Page 25 of Shipwrecked with Mr Darcy

It rose straight and white in the still morning air, a column visible, Darcy estimated, from at least eight or ten miles in any direction. They stood on the upper level and watched it climb and spread and thin against the blue, and they watched the horizon. It remained perfectly, indifferently empty.

They watched for three hours. No sail appeared. No ship changed course. The smoke rose and dispersed and meant nothing to anyone who was not standing on this hill looking at it.

Elizabeth turned away first. She went down the stairs without speaking. After a moment, Darcy followed.

The fire burned itself out by afternoon. The ashes cooled. The horizon stayed empty.

He would build another signal fire tomorrow, and the day after that. He would build them until the wood ran out or a ship came. Hope on an island, he was discovering, was not the soaring emotion poets described. It was a small, stubborn, daily act performed without proof and without ceasing.

He was, it turned out, well suited to stubborn daily acts. It was the one advantage of a temperament that Elizabeth Bennet had once, in a candlelit room in Kent, called the last word in arrogant inflexibility.

She had not been entirely wrong.

Chapter Eleven

Aweek taught Elizabeth things about herself she had not asked to learn.

She could gut a fish swiftly and efficiently, using a knife not made for the task, on a flat rock by the water. The first time, she gagged. The second time, she did not. By the fifth, the motion was automatic; the blade slid under the skin, and she flicked the entrails into the shallows for the crabs without hesitation. Its ease should have unsettled her. She was a gentleman's daughter from Hertfordshire, raised on embroidery, Fordyce's sermons, and the confident belief that fish arrived at the table already cooked and arranged on a platter. The distance between that woman and this one, kneeling in salt-stiffened cotton with blood on her hands, was significant.

Sleeping on stone was also, apparently, within her capabilities. She did not sleep well; she woke at intervals to shift her bruised hip off the unyielding flagstones. Nevertheless, she could sleep. It was a victory she refused to diminish.

What she could not do, it transpired, was stop being angry with Fitzwilliam Darcy.

This discovery she had not anticipated. She had expected the anger to burn itself out. Anger required fuel, and the island had replaced the drawing rooms and social performances that fed her outrage at Hunsford with a different set of concerns: water, food, fire, and shelter. Anger was a luxury; she had expected it to be rationed along with everything else.

Instead, the anger grew. It grew precisely because the immediate necessities of staying alive had been met. Darcy had found the tower, repaired the roof, and built the signal fire. He hauled water without being asked and caught fish with a patience she did not wish to admire. His relentless competence made it impossible to maintain her previous opinion of his character: a proud, cold man who judged her family and separated her sister from the man she loved.

Her assessment was wrong. She had known it since receiving his letter. Standing in the grove at Rosings with shaking hands, she had realised the man who wrote those words was not the man she had accused. That knowledge had not erased the anger; it had merely complicated it. Her anger regarding Wickham was unjust—she could admit this now, with no audience but the gulls. But her anger regarding Jane was not.

She thought of Jane's heartbreak, and her careful, determined cheerfulness. That cheerfulness was worse than weeping; weeping could be comforted, whereas determined cheerfulness could only be witnessed.

That anger was justified. Elizabeth held it close because it was the last piece of the old Darcy—the one she understood. She could be angry at him without the bewildering sensation of being angry at the man currently rebuilding their chimney stack with his bare hands and an obstinacy identical to her own.

It happened on the seventh evening.

They were eating by the fire. Their menu consisted of fish and figs, as it had every night and would every night for an unforeseeable duration. Darcy sat across from her, eating with methodical attention. The firelight softened his sharp angles, making him look entirely unlike the arrogant gentleman she had met in Hertfordshire.

She did not want to notice the softening of his features. It happened regardless, just as she noted the temperature, the wind, the specific set of his jaw when his wound troubled him. She refused to examine any of it.

“You have been quiet today,” he said.

“I have been thinking.”

“About what, if I may ask?”

“You may not.”

He accepted the refusal with quiet courtesy. He accepted most of her refusals this way. The courtesy was perhaps not new, but she had certainly never seen it at Netherfield or Hunsford. The difference between the man she had known in England and the man on this island remained inconvenient.

“Mr Darcy,” she said.

He looked up. The firelight caught his eyes, and she looked away.

“Your letter,” she said. “At Rosings. You wrote that you believed my sister to be indifferent to Mr Bingley.”

His jaw tightened. She watched the muscle move. She knew this expression by now: the careful assembly of composure over whatever lay beneath. “I did.”

“And you acted on that belief.”