Jane Austen After

  “Fire!”

  Another howling screech, and this time the multiple shocks of arriving French cannon balls rocked the ship so violently that Crawford was thrown forward, striking his head. Splinters of red light flashed across his vision, stupefying him; his head rang like a bell.

  When the keening subsided, he made out the shape of a face bent over him. Someone was talking. He squinted, trying to bring face into focus—William Price, soot-covered—patiently barking words over and over.

  “. . . take hurt? Is aught amiss with your bones? Your head?”

  “No.” Crawford croaked, tried to swallow, but his throat burned. “Fine.”

  “Look, a chance ball sent a splinter into one of my powder boys, and the other was knocked through the hatch and broke his leg. Could I trouble you to lend a hand?”

  Crawford struggled to sit. The pain in his head was blinding, but the idea of moving—of having something to do so he did not have to think—came as relief. “Yes. Water?”

  “Catch a drink from the scupper on your way. Just go below—with this—bring up powder. As fast as ever you can.”

  Crawford took the reeking, sulfurous sack, and swayed to his feet. He stumbled to the hatch, spied one of the powder boys, and followed him to the powder room below, as the ship shook twice again, forcing them to steady against a bulkhead. Then the guns on both decks roared in a long, rippling broadside.

  All the world and time narrowed to the rush of blood through his head, the roughness of powder in his hands, the slewing of the ship as he either climbed up the ladders or down the ladders, the mouths open around the firing guns, the slipping of blood on the deck.

  Just once, in a curious lull, the words “. . . give chase!” carried to his ears: sound but little sense, setting up a train of connected memories and thoughts. Chase—fox chase—the sweet verdure around Mansfield—Everingham—William Price galloping after Edmund Bertram, whose hat had fallen, leaving him bare-headed, hair lifting in the wind. Edmund—Fanny—what is her expression when Edmund wakes, and sees her on the next pillow?

  Powder . . . roar. Until the world ends—

  The flash and red pain took him utterly by surprise. Then nothing.

  o0o

  “. . . take off the leg?”

  “No, it looks clean. Bleeding freely. Let’s section it here—hold his arms, I think he’s rousing.”

  A closer voice, lips warm against his ear: “Come, hold tight. That’s the dandy.”

  The red pain blossomed into white lightning, and then nothing again.

  He roused when someone lifted his head and pressed a cup to his lips. “Come now, drink it up.”

  The cup contained the vile concoction the sailors called grog, which seemed to be rum mixed with stale, long-casked water. It was also, apparently, a wholesale medicament: he forced down some sips, then came an even more vile concoction.

  “It’s soup. For convalescents.”

  It tasted like muck made of sawdust and ship’s biscuit. But he felt marginally better when at last they let him lay his aching head down again. Somewhere to the left a man moaned on every outward breath. The sound made Crawford anxious, then sad, and finally bitter.

  When he woke again, a rough but efficient hand was straightening his clothing. Crawford grimaced against his own stink, which was a disgusting and unexplainable mixture of stale sweat and brandy; his flesh was one itch, except for the continual throb in his leg, echoing the smaller one in his head.

  “Waking now, guv’nor?” It was the surgeon’s mate, an old sailor with only one arm. “Here. Your man is come with some tea. Mr. Price, he sent it down special. The capting is a-comin’ of to visit.”

  The tea was the most flavorful brew he had ever tasted, filling his tongue to the outsides of it, where it tingled refreshingly. Warmth spread downward through his veins. “Oh thank you, Bryce,” he gasped. And after another revivifying cup, “Is there a chance of a clean shirt?”

  “No, we don’t want to be movin’ ye about,” the mate said. “Yer man here can tell Mr. Price the tea went down right well. He keeps asking after you, sir. As does Young Price, which is the middie.”

  Crawford shut his eyes, then woke again when several hands began to shift him. His leg, which had quieted to a dull red ember of pain, flared into roaring flames again, as hands moved him, then poured pungent liquid over the wound; he had a vague recollection that this had happened before, as the smell of brandy made him anxious.

  The pain had quieted when Captain himself appeared, his eyes marked with exhaustion, but a smile.

  “Well, then, Mr. Crawford, how do you do?”

  “Well enough,” Henry said. “I take it we prevailed?”

  “Mr. Price tells me you are a man of means, so the news that your share of the prize might net you two hundred pounds or so will probably not cause general celebration. But you’ll have a fine story to tell at home. The French are driven off; a fifty gun man-of-war surrendered to us just before the first watch. It was a fairly long engagement as those go, with a chase in between, but our losses were relatively light: four died, and nearly thirty carry wounds from superficial to severe.”

  “I am glad it was no worse,” Henry murmured, because he thought he must say something.

  “You, sir, are in the latter category. You hit your head in falling, but we are assured it was only a glancing blow. You took a long splinter in the thigh, and several smaller ones lower in your limb. The surgeon was concerned about a major blood vessel, but he feels the wound is healing cleanly. He is a very experienced gentleman. He’s been with me these six years, and you may repose complete trust in him.”

  “Thank you. He’s brought me thus far . . . and has my gratitude. . . How fares the vessel?”

  “We lost the foretopmast, two guns, my larboard quarter-gallery, and numerous gun ports were knocked into holes. The mizzen was wounded, and we’ve fished it for now. We should reach Port Mahon within three days if the wind holds.”

  Crawford suspected Wentworth had duties awaiting him, so he signed his thanks and closed his eyes, listening to Wentworth’s quiet murmur as he made his way around the cabin to each man.

  o0o

  The wind died that night.

  The air heated up until it became stultifying. Midmorning the next day, at the urgent request of the surgeon, the captain gave permission for the wounded who could be carried to be brought up to the weather deck, and set out under awnings rigged to shade them. Crawford lay in a pool of his own sweat, his leg an agony at the slightest movement.

  Gradually he sank into fever. From the sounds, many around him were also feverish. His mind wandered. He heard the text of Mary’s letters, only she was reading. No, she stood at the window at the admiral’s, looking out at the garden, the light on her profile.

  “Who would have thought that little dormouse Fanny Price would be playing the deepest game of all. Did she count upon marrying a future Sir Edmund?”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Henry murmured, and louder, because Mary did not turn from the window. “That’s foolish. Fanny did not know Thomas would become ill when she turned me down.”

  “Here, sir. Drink. It’ll do you good.”

  Tea washed through Henry’s dry mouth, fighting the strange lassitude, and reknitting his body to the present world. Including the pain. He opened his eyes, to discover William Price sitting near his head, using a bit of sailcloth tied to a pole as a fan to create a semblance of a breeze.

  With the sense of his body came a measure of awareness. “Was I talking?” he asked, his voice barely above a whisper.

  “Yes.” William looked to one side, and then said, “About my sister.”

  Henry swallowed. “Is she happy?” And when William looked around again, “Is she happy, William?”

  William Price turned back, his face somber. Unfamiliar that way. “Fanny would be happy anywhere, so long as she’s properly loved.”

  “So . . . does Bertram love her?”

  “I think s
o,” William said, and then in a rush. “Though I don’t think he knows her. That’s why I wished . . .”

  Henry made an effort and opened his eyes. William made a helpless gesture, and Henry understood it to mean that he wished that Henry had married her. He grimaced.

  William said in haste, “Make no doubt, I have a great regard for Cousin Edmund. He’s a capital fellow. But he was used to telling her what to think. He never asked her what she thought.”

  “No one did, in that house,” Crawford said, too weak to be surprised at the turn this conversation was taking—one he never thought he would have. Maybe he was dreaming it. “I asked her. And asked her. What she was thinking. But she would never tell me.”

  William sighed, then said, “She wouldn’t tell me neither, even when we were alone two days, before I sailed on the Thrush. I make no doubt she was turning things over in her mind. She was a thinker, even when we were small. I thought it a fine thing to get her away from the Bertrams’ influence, so she might see clear. Maybe she always saw clear.”

  His implication was clear enough, and nothing new. If Crawford had for once exercised strength of mind and waited, he would have gained his dearest wish.

  Leaving him with the hardest question of all: would anticipation of getting his dearest wish have been sufficient to inspire him to a lifetime of exercising strength of mind?

  Another time he could be his own worst enemy, but now, it was good to just lie passively, listening to the soft plash of water against the hull. There was just enough breeze to keep the ship from rolling out its masts, but not enough to drive it.

  “Would you like to hear something from her latest letter?” William offered.

  “Yes.” Yes, though it would pain him in the heart as much as this damned splinter had cut his limb.

  With that strange, feverish clarity that poised his brain between memory and the present—as if he did not quite exist completely in either place—Henry remembered being so sure, so confident in his powers as he said to Fanny, It is not by equality of merit that you can be won. That is out of the question. It is he who sees and worships your merit the strongest, who loves you the most devotedly, that has the best right of a return.

  He had never believed such a woman existed—such a person existed. If he discovered through her letters the evidence that in attaining happiness she had grown complacent, he would know that she, too, was made like the rest of humanity. Not calculating, or cruel, but . . . perhaps prosy. Smug, perched comfortably on the high moral ground with her clergyman husband. Sharing psalms over breakfast, and subjecting dinner guests to improving sermons.

  Yet such was the conflict of human nature—of his nature—he knew that if she were not happy, it would hurt the worst of all.

  “Here we go, then. ‘Sir Thomas rides over every evening to discuss new plans for Mansfield Parsonage with your cousin Edmund. They scarcely agree on one plan before he thinks of a better, and like the queen in the story, he returns the next day with a new tale. We meet each as if it’s the first, though we are agreed that whatever is settled on, there must always be a room for you. It gives Sir Thomas such pleasure to be planning nursery rooms, and a wine cellar, and a better library, but one day the workmen must actually begin . . .’”

  William’s deep, chesty burr of a voice did not quite mask the soft fall of Fanny’s voice in Henry’s mind. These were her words, and he could so easily see her smile, the mild expression of her eyes as she wrote them.

  “‘Aunt Bertram has given me rose clippings for the new garden. Such blooms we had at Thornton Lacey last spring! It comforts me to know that Mrs. Hodgekin, wife of the curate who takes our place there, will love them as I did . . .’”

  The voice read on, sinking below the images of Fanny in the garden, stooped over the roses, Fanny walking down the avenue toward the Parsonage. Fanny sitting over her sewing, the reflection of the fire in her eyes.

  Henry Crawford ceased to hear the words, as images pressed on his brain, driving him down into dreams of what had never been. Is this death? he wondered. He found he did not really care.

  o0o

  But when William came next, Henry was a little stronger. William brought an older letter, which he brandished, saying that he thought he might read more, having seen what pleasure the latest one gave Henry.

  When William was done reading, Henry asked, “When you write to her. What do you tell her?”

  William chuckled. “Not what you might be thinking. I might say we were in a scrape. She’ll hear that anyway, if Sam writes to our brother Tom, bragging, you know, as boys will. I tell her the news from a distance, you might say. The glorious parts.”

  “Is there a glorious part?” Crawford asked, closing his eyes again. “I remembering hearing something. About that young fellow Musgrove. Something thought he was feigning injury?”

  “We’ve yet to prove that. He’s biding in quarters, as if recovering. The captain don’t want to put him under arrest.”

  “Because if he does, what next, you shoot him?” Henry opened his eyes. “Or hang him from the yard-arm? A boy who should be in school.”

  “Smaller boys that he are hanged for stealing a loaf of bread. Not that I think it right. That is, it has to be called right in that it’s the law. But I don’t like it. As it is, Dick Musgrove has three years on Sam.” William shrugged.

  “He’s not fit for this kind of work,” Henry said.

  “Truth is, he’s not fit for much of anything. If he was just shy, what we call blessed are the peace-makers, for we never like to say the word ‘coward’ outright, in cold blood, you know. If he was timid, he could be put to a clerkship in the Navy office, or the like. But he’s no hand with pen or counter. A coward sober, and a bully when he’s in liquor, which is all the time he can find it. If he was home, he’d be cutting capers like pretending to be a highwayman. He’s no use to us, see, where we have to depend on each other. That’s what duty means, each trusts the next man to do his part. Then we all come through.”

  “I understand what you say about duty, but I find I don’t blame him, or any other man, for a natural instinct in self-preservation.”

  William said soberly, “We all have it. I’ve found out that under fire, we’re all afraid. Or most.”

  Henry would have abandoned the subject if he had been in London. But in London such a subject never would have arisen. It was not witty, or clever, or modish. He seemed impelled, whether by pain, or fever, or some need he did not recognize, to speak. “I never believed in Hell, but if there is one, it could be no worse. Maybe Hell is really this life—war and pestilence. It seems an exercise in futility, murdering one another, when ten years ago I toured in France, and I liked the people and the place. And I can’t help thinking that in any battle with them, both sides are praying to the same God for victory.”

  There was a hesitation, as the eternal surge rushed and slapped the hull, and men’s quiet voices rose and fell, sometimes punctuated by a laugh.

  “I think you’re better asking Cousin Edmund about such things, that being his business, so to speak. Just as he wouldn’t tell someone how to box-haul a brig off a lee shore. But I like to think that Davey Ebbins, as good a man as ever lived, is back with his family, took by the bloody flux ten years ago. He was on the foremast crosstrees when it fell.”

  William shifted, sniffed the air, and said, “We’re getting a breeze.” He reached around and rapped the deck gently with his knuckles. “As for my letters, I tell Fanny the things she’d like to hear. You know, what I talked about, when I visited my Bertram cousins that year. High waves in typhoons, but we survived it. Strange beasts at sea. Odd sights, like rings around the moon, and Leviathan swimming alongside us, giving us a knock against the hull in play, that shakes the ship to the royal yards. Next letter, I’ll tell her about the monkey that Sam bought in Trinidad off a Portugee fellow, taught to dance on the capstan when someone blows a pennywhistle.”

  “Yes, she would like that. If no one is cruel to t
he monkey.”

  “Well that’s the thing about Sister Fanny. She expects Sam to be good to the monkey. She wants life to be good. She lives the good life.”

  Ting! Ting!

  “My watch. Shall I send your man with any more tea? A biscuit?”

  “I am perfectly content. Thank you.”

  Footsteps moved away rapidly, and Henry lay, enjoying the whisper of wind over his limbs. The embers in his leg had banked. If he didn’t move at all . . .

  o0o

  As the wind picked up, life began to flow back into Henry. He woke ravenous for the first time. The ship began to come to life, so the surgeon’s mate and a party of seamen carried the wounded down below again. Bryce hovered anxiously, clearly relieved when Henry asked for something to eat.

  The surgeon came around to check that no wounds had broken open, after everyone was below. “We’ll get your man to shift your clothes, I think,” he said heartily to Crawford. “Another application of burnt brandy will keep the cool humours circulating, and the dangerous warm ones in check. You eat, and rest, and walk about as much as ever you can. I’ve found that the sooner a man is up and about, the sooner the humours circulate, and healing sets in.”

  The sooner you have him back at labor, Henry thought, but he kept that to himself.

  “If you get feverish, you tell us and we’ll blood you. But I suspect you’ll do.”

  The surgeon began to turn away, but Henry reached to catch his wrist. “Will I walk with a limp?”

  The surgeon frowned. He was haggard, unshaven, his eyes red-rimmed. He glanced at Henry’s foot, still encased in the blood-crusted stocking, and shrugged. “I expect so. You might need a cane, but you’ll do.” The tone of voice on those last two words was very different from the previous use. Impatient, and perhaps a judgment.

  Henry heard the separation of rank in those words: until then they had been two men, one recently in danger of losing his life, the other working to preserve it, but now Henry had once again become a wealthy man of rank, and as such, a cane would not be the tragedy that it might for some of these other fellows, whose livelihood depended on working limbs.