Page 57 of Shipwrecked with Mr Darcy

The iron held for ten seconds after he laughed. And then, it shattered.

She began to weep. It was not the quiet, measured crying she had exhibited after the ship passed. It was hard, ragged, and wholly uncontrolled. She had spent twelve hours holding his head, refusing to consider the possibility that he might die. The tears were born of great relief, sheer fury, and a desperate, overwhelming love.

“You stupid, reckless man,” she gasped between sobs. “You went to check a tower in the dark because you are incapable of relinquishing control! The situation nearly killed you. I have spent the night huddled under a rock, talking about my mother's roses, terrified that you were going to die in my arms.”

“I am sorry.”

“You are not sorry! You would do it again. You would check the tower again because you view it as your responsibility. You do not know how to leave a duty unchecked, even when checking it might kill you. That stubbornness is what I love most about you, and what I hate most about you, and I am absolutely furious.”

“I can see that.”

“Do not laugh at me.”

“I am not laughing. I am smiling, which is different. The smile is involuntary. You are crying and calling me stupid, but I am alive, and you are here, and I cannot control my relief.”

She wiped her face with the back of her hand. Her tears were subsiding, and her fury was spending itself, leaving behind a great exhaustion. She looked down at him. His face was pale and drawn, but his eyes were clear. He looked up at her with complete, unshielded devotion.

“Do not ever do that again,” she said.

“I will endeavour.”

“You will not endeavour. You will promise me. You will swear to me that you will not die on this island.”

“I swear it.”

“Good.” She wiped her face again. “Now drink more water and be quiet. Let me think about what to do next. The tower is damaged, the fire is out, and you are injured. I am in charge now, and my orders are not negotiable.”

He drank the water. He was quiet. She thought.

The rain had stopped. The evening light was grey and soft, and the air smelled cleanly of wet stone and crushed herbs. Elizabeth sat under the rock overhang with the man she had kept alive, and she began to plan.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Darcy had never been nursed before. He had been tended, certainly, by paid professionals with clean linen and laudanum, who approached their duties with quiet, detached efficiency. He had been looked after by Mrs Reynolds after a fall from a horse at sixteen, and by a ship's surgeon after a bout of seasickness on his first Channel crossing. A London physician had overseen his care during the influenza that took Pemberley's housekeeper and two footmen. That illness had left Darcy with a cough that lasted six weeks, and a renewed appreciation for his own mortality.

None of those people had truly nursed him. Elizabeth nursed him.

She directed his recovery the way she directed the island: thoroughly, and without consultation. Her competence was so considerable that objecting to it would have required far more energy than he possessed. She changed his bandage twice a day using strips torn from salvaged sailcloth. She boiled water at the spring, letting it cool to lukewarm before cleaning the wound. Her physical gentleness wholly contradicted the firmness of her instructions, which were delivered strictly as commands rather than requests.

“Sit up,” she would say. “Drink this. Do not move. I said do not move, Fitzwilliam; the concept is not complex.”

She fed him. She had miraculously rebuilt the fire within hours of the storm's passing. She used dry wood she had discovered in a crevice on the far side of the hill weeks ago, having quietly noted it as potential emergency fuel. That foresight was now keeping them alive.

She fed him a thin fish broth, made from the morning's catch boiled with wild thyme and the last of the dried figs. The combination was far from pleasant, but it was nutritious. She delivered it to him in the coconut cup with the firm expectation that he would drink all of it.

He drank all of it.

She had even repaired the tower. She could not manage the upper level alone, but she had swept the lower room of debris and dried the floor with salvaged cloth. She restored it to a habitable condition in a single day of unceasing work. He watched her from the pallet where she had installed him, strictly forbidden to stand up without assistance. He obeyed the instruction; he had attempted to stand on the first morning, and the resulting dizziness had sent him crashing back to the pallet, proving her point immediately.

She was magnificent. It was not a word he used loosely. He had applied it to Pemberley, to certain views from the hills in Derbyshire, and to his mother's portrait in the gallery. He had never before applied it to a person. Yet, watching Elizabeth dry fish on the rocks outside the tower was a revelation. Her torn dress was tied at the waist with rope, her hair was bound in sailcloth, and her bare feet stood firmly on the hot stone. She turned the fillets with brisk, cheerful efficiency. She was magnificent, and the word was well earned.

She had carried them both. For three days, while he lay on the pallet and his body repaired itself with maddening slowness, she managed everything. She secured the food, the fire, the water, and the tower, performing the daily maintenance of survival quite alone. She did not complain. She worked, she fed him, and she changed his bandage. In the evenings, she sat beside him and read aloud from the waterlogged Italian novel. Her pronunciation bore no resemblance to actual Italian, and her dramatic interpretation was wildly inventive. It was quite perfect.

“The hero has finally stopped proposing,” she announced on the third evening, squinting at the water-damaged pages by firelight. “Unless this is a completely different kind of proposal. My Italian does not distinguish between a proposal of marriage and a proposal of business, and the context suggests it might be both.”

“In Italian fiction, the distinction is often immaterial.”

“How reassuring. In English fiction the distinction is the entire plot. I begin to understand why Italian novels are shorter.”