Page 44 of Shipwrecked with Mr Darcy

“You are inserting your own sentiments.”

“I am interpreting the text. Though I concede the distinction is fine.”

She sat between his legs with her back resting against his chest, the position that had become their custom for evenings by the fire. His arm rested around her waist. The book was propped on his raised knee. He turned the pages with his free hand while she leaned against him, cheerfully inventing the plot of a novel neither could properly read.

The domesticity of it should not have surprised her. She had lived with this man for three weeks. She ate with him, slept beside him, and managed a strange household that consisted of a ruined tower and a patch of wild herbs.

She turned in his arms. His firelit face was close, and she kissed the corner of his jaw where the stubble was thickest. The kiss was idle and affectionate. Yet, as always between them, such idle affection quickly deepened into something far less idle.

“Fitzwilliam,” she said against his mouth.

“Mm.”

“What are we?”

He pulled back enough to look at her. His face grew serious. She recognised the expression; he wore it when he was asked a question he considered important, and intended to answer with all precision.

“We are two people on an island who have chosen each other,” he said.

“Yes. But what does that make us? In the language of the world we left. What are we?”

“In the language of the world we left, we are compromised. You are ruined, and I am the man who ruined you. The judgement is wrong in every particular, but it is the language the world will use.”

“I am not ruined.”

“No. You are not.”

“I am asking what you want. Not what the world will call it. What you want.”

He was quiet for a moment. His hand rested on her waist, his thumb moving in a small, absent arc. She had learned it was his thinking gesture—the physical expression of his mind working through a problem.

“I want to marry you,” he said. “I have wanted to marry you since before this island. That desire has not changed in kind, only in its certainty. I want to marry you, and I want to take you home. I want to walk into the church at Lambton with you beside me, hear the words spoken, and know that the rest of the world has finally caught up to what has already happened here.”

“What has already happened here?”

“Everything. You are my wife in every way that matters. The ceremony is a formality. A necessary formality, for your protection and your family's peace, but a formality. What we have here, in this tower, is the thing itself.”

She looked at him. His face was steady, his voice was calm, and his hand remained warm on her waist. This proposal was nothing like Hunsford. There was no pride in it, no condescension, and no catalogue of her family's failings. There was only a man in a torn shirt telling a woman in a torn dress that he wanted her for the rest of his life. The declaration was plain, direct, and completely without ornament.

“That is not a proposal,” she said.

“No?”

“A proposal requires a question. You have merely made a series of statements—eloquent statements, to be sure, but statements nonetheless.”

His mouth curved into the faint smile she had loved since the beach. “Elizabeth Bennet. Will you marry me?”

“I will marry you in a church in Lambton, in a chapel in Italy, or on this beach with a lizard as witness. I will marry you because you asked properly this time, and because you are the man I want. I am tired of the question, and I would very much like it settled.”

“That is not a romantic acceptance.”

“It is a practical acceptance from a practical woman who is sitting on a stone floor in a ruin on a deserted island. Romance would be misplaced. Practicality suits the occasion.”

He kissed her. The kiss was a question answered and a matter irrevocably settled. She kissed him back with her hands framing his face, holding him fiercely to her. The embrace felt certain enough to contain both the island and the entire world beyond it.

Later, on the pallet, she explored him in the dark.

The fire was low, consisting of more embers than flame. The faint, red light turned their skin the colour of old copper. She moved over him, her hands mapping his body with slow, deliberate attention. She memorised him. The island was temporary, but his body was real, and the memorising was an act against impermanence.