Page 47 of Shipwrecked with Mr Darcy

“It does not require deliberation. I would not do it again because it was wholly wrong. Separating two people who loved each other for my own selfish convenience was a grave error. I have had months to deliberate, and the deliberation is finished.”

She studied him for a long, quiet moment. He bore her scrutiny because it was the least of what he owed, and because her anger was far preferable to her indifference. He had proposed to her on a deserted island, and she had accepted, but that acceptance did not exempt him from the consequences of his past actions.

“Jane would forgive you,” Elizabeth said. “Jane forgives everyone. It is simultaneously her finest quality and her most infuriating one. She would forgive you, and she would wholly mean it. She would likely even thank you for telling her.”

He almost smiled, but suppressed it, knowing it was not appropriate for the conversation. Elizabeth saw the suppression, and her mouth curved in a sharp expression that was related to a smile, but lacked its warmth.

“I am not Jane,” she said.

“No.”

“I do not forgive easily, and I certainly do not thank people for causing my sister two months of misery.”

“I would not expect you to.”

“But I forgive you for this.” She said it plainly, without ceremony. It was delivered without ornament, exactly as she had delivered every other declaration on this island. “I forgive you because you told me the truth when a lie would have been easier, and I would never have known the difference. You did not excuse your actions, you explained them. The explanation was honest, and the honesty cost you something. I am not so proud that I cannot recognise courage when it is standing in my herb garden.”

He looked at her. She was his betrothed, his Elizabeth, with her stained fingers and her torn dress. Her serious, brown face looked back at him, entirely without concealment.

“Write to Bingley again when we are home,” she said.

She had said when, not if. When they were home, his first order of business would be undoing the damage he had wrought upon two people who had committed no offence.

“I will write to him,” Darcy said.

“You will tell him the full truth, not the convenient version you told him before. You will tell him that you were wrong, and that you told him anyway because you were afraid of what you felt for me. You let his happiness be the price of your own fears.”

“That is a thorough letter.”

“It is an honest letter, and you owe him one. You owe Jane an honest letter as well, though hers should be gentler. She has been through quite enough already.”

“I will write both letters.”

“Good.” She picked up another fig, examined it, placed it on the rock. “And Fitzwilliam?”

“Yes?”

“When you write to Mr Bingley, do not attempt to manage the situation. Do not plan his response or arrange the outcome. Write the letter, and let him decide. He is a grown man, however much you have treated him as otherwise. Jane is a grown woman. Their happiness is theirs to determine, and your role in the matter ends the moment you put down the pen.”

He nodded.

The herb garden smelled heavily of rosemary and thyme in the hot sun. Elizabeth returned to her figs, and he returned to his weeds. They worked side by side in deep silence. The honest air settled into the space between them like soil around a transplanted root.

That evening, she sat between his legs by the fire, her back resting against his chest. The position was well established and comfortably familiar.

"Tell me about Pemberley," she said.

"You have never seen it."

"No. Which is precisely why you must describe it to me.”

He was quiet for a moment. "Tell me what you wish to know."

"The parts visitors never see." Elizabeth laughed. The laugh vibrated through her back into his chest.

“The library has a window seat that Georgiana claimed at the age of seven, and has not relinquished since. She reads there on rainy afternoons with her feet on the cushion and her shoes on the floor. I am not permitted to comment on the shoes; I did so once, and was informed with devastating composure that my own boots leave mud on the front stairs every Tuesday.”

“I think I will like Georgiana very much.”