Page 18 of Shipwrecked with Mr Darcy

“Yes.”

“If we survive this, I am going to require an explanation of why the soup on that ship was so terrible.”

“The soup was the least of the ship's failings.”

“The soup was a confession. Any vessel serving broth that offensive admits in advance that it cannot be relied upon. I should have taken the confession seriously.”

He almost laughed. The impulse fought to surface beneath the exhaustion and terror. The sea kept hitting them in the face, making laughter impossible. He saved it for later.

They held on. The storm raged, diminished, and raged again. His arms burned. His legs burned. The gash had progressed from sharp to dull. He chose to interpret this as an improvement.

Elizabeth stopped talking, conserving energy. It was the most intelligent response to their situation. He should have expected it; her responses were generally more intelligent than his own. She breathed steadily against his chest.

He held on. The plank held. The night continued.

Dawn arrived gradually, peering grey and tentative around the edge of the horizon.

The sky cleared in patches. The sea calmed by degrees, a progression Darcy would have appreciated more if his arms had retained sensation. Elizabeth stirred against his chest. She had not slept. She had been still and silent, mustering endurance.

“Land,” she said.

Her voice was raw, scraped thin by salt. But the word was steady. Land.

He raised his head. An island. Small, rocky, rising from the water with the scrubby green-grey of Mediterranean brush. A cove on the near side, where cliffs dropped to a narrow beach and the water calmed behind the island's shelter.

They paddled. His arms were numb. His hands bled from the hatch bolt and the wreckage. Elizabeth paddled beside him on her stomach. They moved with the wordless coordination of two people who had survived the same night. The cove came closer. Sand, rocks, the dark shapes of tidal pools. The surf was audible. Land was close enough to smell.

The wreckage ground on sand. Elizabeth rolled off into the shallows. Darcy fell beside her. They crawled up the narrow beach, stopping when the sand was dry beneath them.

They lay on their backs. The sky was clearing. They breathed.

“We are alive,” Elizabeth said. Her voice was flat, offering the observation as mere fact rather than celebration.

“We are alive,” Darcy confirmed.

“I am going to lie here for some time.”

“I have no objections.”

The sun came up. Warmth touched their faces, their soaked clothing, their raw and ruined hands. Elizabeth turned her head and looked at him. He turned his head and looked at her. Six inches apart on a beach on an island neither of them could name. Her face was salt-caked and bruised, her hair a catastrophe, her dress torn at the shoulder.

She was magnificent.

“Your lip is bleeding again,” she said.

“I am aware.”

“And you have a cut on your side. I can see it through your shirt.”

“It is not serious.”

“You are the worst judge of your own injuries I have ever encountered.”

“I have little experience for comparison.”

She made a short, airless sound — almost a laugh. Three days ago, the worst thing on her horizon had been a too-small trunk.

“Mr Darcy.”