Page 20 of Shipwrecked with Mr Darcy

“Hold still,” she said.

“I am holding still.”

“You believe you are holding still, yet you actively flinch every time I touch you.”

Darcy's jaw tightened. He sat on a flat rock at the edge of the beach, his ruined shirt pulled up to his ribs. The gash along his side was uglier in daylight—a jagged, crusted line running from below his arm to his hip, the surrounding skin swollen and hot. Elizabeth pressed the torn linen against it. He drew a breath through his teeth and did not flinch.

“It needs cleaning,” she said.

“With what?”

“Seawater. It will sting, and you will bear it without complaint. The alternative is infection. I am entirely unprepared to nurse a fever on a beach lacking supplies, shelter, and medical knowledge.”

“You are remarkably cheerful about inflicting pain.”

“I am remarkably practical about preventing death. The cheerfulness is incidental.”

She went to the water's edge, soaked a strip of linen, and came back. His skin jumped under her hands when she pressed it to the wound. She held the cloth firm and counted in her head, one, two, three, while the salt did its work. Darcy sat perfectly still. He was in considerable pain, but he clearly considered it a private matter requiring no audience.

His skin was warm under her fingers. She noticed this as mere fact, like the temperature of the seawater or the direction of the wind. She was too frightened to examine it further. She was salt-sick and shaking, concealing it by keeping her hands busy. Hands busy tearing linen and cleaning wounds did not have time to tremble.

She refused to cry. She had made the decision fourteen minutes ago and was holding firm.

“There,” she said, tying the bandage with a knot learnt from watching the cook truss a roast. It was entirely unmedical, but it would hold. “You will survive.”

“Your confidence is gratifying.”

“My confidence is based on the fact that you swam through a storm for six hours while bleeding and did not die, which suggests your constitution is either exceptionally robust or exceptionally stubborn, and I suspect the latter.”

His mouth moved. It was not quite a smile, but the suggestion of one.

Elizabeth sat back on her heels. The beach stretched in both directions, a narrow strip of grey sand hemmed by rocks, curving into the cove where they had washed ashore. The water in the cove was calmer than the open sea, lapping against the sand with a patient rhythm. Behind them, the land rose in low, scrubby hills covered in tough grey-green vegetation, clinging tenaciously to the rocky soil.

The air was filled with the scent of salt and herbs. Although she couldn't identify the specific herbs yet, the aroma was unmistakable—sharp, green, and persistent—carried by a warm breeze that felt like a summer day in June or July.

She did not know where they were. The pirate ship had sailed south and then west, or perhaps the reverse. The storm had driven them blindly. They were now deposited on one of several thousand Mediterranean islands, and no one was looking for them here.

The thought arrived, and she put it away. She would examine it when she had the luxury of fear. Now she needed water.

The sound came from uphill — a thin, persistent trickling of water finding its way down rock. Elizabeth followed it. The ground rose steeply behind the beach, the sand giving way to stone and scrub. She climbed. Her ruined shoes slipped on loose gravel; her hands grabbed at bushes that scratched and held.

She found the spring ten minutes up the slope. Water seeped from a crack in the rock face, running down a channel worn smooth by centuries of taking the same path. It pooled in a natural hollow at the base, clear and cold. Elizabeth knelt, cupped her hands, and drank.

The water tasted of stone and mineral. It was the finest thing she had ever consumed, surpassing even Mrs Hill's Christmas pudding, which her father annually declared proof of the Almighty's benevolence. She drank until her stomach protested, and then she drank more. She sat back, wiped her mouth, and looked at the trickle. We will not die of thirst.

One problem solved. Her mental list was long, and she addressed it strictly in order of urgency. Her father would have approved of the system. The thought of her family arrived like a stone dropped into the clear pool. She refused to follow the ripples.

She went back down. Darcy was sitting exactly where she had left him, his hand pressed to his bandaged side. He scanned the cove for sails. The horizon was empty. His expression remained fiercely, deliberately blank.

“There is a spring,” she said. “Fresh water, ten minutes uphill. It is not a torrent, but it flows.”

His shoulders dropped. She had not realised their tension until they fell. The relief was plain in the drop of them, and she looked away. Watching him experience relief felt inappropriately private.

“Can you walk?” she asked.

“I can walk.”

“Can you walk uphill on loose rock with a wound in your side, or are you merely asserting a theoretical capability?”