Page 6 of Shipwrecked with Mr Darcy

Mr Gardiner shook Darcy's hand with cheerful firmness. He judged people by their grip and conversation, having no patience for any other measure. Elizabeth watched Darcy's face register surprise — not at the handshake, but the man behind it. Mr Gardiner did not look the way Darcy expected. Elizabeth could see the recalculation happening behind his eyes. He had placed the Bennet relations under the heading of “Cheapside” and was now confronted with a man who refused to fit that category.

They sat. Soup was served. It was brown and lukewarm and tasted of the earnest efforts of a cook who had been hired for his durability rather than his palate.

“Mr Darcy,” Mr Gardiner said, holding a comfortable directness that suggested silence at dinner was a waste of good sitting. “My niece tells me you are from Derbyshire.”

“I am, sir.”

“A fine county. I fished there as a boy — the streams near Lambton, if I recall. Beautiful water.”

The careful blankness left his face. He had braced for hostility and received a question about fish. “The streams near Lambton are excellent,” he said, and his voice had lost the careful blankness it had carried a moment before. “My estate borders several of them. You would be welcome to fish them, should you find yourself in the county.”

The offer was sincere. The sincerity annoyed Elizabeth. It would have been considerably easier to maintain her position if he had simply behaved as she expected — stiffly, coldly, with precise social clumsiness. He was not cooperating. He was being pleasant. He talked to her uncle about fishing with genuine interest. Mrs Gardiner watched with quiet satisfaction; she had decided something. Elizabeth wanted to kick someone under the table, but could not determine who deserved it most.

“The captain tells us you are travelling on government business,” Mr Gardiner said.

“I am carrying dispatches for the consul in Palermo. My uncle arranged the commission.”

“Your uncle is the Earl of Matlock?” Mrs Gardiner let the question trail with casual precision. She already knew the answer.

“He is.”

“And your cousin — Colonel Fitzwilliam — we have heard his name as well, I think.” Mrs Gardiner glanced at Elizabeth. The glance was brief and lethal, containing a quantity of information that Elizabeth preferred not to acknowledge. “From Elizabeth's visit to Kent this spring.”

Elizabeth took a very deliberate spoonful of soup. The soup had not improved. She swallowed it anyway. The alternative was speaking. Speaking required facial expression, and hers was not currently fully under control.

“The Colonel is in London,” Darcy said. “He sends — that is —” He stopped. The sentence had been heading somewhere — towards a pleasantry, perhaps, or a polite fiction. It ran aground on whatever he had been about to say. The wreckage sat between them at the table like a spilt glass.

“The soup is very good,” Elizabeth said, into the silence.

“It is not,” Mrs Gardiner said.

“No. It is not. But I felt someone should say something.”

Mr. Gardiner chuckled, and his laughter seemed to expand the room. The sound broke the tension that Elizabeth's wit and Darcy's formality couldn't resolve. “Mr. Darcy, please forgive us. We are a lively family. My niece has opinions on everything. My wife has opinions about my niece. I have opinions about soup. With us, you'll be thoroughly entertained during the crossing, whether you want to be or not.”

Darcy observed Mr. Gardiner. His expression was hard to interpret, but Elizabeth, who had studied his face more than she liked to admit, sensed a hint of recognition — as if he were glimpsing a kind of family warmth he hadn't known before, or had known but now was rethinking.

“I am certain I shall benefit from the company,” Darcy said. For once, the formality did not sound like a wall. He was reaching for a phrase inadequate to his meaning, but it was the only one his vocabulary permitted.

Dinner continued, with the clergyman commenting on the weather and the Bristol merchant talking about trade. Mr. Gardiner and Darcy discussed the Mediterranean—covering its commerce, politics, and shipping routes that Mr. Gardiner knew through his trading ties and Darcy through his uncle's correspondence. They conversed effortlessly, though not warmly—Darcy’s style was reserved—yet with mutual respect. Elizabeth, sitting between them, watched and felt something unpleasant: the gradual, discomforting weakening of a conviction she had held since Netherfield.

She had told herself he was proud. He was proud. She had told herself his manners were designed to intimidate. They were not designed to intimidate — they were designed to protect. The distinction had not occurred to her until she watched him deploy them in a room where he was outnumbered and uncertain. He managed to be courteous to a man he would have dismissed six months ago.

The thought was unwelcome.

The deck after dinner was dark and cool, the sky thick with stars in the way that only an open sea could produce — no London smoke, no lamplight, just the whole brutal inventory of the heavens laid out above the water like a display that was showing off.

Elizabeth had come up for air. The cabin below was warm. Mrs Gardiner's silence was loud — she had seventeen questions and was restraining every one of them. Elizabeth needed air unoccupied by someone reading her face.

She walked to the railing. She breathed. The air tasted of salt and the faint sweetness of warm wood. The ship moved under her feet with a rhythm she was beginning to learn: a steady rise and fall, like breathing done by something very large and indifferent.

She heard his step before she saw him. She knew it was his; she had spent an entire dinner cataloguing the sound of his boots on the cabin floor. It was a pathetic use of an excellent mind. She acknowledged this freely and did not stop listening.

He appeared at the railing. Not beside her — six feet away. It was either a respectful distance or cowardice. She was not going to help him by closing it.

“Miss Bennet.”

“Mr Darcy.”