself privately admiring, giving her mother nothing whatever to properly object to and nothing, either, to particularly celebrate, playing the part of a perfectly respectable, perfectly unremarkable military husband with an ease that Jane understood, watching him, concealed a very great deal of private amusement at the whole proceeding.
It was in the hallway, some minutes later, while Mrs Bennet had gone to inform Mrs Hill that there would be two more for dinner and to enquire, at considerable volume, whether the good linen had been properly aired, that Mr Bennet came out from his library and found his eldest daughter standing there, and stopped, and looked at her a long moment before he said anything at all.
“You are well,” he said. It was not quite a question.
“I am very well, Papa.”
“She seems well,” he said, this time to Fitzwilliam, with the dry economy Jane had missed more than she had properly realised, these eight months away.
“She is very well, sir,” Fitzwilliam said, and something passed between the two men that needed no further elaboration, and Mr Bennet nodded once, as though this settled some matter he had been carrying, unresolved, since the morning he had watched his daughter’s carriage disappear down the lane eight months before, and turned, without any further ceremony, and went back into his library, though Jane noticed, following him with her eyes, that his hand rested a moment longer than necessary on the doorframe before he disappeared inside.
Nobody else caught it. Jane understood, watching him go, that this was simply how her father expressed the things that moved him most, and found she would not have wanted it expressed any other way.
?∞?
Elizabeth found her in her old room an hour later, once the worst of the initial commotion had settled and Mrs Bennet had retreated to compose herself over the news with the assistance of her salts and a good deal of conversation directed at nobody in particular, and the two sisters had, at last, some forty-five minutes properly alone together before dinner was to be served.
“You didn’t tell Mama I married?” Jane asked Elizabeth.
“No, I did not think she deserved to know.”
“It was quite a surprise for her.”
“You are different,” Elizabeth said, studying her sister with the same frank, unhurried attention she had always brought to anything that genuinely interested her. “I do not mean only married. I mean something underneath that. You hold yourself differently.”
“I have had rather a lot happen to me, since I left.”
“I gathered as much from your letters, though I think you told me perhaps a tenth of the whole of it, if I am any judge.” Elizabeth sat down on the edge of the bed, exactly as she had the morning Jane left.
“Is he kind? Your Major. I could not properly judge from downstairs, with Mama talking over everybody and everything.”
“He is honest,” Jane said, after a moment’s consideration.
“I have come to think that honest is rather more important than kind, though he is that too. He does not tell me what I wish to hear. He tells me what is true, and I find I trust that a great deal more than I would trust any amount of easy compliments. And he is a Lieutenant Colonel now.”
Elizabeth looked at her a long moment, something working behind her eyes.
“That is a very Portuguese thing to say.”
“I have noticed that myself,” Jane said, and found herself laughing, properly, for what felt like the first time since the carriage had turned in at the Longbourn gate, and Elizabeth laughed with her, and the two of them sat together on the old familiar bed, in the old familiar room, talking as they had talked a hundred times before, though both of them understood, without either saying it plainly, that neither of them was quite the same person who had last sat here together, eight months and a whole changed world ago.