Page 61 of Shipwrecked with Mr Darcy

“I am not changing the rules,” he countered. “I am merely proposing a fairer method of measurement.”

“You are proposing it because the existing method does not favour you.”

“I am attempting to improve the game, Elizabeth.”

“The game requires no improvement,” she said brightly. “I counted the fish. I had more fish. The game worked perfectly.”

One corner of his mouth rose higher than the other. It was a smile he had probably never performed in a drawing room, and she intended to provoke it at least once a day for the rest of her life.

She was going to marry this man. She would live in his house, sit across from him at a proper table, and eat food that was not fish. She would have his children. The thought arrived suddenly—a child with his eyes and her mouth—and it was so vivid and reckless that she forced herself to look away and return to the fishing.

She planted the garden in the afternoon.

It was not a garden in any sense that Longbourn's gardener would have recognised. It was merely a patch of earth beside the tower's south wall. She had cleared it of stones and softened the soil with ash from the fire, enriching it with the remains of fig skins and fish bones she had been saving.

She transplanted wild herbs from the hillside. She planted rosemary, which grew everywhere, alongside hardy thyme and oregano.

She dug with a flat stone, pressing the roots deep into the loosened soil with her fingers. The herbs were real, and the soil was real. The engagement, Pemberley, and children—those were concepts she could not yet truly touch.

She was planting a garden she might never harvest. Rescue might come tomorrow and render it irrelevant, or rescue might not come at all.

Faith was putting rosemary in the ground without knowing who would eat it.

She watered the rosemary and the thyme from the cistern. The herbs stood in the dark soil, looking small but decidedly alive.

Darcy appeared beside her. He had descended from the tower, which meant his work on the fire pit was quite finished.

“A garden,” he said.

“A garden.”

He knelt beside her. His hands moved to the soil with a familiarity that surprised her, though it should not have; he was the master of ten thousand acres in Derbyshire.

He pressed the earth around the thyme with his thumbs. It was the firm, careful pressure of a man who had watched the process done correctly and remembered the exact method.

“My mother had a kitchen garden,” he said. “At Pemberley. Behind the south wing, where the wall holds the warmth. She grew herbs and lettuces and strawberries. After she died, the gardener maintained it for a year, then converted it to ornamentals. I did not object. I should have.”

“You were young.”

“I was twelve. Young enough to be forgiven for not objecting, old enough to have noticed what was lost.”

She looked at the small, wind-bitten herbs, rooted in island soil that was more rock than earth. She looked at Darcy kneeling beside her, with dirt on his hands and the scar visible through his open shirt. When he spoke of his mother, his expression carried an open, quiet grief.

“We will plant a kitchen garden at Pemberley,” she said.

The we was wholly deliberate. She was making real plans that included Pemberley and a kitchen garden behind the south wing. Such planning required immense faith—a luxury a sensible woman from Hertfordshire could ill afford on a deserted island.

She made the plans anyway. Sensible women from Hertfordshire had not survived pirates, shipwrecks, and fevers. She was no longer that woman.

The cove in the late afternoon was warm, private, and washed in gold. The rocks curved inward, and the sand held the day's heat. The brilliant light turned the water into a startling, vivid blue.

They swam. His body was noticeably thinner from the fever; she could clearly see the ribs she had pressed her ear against during the worst night. But the water invigorated him. He dove under and surfaced with his hair streaming, his face alive with sheer pleasure.

She floated on her back beneath a depthless, cloudless sky. She knew she would genuinely miss this vivid blue when they returned to the pale, grey skies of England.

She was going to miss the sky, the water, and the very version of herself that this island had produced. She had become a woman who caught fish, planted gardens, and loved a man without anyone's permission.

She was, however, not going to miss the food.