Page 24 of Shipwrecked with Mr Darcy

“Needs clearing. Bird nests, debris, a decade of accumulated filth.”

“Filth,” she repeated, looking at the flagstones with an expression that suggested the filth had made a personal enemy. “We shall need to carry water from the spring. And something to scrub with. The myrtle bushes have stiff branches that might serve.”

She was already working. He watched her climb the stairs to the upper room. He heard her footsteps on the stone and the small sound she made upon seeing the view. Elizabeth Bennet did not gasp; it was a caught breath, quickly released, followed by silence. It was her version of admiration, and it proved more eloquent than any exclamation from women who exclaimed more freely and meant less by it.

She came back down. “We can live here,” she said.

The word live carried more than either had said aloud. It suggested more than the temporary occupancy they had managed on the beach, sleeping on sand under sailcloth. It implied an unspecified duration, perhaps weeks. It meant the two of them, in this tower, building a life from nothing on an island where no one was looking for them.

“Yes,” he said. “We can.”

They spent the rest of the day making it possible. Darcy cleared the lower room, hauling debris and bird nests through the archway and dumping them down the slope. The work pulled at his wound with every lift, but he ignored the bright, insistent pain in his side. The tower needed clearing. Elizabeth carried water from the spring in the salvaged barrel, trip after trip up the hill, her dress stained dark at the hem from kneeling in the mud by the pool. She scrubbed the flagstones with myrtle branches and seawater until the stone showed through, grey and clean, and the room smelled of wet rock and the sharp herbal bite of crushed myrtle instead of decay.

He patched the roof. He stretched sailcloth over the timber beams, lashed it down with rope, and wedged smaller pieces of canvas into the stone gaps with rock chips. It was neither watertight nor permanent, but it would suffice for a night without rain. Adequacy was their standard; perfection was a luxury that belonged to the world across the sea.

She arranged two pallets, separated by a careful distance of approximately four feet. It was less than propriety demanded, but more than the room comfortably allowed. Like everything else, it was a compromise between the correct and the possible.

He got a fire going in the old fireplace. The chimney drew well, the smoke rising straight and clean through the stonework, and the fire's light filled the lower room with an uneven warmth that turned the grey stone golden and made the space feel, for the first time, like somewhere a person might choose to be rather than somewhere circumstance had deposited them.

Elizabeth found the fig trees on her second trip for water.

She came back up the hill carrying figs in her gathered skirt. Her expression was the closest thing to triumph he had seen since they washed ashore. The figs were small, dark-skinned, and overripe. They were sweet. It was the first thing they had eaten on the island that tasted of anything other than salt and survival.

“There are dozens of trees in the hollow below the ridge,” she said. “The fruit is ripe. Some of it is overripe and falling. It has been ripening for weeks with no one to eat it—a waste I intend to correct.”

She had also found herbs. Wild rosemary, growing in dense bushes on the rocky slope. Thyme, low and spreading, between the stones. Fennel, tall and feathery, in the sheltered spots where the soil held moisture. She had picked bundles of each and carried them in her other hand, and when she laid them on the newly scrubbed floor the tower filled, improbably, with the smell of a kitchen. It did not smell like Longbourn's kitchen or Pemberley's. It was simpler and older: the smell of food prepared in a stone room by a fire. The domesticity of the scent struck Darcy forcefully.

Their first proper meal in the tower: fish caught in the shallows that morning, cooked on a flat stone at the edge of the fire, seasoned with rosemary and thyme and a quantity of salt that was not deliberate but inevitable since the fish had been swimming in it an hour earlier. Figs afterward, eaten with fingers, the juice running down their hands.

No cook at Pemberley would have served the meal without expecting immediate dismissal. The fish was unevenly cooked and tasted primarily of seawater, rosemary, and charcoal. The figs were the only element requiring no qualification.

They ate on the floor by the fire, sitting on their sailcloth pallets with their backs against the stone wall. Neither spoke. The eating absorbed their full attention in a way that four-course meals with silver and crystal never had. Hunger, Darcy was discovering, was the most effective seasoning ever devised. It surpassed French technique, Mrs Reynolds's game pie, and his London cook's proudest venison sauce.

When they finished, Elizabeth wiped her hands on what remained of her skirt and leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes.

“That,” she said, “was the finest meal I have ever eaten, and I include the Christmas goose at Longbourn, which is saying a great deal because my father considers that goose the pinnacle of English cookery and has said so annually for twenty years.”

Darcy looked at her. Firelight on her face, her eyes closed, her head against the stone. The fine bones of her jaw. The line of her neck. The way her shoulders had dropped, the tension of the day releasing now that the fire was lit and the food was eaten and the tower was, for the first time, theirs.

He looked away — at the fire, at his hands, which were raw and blistered and bleeding at one knuckle from hauling stone — and thought of Jane Bennet. The problem of her sister sat between them, occupying the four feet separating their pallets.

He had separated Bingley from her sister deliberately, certain he was right. He had been wrong. That wrongness had cost Jane Bennet her happiness. The fact sat between them like a stone; moving it required a conversation neither had yet started.

Elizabeth had confronted him on the ship. She had detailed the consequences his letter had ignored: Jane's face, the months of silence. He had admitted he was wrong, but the admission was not enough. Words could not undo acts.

He had written to Bingley. The attack had come before they could reach port; the letter had never been posted. It was on the Adeona still, or in the sea, or in the hands of someone who might never deliver it. He did not know. Certainty on this island was a commodity in shorter supply than fresh water.

Elizabeth opened her eyes. She caught him looking. He did not pretend he had not been.

“The tower has a good vantage,” he said. “If we build a signal fire on the upper level, the smoke would be visible for miles.”

“Then we should build one.”

“Tomorrow. There is enough wreckage for fuel, and the height will carry the smoke further than anything we could manage from the beach.”

She nodded. The subject change was clumsy, and they both knew it. The unspoken topics were accumulating; the tower would not contain them indefinitely.

They built the signal fire the next morning. Darcy hauled driftwood and broken planks up the narrow stairs to the upper level, stacking them in the centre of the open half where the roof was gone and the sky was wide and blue above. Elizabeth fed the fire below while he worked, and when the pile was high enough he lit it with a brand carried from the hearth, and the wood caught, and the smoke rose.