Page 60 of Shipwrecked with Mr Darcy

Afterward, the fire burned low. She rested her head upon his chest while he stroked her hair. They breathed together in the quiet aftermath, sharing the deep, shaking gratitude of two people who had almost lost one another, and survived.

“I would have said yes on the ship,” she said.

He went completely still. His hand paused in her hair.

“Before the island,” she clarified. “If you had asked me on the ship. I had read your letter, and I finally understood what it meant, and what we had both done. If you had asked me properly—without the catalogue of my family's failings, and without the pride that made you ashamed of wanting me. If you had simply asked, I would have said yes.”

“I did not know that.”

“I know you did not. I did not fully realise it myself until we were stranded here. But I know it now, and I want you to know it. The proposal at Hunsford was disastrous, but the feeling underneath it was not. The feeling was love. That love was real, even when the execution was terrible. I want you to remember the real thing, Fitzwilliam. Not the terrible thing.”

He was quiet for a long moment. His hand slowly resumed its movement in her hair.

“I will remember the tower,” he said softly. “The night you held my head in your lap and talked about a peeling bench for twelve hours. The yes you gave me here, where a betrothal meant fish, figs, a leaking roof, and no guarantee of rescue. You chose this life with me, and that choice is the bravest thing I have ever witnessed.”

“The choosing was practical. I am a practical woman.”

“You are the least practical woman I have ever known, and the most courageous. The two are not the same thing, Elizabeth, though you consistently confuse them.”

She smiled against his chest. He felt the curve of her mouth against his skin. That simple joy was worth the storm, the fever, and the terrible wound on the dark path. It was worth every single thing the island had done to him.

The fire burned low. The stars appeared through the damaged roof, glowing brighter now that the section of stone had fallen away.

The stars turned, and they finally slept. The island held them—battered, repaired, and enduring. They held each other in the exact same manner: not perfectly, but with deep, stubborn devotion.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Elizabeth Bennet was engaged to be married. The engagement had been announced to a population of four lizards, an indeterminate number of seabirds, and a single, ancient fig tree.

She picked three figs from the lower branches, inspected them for soundness, and added them to the juniper-bark basket, which could only hold eight before it began to collapse.

She was engaged. The reality of it was difficult to grasp. In Hertfordshire, an engagement meant calling cards and morning visits; it meant her mother's voice ringing at an unbearable pitch throughout the house. It meant a ring, a breakfast, a settlement, a date, and a church. It meant a clergyman who was not Mr Collins—though if Mr Collins were the only available clergyman, she would have endured his homily without complaint, simply to be married to Fitzwilliam Darcy.

Here it meant figs.

She carried the basket up the hill to the tower, where Darcy had been constructing something since dawn. The fever had kept him quite still for seven days. He was now compensating for that forced idleness with a relentless energy that deeply concerned her.

“You are overdoing it,” she said.

He was on the upper level of the tower. The storm had taken the roof and a section of the east wall, leaving a platform open to the sky. On this platform, Darcy was building a fire pit from the flat stones she had collected during his convalescence. Beside it sat a growing pile of green juniper branches, cut and stacked with exact, geometric precision.

“You are building a signal fire six days after a fever nearly killed you,” she observed.

“This fire will burn longer and produce more smoke,” Darcy replied without looking up. “It will be visible from a greater distance than anything we have managed. The green wood creates a column of white smoke that can be seen for miles in clear weather. The stone pit retains heat, which means we can bank coals overnight and relight in the morning. And this elevation gives us the highest point on the island.”

He had clearly been planning this during his confinement on the pallet. He presented the scheme with great fluency, as though reading from notes he had composed while she was forbidding him to stand. Planning was the thing Fitzwilliam Darcy did instead of resting; forbidding it would have been quite useless.

“The fire pit is sound,” she said. “But the man building it must sit down and drink water before he falls off the tower.”

He drank the water, though he refused to sit down. The drinking was at least a minor concession, and she had learnt to take what was available.

The engagement required absolutely no adjustment to their daily life.

In England, an engagement restructured everything. The households negotiated; the families met, carefully assessing one another's connections and fortunes. The woman's days filled with linens, menus, and the endless opinions of aunts. The man's days filled with solicitors and settlements, converting honourable intentions into binding legal documents.

On the island their days filled with fish.

She caught four bream that morning. Darcy, who was restricted from swimming but allowed to fish from the rocks, caught two. She proudly announced her victory. He immediately observed that his two fish far outweighed her four, and that a just reckoning would award him the victory based on size rather than count. She replied that she had established the rules based on numbers, and she would not allow him to change them after the fact merely because he was losing.