Page 43 of Shipwrecked with Mr Darcy

Later, on the lower level, she sat by the rebuilt fire between his legs. Her back rested against his chest, his arms wrapped securely around her. It was the same position they had taken during the rainstorm. The echo was wholly deliberate.

“We may not be found,” she said.

“We may not.”

“I need to hear you say it.”

“We may not be found.” The words were heavy in his mouth. He had carried them for weeks, examining the truth in the dark while she slept. Saying them aloud to her was a different act entirely; it was the dividing of a terrible weight. “The sea is vast, and the island is small. No one knows where to look.”

She nodded against his chest. Her breathing was steady now, the crying fully spent.

“Then we live,” she said. “If this is where we are, then we live here, and we live well. We cannot spend every morning looking at the horizon, waiting for it to return something it has stolen.”

He pressed his mouth to her hair, breathing in the scent of salt and rosemary.

“We live,” he said.

She turned in his arms, lifting her face to his. She kissed him with a tenderness entirely different from the afternoon's urgency, or the night's slow exploration. The kiss was built of grief and resolve. It held the particular courage of a woman who watched rescue sail past her, and was choosing, once again, to survive.

He held her tightly as the fire burned low. The horizon remained empty, but Darcy discovered he was no longer watching it.

Chapter Nineteen

Elizabeth reckoned with the island the way she reckoned with everything: practically, thoroughly, and with a refusal to be sentimental about the arithmetic.

The arithmetic was not encouraging. They had been on the island for three weeks. In that time, four ships had passed within visible distance of the tower. Of those four, only one had been close enough to theoretically see their signal fire. Yet no ship had stopped or altered course. None had shown any sign that two people on a hilltop were waving, shouting, and burning everything they could find.

The signal fire had failed. The raft had failed. The methods available to two people on a small island, possessing no materials beyond wreckage and rope, were ultimately insufficient.

The fundamental problem was scale. They were small, and the sea was impossibly large. That disproportion was not going to change. Waiting for luck to resolve the matter was merely a prayer, and Elizabeth preferred action.

If they could not make the sea smaller, they could make the island more liveable.

She began with a garden. It was not a garden in the Longbourn sense, with borders and her mother's opinions regarding the arrangement of roses, but a purely practical one. She transplanted wild herbs from the hillside to a cleared patch of soil near the tower, where the cistern's overflow kept the ground damp. The rosemary, thyme, oregano, and fennel had been growing wild on the island for centuries. However, with the benefit of regular watering and cleared soil, the transplants took hold vigorously.

She also began drying figs. The trees produced more fruit than they could eat fresh, and she disliked seeing the surplus rot on the ground. She laid split figs on flat rocks in the sun, turning them daily. Within a week, she had a store of dried fruit that would keep through bad weather and supplement the fish. It was not glamorous work; it attracted insects, required constant vigilance, and left her fingers stained. Yet she performed it with systematic dedication. If she was going to live on this island, she intended to manage it thoroughly.

Darcy watched her work, but did not interfere. He had learned during the argument over the roof that Elizabeth's decisions were not tentative proposals requiring his approval. They were settled plans requiring his cooperation, a distinction he was increasingly comfortable with.

He focused his efforts on the tower. The stone repairs she had insisted upon for the roof proved sound; the beams held the weight, and the leaks stopped entirely. He built a shelf from driftwood planks for their supplies. He constructed a rainwater channel from the intact section of the roof to the cistern, doubling their water collection. He also carved hooks into the stone wall to hang the sailcloth, which served as a curtain, shade, and additional bedding on cold nights.

The tower was beginning to look like a home. The word arrived in Elizabeth's mind one afternoon as she walked up the hill from the cove. She saw the smoke rising from the chimney, the herb garden by the door, and the sailcloth moving in the breeze. The word was both wholly absurd and wholly accurate.

At night, by the fire, they read aloud.

The book had washed ashore in their first days. It was a waterlogged volume with warped covers and stuck pages, which Darcy had carefully separated and dried in the sun over the course of a week. It was an Italian novel. Elizabeth did not speak the language, and Darcy read it poorly. Reading it aloud was therefore an exercise in creative interpretation that likely bore little resemblance to the author's intent.

“I believe he is proposing to her,” Darcy said, squinting at the water-damaged text by firelight.

“You said that three chapters ago.”

“He was proposing three chapters ago. He appears to still be proposing. The man is either very thorough or very unsuccessful.”

“Perhaps she has not answered.”

“She has answered at length. I simply cannot determine whether the answer is yes or no. My Italian does not extend to the conditional subjunctive.”

“Then she is being evasive. It suggests the answer is no, but she would like it to be yes.”