Page 69 of Shipwrecked with Mr Darcy

Her face was noticeably thinner. Her cheekbones were prominent and her jaw sharp, the last soft roundness of girlhood stripped away by six weeks of fish and figs. She looked older and far harder — exactly like a woman who had survived a catastrophe.

She set the mirror down. The reflection could be dealt with later; she had urgent letters to write.

She wrote to Longbourn first. Captain Rossi had generously provided paper, ink, and the use of his writing desk. It was a solid slab of mahogany bolted to the cabin wall, covered with charts and a heavy Bible.

The letter was the hardest thing she had ever attempted to write. It was far more difficult than any previous correspondence, because she had to announce that she was alive to people who firmly believed she was dead. It required a delicacy she was not certain she possessed.

Dear Papa, she wrote, and immediately stopped. It was the ordinary opening of every letter she had ever sent home, and its casual familiarity felt almost obscene while her father sat in his library grieving her.

She started again.

Dear Papa,

I am alive and well, writing from a merchant vessel bound for Valletta. Following the pirate attack, I was stranded upon a small island off the southern Italian coast. I have been rescued after six weeks. I am uninjured, and I am safe. I am in the company of Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy, who was stranded with me. His conduct throughout has been thoroughly honourable, and I have had ample occasion to know his character.

She paused. Her father was an exceptionally perceptive man, accustomed to reading between the lines of his wife's correspondence. He would immediately grasp the heavy implication of that final sentence.

Mr Darcy and I are engaged to be married. I anticipate this news will arrive as a surprise, given that my last correspondence regarding Mr Darcy detailed my firm refusal of his proposal at Hunsford. I was quite wrong at Hunsford. I was wrong about his character, his motivations, and my own feelings. That error has been corrected by six weeks of close acquaintance in circumstances that permitted no pretence. I have chosen him freely. I want you to know that I chose him freely.

The word freely was deliberate. Her father would read it and immediately understand that she was answering his most urgent, unspoken question. She was managing his fears from a distance of a thousand miles.

She wrote to Jane next. It was a longer, warmer letter that contained far more of the truth. Jane was the person Elizabeth trusted most in the world, and she was not going to break that habit now.

To Jane she told everything except the nights — the stone tower, the spring, the herb garden, the storms, and the long conversations that had changed her mind about a man she had once dismissed wholly. She wrote last of Mr Bingley.

He wrote to Mr Bingley before the shipwreck, sending a letter that explained exactly what he had done in London, and why. He has promised to write to him again when we reach England. I do not know what Mr Bingley will do with the information, but I know what he ought to do. You deserve to know that his sudden disappearance was not wholly his own choice.

She sealed both letters with the wax Captain Rossi had provided, then wrote a shorter letter to the Gardiners. She did not know if they were alive, or where to send it, but she wrote it anyway — an act of faith.

Darcy was writing his own letters. She could hear the scratch of his pen through the thin cabin wall. It was a domestic, extraordinary sound; pens, paper, and wooden walls had not existed in their world twenty-four hours ago, and their sudden reality still felt slightly like a dream.

He was writing to his solicitor. He had informed her of this with the careful, intense specificity of a man who was finally permitted to plan their future in England. He had also written to Georgiana, composing that letter in silence and sealing it without showing her. She respected that privacy; it belonged to him and his sister.

The sailor's wife's dress was a practical, faded blue. The bodice was too wide across the shoulders, and the hem was too long by three inches. It did not fit her body or reflect her taste, but it was clean, and it did not have holes.

She put it on in the cabin. The soft cotton against her skin was a sensation she had completely forgotten after weeks of torn, salt-stiffened linen. She smoothed the skirt with her hands, surprised to find herself performing a gesture of simple vanity. It was a relief to realise that she was returning to a civilised world where her appearance would once again matter.

She looked at herself in the spotted mirror: a woman in a blue dress that did not fit, with deeply brown skin and calloused bare feet. The sailor's wife had no spare shoes, and the prospect of wearing them again felt implausible.

Caught between worlds. Neither the woman who had left Longbourn nor the woman who would return to it — in transit, wearing a borrowed dress, carrying a small pink shell in her pocket, and bearing a decision that would alter the rest of her life.

She was ready.

She was ready for the conversation she had been composing since the rescue. She knew exactly what she would say to the society matrons who would inevitably conclude that Elizabeth Bennet had been irreparably compromised by Mr Darcy. The core of her defence was settled: she was not ashamed, and she would not pretend to be.

She went on deck. The morning was clear and the sea was calm. The Santa Chiara moved steadily westward under a brilliant blue sky. It was the Mediterranean's bright farewell — blue sky, calm water, the coast of Malta growing on the horizon.

Darcy was standing at the railing. He turned when she appeared, and his expression instantly arrested. Seeing her in a proper, clean dress for the first time in weeks was somehow far more startling to him than seeing her in nothing at all.

“You look—” he said, and stopped.

“I look like a woman wearing a borrowed dress,” she supplied.

“You look wholly beautiful,” he corrected quietly. “And I find it unexpectedly affecting.”

“Affecting?”

“The word is utterly insufficient. Most words are, when applied to you.”