Page 2 of Shipwrecked with Mr Darcy

A silence settled between them. Jane smoothed the bonnet's ribbon with her thumb. Outside the window, Gracechurch Street offered its usual afternoon programme of cart wheels and commerce and someone shouting about the price of mackerel.

“The sea air will do you good,” Jane said quietly. “You have not been yourself this spring.”

Elizabeth had not been herself since a parsonage in Kent, but that was a confession for another century. She kissed Jane's cheek. Powder, rosewater, and the faint salt trace of a complexion washed too recently. Elizabeth was leaving her in the care of a mother who would not notice and a father who would notice and do nothing.

She picked up the conquered trunk instead. It was heavy. She was glad of the weight. It gave her hands a purpose that was not wringing.

The Gardiners' house in Gracechurch Street operated on a principle of cheerful anarchy that Mrs Bennet would have found distressing, and Mr Bennet would have found restful. Mr Gardiner's study had disappeared beneath shipping manifests and Sicilian correspondence. The children — four of them, all under ten, all in possession of lungs — had constructed a fortification in the drawing room using sofa cushions, good linen, and Mrs Gardiner's second-best shawl, serving as a flag of uncertain nation.

She was a great maker of lists, Mrs Gardiner. Mr Gardiner bore them with equanimity; twelve years of marriage had taught him the lists were not requests for his opinion.

Mrs Gardiner looked up. “You look as though someone has trodden on your foot.”

“No one has trodden on my foot.”

“And yet the expression.”

Elizabeth sat. The morning room smelled of ink, and the roses Mrs Gardiner kept on the windowsill. “I have been saying goodbye to Jane.”

Mrs Gardiner set down her pen. “How is she?”

“Thin. Composed. Perfectly cheerful in a way that makes me want to break crockery.”

“Jane has always been composed.”

“Jane has always been happy. Composure without happiness is just good posture.” Elizabeth picked up a petal from the desk. It was pink and already browning at the edge. She set it down. “I worry about leaving her.”

Mrs Gardiner studied her, measuring how much truth the conversation could sustain. She knew when comfort was wanted and when it was merely convenient.

“Jane is stronger than you give her credit for,” she said.

“Everyone keeps saying that. I wish people would stop confusing the ability to suffer without complaint with actual strength. A fence post suffers without complaint. No one calls it resilient.”

Mrs Gardiner's mouth twitched. “You are comparing your sister to a fence post.”

Elizabeth stopped. “Forgive me. I am discomposed.”

Mrs Gardiner picked up her pen and added a line to her list. “This voyage will do you good. There has been something weighing upon you this spring. You will not tell me what it is. I shall not press you. But I have noticed.”

Elizabeth looked at her aunt. Mrs Gardiner was the mother she should have had — observant, unsentimental, capable of love without theatre. The Bennet household had produced two sensible daughters through sheer biological accident; Providence seemed to have corrected the error by placing Mrs Gardiner in London.

“I am carrying something,” Elizabeth admitted. “But the sea air may lighten it, or the distance, or an extremely thorough acquaintance with Sicilian wine.”

“We shall try all three,” Mrs Gardiner said, “and see which one takes.”

The morning of departure was the kind of bright, loud, impossibly busy affair the Gardiner household produced with the regularity of a theatrical company that had been rehearsing chaos for years.

The children wept. They wept theatrically, treating their parents' departure as a Greek tragedy in miniature. The youngest clung to Mrs Gardiner's skirts and produced a howl that threatened the windows. Mrs Gardiner absorbed the performance, knelt to kiss each head, and stood to smooth her dress.

Mr Gardiner loaded the carriage. He trusted no one else to stack boxes correctly. A trunk went in. A hatbox followed. A leather case of documents was placed with the tenderness normally reserved for fine china.

“Edward, the children are still weeping,” Mrs Gardiner observed from the pavement.

“They will stop when they find the biscuits I left in the nursery,” Mr Gardiner replied, without looking up from his stacking. “I have calculated approximately four minutes.”

He was off by two. The howling ceased. Silence from the upper windows suggested the biscuits had been located.

“Your uncle,” Mrs Gardiner said, “is an excellent father.”