Page 16 of Shipwrecked with Mr Darcy

“She does. Three pages. Annotated.”

The ship groaned. Something shifted in the hold above them, wood on wood, heavy and purposeless.

“Elizabeth.”

His voice had changed. The performance of calm had slipped, leaving him without his customary composure. He was frightened and not pretending otherwise. The use of her Christian name in the dark, without permission or preamble, broke a rule neither of them addressed. She felt it land in her chest, precise and unwelcome. She did not remark on it.

“Why did you do that?” he said.

She did not pretend to misunderstand. “I do not know.”

“You were safe. They were not interested in you. You would have been returned to your uncle and aunt, and you would have been⁠—”

“I would have watched them take you,” Elizabeth said, “and done nothing.” Her voice was quiet, perfectly even, the voice she used when she was most in earnest. “I find I am unable to do nothing. I have been examining this quality in myself for several weeks and I cannot correct it.”

He was very close in the dark. Three feet was simultaneously a great distance and no distance at all. “You could have been⁠—”

“I am aware of what I could have been.” She cut the sentence off neatly. “I am sitting beside you in a pirate vessel. I have already bitten a man and I am managing. Please do not enumerate the risks of decisions that cannot be reversed.”

His hand found hers.

Two people sat in the dark on a ship they did not control, heading somewhere they did not know. His hand was warm, closing around hers with a pressure that conveyed everything his voice withheld. She gripped back with all her strength.

His thumb moved across her knuckles once. It was a single, careful stroke—the way one touches what one has nearly lost. The three feet between them remained three feet. The situation was terrible.

It was also, in some very specific and improbable sense, all right.

She noted this as a matter requiring further consideration and attended to the breathing.

The storm arrived without sufficient introduction.

A storm of that magnitude might reasonably have offered some preliminary remarks. The change came first as a shift in the ship's motion. The roll became less purposeful, staggering like a vessel losing its battle with the water. The wind changed pitch in the rigging above. The creaking deepened.

The water did not come all at once. It seeped at the seams and joints, wherever the hull failed, and was cold at her ankles before she understood what she was standing in.

“Darcy.”

“I know.”

She heard him moving in the dark, his hands searching the ceiling above. The rope on her wrist went taut as his reach ran out. She reached up with her free hand, finding his arm and feeling her way towards the knot at his wrist. She could not loose it in the dark. The ship moved too violently.

The ship lurched. Hard, sideways. She went with it.

He caught her. One arm moved fast, pulling her back against the hull. He held her securely against the planking while the vessel recovered.

“Stay here,” he said, into her hair.

“I am not proposing to leave,” she said, into his shoulder. “I am merely in the process of falling.”

The water was at her shins. The ship made a deep, catastrophic sound: the voice of a failing hull. A wave struck. The vessel tilted steeply and did not fully right itself.

He was at the hatch again. She could not see him, hearing only the sustained, methodical labour of working a bolt in the dark with insufficient leverage. The ship listed further. The water reached her knees. The floor was no longer level.

The hatch opened.

Thin, storm-grey light spilled in. His hands gripped the hatch edge, bleeding. He was there.

“Up,” he said. “Now.”