Page 3 of Shipwrecked with Mr Darcy

“My uncle is a general,” Elizabeth said. “There is a distinction, though I am no longer certain which is the compliment.”

The docks at Wapping smelled of tar and brine and the particular concentrated humanity of a working port in late spring. Ropes, men shouting, crates swinging on cranes with a cheerful disregard for the skulls below. The ship was called the Adeona — Roman goddess of safe returns.

She was a merchant vessel, broad-beamed and practical, with none of the elegance of a naval ship and all of the sturdiness. Mr Gardiner knew her captain through his trading connections — a man named Holt, weathered and economical, who shook hands as though rationing the gesture and showed them to cabins that were small, clean, and equipped with windows that opened onto the sea.

Elizabeth's cabin was barely large enough for the bed, the trunk, and a person standing between them. She set her things down and opened the window. The salt air came in. She breathed it, and the tightness in her chest eased.

She knew what she was carrying. She had known since Kent.

She had been wrong about Mr Wickham — catastrophically, vainly wrong. A handsome man had told her exactly what she wished to hear. The wrongness was hers. She owned it. She had turned it over in enough sleepless nights to know its weight, its shape, and the mounting embarrassment of having been loud about it.

She had been wrong about that.

She had not been wrong about Jane.

Mr Darcy had separated her sister from Mr Bingley. He had written as much in his letter, calm and detailed, believing his own reasonableness was a sufficient defence. He had looked at the Bennet family and found them wanting — the mother's vulgarity, the younger sisters' wildness, the father's negligence. Jane's happiness was an acceptable cost, he had decided, to preserve his friend's dignity. Protection, he had told himself. Elizabeth called it arrogance.

Two truths. She had misjudged his character, and he had destroyed Jane's happiness. Neither disposed of the other. They sat side by side in her chest like mismatched bookends, holding up nothing, supporting nothing, simply occupying it.

The letter itself was in her writing case, folded so many times the creases had gone soft. She could have recited it. She did not wish to recite it. She wished, with a fervour that surprised her, to think about something else entirely — the sea, the crossing, Sicily, the ruins, anything that did not involve a man who had proposed to her with the romantic sensibility of a bailiff serving notice and then dared to be partly right.

She closed the window, then opened it again. She left the cabin and went up on deck.

The Thames spread out below, brown and busy. London rose behind it in smoke and brick. London gave way to Hertfordshire, Hertfordshire to Longbourn, and Jane in the garden, pressing a chemise flat with the heel of her hand.

Mrs Gardiner appeared beside her at the railing. “We shall be underway within the hour. The captain says the wind is favourable.”

“Good.”

“You are gripping that railing as though it owes you money.”

Elizabeth loosened her hands. Her knuckles were white. She had not noticed. “I am merely enthusiastic about sailing.”

“You are a great many things at this moment, Elizabeth, and enthusiastic is not the most prominent.” Mrs Gardiner placed a hand over hers on the railing — brief, warm, and then removed. “Whatever you are carrying, the Mediterranean is large enough to hold it. And if it is not, there is always the Sicilian wine.”

Elizabeth laughed.

The ropes were cast. The ship groaned, shifted, and caught the current. The dock began to slide away. Elizabeth watched London diminish. She thought of Jane's smile, Wickham's smile, and a letter that had overturned her every certainty.

She was taking two incompatible truths to sea.

The wind picked up, the sails filled, and England fell behind.

Elizabeth turned her face to the open water and decided she would not think about Mr Darcy for the entire voyage.

The resolve lasted until the English coast disappeared.

Chapter Two

The dispatches were dull.

Darcy had read them twice. They concerned grain shipments, naval provisioning, the movements of French privateers in the Strait of Messina, and the temperament of a Sicilian magistrate who had developed an inconvenient enthusiasm for revolutionary pamphlets. They were exactly the kind of work a younger son might find absorbing. Darcy found them roughly as engaging as a hymnal in a language he did not speak.

He had not taken the assignment for its intellectual rewards. Three days after Hunsford, he had appeared in the Earl's study, requiring either an occupation or a cliff. The Earl had supplied the former.

Colonel Fitzwilliam would have been the natural choice. The Colonel carried dispatches, charmed consuls, and moved through foreign cities with easy competence. Darcy stayed home, managed the estate, attended to Georgiana, and did his duty with grim satisfaction.

He knew it now. Elizabeth Bennet had told him.