Shipwrecked with Mr Darcy

A SENSUAL PRIDE AND PREJUDICE VARIATION ROMANCE

A PRIDE AND PREJUDICE VARIATION ROMANCE

BOOK FOUR

ELLA PAUL

Shipwrecked with Mr Darcy: A Sensual Pride and Prejudice Variation Romance

A Pride and Prejudice Variation Romance Series Book 4

Copyright © 2026 Ella Paul

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical,

photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission

of the author, except for brief quotations used in a book review or scholarly

work.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either

the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any

resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locations is purely

coincidental.

First Edition | 2026

Chapter One

Jane had a system for packing a trunk, and Elizabeth had a system for sitting on one.

The trunk in question belonged to their uncle and was built for documents, not dresses. Books had claimed Elizabeth's own trunk — a quantity Jane had already declined to count — leaving this one for everything else. She had noted the dimensions with optimism, rolled stockings into corners, pressed chemises flat with the heel of her hand, and laid her second-best muslin on top. The lid would not close. She was sitting on it now. Jane appeared in the doorway of the guest room with a length of ribbon in one hand.

“You are sitting on your luggage, Lizzy.”

“I am conquering it. There is a distinction.”

“Is that so?”

“The distinction is that I am winning.”

At that precise moment, the lid sprang open, depositing Elizabeth sideways onto the floor with a thump she felt in her dignity more than in her hip. Jane did not laugh. She stood with her lips pressed together, her eyes bright, her whole face doing the work of a laugh without committing to one.

“The trunk appears to disagree,” Jane said.

Elizabeth picked herself up. “The trunk is French.”

“It is Uncle Gardiner's.”

“Uncle Gardiner bought it in Calais. It has inherited a Continental stubbornness.” She brushed her skirts and eyed the open trunk. “There are too many petticoats. That is the difficulty.”

“The difficulty,” Jane said, kneeling beside the trunk and removing its contents, “is that you have packed three shawls, a parasol, two bonnets you do not like, and a volume of sermons from Mary that you will never read.”

“I might read them.”

“You will not read them.” Jane refolded a chemise with two efficient movements, set the parasol aside, removed one bonnet, relocated a pair of gloves, and slid Mary's sermons upright along the side where they served as a buttress rather than an occupant. The lid closed. The latch caught on the first attempt.

Elizabeth regarded her sister with sincere admiration. “You have a gift.”

“I have patience with fabric. It is not a gift one puts on a headstone, but it has its uses.”

Jane smiled. It was the smile of someone who had been practising.

Jane's collarbones were sharper. Her wrists were narrower. She was holding herself together so competently that no one asked if she needed holding.

She did not mention Mr Bingley. She had not mentioned him since January.

Elizabeth wanted to say his name. She wanted to say, “He was manipulated.” You were lied to. The fault is not yours, and it is not his, and I know exactly whose it is because a man I despise told me so in a letter I have read forty times.

She said none of this. It required explaining everything, including her own spectacular wrongness. She was not yet prepared to be that honest aloud.

“You could still come,” Elizabeth said instead. She had said it twice before. “Uncle Gardiner would be delighted. Sicily is warm. The ship has room.”

Jane folded the rejected bonnet in her lap, looking at the fabric to avoid looking anywhere else. “Mama needs me at Longbourn.”

“Mama needs an audience. That is not the same thing.”

“Lizzy.”

“She needs someone to listen while she catalogues her nerves. You are too kind to interrupt. By September, you will be thinner still, and I shall have to write to you from Sicily about the sunshine while you turn to paper in Hertfordshire.”

The speech was too much. The knowledge arrived a moment after the words left her mouth.

Jane looked at her with that steady, unreadable gaze that could mean forgiveness or reproach or simply that she was tired. “I am well, Lizzy.”

“You are not well. You are performing it with extraordinary conviction, and I love you too much to applaud.”

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.”

“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.

The thought arrived without permission, at speed, and with precise aim. He had replayed the refusal so many times it had lost its chronological shape and existed as a collection of fragments, each capable of striking at random. The last man in the world. That one arrived at the razor and had nearly cost him an ear. Had you behaved in a more gentlemanly manner. That one preferred mealtimes. Your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain for the feelings of others. That one came at night. It came with her voice, her eyes, and her particular expression. She meant every word and would not take a single one back.

He had deserved it. That was the stone he could not swallow and could not spit out. He had deserved at least half of it, possibly more. The uncertainty left a margin in which he could hope he had not deserved the worst of it. Hope was the cruellest thing she had left him with.

He put the dispatches down, picked them up, and put them down again. The cabin smelled of wood, tar, and enclosed air at sea. It contained nothing to look at other than a wall, a dispatch, or his own hands. His hands reminded him of the moment he had reached for her. She had stepped back. The step back was the most honest thing that had happened in that room. Her body had rejected him before her mouth had finished the job.

He stood. The cabin would not accommodate pacing. He settled for standing at the small window and watching the sea.

The crossing to Palermo would take four weeks, weather permitting. Barely a day from the Thames, the weather was already permitting with a stubborn consistency. He had nothing to blame for his sleeplessness except the obvious: a woman in Hertfordshire thought he was the worst man she had ever met, and she was not entirely wrong.

He should go on deck. The alternative was to remain here, cataloguing the ways he had failed to conduct himself as he ought. It was an exercise with no natural conclusion.

He went on deck.

The wind was warm. The Adeona was cutting steadily south. Sailors moved with unhurried purpose. Captain Holt supervised the way a hawk supervised its territory: from a height, in silence, looking mildly disappointed.

Darcy liked the captain. This was notable primarily because Darcy did not, as a general rule, like people. He respected them, tolerated them, occasionally admired them, and reliably failed to make them comfortable. Elizabeth had pointed this out with a directness he suspected he had found attractive even while it lacerated him.

He stopped thinking about Elizabeth for the brief walk from the companionway to the port railing. That was the full extent of it. He had been trying to count his steps on this voyage to occupy his mind. The counting served him little, but it occupied a part of his mind that might otherwise have done something worse.

He leaned on the railing. The sea stretched in every direction, blue-green and glittering. It was comprehensively empty, offering no landmarks, no reassurance, and no sign that anything existed beyond this ship.

It was peaceful. He resented it.

He turned to survey the deck. It offered the usual tableau: sailors, ropes, the captain at the helm, a stack of crates lashed near the bow, and⁠—

His instincts alerted him before he consciously realised it. His breath locked. His hands tightened on the railing. His vision narrowed.

Elizabeth Bennet was standing at the starboard railing with the wind in her hair.

He did not move. He was not certain he could. His mind was producing a single thought with the manic repetition of a jammed church bell:

She is here.

She was here. On the ship, he had boarded specifically because it was leaving England and standing at the railing. In a blue dress, the wind pressed against her body. He would certainly go to hell for noticing.

She had not seen him. The set of her shoulders suggested a heavy weight. The way she gripped the railing suggested she was either angry or seasick. He hoped it was seasick; he could do nothing about her anger except deserve it.

A woman stood beside her — older, handsome, with upright bearing. An aunt, perhaps. The woman said something, and Elizabeth turned her head. He should go below. He should return to his cabin and lock the door for the duration of the crossing. The woman at the railing wanted nothing to do with him.

He did not go below.

He stood at the port railing and thought with desperate clarity: She is going to turn around and see me. I will have to say something. I do not have a single sentence prepared that does not contain the words 'I am sorry' or 'you were right.' I cannot say either of those things. I am merely standing on a ship attempting not to be sick.

He was not seasick. He had not been seasick once on this voyage. The nausea was entirely personal.

The aunt turned, casually scanning the deck. Her gaze passed over Darcy, paused, and returned with focused interest. She looked at him the way a shopkeeper looked at goods: appraisingly, without embarrassment, and with confidence.

She touched Elizabeth's arm.

Elizabeth turned.

Their eyes met across thirty feet of deck and the accumulated wreckage of one proposal, one letter, and several months of the most productive misery of his life.

He watched her face — the recognition arriving, the shock behind it, the rapid work of composing herself. He remained at the railing. Moving seemed to require a decision he had not yet made.

She recovered first. He had not expected otherwise. Her chin came up, and she faced him with the composure of someone who had called him the last man in the world and had not blinked.

He should cross the deck and bow. He should say something. The correct forms, the right distance.

He bowed from across the deck. The distance made it absurd. He knew it was absurd. He did it anyway, because his body had decided on decorum, and his body was an idiot.

She inclined her head. The gesture was correct, cool, and exactly what the situation required. It told him absolutely nothing about what she was thinking.

The aunt was looking between them with barely contained interest. She had seen the bow. She had seen Elizabeth's face. She was drawing conclusions, and Darcy suspected they were accurate.

He turned back to the sea. His heart was conducting itself with considerable indecorum. His hands were shaking. He gripped the railing and thought: Four weeks. I am on this ship with her for four weeks. I will speak to her because I must. I will be civil. I will not look at her mouth. That way lies madness.

The wind shifted. A strand of her hair caught the light at the edge of his vision.

He was going to die on this ship.

Chapter Three

The Mediterranean was large. The Adeona was not. Mr Darcy was on it regardless.

Elizabeth was aware this was not, technically, his fault. Ships were booked weeks in advance. Passengers did not consult one another before purchasing passage. The Mediterranean was a popular destination, and the Adeona was a reputable vessel. The fact that the man she had last seen receiving the worst refusal in the history of English proposals was standing thirty feet away was a coincidence so thoroughly inconvenient she suspected God of having a theatrical streak.

Gripping the railing, she refused to look at him. She looked at the sea—blue, infinite, and blessedly free of tall men in dark coats bowing from across the deck.

“Elizabeth.” Mrs Gardiner's voice carried a dangerous frequency; she had noticed something interesting and intended to pursue it. “Who is that gentleman?”

“Which gentleman?”

“The one who just bowed at you from across the deck as though he were signalling a passing frigate.”

Elizabeth's jaw tightened. “That is Mr Darcy.”

A silence. Mrs Gardiner was a woman of formidable composure. Still, the name produced a pause — brief, weighted, and followed by the slight elevation of both eyebrows that was Mrs Gardiner's equivalent of a gasp. She knew the name. She knew it because Elizabeth had brought it up in London before leaving for Kent, mentioning him four times in one conversation with studied casualness to prove she was not thinking about him. She knew it because Jane's careful letters had contained enough about Netherfield's occupants to assemble the relevant picture.

She did not, however, know about Hunsford. Nobody knew about Hunsford.

“Mr Darcy,” Mrs Gardiner repeated. “The gentleman from Netherfield. Mr Bingley's friend.”

“The very same.”

“The one you described as — let me recall — 'disagreeably proud and not worth the trouble of conversation.'“

“I may have been hasty in my assessment.”

“You were very thorough in your assessment. You gave it twice.”

Elizabeth turned from the railing, projecting the composure of someone merely choosing to inspect a different portion of the deck. “He is a fellow passenger. The ship is large enough for both of us. I do not anticipate difficulty.”

Mrs Gardiner looked at Elizabeth's hands, clenched at her sides. She looked at Elizabeth's face, performing valiancy with its colour. She looked across the deck at Mr Darcy, staring at the sea with rigid concentration, trying to bore a hole in it through sheer force of will.

“No,” Mrs Gardiner said mildly. “I can see there will be no difficulty at all.”

Dinner was unavoidable.

The Adeona carried a small number of passengers, and they dined together in a common cabin that had been fitted with a table long enough for twelve and narrow enough that one's elbows were in constant negotiation with one's neighbours. Captain Holt sat at the head and dispensed hospitality with the enthusiasm of a man fulfilling a contractual obligation. A clergyman and his wife occupied one end. A merchant from Bristol occupied the other. Mr Darcy sat directly across from Elizabeth. He looked tired. She noticed it involuntarily, with a wince. His face was thinner than she remembered. The lines around his eyes were deeper. He had not been sleeping well, concealing the want of it through rigorous posture — a device she recognised because she was employing it herself.

He stood when she entered. Of course, he stood. He would have stood if she had entered a burning building — the manners were structural, built into the architecture of his bones; no amount of personal catastrophe could dislodge them. He bowed. She curtsied. The formality achieved a kind of absurdity. They were performing the rituals of polite society as though they had not last spoken in a room where she called him arrogant, and he told her he loved her in the worst possible way.

“Miss Bennet.” His voice was careful. Controlled. Stripped of everything except the consonants.

“Mr Darcy.” Hers was no better. She sounded as if she were reading from a card.

Mrs Gardiner, who missed nothing and forgave everything, extended her hand, intending to make this dinner tolerable through sheer force of social competence. “Mr Darcy, I am Mrs Gardiner. Elizabeth's aunt. My husband and I are very pleased to have company for the crossing.”

Mr Gardiner shook Darcy's hand with cheerful firmness. He judged people by their grip and conversation, having no patience for any other measure. Elizabeth watched Darcy's face register surprise — not at the handshake, but the man behind it. Mr Gardiner did not look the way Darcy expected. Elizabeth could see the recalculation happening behind his eyes. He had placed the Bennet relations under the heading of “Cheapside” and was now confronted with a man who refused to fit that category.

They sat. Soup was served. It was brown and lukewarm and tasted of the earnest efforts of a cook who had been hired for his durability rather than his palate.

“Mr Darcy,” Mr Gardiner said, holding a comfortable directness that suggested silence at dinner was a waste of good sitting. “My niece tells me you are from Derbyshire.”

“I am, sir.”

“A fine county. I fished there as a boy — the streams near Lambton, if I recall. Beautiful water.”

The careful blankness left his face. He had braced for hostility and received a question about fish. “The streams near Lambton are excellent,” he said, and his voice had lost the careful blankness it had carried a moment before. “My estate borders several of them. You would be welcome to fish them, should you find yourself in the county.”

The offer was sincere. The sincerity annoyed Elizabeth. It would have been considerably easier to maintain her position if he had simply behaved as she expected — stiffly, coldly, with precise social clumsiness. He was not cooperating. He was being pleasant. He talked to her uncle about fishing with genuine interest. Mrs Gardiner watched with quiet satisfaction; she had decided something. Elizabeth wanted to kick someone under the table, but could not determine who deserved it most.

“The captain tells us you are travelling on government business,” Mr Gardiner said.

“I am carrying dispatches for the consul in Palermo. My uncle arranged the commission.”

“Your uncle is the Earl of Matlock?” Mrs Gardiner let the question trail with casual precision. She already knew the answer.

“He is.”

“And your cousin — Colonel Fitzwilliam — we have heard his name as well, I think.” Mrs Gardiner glanced at Elizabeth. The glance was brief and lethal, containing a quantity of information that Elizabeth preferred not to acknowledge. “From Elizabeth's visit to Kent this spring.”

Elizabeth took a very deliberate spoonful of soup. The soup had not improved. She swallowed it anyway. The alternative was speaking. Speaking required facial expression, and hers was not currently fully under control.

“The Colonel is in London,” Darcy said. “He sends — that is —” He stopped. The sentence had been heading somewhere — towards a pleasantry, perhaps, or a polite fiction. It ran aground on whatever he had been about to say. The wreckage sat between them at the table like a spilt glass.

“The soup is very good,” Elizabeth said, into the silence.

“It is not,” Mrs Gardiner said.

“No. It is not. But I felt someone should say something.”

Mr. Gardiner chuckled, and his laughter seemed to expand the room. The sound broke the tension that Elizabeth's wit and Darcy's formality couldn't resolve. “Mr. Darcy, please forgive us. We are a lively family. My niece has opinions on everything. My wife has opinions about my niece. I have opinions about soup. With us, you'll be thoroughly entertained during the crossing, whether you want to be or not.”

Darcy observed Mr. Gardiner. His expression was hard to interpret, but Elizabeth, who had studied his face more than she liked to admit, sensed a hint of recognition — as if he were glimpsing a kind of family warmth he hadn't known before, or had known but now was rethinking.

“I am certain I shall benefit from the company,” Darcy said. For once, the formality did not sound like a wall. He was reaching for a phrase inadequate to his meaning, but it was the only one his vocabulary permitted.

Dinner continued, with the clergyman commenting on the weather and the Bristol merchant talking about trade. Mr. Gardiner and Darcy discussed the Mediterranean—covering its commerce, politics, and shipping routes that Mr. Gardiner knew through his trading ties and Darcy through his uncle's correspondence. They conversed effortlessly, though not warmly—Darcy’s style was reserved—yet with mutual respect. Elizabeth, sitting between them, watched and felt something unpleasant: the gradual, discomforting weakening of a conviction she had held since Netherfield.

She had told herself he was proud. He was proud. She had told herself his manners were designed to intimidate. They were not designed to intimidate — they were designed to protect. The distinction had not occurred to her until she watched him deploy them in a room where he was outnumbered and uncertain. He managed to be courteous to a man he would have dismissed six months ago.

The thought was unwelcome.

The deck after dinner was dark and cool, the sky thick with stars in the way that only an open sea could produce — no London smoke, no lamplight, just the whole brutal inventory of the heavens laid out above the water like a display that was showing off.

Elizabeth had come up for air. The cabin below was warm. Mrs Gardiner's silence was loud — she had seventeen questions and was restraining every one of them. Elizabeth needed air unoccupied by someone reading her face.

She walked to the railing. She breathed. The air tasted of salt and the faint sweetness of warm wood. The ship moved under her feet with a rhythm she was beginning to learn: a steady rise and fall, like breathing done by something very large and indifferent.

She heard his step before she saw him. She knew it was his; she had spent an entire dinner cataloguing the sound of his boots on the cabin floor. It was a pathetic use of an excellent mind. She acknowledged this freely and did not stop listening.

He appeared at the railing. Not beside her — six feet away. It was either a respectful distance or cowardice. She was not going to help him by closing it.

“Miss Bennet.”

“Mr Darcy.”

Silence lingered. The ship slowly creaked, while a wave slapped against the hull with the wet, casual violence of a nighttime sea.

“I did not know you would be aboard,” he said.

“Nor I you.”

“If my presence causes you discomfort, I can — arrangements might be made — I could take my meals separately, or⁠—”

“Mr Darcy.” She turned to face him. He was a shape in the dark — tall, rigid, his hands on the railing in a grip that suggested he was holding on to something more than wood. “We are passengers on the same ship. No arrangement will make this vessel larger. I am capable of dining in your company without requiring accommodation.”

“I did not mean to suggest otherwise.”

“You suggested precisely otherwise. You suggested my composure is so fragile that the sight of you at a dinner table would undo it.” She heard herself and knew she was being unfair. The knowledge did not slow her down. Unfairness was easier than the alternative: admitting the sight of him at the dinner table had very nearly undone her, though not in the way he imagined.

He was quiet. She wished he would argue. She was equipped for his arguments. She had rehearsed them, refined them, polished her responses until they gleamed. She was not equipped for his silence. It was new and unsettling. He seemed to have learnt something since April. She did not want him to have learnt things. A Darcy who was learning was considerably more dangerous than a Darcy who was certain.

“You are right,” he said. “I apologise.”

She stared at him. The apology landed in a part of her that she had not defended, because she had not expected to need defences there. Mr Darcy did not apologise. Mr Darcy explained. Mr Darcy justified. Mr Darcy wrote eight-page letters outlining the precise moral reasoning behind his every decision. He did not stand on a dark deck and say, “You are right, and I apologise,” meaning both words and expecting nothing in return.

“For what, precisely?” She heard the edge in her own voice and did not soften it. She was not ready to be soft with him. She was not certain she ever would be. Softness required trust. Trust required her to set down the thing she was carrying. The thing she was carrying had Jane's face.

“For the presumption.” He paused. “And for other things. I will not enumerate them. The deck of a ship is not the venue, and you did not come up here to receive an inventory of my regrets.”

“You have regrets.”

“I have a considerable collection. I have been adding to it steadily.” The faintest edge of something that was not quite humour. “It is my primary occupation, of late.”

She should not have smiled. She caught it before it reached her mouth, but the impulse had been there, and the impulse was a traitor, and she would deal with it later, in the privacy of her cabin, where she could have a stern conversation with her own reflexes.

A gust of wind. Her hair pulled loose from its pins — a single strand, whipping across her face. She reached up to catch it.

He looked at the strand of hair with an expression she had never seen from him before. She could not classify it and was not going to try.

“Goodnight, Mr Darcy.”

“Goodnight, Miss Bennet.”

She left the deck. She walked the narrow corridor to her cabin, closed the door, leaned against it, and pressed her hands to her face.

He apologised.

She had accused him of arrogance, conceit, and selfish disdain. She had refused his proposal with the delicacy of a cannon shot. She had spent months reading his letter and rearranging her understanding of the world. The rearrangement had left her angry — not at him, or not only at him, but at herself. She had been wrong with considerable assurance. She had been placed on the same ship as him before she had finished deciding what she thought of him.

She thought of Jane. Thin, composed, performing cheerfulness, refusing to grieve in public. Mr Bingley's departure had broken Jane's heart. Mr Darcy had engineered Mr Bingley's departure. Mr Darcy had just apologised to her on a dark deck with a voice that sounded like it had been dragged over gravel. She did not know what to do with any of it.

Two truths. She had misjudged his character. He had destroyed Jane's happiness. The letter had resolved one and confirmed the other. The resolution did not redeem the confirmation. The confirmation did not invalidate the resolution. She was sharing a ship with him for four weeks. The ship was not large enough for her contradictions.

She lay down on the narrow bed. The cabin rocked gently. Through the window, the stars continued their display, indifferent to Elizabeth, who stared at the ceiling, arguing with herself; she was losing on both sides.

The memory of his apology surfaced—spoken, without performance, the words plain, and without artifice.

Against it pressed the image of Jane's collarbones, sharper than they should have been.

Chapter Four

Darcy's new routine was not helping and was actually making things worse.

He rose before dawn, wanting to be on deck first. He faced the port side, pretending to admire the sunrise while listening for her step on the companionway ladder. He watched the sky lighten, refusing to look towards the starboard side when she appeared. She arrived every morning at the same time, her hair not yet pinned, a shawl wrapped over her dress. It made her look smaller, younger, and less capable of levelling him with six sentences in a parsonage.

He did not look, but he knew exactly where she stood. He knew which section of railing she preferred, how long she stayed, and the precise moment she turned to go below. He had lost access to her by every legitimate means, reduced to gathering intelligence by peripheral vision. It was not dignified, and it was not going to stop.

This was day five. He had managed to speak to her exactly three times—twice at dinner, once on deck that first night. Each conversation had lasted mere minutes, leaving him feeling as if he had performed badly in an examination. She was civil. She was correct. Mrs Gardiner was always beside her, watching him with sharp, unsentimental interest.

He was going to have to speak to Mr Gardiner again. This was not a hardship. The hardship was that speaking to Elizabeth's uncle was pleasant. Every agreeable exchange struck another crack in Darcy's prior judgements, forcing him to admit he had been wrong.

Mr Gardiner was on the foredeck, reading with complete absorption and no ceremony. A book balanced on his knee, his coat discarded beside him, his face turned up to catch the light. The book was Virgil. In Latin.

Darcy hesitated. He adjusted his expression and continued walking, the limited deck space forcing him past Mr Gardiner's position.

“Mr Darcy.” Mr Gardiner looked up with ready friendliness. Darcy was beginning to understand it was not performance, but temperament. “Join me. I am attempting to remember more Latin than I possess, and a conversation would provide a welcome excuse to abandon the effort.”

“Virgil?” Darcy sat. Standing over another man felt unpleasantly imposing.

“The Aeneid,” Mr Gardiner said. “I am rereading it for the voyage. It seemed appropriate — Mediterranean crossing, storm-tossed hero, the wrath of the gods. Though I confess I hope our crossing is less eventful than Aeneas's.”

“You read Classics.” Darcy heard himself and winced. The sentence carried the distinct tone of someone who had expected otherwise.

Mr Gardiner did not miss it. He looked at Darcy with mild, unruffled amusement—the look of someone accustomed to being underestimated. “I do. My education was not at Oxford, but it was thorough. My father was a country attorney who believed that a boy who could not parse a Latin sentence was a boy who had not yet been sufficiently threatened.” He smiled. “I can also parse a Greek one, if that improves my standing.”

The reproach was gentle and landed precisely. Darcy felt it in his chest. It was not a blow, but a correction.

“I did not mean⁠—”

“You did, a little.” Mr Gardiner's smile widened. He was not angry. He could acknowledge a slight and dismiss it in the same breath. Darcy envied the skill. “But you are correcting yourself, which I find more interesting than the error. Most men of your station would not bother.”

Darcy did not know what to do with this. He was not accustomed to being observed by people who were not trying to marry him, deceive him, or petition him for something. Mr Gardiner appeared to want nothing from him except conversation.

Darcy sat beside him and talked.

They discussed the Mediterranean — Mr Gardiner's trading routes, the complexities of Sicilian commerce, the tariffs and blockades that the war had produced. Mr Gardiner knew his business comprehensively. He was sharp, well-read, and expressed nuanced opinions about Napoleon without the posturing gentlemen often employed.

Darcy listened and asked questions. The interest was genuine, and it served as its own reproach. Six months ago, he would not have had this conversation. Mr Gardiner would have been a name attached to a Cheapside address. He would have placed the man under the heading of “trade” and moved on, never knowing what he missed.

He knew now. Elizabeth had told him. Your arrogance has blinded you to the worth of people who do not fit your assumptions. The accusation had been accurate. The accuracy was sitting beside him in the sun, reading Virgil and offering fishing advice.

Your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain for the feelings of others.

He thought of Bingley's face when he had told him Jane Bennet did not care for him. Bingley had accepted the verdict because Bingley trusted him. Darcy had used that trust, breaking something he could not see from where he stood.

“You are very quiet, Mr Darcy.” Mr Gardiner was watching him with gentle attention. “I have said something that has sent you somewhere else.”

“You have reminded me of something.”

“Something pleasant?”

“Something necessary.” He paused. “Mr Gardiner, I — I owe you — that is—” The sentence collapsed. He did not know how to finish it. He wanted to say, “I judged your family without meeting them.” The judgement cost your niece her sister's happiness. I am sitting here enjoying your company while Jane Bennet is thin and quiet in Hertfordshire. The incongruity of it is making me ill.

He said none of this. He said: “I am glad of your company, sir. It is a greater pleasure than I anticipated.”

Mr Gardiner looked at him. He was hearing what was said and also what was not said. With a generosity Elizabeth must have learnt from someone, he chose to accept the former and wait for the latter.

“The pleasure is mutual, Mr Darcy. And the crossing is long. There is time.”

Elizabeth was in the common cabin when Darcy entered for dinner, and she was laughing.

The laugh was directed at something Mrs Gardiner had said. The sound went through him. He had heard her laugh before, at assemblies and in drawing rooms, but he had never heard her laugh in close quarters. The candlelight caught the side of her face, her head tilted back, her throat exposed. The intimacy of it hit him with a force the open deck had not prepared him for.

She saw him, and her laugh faded instantly.

“Mr Darcy.” Mrs Gardiner's greeting was warm and, he suspected, strategic. She had been watching him for five days, assembling a theory that appeared to involve him, Elizabeth, and the distance between them. He did not know whether to be alarmed or grateful.

“Mrs Gardiner. Mr Gardiner. Miss Bennet.”

Elizabeth inclined her head. She conveyed perfect civility and complete opacity in a single movement.

Dinner proceeded. The soup was marginally better than the previous evening. The clergyman held forth on the antiquities of Sicily with breathless enthusiasm. His wife nodded at intervals. The Bristol merchant ate with single-minded focus.

Darcy ate and watched Elizabeth's hands. They were restless when she was amused, still when she was annoyed, and gripped things tightly when she was truly angry. He had seen her angry only once, and that was sufficient.

Tonight, she tapped her spoon against the edge of her bowl in a rhythm matching the ship's sway. She watched Mr Gardiner and Darcy with an unreadable expression.

“Mr Darcy,” Elizabeth said. The sound of his name in her voice made his chest tighten. “My uncle tells me you discussed the Sicilian grain trade this afternoon.”

“We did.”

“For how long?”

“I — some time. An hour, perhaps.”

“Two hours,” Mr Gardiner said cheerfully. “And we had not exhausted the subject. Mr Darcy has a thorough understanding of Mediterranean commerce for a man whose primary occupation is in Derbyshire.”

“Mr Darcy has a thorough understanding of many subjects,” Elizabeth said. Her tone was neutral. Her eyes were not. “He is a man of extensive study.”

Darcy looked at her. He did not know whether she was complimenting his learning or insulting his habit of forming conclusions from a distance.

“I aspire to be,” he said. “I do not always succeed.”

Her eyebrows rose. “An unusual admission.”

“I have been making unusual admissions recently. It is a new undertaking.”

“Is it going well?”

“I am told it improves with practice. I am in the early stages and therefore frequently wrong.”

The corner of her mouth twitched. It was not a smile, but it was close. He watched her with complete, desperate attention.

Mrs Gardiner looked at Mr Gardiner. Mr Gardiner looked at his soup. The table held its breath.

“Practice does help,” Elizabeth said. “I have found that being wrong becomes less painful with repetition, though it never becomes pleasant.”

“No,” Darcy said. “It does not.”

The ship rocked. Their eyes held for a moment longer than the conversation warranted. They both knew they had been wrong.

Elizabeth looked away first. She picked up her spoon. The tapping resumed.

Darcy ate his soup without tasting it. She made a joke about being wrong. She included herself. She did not say “you were wrong” — she said “being wrong.” First person, general application, herself included.

A door that had been closed was now, by the width of a sentence, ajar.

He finished his soup and excused himself. He went to his cabin, sat on the edge of his bunk, and pressed his hands together. He thought about her mouth, almost smiling. He thought about her voice, saying practice helps. She had destroyed him. Now, possibly, she was three inches from finding him bearable.

Three inches was a country. He would cross it on his knees if she let him.

Chapter Five

It started with a remark about loyalty.

They were at dinner — the eighth dinner. Elizabeth was counting the way one counted the days of an illness or a prison sentence. The clergyman was discussing the book of Ruth, dispensing scripture by habit, without checking whether anyone was listening. His wife was nodding. The Bristol merchant was engaged in a private war with a piece of salt beef that appeared to be winning.

“Ruth's loyalty to Naomi,” the clergyman said, with gentle conviction. He had delivered this homily at least thirty times and had not yet tired of it. “Is the truest model of faithfulness in the Old Testament. She gave up her country, her people, her very identity, for the sake of a bond she was not obligated to honour.”

“And lost nothing by it,” Mrs Gardiner said. “She gained Boaz, a prosperous husband, and a place in the genealogy of kings. Loyalty was well rewarded in her case.”

“Is loyalty only valuable when it is rewarded?” Elizabeth asked. The question was aimed at no one in particular, but it hit everyone at the table. It was the danger of a mouth that moved before the thinking was done.

“It is valuable regardless,” the clergyman said, “but its value is demonstrated most clearly when⁠—”

“When it costs something,” Elizabeth said. “When loyalty demands that a person sacrifice their own comfort for someone else's happiness, and they do it, quietly, without recognition, and the person who benefits never knows the price.”

She was not talking about Ruth. She was talking about Jane — Jane folding linens in Hertfordshire. Jane maintained the appearance of cheerfulness with quiet dedication, deciding her suffering was a private matter. She was going to keep it private if it killed her. It was doing exactly that, slowly, by degrees, evident in the sharp lines of her collarbones.

She should not have said it. She especially should not have said it in front of Mr Darcy. His face had gone still, his hands unmoving on the table. She knew what his still hands meant. She had been watching them for eight days.

The table moved on. The clergyman's wife remarked on the weather. Mr Gardiner asked for more bread. Mrs Gardiner watched Elizabeth with a steady, patient gaze. She had identified the subtext and was choosing not to excavate it in public.

Darcy said nothing. His silence was louder than the clergyman's homily.

She found him on deck after dinner. She was not yet willing to determine whether it was an accident or a decision. The night was warm. The stars were excessive. The sea churned, dark and restless, entirely indifferent to the emotional state of the people floating on top of it.

He was at the port railing. His coat was off. He had loosened his cravat. She had not seen him do this before. The informality of it—the collar open, the line of his throat visible in the moonlight—was distracting. She was not prepared to analyse it.

She walked to the railing. Not beside him. Close enough to speak without raising her voice. Far enough that the gap between them was a statement.

“Miss Bennet.”

“Mr Darcy.”

The ship moved. Somewhere below, the Bristol merchant was snoring, approaching sleep the way he approached beef: aggressively.

“You were not discussing Ruth,” Darcy said.

“No.”

“You were discussing your sister.”

Elizabeth's hands tightened on the railing. “I was discussing loyalty. You may assign the reference as you see fit.”

“I am assigning it accurately, and you know it.” His voice was quiet, careful. Carelessness with this woman produced a catastrophe. “You were speaking of Jane.”

The name landed between them. Elizabeth felt the sharpness of it. She was suddenly, comprehensively tired of the careful distance she had maintained for eight days.

“Yes,” she said. “I was speaking of Jane. I was speaking of a woman who has not smiled — really smiled, with her whole face — since November. I was speaking of a woman who writes letters to Miss Bingley and does not send them. I was speaking of my sister, Mr Darcy, who is the best person I know, and who is thin and quiet and performing contentment with such conviction that everyone in Hertfordshire believes her. I am the only person who does not, because I am the only person who knows what she looked like before.”

She had not planned the speech. It arrived fully formed, the way her worst speeches always did. She felt it leave her and knew it was too much, but she could not stop it.

Darcy did not flinch. He stood at the railing and took it. A man who believed himself blameless would have argued. He was not arguing.

“Before what?” he asked. His voice was barely audible above the water.

“Before Mr Bingley left Netherfield without explanation. Before your friend departed in the night like a man fleeing a creditor. Before Jane went to London and called on his sisters and was told, by Miss Bingley, with a smile I am quite certain was intended to wound, that Mr Bingley was unlikely to return to Hertfordshire and that his affections were engaged elsewhere.” Elizabeth's voice was steady. She was proud of the steadiness. It was costing her everything. “Before she came home from London and unpacked her trunk with the same careful hands she uses for everything, and went to her room, and I found her sitting on the bed with a letter she had not finished writing, and she looked at me, and I saw⁠—”

She stopped. She had reached the edge of what she could say without crying, and she was not going to cry in front of him. She was Elizabeth Bennet. She expressed her pain through sarcasm and her grief through fury. Neither left room for tears.

“What did you see?” Darcy asked.

“I saw my sister's heart broken. Neatly. Quietly. With all the composure you could wish for, because Jane does not make scenes, and she does not assign blame, and she does not say cruel things about the people who have hurt her, because she is better than I am, and I have always known it, and it makes me furious.”

A new silence settled between them. Darcy was hearing something he had never heard before, understanding what his actions looked like from inside a house he had never entered.

“You separated them,” Elizabeth said. She was calmer now. The outburst had cost her dear, but it had also lightened her, and she found she could speak now with the precision she preferred. “Your letter acknowledged as much. You persuaded Mr Bingley that Jane did not care for him, and he believed you because he trusted you. You used that trust to remove him from a woman who loved him, and the reason you gave — that her family was beneath him — was a judgment you were not entitled to make about another woman's heart.”

Darcy was very still. His hands on the railing were white-knuckled. His jaw was set the way it went when he was holding himself in check. She had seen it at Hunsford and at Netherfield before that. The recognition told her she had been watching him longer than she admitted.

“You are right,” he said.

She had expected the argument. She had not expected the admission, and the absence of the argument left a hole in her prepared remarks that she did not know how to fill. She had rehearsed his defence — the pride, the justification, the calm assertion that he had acted in his friend's best interest — and none of it was coming. The silence where his defence should have been was louder than anything she had said.

“I was wrong,” Darcy said. The admission was pulled from him with effort, bearing the private conviction that the pain of it was deserved. “I was wrong about your sister's feelings. I watched her face and saw composure, which I interpreted as indifference. It was the mistake of a man who believes his own perceptions are reliable.”

“You described her serenity as evidence of a cold heart.”

“I described her serenity as evidence that she did not love Bingley. I was wrong. I have known I was wrong since — since April.”

Since Hunsford. He did not say it. He did not need to.

“And what have you done about it?” Elizabeth's voice was quiet now, the anger replaced by something harder and more specific. “You knew you were wrong. You wrote me a letter in which you admitted as much — with qualifications and explanations. You reasoned that understanding your error was the same as correcting it. But Jane is still thin. Mr Bingley is still in London. The letter explained everything and fixed nothing.”

He closed his eyes, briefly. When he opened them, the expression was emptied of everything she had seen there before—the reserve, the control, the careful management. What remained was raw. She looked away.

“I wrote to Bingley,” he said. “On this ship. Before — before your uncle's company, your aunt's observations, and this conversation. I sat in my cabin on the third day and wrote him a letter confessing what I had done: concealing Miss Bennet's presence in London. I told him his feelings were not returned when I had no grounds for the claim. That he should return to Hertfordshire at the earliest opportunity and make his own judgement.”

Elizabeth stared at him. The wind pulled at her hair. The stars were still there, which seemed wrong — a sky that dramatic should have the decency to dim for a conversation this serious.

“You wrote to him.”

“I cannot send it from the ship. But I wrote it. The writing matters to me, if not to you.”

She did not know what to say. She had come up here with specific, domestic, devastating ammunition. He had disarmed her without defending himself. Admitting everything, he had already begun the repair. The repair was a letter sitting in a cabin below decks, addressed to a man in London, containing the truth.

The anger had nowhere to go. It cooled slowly, like metal, changing shape but not substance. It had lost its target. She could not aim at a man standing in front of her, saying I was wrong without qualifications, without the pride that had made her refusal so easy.

She was not ready to forgive him. Forgiveness implied resolution, and nothing was resolved. Jane was still thin. Bingley was still absent. A letter in a cabin was not the same as a man in Hertfordshire.

But he had written it. Sitting in his cabin alone, he had written the truth. The act of writing was not the act of sending, but it was nothing. He had done the one thing he could do on a ship in the middle of the sea. It was more than she had expected. The more the problem was. Every time he exceeded her expectations, the ground shifted under her certainties. Her certainties were the only thing keeping her upright.

“I cannot forgive you for Jane,” she said. “Not yet. Perhaps not for some time. She is my sister, and her pain is not an abstraction to me, and your regret, however sincere, does not undo the months she spent composing herself into someone she was not.”

“I know.”

“And I —” She stopped. She had been about to say something she was not ready to say: something about Hunsford, about the letter, about her own wrongness. The words were there. She pulled them back and held them behind her teeth.

“You do not owe me anything,” Darcy said. “You do not owe me your forgiveness, or your conversation, or your company at dinner. I am aware of what I have done. I am attempting to correct it. The correction does not require your participation.”

She looked at him. In the moonlight, his face was all planes and shadows. The man was miserable, and it was not a performance. She did not want to care, and she was failing.

“You should send the letter,” she said.

“I will. I will send it on the first packet ship returning to England when we reach port.”

“Send it first. Before the dispatches. Before whatever business your uncle requires.”

He looked at her. It was a steady, searching look, listening for something underneath the words. “I will.”

“Good.”

She turned from the railing. She walked three steps. She stopped.

“Mr Darcy.”

“Miss Bennet.”

“I was wrong about your character. Not about Jane — about your character. The letter — I read it. I read it many times. I was wrong about Wickham, and I was wrong about your reasons, and I formed my opinion of you on the word of a man who did not deserve my trust, and the forming of it was vanity, not judgement, and I have been — I have been living with that since April.”

The words came out in a rush. She had not planned to say them. She had been carrying them since Kent. The carrying had become so familiar that she had mistaken its weight for a natural condition. She opened her mouth, and the weight shifted. The relief was dizzying and incomplete.

She did not wait for his response. She crossed the deck, descended the companionway, and entered her cabin. She closed the door, sat on the edge of her bunk, and shook.

She had told him. She withheld the rest—the nights she had spent reading his letter until the words blurred, the slow, nauseating revision of every conversation she had ever had with Wickham, the shame that arrived at four in the morning and sat on her chest until dawn. She had told him the facts. The facts were sufficient. The rest was hers.

Her mind turned to Jane, and then to the letter in his cabin. She recalled his face when she had said I was wrong about your character. She would describe his expression to herself as surprise and nothing else. Anything else was a conversation she was not ready to have.

The ship rocked. Elizabeth pulled the blanket over her shoulders and stared at the cabin wall and felt, for the first time in months, a fraction lighter and a great deal more confused.

Chapter Six

Darcy did not sleep.

He had not slept well since Hunsford. It had become a feature of his character rather than a symptom of his distress. Tonight's sleeplessness was different. He was not replaying the refusal; he was replaying that I was wrong about your character. The refusal had at least been unambiguous. This was not. She had told him he was wrong about Jane and right about himself in the space of ten minutes. The combination settled into no emotion he knew how to govern.

He lay in his bunk, stared at the low ceiling, and thought about Jane Bennet's face.

He had met Jane Bennet. They had danced in the same room, stood at the same table, observed each other across the same crowded assemblies. He had looked at her serene face and seen only poise. He had assumed she smiled at everyone and meant nothing by it, deciding this from a distance. He possessed the arrogance to believe he could read a woman's heart by the set of her features.

He was wrong. Elizabeth had told him so, her account specific in a way his own reckoning was not. He knew, in the abstract, that he might have misjudged Jane's feelings. The letter he wrote in April admitted the possibility—a careful, hedged admission that left room for an honest mistake rather than culpable arrogance.

Elizabeth's account left no such room. Jane's collarbones. The unfinished letter. Composure serves as camouflage rather than contentment. Such details did not belong to someone mildly disappointed by a suitor's departure. Her heart had broken quietly, with no audience, while Darcy stood in London congratulating himself.

He sat up. The cabin was dark. He lit the candle, moving to the small writing desk to take out paper, ink, and the letter he had written to Bingley three days earlier. He recognised it now as inadequate. It had been written by someone who understood his error in principle but had not yet seen its face.

He had seen its face now. Elizabeth had shown it to him.

He read the letter. It was courteous and completely insufficient. It said, “I was wrong to conceal Miss Bennet's presence in London.” It failed to confess that he had looked at a composed face and decided her heart was empty. It said, “You should return to Hertfordshire.” It failed to admit that he had used Bingley's trust as a weapon against an innocent woman. His motives were not malicious, but arrogance that destroys happiness is indistinguishable from cruelty.

Setting the old letter aside, he took a fresh sheet and wrote.

The writing took an hour. It lacked elegance. Elegance managed an audience, and Darcy was confessing. Confession required a plainness his education had not provided. He outlined his actions and his reasoning, acknowledging that his intentions did not excuse the damage.

He wrote: Jane Bennet loved you. I was wrong to say otherwise. Return to Hertfordshire. Tell her yourself that you are sorry, because an apology from me will do her no good — she does not know me, and she does not need to. She needs to hear from you that your leaving was not her failure but mine.

He signed and folded it, setting it on the desk. He felt the unpleasant sensation of doing the right thing too late, finding no comfort in the act.

Morning brought a deep, brilliant sky untouched by London smoke. Darcy went on deck, standing at his usual position. He waited for Elizabeth with the patience of someone whose dignity had been thoroughly abandoned; waiting for a woman who might not speak to him felt entirely reasonable.

She came. She stood at the starboard railing. She did not look at him.

He waited. The sun climbed. A gull circled the mast with easy presumption, behaving as if the ship existed for its convenience.

She crossed the deck.

She walked with the pace of a decision already made. Stopping at his railing, she stood beside him. They maintained a careful distance, facing the same direction, looking at the same sea.

“Good morning, Mr Darcy.”

“Good morning, Miss Bennet.”

The gull made another circuit.

“I said things last night,” Elizabeth began. She stopped, then started again. It was unusual; she typically committed to her sentences the way she committed to her opinions. “I said things I had been carrying for some time. The weight made them heavier than I intended, and I may have delivered them with more force than was⁠—”

“You delivered them with exactly the force they required,” Darcy said. “I needed to hear them. My own versions allowed me to be honestly mistaken, my judgement sound even if my conclusion was wrong. I needed the specific details. The collarbones. The letter.” He paused. “I rewrote my letter to Bingley last night.”

She looked at him. Her face in the morning light was extraordinary, and he was aware that thinking so was not useful and could not stop. “You rewrote it.”

“The first version was insufficient. It explained what I had done without adequately describing what it had cost. The second version is — more honest.”

“More honest how?”

“It tells him that I used his trust against a woman who loved him, and that the responsibility is mine entirely, and that he should return to Hertfordshire and apologise to your sister in person.”

Elizabeth was quiet. The wind caught a loose strand of her hair. He noticed it was the same strand that had escaped two nights ago. He was paying too much attention, and he did not care.

“That is a significant letter,” she said.

“It is a necessary one.”

“Bingley will be hurt.”

“Bingley should be hurt. I hurt him. The least I can do is let him know about it.”

She looked at him with a new expression. He knew it lacked forgiveness; her features remained managed, held under the careful control of someone who did not trust easily. But it was something approaching forgiveness. It was a beginning.

“You are different,” she said.

“I am the same man. I am attempting to behave differently.”

“Is there a distinction?”

“I believe so. A significant one.” He looked from the sea to her face, and then quickly back. “Character does not change. Behaviour can. I remain capable of the arrogance I displayed towards your sister—the presumption that my judgement justified another person's unhappiness. That capability has not vanished. I have merely chosen not to exercise it.”

“That is the most unflattering self-assessment I have ever heard a man deliver voluntarily.”

“I was recently given cause to reassess my approach to flattery.”

She laughed. The sound was short and startled, extracted against her better judgement. It was the most beautiful thing he had heard since April.

The laugh stopped. She pressed her lips together to fight the smile. The struggle was visible, itself a kind of gift. She was amused against her will, and her reluctance meant it mattered.

“We should not be friends,” she said.

“I was not under the impression that we were.”

“We should not become friends. You separated my sister from the person she loved. I accused you of being the last man in the world I could ever be prevailed on to marry. A civil conversation at a railing erases neither of those things.”

“It does not.”

“Good. Then we understand each other.”

“I believe we do.”

She nodded, turning away. She took three steps and stopped. It was becoming a pattern, the pause where she decided whether to say what she had been holding back. He could see the decision in the set of her shoulders.

“Mr Darcy.”

“Miss Bennet.”

“The letter to Bingley. Send it the moment we reach port.”

“I intend to.”

“And the letter you wrote me. In April.” She did not turn around. “I have read it. Many times. You should know that.”

She walked away without stopping again. He watched her go, gripping the railing. He drew a deliberate breath, struggling to steady himself after what she had just said.

She read it. Many times.

He stood at the railing for a long time. The gull settled on a crate, entirely indifferent to human emotion, simply waiting for someone to drop a fish.

The day passed. At dinner they spoke with careful, surface-level civility. They had said too much and were now pretending they had not. The performance convinced no one. Mrs Gardiner’s expression throughout the meal suggested she was actively restraining her applause.

Returning to his cabin after dinner, Darcy sat at his desk. He neither wrote nor read the dispatches. He thought of Elizabeth at the railing, not turning around, saying I have read it many times. The sentence hung in the dark of his cabin like a lit lamp.

She had read the letter. The letter that had been written in anguish and delivered in fury and had contained, alongside its self-defence and its confessions, the only honest account of his feelings that he had ever committed to paper. She had read it many times.

He did not know what that meant, though he wanted it to mean everything. His acquaintance with disappointment taught him it might mean nothing. Reading a letter many times could indicate anger, confusion, or the unhappy habit of returning to a wound. It did not necessarily indicate what he hoped. He refused to name that hope; naming it gave it power, and hope had never reliably served him.

He put out the candle. He lay in the dark.

Tomorrow they would dock briefly for water at a Mediterranean port. He would send the letter to Bingley from there. He would do it because Elizabeth had asked, and because it was right. Doing the right thing was all he had left, even if the returns were uncertain and she had clearly told him they should not be friends.

She was right. Friendship was too small a word for what existed between them, too easily managed with good manners and careful distance. Their connection was the wreckage of a proposal, a refusal, a letter, and a reckoning. The wreckage was still smoking. Standing near it was dangerous. Yet neither of them was walking away.

Closing his eyes, he recalled her short, startled laugh. He was going to make her laugh again. He did not know how or when. But laughing against her own will meant she was fighting herself, and that was not contempt. That narrow, implausible ground was where he intended to build whatever came next.

He slept. It was the first full night's sleep he had managed since April.

Chapter Seven

The sun had not yet cleared the horizon when Elizabeth came on deck, which put her approximately twenty minutes ahead of the light and, as it transpired, considerably ahead of the pirates.

She slept badly. She had spoken too much truth the previous day and now felt its weight. The cabin was too small for her and her thoughts simultaneously. The sea, at least, was very large.

The sky was the improbable blue of Mediterranean dawn, a shade London weather did not produce. The air was warm already, carrying salt and something faintly green from wherever the nearest land was concealing itself. She stood at the starboard railing. She attempted to think about nothing, which meant she thought about Jane and the letter to Bingley. She thought about Darcy’s polite, careful expression at dinner, which she had been revisiting since nine o'clock.

She was failing at nothing. This was customary.

The sea was very still. It was glassy in a way the open Mediterranean had not been on any previous morning. The surface was undisturbed except for the Adeona's own wake spreading behind them in a slow, pale V. The stillness was ominous only in retrospect.

She heard shouting first. Then a pistol fired, sharp and close. It was a signal. She spun around, understanding very little of what she was seeing.

Pirates were, she subsequently reflected, considerably less romantic in practice than literature suggested. Two vessels sat close off the Adeona's port side. They were low and fast, already emptying men onto her deck by rope and grapple. The attackers moved with practised, unceremonious efficiency. They came over the sides while the crew was still waking. A man ran past Elizabeth, close enough that she felt the wind of his passage. A sailor followed immediately, trying to catch him and failing.

“Miss Bennet.”

There he was: Darcy, appearing from the companionway. He was slightly out of breath, his coat missing, his hair disordered in a way she had never witnessed. She noted the disorder despite the chaos.

“Mr Darcy⁠—”

“Stay close.”

He did not touch her. He positioned himself between her and the nearest boarding men, efficiently blocking their path.

She stayed close.

What followed was chaos administered with professional purpose. The Adeona's crew fought above and behind her, defending their ship but losing ground by increments. The attackers moved with the quiet purpose of men seeking only the conclusion. They wanted the cargo, and they wanted passengers with ransom value.

She saw her uncle first. Two men held him with the practised ease of men directing livestock towards a gate. He was steered towards the hatch leading to the hold, where other passengers had gathered. He caught her eye across the deck and mouthed something. She could not read it. Her aunt was not on deck; she must still be below.

Her aunt was safe below.

She held onto that.

Darcy was the obvious target. His bearing and his clothing communicated wealth and consequence without a word spoken. Two large men approached him from the bow. Darcy saw them coming. He was not small, and he was not accommodating. The first man received a sharp elbow to the ribs, buying Darcy approximately fifteen seconds and nothing more.

Elizabeth was moving before she decided to move. Running was undignified but entirely unavoidable; reason had abandoned her, leaving only the urgent necessity of reaching him.

She almost reached him.

One of the pirates caught her arm. He smelled strongly of unwashed wool and old sweat. The grip tightened. She did what any sensible Englishwoman in her position would do.

She bit him.

The man yelled a stream of words in a language she did not speak, but his grip did not loosen. The captain—older and scarred—watched from the port side. His eyes moved between her and Darcy. Elizabeth saw the calculation happening, understanding with cold clarity what it meant.

She stepped forward. “Take me as well.”

She did not know why she said it. It lacked rationality or considered bravery; it was merely an absolute refusal to watch him disappear over the railing while she did nothing. The captain looked at her, then at Darcy. Darcy's colour drained, the word no forming silently on his lips. The captain recognised leverage when he saw it.

He jerked his chin. Two of his men took Elizabeth's arms.

The transfer to the pirate vessel was managed with brisk efficiency. Elizabeth was directed by gesture to cross a line strung between the two ships over dark water. She crossed it. The alternative was being carried, and she was reserving her strength.

The pirate vessel was smaller than the Adeona and smelled decisively worse, which Elizabeth had not believed possible until she was standing on its deck and confronted with the evidence.

She turned to look back at the Adeona.

Her aunt was at the railing.

Mrs Gardiner had come up from below. Her hair was loose, her nightgown trailing, her hands white on the rail. She was calling Elizabeth's name across the water. Elizabeth could not hear the words. The gap was widening, a span of dark sea opening relentlessly between them. The wind carried the sound away, but her aunt's face needed no words.

“Mrs Gardiner,” Darcy called, his voice clear across the chaos. He was at the railing beside her, arms still held. “I will protect her. I will bring her back.”

He said it as a binding, enforceable fact. Mrs Gardiner heard it. Her expression shifted into the faintest shadow of trust. Elizabeth was moved towards the hold. The last thing she saw on the Adeona was her uncle's arm around her stricken aunt's shoulders.

The water widened. Elizabeth looked for as long as she could. She fixed the image in her mind: her uncle alive, her aunt alive, the deck of the Adeona receding. She held it with white-knuckled determination; letting go was not an option.

Then she looked away.

The hold was dark and low-ceilinged, smelling of fish, bilge, and stale air. A rope secured them both by the wrist to a fitting in the wall, placing them approximately three feet apart in the dark.

She could hear him breathing. It was controlled and deliberate; he was mastering his fear and choosing not to show it.

“Are you hurt?” he asked.

“No. You?”

“The lip is nothing.”

She almost laughed. Of course it was nothing. He would dismiss a broken collarbone as an inconvenience and bleed to death without complaint. It should not have been funny. It was. Humour was her only remaining defence, and she intended to use it until it failed.

“Well,” she said, and her voice was steady in a way that surprised her. “This is not how I imagined the voyage.”

“Nor I.”

“I had plans. I was going to see the antiquities at Syracuse. Mrs Gardiner had compiled a list.”

“Mrs Gardiner compiles lists the way other women breathe.”

“She does. Three pages. Annotated.”

The ship groaned. Something shifted in the hold above them, wood on wood, heavy and purposeless.

“Elizabeth.”

His voice had changed. The performance of calm had slipped, leaving him without his customary composure. He was frightened and not pretending otherwise. The use of her Christian name in the dark, without permission or preamble, broke a rule neither of them addressed. She felt it land in her chest, precise and unwelcome. She did not remark on it.

“Why did you do that?” he said.

She did not pretend to misunderstand. “I do not know.”

“You were safe. They were not interested in you. You would have been returned to your uncle and aunt, and you would have been⁠—”

“I would have watched them take you,” Elizabeth said, “and done nothing.” Her voice was quiet, perfectly even, the voice she used when she was most in earnest. “I find I am unable to do nothing. I have been examining this quality in myself for several weeks and I cannot correct it.”

He was very close in the dark. Three feet was simultaneously a great distance and no distance at all. “You could have been⁠—”

“I am aware of what I could have been.” She cut the sentence off neatly. “I am sitting beside you in a pirate vessel. I have already bitten a man and I am managing. Please do not enumerate the risks of decisions that cannot be reversed.”

His hand found hers.

Two people sat in the dark on a ship they did not control, heading somewhere they did not know. His hand was warm, closing around hers with a pressure that conveyed everything his voice withheld. She gripped back with all her strength.

His thumb moved across her knuckles once. It was a single, careful stroke—the way one touches what one has nearly lost. The three feet between them remained three feet. The situation was terrible.

It was also, in some very specific and improbable sense, all right.

She noted this as a matter requiring further consideration and attended to the breathing.

The storm arrived without sufficient introduction.

A storm of that magnitude might reasonably have offered some preliminary remarks. The change came first as a shift in the ship's motion. The roll became less purposeful, staggering like a vessel losing its battle with the water. The wind changed pitch in the rigging above. The creaking deepened.

The water did not come all at once. It seeped at the seams and joints, wherever the hull failed, and was cold at her ankles before she understood what she was standing in.

“Darcy.”

“I know.”

She heard him moving in the dark, his hands searching the ceiling above. The rope on her wrist went taut as his reach ran out. She reached up with her free hand, finding his arm and feeling her way towards the knot at his wrist. She could not loose it in the dark. The ship moved too violently.

The ship lurched. Hard, sideways. She went with it.

He caught her. One arm moved fast, pulling her back against the hull. He held her securely against the planking while the vessel recovered.

“Stay here,” he said, into her hair.

“I am not proposing to leave,” she said, into his shoulder. “I am merely in the process of falling.”

The water was at her shins. The ship made a deep, catastrophic sound: the voice of a failing hull. A wave struck. The vessel tilted steeply and did not fully right itself.

He was at the hatch again. She could not see him, hearing only the sustained, methodical labour of working a bolt in the dark with insufficient leverage. The ship listed further. The water reached her knees. The floor was no longer level.

The hatch opened.

Thin, storm-grey light spilled in. His hands gripped the hatch edge, bleeding. He was there.

“Up,” he said. “Now.”

She went up.

The deck was unrecognisable. One mast had gone; the remaining sail was tearing itself apart. The sea made one wonder whether the people who wrote admiringly of the Mediterranean had ever encountered it in a storm.

The deck was entirely abandoned. Elizabeth did not look too carefully at the sea alongside.

“Can you swim?” Darcy said.

The question was so direct and so practical that it cut through everything else. “After a fashion,” she said, which was the honest answer and presumably not what he wanted to hear.

His expression confirmed this with the resignation she deserved.

The ship sank slowly. The stern settled first, pulling the rest of the hull down with it. The bow where they stood became the last point above the waterline. And then it vanished.

She was in the water.

Mediterranean water in summer was warm enough even in a storm. But it was enormous, dark, and directionless, with no bottom she could feel and no horizon she could trust. She fought it with everything she had. It was not going to be sufficient.

He found her.

His arm came around her chest from behind, firm and conclusive. She stopped fighting the sea, locking her hand over his forearm. She drew a deliberate breath. Wreckage floated around them. He moved them towards a section of hull broad enough to keep their heads above the surface. She gripped the edge. He held beside her, shoulder to shoulder. The water was loud and required nothing of them except survival.

She concentrated on survival. It was her best quality.

“I have you,” he said, close to her ear.

She did not tell him she was fine. The plank was real, and she intended to hold on until her capacity expired. She refused to let it expire. The storm drove waves at them with impersonal force. They held.

The night was very long.

Chapter Eight

Darcy was clutching a plank, a woman, and the hope that the sea might someday turn away.

The plank floated steadily, displaying the resigned buoyancy of wood that had once been part of a ship. Elizabeth was less cooperative, her back pressed against his chest as his arm wrapped around her. Her fingers clutched his forearm with enough force to leave bruises, which he planned to admire later—if later ever came.

The storm had opinions about later.

A wave struck them broadside. The plank creaked, wavered, then stabilized. Elizabeth's grip grew firmer. His legs, which had been kicking relentlessly for what seemed like forever—likely two hours—kept moving. Sinking was the only other option, and he was not willing to sink while Elizabeth Bennet depended on his legs.

His legs had never been relied upon in this manner. They had walked Pemberley's grounds, ridden across Derbyshire, and maintained appropriate posture in ballrooms. None of this prepared them for kicking through the Mediterranean at night while Elizabeth Bennet used his ribcage as a headrest.

“Stop thinking,” Elizabeth said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You are thinking. I can feel it. Your arm gets rigid when you think.”

“My arm is rigid because I am preventing us from drowning.”

“Your arm is rigid because you are calculating something. Our chances, I expect. Or the distance to the nearest port. Whatever you are calculating, stop. The answer will not improve the situation.”

She was correct. The answer would not improve the situation. He stopped calculating and returned to the more productive business of kicking.

The storm threw water at them with impersonal malice. His side was bleeding; the gash acquired during the scramble off the deck felt sharp and hot against the salt water. He supposed the salt was cleaning the wound. He did not normally entertain such optimism, but all normality had ended four hours ago when the mast snapped.

Elizabeth coughed. Salt water. She spat it out with practical efficiency and returned to gripping his arm.

“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.”

“Miss Bennet.”

“We are on a deserted island.”

“So it would appear.”

“We lack a ship, a crew, supplies, and any immediate prospect of rescue.”

“That is a comprehensive summary.”

“I embarked on this voyage hoping for antiquities and Sicilian wine. The Mediterranean has been a very great disappointment.”

He laughed. The sound surprised him. He hardly recognised it. His laugh was typically rare and controlled, a social instrument deployed at dinner parties. This sound was raw and helpless, produced while lying on sand, bleeding from his side, as Elizabeth complained about the voyage.

She looked at him. Her expression shifted into something akin to surprise. She had made him laugh. She was visibly revising her Hertfordshire opinion of his character.

“You laughed,” she said.

“You were funny.”

“I am frequently funny. You have never laughed before.”

“I have never been shipwrecked before. Perhaps it reduces one's requirements.”

She looked at the sky. She looked at him. The smile came slowly, then all at once — tired, salt-stained, entirely real.

The smile gave way to purpose.

Elizabeth sat up first. She examined the island directly. She saw low hills, dense scrub, and resilient green-grey vegetation. Above the crest of the nearest hill stood a stone structure. A tower, or its remains.

“There is a building on the hill,” she said.

“I see it.”

“We should find fresh water before we investigate.”

“Yes.”

“And I am going to need to look at that cut.”

He glanced down at his side. The gash was long, the blood dark against his ruined shirt. He had genuinely forgotten about it; his exhausted body had found other complaints more pressing.

“It is nothing,” he said.

“It is bleeding quite conclusively for nothing.”

She stood. Her legs held. She held out her hand to him. He took it, and she pulled him up. She withdrew her hand immediately; the assistance was entirely practical.

She turned inland. The scrub was dense and fragrant. Rosemary — the warming air released the scent. It grew wild and abundant across the hillside.

Elizabeth picked a path up the slope. She walked three miles most mornings at home and did not consider rough terrain a reason to slow down. He followed. His legs had spent the night performing heroics they had not trained for, but he intended to ignore their ache until they failed completely.

The rosemary smell grew stronger. The sky was that brilliant, unreasonable blue. The island had nearly killed them, but it was now presenting its best face.

Elizabeth climbed. He climbed. The tower grew larger against the sky.

Chapter Nine

Elizabeth had been tending wounds for most of her adult life. She had never before tended a man who was not her father, nor had she used strips torn from her own petticoat. It was precisely the sort of morning the Mediterranean had been building towards.

“Hold still,” she said.

“I am holding still.”

“You believe you are holding still, yet you actively flinch every time I touch you.”

Darcy's jaw tightened. He sat on a flat rock at the edge of the beach, his ruined shirt pulled up to his ribs. The gash along his side was uglier in daylight—a jagged, crusted line running from below his arm to his hip, the surrounding skin swollen and hot. Elizabeth pressed the torn linen against it. He drew a breath through his teeth and did not flinch.

“It needs cleaning,” she said.

“With what?”

“Seawater. It will sting, and you will bear it without complaint. The alternative is infection. I am entirely unprepared to nurse a fever on a beach lacking supplies, shelter, and medical knowledge.”

“You are remarkably cheerful about inflicting pain.”

“I am remarkably practical about preventing death. The cheerfulness is incidental.”

She went to the water's edge, soaked a strip of linen, and came back. His skin jumped under her hands when she pressed it to the wound. She held the cloth firm and counted in her head, one, two, three, while the salt did its work. Darcy sat perfectly still. He was in considerable pain, but he clearly considered it a private matter requiring no audience.

His skin was warm under her fingers. She noticed this as mere fact, like the temperature of the seawater or the direction of the wind. She was too frightened to examine it further. She was salt-sick and shaking, concealing it by keeping her hands busy. Hands busy tearing linen and cleaning wounds did not have time to tremble.

She refused to cry. She had made the decision fourteen minutes ago and was holding firm.

“There,” she said, tying the bandage with a knot learnt from watching the cook truss a roast. It was entirely unmedical, but it would hold. “You will survive.”

“Your confidence is gratifying.”

“My confidence is based on the fact that you swam through a storm for six hours while bleeding and did not die, which suggests your constitution is either exceptionally robust or exceptionally stubborn, and I suspect the latter.”

His mouth moved. It was not quite a smile, but the suggestion of one.

Elizabeth sat back on her heels. The beach stretched in both directions, a narrow strip of grey sand hemmed by rocks, curving into the cove where they had washed ashore. The water in the cove was calmer than the open sea, lapping against the sand with a patient rhythm. Behind them, the land rose in low, scrubby hills covered in tough grey-green vegetation, clinging tenaciously to the rocky soil.

The air was filled with the scent of salt and herbs. Although she couldn't identify the specific herbs yet, the aroma was unmistakable—sharp, green, and persistent—carried by a warm breeze that felt like a summer day in June or July.

She did not know where they were. The pirate ship had sailed south and then west, or perhaps the reverse. The storm had driven them blindly. They were now deposited on one of several thousand Mediterranean islands, and no one was looking for them here.

The thought arrived, and she put it away. She would examine it when she had the luxury of fear. Now she needed water.

The sound came from uphill — a thin, persistent trickling of water finding its way down rock. Elizabeth followed it. The ground rose steeply behind the beach, the sand giving way to stone and scrub. She climbed. Her ruined shoes slipped on loose gravel; her hands grabbed at bushes that scratched and held.

She found the spring ten minutes up the slope. Water seeped from a crack in the rock face, running down a channel worn smooth by centuries of taking the same path. It pooled in a natural hollow at the base, clear and cold. Elizabeth knelt, cupped her hands, and drank.

The water tasted of stone and mineral. It was the finest thing she had ever consumed, surpassing even Mrs Hill's Christmas pudding, which her father annually declared proof of the Almighty's benevolence. She drank until her stomach protested, and then she drank more. She sat back, wiped her mouth, and looked at the trickle. We will not die of thirst.

One problem solved. Her mental list was long, and she addressed it strictly in order of urgency. Her father would have approved of the system. The thought of her family arrived like a stone dropped into the clear pool. She refused to follow the ripples.

She went back down. Darcy was sitting exactly where she had left him, his hand pressed to his bandaged side. He scanned the cove for sails. The horizon was empty. His expression remained fiercely, deliberately blank.

“There is a spring,” she said. “Fresh water, ten minutes uphill. It is not a torrent, but it flows.”

His shoulders dropped. She had not realised their tension until they fell. The relief was plain in the drop of them, and she looked away. Watching him experience relief felt inappropriately private.

“Can you walk?” she asked.

“I can walk.”

“Can you walk uphill on loose rock with a wound in your side, or are you merely asserting a theoretical capability?”

“I am asserting a tested capability. I walked down a gangplank with this wound two days ago.”

“You walked down a gangplank at knifepoint. I am not certain the motivation transfers.”

“Miss Bennet.” His voice was dry and tired and faintly amused in a way that cost him effort. “I can walk.”

He could walk, though slowly, with his hand pressed against his side. The careful precision of his steps betrayed the pain he refused to admit. They climbed to the spring together. He drank desperately, gratefully, on his knees with his hands cupped in the water. She watched him. They were alive; they had water; the next item on the list was food.

Food presented itself in a form Elizabeth had not previously considered edible: small creatures clinging to rocks in tidal pools.

“Limpets,” she said, prying one off with a flat stone. It came away with a reluctant sucking sound. The limpet sat in her palm, grey, conical, and entirely unappetising. She knew they were edible because of a book Mr Gardiner had lent her—a book now at the bottom of the sea, along with her clothes and an excellent pair of walking boots.

She put the limpet in her mouth. It tasted of distilled seawater and remarkable chewiness. When it finally surrendered, she swallowed, looked at the tidal pool, and reached for another.

Darcy was watching her. His expression mingled admiration with concern; he was evidently revising his definition of an accomplished young lady.

“They are edible,” she said. “They are not good. They are edible.”

He took one. He chewed. His face did not change. He simply locked his features into a neutral position and waited for the experience to pass.

“There are mussels as well,” she said, pointing to a cluster of dark shells on the rocks at the waterline. “And I believe those may be sea urchins, although I cannot be certain, and I would rather not discover I am wrong by eating one.”

They ate limpets and mussels, raw, sitting on the rocks with their feet in the warm water. The mussels were marginally better than the limpets—softer, and less aggressively briny. Elizabeth ate until the sharp edge of hunger dulled. She rested her hands on her knees, looked at the sea, and reckoned what they had.

They had water. Food — barely, raw, monotonous, but food. Darcy's wound was bound. The sun was warm, and the air was kind, and the cove was sheltered from the wind.

Beyond that, they had nothing. They lacked shelter, tools, and any means of signalling. Darcy's tinderbox was soaked; it might or might not work when it dried. They had no knowledge of their location, and no certainty that anyone alive knew it either.

The merchant ship's crew had seen them taken by pirates. The Gardiners had watched her disappear. Mrs Gardiner's scream still echoed across the water in Elizabeth's memory. They knew she had been taken, but they could not know where the pirates had sailed. The storm, the sinking, and this island had no witnesses. Any search would look in the wrong waters for a ship that no longer existed.

No one was coming.

The thought landed this time. She let it.

The sea, having nearly killed them, spent the rest of the day delivering apologies.

Wreckage washed into the cove throughout the day, deposited piece by piece on the sand. Elizabeth and Darcy collected everything. They waded into the shallows, dragging sodden planks, tangled rope, and waterlogged canvas up the beach. By late afternoon, they had assembled a dismal collection of salvage.

Sailcloth. Heavy, salt-stiff, torn but usable. Several arm-lengths, enough to rig a shade or a lean-to or, if Elizabeth was being optimistic, a very unconvincing tent.

Rope. Yards of it, knotted and tangled, hemp fibres swollen with seawater but intact. Rope was undeniably useful, far surpassing the practical value of hair pins or novels.

Timber planks. Broken pieces of the hull and deck, splintered at the ends, salt-darkened. Fuel, if they could make fire. Building material, if they had anything to build.

They found a breached barrel, half-full of seawater and hard tack. The biscuit was waterlogged and soft, but it provided sustenance. Elizabeth fished out every piece and spread them on a rock to dry, or at least to become less wet.

Darcy worked beside her, hauling planks and coiling rope with his jaw set against the pulling at his wound. She told him to stop twice. He stopped neither time. She considered telling him a third time and did not, because she was learning the limits of his stubbornness. He would stop only when his body forced the issue.

He had also retained the knife he took from the pirate ship — she had not asked how — and the tinderbox, pulled from his ruined coat. Flint and steel in a small tin box. Darcy opened it, examined the contents, closed it, and set it in the sun. His expression gave nothing away, but his hands placed the box with deliberate, careful precision.

If the tinderbox worked, they could make fire, cook, and eat more than raw shellfish. Their immediate future depended entirely upon a small tin box drying in the sun.

“The hard tack will last three days,” Elizabeth said. She was organising. She had managed Longbourn since she was fifteen. The habit of competence did not dissolve simply because the household in question was a beach. “Perhaps four if we ration. After that, shellfish and whatever else we can find.”

Darcy nodded. He was standing with his hand against his side, looking at the hills behind the beach. His gaze moved slowly, cataloguing the terrain with the same methodical attention she had seen him bring to a room at Netherfield — assessing, evaluating, storing away. She had thought, then, that he was judging. She was less certain now.

“There may be fresh water further inland,” he said. “We found the spring, but on islands this size there are sometimes cisterns, or ruins. Old structures.”

“You have extensive experience with deserted islands?”

“I have read extensively about the Mediterranean.”

“Naturally. I cannot imagine why anyone would travel to the Mediterranean unprepared. The prudent man reads about cisterns before boarding a ship, in case of pirate attack and subsequent shipwreck.”

The corner of his mouth moved. “The prudent man reads about many things that prove unexpectedly relevant.”

The exchange was neither warm nor cold. The night had burned away pretence, leaving them able to speak plainly. Conversation was the only currency they possessed, and they were both richer in it than they had known.

The sun moved lower. The wreckage dried slowly. The hard tack sat on its rock looking unpromising. Her torn dress dried stiff with salt, sticking to her skin in ways that were uncomfortable and undignified. She ignored it; dignity had not washed ashore with the sailcloth.

She sat on the sand near the pile of salvage and looked at the sea. The horizon was empty, a clean curved line where the water met the sky, unmarked by sail or smoke or any sign that the rest of the world existed beyond this cove.

No one is coming today, she thought. Perhaps not tomorrow. Perhaps not for a long time.

The thought was steady. She held it the way she had held the limpet — with a firmness she did not entirely feel, examining it for what it was, not for what she wished it were.

Darcy sat beside her at a careful distance. He clearly understood that proximity on a beach was different from proximity in the water. His wound was hurting him; she could tell by the set of his shoulders and the way he held his left arm. She did not mention it. He did not wish it mentioned, and she respected the distance.

“We should build a shelter before dark,” he said.

“Yes.”

“And try the tinderbox.”

“Yes.”

The sea moved against the sand. A white, sharp-winged bird wheeled over the cove, screaming its territorial displeasure.

“Miss Bennet,” he said.

“Mr Darcy.”

“I am aware that our current situation is”—he hesitated—”unprecedented.”

“That is one word for it.”

“I wish you to know that your safety and your reputation are my first concern, and I will conduct myself accordingly.”

Elizabeth looked at him. He was entirely, gravely serious. He sat on a beach in a torn shirt, delivering a speech about propriety to a woman whose petticoat was missing its lower six inches. The sincerity was genuine. The setting was absurd. It was so perfectly, characteristically him that she did not know whether to thank him or laugh.

She did neither. She looked at the empty horizon and then she looked at him and she said: “Mr Darcy, we are stranded without reliable food, fire, shelter, or any prospect of rescue. I believe propriety will be the least of our concerns.”

His expression shifted. He absorbed her words with careful attention, nodding once.

“Nevertheless,” he said.

“Nevertheless,” she agreed.

The word settled over the sand like a concession. He would try to maintain propriety. She understood why he needed to. Yet underneath the word, they both knew the effort would matter less with every day the horizon remained empty.

The bird screamed again. The sun touched the water. Elizabeth stood, brushed the sand from what remained of her skirt, and went to see if the tinderbox was dry.

It was not.

Chapter Ten

The tinderbox dried on the second morning. Darcy's hands shook when he struck the flint. The spark caught on the third try, and the tinder glowed. He blew on it with careful, measured breath. He understood that this small flame was the difference between eating raw shellfish for the foreseeable future and not doing so. The flame held. He fed it dried grass, then twigs, then a splintered hull plank. The fire took.

Elizabeth had been watching from three feet away with her arms crossed and her body perfectly still. She was not going to interfere, but she was prepared to have opinions about the outcome. She exhaled.

“Well,” she said.

“Well,” he agreed.

They looked at the fire. Given driftwood and sea air, it smoked considerably and crackled without enthusiasm. Its heat was weak. But it was fire, and they had made it. For a long moment, neither spoke.

He had not built a fire since he was fourteen. His father had taught him on a grouse hunt in Derbyshire, delivering the practical lesson with his usual quiet authority: here is the tinder, here is the steel, here is how you hold your hands. Darcy had lit a fire on a moor in September and been proud of it. He had not thought about the skill for twelve years. Since then, servants had laid fires in every room he entered. The gap between that boy on the moor and this man on the beach was precisely the width of everything he had taken for granted.

“I am going to explore inland,” he said. “There may be structures. Ruins, a cistern, shelter better than what we can rig from sailcloth.”

“And if there is nothing?”

“Then I will know there is nothing, and we will work with what we have.”

Elizabeth looked at his side. The bandage she had tied was holding, darkened with dried blood at the edges but clean enough. His wound ached with a persistent, grinding heat. He chose to interpret this as the body's natural healing process rather than anything concerning. The alternative involved fever, infection, and a woman with no medical supplies nursing him on a beach. That interpretation was entirely unhelpful.

“You should not climb with that wound,” she said.

“I should not do many things. I should not be on this island, eating limpets, or wearing a shirt lacking buttons. The list has grown so long that adding one more item will make no material difference.”

Her mouth moved. The almost-smile he had noticed on the ship was becoming a regular feature of his mornings. He noted the variations: the slight curve when she was amused but unwilling to show it; the broader smile when amusement won; and the full expression he had seen precisely once, on the beach after the shipwreck.

He climbed.

The island was small. He could see most of it from the ridge above the cove: a rough oval, perhaps two miles long and a mile wide, the coastline rocky and irregular except for their sheltered cove on the southern side. The vegetation was low and tough, the grey-green scrub of the Mediterranean macchia: myrtle, juniper, something aromatic he could not name but could smell, sharp and clean, carried on the wind. Wild fig trees grew in clusters in the sheltered hollows, their broad leaves dark against the pale rock. Prickly pear cactus clung to the steeper slopes, its flat pads studded with spines and, on some, the bulbous beginnings of fruit.

No buildings. No paths. No sign that anyone had set foot here in recent memory.

He kept climbing. The ground rose towards the island's highest point, a rocky hill at the northern end, and as he came over the last rise he saw it.

It was a stone tower. It stood two storeys high on the hilltop, affording a commanding view of the sea in every direction. It was old; the mortar crumbled between the stones, and the upper walls had partially collapsed. The lower storey was intact, its walls thick and solid, with a stone archway serving as a door. It was a watchtower—a torre di guardia, the kind Italians had built along their coasts two centuries ago to watch for pirates.

It had been built to watch for the very men who had brought him here. The irony was acute.

He ducked through the archway. The lower room was perhaps twelve feet across, round, with a flagstone floor covered in bird droppings and debris. A fireplace was set into the far wall, its chimney still intact, rising through the ceiling to the open sky above. A stone staircase, narrow and steep, spiralled upward to the second level. The walls were thick enough to keep out weather and solid enough to last another two centuries if no one asked them to do anything more ambitious than stand.

He climbed the stairs. The upper room had lost half its roof; the other half, stone slabs laid across timber beams, still held. The view was extraordinary. The sea spread in every direction, blue and glittering, and a ship passing within ten miles of this hill would be visible from where he stood.

A cistern sat at the base of the tower, a stone basin built to catch rainwater from the roof. It was dry, cracked, half-filled with blown leaves and dust. But the stonework was sound. Rain would fill it.

Darcy stood in the ruined upper room and looked at the sea and thought about the estate at Pemberley. Not the house, not the drawing rooms or the library or the music room that Georgiana loved. The land. The tenants' cottages that needed re-roofing every fifteen years. The drainage ditches his father had taught him to inspect in spring. The wall that ran along the north pasture, rebuilt three times in his lifetime, each time by a different stonemason with a different opinion about the proper way to lay Derbyshire grit.

He knew how to manage land and assess structures. He understood the difference between critical damage and damage that could wait. He could distinguish a failing wall from one that had merely settled into its age and would hold. This tower was the second kind. The floor needed clearing, the fireplace required testing, and the roof needed sailcloth over the gaps. Nevertheless, the structure was sound.

He went back down the hill to tell Elizabeth they had a house.

She came to see it herself. No piece of information arrived in Elizabeth Bennet's life without being personally inspected and cross-examined. Darcy was learning this by direct observation, without the barrier of drawing rooms and dinner parties. The social artifice of their previous acquaintance had, he realised, prevented him from seeing her clearly.

She walked through the archway, standing in the centre of the lower room and turning slowly. Her gaze moved over the walls, the fireplace, the staircase, and the floor. He could see her mind working—assessing the space, noting what was sound, and ordering her concerns. She brought the same efficient management to a stone ruin that she presumably brought to Longbourn's accounts.

“The fireplace,” she said.

“The chimney draws. I tested it.”

“The roof.”

“Sailcloth over the gaps. Timber for the beams where they have rotted.”

“The floor.”

“Needs clearing. Bird nests, debris, a decade of accumulated filth.”

“Filth,” she repeated, looking at the flagstones with an expression that suggested the filth had made a personal enemy. “We shall need to carry water from the spring. And something to scrub with. The myrtle bushes have stiff branches that might serve.”

She was already working. He watched her climb the stairs to the upper room. He heard her footsteps on the stone and the small sound she made upon seeing the view. Elizabeth Bennet did not gasp; it was a caught breath, quickly released, followed by silence. It was her version of admiration, and it proved more eloquent than any exclamation from women who exclaimed more freely and meant less by it.

She came back down. “We can live here,” she said.

The word live carried more than either had said aloud. It suggested more than the temporary occupancy they had managed on the beach, sleeping on sand under sailcloth. It implied an unspecified duration, perhaps weeks. It meant the two of them, in this tower, building a life from nothing on an island where no one was looking for them.

“Yes,” he said. “We can.”

They spent the rest of the day making it possible. Darcy cleared the lower room, hauling debris and bird nests through the archway and dumping them down the slope. The work pulled at his wound with every lift, but he ignored the bright, insistent pain in his side. The tower needed clearing. Elizabeth carried water from the spring in the salvaged barrel, trip after trip up the hill, her dress stained dark at the hem from kneeling in the mud by the pool. She scrubbed the flagstones with myrtle branches and seawater until the stone showed through, grey and clean, and the room smelled of wet rock and the sharp herbal bite of crushed myrtle instead of decay.

He patched the roof. He stretched sailcloth over the timber beams, lashed it down with rope, and wedged smaller pieces of canvas into the stone gaps with rock chips. It was neither watertight nor permanent, but it would suffice for a night without rain. Adequacy was their standard; perfection was a luxury that belonged to the world across the sea.

She arranged two pallets, separated by a careful distance of approximately four feet. It was less than propriety demanded, but more than the room comfortably allowed. Like everything else, it was a compromise between the correct and the possible.

He got a fire going in the old fireplace. The chimney drew well, the smoke rising straight and clean through the stonework, and the fire's light filled the lower room with an uneven warmth that turned the grey stone golden and made the space feel, for the first time, like somewhere a person might choose to be rather than somewhere circumstance had deposited them.

Elizabeth found the fig trees on her second trip for water.

She came back up the hill carrying figs in her gathered skirt. Her expression was the closest thing to triumph he had seen since they washed ashore. The figs were small, dark-skinned, and overripe. They were sweet. It was the first thing they had eaten on the island that tasted of anything other than salt and survival.

“There are dozens of trees in the hollow below the ridge,” she said. “The fruit is ripe. Some of it is overripe and falling. It has been ripening for weeks with no one to eat it—a waste I intend to correct.”

She had also found herbs. Wild rosemary, growing in dense bushes on the rocky slope. Thyme, low and spreading, between the stones. Fennel, tall and feathery, in the sheltered spots where the soil held moisture. She had picked bundles of each and carried them in her other hand, and when she laid them on the newly scrubbed floor the tower filled, improbably, with the smell of a kitchen. It did not smell like Longbourn's kitchen or Pemberley's. It was simpler and older: the smell of food prepared in a stone room by a fire. The domesticity of the scent struck Darcy forcefully.

Their first proper meal in the tower: fish caught in the shallows that morning, cooked on a flat stone at the edge of the fire, seasoned with rosemary and thyme and a quantity of salt that was not deliberate but inevitable since the fish had been swimming in it an hour earlier. Figs afterward, eaten with fingers, the juice running down their hands.

No cook at Pemberley would have served the meal without expecting immediate dismissal. The fish was unevenly cooked and tasted primarily of seawater, rosemary, and charcoal. The figs were the only element requiring no qualification.

They ate on the floor by the fire, sitting on their sailcloth pallets with their backs against the stone wall. Neither spoke. The eating absorbed their full attention in a way that four-course meals with silver and crystal never had. Hunger, Darcy was discovering, was the most effective seasoning ever devised. It surpassed French technique, Mrs Reynolds's game pie, and his London cook's proudest venison sauce.

When they finished, Elizabeth wiped her hands on what remained of her skirt and leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes.

“That,” she said, “was the finest meal I have ever eaten, and I include the Christmas goose at Longbourn, which is saying a great deal because my father considers that goose the pinnacle of English cookery and has said so annually for twenty years.”

Darcy looked at her. Firelight on her face, her eyes closed, her head against the stone. The fine bones of her jaw. The line of her neck. The way her shoulders had dropped, the tension of the day releasing now that the fire was lit and the food was eaten and the tower was, for the first time, theirs.

He looked away — at the fire, at his hands, which were raw and blistered and bleeding at one knuckle from hauling stone — and thought of Jane Bennet. The problem of her sister sat between them, occupying the four feet separating their pallets.

He had separated Bingley from her sister deliberately, certain he was right. He had been wrong. That wrongness had cost Jane Bennet her happiness. The fact sat between them like a stone; moving it required a conversation neither had yet started.

Elizabeth had confronted him on the ship. She had detailed the consequences his letter had ignored: Jane's face, the months of silence. He had admitted he was wrong, but the admission was not enough. Words could not undo acts.

He had written to Bingley. The attack had come before they could reach port; the letter had never been posted. It was on the Adeona still, or in the sea, or in the hands of someone who might never deliver it. He did not know. Certainty on this island was a commodity in shorter supply than fresh water.

Elizabeth opened her eyes. She caught him looking. He did not pretend he had not been.

“The tower has a good vantage,” he said. “If we build a signal fire on the upper level, the smoke would be visible for miles.”

“Then we should build one.”

“Tomorrow. There is enough wreckage for fuel, and the height will carry the smoke further than anything we could manage from the beach.”

She nodded. The subject change was clumsy, and they both knew it. The unspoken topics were accumulating; the tower would not contain them indefinitely.

They built the signal fire the next morning. Darcy hauled driftwood and broken planks up the narrow stairs to the upper level, stacking them in the centre of the open half where the roof was gone and the sky was wide and blue above. Elizabeth fed the fire below while he worked, and when the pile was high enough he lit it with a brand carried from the hearth, and the wood caught, and the smoke rose.

It rose straight and white in the still morning air, a column visible, Darcy estimated, from at least eight or ten miles in any direction. They stood on the upper level and watched it climb and spread and thin against the blue, and they watched the horizon. It remained perfectly, indifferently empty.

They watched for three hours. No sail appeared. No ship changed course. The smoke rose and dispersed and meant nothing to anyone who was not standing on this hill looking at it.

Elizabeth turned away first. She went down the stairs without speaking. After a moment, Darcy followed.

The fire burned itself out by afternoon. The ashes cooled. The horizon stayed empty.

He would build another signal fire tomorrow, and the day after that. He would build them until the wood ran out or a ship came. Hope on an island, he was discovering, was not the soaring emotion poets described. It was a small, stubborn, daily act performed without proof and without ceasing.

He was, it turned out, well suited to stubborn daily acts. It was the one advantage of a temperament that Elizabeth Bennet had once, in a candlelit room in Kent, called the last word in arrogant inflexibility.

She had not been entirely wrong.

Chapter Eleven

Aweek taught Elizabeth things about herself she had not asked to learn.

She could gut a fish swiftly and efficiently, using a knife not made for the task, on a flat rock by the water. The first time, she gagged. The second time, she did not. By the fifth, the motion was automatic; the blade slid under the skin, and she flicked the entrails into the shallows for the crabs without hesitation. Its ease should have unsettled her. She was a gentleman's daughter from Hertfordshire, raised on embroidery, Fordyce's sermons, and the confident belief that fish arrived at the table already cooked and arranged on a platter. The distance between that woman and this one, kneeling in salt-stiffened cotton with blood on her hands, was significant.

Sleeping on stone was also, apparently, within her capabilities. She did not sleep well; she woke at intervals to shift her bruised hip off the unyielding flagstones. Nevertheless, she could sleep. It was a victory she refused to diminish.

What she could not do, it transpired, was stop being angry with Fitzwilliam Darcy.

This discovery she had not anticipated. She had expected the anger to burn itself out. Anger required fuel, and the island had replaced the drawing rooms and social performances that fed her outrage at Hunsford with a different set of concerns: water, food, fire, and shelter. Anger was a luxury; she had expected it to be rationed along with everything else.

Instead, the anger grew. It grew precisely because the immediate necessities of staying alive had been met. Darcy had found the tower, repaired the roof, and built the signal fire. He hauled water without being asked and caught fish with a patience she did not wish to admire. His relentless competence made it impossible to maintain her previous opinion of his character: a proud, cold man who judged her family and separated her sister from the man she loved.

Her assessment was wrong. She had known it since receiving his letter. Standing in the grove at Rosings with shaking hands, she had realised the man who wrote those words was not the man she had accused. That knowledge had not erased the anger; it had merely complicated it. Her anger regarding Wickham was unjust—she could admit this now, with no audience but the gulls. But her anger regarding Jane was not.

She thought of Jane's heartbreak, and her careful, determined cheerfulness. That cheerfulness was worse than weeping; weeping could be comforted, whereas determined cheerfulness could only be witnessed.

That anger was justified. Elizabeth held it close because it was the last piece of the old Darcy—the one she understood. She could be angry at him without the bewildering sensation of being angry at the man currently rebuilding their chimney stack with his bare hands and an obstinacy identical to her own.

It happened on the seventh evening.

They were eating by the fire. Their menu consisted of fish and figs, as it had every night and would every night for an unforeseeable duration. Darcy sat across from her, eating with methodical attention. The firelight softened his sharp angles, making him look entirely unlike the arrogant gentleman she had met in Hertfordshire.

She did not want to notice the softening of his features. It happened regardless, just as she noted the temperature, the wind, the specific set of his jaw when his wound troubled him. She refused to examine any of it.

“You have been quiet today,” he said.

“I have been thinking.”

“About what, if I may ask?”

“You may not.”

He accepted the refusal with quiet courtesy. He accepted most of her refusals this way. The courtesy was perhaps not new, but she had certainly never seen it at Netherfield or Hunsford. The difference between the man she had known in England and the man on this island remained inconvenient.

“Mr Darcy,” she said.

He looked up. The firelight caught his eyes, and she looked away.

“Your letter,” she said. “At Rosings. You wrote that you believed my sister to be indifferent to Mr Bingley.”

His jaw tightened. She watched the muscle move. She knew this expression by now: the careful assembly of composure over whatever lay beneath. “I did.”

“And you acted on that belief.”

“Yes.”

“You separated them.”

“Yes.”

The word was steady and offered no defence. She hated the simple admission because it denied her an argument. Darcy was not resisting; he was sitting across a fire, agreeing with her. The agreement was maddening. She could not fight it.

“My sister loved him,” Elizabeth said. The words were unplanned, rushing out after a week of suppression. “She loved him, and you decided she did not. You looked at her composure and read it as indifference. You were wrong, and your error cost her everything.”

Darcy did not speak.

“You did not know her. You saw a gentle, reserved woman who was pleasant to everyone, and concluded she could not possibly feel deeply. You took that conclusion to your friend and told him to leave. He left, and my sister spent four months pretending she was well when she was entirely broken.”

Her voice was unsteady. She was aware her hands were clenched on her knees and her shoulders were tight. The control she had maintained for seven days was fracturing over Jane. It had always been Jane.

“The letter I found in her room,” Elizabeth said. “Half-written. To Miss Bingley. Asking, in the politest possible language, whether Miss Bingley's brother had been well, and whether his business in London had concluded, and whether there was any prospect of the Netherfield party returning to Hertfordshire. She did not finish it. Finishing it meant admitting she still hoped. Jane would rather suffer in silence than admit to an unwanted hope.”

The fire cracked. A log shifted and sent sparks up through the chimney. Darcy was looking at the fire, not at her, and his face in the shifting light was very still.

“You did not know about that letter,” she said. “You did not know about the mornings she spent walking to Meryton and back, hoping for post that did not come. You did not know that she stopped playing the pianoforte because she had played duets with Miss Bingley and the instrument reminded her. You did not know any of it, because you did not trouble to look.”

“No,” he said. His voice was quiet. “I did not.”

“You looked at her face and called her composure indifference. The arrogance of that judgement, Mr Darcy—the absolute certainty that you could read a woman's heart from across a ballroom—is what I cannot forgive.”

The wind moved through the scrub outside the tower. A lizard clung frozen to the wall above the archway.

Darcy spoke. “You are right.”

He offered no elaboration, qualification, or counterargument. She had been bracing for counterarguments, rehearsing her responses during long afternoons of gathering figs and carrying water. Her case was sound, her arguments were ready, and he was using none of them.

“I was wrong about your sister,” he said. “I knew it before I left England. I knew it when I wrote the letter, though I did not say so plainly enough. I told you her composure suggested indifference. I believed it when I said it, but I was wrong.”

His hands rested on his knees, mirroring hers. She noticed the posture and wished she had not.

“On the ship,” he said. “Before the attack. I wrote to Bingley.”

Elizabeth went still.

“I wrote a letter telling him the truth. I confessed that I had concealed your sister's presence in London, and that I had advised him to leave Hertfordshire based on an incorrect judgement of Miss Bennet's feelings. I advised him to return when circumstances allowed.”

“You wrote to him.”

“Yes.”

“Telling him to go back.”

“I told him the truth. What he does with it is his concern. The truth was mine to give; I gave it too late and poorly, but I gave it.”

She stared at him. The firelight flickered between them. His face was steady, tired, and entirely undefended. The letter to Bingley was an unexpected fact she did not know how to accommodate.

“The letter was on the merchant ship,” she said. “It may not have survived.”

“It may not.”

“It may never reach Mr Bingley.”

“It may not.”

“Then what is the use of it?”

He looked at her directly. The firelight was in his eyes and she did not look away this time because the question was real and she wanted the answer to be real.

“The use of it,” he said, “is that I wrote it. I sat in my cabin and told my closest friend that I had lied to him. I believed I knew better than he did about the woman he loved. I was wrong, and I was sorry. Whether the letter reaches him matters enormously. Whether I wrote it matters more.”

Elizabeth's hands loosened on her knees. The physical release was involuntary, a response to the unvarnished honesty of a man offering no excuses.

The anger was still there, familiar and necessary. It had carried her through Hunsford, the voyage, the shipwreck, and seven days on this island. But the foundation of that anger had shifted. She was no longer certain of her footing, nor was she sure whether the shift brought relief or loss.

She stood and walked out through the archway, down the hill, and across the beach to the far end of the cove, where she sat on a flat stone above the waterline, looking out at the dark sea. The last light faded from the horizon. The water moved against the rocks with steady, ancient patience.

She sat there until the stars came out. Her thoughts were disjointed. The anger, his admission, and the letter to Bingley moved through her mind without settling. He had been wrong, but he had admitted it and tried to make amends. The attempt might fail, but the effort mattered.

The effort mattered.

She did not want it to matter. She wanted the anger clean and justified. Justified anger was armour, and she needed armour on an island where she slept four feet from the man who had broken her sister's heart. Yet this same man had rebuilt their chimney with his bare hands. The contradiction could not hold. Eventually, she would have to decide what to do with it.

But not tonight. Tonight she would merely sit on the rock, listen to the sea, and allow her resentment to settle.

She went back to the tower when the air turned cold. The fire was low. Darcy was lying on his pallet with his back to the room, and whether he was asleep or awake she could not tell and did not ask.

She lay down on her own pallet. The flagstones were hard beneath the grass and sailcloth. His breathing was even; he was either asleep or feigning it perfectly.

She was four feet from him, looking at the ceiling, at the sailcloth patches and the stone and the one gap where a star was visible, a single bright point in the dark.

She was closer to him than she had been the night before. She had placed her pallet an inch, perhaps two, nearer to his. The movement was so small it might have been accidental, but it was not. She closed her eyes and did not move it back.

Chapter Twelve

Darcy told her about Wickham on a Tuesday.

He did not know it was a Tuesday. He had lost count of the days somewhere between the fifth and the eighth. The rhythm of the island had replaced the calendar. Mornings were defined by the spring and the fire; afternoons by fishing and foraging; evenings by the tower and the careful proximity he and Elizabeth had negotiated. Yet it felt like a Tuesday—unremarkable and unheroic.

They were on the beach, carrying stones. Elizabeth had decided they should spell out HELP in rocks on the sand, large enough to be read from a ship's crow's nest. The logic was sound, but the execution was punishing. The Mediterranean beach stones were heavy, requiring committed labour to arrange into massive letters. They had been hauling them since morning and were currently working on the E. Darcy's back ached in strenuous objection.

“The P will be the most difficult,” Elizabeth said, setting a stone into the curve of the E. “Straight lines are simple. Curves require planning.”

“You are being excessively precise for a rescue signal.”

“I am being as precise as necessary for a ship half a mile away to read it. There is no point in spelling HELP if the letters are illegible.”

He laughed. He had laughed more on this island than in the entirety of the previous year. Elizabeth Bennet produced wit as naturally as other women produced watercolours.

They worked in silence for a while. The stones were warm from the sun. The sea was calm, lapping at the edges of the cove with the drowsy patience of mid-morning. Above them, the tower stood on its hill, the signal fire's remains visible as a dark smudge against the stone.

“Mr Darcy,” Elizabeth said.

She was not looking at him. She was adjusting a stone with her foot, her expression hidden by her hair. It hung in salt-stiffened waves that she pushed back impatiently. Darcy observed her with discreet attention.

“Your letter at Hunsford,” she said. “You wrote about Mr Wickham.”

His body went still before his mind caught up. It was an old, deep reflex—the same response he had to the name regardless of context. Even here, on an isolated island, Wickham's name carried the weight of old and particular grief.

“I did,” he said.

“You wrote that his character was not what it appeared. That the living at Kempston was refused him because of his conduct, not your malice. That his debts were considerable and his habits worse.”

“Yes.”

“You wrote about your sister.”

He put down the stone he was carrying. The muscles in his arms relaxed, but his jaw remained tight.

“I wrote about Georgiana, yes.”

Elizabeth turned to face him. Her expression was open in a way he had not seen before on the island. She was neither challenging nor defensive; she had discarded the armour of her previous judgements. She sincerely wanted to know.

“Tell me,” she said. “Not in a letter. Not in the cautious sentences you selected when you wrote to an angered woman. Tell me what actually happened.”

He sat down on the sand. Elizabeth sat across from him, her knees drawn up, preparing to listen.

He told her.

He did not offer the version from the letter, which had been composed in anger and shame by a man rejected. That written account was accurate. The spoken version was truthful, capturing the raw emotion he had previously kept hidden.

He spoke of Georgiana at fifteen. She was shy in the way their mother had been—not from lack of feeling, but from too much of it. Their mother had died when Georgiana was three, and their father when she was eleven. Darcy had been twenty-two, newly master of Pemberley, and the sole guardian of a girl who expected him to know what he was doing.

He had not known what he was doing. He could manage an estate and adjudicate tenant disputes. He could not manage a sister who missed their father with an inexpressible grief. She compensated by playing the pianoforte for hours a day and speaking only when directly addressed, retreating entirely into silence.

He spoke of the companion he had hired on recommendation. The woman's credentials had been fabricated, her connection to Wickham expertly concealed. Darcy had been deceived. The failure of his own judgement remained an unhealed wound.

Then came Ramsgate. Wickham had courted Georgiana in secret for three months before Darcy arrived unexpectedly. He found his fifteen-year-old sister on the verge of elopement with a man who wanted only her thirty thousand pounds.

He told Elizabeth this part carefully. His sister was not there to choose what was shared, and the telling felt like a second failure of guardianship.

Elizabeth's face went through a series of changes: surprise, then recognition, then a tightening of anger around her mouth. The anger was directed at Wickham. Darcy noticed the distinction, and a tension he had been carrying since Hunsford loosened.

“She was fifteen,” Elizabeth said.

“Yes.”

“And he was, what, twenty-four? Twenty-five?”

“Twenty-five.”

She was quiet. Her arms tightened around her knees, and her gaze dropped to the sand. She sat very still, absorbing the full weight of it.

“I liked him,” she said.

The confession was entirely without decoration. She refused to soften it for his benefit or her own.

“He was charming and attentive, and told me exactly what I wished to hear. I believed every word. He claimed you had denied him the living at Kempston out of spite, and I believed it. He blamed your pride for every injustice he suffered. I believed him because I already wanted to think ill of you, and he gave me permission.”

She looked up with clear eyes, and the sharpness of her vision was worse than tears, because it meant she was seeing herself truthfully and not avoiding the view.

“I was vain,” she said. “That is the precise word. Not mistaken, or misled. I was vain. He flattered me, and the flattery clouded my judgement—the very judgement I have always prided myself upon. Believing myself too clever for vanity is the most humiliating discovery I have ever made.”

Darcy did not speak. The silence was deliberate. She was telling him something that cost her, and the least he could do was let the cost stand without rushing to diminish it.

“I owe you an apology,” she said. “I will not apologise for everything I said at Hunsford, for some of it was justified. But I must apologise for Wickham. I believed him without question. I took his word as evidence against you when I had nothing but his smile and my own willingness to be deceived. For that, I am truly sorry.”

She delivered the apology without performance or softening qualifications. She was sorry, she had said so, and now she waited.

“You had no reason to doubt him,” Darcy said. “He is practised at deception. He has been refining it since we were boys.”

“I had every reason to doubt him. I simply chose not to. Doubting him would have required acknowledging my own prejudice.”

They sat on the beach within the unfinished signal. The H and the E were complete, the L half-built.

He told her the rest—the years before and after Ramsgate. He spoke of Wickham's debts, which he had paid, and the three thousand pounds Wickham had accepted in lieu of the living at Kempston, only to squander it in two years. He spoke of the ruined women in Lambton and Matlock. Darcy's family had always borne the responsibility for Wickham's misdeeds, a heavy and thankless burden.

“I concealed it all,” he said. “His debts, his behaviour, and his intentions towards Georgiana. I concealed it because exposing him would have exposed her. Her reputation was worth more to me than his punishment.”

He was quiet for a moment. “Though after Ramsgate, I did take one precaution. I had my solicitor obtain a sworn statement from Mrs Younge — her full account of the scheme, signed and witnessed. She provided it under legal pressure. I have never used it. I suppose I hoped never to need it.”

Elizabeth looked at him with an expression he could not categorise. It shifted as he spoke, reflecting the private work of revising everything she had believed about him.

“You have been protecting her for years,” she said.

“I have been failing to protect her for years. Ramsgate happened under my watch. Mrs Younge was my appointment. The elopement was prevented by luck, not by competence. I arrived a day early because the roads were better than expected. A day later, and Georgiana would have been married to a man who wanted her fortune and despised her character.”

“You prevented it.”

“By accident.”

“You prevented it.” Her voice was firm. “The method is irrelevant. You were there.”

He looked at the sand. He was unaccustomed to being defended, especially by a woman who had so recently found his character indefensible. Her defence settled a lingering doubt, reminding him that the prevention mattered more than the method.

The sun moved overhead. The shadows of the unfinished letters stretched across the sand.

“We are a pair,” Elizabeth said.

He looked at her.

“We were both wrong, and both proud. We were so certain of our own judgement that we missed the obvious. You misjudged my sister's heart, and I misjudged your character. You separated two people who loved each other; I condemned a man I barely knew because a charming liar told me what I wanted to hear. We have been extraordinarily foolish, Mr Darcy. The only comfort I can extract is that we were foolish in complementary directions.”

His mouth moved. The laugh did not quite arrive, but it was close, hovering at the edge, and the closeness was itself a kind of arrival. “Complementary foolishness.”

“It has a certain symmetry,” she said. “We share a considerable history of arrogance and poor judgement. We both qualify handsomely.”

This time he laughed—a brief, rough sound, surprised out of him by her precision. This shared acknowledgment was the first thing they had held in common without argument since washing ashore.

Elizabeth was not smiling. Her face was serious and tired; the conversation had been as exhausting as hauling the stones.

“I cannot forgive you for Jane,” she said. “Not yet.”

“I know.”

“But I see you more clearly now, and I believe you see me more clearly. I would rather stand on honest ground with you than on the comfortable lies I believed before.”

The words struck him with unexpected force. She finally saw him — not the master of Pemberley, nor the villain Wickham had constructed, but the man on the beach with blistered hands, who had been wrong about her sister and was now trying to make amends.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Do not thank me. I have insulted you, accused you, and forced you to relive the worst experience of your sister's life on a beach while building a rescue sign. Gratitude seems misplaced.”

“Nevertheless.”

The word carried more weight than it could reasonably support: a mutual acknowledgment that they must continue, despite everything.

Elizabeth looked at the unfinished letters on the sand. “We should finish the P before the tide turns.”

“The curves.”

“The curves will require planning, as I said. You may carry stones. I will direct their placement.”

“You are assigning yourself the role of overseer.”

“I am assigning roles based on skill. You are stronger; I have better penmanship. The arrangement is entirely logical.”

He stood and carried stones. She directed their placement with a specificity that would have been maddening in any other context. Here, it was merely characteristic, and he found he no longer minded.

They finished the signal by late afternoon. The pale stone letters stood against the grey sand, each roughly ten feet tall, visible to any vessel passing within a mile.

They climbed the hill to the tower and ate fish and figs by the fire. Elizabeth sat with her arms around her knees, facing the flames. Darcy sat across from her, watching the firelight move across her features, reflecting on their complementary foolishness and their new, honest ground.

She caught him watching, but she did not tell him to look away.

Chapter Thirteen

The problem was his forearms.

Elizabeth had not previously given forearms much thought. They were the part of the body between the elbow and the wrist, generally concealed by shirtsleeves and coat cuffs, and in twenty years of knowing men she had formed no particular opinion about them. They were forearms. They were there.

Darcy's forearms, bared by rolled shirtsleeves and browned by two weeks of sun, were forcing her to revise this position.

He was repairing the cistern, an old stone basin at the tower's base with cracks that allowed rainwater to seep out. He mixed a paste of mud and crushed shells, packing it into the gaps with his hands, using his forearms for the work. Elizabeth sat six feet away, sorting figs into categories—ripe, overripe, and unsalvageable—and was watching his forearms rather than the repair.

She stopped and looked at the figs. One that had been classified as ripe had begun leaking juice onto the stone during her distraction. She dealt with it. She did not look at his forearms again for nearly four minutes. It was a respectable interval, though technically a lie; she had looked twice in her peripheral vision. She refused to examine the technicality.

This had been happening for three days.

It had started with his hands. She had watched him gut a fish with his usual methodical precision and noticed his hands. They were no longer the hands of a gentleman. They were cut, calloused, brown, and competent. Competence, she was discovering, was attractive in ways that drawing-room accomplishments had never been. The discovery was inconvenient, persistent, and refused to confine itself to his hands.

She noticed his back when he hauled water, his shoulders when he climbed, the line of his jaw when he concentrated, and the way he stood at the top of the tower scanning the horizon, his weight on one leg, his hand shading his eyes. He stood in a posture of vigilance, yet he looked exactly as though he belonged there.

She did not want to notice these things. She noticed them the way she noticed the weather: involuntarily, constantly, with increasing specificity.

The island had stripped every buffer between them. In England, clothes did the work of concealment: coats, cravats, and waistcoats. The elaborate layers turned the male body into an abstraction, a tailored outline suggesting a form without revealing it. Here, Darcy wore only a shirt and trousers. The shirt had lost its last button on the fourth day and hung open at the collar. The trousers were torn at one knee. The body underneath was specific and real, present in a way no ballroom had ever permitted her to observe.

She was observing. She wished she would stop. She did not stop.

They slept about four feet apart, or rather three and a half after she moved her pallet that night. She hadn't shifted it again, as that small change was enough to recognize without needing to talk about it. The silence surrounding this was increasing.

She listened to his breathing, noticing its steady and rhythmic pattern indicative of light sleep. She had learned to distinguish between the deeper inhale when he was truly asleep and the shallower breath when he was awake, pretending to be asleep. Each night, she knew exactly which it was. This understanding felt personal in a way that traditional notions of propriety didn't expect, because propriety usually focuses on physical touch and proximity, ignoring how sound can reveal intimate details.

He turned his back when she changed. She had noticed this on the third day, when the salt-stiffened remnants of her dress needed airing. She had wrapped herself in sailcloth while it dried. Darcy had faced the wall with a rigid deliberateness that communicated the effort the turning cost him. He was not indifferent. His rigidity and the careful, disciplined angle of his shoulders made his awareness entirely obvious.

She had noticed the effort. She wished she had not.

The swimming began as a necessity.

Salt built up on their skin, hair, and clothing folds. After two weeks, it became intolerable. The spring was too narrow and cold for a bath; instead, they relied on the warm, private sea, which was always there. They had to wash. It was a clear, practical need.

Elizabeth went first. She waded into the cove in her chemise; her dress was too heavy and likely to drag her under. The water closed around her calves, her thighs, and her waist. The Mediterranean in summer was warm in a way English seas never approached. The water was silky and blue-green. She ducked under, and the salt rinsed from her hair and skin. The relief was so complete that she stayed in the shallows for twenty minutes, floating on her back with her eyes closed.

When she came out, Darcy was not looking. He was at the fire, attending to something that required his full attention. His concentration was turned away from the waterline with a total, deliberate focus.

She dressed. She wrung water from her hair. She told him the cove was clear.

He went in.

She attended to the fire. She had every intention of not looking. Her intention lasted until she heard the splash of him entering the water, and then her gaze moved of its own volition — not her own volition, her gaze's volition, which was apparently an independent quarter with its own designs — and she saw him.

He was waist-deep, his back to her, and his shirt was gone. His body in the water was the body she had been assembling in fragments for three days. It was now whole and continuous, brown from the sun and lean from two weeks of inadequate food. The scar from the shipwreck formed a dark line along his ribs. Water ran down his spine. His shoulders moved as he cupped water and poured it over his head. The movement was simple and unselfconscious. She watched him, and the watching was neither peripheral nor pretended.

He turned towards the open cove, wading deeper. She saw his profile, the line of his chest, the flat plane of his stomach, and the way the water rose around his hips. He dove, surfacing ten yards out, shaking water from his hair. Even at that distance, she could see the efficient way his body cut the surface.

She averted her eyes. She had stared too long, and she was aware of it. She could no longer ignore her physical sense of Fitzwilliam Darcy, and the realization was distinctly uneasy.

She looked at the fire, but it offered no help.

They then swam together immediately. The illusion of taking turns broke down within two days, worn away by practicality and heat. The cove was spacious enough for both, and maintaining the pretense proved more noticeable than the swimming itself.

Elizabeth swam in her chemise; Darcy swam in his trousers. The wet garments clung to them, revealing more than dry fabric ever could. This unspoken exposure was present every time they stood together in the shallows, water running off their skin.

Neither spoke of it. The silence stretched between them, thick and heavy, and could not, she suspected, continue much longer.

She caught him looking once as she came out of the water, her chemise plastered to her body, her hair dark and heavy down her back. She looked up and met his gaze. His eyes were not polite. They were direct and precise, observing her with a focus that had nothing to do with civility. The look lasted a second, perhaps two, before he looked away. His jaw set, his shoulders squared, and his composure snapped back into place.

A second was enough.

The raft was Darcy's idea.

He constructed it from the leftover wreckage. It was a simple square, about six feet across, made of planks tied with rope, with a vertical plank serving as a rudder and a piece of sailcloth as a sail. He worked on it for two days with intense focus. Elizabeth started to associate this focus with his worst ideas; her best ideas came with doubt, but his worst ones seemed certain. The raft was one such certainty. She stayed silent because her hope gave her a sense of certainty, and she couldn't argue against hope.

His plan was to paddle to a shipping lane. He believed the merchant routes between Sicily and the Italian mainland ran within fifteen or twenty miles of the island. A man on a raft with a sail could cover that distance in a day if the wind was favourable. If it was not, he could paddle. The plan was rational and detailed, yet it ignored the realities of the open Mediterranean. Elizabeth chose not to raise these realities. Voicing them meant saying aloud that the raft might kill him, and she was not prepared to say that.

He launched at dawn. Elizabeth stood on the beach, watching him push the raft into the shallows and climb aboard. The raft sat precariously low in the water. He paddled out of the cove. The sail caught the breeze and billowed weakly, and the raft moved. Elizabeth watched it grow smaller. Dread settled in her as she watched. He was floating away on a collection of wood and rope that she privately expected to fail within forty minutes.

Her assessment was optimistic. The raft lasted thirty-seven minutes.

She saw it happen from the tower, where she had climbed to track his progress. The raft was perhaps half a mile from the island when the port lashings gave way. The planks separated with a leisurely inevitability. Darcy went into the water, and the raft's remains drifted apart.

It took him an hour to swim back. Elizabeth spent the hour standing at the waterline, watching his dark head in the blue water. She counted his strokes the way she had once counted stitches in embroidery—mechanically and compulsively. The counting was a substitute for the one thing she could not do: swim out and drag him back. Her helplessness was a new and particular kind of misery.

He waded ashore, soaked, furious, and breathing hard. His wound was flushed from the exertion. He stood in the shallows with water streaming off him, his hands on his knees, his chest heaving. He did not speak.

Elizabeth tried not to laugh, but her mouth did not cooperate. The amusement was wretched, inappropriate, and irresistible. The image of proud, meticulous Darcy standing in the surf after his raft so thoroughly disassembled itself was the funniest thing she had seen in two weeks.

Her mouth revealed her true feelings. The corners lifted, she pressed them down, and they lifted again.

He saw it.

His face changed. She had expected anger, or at least the rigid dignity he wore when embarrassed. Instead, his composure shattered, revealing his amusement, directed squarely at himself. It was so unexpected, and so entirely out of character, that she stared at him. The staring broke the last of her control, and she laughed.

It was not a polite laugh; it was ungraceful and hearty. Seeing Darcy's dripping, raftless, angry figure allowed her to finally let go of two weeks of built-up tension.

He also laughed, though it was short and hesitant, as if it was forced out of him unwillingly. The laugh was rough, unfamiliar, and she immediately wanted to hear it again.

“The port lashings,” he said.

“Yes.”

“They were insufficient.”

“I noticed.”

“I should have doubled them.”

“You should not have built a raft.”

He looked at her. Water dripped from his hair onto his shoulders. His shirt was transparent. She did not look at his shirt.

“The shipping lanes are too far,” he said.

“Yes.”

“The current runs east. I would have drifted past them.”

“Yes.”

“You knew this.”

“I suspected it.”

“And you did not say.”

She looked at the sea, then at him. “You needed to try. I was not going to take that from you.”

His face changed again. It was not amusement this time. The expression was quieter and harder to read. She did not try to read it; doing so would require acknowledging its meaning, and she was not ready. This uncertainty was becoming a settled condition she would have to live with, like the sand in her shoes, the salt in her hair, and the sound of his breathing four feet from hers in the dark.

He walked past her up the beach, and she followed. They did not speak again until they were by the fire. They spoke of fish, figs, and the angle of the wind. Underneath those words was the conversation they were not having, and its volume was increasing.

Chapter Fourteen

Darcy had finally given up pretending. Maintaining the facade had been hopeless, as it demanded him to overlook Elizabeth Bennet constantly—eighteen hours a day—and to ignore her presence even when sleeping just four feet away. He had to coexist in the same space, share meals, and work on repairs without acknowledging her. It felt as if he was stranded on an island with the woman he had desired since Hertfordshire, with social norms that usually dictated such feelings no longer relevant.

His self-control, which he had considered robust, lasted approximately twelve days. On the thirteenth day, he watched her emerge from the sea in a wet chemise, and his self-control vanished entirely.

He was watching her now. She was on the hillside above the tower, cutting rosemary. He was at the cistern checking the morning's rainwater collection. There was no practical reason for his gaze to linger on the hillside, yet it did. He was no longer going to pretend otherwise.

She navigated the scrubland with a level of efficiency that was unthinkable just two weeks earlier. Her physique had transformed during her time on the island. She was leaner and darker-skinned, the gentle contours of an English lady replaced by the more athletic build of someone who carried water and scaled rocks from sunrise to sunset. Her arms were more toned than before, now visible where sleeves once hid them. She moved with a fresh sense of physical confidence, and he observed every step.

He did not look away when she turned. She caught his gaze, held it for a beat, and went back to cutting rosemary. She did not tell him to stop.

She had not told him to stop for three days. Her silence was communication enough; the implication was dangerous, but the danger did not make him look away.

Decency was a word that had been losing weight since they arrived.

In England, propriety was enforced by drawing rooms, chaperones, and the understood distance between an unmarried man and woman. It relied upon the presence of witnesses and the shared agreement that certain boundaries were not crossed. Such propriety required an audience.

On this island, there was no audience. There was no Mrs Gardiner to glance with quiet approval at the correct distance between them. There was no Mr Bennet assessing them from behind a newspaper, nor Bingley to politely feign obliviousness.

There was only Darcy, Elizabeth, and the isolated stone tower.

He had maintained the distance because it was correct. He was a man who adhered to correctness even when it cost him sleep. The cost had been considerable, and it was mounting beyond what he could endure.

He watched her hands when she cooked, and her face when she looked at the sea. He watched her in the mornings when she returned from the spring with wet hair, and in the evenings when the firelight turned her skin gold. At night, when she lay on her pallet—her eyes closed, her breathing still measured, still clearly aware that he was awake four feet away—he watched her too.

His observation was no longer covert. He had abandoned discretion, along with the self-deception that he was merely monitoring a companion's welfare. In truth, he was memorising the shape of her mouth.

He knew he ought to stop, but he would not. The argument had been settled days ago.

The rain came in the afternoon.

Unlike the gentle rain of English summers, the Mediterranean rain came with sudden violence. The sky darkened in ten minutes, the air grew heavy, and fat drops began striking the stone tower.

Darcy was on the upper level checking the signal fire when the storm broke. He came down the stairs rapidly, ducking through the archway as the rain turned to sheets. Elizabeth was already inside. She had sprinted from the hillside; she was breathing hard, her shoulders and collarbones damp where the rain had caught her.

The lower room of the tower was barely twelve feet across. Between the two pallets, the salvaged supplies, and the stacked firewood, space was severely limited. It diminished further when rain began leaking through the sailcloth patches on the ceiling.

Water found the gaps in the patchwork, coming through in steady drips that landed on the pallets, the firewood, and the dry section of floor where Elizabeth had been sitting.

They both moved towards the same dry corner, seeking refuge beneath the intact stone roof. The corner was large enough for one person comfortably, but not two.

“The firewood,” she said.

He pulled the driest pieces away from the leaking wall, stacking them in the corner behind them. She rescued the tinderbox and the remaining hard tack. The fire hissed and spat as water found the hearth. Smoke thickened, filling the upper room with a grey haze that smelled of wet wood and burning rosemary.

The rain increased. The enormous roaring on the stone roof obliterated conversation, reducing their world to this single, small dry space.

He was trapped directly behind her, his back against the stone wall. Her shoulder blades were so close to his chest he could feel her warmth through their damp clothes. They were not touching. The distance between them was an inch, maintained by the acute effort of two people intensely aware that it was the only distance remaining.

The rain hammered the roof. A new leak opened above the hearth and the fire died to a sulky smoulder. The room darkened. The light that remained was grey and close and came from the archway, where the rain was falling in a curtain that sealed them inside.

Elizabeth shivered. The rain had cooled the air, and her dress was damp. The dead fire offered no warmth; her only shelter was the man standing an inch behind her.

He put his hand on her hip.

The action was entirely involuntary. His hand moved before his mind could prevent it, his fingers resting on the curve where her waist became her hip. The touch was light and steadying, as if she had stumbled. She had not, and the pretence was transparent to them both.

She neither moved away nor spoke. He heard her breathing change, shifting from the measured rhythm of the cold to the shallow rhythm of a woman acutely aware of the hand on her hip.

His hand remained. The rain roared. The final inch between his chest and her back held, barely maintained by the last shreds of his self-control.

She leaned back.

It was a small movement—a shift of weight, a settling. Her shoulder blades met his chest. It was a deliberate choice, not an accidental lean seeking warmth. The inch vanished. His breath stopped.

She was warm and solid against him. There was no distance, no mediation—only her back against his chest, his hand on her hip, the rain, and the dark.

His hand tightened involuntarily, his fingers pressing into the fabric at her hip. The pressure was a question he had not asked in words. Her answer was to stay exactly where she was. She tilted her head slightly, bringing her temple near his jaw. He could smell her hair—salt, rosemary, and the particular scent that was entirely Elizabeth.

They stood in the dark as the rain continued. He did not know for how long; time had lost its meaning. The only measure that mattered was the pressure of her back against his chest and the heat of her hip beneath his hand.

His thumb moved in a small, rhythmic arc across the fabric at her hip. He felt her breath catch. She did not move away, nor did she remove his hand.

The rain began to ease. The roaring diminished to a steady fall, then to a patter, then to the dripping of water from saturated sailcloth onto the flagstones. The grey light from the archway brightened. The fire, reduced to wet coals, sent up a thin plume of smoke that carried the promise of warmth without delivering it.

She stepped forward.

The separation was clean. She did not look back as she moved to the hearth and began rebuilding the fire from the dry wood. Her hands were steady and her movements efficient; she neither fumbled nor hesitated.

His hand retained the shape of her hip. He could feel it, the phantom impression.

He did not help with the fire. He stood in the corner, watching her coax the flame from the wet coals. His pulse was racing, his breathing shallow. His hand hung at his side, burning with the memory of her touch.

They did not speak about it.

When the rain stopped, they emerged into a world washed clean. The scrub gleamed, and the air was sharp with the scent of wet earth and rosemary. The sun broke through, drawing steam from the stones, entirely indifferent to what had happened in the tower.

Elizabeth checked the cistern. The rain had filled it to the brim, the patched cracks holding. She announced this with the brisk practicality of a woman discussing water storage. Darcy acknowledged it with equal, deliberate neutrality. The unspoken intimacy sat heavily between them.

They resumed the routine of the island. She cooked; he hauled water from the overflowing spring. They ate by the fire as the sun set, sitting across from each other at their usual distance. After the tower, however, that distance was a deliberate choice rather than mere habit. They had both crossed the line, and neither could pretend the proprieties still held.

He watched her across the fire while she watched the flames. Her face was composed, her hands loose on her knees. She appeared perfectly at ease, though he suspected it was the practised ease of a gentleman's daughter. He was still learning to read her.

“Mr Darcy,” she said.

“Miss Bennet.”

She looked at him. The fire between them. Her face half in light, half in shadow.

“The rain has stopped,” she said.

“So it has.”

She held his gaze, and he held hers. They were ostensibly discussing the rain, but the true conversation required no words. They both knew what had moved between them could not be walked back.

“Good night, Mr Darcy.”

“Good night, Miss Bennet.”

She lay down on her pallet, and he lay down on his. The fire crackled between them. Four feet of flagstone separated them. He lay awake listening. He could hear her breathing with the careful steadiness of a woman who was entirely awake.

He closed his eyes, still able to sense the warmth of her back against his chest and the curve of her hip under his hand.

The line had moved. It was not going back.

Chapter Fifteen

The argument was about the roof.

“Flat stones,” Elizabeth said. She was already on the hillside, assessing the slope above the tower. “They will not rot.”

“The beams will not hold them,” Darcy said.

“The beams have held stone for two centuries.”

“Which is precisely why they cannot hold more of it.” He picked up the sailcloth.

She turned. Her expression indicated she found this logic unpersuasive. “You have already decided.”

“The sailcloth is the correct solution.”

“The sailcloth leaked for an entire afternoon.” She followed him towards the stairs. “I would not call that correct.”

He carried it up regardless. By the time they were standing in the lower room with the fire between them, the argument had left the roof far behind.

“You do this,” she said. Her voice was not raised, but its precision was devastating. “You assess a situation and you act upon your assessment. You do not consult the other person living in the building whose roof you are repairing.”

“I consulted you.”

“You informed me. Consulting implies the possibility of disagreement, and that such disagreement might change the outcome. You merely informed me of a decision you had already made.”

“That is not what happened.”

“That is exactly what happened. It is what happened with the signal fire, the water collection, the fishing arrangement, and now the roof. You dictate, Mr Darcy. You dictate beautifully. You behave as though it is a gift you were born with, and the rest of us were born to be governed. It does not occur to you that others might have opinions as sound as your own.”

She was standing close. The argument had drawn them towards each other. She stood two feet from him, her chin up. Her eyes were bright with the particular fire of a woman who knew she was right, and who was not going to permit him to retreat gracefully.

“I am trying to keep us alive,” he said.

“We are alive. We have been alive for two weeks. Our survival has been a mutual effort, and I would appreciate it if you stopped treating it as your exclusive responsibility.”

“I do not treat it as my exclusive responsibility.”

“You treat everything as such. You dictated to Bingley, and to Georgiana. You govern Pemberley, your tenants, your cousin, and every person in your life. You exert control when you are afraid. And you are afraid, Mr Darcy—you have been afraid since we washed ashore. This unrelenting authority is how you disguise the fear. I understand it, for I do the same thing. I am telling you that on this island, with me, you do not have to bear it alone.”

The words landed heavily. She had not planned them. He could see the surprise on her face—the recognition that she had said more than she intended, and that it was true.

He was close to her. Two feet had become one. He did not remember moving, and she did not step back.

“You are right,” he said.

“I am aware.”

“About my authority.”

“I know.”

“About the fear.”

She was quiet. Her eyes, which had been bright with argument, shifted. The anger left, and what remained was open in a way she had not allowed him to see before.

“Yes,” she said. “About the fear.”

He kissed her.

The kiss was hard and sudden. Two weeks of proximity, three days of watching, one rainstorm, and an argument about a roof. Her insight had broken his composure, and he had closed the distance before he intended to.

She made a sound against his lips — a short, hard exhale. Her hands found the front of his shirt. The ruined linen bunched in her fists, and she held on.

His hands framed her face, her jaw in his palms, his fingers tangling in the salt-stiffened mass of her hair. He kissed her with desperate intensity — the taste of her mouth, the heat of her breath, the pressure of her body against his.

She kissed him back with the same urgent ferocity.

They broke apart, breathing heavily. Her forehead rested against his; her hands were still in his shirt, and his hands were still on her face. He could feel her pulse in her jaw, fast and hard under his fingers, answering the frantic rhythm of his own.

“Well,” she said.

“Well,” he said.

“That was not about the roof.”

“No.”

Her mouth curved into the smile he had observed since their time on the ship—the one that began at the corners and worked inward. She smiled against his mouth. The kiss that followed was entirely different from the first.

It was slower. His hands slid from her face into her hair, cradling her head. Her hands released his shirt and moved to his shoulders, then to his neck. Her fingers found the nape of his neck, and the light touch sent a line of heat down his spine, making his hands tighten in her hair.

She made another sound, quieter and deeper in her throat. His self-control was irreversibly shattered.

He kissed the corner of her mouth, her jaw, and the line below her ear where she smelled of salt and rosemary. His lips moved against her pulse, fast under his mouth, and her hands were in his hair.

She pulled back just far enough to look at him. Her face was flushed, her eyes dark, and her hands remained on his shoulders. Her breathing was unsteady.

“Hertfordshire,” she said.

He blinked. The word arrived from a different conversation, one he had not been having, and his mind, still several steps behind his body, took a moment to locate it.

“You will ask me when I knew,” she said. “I did not know in Hertfordshire. I did not know at Hunsford. I did not know on the ship. I knew when you laughed on the beach after the shipwreck. Your face changed, and I saw a man I had not met before. I wanted to know that man, and the wanting has not stopped. I do not think it ever will.”

He looked at her face in the firelight.

“Hertfordshire,” he said.

“What?”

“You will ask when I knew. I am telling you now. Hertfordshire. At an assembly, on an evening when I had too much pride and not enough sense. A woman I did not deserve stood across a room. I could not look away from her, and I have not been able to look away since.”

“You told Mr Bingley I was merely tolerable.”

“I was lying.”

“You were lying at an assembly in Hertfordshire.”

“I was lying to myself at an assembly in Hertfordshire, and I continued lying to myself for months. The deception required more effort than any truth I have ever told, and I am finished lying.”

She looked at him. Her eyes were bright, and her face was serious. The fire crackled behind them as she said, “Good.”

She kissed him. She rose on her toes and kissed him with the deliberate intention of a woman who had decided what she wanted. The deliberate act of choosing him undid his remaining composure.

They sat by the fire, shoulders touching. The argument about the roof remained unresolved, but neither cared to mention it. The fire was low, casting moving shadows on the stone walls. It felt like a place outside the ordinary rules—a place where she could kiss the man she had refused four months ago, and both the refusal and the kiss could be true.

“We should repair the roof,” he said.

“Yes.”

“With stones.”

She smiled faintly. “With stones.”

“You were right.”

“I was right about several things this evening, Mr Darcy. You will need to be more specific.”

He turned his head, and she turned hers. Their firelit faces were close. The intimacy was different now, charged with the certainty of what had just occurred, and what would occur again.

“Elizabeth,” he said.

Her breath caught. He saw the held moment, then the release. It was the first time he had used her given name.

“Fitzwilliam,” she said softly. The fire crackled. Neither of them moved; the spoken names were enough. The night was long, and the roof still leaked, but the island was no longer a trap.

It was starting to feel like a choice.

Chapter Sixteen

The day after the kiss, Darcy discovered that kissing Elizabeth Bennet did not, as he had privately hoped, diminish his awareness of her. It magnified it. Every sense he possessed had been sharpened overnight, to a degree that was, practically speaking, disabling.

Her hand, passing him a fig at breakfast: the brush of her fingers against his palm. He felt it in his teeth.

Her shoulder, bumping his as they walked to the spring: accidental, possibly. He was not able to treat it as accidental.

Her mouth, shaping words he did not hear because he was looking at her mouth and remembering the precise pressure of it against his, the taste of salt and warmth, the sound she had made against his lips when he kissed her throat.

He was in trouble. The trouble was not new; it had been developing since Hertfordshire and intensifying on the island. With the kiss, it had reached a critical stage. He refused to describe it as such, for doing so would require admitting the extent of its hold. The depth of his feeling was embarrassing for a man of his education and self-discipline. Yet that self-discipline had availed him nothing since the moment she had accused him of fear, and been right.

Touches accumulated through the day. His steadying hand on her back when they climbed the hill. Her fingers on his arm when she pointed at a bird. His hand taking hers to help her over a rocky stretch of path, the hold lasting three steps longer than the terrain required, neither of them pulling away. Her hand on his side, checking his wound, tracing the scar through his shirt with an attention that was far from clinical. His breath stuttered under her touch. Her eyes lifted to his, asking a silent question that remained unanswered.

They did not kiss again. Their restraint was a deliberate choice. They were two people who had crossed a line and were now carefully considering what came next. The suspense of this mutual consideration was driving him comprehensively out of his mind.

Evening fell over the fire. Warm air came through the archway, carrying the scent of the sea and dry herbs. Elizabeth was sitting on her pallet with her back against the wall, her legs extended, her feet bare. She had abandoned her ruined shoes three days ago. Her feet were brown and calloused. She flexed her toes in the firelight with unselfconscious ease. Her complete disregard for convention was, Darcy was forced to acknowledge, devastating.

He sat across the fire. The distance between them was the usual four feet, but the distance was now a lie. It was a polite fiction maintained by two people who had kissed in the dark the night before, and were now pretending the act had not entirely altered their relationship.

“You are staring,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You do not deny it.”

“I have given up denying it. The denial was unconvincing and the effort was considerable. I am reserving my strength for more productive endeavours.”

“Such as staring.”

“Such as staring.”

Her mouth curved. She looked at the fire, then back at him. Her gaze was steady, direct, and completely unguarded. She was no longer hiding her desire, and neither was he. The plainness of it in her eyes was something he could not withstand.

She stood and crossed the four feet between them. She sat beside him, her back against the same wall. Her shoulder pressed against his; the contact was deliberate and unhurried. She did not look at him, but at the fire.

“Elizabeth,” he said.

“I am here,” she said. “I am choosing to be here. If you have objections, this would be the time.”

“I have no objections.”

“Good.”

She turned her face to his. The firelight caught the flecks of gold in her eyes that he had never been near enough to see. It was a privilege the island had granted, and one England would never have permitted.

He kissed her. This time, it was slow. There was no argument behind it, no sudden breaking of a seal. His mouth was careful and deliberate on hers, learning the shape of her lips and the way she tilted her head to the left. Her breath came faster when he deepened the kiss.

Her hands came to his chest. She pressed her palms flat against him, the heat of her skin radiating through his thin linen shirt. She spread her fingers directly over his rapid, uncomposed heartbeat. She felt it, and she smiled against his mouth.

“Your heart,” she said.

“Is making a fool of me. Yes.”

“I was not going to say that.”

“You were thinking it.”

“I was thinking that it is reassuring. You are very controlled, Mr Darcy. Fitzwilliam. It is reassuring to discover that something in you is not.”

He put his hand in her hair. It was a proper touch this time—not the desperate clutch of the night before, but a slow, deliberate slide. His fingers threaded through the salt-stiffened waves, finding the warmth of her scalp underneath. She closed her eyes and tilted her head back into his hand. The gesture was so instinctive and unguarded that it struck him with more force than the kiss itself.

He kissed her jaw, right at the hinge where the bone met her ear. He kissed down the line of her neck to the hollow at the base of her throat, where her pulse beat fast and visible. Her skin tasted of salt, warmth, and faintly of rosemary. The taste was particular and unrepeatable. He memorised it with an urgency he could not account for.

She breathed his name — full-voiced: Fitzwilliam. It carried the full weight of the intimacy they had established the night before. This second use of his given name carried something the first had not: explicit permission.

His mouth moved lower to her collarbone, sharp under the thin skin. Her dress had slipped off one shoulder. Her hand came to the back of his head, her fingers tangling in his hair, holding him there. The hold was a clear directive, and he followed it.

The neckline of her dress had been loose since the second week, the fabric stretched and weakened by salt. It slipped further under his mouth. The skin below her collarbone was paler than her face and neck, untouched by the sun. The paleness was intensely intimate. His mouth traced it with a reverence his rational mind would have forbidden.

She pulled the dress down.

The gesture was small, deliberate, and it changed everything. Her hand rested on the fabric at her shoulder, drawing it down and away. She bared her breast to the firelight, and to him. She kept her eyes open, her gaze fixed on his face, watching him see her.

His breath caught. She was beautiful. The word was inadequate, but it was all he possessed. Her breast was small and round in the firelight. Her face above it remained calm and watchful. She was neither shy nor ashamed; she performed none of the coy emotions he had been taught to expect from a woman in such a moment. She was showing him her body with the same unabashed directness she had shown him her mind. That sheer directness was the most intoxicating thing he had ever witnessed.

“You can touch me,” she said. “I would like you to touch me.”

He touched her. The hand that had been in her hair moved to her breast. The first contact was gentle and exploratory, his palm resting against her soft weight. His thumb brushed her nipple, and it hardened under his touch. Her breath hitched, a soft sound he knew he would never forget.

He lowered his mouth to her, his lips closing around the peak. She made a low, surprised, wholly ungoverned sound. Her hand tightened in his hair and her back arched, pressing herself into his mouth.

He kissed one breast, then the other. She held his head, breathing in short, sharp pulls, and said his name twice. Each time it was less composed and more fractured. Her breaking composure was the finest gift he had ever received.

Her hand moved down, from his hair to his neck, and then to his chest. Her fingers worked the open collar of his shirt, spreading the fabric. She pressed her palm flat against his bare chest. The touch of her hand on his skin was a shock that went through him like a physical blow, undoing his remaining restraint.

She pushed his shirt open further, using both hands to spread the linen and expose his chest to the firelight. Her fingers found the scar on his side, the long line where the shipwreck had torn him. She traced it tenderly. The touch evoked an ache that had nothing to do with the physical wound.

“Does it pain you?” she asked.

“No.”

“You are lying.”

“It does not pain me when you touch it. It pains me at other times. When you touch it, it is something else entirely.”

She traced the scar again, from his ribs to his hip. Her fingers continued past the scar to his taut stomach, and then lower, to the line where his trousers began. Her hand rested there, at the edge of his waistband. The pause was a deliberate question.

His physical desire was obvious. He had been aroused since she had first bared her shoulder. She was close enough to see it, and her hand at his waistline proved that she had. Her flushed, direct gaze offered no polite pretences.

Her hand moved lower, over the fabric of his trousers. She pressed her palm against him, finding his shape through the linen. His breath left him in a sudden rush. His hips moved against her hand involuntarily. He had always prided himself on his physical control, but she had undone it entirely with a single press of her palm.

“Elizabeth.” His voice was rough. He did not recognise it.

“Yes.”

“You do not have to.”

“I know I do not have to. I want to.” Her hand pressed again. Her fingers explored his shape through the fabric with a thorough, unhurried deliberation that nearly unmade him. “Tell me if you want me to stop.”

“I do not want you to stop. That is the problem.”

“I assure you, it is not a problem.” She stroked him through the linen—a long, slow movement. His head fell back against the stone wall and his eyes closed. He made a quiet, helpless sound, completely outside his own control.

He pulled her to him, capturing her mouth. With his hand in her hair and her hand still stroking him, their kiss became deep and uncoordinated. It tasted of figs and the raw desperation of two people who had finally abandoned all restraint. His free hand found her bare breast again, his thumb drawing across the nipple. She gasped into his mouth. Her hand tightened on him, drawing a rough groan from his throat.

They stayed against the wall for a long time. He kissed her breasts, her neck, and the sensitive skin below her ear. Her hand stroked him through the fabric, eventually finding the opening at his waist and slipping inside. The first touch of her bare hand on his bare skin emptied his mind of every thought except the devastating, precise rhythm of her fingers.

Eventually, he stopped her. He placed his hand on her wrist, gentle but firm. He was far too near the edge, and there was still so much left unexplored. Stopping her cost him more than any physical labour on the island.

“Not yet,” he said.

She looked at him. Her face was flushed, her lips swollen, and her dress was bunched at her waist. Her dark, bright eyes asked a silent question in the firelight.

“I want to touch you,” he said. “Will you let me?”

“Yes.”

He laid her down on the pallet, keeping his hand behind her head to ease her onto the sailcloth. She lay on her back, her breasts bare and glowing in the firelight. She watched him with an openness that was not vulnerability, but entire trust.

He kissed her mouth, then her throat. He kissed the warm valley between her breasts and the taut muscles of her stomach. He kissed the curve of her hip where the thin, salt-softened dress still covered her. His fingers gathered the fabric and drew it up slowly, exposing her thighs.

Her legs were bare, brown, and strong. A faint tremor ran through her muscles — pure anticipation. She parted her knees in a small, welcoming movement.

He placed his hand on the inside of her thigh, where the skin was softer and untouched by the sun. He moved upward slowly. Her breathing fractured, the even rhythm breaking into sharp pulls. When his fingers found her, she was wet, and the slick heat of her arousal destroyed his remaining composure.

“Oh,” she said, the syllable caught between breath and voice. He stroked her gently, finding the sensitive peak that made her hips rise. Her eyes closed, and her hands fisted in the sailcloth beneath her. The composure she had maintained all evening unravelled.

He watched her face. Her lips parted, and her brow drew together. Expressions moved across her features faster than she could control them: pleasure, surprise, and a sharp intensity when his thumb found the perfect rhythm and pressure. She was not quiet. Small sounds escaped her, caught between her teeth and her breath.

“There,” she said. “Yes. There.”

He maintained the rhythm, working his fingers while his mouth drew at her breast. The combination pulled a loud, uninhibited sound from her throat—a sound that would have mortified her in any English drawing room. To him, it was exquisite. He drew it from her again and again. On the third time, her back arched and her thighs clamped tight around his hand. She broke apart beneath his touch with a sharp cry that echoed off the stone walls, answered by nothing but the sea and the night.

Afterward, the fire burned low in the warm air. Elizabeth lay on the pallet, her dress still at her waist, her body entirely relaxed. The trembling was gone, replaced by the great stillness of the aftermath. He lay on his side beside her, resting his hand on her stomach, feeling it rise and fall beneath his palm.

She turned her head. Her eyes, when they found his, were dark, satisfied, and distinctly amused. It was entirely characteristic of her to find even this surrender at least partially humorous.

“I imagined,” she said, “that I would feel guilty.”

“Do you?”

“No.” She considered. “I feel as though I have been walking through a room in the dark and someone has lit a candle. I feel awake. I did not know I was not awake before.”

His hand moved in a slow circle on her stomach. “I did not expect that you would,” he said.

“Would what?”

“Feel guilty.”

“Why not?”

“Because you have never let convention dictate your feelings. You have always done what you believed was right. You feel what you feel, and convention be damned.”

She laughed quietly, looking up at the ceiling. “Convention be damned. Is that the official position of Mr Darcy of Pemberley?”

“It is the official position of Fitzwilliam Darcy of this island, which is a different man, and a better one, and the one I intend to remain.”

She rolled towards him, placing her hand flat over his rapidly beating heart. Her face was close to his, her eyes holding his gaze in the low firelight.

“You have not,” she said. “Finished.”

“No.”

“That seems unkind.”

“It is not unkind. It is a choice. I wanted this evening to be yours.”

She was quiet. Her hand pressed against his chest, then relaxed. The simple contact contained something he could not name, but the feeling itself was sufficient.

“Tomorrow,” she said.

“Tomorrow.”

“I will not forget.”

“Nor will I.”

She put her head on his chest, and he wrapped his arm around her. The fire crackled low. Her breathing slowed against his ribs as she settled towards sleep. He held her, looking up at the stone ceiling. He felt, with a clarity that surprised him, wholly happy.

He was a man on an island holding a woman who had chosen him. That choice was the source of his happiness. The source was simple, yet that very simplicity was the greatest thing he had ever known.

Chapter Seventeen

Elizabeth did not forget.

The day was warm and long, charged with the tension of two people who knew what the evening held. They spent the daylight hours pretending otherwise, though the pretence fooled neither of them. When she passed him a fig at breakfast, his hand brushed hers. The touch was far from accidental. Her body vividly recalled the feeling of his fingers the night before.

She was as practical about her desire as she was about everything else. She had felt it, examined it, and concluded that it was genuine, reciprocated, and permanent. This conclusion freed her from any obligation to agonise over it. The outcome was always going to be this: Darcy's hands, Darcy's mouth, and a decision she made with her eyes wide open.

The decision was not complicated. She wanted him. She had wanted him since the rainstorm—possibly since the raft, and probably since the beach after the shipwreck, when he had laughed and she had seen a man she wished to know. The feeling had grown from mere curiosity into the particular physical need that his fingers had answered the night before. But the answering had not satisfied the need; it had sharpened it. She now knew what his hands could do. The knowledge made her desire keener, and far more urgent.

She had made her choice. The phrasing in her own mind was indelicate, yet wholly accurate. She did not attempt to soften it, for softening was a habit of the world she had left behind. On this island, she was learning to think plainly about plain facts. She wanted this man, and she was going to have him. The act would compromise her in every way that mattered in England, and in no way that mattered here.

They swam in the afternoon.

The cove was warm, the water clear to the sand below. They swam together as they had since the pretence of taking turns had collapsed. Elizabeth wore her chemise, and Darcy his trousers. The wet garments clung to them, concealing very little. Today, the lack of concealment carried a new weight. They both knew exactly what lay beneath the fabric, and that knowledge wholly changed the quality of their observation.

She watched him surface from a dive, water streaming from his hair and shoulders. Her gaze was neither covert nor apologetic. He watched her float on her back, her chemise transparent in the water, the shape of her body clearly visible through the wet linen. His gaze was direct and unreserved. They circled each other in the shallows, close but not touching. The clear, warm water was by no means a sufficient barrier. Their circling was the day's long prelude condensed into movement.

She came out of the water first and sat on the sand at the cove's edge. Her chemise dried in the sun. Darcy sat beside her. Neither of them spoke, but the silence was heavily freighted with anticipation.

The sun dried them, the salt tightening on their skin. His hand found hers on the sand, his fingers lacing through hers. The gesture felt absurdly innocent after the night before, yet it was not innocent at all. The touch of his hand was a thread connected to every other touch. It pulled at her patiently, insistently, as it had been pulling all day.

Evening came slowly. The light shifted from gold to amber to a deep, warm red, turning the sea the colour of wine and the stones the colour of honey. Elizabeth built the fire, and Darcy brought fish. They ate quickly. The food was a functional necessity rather than a pleasure; the delay was becoming its own kind of unbearable tension.

The fire settled to coals. The air was warm enough that the fire was needed only for light. The low, orange glow made the tower's lower room feel smaller and infinitely more private than it did by day.

Elizabeth looked at him across the fire, and he met her gaze. They had been exchanging such looks all day. The silent communication admitted no uncertainty.

She stood and crossed the space between them. She stopped in front of him where he sat against the wall. When he looked up at her, his face was unguarded in a way she had never seen. His formal composure had been deliberately set aside.

“I want you,” she said. “I am telling you plainly because I do not wish there to be any ambiguity. I want this, and I am choosing it freely. If you are going to ask me if I am certain, the answer is yes. It has been yes since this morning. I would rather you did not waste time asking.”

He stood, slowly unfolding his body from the wall. When he was fully upright, they were closer than they had been since the kiss. His face above hers was steady, grave, and undeniably hungry.

“I was going to ask,” he said.

“I know.”

“Not because I doubted you. Because the asking matters to me.”

She understood.

“Then ask,” she said.

“Are you certain?”

“I am certain.”

He kissed her, his hands framing her face and jaw as they had the first time. The pace was slower now, the initial urgency banked into something deliberate and deep. She kissed him back, pushing his shirt open with her hands. She pressed her palms flat against his bare, warm skin, feeling the muscles tighten beneath her touch.

She pulled his shirt over his head. He lifted his arms to help, and then the fabric was gone. He was bare to the waist. She put both hands flat on his chest, touching him with the same deliberate, focused attention he had shown her the night before.

His breathing changed, becoming shorter and shallower.

He undressed her slowly. He lifted the dress over her head first—a garment so worn and weakened by salt that it came away easily. The fine chemise beneath was the final layer. He paused with his hands on the hem and looked at her. The look was a silent question, and she answered it by lifting her arms.

He drew the chemise off. She stood naked in the firelight. His eyes moved over her with an attention that went beyond assessment; he was memorising her. The deliberate noting of her body in the warm light was visible on his face: her breasts, her waist, and the curve of her hips.

She felt no shyness. Any lingering modesty had been burned away by two weeks of sun, sea, and the particular confidence that came from surviving. Her body had carried her through a shipwreck and sustained her on this island. It was strong, brown, and wholly alive, and she would not apologise for any part of it.

“Lie with me,” she said.

They went to the pallet. The sailcloth and dried grass was insufficient as a mattress, but sufficient as a bed. She lay down, and he knelt beside her. He was still wearing his trousers. “Those as well,” she said. He removed them, and then he was naked beside her. She looked at him directly.

His arousal was evident. She had felt his shape and heat through the fabric the night before, but seeing him was wholly different. Her gaze was direct and unhesitating. She refused to look away; doing so would have been a concession to a modesty she no longer felt.

He lay beside her, placing his hand on her hip and his mouth over hers. The kiss was slow and thorough. His hand moved from her hip to her breast, his thumb circling the peak, before trailing down her stomach. She parted her thighs for him, quite done with waiting.

His fingers found her slick and ready. She gasped against his mouth. His fingers moved with the confident knowledge they had gained the night before. That confidence drew a loud, unrestrained sound from her throat. There was no reason to hold back on an island where the only audience was the man causing her pleasure.

“Now,” she said. “Fitzwilliam. Now.”

He moved over her, taking his weight on his arms and settling his hips between her thighs. His body hovered over hers; his face was close, his breath warm on her mouth. She felt him press against her, and her body answered the silent question by tilting her hips upward.

He entered her slowly. It was a firm, insistent pressure. As he pushed inside her, the sensation of fullness and the sharp, bright sting made her catch her breath.

He stopped immediately. His arms were trembling and his jaw was tight. He held himself quite still, refusing to move until she told him to.

“Elizabeth.”

“I am well. Move.”

He moved again. He began with a slow, careful rhythm, his body learning hers. The initial discomfort gave way to friction, and then to a pleasure that built in escalating waves. She held his shoulders tightly. Her fingers dug into his skin; she was not gentle, and he did not ask her to be.

They found their rhythm. The cadence settled into something mutual and deeply instinctive — she had expected awkwardness, and found instead that she knew. Her body rose to meet his without instruction, her legs wrapping around him, her heels pressing into the small of his back.

He groaned—a low, rough sound against her neck. The formal, meticulous Fitzwilliam Darcy would never have made such a sound in any other circumstance. It undid her.

“Harder,” she said. The direct demand in her own mouth surprised her. It surprised him too; she felt it in the momentary stutter of his rhythm. Then he complied, his hips driving deeper and faster. The powerful thrusts sent a shock through her that tightened every muscle in her body.

The pleasure built in intense, breathless surges. His mouth was on her neck, and his hand moved between them, his thumb finding the sensitive peak he had discovered the night before. The combination was overwhelming. She heard herself cry out his name in a fractured gasp.

She came apart. The release was a powerful wave that began where his thumb pressed and spread outward through her hips and thighs. She clenched around him in a hard, involuntary spasm, her body seizing with a pleasure that obliterated all rational thought. She cried out loudly, the uncontrolled sound echoing in the stone tower.

He followed her immediately. His remaining control cracked on a final, deep thrust. His hips stilled, and his forehead dropped to her shoulder. His body shuddered violently against hers as he spilled into her, releasing a heavy groan that she felt reverberate against her own ribs.

Silence returned to the tower, broken only by the crackle of the fire and the unchanged rhythm of the sea beyond the archway. Through the gap in the roof, the stars shone bright and indifferent.

They lay tangled on the pallet. His head rested on her chest, his breathing slowly steadying against her skin. She tangled her hand in his hair, her fingers moving through the damp strands in a gesture that was idle, possessive, and wholly new. His arm lay heavy and warm across her waist. He was a man who had finally let go of every rigid structure that held him upright, resting wholly upon someone else.

Her body was tender, and sore in a particular, unfamiliar way. She knew she would feel it more keenly on the morrow, but she did not regret it. The soreness was physical evidence that she had chosen this path, and that her choice was correct.

“I did not know,” she said.

He raised his head. His firelit face was close to hers. The formal composure that had been his defining feature was gone altogether. It was replaced by something raw, open, and much younger than the severe man she had danced with at Netherfield.

“What did you not know?”

“Any of it. What it would feel like. That I was capable of this. That you were.” She traced his jaw with her finger, feeling the rough stubble that had grown over the past two weeks. “I feel awake. I said that last night, and it is still true. I feel as though I have been living at half measure, and suddenly I am wholly alive.”

“I feel,” he began, then stopped. It was a characteristic pause—the hesitation of a man whose deep feelings outpaced his vocabulary. “I feel as though I have been carrying a heavy weight for a very long time. I have finally set it down, and I cannot even remember what it was.”

She kissed his forehead. The tender, domestic gesture belonged to a relationship that had not existed an hour ago. Yet it existed now, and it was as real as the stone beneath her back and the sound of the sea outside.

“The stars are out,” she said.

“Yes.”

“The roof is still leaking.”

“Yes.”

“We should fix it with stones.”

He laughed against her chest, his body shaking with the warm, close sound. She held him while he laughed. The embrace was a new thing—a depth of affection she had not known she was capable of. Such holding required great trust, and trust required risk. She had risked everything tonight, and the reward was far greater than she could have imagined.

The fire burned low, and the stars turned overhead. The island held them, and the sea held the island. They had crossed every line, and they were not sorry.

For the first time, they were home.

Chapter Eighteen

Darcy discovered, in the days that followed, that Elizabeth Bennet hummed when she worked.

It was not a tune he recognised. It was a low, absent melody she produced while gutting fish, sorting figs, or scrubbing the flagstones. The sound emerged from her naturally, without intent, as a consequence of some internal process that required no audience. He had not heard it before. Either she had only just begun to hum, or he had previously not been close enough or quiet enough to notice.

He was learning her. The project had no end date. He approached it with the same methodical attention he brought to the management of Pemberley: he observed, he catalogued, and he remembered. He was well aware that this intense study was a form of devotion masquerading as method.

She was fiercely competitive. Even fishing was a contest. He had not understood this until the morning she caught three sea bream to his two, and announced the score without being asked. Her announcement contained a satisfaction so complete that he understood, with a clarity both humbling and charming, that she was keeping count. She had been keeping count since the beginning, and she took the matter quite seriously.

She stole the blanket. The large piece of sailcloth they shared on their single pallet was wholly hers by three in the morning, regardless of how it had been distributed at bedtime. He woke cold, while she woke securely wrapped. The pattern was consistent, yet she denied it consistently. Her denials were delivered with the serene confidence of a woman who was fully aware of her own falsehood, and thoroughly enjoyed it.

She was completely unself-conscious about her body. This surprised him deeply, and attracted him even more. It forced him to examine the assumptions he had brought to this island regarding women and modesty. On warm mornings, she walked from the pallet to the spring without covering herself; the island was quite private, and she saw no reason to pretend otherwise. She swam bare in the cove and sat on the rocks to dry in the sun. Her lack of clothing was never a provocation or a display. It was merely a natural state in a place where clothing served no social purpose. Her plain ease was more intoxicating than any deliberate seduction could have been.

He was also learning that he could be happy.

The realisation arrived without ceremony. He was sitting at the tower's entrance, watching Elizabeth walk down the hill from the spring with wet hair and a fish in each hand. Her dress—worn for protection against sunburn and thorns rather than modesty—was torn at the hem and stained with smoke. Her feet were bare, and her brown face was absorbed in a calculation regarding the day's food supply. She lacked the polished beauty the ton would have recognised. She was simply a woman carrying fish down a hill in the Mediterranean sun. Yet the sight of her made his chest ache with a feeling so great that he sat perfectly still for a full minute after she passed through the archway. He tried to name the feeling, and finally did.

He was happy. The word was small, but the feeling it described was immense. He had been responsible, dutiful, and correct for his entire adult life. He had managed Pemberley, protected Georgiana, and fulfilled every obligation his birth required. Such fulfilment had been satisfying in the manner of completed accounts: orderly, balanced, and conclusive. But he had not been happy. He had not truly known what happiness felt like. Happiness was a woman with wet hair who hummed while she cooked, stole his blanket, and beat him at fishing. She had chosen him on an island where she had every reason to rely only upon herself. Her choice was his happiness.

The days had a rhythm.

In the mornings, they visited the spring, built the fire, and ate breakfast. Their diet of fish and figs was occasionally supplemented by mussels or the hard, sweet fruit of the prickly pear cactus. Elizabeth had learned to harvest the fruit using two flat stones as tongs, following an early encounter with the spines that had produced language entirely unsuitable for a gentleman's daughter. That first attempt had left her right hand covered in hair-fine needles, requiring an hour to extract. Her ensuing, theatrical complaints to the island at large were met by Darcy with quiet amusement rather than sympathy.

Midday was devoted to work. The tower required constant maintenance; the sailcloth patches wore thin, the ropes frayed, and the cistern developed new cracks that he continually re-patched. Elizabeth managed the food supply with an efficiency that reminded him of Mrs Reynolds at Pemberley—if Mrs Reynolds had worked barefoot and kept a running tally of her fish catch against his.

They spent their afternoons at the cove. Swimming had become something far beyond hygiene. It was the hottest part of the day, and the water was the coolest part of the island. They swam together without the pretence of clothing. The time in the water was playful, yet charged with anticipation, their bodies finding each other and parting in the clear depths.

They often sought each other out in the afternoons—in the shade of the fig trees, on the warm sand, or in the shallows where the water was knee-deep and warm. The variety became part of the texture of their days. Some afternoons were slow and deliberate, with Elizabeth resting on her back on the sand, her hands tangling in his hair under the high sun. Other afternoons were urgent, pressed against the stone wall of the tower. Such urgency was usually the product of a look exchanged at breakfast, or a touch during the morning's work that had left them building tension all day.

He learned her body as he learned everything else about her: with focused attention. He learned the place on her neck, just below her ear, that made her breath catch. He learned that a slow kiss on the inside of her thigh produced a sound he wished to hear for the rest of his life. He learned the exact rhythm that pushed her to the edge, the tightening of her body, and the broken syllable she produced at the peak.

She learned him with equal attention. Her mouth explored his chest, his stomach, and the scar on his side, which she kissed as though tenderness might undo the wound. In the dark, her hands found him with a slow, perfected stroke. She adjusted her touch and pressure until she found precisely the point where his composure fractured. She produced this fracture deliberately, watching him with an attention that was both tender and distinctly amused. Even in such close intimacy, Elizabeth retained the flicker of irony that was her deepest nature.

He discovered that she was prone to speaking during their intimacies. It was not a performance, but genuine observation, delivered between ragged breaths and shifts in movement. She maintained the exact diction of a woman who was being thoroughly undone, yet wished to comment upon the process. “That is very effective,” she told him once, her fingers tangled in his hair. “You have a talent for this that your other accomplishments did not suggest.” He had laughed against her skin. The vibration of his laugh made her gasp, bringing a temporary end to her commentary.

On the fourth morning after the consummation, Elizabeth saw the sail.

She was on the upper level of the tower, where she went each morning to check the horizon. Darcy heard her shout from the lower room—a single, sharp sound. He was up the stairs before the sound finished. His body responded faster than his mind; a shout from Elizabeth meant either danger or rescue, and both required his immediate presence.

“There,” she said, pointing south. A white sail stood out small but distinct against the blue. It was a ship, moving east along the coast.

They lit the signal fire. Darcy had kept the fuel stacked and ready with dry wood and green branches for smoke. He was a man who had built signal fires for two weeks without losing the habit of hope. The fire caught quickly. The smoke rose in a thick white column against the blue sky, visible from at least ten miles.

The ship was closer than ten miles. Five, perhaps. Close enough to see, if someone were looking in the right direction.

Elizabeth tore a piece of sailcloth from the wall and waved it over her head, the white fabric snapping in the wind. Darcy fed the fire to make the smoke climb higher. They both shouted across the water, desperate to reach a ship that might not be close enough to hear them. They could only pray there was a lookout watching the horizon, and that the crew would investigate smoke rising from a small, unnamed island.

The ship held its course. East, steady, the sail unchanged. It did not turn.

“It is changing course,” Elizabeth said. Her voice was tight with a hope so fierce it was indistinguishable from fear.

It was not changing course. A shift in the wind had merely altered the angle of the sail, creating the illusion of a turn. The ship continued east, steadily growing smaller. The sail diminished from a rectangle, to a line, to a point, and finally vanished entirely. The horizon was empty again. The emptiness was the same as it had been every morning, but this time it was infinitely worse. They had seen rescue, and rescue had passed them by.

Elizabeth sat down heavily on the stone floor, her legs folding beneath her. The sailcloth remained clutched in her hands. Her face was turned towards the empty horizon. For several long minutes, she neither spoke nor cried.

Then she cried.

The sound was perfectly quiet. It was not theatrical weeping, but the private, devastated crying of a woman whose formidable strength had finally failed her. Tears ran down her face, and her shoulders shook as her hands gripped the useless sailcloth. He sat beside her and put his arm around her shoulders. She leaned into him, burying her face against his chest. Her tears soaked his shirt. He held her without speaking, knowing that words were useless. She needed to weep without being reasoned with or comforted by false promises. He offered her silent, steady presence—the most difficult discipline he had practised on the island.

She cried for a long time. When she finally stopped, it was from sheer exhaustion rather than recovery. She wiped her face with the back of her hand and looked out at the stubbornly empty horizon. “I am sorry,” she said, her voice scraped raw.

“Do not apologise.”

“I am not apologising for crying. I am apologising for believing, for ten minutes, that we were going home.”

He tightened his arm around her, and she leaned heavier into his side. They sat on the upper level of the tower while the dead signal fire smouldered beside them. The sea spread out in every direction—blue, enormous, and quite empty. Despair settled over them like a physical weight, and they held each other against it.

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.”

“You are inserting your own sentiments.”

“I am interpreting the text. Though I concede the distinction is fine.”

She sat between his legs with her back resting against his chest, the position that had become their custom for evenings by the fire. His arm rested around her waist. The book was propped on his raised knee. He turned the pages with his free hand while she leaned against him, cheerfully inventing the plot of a novel neither could properly read.

The domesticity of it should not have surprised her. She had lived with this man for three weeks. She ate with him, slept beside him, and managed a strange household that consisted of a ruined tower and a patch of wild herbs.

She turned in his arms. His firelit face was close, and she kissed the corner of his jaw where the stubble was thickest. The kiss was idle and affectionate. Yet, as always between them, such idle affection quickly deepened into something far less idle.

“Fitzwilliam,” she said against his mouth.

“Mm.”

“What are we?”

He pulled back enough to look at her. His face grew serious. She recognised the expression; he wore it when he was asked a question he considered important, and intended to answer with all precision.

“We are two people on an island who have chosen each other,” he said.

“Yes. But what does that make us? In the language of the world we left. What are we?”

“In the language of the world we left, we are compromised. You are ruined, and I am the man who ruined you. The judgement is wrong in every particular, but it is the language the world will use.”

“I am not ruined.”

“No. You are not.”

“I am asking what you want. Not what the world will call it. What you want.”

He was quiet for a moment. His hand rested on her waist, his thumb moving in a small, absent arc. She had learned it was his thinking gesture—the physical expression of his mind working through a problem.

“I want to marry you,” he said. “I have wanted to marry you since before this island. That desire has not changed in kind, only in its certainty. I want to marry you, and I want to take you home. I want to walk into the church at Lambton with you beside me, hear the words spoken, and know that the rest of the world has finally caught up to what has already happened here.”

“What has already happened here?”

“Everything. You are my wife in every way that matters. The ceremony is a formality. A necessary formality, for your protection and your family's peace, but a formality. What we have here, in this tower, is the thing itself.”

She looked at him. His face was steady, his voice was calm, and his hand remained warm on her waist. This proposal was nothing like Hunsford. There was no pride in it, no condescension, and no catalogue of her family's failings. There was only a man in a torn shirt telling a woman in a torn dress that he wanted her for the rest of his life. The declaration was plain, direct, and completely without ornament.

“That is not a proposal,” she said.

“No?”

“A proposal requires a question. You have merely made a series of statements—eloquent statements, to be sure, but statements nonetheless.”

His mouth curved into the faint smile she had loved since the beach. “Elizabeth Bennet. Will you marry me?”

“I will marry you in a church in Lambton, in a chapel in Italy, or on this beach with a lizard as witness. I will marry you because you asked properly this time, and because you are the man I want. I am tired of the question, and I would very much like it settled.”

“That is not a romantic acceptance.”

“It is a practical acceptance from a practical woman who is sitting on a stone floor in a ruin on a deserted island. Romance would be misplaced. Practicality suits the occasion.”

He kissed her. The kiss was a question answered and a matter irrevocably settled. She kissed him back with her hands framing his face, holding him fiercely to her. The embrace felt certain enough to contain both the island and the entire world beyond it.

Later, on the pallet, she explored him in the dark.

The fire was low, consisting of more embers than flame. The faint, red light turned their skin the colour of old copper. She moved over him, her hands mapping his body with slow, deliberate attention. She memorised him. The island was temporary, but his body was real, and the memorising was an act against impermanence.

She kissed his chest. She kissed the flat plane of his stomach, where the skin was warmer than on his arms and shoulders. She traced his scar with her mouth, moving gently over the tender tissue. His breath hitched under her lips.

She did not move lower. Instead she pressed her mouth to his jaw, and his arm came around her, drawing her up towards him. She went willingly.

He kissed her with a thoroughness that left nothing provisional about it. Both hands moved over her—her back, the curve of her waist, the length of her spine—unhurried and methodical, as he was in all things. She threaded her fingers into his hair and kissed him back with equal thoroughness and no restraint whatsoever.

They lay together in the ember-light. She discovered the particular sensitivity behind his ear that made his breath catch. He discovered that she made a quiet, involuntary sound when his mouth found the curve of her throat. These were small findings, carefully noted on both sides.

“Fitzwilliam,” she said against his mouth.

“Mm.”

“You are not attending to the Italian novel.”

“No.” He kissed the corner of her jaw. “I am not.”

“The man has apparently stopped proposing. I thought you ought to know.”

“I have already proposed,” he said, his mouth moving to her collarbone. “The matter is settled.”

She laughed quietly against his shoulder. It was, she thought, a thoroughly satisfactory answer.

His hand slid from her waist to her thigh, his fingers finding her with the focused attention she had learned was his hallmark in all things. He was thorough and unhurried. He touched her in the dark, keeping his eyes fixed on her face. She let him watch her.

She came quietly — a slow wave that built through her hips and broke gently. She curled towards his hand, resting her forehead against his chest as she whispered his name.

They lay in silence. His mouth rested against her hair, and her hand lay flat over his beating heart.

“Fitzwilliam.”

“Yes.”

“I said yes.”

“I know.”

“To the marriage. I said yes. I want you to remember that I said it here, in this tower, on this island, before we knew if we would ever leave. I said yes when yes meant this life, not the other one. I want that to be the yes you remember.”

He pulled her closer, wrapping his arms securely around her. His body was warm, solid, and wholly hers.

“I will remember,” he said.

The fire died to embers, and the stars turned through the gap in the roof. She fell asleep against his chest. The last thing she heard was his steady heartbeat. It was the same sound she had listened to for weeks across four feet of flagstone, but it was now heard directly, without distance, and without pretence.

It was the sound of a man who was hers, and the life she had chosen.

Chapter Twenty

Darcy had always considered himself a truthful man. He now recognised this as the particular vanity of a man who lied chiefly to himself, and was therefore never caught.

He had lied to Bingley. It was not a direct lie, nor was it the crude falsehood that Wickham employed. It was the more refined dishonesty of a man who selected which truths to present, and called the selection judgement. He had told Bingley that Jane Bennet's feelings were not engaged. He had spoken with the confidence of a man who had observed Miss Bennet's composure in a ballroom and concluded that the heart beneath it was similarly composed. He had been wrong. Somewhere beneath his certainty, he had suspected he might be wrong. He had told Bingley anyway. The alternative was admitting that his judgement of a woman's heart might be as fallible as his judgement of his own.

The admission had been building for weeks. It built the way the fig trees produced fruit: slowly, invisibly, until the weight was too much and the fruit fell.

Elizabeth was drying figs. The task had become her province. She managed it with the focused determination of a woman who refused to let any edible thing on the island rot while she had flat rocks and sunlight available. She turned the split halves with her fingertips, checking the undersides for moisture. She discarded the ones that had attracted ants with a quick flick, sending the offending fruit into the scrub. Her fingers were stained purple, and her hair was tied back with a strip of sailcloth. She looked like no woman he had ever seen in a drawing room, and like the only woman he wished to look at.

“I lied to Bingley about your sister.”

The words arrived without permission. He had planned to introduce the subject carefully, to build the context, and to frame the explanation with precision. Instead, the words fell out of him like the figs from the branch, dropped heavily by their own weight. Elizabeth's hands went perfectly still over the drying rocks.

She did not look up. “I know.”

“You know what I did. You do not know why.”

“You thought she did not care for him. You said as much in your letter.”

“I thought she did not care for him because her face did not show it. She was composed in his presence, and smiled at him the way she smiled at everyone. The particular quality of her regard was not, to my eye, distinguishable from her general civility.” He was pulling weeds from the herb garden while he spoke, the work giving his hands occupation while his mouth did something considerably more difficult. “I was wrong.”

“Yes.”

“I was wrong because I assumed that a woman's feelings must be instantly legible to a man who had barely spent ten minutes in her company. I applied to your sister a standard I would not have applied to myself. The presumption was wholly mine, and Jane Bennet's happiness was the price of it.”

Elizabeth turned a fig. She was precise and unhurried, maintaining her composure while the conversation clearly produced something that was not calm.

“What did you tell him?” she asked.

“That her feelings were not engaged. That her composure in his company suggested regard without attachment. I also told him that an alliance with her family would bring difficulties he could not afford.” He pulled the weeds from the soil with force. “I told him the truth about her family because the truth was convenient. I told him a lie about her heart because the lie was also convenient. I did not distinguish between the two, because doing so would have required admitting that my motives were wholly selfish.”

She looked at him. Her dark, direct eyes held his across the herb garden. Her attention was neither anger nor forgiveness, but something far harder than either.

“What were your motives?”

He pulled a weed. The root was long and came out of the soil slowly, trailing dirt. “If Bingley married your sister, I would have been connected to your family. If I was connected to your family, I would have been continually in your proximity. If I was near you, I would have been forced to confront feelings I was entirely unprepared for. I separated Bingley from your sister because I could not separate myself from you. One seemed easier than the other. I was a coward, and my cowardice wore the face of good advice.”

The silence that followed was heavy.

“You broke her heart to avoid confronting your own,” Elizabeth said.

“Yes.”

“That is worse than what I thought.”

“Yes.”

“I thought you were merely proud. I thought you looked at my family, found them wanting, and decided your friend deserved better. That was arrogant, but it was at least about him. You are telling me that it was always about you, and what you could not bear to feel.”

“Yes.”

She was quiet. A lizard darted across the flat rock between them, oblivious to the conversation, quite untroubled by moral reckonings.

“Jane cried for two months,” Elizabeth said. Her voice was steady, merely reporting a fact. “Not where anyone could see. Jane does not cry where people can see. She cried in her room at night, and I heard her through the wall. I could not comfort her. My inability to ease her pain was the worst thing I had ever felt.”

“She stopped eating properly,” Elizabeth continued. “My mother did not notice because she was too occupied with her own disappointment at losing Mr Bingley's five thousand a year. My father noticed and said nothing; his method of addressing family distress is to retreat to his library and hope the distress resolves itself. People stop crying eventually, though that is hardly a resolution. I noticed. I brought her tea and sat with her, but I could not tell her the truth, because I did not know it.”

He had stopped pulling weeds. His hands were dirty and perfectly still. The things she was saying landed on him with the brutal weight of stones.

“I am sorry,” he said.

“I know you are sorry. You have been sorry since your letter. Being sorry is not the question.”

“What is the question?”

She put down the fig she was holding and wiped her stained fingers on her dress. She looked at him with the full, unhesitating directness that was her most formidable quality. It was the quality he loved most, yet at this particular moment, he wished she would set it aside. But she was Elizabeth Bennet, and she did not retreat.

“The question is whether you would do it again.”

“No.”

“That was fast.”

“It does not require deliberation. I would not do it again because it was wholly wrong. Separating two people who loved each other for my own selfish convenience was a grave error. I have had months to deliberate, and the deliberation is finished.”

She studied him for a long, quiet moment. He bore her scrutiny because it was the least of what he owed, and because her anger was far preferable to her indifference. He had proposed to her on a deserted island, and she had accepted, but that acceptance did not exempt him from the consequences of his past actions.

“Jane would forgive you,” Elizabeth said. “Jane forgives everyone. It is simultaneously her finest quality and her most infuriating one. She would forgive you, and she would wholly mean it. She would likely even thank you for telling her.”

He almost smiled, but suppressed it, knowing it was not appropriate for the conversation. Elizabeth saw the suppression, and her mouth curved in a sharp expression that was related to a smile, but lacked its warmth.

“I am not Jane,” she said.

“No.”

“I do not forgive easily, and I certainly do not thank people for causing my sister two months of misery.”

“I would not expect you to.”

“But I forgive you for this.” She said it plainly, without ceremony. It was delivered without ornament, exactly as she had delivered every other declaration on this island. “I forgive you because you told me the truth when a lie would have been easier, and I would never have known the difference. You did not excuse your actions, you explained them. The explanation was honest, and the honesty cost you something. I am not so proud that I cannot recognise courage when it is standing in my herb garden.”

He looked at her. She was his betrothed, his Elizabeth, with her stained fingers and her torn dress. Her serious, brown face looked back at him, entirely without concealment.

“Write to Bingley again when we are home,” she said.

She had said when, not if. When they were home, his first order of business would be undoing the damage he had wrought upon two people who had committed no offence.

“I will write to him,” Darcy said.

“You will tell him the full truth, not the convenient version you told him before. You will tell him that you were wrong, and that you told him anyway because you were afraid of what you felt for me. You let his happiness be the price of your own fears.”

“That is a thorough letter.”

“It is an honest letter, and you owe him one. You owe Jane an honest letter as well, though hers should be gentler. She has been through quite enough already.”

“I will write both letters.”

“Good.” She picked up another fig, examined it, placed it on the rock. “And Fitzwilliam?”

“Yes?”

“When you write to Mr Bingley, do not attempt to manage the situation. Do not plan his response or arrange the outcome. Write the letter, and let him decide. He is a grown man, however much you have treated him as otherwise. Jane is a grown woman. Their happiness is theirs to determine, and your role in the matter ends the moment you put down the pen.”

He nodded.

The herb garden smelled heavily of rosemary and thyme in the hot sun. Elizabeth returned to her figs, and he returned to his weeds. They worked side by side in deep silence. The honest air settled into the space between them like soil around a transplanted root.

That evening, she sat between his legs by the fire, her back resting against his chest. The position was well established and comfortably familiar.

"Tell me about Pemberley," she said.

"You have never seen it."

"No. Which is precisely why you must describe it to me.”

He was quiet for a moment. "Tell me what you wish to know."

"The parts visitors never see." Elizabeth laughed. The laugh vibrated through her back into his chest.

“The library has a window seat that Georgiana claimed at the age of seven, and has not relinquished since. She reads there on rainy afternoons with her feet on the cushion and her shoes on the floor. I am not permitted to comment on the shoes; I did so once, and was informed with devastating composure that my own boots leave mud on the front stairs every Tuesday.”

“I think I will like Georgiana very much.”

“She will like you. She will be terrified of you for approximately one hour, but then she will like you. From there, she will quickly conspire with you against me, and I will have no allies remaining in my own house.”

“You will have your housekeeper. You said her name is Mrs Reynolds.”

“Mrs Reynolds will defect to your side before the first dinner. She has been waiting for someone to defect to since my mother died. You will fill the vacancy with an enthusiasm that will make my authority in my own home quite theoretical.”

She turned her head against his chest. Her firelit face angled up towards his, warm and deeply amused.

“You are looking forward to it,” she said.

“I am looking forward to it,” he said.

He gently kissed her temple, a light touch that carried the weight of his confessions from that afternoon. It was an open, unguarded moment, allowing himself to be fully known without pride or reservation. He trusted her to decide how to respond to that honesty.

The fire crackled. The stars shone through the gap in the roof they had repaired with Elizabeth's stones. The repair had lasted because she had been right. He had learnt, belatedly, that being right was not a competition that required a sole winner.

She drifted asleep against his chest as he held her, watching the fire. He reflected on the letters he planned to write and the future they would create together. The woman in his arms had forgiven him—not because the offense was minor, but because her forgiveness was genuine. He was committed to honoring that sincerity for the rest of his days.

As the fire burned low, he carried her to the pallet. Carrying her was one of the few things he could do for her without being corrected. Caring for Elizabeth Bennet had quietly become the singular devotion of his life.

Chapter Twenty-One

Elizabeth counted days by figs.

The drying operation produced six to eight figs per batch, with each batch requiring three days of sun. She had completed fourteen batches, which meant the island had held them for approximately six weeks. It was longer than any house party she had ever attended, and considerably less comfortable. However, the company was better, and the conversation was far more honest. The host—the island itself—asked nothing of its guests beyond the simple ability to survive. Elizabeth found this standard refreshingly clear compared to the shifting expectations of Hertfordshire society.

She was darker than she had ever been, with a deeply tanned face, arms, and legs below her torn dress hem. Her hands, rough from work, had short, broken nails, and her feet were calloused from the rocks. She could gut a fish in under a minute and light a fire even in strong wind. She identified four types of edible seaweed by sight, although she was only moderately enthusiastic about eating any of them. Darcy, however, had no enthusiasm at all. His expression when offered the boiled kelp she had prepared as a nutritious paste was one she planned to describe to his housekeeper at Pemberley; Mrs Reynolds needed to know that the master of the house could be so visibly disturbed by aquatic plants.

She had stopped missing mirrors and shoes. She had stopped missing the small, daily comforts that had constituted her life in England: tea, proper bread, a chair with a back, and a door that closed. She no longer even missed the privacy of a bedroom that was hers alone, rather than shared with a man, the Mediterranean wind, and whatever insects had colonised the tower walls that week.

She had not stopped missing her family.

The grief arrived at inconvenient moments. It struck while laughing at something Darcy said about the Italian novel they could not read, or while swimming in the cove with the sun on her face. It returned while lying on the pallet with his arm around her waist, the night so quiet she could hear the sea shift on the sand below the hill. The happiness was real, and the grief was equally real. That the two could coexist so violently was the particular cruelty of her situation.

She thought about her father most in the mornings, when the light was new and the island was quiet. The thoughts had not yet been crowded out by the day's work. He would be in his library with the door closed. He would be reading, or rather, performing the physical motions of reading while his mind was elsewhere. He would be imagining wherever his second daughter had gone, and the imaginings would be terrible. Mr Bennet's imagination was considerable, and his capacity for envisioning disaster was a talent he had passed to Elizabeth, along with his wit, his love of books, and his habit of laughing at things that were not strictly funny.

He would blame himself. This was the thing she could not bear. Her father, who blamed himself for nothing, who met every family catastrophe with the detached amusement of an audience member at a comedy of errors, would blame himself for Elizabeth's disappearance. She was the one he loved best. Losing her would break his detachment. What lay beneath that detachment was not amusement, but deep grief, and that grief would have nowhere to go, for Mr Bennet had never built a place for it.

Jane would be holding the family together. She would be managing their mother, who would be hysterical; their younger sisters, who would be frightened; and their father, who would be retreating. She would do it with her particular selfless competence, placing everyone else's needs above her own. Jane would not cry in front of anyone. She would cry at night, in her room, the same room where she had wept over Bingley. The crying would be private and prolonged, and no one would bring her tea, because Elizabeth was the one who brought Jane tea. And Elizabeth was on an island in the Mediterranean, finding happiness with the man who had caused half of Jane's tears in the first place.

Were the Gardiners alive? The question was a heavy stone she carried and turned over, but could not set down. She remembered the pirate attack, the confusion, and the ship burning. The Gardiners had been below decks. Had they reached the boats? Had the boats survived? Were they in Naples, in Sicily, or at the bottom of the sea? The ignorance was worse than any terrible truth, because her mind populated the silence with infinite possibilities, and most of them were tragic.

She did not share these thoughts with Darcy. It was not because she was hiding them, but because speaking them aloud served no purpose beyond transferring the weight. The burden was hers. Bearing it alone was a necessity, and Elizabeth had always done what was necessary.

He knew anyway. He watched her closely. In the mornings, when her thoughts were loudest, she could not compose her features fast enough. Her unguarded expression told him everything her composure was designed to hide.

He did not press her. He merely brought her a fig, touched her shoulder, or said something dry about the Italian novel's hero, who had apparently been proposing for nine chapters and counting.

The sail appeared on a Tuesday. She recognized it as Tuesday because she had been keeping track of days, and Tuesday was her fishing day. She was on the rocks at the southern end of the cove with her line in the water when the white rectangle showed up on the eastern horizon, small and crisp against the blue sky.

She did not shout. She had shouted the last time, and the shouting had produced hope, which in turn produced despair. The resulting despair had been far worse than the emptiness that preceded it. She stood slowly and watched the sail, assessing its distance, direction, and speed with clinical precision.

It was closer than the last one, heading northwest, which would bring it nearer before it passed. She thought it was a merchant vessel from the shape of the rigging, though her knowledge was limited to what Darcy had taught her. His own knowledge was limited to what he remembered from two voyages and a conversation with a captain who had been more interested in his wine than instructing a passenger.

She climbed the hill. Darcy was at the tower, repairing a section of wall that the wind had loosened. He saw her face before she spoke. He immediately set down the stone he was holding, already calculating fuel and wind direction.

They lit the fire in the permanent pit on the tower's upper level. The fuel was stacked and ready, a preparation they maintained in shifts. The dry wood caught instantly, and the green branches produced thick, white smoke. The column rose straight in the still air, and should have been visible from miles away.

The ship was close—two miles, perhaps less. It was close enough to see the individual sails, and to make out the dark line of the hull against the water. Elizabeth frantically waved the sailcloth while Darcy fed the fire. The thick smoke climbed higher.

The ship altered course.

Elizabeth's hands went quite still. She watched, her body rigid with the effort of suppressing her hope. The effort failed. Hope rose through her defences like water through sand, unstoppable and wholly unwelcome.

The ship turned further, shifting from northwest to north. It was turning towards them. The angle of approach was consistent with a vessel responding to a signal; it was the turn of a captain who had seen smoke and decided to investigate.

“It is turning,” she said. Her voice was flat, controlled, the voice of a woman who had been broken by hope once and would not be broken again.

“It is turning,” Darcy said. His voice was the same.

The ship turned further north, then northeast, and finally east. The turn continued in a long, slow arc that had nothing to do with their signal, and everything to do with the wind. The breeze had shifted, driving the ship's course away from the island. It moved steadily away from the smoke, and away from the two people standing on a hilltop with their lungs full of shouting. The great hope they had felt was, even as they watched, curdling back into despair.

The ship sailed east, and the sail grew steadily smaller. Elizabeth watched it go with her arms hanging at her sides, the sailcloth trailing from one hand. Her face was set in an expression of frozen blankness; she had run out of both despair and composure.

She sat down heavily on the stone ledge. The smoke continued to rise from the fire beside her, quite purposeless. She sat and watched the empty horizon, and the horizon remained perfectly, indifferently empty.

She did not cry. She had cried the last time, and it had not helped. She was not going to cry again. Tears served no function on a deserted island, and she refused to waste her strength on them.

She sat for hours as the sun and the shadows moved across the stone. The smoke died as the fire burned through its fuel. Darcy did not rebuild it. Rebuilding it would have been a pretence that the fire still held a purpose, and they were long past pretending.

He sat beside her. He remained close, but did not touch her. Company was required, but comfort was not, and he understood the distinction.

They sat together on the upper level of the tower with the dead fire between them. The sea spread out in every direction, blue, flat, and enormous. It was beautiful, but its beauty was quite irrelevant, which was perhaps the cruellest thing about it.

“I was counting sails,” Elizabeth said. Her voice was raw from the great effort of not crying. “Six ships in six weeks. Four were within visible distance. Two were close enough to theoretically see the signal, yet none stopped. The numbers do not improve.”

“No.”

“I have always been a practical woman. My mother considers it a failing, while my father considers it a virtue. They are both correct. Practicality feels very much like a failing when the only logical conclusion is that no one is coming.”

He did not answer. The not-answering was correct.

“No one is coming, Fitzwilliam.”

“We do not know that.”

“We know the probability. The probability is that we will grow old and die on this island, and no one will find us until long after it matters. The probability is that my father will die believing I am dead. Jane will marry someone who is not Mr Bingley, because he will never receive your letter. My mother will wear black for a daughter who is alive, growing figs on a rock in the sea.”

Her voice cracked slightly. It was a small fissure in the composure she was maintaining with iron determination. She had decided she was not going to fall apart, and she intended to hold to that decision.

He put his hand over hers on the stone ledge. He was warm, present, and steadfastly silent.

She turned her hand under his, lacing their fingers together. She held on.

They sat until the sun was low and the shadows grew long. The horizon had given them nothing, and would continue to give them nothing. They went down the hill together, hand in hand. They made dinner and ate without speaking of the ship.

That night in the tower, her exhaustion was complete, yet she found she desperately needed him to touch her. The shift was sudden, a decision made by instinct. Her mind was exhausted from the day's punishing hope, but her body sought the only solace available: to be here, firmly anchored on this island, with this man, and nowhere else.

She kissed him hard and without prelude in the dark, tangling her hands in his hair — fierce, undecorated need. She had spent the day staring at an empty horizon, and she wanted, with a ferocity that surprised her, to be filled with something other than loss.

He responded instantly. His hands caught her waist and pulled her hips against his, matching her urgency with a desperation she had not expected. He had been carrying the day's terrible weight as well. They were setting the burden down together. His mouth sought her neck as her hands dragged his shirt over his head, the fabric tossed into the dark and forgotten.

She pushed him onto his back. The dried grass beneath the sailcloth crackled under his weight. She straddled him, bunching her dress at her waist. The position was new, and the newness was precisely what she wanted.

“Elizabeth,” he breathed into the dark. His hands gripped her thighs, and his face below hers was drawn with a concern she did not want.

“Do not ask me if I am well,” she said fiercely. “I am angry, I am frightened, and I want you. This is the only one of those things I can do anything about. Let me do something about it.”

His hands tightened on her thighs. The tightening was an answer.

She freed him from his trousers, finding him quite ready for her. It was a fact she appreciated with grim practicality; she was in no mood for courtship. She stroked him, and his hips arched immediately against her hand. The sound he made was low, rough, and wholly hers.

She positioned herself over him, guiding him with her hand as she lowered her hips. She sank onto him slowly. The cautious pace was a physical necessity rather than a choice; the angle was new, and her body required a moment to accommodate what her mind fiercely demanded.

He filled her completely. She remained still for a moment, adjusting to the great fullness, her hands resting flat on his bare chest and her weight on her knees. The deep stillness held its own kind of sharp anticipation.

She began to move, slowly at first, finding a rolling rhythm that drew a rough, uncontrolled sound from her own throat. His hands moved from her thighs to her hips. He matched her rhythm, offering steady support while letting her set the pace.

She increased the pace, and his hands gripped her hips harder. She rode him with a fierce determination that was equal parts passion and anger. The two feelings fused into relentless movement as her body sought the angle that would finally blot out the terrible events of the day.

He sat up, wrapping his arms around her and pressing his chest against hers. His mouth found her neck. The sudden shift in position drove him deeper, pulling a sharp gasp from her lungs without warning. His mouth caught the sound as they kissed deeply. They moved together with a fast, fracturing rhythm, and her complete loss of control was precisely what she sought.

“There,” she said against his mouth. “Yes. There.”

He held the angle, his hands locking her hips in place while he thrust upward. The relentless friction concentrated and built into a breathless, relentless tension. She surrendered to it wholly. She was finished with holding things in, and this shattering release was the only thing she required.

She came with her face pressed tightly against his neck, her fingers digging fiercely into his shoulders. The rough sound she made was muffled against his skin. The release shook through her in intense waves, her body clenching around him as she ground her hips against his. The long, thorough waves left her trembling, breathing hard, and still wanting.

“More,” she said.

He laid her down gently, keeping his hand behind her head to protect it from the stone floor. The tenderness was a sharp counterpoint to their previous urgency. He moved over her and settled between her thighs. He drove into her with long, deep strokes that immediately began building a second, sharper tension on top of the first.

He pressed his forehead to hers. His eyes remained open, watching her in the dark, catching the faint red of the dying fire.

He reached between them, his thumb finding her sensitive peak. The precise pressure, combined with his deep rhythm, overwhelmed her. She let go. The second release was sharper than the first—a bright, concentrated burst of pleasure that arched her back off the pallet. Her legs tightened instinctively around his waist as she cried out into the dark.

He followed her immediately. His rhythm broke as he drove himself deep into her, spilling his seed with his mouth pressed hard against her shoulder. His hands fisted in the sailcloth beneath her. His release was silent, save for the ragged, uncontrolled sound of his breathing—the most unguarded sound she had ever heard from him.

Afterward, they lay quietly in the dark. His body was heavy and warm beside hers. His hand rested on her stomach, rising and falling slowly with her breath.

“I am sorry,” she said.

“For what?”

“For using you to stop thinking.”

His hand traced a slow circle on her stomach. “You did not use me. You chose me. There is a great difference.”

“The difference is accurate. You were in pain, and you wanted closeness. You chose me for that closeness, and I am certainly not injured by being chosen.”

She rolled towards him, pressing her face against his chest. Her hand rested on his side, her fingers lightly tracing the smooth, raised line of his scar in the dark.

“I am frightened,” she said quietly against his chest.

“I know.”

“I am not frightened of the island, or of dying. I am frightened of being forgotten. I cannot bear the thought of my family grieving me for years, believing I am dead, while I am alive and quite unable to tell them.”

His arms tightened securely around her, and she pressed closer. The fire was out. The stars were visible through the gap in the roof. They were old, distant, and indifferent. The indifference was a strange comfort; it meant that their isolation was not a targeted cruelty, but merely a circumstance.

“We will find a way,” he said.

“You do not know that.”

“No, but I believe it. That belief is not built on blind hope; it is built on you. You will find a way, because finding ways to survive is exactly what you do. You have not stopped finding solutions since we washed ashore. The island is better for your efforts, and I am better for them. Your work is not finished.”

She was quiet. His words settled into her like rain settling into the cistern—slowly absorbed, and stored for later when her own supply of courage ran short.

“That is the nicest thing you have ever said to me,” she said.

“I have said nicer things.”

“You have certainly said more romantic things. Nicer is different. Nicer is someone who sees what you are actually good at, and acknowledges it. You said that I am good at surviving, and I am. Hearing that matters to me, perhaps even more than hearing that I am beautiful or beloved—though I appreciate those as well.”

He laughed warmly against her hair. She could make him laugh in the dark after the worst day they had spent on the island.

She fell asleep against him while he held her. The stars turned overhead. The island held them, as it had held them for six weeks, and would hold them for however many weeks remained. It was neither rescue nor prison, but simply the particular, daily fact of their lives. The fact was bearable only because they bore it together.

The horizon stayed completely empty, and the fire stayed dead. But morning would eventually come. Elizabeth would rise to count her figs, and catch her fish, and survive. She would continue to survive because that was who she was. And who she was, on this island, was wholly enough.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Darcy made lists.

He made them in his head, for the island had no paper and no ink. He had discovered that this lack of materials was insufficient to stop a man who had managed a ten-thousand-a-year estate since the age of two-and-twenty. The lists formed the way weather formed: involuntarily and atmospherically. They were the natural product of a mind that could not observe a problem without immediately seeking to organise it.

The lists were about England.

His first list concerned legal matters. He required a special licence, obtainable through the Archbishop's office, which his solicitor, Kensington, could prepare in advance. The marriage must occur immediately upon their return to English jurisdiction; Malta had an Anglican chapel, and so did Gibraltar. The speed was essential, not because he doubted Elizabeth's commitment, but because the ton possessed ruthless arithmetic. They would count the days between rescue and marriage and draw terrible conclusions. Those conclusions would inevitably fall on Elizabeth, for custom dictated that the woman bear the burden of scandal. Custom was the enemy he was preparing to fight.

His second list concerned settlements. Elizabeth would require an independent income. The settlement must be generous enough to protect her if he died—a thought he had been unable to avoid since the fever scare. It must also be particular enough to demonstrate to the Bennet family that his intentions were strictly honourable.

His third list concerned the ton. Lady Catherine would present a problem, as would Caroline Bingley, and the general population of London drawing rooms. He could manage his aunt through the simple expedient of ignoring her opinion, though in practice this would require withstanding an untested level of rage. Caroline could be managed through Bingley; his friend's good nature and loyalty, once properly redirected, would provide a buffer. The drawing rooms would require time, carefully managed invitations, and the slow work of social repair. It was not his strength, but it was his very great obligation.

His fourth list concerned Georgiana. She would need preparation—not for the match itself, which she would welcome, but for the circumstances surrounding it. Her brother had been stranded on an island with a woman for weeks. Georgiana was seventeen and perceptive. She would understand the implications, and that understanding needed to arrive gently from his pen, before it arrived brutally from societal gossip.

He was composing the letter to Georgiana in his head, selecting words with the care of a man building a stone wall, when Elizabeth said: “Stop.”

They were resting on the warm sand of the beach. The routine of their days had become so settled it resembled domesticity more than survival. He was sitting against the rocks with his knees drawn up and his hands tightly clasped.

“Stop what?”

“Stop whatever you are doing in your head. You have been somewhere else all morning. Your face bears the expression of a man sitting at a desk with correspondence. There is no desk, and there is no correspondence. You are on a beach, and I would appreciate your company, if the beach is not too inconvenient for your schedule.”

He looked at her. She was sitting on the sand with her dress pulled over her knees, her hair loose and salt-tangled. Her brown face was direct. She held a particular expression that meant she had been observing him for some time, and had reached a conclusion she intended to deliver whether he wished to hear it or not.

“I am planning,” he said.

“I can see that you are planning. What are you planning?”

“England.”

“England.”

“The return,” he said. “The legal arrangements, the marriage, and the management of our situation in society. I am arranging the letters that must be written, and the people who must be managed.”

She regarded him with steady attention.

“Fitzwilliam,” she said. “We are on a beach.”

“I am aware.”

“We are on a beach, on an island that may never permit us to leave. We have sand, fish, figs, and each other. We possess no paper, no solicitor, and no Archbishop. We certainly have no access to the ton, who are at this moment doing exactly what they always do: talking about people who are not in the room.”

“I am trying to protect you.”

“From what?” she asked. “The sand? The fish? I believe I can manage the fish without legal counsel.”

He tried not to smile, but he was unsuccessful. The smile escaped him involuntarily.

“From the consequences,” he said. “When we return, there will be talk and judgement. People will make assumptions about what happened here. Those consequences will fall heavily upon you, and the disproportion is unjust. I intend to prepare for it.”

“By planning settlements on a beach.”

“By having a plan in place before the plan is needed.”

She moved across the sand to sit beside him against the rocks. She pressed her shoulder against his.

“I love that you are planning,” she said. “Your immediate response to being stranded on a deserted island is to prepare a legal plan for a society we may never re-enter. It is quite in character, and I love it, but I need you to stop.”

“Why?”

“Because England is not here. Planning for tomorrow takes you out of today. Today is the only day we possess, and I do not wish to share it with your solicitor, however competent he may be.”

“Kensington is very competent.”

“I have no doubt of it. But Mr Kensington can wait, and England can wait. The only thing that cannot wait is this warm afternoon. I would like to swim, and I would like to lie in the sun. Then I would like to spend the evening with a man who is present, rather than trapped in his own head planning my legal protection. Can you do that?”

He looked out at the water. The sea was blue, flat, and warm. It contained no plan whatsoever, which was entirely her point.

“I can try,” he said.

“Trying is not the same as doing.”

“Trying is the best I can offer. The planning is not a choice; it is a necessity. I manage things because it is my only response to situations I cannot control. This situation is the least controllable I have ever encountered, and the planning is the only thing standing between me and the admission that I am terrified.”

The honesty surprised him, and it surprised her as well. He saw it in the slight widening of her eyes, and the sudden shift from teasing to full attention.

“Terrified of what?” she asked.

“I am terrified of losing this. I am terrified of being rescued, only to have the rescue destroy what we have built here. On this island, I am a man who fishes, repairs walls, and loves you without seeking anyone's permission. In England, I am Mr Darcy of Pemberley. That man has obligations and a position in society that will scrutinise every aspect of what happened here. They will find it wanting, and their judgement will hurt you. I cannot bear the prospect of you being hurt by the very thing that has made me so very happy.”

She was quiet. Her shoulder was warm against his, and the sea washed quietly against the shore.

“Our time here is real, whether the ton approves or not,” Elizabeth said. “Their opinion does not retrospectively change what happened in that tower, or between us. If society wishes to judge me for loving you, they may do so. I will not offer them an apology.”

He looked at her. Her brown, serious face was lit with the specific stubbornness he had mistaken for impertinence in Hertfordshire. He recognised it now as sheer courage.

“You are not afraid,” he said.

“I am afraid of many things, but gossip is not one of them. I have survived a shipwreck, a pirate attack, and a deserted island. Society's opinion of my virtue is not going to be the thing that breaks me.”

He laughed. The sound was real and full, breaking the tension he had been holding in his chest.

“Come swim,” she said. She stood and held out her hand. It was brown, calloused, and stained with fig juice. It was the most beautiful hand he had ever seen.

He took it.

They swam. The nakedness between them had become ordinary, yet he could not look at her without his body responding with a sudden, sharp directness.

They came out of the water and lay on the warm sand. The sun was low and gold on their skin. She turned onto her side and looked at him. Her gaze held a quality he immediately recognised—the particular look that preceded her closing the distance between them.

“You are still planning.”

“I am not.”

“Your jaw tightens along the hinge when you are composing correspondence in your head. I have been studying your expressions for five weeks, Fitzwilliam. I am an authority.”

She placed her hand flat and warm against his bare chest, a deliberate pressure over his sternum. His heartbeat thudded against her palm.

“Stay here,” she said. “Stay on this beach, in this afternoon, with me. Do not go to England. Do not go to your solicitor. Stay.”

“I am here.”

“Prove it.”

She kissed him slowly. Her mouth was salt-warm, and the deep kiss scattered the remains of his last list into the wind.

His hand moved to her hip, tracing the curve of her waist. The sand was warm beneath her skin. She pressed closer, sliding her knee over his hip. She felt his immediate response, and her mouth curved into a smile against his.

“That is not a legal plan,” she said.

“That is not a legal plan.”

She pushed him onto his back and straddled him, her knees sinking into the warm sand. Her hair fell around her face. The peculiar intimacy of her gaze undid the last of his formal defences without her ever needing to raise her voice.

She took him in hand, and his breath caught. Her grip was completely assured now, quite without the uncertainty of their first night. Her thumb traced the length of him with a slow deliberateness that undid him.

She sank onto him in a slow, controlled descent. Her hands braced on his chest, and her eyes held his. The warmth of her and the tight grip of her body around him made her take a sharp breath. The whole weight of the afternoon collapsed into the single point where their bodies joined.

She moved, rolling her hips in an unhurried, deliberate rhythm. His hands gripped her waist, following her lead and surrendering wholly to her pace.

“Stay here,” she said again, her voice lower and rougher. “Stay.”

“I am here. I am here, Elizabeth.”

He found her sensitive peak with his thumb. He applied the steady, circling pressure she responded to, and her rhythm immediately faltered. Her breath broke, and her hands pressed harder on his chest. Her head fell back, exposing the long line of her throat to the sun. The fierce, private expression on her face was the most honest thing he had ever seen.

She came with a low, shuddering cry that carried across the empty beach. Her body clenched around him in tight waves, pulling him immediately after her. His hips drove up from the sand as he gripped her waist. The release was sharp and sudden. He pressed his face to the inside of her wrist, muffling his own ragged groan against her skin.

They remained intertwined on the warm sand as the sun dropped lower. Their breathing slowed in tandem. She folded heavily onto his chest, wholly spent. His hand rested in her hair, and her breath was warm on his neck.

England could wait.

That night, by the fire, she leaned against his chest. He held her close, and he did not make lists.

He thought, instead, about the particular weight of her against him, and the salt smell of her hair. He listened to the sound of her breathing as it slowed towards sleep. The reality of this woman, in this place, would never come again, which made it the only night that mattered.

The lists would return. The planning was constitutional, bred into him by twenty years of unyielding responsibility. One afternoon on a beach was not going to cure a lifetime of managing his world. But the afternoon had introduced a pause, and that quiet space belonged wholly to her.

“Fitzwilliam,” she said, almost asleep.

“Yes.”

“If you are composing a letter to your solicitor in your head, I will know, and the consequences will be severe.”

“I am not composing a letter.”

“What are you thinking about?”

“The particular way your hair smells after swimming.”

She was quiet for a moment. Then she laughed, a soft, sleepy sound against his chest. “That is an acceptable thought.”

“Thank you.”

“You are welcome. Good night.”

“Good night.”

She slept, and he held her as the fire burned down. For one night, the lists did not come. He slept instead, deciding it was a far better use of his hours.

Chapter Twenty-Three

The storm approached from the south as if bearing a personal grudge.

Elizabeth had been observing the sky since midday. Clouds gathered on the horizon with the disciplined precision of an army lining up. By late afternoon, these ranks had moved overhead. The wind changed from the warm, herb-scented breeze she was used to into something sharper and colder. It brought the scent of rain, along with a metallic sharpness suggesting that when the rain came, it would be intense and not gentle.

“We should secure the tower,” she said.

They secured the tower by tying down the sailcloth curtain, wrapping dried figs in cloth, and placing them on the highest shelf. They brought the firewood inside and covered the cistern with a flat stone they had specifically cut for that purpose. Moving efficiently, having endured three previous storms—each less intense than the last—the tower had proven its resilience. Their preparations were methodical and routine.

The storm was not routine.

The first gust took the sailcloth curtain completely off the wall. It did not happen gradually; there was no polite negotiation of wind against rope. It was a single, violent act. The ropes snapped, and the fabric tore free, vanishing instantly into the dark.

The rain continued, but it was not the gentle, steady rain of earlier storms; instead, it came as a horizontal onslaught. The wind pierced every crack and gap in the tower's walls, exploiting them with the relentless precision of a creditor. The fire was extinguished within the first ten minutes. The smoke hissed and vanished, leaving the lower room engulfed in complete, unforgiving darkness.

Elizabeth and Darcy pressed themselves against the wall, avoiding the archway, the main entry for rain and wind. The Mediterranean storm seemed intent on unleashing its complete, unrestrained fury on their small island.

“This is worse,” Elizabeth said.

“Yes.”

“Significantly worse.”

“This is no ordinary squall,” Darcy said.

The wind screamed through the tower's upper level. She had no comparison for the terrible sound; the air was being violently compressed through the stone channels, producing a deafening, continuous roar.

There was a sharp, percussive crack from above, followed by a terrible grinding sound. She felt the vibration through the stone wall against her back before she fully registered the noise. She looked up, though the dark was quite impenetrable. Darcy's arm tightened around her shoulders as they waited for the roof to give way.

The northeast section of the roof—the part they had repaired with her flat stones—suddenly gave way. It was not the entire roof, perhaps only a quarter of it. The stones and the wooden beams beneath them collapsed into the upper level with a tremendous crash, sending a cloud of dust and sharp fragments hurtling down the stairway.

“Move,” Darcy commanded. He pulled her violently sideways along the wall, dragging her away from the stairway and into the farthest corner. He kept his arm tight around her as her feet scrambled for purchase on the wet flagstones. They wedged themselves into the corner. The stones held, and the collapse did not continue.

The rain poured through the new gap. She could hear it hitting the upper floor, drumming violently against the flagstones. The water would soon find the stairway and begin pouring down upon them. They had perhaps twenty minutes before the lower room entirely flooded.

“The overhang,” she said. “The rock overhang above the spring.”

They fled the tower and ran directly into the storm. The driving rain hit them with bruising force. The path down the hill had become a rapid stream, the water washing over rocks and turning the soil into treacherous mud. Elizabeth's bare feet slipped twice, and only Darcy's desperate grip on her arm kept her upright.

The rock overhang was hardly a shelter. It was merely a ledge of stone jutting from the hillside above the spring. It created a cramped space, perhaps six feet deep and three feet high. The ground beneath it was relatively dry, protected from the direct downpour, though the wind-driven spray and the bitter cold easily found them. The utter darkness made both the wet and the cold far harder to bear.

They huddled beneath the overhang, her back against the rock while his arms encircled her tightly. The confined position was very uncomfortable; their bodies felt warm where they touched but remained freezing elsewhere. Above, the storm continued to rage relentlessly, fueled by days of escalating fury.

The storm lasted for three hours at its utmost fury before moderating into a steady, heavy rain that continued through the night. For three hours, the wind and water shrieked around them, violently rearranging the island without the slightest regard for the tower, the herb garden, or the two people huddled beneath a rock.

Sometime during the third hour, Darcy went to check the tower.

“Stay here,” he said.

“Do not tell me to stay here.”

“Elizabeth, the path is flooded and the visibility is nonexistent. One of us should remain in a known safe location while the other assesses the damage.”

“Then I will assess and you will remain.”

“You are not wearing shoes.”

“I have not worn shoes in three weeks.”

“The path will be covered in broken stone and debris. We have no surgeon and no clean bandages. If you cut your foot in the dark, an infection would be deadly.”

She angrily conceded the point. She was far too cold and wet to argue the matter gracefully.

He left her in the dark. She listened to his footsteps sloshing on the muddy path until they grew faint. Then, she was left to listen only to the rain, the wind, and the sound of her own rapid breathing. Her pulse was racing towards sheer panic, and she forced herself to breathe slowly, demanding composure.

He was gone for twenty minutes. They were the longest twenty minutes she had experienced on the island, far worse than the agony of watching the ship pass, or the terror of the raft sinking. Those events had contained action; these twenty minutes contained nothing but blind, helpless waiting in the dark.

Finally, he returned. She heard him before she saw him; his breathing was terribly laboured, and his footsteps dragged heavily on the wet ground. When he crouched beneath the overhang, she could barely make out the shape of his face in the dark, but she instantly knew something was wrong.

“The tower is intact,” he said. “The upper level lost a section of roof. The lower room is flooded but the walls held.”

“You are hurt.”

“A broken branch on the path. I could not see it in the dark.”

“Where?”

“My side. The same side.”

Her hands blindly searched for him in the dark. His shirt was wet and torn. Beneath the fabric, her fingers found his skin, and traced along the familiar scar on his ribs. Just below it, she felt a new, jagged wound. It was covered in a warm wetness that was quite distinct from the rain.

“How bad?”

“I do not know. It is bleeding. The bleeding is steady but not heavy.”

“Lie down.”

He lay down upon the cold ground beneath the overhang, and she knelt beside him. Her hands explored the wound in the dark with desperate, systematic attention. She had no medical training, no supplies, and no light. She tore a long strip of fabric from the ruined hem of her dress without a second thought.

She pressed the wadded cloth hard against the wound. He hissed sharply. It was the sound of a man attempting to suppress his agony and failing. The failure was strangely reassuring; silence would have meant he was unconscious.

“Hold this,” she said. She placed his hand over the cloth, pressing. “Pressure. Do not release it.”

“I know how to apply pressure to a wound.”

“Then apply it and be quiet.”

She tore another strip of fabric, wadded it, and layered it directly on top of the first. Using a much longer strip, she bound the makeshift bandage tightly around his torso. She tied it as securely as she could manage in the pitch black with her wet, shaking hands. She refused to name the rising terror in her chest.

The fever started before dawn.

She knew because his skin, which had been cold and clammy for hours, became intensely hot. It was the dry, radiating heat of a body fighting a severe infection. The battle was visible in the violent shaking that began in his shoulders and spread to his limbs, until she could no longer hold him still.

“Fitzwilliam.”

His eyes were open, but they were not seeing her. His gaze was turned wholly inward, lost to whatever delusions the fever had constructed. He was somewhere she could not follow.

“Fitzwilliam. Look at me.”

He looked at her. He found a sudden moment of clarity, his eyes focusing on her face in the grey pre-dawn light that had finally penetrated the overhang.

“Elizabeth.” His voice was rough, scraped. “The tower.”

“The tower can wait. You cannot.”

“The fire.”

There is no fire; the previous one drowned. Everything is soaked. I will start a new fire once the rain ceases.

“The rain.”

“Is still happening. Be quiet.”

She cradled his head in her lap. The ground was cold and damp, and her back ached from sitting in such a cramped position, but she paid no attention to her discomfort. Her only concern was the scorching heat emanating from his body and the intense shaking of his limbs. She couldn't see the wound clearly or clean it properly, so all she could do was apply pressure with a cloth and maintain a fierce, focused determination not to let him die.

She talked to him continuously. Talking would not cure the fever, but allowing silence felt like a surrender, and she absolutely refused to surrender to a broken branch on a muddy path.

She shared with him details about Longbourn. She mentioned the garden, which her mother cared for more than anything else in her life. She described the roses that blossomed every June, demanding relentless, tiring care, only to wither by August. She also talked about the lavender hedge her father planted in the year she was born. Over twenty-one years, it grew into a dense, fragrant border that attracted swarms of bees, often prompting the cook's seasonal complaints.

“There is a bench,” she murmured, “under the oak tree at the back of the garden. My father put it there when I was small. He never said it was for me, but it was. It is the only bench in the garden that cannot be seen from the house. My father understood that I needed a place to read unobserved.”

Darcy's shaking had not stopped, but his eyes were fixed upon her face. They were slightly clearer, and she intended to keep him anchored to that clarity.

“I read there every afternoon when the weather permitted,” she said. “I took books from my father's library without asking. He never once mentioned it, though he must have noticed, for I was never subtle. I read novels, poetry, and sermons. My father's library did not discriminate between the edifying and the entertaining, and neither did I.”

His hand found hers. The grip was terribly weak. He was marshalling his strength merely to hold her fingers. The weakness frightened her more than the blood. Since the shipwreck, his hands had been strong; they had held her, lifted her, and touched her with a complete certainty. That certainty was quite absent now.

“The bench needs painting,” she said, her voice shaking slightly. “It has needed painting for three years. My mother mentions it, and my father agrees, yet nobody ever paints it. Leaving it peeling has become its own kind of tradition, much like the bees in the kitchen, and my mother's annual conviction that the hedgerow requires replanting.”

He almost smiled. The muscles of his face tightened, but he lacked the strength to finish the expression. Still, it was proof; he was in there, fighting through the fever and the pain to listen to her talk about a peeling bench in Hertfordshire.

The rain continued. Morning arrived, grey, wet, and cold. The temperature had dropped significantly with the storm, leaving them shivering in their damp clothes.

She did not leave him. She desperately needed water, and the spring was only ten feet away, but those ten feet might as well have been ten miles. She absolutely refused to release his head from her lap.

She waited for hours. Sometime past midday, the rain finally eased, thinning from a violent assault to a light drizzle. When the rain stopped entirely, she moved fast. She settled his head on the ground as gently as she could, sprinted to the spring, filled their coconut shell cup, and hurried back.

She lifted his head and pressed the cup to his lips. He drank clumsily, the water running down his chin. The instinct to drink was an enormous relief; it meant the fever had not completely overwhelmed his senses.

The fever broke in the evening.

She knew the exact moment, because the violent shaking finally stopped. The sustained tremors that had wracked his body for twelve hours simply ceased. The stillness was so sudden and complete that she placed her trembling hand flat on his chest in sheer panic. He was still breathing. His breaths were slow and deep; it was the sleep of a man who had fought a terrible battle and survived.

His eyes opened. Clear. Present. Finding her face.

“Elizabeth.”

“I am here.”

“How long?”

“Since last night. Twelve hours, approximately. I was not counting with precision; I was wholly occupied with keeping you breathing.”

He reached for her hand. His grip was far stronger than it had been that morning.

“You talked about Longbourn,” he said.

“You heard.”

“The bench. The garden. Your mother's roses.”

“My mother's roses that die every August, yes. I was running out of subjects. I had just moved on to detailing the poultry yard.”

He laughed. It was weak and barely audible, closer to a heavy exhalation, but it was a genuine laugh.

She did not cry. She had suppressed her tears for twelve hours through sheer force of will, and her will was iron. She was Elizabeth Bennet, and her determination had always been sufficient.

The iron held for ten seconds after he laughed. And then, it shattered.

She began to weep. It was not the quiet, measured crying she had exhibited after the ship passed. It was hard, ragged, and wholly uncontrolled. She had spent twelve hours holding his head, refusing to consider the possibility that he might die. The tears were born of great relief, sheer fury, and a desperate, overwhelming love.

“You stupid, reckless man,” she gasped between sobs. “You went to check a tower in the dark because you are incapable of relinquishing control! The situation nearly killed you. I have spent the night huddled under a rock, talking about my mother's roses, terrified that you were going to die in my arms.”

“I am sorry.”

“You are not sorry! You would do it again. You would check the tower again because you view it as your responsibility. You do not know how to leave a duty unchecked, even when checking it might kill you. That stubbornness is what I love most about you, and what I hate most about you, and I am absolutely furious.”

“I can see that.”

“Do not laugh at me.”

“I am not laughing. I am smiling, which is different. The smile is involuntary. You are crying and calling me stupid, but I am alive, and you are here, and I cannot control my relief.”

She wiped her face with the back of her hand. Her tears were subsiding, and her fury was spending itself, leaving behind a great exhaustion. She looked down at him. His face was pale and drawn, but his eyes were clear. He looked up at her with complete, unshielded devotion.

“Do not ever do that again,” she said.

“I will endeavour.”

“You will not endeavour. You will promise me. You will swear to me that you will not die on this island.”

“I swear it.”

“Good.” She wiped her face again. “Now drink more water and be quiet. Let me think about what to do next. The tower is damaged, the fire is out, and you are injured. I am in charge now, and my orders are not negotiable.”

He drank the water. He was quiet. She thought.

The rain had stopped. The evening light was grey and soft, and the air smelled cleanly of wet stone and crushed herbs. Elizabeth sat under the rock overhang with the man she had kept alive, and she began to plan.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Darcy had never been nursed before. He had been tended, certainly, by paid professionals with clean linen and laudanum, who approached their duties with quiet, detached efficiency. He had been looked after by Mrs Reynolds after a fall from a horse at sixteen, and by a ship's surgeon after a bout of seasickness on his first Channel crossing. A London physician had overseen his care during the influenza that took Pemberley's housekeeper and two footmen. That illness had left Darcy with a cough that lasted six weeks, and a renewed appreciation for his own mortality.

None of those people had truly nursed him. Elizabeth nursed him.

She directed his recovery the way she directed the island: thoroughly, and without consultation. Her competence was so considerable that objecting to it would have required far more energy than he possessed. She changed his bandage twice a day using strips torn from salvaged sailcloth. She boiled water at the spring, letting it cool to lukewarm before cleaning the wound. Her physical gentleness wholly contradicted the firmness of her instructions, which were delivered strictly as commands rather than requests.

“Sit up,” she would say. “Drink this. Do not move. I said do not move, Fitzwilliam; the concept is not complex.”

She fed him. She had miraculously rebuilt the fire within hours of the storm's passing. She used dry wood she had discovered in a crevice on the far side of the hill weeks ago, having quietly noted it as potential emergency fuel. That foresight was now keeping them alive.

She fed him a thin fish broth, made from the morning's catch boiled with wild thyme and the last of the dried figs. The combination was far from pleasant, but it was nutritious. She delivered it to him in the coconut cup with the firm expectation that he would drink all of it.

He drank all of it.

She had even repaired the tower. She could not manage the upper level alone, but she had swept the lower room of debris and dried the floor with salvaged cloth. She restored it to a habitable condition in a single day of unceasing work. He watched her from the pallet where she had installed him, strictly forbidden to stand up without assistance. He obeyed the instruction; he had attempted to stand on the first morning, and the resulting dizziness had sent him crashing back to the pallet, proving her point immediately.

She was magnificent. It was not a word he used loosely. He had applied it to Pemberley, to certain views from the hills in Derbyshire, and to his mother's portrait in the gallery. He had never before applied it to a person. Yet, watching Elizabeth dry fish on the rocks outside the tower was a revelation. Her torn dress was tied at the waist with rope, her hair was bound in sailcloth, and her bare feet stood firmly on the hot stone. She turned the fillets with brisk, cheerful efficiency. She was magnificent, and the word was well earned.

She had carried them both. For three days, while he lay on the pallet and his body repaired itself with maddening slowness, she managed everything. She secured the food, the fire, the water, and the tower, performing the daily maintenance of survival quite alone. She did not complain. She worked, she fed him, and she changed his bandage. In the evenings, she sat beside him and read aloud from the waterlogged Italian novel. Her pronunciation bore no resemblance to actual Italian, and her dramatic interpretation was wildly inventive. It was quite perfect.

“The hero has finally stopped proposing,” she announced on the third evening, squinting at the water-damaged pages by firelight. “Unless this is a completely different kind of proposal. My Italian does not distinguish between a proposal of marriage and a proposal of business, and the context suggests it might be both.”

“In Italian fiction, the distinction is often immaterial.”

“How reassuring. In English fiction the distinction is the entire plot. I begin to understand why Italian novels are shorter.”

He laughed. The sudden movement hurt his side terribly, but the pain was worth it. Laughing was the first thing that had felt like his true self since the fever broke. Feeling like himself was a gift she gave him with every dry observation and every badly pronounced Italian word. Her wit was a medicine no physician could have prescribed.

On the fourth day he was strong enough to walk.

She permitted it, though the permission was highly conditional. It involved particular instructions about distance, pace, and the exact circumstances under which he was to sit down immediately and not argue. The rules were delivered with the firm authority of a woman who had spent three days in sole command of a household, and had no intention of relinquishing it simply because the other occupant could now stand.

They walked slowly to the cove. His legs were far weaker than he wanted them to be. It was a humiliation he bore with enforced patience; Elizabeth had ordered him not to be stupid about his limitations. She watched him constantly, with the particular, devoted attention of someone who had almost lost him, and refused to look away again.

The cove was fundamentally changed. The storm had rearranged the sand, piling it higher on the south side and scooping it away from the north. There was new debris on the waterline: wood, rope, and pieces of what might have been a barrel. The sea had delivered wreckage once again. Elizabeth was already assessing the debris with the acquisitive eye of a woman who wasted nothing whatsoever.

“Planks,” she said. “Good ones. And rope. The tower's upper level needs a new framework before we can re-lay the stones. These will do.”

“You are planning repairs.”

“I am planning repairs.”

“The repairs will require lifting,” Darcy pointed out. “The lifting will require two people.”

“The lifting will require two people when both are capable of it, which you are currently not. The lifting will wait. The planning, however, does not need to wait. I can plan while you convalesce, and the scheme will be ready when you are.”

He sat heavily on the sand. She had directed him to sit, and he obeyed. Over the past three days, her preferences had acquired the full force of natural law.

He watched her sort the debris. She was efficient and systematic, grouping pieces by material, size, and potential use. She placed planks in one pile, rope in another, and scraps of canvas in a third. She worked with a focused, purposeful energy. She was visibly thinner than she had been five weeks ago, but she was stronger than she had ever been.

“Elizabeth.”

She looked up from a length of rope she was coiling. Her intent, absorbed expression softened the moment her eyes found his.

“You kept me alive,” he said.

“You kept yourself alive. The fever broke on its own. I merely provided commentary.”

“You provided twelve hours of commentary about a bench in Hertfordshire while holding my head in your lap in the rain. That is not merely commentary. That is a sustained act of care that I am not certain I could have matched.”

“You would have matched it. You would have talked about Pemberley, which has considerably more material than Longbourn. You could have talked for days about the grounds alone.”

“I would have talked about you.”

She went completely still, pausing her work on the rope. Her dark, steady eyes rested on his face. He had spent five weeks learning the precise geography of her expressions.

“That would have been a poor approach,” she said. “You would have run out of material in an hour.”

“I would not have run out of material in a lifetime.”

“Fitzwilliam.”

“It is true. I would have talked about the way you hum while you work. I would have detailed the way you sleep with your fist tucked under your chin. I would have recounted how you stood in a stone tower, a mere two months after refusing me, and bravely kissed me. I would not have run out.”

She looked at the rope in her hands, and then back at him. She set the rope down with deliberate care. She was entirely finished with sorting debris, and finished pretending that it was what she wanted to be doing.

She crossed the sand and sat beside him, pressing her shoulder firmly against his.

“I was terribly afraid during the fever,” she confessed quietly. “I was afraid in a way I have not been since the shipwreck. The shipwreck was rapid chaos, but the fever was so agonisingly slow. I sat with you for twelve hours, terrified for every one of them. I talked because it was the only weapon I had against the silence. Giving into the silence felt like giving up, and I will never give up on you.”

He put his arm around her. The sudden movement pulled painfully at his side, but he dismissed the agony. He needed to hold her. The great need wholly overrode the wound, his weakness, and her strict instructions to avoid unnecessary movement.

She leaned into him, resting her head on his shoulder and her hand on his chest. The afternoon sun was warm on the sand, and the sea washed quietly against the shore. The island held them exactly as it had since the beginning—indifferent, wild, and quite present.

“I heard you,” he said softly. “During the fever, I heard your voice. I did not always understand the words, but your voice was a thread in the dark. I followed that thread back.”

“From where?”

“From wherever the fever took me. I do not remember it clearly. It was dark and confused, and I felt as though I was very far from everything. But your voice was a constant anchor, and I followed it.”

“You followed my voice out of a fever.”

“I followed your voice out of everything. I have been following you since Hertfordshire. My methods have not always been elegant, and my pursuit was occasionally marred by a severe lack of understanding, but my direction has always been consistent.”

She laughed warmly against his shoulder. “You have been following me since Hertfordshire, and yet you managed to detour to Kent, then to London, then to a ship, and finally to a pirate attack before arriving at this island. Your pursuit was exceedingly indirect.”

“The following was circuitous. The destination was never in doubt.”

That night, in the tower, on the pallet, she touched him with the particular, careful attention of a woman touching something she had almost lost.

She touched his face first. Her fingertips traced his forehead, his temples, and the rough line of his jaw. Her fingers lingered on his mouth, tracing his lower lip — a deep physical verification that he was real, warm, and finally safe.

She moved to his neck, resting her fingers gently against his pulse point. She felt the steady beat with a diagnostic care. She had spent twelve hours terrified that the pulse would stop, and she was not yet ready to trust that her vigil was over.

She pressed her palm flat over his heart. She left her hand there for a long time, feeling the strong, steady rhythm. She had slept against his chest for weeks; the rhythm was wholly known to her, and that familiarity was her ultimate reassurance.

She kissed him gently, then held still, her mouth barely touching his. His hand came to her face.

“Tell me if it hurts,” she whispered.

“It does not hurt.”

“You are lying.”

“It hurts far less than not touching you would hurt,” he replied.

She kissed his chest over his heart. She trailed her mouth slowly downward, following the line of hair she had learnt on other nights. She kissed the skin just above the bandage on his side — her lips an act of gratitude against the healing wound.

He touched her face, brushing his thumb across her lower lip. His touch was exceedingly light, born of restraint rather than weakness. He was being exceedingly careful with both of them. Tonight required a different temper entirely.

She undressed slowly. She removed her dress—a routine gesture that had become beautifully ordinary.

She undressed him with exquisite care. She lifted his shirt over his head, taking great pains to avoid the bandage on his side. She drew his trousers down his legs. His body was visibly thinner than it had been before the storm, the bones of his hips sharper. The thinness was stark evidence of what the fever had taken.

She lay down beside him, pressing the full length of her bare skin against his. The contact provided the particular, ancient comfort of warmth and shared breath—a comfort that wholly preceded language.

“I want you,” she said. “Gently.”

“Yes.”

She drew his arm around her, and he shifted onto his uninjured side to face her. They lay together in the firelight, the full length of their bodies aligned. It was nothing like the urgent desperation of the night after the ship passed. Tonight, she did not need oblivion; she needed the precise, sensory proof that he was alive, whole, and hers.

She lifted her thigh over his hip, and he entered her slowly—a careful, deliberate joining, a question asked in the dark and answered without hesitation. He moved with measured patience, each slow stroke drawn from the restraint of a man attending to two things at once: his desire and her wellbeing, the distinction between them long since collapsed.

His eyes remained open, watching her face as she watched his. The mutual, steady gaze, the language they had built over weeks of island mornings and firelit evenings, deepened the slow rhythm into something that felt less like desire and more like necessity.

She felt the deep warmth and fullness of him. The sensation was not new, but it felt wholly renewed. It was a miraculous rediscovery after three days of terrible fear, making it feel like its own kind of first time.

The pleasure built slowly. It was a gradual gathering of warmth that spread outward through her hips in slow, lapping waves. She let the tension accumulate layer by layer, perfectly matching the patient rhythm of the night.

He reached between them. His thumb found her sensitive peak with the perfect accuracy of their shared history. His pressure was exceedingly gentle. It provoked a deep, quiet wanting within her that was far closer to essential need than mere desire.

She came with a long, rolling release that moved through her in gentle waves. Her body shuddered against his. Her breath caught, releasing in a soft sigh that formed his name. She spoke it deliberately, offering the sound of his name in her voice as a gift.

He followed her quietly. His body tightened against hers, and his hands gripped her hips with a sudden strength that surprised them both. The strength had been absent for days, and its return was a glorious sign of his recovery. He released his seed deep inside her with a muffled groan, the private conclusion to a terrifying week.

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.

“I am not changing the rules,” he countered. “I am merely proposing a fairer method of measurement.”

“You are proposing it because the existing method does not favour you.”

“I am attempting to improve the game, Elizabeth.”

“The game requires no improvement,” she said brightly. “I counted the fish. I had more fish. The game worked perfectly.”

One corner of his mouth rose higher than the other. It was a smile he had probably never performed in a drawing room, and she intended to provoke it at least once a day for the rest of her life.

She was going to marry this man. She would live in his house, sit across from him at a proper table, and eat food that was not fish. She would have his children. The thought arrived suddenly—a child with his eyes and her mouth—and it was so vivid and reckless that she forced herself to look away and return to the fishing.

She planted the garden in the afternoon.

It was not a garden in any sense that Longbourn's gardener would have recognised. It was merely a patch of earth beside the tower's south wall. She had cleared it of stones and softened the soil with ash from the fire, enriching it with the remains of fig skins and fish bones she had been saving.

She transplanted wild herbs from the hillside. She planted rosemary, which grew everywhere, alongside hardy thyme and oregano.

She dug with a flat stone, pressing the roots deep into the loosened soil with her fingers. The herbs were real, and the soil was real. The engagement, Pemberley, and children—those were concepts she could not yet truly touch.

She was planting a garden she might never harvest. Rescue might come tomorrow and render it irrelevant, or rescue might not come at all.

Faith was putting rosemary in the ground without knowing who would eat it.

She watered the rosemary and the thyme from the cistern. The herbs stood in the dark soil, looking small but decidedly alive.

Darcy appeared beside her. He had descended from the tower, which meant his work on the fire pit was quite finished.

“A garden,” he said.

“A garden.”

He knelt beside her. His hands moved to the soil with a familiarity that surprised her, though it should not have; he was the master of ten thousand acres in Derbyshire.

He pressed the earth around the thyme with his thumbs. It was the firm, careful pressure of a man who had watched the process done correctly and remembered the exact method.

“My mother had a kitchen garden,” he said. “At Pemberley. Behind the south wing, where the wall holds the warmth. She grew herbs and lettuces and strawberries. After she died, the gardener maintained it for a year, then converted it to ornamentals. I did not object. I should have.”

“You were young.”

“I was twelve. Young enough to be forgiven for not objecting, old enough to have noticed what was lost.”

She looked at the small, wind-bitten herbs, rooted in island soil that was more rock than earth. She looked at Darcy kneeling beside her, with dirt on his hands and the scar visible through his open shirt. When he spoke of his mother, his expression carried an open, quiet grief.

“We will plant a kitchen garden at Pemberley,” she said.

The we was wholly deliberate. She was making real plans that included Pemberley and a kitchen garden behind the south wing. Such planning required immense faith—a luxury a sensible woman from Hertfordshire could ill afford on a deserted island.

She made the plans anyway. Sensible women from Hertfordshire had not survived pirates, shipwrecks, and fevers. She was no longer that woman.

The cove in the late afternoon was warm, private, and washed in gold. The rocks curved inward, and the sand held the day's heat. The brilliant light turned the water into a startling, vivid blue.

They swam. His body was noticeably thinner from the fever; she could clearly see the ribs she had pressed her ear against during the worst night. But the water invigorated him. He dove under and surfaced with his hair streaming, his face alive with sheer pleasure.

She floated on her back beneath a depthless, cloudless sky. She knew she would genuinely miss this vivid blue when they returned to the pale, grey skies of England.

She was going to miss the sky, the water, and the very version of herself that this island had produced. She had become a woman who caught fish, planted gardens, and loved a man without anyone's permission.

She was, however, not going to miss the food.

Darcy surfaced closely beside her, treading water as the current gently pushed them together.

“I have finished the signal fire,” he said.

“I gathered.”

“It is the best we can build with available materials. The stone pit will hold coals for eight hours. The green wood will produce a smoke column visible from three miles in clear weather. We can maintain it in shifts.”

“You are reporting to me as though I am your governess,” she teased.

“You have governed my every action for the past week,” he replied. “I am merely accustomed to following your orders.”

She laughed, splashing backward into the water. She came up coughing and laughing simultaneously, wholly abandoning her dignity. He watched her with an expression that was exceedingly warm, and dangerously close to desire.

She swam to him, closing the distance between them. She rested her hands on his shoulders, her legs brushing against his beneath the water.

“We are engaged,” she said.

“We are.”

“And you have built me a signal fire.”

“I have.”

“Is the signal fire my engagement present?” she asked. “Because in England, the convention is a ring. The ring is typically made of gold, rather than whatever coarse mineral you have been stacking on the tower.”

“I will get you a ring in England.”

“I do not want a ring in England. I want a ring on this island. This is where you asked, and this is where I accepted. We should mark the occasion with whatever is available.”

He looked at her. There was water on his face and in his eyelashes, the drops catching the gold light. His unguarded expression made her chest tight, and her resolve to be witty completely faltered.

He suddenly dove beneath the surface. She treaded water and waited. He quickly surfaced with his hand closed, water streaming from his hair. He looked quite serious.

He opened his hand to reveal a small, spiralled shell. Its pale pink interior caught the light. It was not a ring, and it was not gold; it was merely a shell from the bottom of the cove.

“It is a shell from the floor of an unmapped cove,” he said softly. “It is not valuable, it is not gold, and it does not satisfy the conventions of any society we belong to.”

“It is perfect,” she said.

She took it. It was small in her palm, and warm from his hand. She closed her fingers tightly around it. There was no clergyman, no church, and no witnesses except the sea.

She kissed him. His hands found her waist under the water, drawing her firmly against him.

The kiss deepened. His hands slid to her hips as her legs wrapped around him. She could feel his immediate response against her through the wet fabric. For the first time on the island, their desire was neither desperate nor frantic; it was wholly joyful.

“Here,” she whispered against his mouth. “In the water.”

“The water is highly impractical,” he murmured.

“I am not interested in being practical.”

“The mechanics of it will be difficult.”

“Fitzwilliam, I have survived a pirate attack, a shipwreck, and your terrible fever. I am not intimidated by the water.”

He laughed against her mouth. She felt it vibrate through his chest and into her ribs.

They moved to the shallows where the water was waist-deep, and the sand was firm beneath his feet. She kept her legs around his waist and her arms around his neck. The water held her weight, freeing her to press fully against him.

He pulled her wet chemise over her head. She was bare in the water, the warm current moving against her skin. His hands found her breasts, his thumbs applying a particular, exquisite pressure. He brought a grave, formal attention to her body that set her blood alight.

She freed him from his trousers underwater. The water made her touch slick and frictionless as she stroked him. His hips moved involuntarily against her hand, and he made a quiet, rough sound against her neck.

“Now,” she said.

She lowered herself onto him in the water. The depth was sudden and immediate. She gasped loudly; there were no stone walls to muffle the sound, and no audience but the rocks and the sky.

She moved against him. The water buoyed her, allowing her to rock her hips in a slow, exceedingly deep rhythm. His hands rested firmly on her hips. His mouth pressed against her neck, just below her ear. The depth and the warmth of the water built a rising tension in her belly, tightening her fingers on his shoulders.

“Louder,” he said against her ear. “There is no one to hear.”

She had not expected that from him. His quiet encouragement unlocked the last of her Hertfordshire restraint—the rigid instruction that noise was improper, and pleasure must be wholly silent.

She abandoned the slow rhythm for something fast and desperate. Her cries carried openly over the water, bouncing off the cove's rocks.

He thrust up into her, sending small waves radiating from their bodies. His hips drove upward while she drove downward. The pleasure arrived with a sudden, crashing force that bent her forward against his shoulder. She cried out his name into the open air.

He gripped her hips tightly. His formidable control finally cracked on a devastatingly deep thrust. He groaned against her shoulder, shuddering violently as he spilled his seed into her.

They lay upon the sand afterward. The late sun slowly dried the saltwater from their bare skin. She picked up the shell from where she had carefully placed it. The interior glowed pink and gold in the fading light.

For the first time in weeks, she was not bracing for loss. She noticed the absence of her anxiety by the sudden, wonderful lightness in her chest.

She had been afraid since the pirate ship. She had feared they would die, and then feared they would not be rescued. More recently, she had feared that the deep happiness she had built with Darcy would not survive their return to England. She had managed that terror quietly and productively, burying it beneath a mountain of daily labour.

She was no longer afraid. The fear had finally stopped, replaced by a complete, peaceful certainty.

She was going to marry Fitzwilliam Darcy, and she would live at Pemberley. She would plant a kitchen garden behind the south wing, and they would have children who would run upon the very grounds Darcy had known as a boy.

Jane would visit. She would sit in the Pemberley garden and drink tea. Bingley would return to her; Darcy had promised to tell him the truth in person, and Jane would finally be happy.

Her happiness was no longer fragile. The roots had firmly taken.

“We should light the fire,” she said.

Darcy turned his head on the sand. His face was relaxed in a way she suspected it had not been since long before they met. He looked much younger, stripped of the heavy responsibilities of Pemberley.

“We should,” he agreed.

“Your masterwork awaits,” she teased gently. “The permanent, green-wood signal fire that you spent all morning building, while explicitly forbidden to stand.”

“It is ready to light.”

“Then we should light it.”

Neither of them moved. The sand was wonderfully warm, and the effort of standing felt quite beyond them.

“In a moment,” she said.

“In a moment,” he agreed.

The sun slowly descended. The light shifted from gold to a deep amber, signalling the arrival of evening.

She stood and brushed the sand from her body. It was a process that was never fully successful, but she had long ago ceased to care.

They climbed the hill together. She knew the path wholly by memory now; every rock and root was as familiar to her as the road from Longbourn to Meryton.

The fire pit was exceptionally well-built. It was a tight stone circle, its gaps packed securely with mud and gravel. The green juniper branches were stacked neatly beside it, covered with a flat stone to protect them from the dew. His thorough competence was visible in every stone; he had done the job properly, because it was the only way Fitzwilliam Darcy knew how to work.

She lit the fire using the tinderbox. The flint and steel had been the difference between life and death. She was now privately certain she could light a fire faster than any man in Hertfordshire.

The kindling caught. She fed it carefully with small sticks, and then larger pieces of wreckage. The fire grew steady and hot. It had to last the night and hold its coals, so it would be ready in the morning for the green wood. The resulting white smoke would signal any passing ship, and perhaps bring a crew to their shores.

She laid the first green juniper branch on the flames. The sap hissed loudly, and the smoke rose thick and white in the still evening air. It formed a stark column against the darkening sky. She prayed it would be visible from the sea.

Darcy stood closely beside her. His hand found hers in the dark. It was the oldest gesture between them, born in the pitch black of the pirate ship's hold.

They watched the smoke rise, a brilliant white column climbing steadily into the dark.

“We will keep it burning,” she said.

“In shifts. I will take the first watch. You will take the morning.”

“Agreed.”

The sun slipped wholly below the horizon. The new signal fire burned against the night sky, small, bright, and exceedingly stubborn.

The shell was safe in her pocket. She traced its smooth spiral through the fabric.

The coals banked hot and red. The stars came out over the Mediterranean, and the white smoke rose steadily into the dark.

She was certain of very little on this island, but she was certain of one thing: they would keep the fire burning. The smoke would rise again in the morning, and every morning after, until rescue finally came. They had built a life together, and they were not going to stop.

Chapter Twenty-Six

The sail appeared during Elizabeth's watch.

Darcy was properly asleep for the first time since the fever. It was a heavy, exhausted slumber that pinned him to his pallet. It did not release him for dawn, or light, or even the distant sound of Elizabeth shouting his name from the top of the tower.

He was awake by the second shout. By the third, he was on his feet. By the fourth, he was climbing the stone steps to the upper platform with terrifying speed. Elizabeth did not shout without cause, and the cause was immediately visible the moment he cleared the last step: a white rectangle on the eastern horizon, sharp against the morning blue.

A sail.

He had seen sails before. Over six weeks, six ships had appeared on the horizon and vanished again without stopping. He had watched them come and go with Elizabeth standing tightly beside him. He had felt her hand grip his when the ships passed, and slowly loosen when they disappeared. The loosening was an agony.

This sail was different. This sail was close.

Elizabeth was frantically feeding green juniper branches onto the banked coals of the fire pit. The smoke was already rising in a thick, white column against the sky. She was working fast, her face set in concentration.

“How close is it?” he demanded.

“Two miles. Perhaps less. It is moving northwest, but it altered course three minutes ago.”

“Toward us?”

“I cannot tell yet.” She fed another branch onto the fire, thickening the smoke. “But a ship does not change its heading without cause.”

He went to the edge of the platform. The ship was clearly a two-masted merchant vessel, riding low in the water under a heavy cargo. A trading captain with a strict schedule and a destination would have no interest in investigating an uncharted island unless the distress signal was massive.

They needed more smoke.

He fed every piece of green wood they had onto the fire. The white column doubled in size, climbing high into the air before the wind finally caught it and bent it eastward.

Elizabeth stood beside him. She had taken the largest piece of sailcloth from the tower's lower room, and was waving it over her head in a slow, deliberate arc.

The ship held its northwest course. He watched the angle of the hull and the set of the sails, trying to gauge the captain's intentions across the distance.

The ship turned.

It turned north. The bow swung directly towards the island, the adjustment small but definite. The captain had seen the smoke, and he was investigating.

“It is turning,” Elizabeth gasped, her hands white-knuckled on the sailcloth.

“Yes,” Darcy said. “They are coming towards us.”

She kept waving, and he kept feeding the fire. The ship grew steadily larger. He could make out the dark hull against the blue water, and the individual sails.

It was soon close enough that a man on the deck with a glass could clearly see the tower, the fire, and the two desperate figures waving from the platform.

The ship dropped anchor.

Darcy heard the sound echo across the water: the distant but unmistakable rattle and splash of an anchor chain. Elizabeth finally stopped waving. She clutched the sailcloth against her chest and stared at the ship in silence. The vessel had stopped, but neither of them dared to speak until they saw a boat.

A small boat lowered from the ship's side. It carried four oars and three men.

Elizabeth abruptly sat down on the stone ledge, her legs quite giving way beneath her. She watched the boat hit the water and begin rowing steadily towards the island.

Darcy remained standing, though it took every ounce of his discipline not to collapse beside her. She was shaking violently.

The sailors reached the cove twenty minutes later. A man stood in the bow of the small boat, calling out first in Italian, and then in accented French. Upon hearing Darcy's reply, he switched to English.

“You are English?”

“We are English. We have been stranded on this island for six weeks following a shipwreck. My name is Fitzwilliam Darcy. This is my betrothed, Miss Elizabeth Bennet.”

The man in the bow stared at them. Darcy was acutely aware of what the sailor saw: a barefoot, bearded man in ruined trousers, standing beside a sunburnt woman in a torn dress. Elizabeth was gripping his hand with a force that would not release him.

“I am Matteo Ferrara, first mate of the Santa Chiara, out of Valletta. Captain Rossi sends his respects. He saw your smoke.”

“The smoke was intended for him. We are grateful.”

“You have injuries?”

“A wound that is healing. We require passage to the nearest port with British consul presence. I can pay.”

Ferrara nodded. He looked at Elizabeth, who was standing beside Darcy with her chin raised. Her fierce bearing communicated clearly that she required no pity.

“We can take you to Valletta,” Ferrara said. “Two days. Perhaps three, with the wind.”

“Valletta will do,” Elizabeth said. Her voice was steady. Her hand in Darcy's was not.

The transition from the island to the ship was a kind of violence.

It began with the boat ride. The sailors smelled strongly of tar, sweat, and cooked food. The scent of actual bread and garlic hit Darcy with a force he had not anticipated. After six weeks of fish and figs, the simple smell of baked flour was enough to make his eyes unexpectedly sting.

Elizabeth's grip on his hand tightened when they reached the ship's side. The Santa Chiara was merely a trading brig, but from the waterline, it towered over them. It was a wall of dark wood and rigging, alive with the sounds of a working vessel: men calling, ropes creaking, and a heavy brass bell. It was the entire world, arriving all at once after six weeks of silence.

He helped Elizabeth up the ladder. She climbed without hesitation, and he followed close behind. When they reached the deck, there were nearly a dozen men staring at them. It was the first time in six weeks they had been observed by strangers, and the sudden scrutiny felt exposing.

Captain Rossi was a short, broad man with a grey beard and the unhurried manner of someone who had been at sea long enough to be surprised by very little. He greeted them in English that was better than his first mate's, offered water and bread and olives, and led them to a small cabin near the stern that contained a table, two chairs, and a bunk.

“For the lady,” he said. “You, Mr Darcy, I can put in the crew's quarters, or⁠—”

“Miss Bennet is my betrothed,” Darcy said. “We are to be married upon reaching British jurisdiction. I would be grateful for whatever arrangements you consider appropriate, Captain, and I defer to your judgement in the matter.”

Rossi looked at Darcy, and then at Elizabeth. He observed the deep sun on their skin, their ruined clothes, and the way they stood within arm's reach of each other. Their proximity was an ingrained condition of survival. Rossi drew his own silent conclusions.

“I have a second cabin,” Rossi said. “It is small. It has a door.”

“Thank you, Captain.”

“The door has a lock.”

“I appreciate your thoroughness.”

Rossi almost smiled. He moved immediately to practical matters: food, water, the loan of clean clothing from the crew's stores, and their exact course to Valletta. Darcy answered his questions with automatic, grateful precision.

Darcy took charge of the arrangements. He had begun governing the situation the moment the boat reached the beach, falling back on his natural authority because the alternative was to collapse altogether. His staggering relief was too large for the deck of a trading brig.

They were rescued. Elizabeth was safe. The simple words felt wholly inadequate. Six weeks of fear, labour, and love on an unnamed island had not been simple. The rescue had finally lifted the crushing weight of uncertainty he had carried every day—a weight far heavier than the stones he had moved, or the fever that had nearly killed him.

They sat in the cabin Rossi had assigned to Elizabeth, eating bread and olives. They drank water from a tin cup rather than a coconut shell. The bread was terribly stale, the olives were far too salty, and the water tasted faintly of the barrel, but it was the best meal Darcy had ever eaten.

Elizabeth ate with a silent, focussed intensity. She finished her piece of bread, stared at the empty plate, and then looked up at him. She was attempting to smile, but her eyes were brimming with tears.

“Bread,” she whispered.

“Yes.”

“It has flour in it. And yeast. And someone baked it in an actual oven.” A tear spilled over her cheek. “I do not think I shall ever recover.”

He reached across the small table and took her hand. Her fingers laced tightly through his. They sat together in the cabin, feeling the ship move steadily beneath them. Neither spoke.

Night fell. The Santa Chiara moved steadily westward under clear skies. Darcy stood on the deck and watched the island disappear.

It vanished slowly. He watched the hill and the tower's silhouette fade into the dark mass of rock. The signal fire was still burning; he could see the faint glow of orange light on the horizon. They had not thought to put it out before leaving. It continued to burn as a beacon for no one, a stubborn habit of hope.

The light finally dimmed, and the horizon absorbed the island wholly. There was only the sea, the stars, and the sound of Elizabeth's step on the deck behind him.

He turned. She was wearing a borrowed sailor's shirt, the sleeves rolled to her elbows, the hem falling over her torn skirt. Her loose, salt-stiff hair was far lighter than it had been in England. She did not look like a gentlewoman, but she looked exactly like the woman he was going to marry.

“It is gone,” she said. She stood beside him at the railing, looking at the empty horizon where the island had been.

“Yes.”

“I expected to feel relieved. I feel something else. I have not determined what.”

“Grief,” he said. “Or something near it.”

“For an island?”

“For what we were on it. The island did not require us to be anyone other than who we were. The world will require more.”

She leaned against his shoulder. The contact had been natural on the island, but here, on a crowded ship with a perceptive captain, the intimacy was a deliberate, public choice.

“Your cabin has a door,” she said.

“It does.”

“And a lock.”

“Captain Rossi was thorough on that point.”

“I should like to see this door. And this lock. I have not encountered either in some time, and I believe I have forgotten how they operate.”

He looked at her in the lamplight. She was inviting herself to his cabin, openly defying the rules of England that were already reassembling around them.

“The operation is straightforward,” he said. “One turns the key.”

“Show me.”

The cabin was small. A narrow bunk was built against the hull, covered with a wool blanket that smelled of cedar. Darcy turned the key in the lock. The sharp slide of the bolt was a sound he had not heard in six weeks. It meant walls and privacy. It was both a gift and a loss; on the island, they had needed neither.

Elizabeth stood in the middle of the cabin. The space was perhaps six feet by eight. She could touch both walls if she extended her arms. She did not extend her arms. She looked at the bunk, the porthole, the door.

“It is very small,” she said.

“It is larger than the tower.”

“It is smaller than the beach.”

“We are not going to fit the beach in here.”

“No.” Her mouth curved. “We will have to make do.”

She kissed him. The kiss was wholly different from the ones they had shared on the island. The desire was the same, but the context had shifted. They were behind a locked door, surrounded by a crew, re-entering a world with strict, unyielding rules about what an unmarried man and woman were permitted to do.

He kissed her back, burying his hands in her freshly washed hair. Her hands went to his chest, quickly unbuttoning the borrowed shirt he was wearing.

The shirt came off. She pulled the sailor's shirt over her own head. She was bare beneath it, having lost her chemise to the island weeks ago. The sight of her in the golden lamplight, behind a locked door, was fiercely intimate in a way the open beach had never been.

On the island, her body had been a natural part of the wild landscape. Here, enclosed by walls, it was a secret once more. She was disclosing that secret to him behind a locked door, an act of trust the island had never required.

She pulled him towards the bunk and lay down on the narrow mattress; he lay beside her. The bed was barely wide enough for one person, forcing them flush against each other.

“This mattress,” she breathed. “Fitzwilliam, this mattress is stuffed with actual cotton. I may weep.”

“Please do not weep on the mattress,” he murmured. “It belongs to Captain Rossi.”

“I have been sleeping on sailcloth and stone. This mattress is the finest object I have ever encountered.”

“Pemberley has feather beds,” he told her softly.

She closed her eyes. “Do not speak to me of feather beds. I shall die of anticipation.”

He kissed her throat, pressing his mouth to the sensitive skin below her ear. Her breath caught sharply, and her fingers curled into the hair at the back of his neck, pulling him closer.

The ship swayed, imposing a slow, rolling rhythm upon them. The gentle rocking of the hull against the sea and the creak of the timber felt wholly different from the unmoving stone of the tower.

His mouth moved down her throat to her collarbone, and then to her breasts. Her back arched as he kissed her. The mattress yielded beneath her weight; the softness was a luxury after the unforgiving sand and stone.

Her hand found him through the trousers he was still wearing. She stroked him through the rough fabric, her mouth curving into a smile against his hair.

“These trousers also belong to Captain Rossi,” she said. “Perhaps you should remove them before we compromise the captain's wardrobe.”

He removed them. She watched him in the lamplight with frank, unabashed desire. His body's immediate response to her gaze was quite outside of his control.

She opened her arms. His body covered hers on the narrow bunk. The enclosed space compressed the air between them until it was warm and heavy, smelling of cedar and salt.

He entered her slowly. The angle on the narrow bunk required an awkward adjustment of his weight, producing a soft laugh from her that quickly turned into a sharp gasp as he found his depth.

“There,” she said.

He moved slowly, acutely aware that the hull was thin and the crew was just on the other side. On the island, they had been as loud as the open sky. Here, they were pressed into a breathless silence, marked only by the quiet creak of the wooden frame.

She wrapped her legs around him, pressing him deeper. He groaned quietly into her neck. They were forced to constrain their volume, whispering against each other's skin in the dark.

“I miss the beach,” she whispered. She gasped sharply as he thrust deeper. She missed the freedom of the island, but the intense, muffled secrecy of the cabin was consuming.

His hand slid between them. Her hips rose against his touch, and her teeth closed hard over her lower lip to bite back a cry. The required silence forced an agonising, exquisite tension into her every nerve.

She came with a silent, violent shudder that rolled through her entire body. Her back arched off the mattress, and she breathed his name against his neck. As she clenched tightly around him, his own control shattered. He followed her instantly, driving deep as his release shook through him in the utter quiet of the cabin.

Afterward, they lay tightly fitted together on the narrow bunk. Her back was pressed against his chest, and his arm rested across her waist. The porthole admitted a stream of pale moonlight and the faint sound of the sea.

“The door is locked,” she said.

“It is.”

“On the island, we did not need a door.”

“On the island, we did not have an audience.”

“We have an audience now.”

“We do.”

She was quiet. The ship rocked gently, sending the moonlight across the cabin wall like a slow, silver pendulum.

“I am not ashamed,” she said softly. “I want you to know that. Whatever the world says when we reach it, I chose you on that island with my eyes wholly open. I will not pretend to be ashamed of what we did for anyone's comfort.”

“I know,” he said.

“You do not need to protect me from society's judgement.”

“I know that as well.”

“But you will try.”

“I will,” he admitted. “You will tell me it is unnecessary, and I will agree, and yet I will continue to offer it. I suspect this argument will recur at regular intervals for the next fifty years.”

She turned in his arms, her face close to his in the dark cabin.

“Fifty years,” she said.

“At minimum.”

“That is a great many arguments.”

“I am prepared.”

Her mouth found his in a steady, certain kiss. It was a settled promise.

The ship moved westward through the dark. The island was gone behind them, existing now only in the objects they carried: a shell in Elizabeth's pocket, a scar on Darcy's side, and the memory of fire and salt and a happiness that had cost them everything and been worth it.

The locked door held firm against the world. Behind it, two people who had learnt to live wildly without walls finally slept within them. They had fifty years to learn the balance between freedom and shelter.

He was looking forward to the arguments.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Elizabeth Bennet had not seen her own face in six weeks, and the face that looked back at her from the captain's shaving mirror was not wholly recognisable.

The small mirror was spotted with age and salt air, propped upon a shelf in her assigned cabin. She had not asked for it, nor had she missed it. Mirrors belonged to a world that cared deeply about appearances. For six weeks, the only person who had looked at her was a man who appeared to find her increasingly attractive as she became progressively more ruined by the sun.

The face in the mirror was deeply brown. It was not the delicate complexion Hertfordshire considered proper, nor even the mild tan produced by country walks. It was the even, deep brown of a woman who had spent six weeks under a Mediterranean sun without a bonnet, caring only for her survival.

Her hair was much lighter. The dark brown she had inherited from her mother had been bleached by salt and sun into a warm copper at the temples. Darcy had clearly noticed it, but he had tactfully said nothing.

Her face was noticeably thinner. Her cheekbones were prominent and her jaw sharp, the last soft roundness of girlhood stripped away by six weeks of fish and figs. She looked older and far harder — exactly like a woman who had survived a catastrophe.

She set the mirror down. The reflection could be dealt with later; she had urgent letters to write.

She wrote to Longbourn first. Captain Rossi had generously provided paper, ink, and the use of his writing desk. It was a solid slab of mahogany bolted to the cabin wall, covered with charts and a heavy Bible.

The letter was the hardest thing she had ever attempted to write. It was far more difficult than any previous correspondence, because she had to announce that she was alive to people who firmly believed she was dead. It required a delicacy she was not certain she possessed.

Dear Papa, she wrote, and immediately stopped. It was the ordinary opening of every letter she had ever sent home, and its casual familiarity felt almost obscene while her father sat in his library grieving her.

She started again.

Dear Papa,

I am alive and well, writing from a merchant vessel bound for Valletta. Following the pirate attack, I was stranded upon a small island off the southern Italian coast. I have been rescued after six weeks. I am uninjured, and I am safe. I am in the company of Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy, who was stranded with me. His conduct throughout has been thoroughly honourable, and I have had ample occasion to know his character.

She paused. Her father was an exceptionally perceptive man, accustomed to reading between the lines of his wife's correspondence. He would immediately grasp the heavy implication of that final sentence.

Mr Darcy and I are engaged to be married. I anticipate this news will arrive as a surprise, given that my last correspondence regarding Mr Darcy detailed my firm refusal of his proposal at Hunsford. I was quite wrong at Hunsford. I was wrong about his character, his motivations, and my own feelings. That error has been corrected by six weeks of close acquaintance in circumstances that permitted no pretence. I have chosen him freely. I want you to know that I chose him freely.

The word freely was deliberate. Her father would read it and immediately understand that she was answering his most urgent, unspoken question. She was managing his fears from a distance of a thousand miles.

She wrote to Jane next. It was a longer, warmer letter that contained far more of the truth. Jane was the person Elizabeth trusted most in the world, and she was not going to break that habit now.

To Jane she told everything except the nights — the stone tower, the spring, the herb garden, the storms, and the long conversations that had changed her mind about a man she had once dismissed wholly. She wrote last of Mr Bingley.

He wrote to Mr Bingley before the shipwreck, sending a letter that explained exactly what he had done in London, and why. He has promised to write to him again when we reach England. I do not know what Mr Bingley will do with the information, but I know what he ought to do. You deserve to know that his sudden disappearance was not wholly his own choice.

She sealed both letters with the wax Captain Rossi had provided, then wrote a shorter letter to the Gardiners. She did not know if they were alive, or where to send it, but she wrote it anyway — an act of faith.

Darcy was writing his own letters. She could hear the scratch of his pen through the thin cabin wall. It was a domestic, extraordinary sound; pens, paper, and wooden walls had not existed in their world twenty-four hours ago, and their sudden reality still felt slightly like a dream.

He was writing to his solicitor. He had informed her of this with the careful, intense specificity of a man who was finally permitted to plan their future in England. He had also written to Georgiana, composing that letter in silence and sealing it without showing her. She respected that privacy; it belonged to him and his sister.

The sailor's wife's dress was a practical, faded blue. The bodice was too wide across the shoulders, and the hem was too long by three inches. It did not fit her body or reflect her taste, but it was clean, and it did not have holes.

She put it on in the cabin. The soft cotton against her skin was a sensation she had completely forgotten after weeks of torn, salt-stiffened linen. She smoothed the skirt with her hands, surprised to find herself performing a gesture of simple vanity. It was a relief to realise that she was returning to a civilised world where her appearance would once again matter.

She looked at herself in the spotted mirror: a woman in a blue dress that did not fit, with deeply brown skin and calloused bare feet. The sailor's wife had no spare shoes, and the prospect of wearing them again felt implausible.

Caught between worlds. Neither the woman who had left Longbourn nor the woman who would return to it — in transit, wearing a borrowed dress, carrying a small pink shell in her pocket, and bearing a decision that would alter the rest of her life.

She was ready.

She was ready for the conversation she had been composing since the rescue. She knew exactly what she would say to the society matrons who would inevitably conclude that Elizabeth Bennet had been irreparably compromised by Mr Darcy. The core of her defence was settled: she was not ashamed, and she would not pretend to be.

She went on deck. The morning was clear and the sea was calm. The Santa Chiara moved steadily westward under a brilliant blue sky. It was the Mediterranean's bright farewell — blue sky, calm water, the coast of Malta growing on the horizon.

Darcy was standing at the railing. He turned when she appeared, and his expression instantly arrested. Seeing her in a proper, clean dress for the first time in weeks was somehow far more startling to him than seeing her in nothing at all.

“You look—” he said, and stopped.

“I look like a woman wearing a borrowed dress,” she supplied.

“You look wholly beautiful,” he corrected quietly. “And I find it unexpectedly affecting.”

“Affecting?”

“The word is utterly insufficient. Most words are, when applied to you.”

She stood beside him at the railing. There was a faint smudge on the western horizon that Rossi had identified as the coast of Malta. It was growing slowly closer, arriving visibly and inevitably.

“I have written to my father,” she said.

“I know.”

“I told him I chose you freely. He will read between the lines, and understand that I was not coerced by our circumstances. He will understand it, but he will still demand to hear it from my own mouth.” She sighed. “It will be far more difficult than refusing you at Hunsford.”

“Because you must now explain why you changed your mind.”

“Precisely. I refused you in a parsonage, and I accepted you in a ruined tower. I doubt the etiquette books cover such a sequence of events.”

He smiled his genuine, warm smile—the one the island had finally produced.

“I have written to Georgiana,” he said. “I told her I am bringing home a wife. I told her you are exceedingly clever, exceedingly brave, and quite unwilling to tolerate my arrogance.”

“You told her that?”

“I told her the plain truth. I fully expect the two of you to conspire against me within a fortnight of your arrival at Pemberley, and I know I shall enjoy every moment of it.”

She leaned against his shoulder. It was a gesture that had begun in a rainstorm in a ruined tower, and had continued through every day since.

“Malta,” she said.

“Malta.”

“And then England.”

“And then England.”

“Are you ready?”

He considered the question. She watched his face, knowing it better than any other in the world. It was the face that would be the first thing she saw every morning for the rest of her life.

“I am ready,” he said. “I have been planning for this since our second week on the island. The settlements are drafted in my head, the letters are written, and I am prepared to face the ton.”

“But?”

“But none of my preparation accounts for the fact that I would far rather remain on the island. I have prepared for the life we must lead, but the island was the life I truly wanted. They are wholly different things.”

She took his hand on the wooden railing. The coast of Malta was growing on the horizon; the future was arriving, whether they were ready or not.

“The island is in us,” she said fiercely. “Wherever we go. It is the life we built, and no drawing room in England can take that away from us. They have no power over what happened in that tower.”

“No,” he agreed, his fingers tightening on hers. “They do not.”

The coast steadily grew. They stood at the railing and watched the future arrive. They were hand in hand, their skin brown and deeply calloused, holding each other with the unyielding grip of two people who were never going to let go.

The morning was bright and blue, and Malta was finally close. They were ready.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Valletta did not appear gradually. It arrived all at once: honey-coloured stone rising from the harbour, fortifications climbing in high tiers, and the dome of a cathedral catching the morning sun. The city was remarkably solid, populated with people walking on streets and buying bread. After six weeks on the island, the simple sight of civilisation struck Darcy with an overwhelming force.

There were hundreds of people on the harbour walls, on the docks, and in boats. They were speaking, shouting, and laughing. The aggregate sound of human voices hit him like a physical blow, a sudden wall of noise after six weeks where the loudest sound had been the sea.

Elizabeth stood beside him at the railing. She held his hand tightly — her grip had not loosened since the rescue — and looked at Valletta with an expression of disbelief, as though the world she had given up reaching had miraculously come to her.

“There are buildings,” she breathed.

“Yes.”

“Stone buildings with intact roofs,” she continued, her voice filled with wonder. “Roofs that were not desperately repaired with flat stones and mud.”

“The roofs of Valletta are, I believe, properly constructed.”

“Proper construction,” she whispered. “The concept is almost too beautiful to bear.”

The Santa Chiara smoothly docked. Rossi's crew handled the mooring with efficient indifference, but Darcy found every moment remarkable. The rope hit the bollard, the gangplank was lowered, and he stepped onto the dock. His feet touched the solid stone of a city filled with people who had not been stranded, people who moved about their lives without a second thought for their survival.

Elizabeth stepped onto the dock in bare feet, for the sailor's wife had possessed no spare shoes. The ancient stone under her feet was warm from the morning sun. She stood perfectly still, looking at the city, tears spilling silently over her smiling cheeks.

Darcy quickly dealt with Captain Rossi. He arranged payment for their passage through a letter of credit drawn on his London bank. The captain accepted Darcy's signature with pragmatic trust, correctly judging that an English gentleman of Darcy's bearing was good for his debts. Darcy made the amount exceedingly generous.

“The British consul,” Darcy said.

Rossi gave him swift directions. The consulate was on Merchants Street, a ten-minute walk across cobblestones. Darcy's borrowed shoes could manage the stones, but Elizabeth's bare feet could not. The problem was immediately solved by Rossi's wife, Maria. She appeared from below decks with a pair of leather slippers that were two sizes too large. Elizabeth accepted them with a gratitude that nearly undid her composure.

“Thank you,” Elizabeth said, in the Italian that Darcy had been teaching her on the island, the pronunciation adequate and the sincerity unmistakable.

Maria said something rapid and warm in Maltese. Neither of them understood the words, but the kind, wishing tone was unmistakable.

The British consul was a tall, thin man named Harrington. He had the measured manner of a career diplomat, and his efficient gaze had thoroughly assessed them before they had even finished taking their seats.

Darcy clearly related the facts: the pirate attack, the shipwreck, and their six weeks stranded upon the island. He provided his name and estate, and then named Elizabeth, along with the Gardiners who had been aboard the Adeona.

Harrington listened carefully, taking precise notes. He asked relevant questions, omitting the one obvious question burning in his gaze: What exactly happened on that island?

That question could wait.

“The Gardiners,” Darcy said. “Mr and Mrs Edward Gardiner, of Gracechurch Street, London. They were aboard the Adeona when it was taken. Do you have any record of their survival?”

Harrington silently consulted his files. It took only four minutes, but to Elizabeth, the wait was an agony rivalled only by the fever. She sat perfectly still in her chair, her hands folded tightly in her lap, waiting for the answer she had desperately sought for six weeks.

“Mr and Mrs Edward Gardiner arrived in Naples six weeks ago,” Harrington said. “Carried there by the merchant vessel Prosperità, which recovered survivors from the wreck. They have been in contact with this office, enquiring about two persons: a Miss Elizabeth Bennet and a Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy, both believed lost.”

Elizabeth's hands moved, her palms pressing flat against her thighs. She absorbed the impossible information.

“They are alive,” she said.

“They are well and in good health, by the last correspondence. I can have a message sent by the next packet.”

“Send it immediately.” Darcy's voice was utterly calm; it was the voice of a man accustomed to authority. “I will pay for an express. The Gardiners must know that Miss Bennet is alive and safe. The message should also be forwarded to Mr Thomas Bennet of Longbourn, near Meryton, Hertfordshire, and to my own household at Pemberley.”

Harrington wrote as Darcy dictated. Elizabeth sat in her chair with bright eyes and an intact, rigid composure. It was a fiercely controlled performance. Only Darcy, having spent six weeks learning her every expression, could see the violent trembling she was suppressing through stillness.

They left the consulate and walked down Merchants Street. Elizabeth in her oversized slippers and Darcy in his borrowed sailor's clothes attracted many curious glances from the residents of Valletta.

Between a shop selling lace and a shop selling olives, Elizabeth suddenly stopped. She pressed her back against the warm stone wall and breathed deeply.

Darcy stood beside her. He did not touch her, but positioned his body between her and the street, providing the privacy the island had given freely and the world required them to construct.

Her breathing was deliberate and controlled, her hands in tight fists at her sides. The effort of her stillness was visible in the sharp line of her jaw and the rigid set of her shoulders.

The composure held. It cost her, but it held.

“They are alive,” she said.

“They are alive.”

“Jane does not know I am alive.”

“She will know soon. The express will reach England in days.”

Elizabeth pushed herself away from the wall and smoothed her borrowed dress. She lifted her chin with a fierce, familiar pride—the exact gesture he had first seen in a Hertfordshire ballroom.

“We require a clergyman,” she said firmly.

“I will find one.”

“An English clergyman, if one exists in Valletta,” she insisted. “If not, I will accept any denomination that can produce a legal marriage recognised by English law.”

“The consul will have a recommendation,” he assured her.

“Good. We must also send for the Gardiners. If they are in Naples, they must be brought here. My aunt should be present when I marry you. It is not about propriety, Fitzwilliam, it is about love; she is the one person in my family who will truly understand what I have done, and why.”

“I will arrange their passage immediately.”

“You will arrange it, and you will pay for it, and I will not argue with you over the expense,” she declared. “I would rather spend that time being married to you.”

He looked at her. She stood on a foreign street in borrowed shoes, directing the arrangements for her own wedding with unyielding authority.

“You are magnificent,” he said.

“I am merely practical,” she replied, though a small smile touched her lips.

Harrington quickly secured them rooms at a small, modest hotel near the harbour. It was run by an English widow named Mrs Palmer, who assessed their ruined state with a single glance. Within an hour, she had produced a basin of hot water, a bar of lavender soap, a clean shift, and a comb.

Elizabeth stared at the soap, lifting it to her face. The scent of lavender immediately recalled the gardens at Longbourn. That simple, domestic smell finally broke her composure. She had survived the pirate attack, the island, and the shocking news at the consulate, but she could not survive the lavender.

Darcy caught her as she wept. In the small hotel room, with the basin of water cooling on the table, he held her tightly. It was not the quiet, controlled crying of the island; it was the full, open weeping of a woman who had finally reached safety, and was only now allowing herself to feel the terror of the past six weeks.

He held her exactly as the island had taught him: without speaking, offering only his warm, solid presence.

She wept for a long time. The shaking slowly subsided, and her breathing gradually returned to a steady rhythm.

She pulled back. Her face was wet and her eyes were red. She gratefully accepted the handkerchief he offered.

“Lavender,” she whispered.

“I know.”

“It smells of home. I am apparently not as strong as I believed.”

“You are the strongest woman I have ever known,” he said fiercely. “Tears do not diminish that.”

She gave a wet, rough laugh, wiping her eyes with the handkerchief.

He kissed her forehead gently, holding the world at bay while the woman he loved cried over a piece of soap.

“I will go and find a clergyman,” he told her softly.

“Find a good one,” she replied, her voice steadying.

“The wedding will likely be in a small chapel in Valletta, with a borrowed dress and a congregation of two.”

“Then it will be perfect,” she said, looking up at him. “The circumstances do not matter in the slightest.”

He kissed her forehead once more before leaving the room. She listened to his steady, purposeful footsteps descending the stairs.

She picked up the soap again and breathed in the lavender, then washed her hands in the basin. The hot water, the soap, the solid walls — remarkable luxuries, all of them. She dried her hands on a soft cotton towel and sat on the bed, feeling the mattress and sheets beneath her, and held the small pink shell in her pocket.

She was ready.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Elizabeth stood in the doorway and looked at the interior: small and whitewashed, with a single nave, wooden pews darkened by time, and a stone altar. The chapel was attached to a larger church on a side street near the harbour. The clergyman Darcy had found was an English curate named Reverend Aldridge, posted to Valletta to serve the naval officers and their families. He stood at the altar with a prayer book, looking deeply bewildered to be performing a marriage between a gentleman and a lady who had arrived in Valletta destitute.

The Gardiners had arrived that morning. Darcy's express to Naples had found them within three days; they had taken the next packet boat south and arrived in Valletta five days after that, at dawn. Mrs Gardiner had come through the door of Mrs Palmer's boarding house, taken one look at Elizabeth, and held her tightly.

The embrace lasted a long time. Elizabeth had not cried, having spent all her tears the day before. Her aunt held her fiercely, their silent embrace conveying everything that words could not: You are alive. I am alive. The world did not end.

Mr Gardiner had shaken Darcy's hand. The handshake was longer and far weightier than a greeting between mere acquaintances. They were becoming family. It happened in a modest boarding house in Valletta at seven in the morning over strong Maltese coffee.

Mrs Gardiner had seen everything. Elizabeth knew her aunt possessed a sharp, quiet intelligence. She had watched the way Elizabeth instinctively stood near Darcy, and the way Darcy's hand protectively found the small of Elizabeth's back when they moved through a doorway. They looked at each other with a habitual intimacy that was impossible to hide.

Mrs Gardiner understood, and she did not judge. Her acceptance was the greatest gift Elizabeth received in Valletta. It was the blessing of a woman Elizabeth loved and respected.

The dress was not bridal white, nor was it the fine satin and lace of an English wedding. It was a simple white cotton dress that Mrs Palmer had generously procured.

The dress fitted well enough. The bodice was snug, the skirt falling to her ankles, and the clean cotton smelled of the sun. Mrs Gardiner had carefully arranged Elizabeth's hair, pinning the salt-streaked waves up into a proper, elegant style.

Elizabeth looked at herself in Mrs Palmer's mirror. The woman looking back was changed from the girl who had left Longbourn. Her skin was deeply brown, and fine lines crinkled at the corners of her eyes from weeks of squinting at the glaring sea. Her hands were rough and her feet were calloused. She was going to marry Fitzwilliam Darcy in a foreign chapel, wearing someone else's dress, and carrying a shell in her pocket instead of flowers.

Yet she felt more herself than she had ever been. The island had stripped away every polite performance and every concession to the drawing rooms of Meryton. What remained was certain: a woman who had chosen a man with her eyes open, and who was going to choose him again, legally and forever, in the sight of God.

She walked to the chapel between her aunt and uncle. The narrow street was warm, the honey-coloured stone of Valletta glowing in the morning light. She wore no veil, only the fierce, steady certainty that what she was about to do was right.

Darcy stood at the altar. He was wearing a dark blue, well-cut coat borrowed from Harrington, and a clean white shirt. He had finally shaved the beard grown over six weeks on the island. Seeing him clean-shaven was a shock; it was the exact face she had first seen in a Hertfordshire ballroom, the face of the proud man she had hated, then understood, and then loved. Yet it was also a different face, shaped by everything he had become on the island.

His hands were shaking. She saw the fine tremor in his fingers as she reached the altar. Those hands, which had built fires, moved stone, and touched her with confidence, were trembling. It undid her. Fitzwilliam Darcy, a man of supreme competence and composure, was overwhelmed by the sheer, staggering permanence of what they were about to do.

She took his hand, absorbing the tremor into her own fingers. Standing together at the altar, holding each other tightly, felt like the true vow, even before the words were spoken.

Reverend Aldridge opened his prayer book. Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this congregation, to join together this Man and this Woman in holy Matrimony.

The congregation consisted only of the Gardiners in the front pew. They watched with the tearful attention of a family who had been given a niece back from the dead.

Elizabeth said her vows. She forced her voice to remain steady and clear, offering that strength to the trembling man across from her. His expression was the most unguarded she had ever seen it—more vulnerable than during the fever, more open than their nights on the island. He stood in the chapel and let his unadorned love be visible to everyone in the room.

He said his vows. His voice was rough, strained by the effort of maintaining his composure. The solemn words emerged with a raw sincerity far more moving than any smooth delivery could have been.

The ring was a simple gold band Darcy had purchased on Merchants Street. It fitted perfectly. Elizabeth looked at the bright gold against her brown skin. It was real; they were married, permanently and forever. It changed nothing of what they were, and yet it changed everything.

Reverend Aldridge closed his book. “I pronounce that they be Man and Wife together.”

Elizabeth Darcy. The name arrived in her mind with quiet certainty. She was Mrs Darcy. The title felt strange, but she would grow to wear it as naturally as she breathed.

He kissed her gently in front of the Gardiners and the curate.

Mrs Gardiner was openly weeping, and Mr Gardiner's eyes were suspiciously bright. Elizabeth hugged her aunt, and then her uncle. She stood in the quiet nave of the chapel with her husband beside her. The word husband echoed in her mind — new, and hers.

They signed the register. She wrote Elizabeth Bennet for the very last time. Fitzwilliam Darcy signed with a hand that had finally stopped shaking, and the Gardiners signed as witnesses. Elizabeth Darcy walked out of the quiet, incense-filled chapel into the bright Valletta sun. She held her husband's hand, carrying the small shell in her pocket as the rest of her life began.

Mrs Palmer had provided her best room for their wedding night. It featured a large bed, a window overlooking the harbour, and a heavy door with a brass lock.

The Gardiners had retired after a warm, celebratory dinner at Mrs Palmer's table. They had shared roast lamb, fresh bread, and a fine bottle of wine sent by Captain Rossi. The evening had been filled with the joy of a family reunited. Before retiring, Mrs Gardiner had kissed Elizabeth's cheek and whispered, 'Good night, Mrs Darcy.' It was the first time she had been addressed by her new name. She stood still for a moment, her aunt's hand still on her shoulder.

The door closed, and the lock turned. Elizabeth stood in the quiet room with her husband.

She had been intimate with this man on the island, loving him wildly on the beach, in the tower, and in the shallows of the sea. Yet standing here now, an overwhelming sensation filled her chest: unyielding safety.

They were legally bound by the church and the law. She could stand in a room behind a locked door, remove her dress, and press her body against his without courting utter ruin. She was a wife. Her desire was fiercely, permanently sanctioned.

That sudden freedom hit her as a physical shock. It was as though a crushing stone had been lifted from her chest. The relief was so complete that her legs went unsteady, and her eyes rapidly filled with tears.

She had not felt guilty on the island. She had never been ashamed of loving him.

But she had carried a terrible, silent weight. Beneath her defiance, she had known that her actions on the island would wholly destroy her in England. It would have ruined her reputation, her family's standing, and her sisters' prospects.

She had carried that terrifying knowledge in secret. Now, standing in Valletta with a ring on her finger and a marriage certificate in the consul's files, the danger was gone. The relief was too large to contain.

She began to weep. Before he touched her, she stood in the middle of the room and cried with the sheer, overwhelming release of a woman who had willingly chosen ruin, and had been saved from it.

She was not ruined; she was Mrs Darcy. The marriage was a legal fortress protecting them both.

Darcy held her tightly without speaking or asking questions. He simply offered his strength as she wept against his chest.

Her tears eventually slowed. She wiped her face with the back of her hand, her breathing returning to a steady rhythm.

“I did not expect that,” she whispered.

“No.”

“I was terrified for my family. For Jane. For all of them.”

“I know,” he said softly. “But they are safe, and so are you.”

“Most bridegrooms would prefer their wives not to weep on their wedding night,” she managed a fragile smile.

“I am not most bridegrooms,” he replied, brushing a tear from her cheek. “I know exactly what those tears cost you.”

She looked up at him in the lamplight. His eyes were steady and warm. His hands, which had shaken so violently at the altar, were calm. He was waiting for her.

“I am done crying,” she declared.

“Take whatever time you need, Elizabeth.”

“I need you,” she said fiercely. “I am your wife, Fitzwilliam, and I have been looking forward to this night since we stood in the chapel.”

A slow, devastating smile spread across his face. “Have you?”

“I am a practical woman,” she breathed. “You knew this when you married me.”

She closed the distance between them and kissed him hungrily. She was done waiting. She wanted her husband, and that desire was clean, uncomplicated, and free from the terrifying shadow of ruin.

He kissed her back, his hands framing her face exactly as they had in the tower. His fingers tangled in her hair, his mouth claiming hers with focused attention.

She reached behind her back and unfastened her dress. The borrowed white cotton fell from her shoulders, and she stepped out of it. She stood in the thin shift Mrs Palmer had provided. Darcy's eyes moved over her body in the warm lamplight; he had seen her bare many times, but seeing her now, as his legal wife, felt new.

“Elizabeth,” he whispered. It was the first time he had spoken her name as his wife, and the heavy, reverent weight of it vibrated against her ribs.

She pulled the shift over her head, standing bare in the amber glow of the lamplight. She let him look at her. The intense heat of his gaze was as real as his touch, and the legitimacy of his desire thrilled her.

He undressed. She watched him with frank, unhesitating desire. He was still thin from the fever, the pale scar sharp against his brown skin. This body was hers now, permanently and legally.

She looked at him with the bold directness she had maintained since their first night, and his immediate, visible response to her gaze was deeply gratifying.

She went to the bed and lay down on the clean white sheets. They smelled of lavender and sunlight. The soft, cool fabric against her bare skin was a luxury after weeks of sand and stone.

He lay beside her, his hand on her hip, his mouth finding hers. The kiss was slow and exquisitely unhurried. They had a locked door and an entire night, with no danger and no reason to rush. She sank into the soft pillow with a quiet, involuntary sound of pure comfort, making him smile against her lips.

“The pillow is unreasonably soft,” she murmured.

“I am glad you approve,” he whispered, kissing her jaw.

His mouth moved to the sensitive skin below her ear. His hand slid from her hip to her breast, his thumb circling her nipple. The soft mattress allowed them to move with a fluid grace that the unforgiving stone of the tower had never permitted. She gave a small, caught breath as his touch deepened.

His mouth replaced his thumb, his tongue circling the tight peak. The sensation of his lips upon her breast carried the full weight of their new reality. She surrendered to the pleasure without reserve.

His hand moved lower, tracing the tight muscles of her stomach before slipping between her thighs. She parted her legs for him with eager familiarity, free from fear.

His fingers found her wet and desperately ready. The dark wanting had been building since they spoke their vows in the chapel. He stroked her with a sure, knowing rhythm, drawing a loud, broken moan from her throat. She did not try to be quiet. They were protected by strong walls and a locked door, safe from the world.

“More,” she said. “Fitzwilliam. I want you inside me.”

He moved over her, his familiar weight pressing her into the mattress. He settled between her thighs and slowly entered her. The yielding bed allowed him to find a depth that made her gasp.

He filled her completely. She closed her eyes, consumed by the fierce heat and heavy stretch of his body inside hers.

He began to move. They quickly found their familiar, demanding rhythm. The soft bed yielded beneath his heavy thrusts, producing a deep, rolling sensation that was far more luxurious than the hard urgency of the beach. She cried out openly, her sounds muffled only by his shoulder.

“Mrs Darcy,” he rasped against her mouth. The new name, spoken in his fractured voice while he thrust deeply inside her, was devastating. It was a fierce, possessive claim.

“Say it again,” she said.

“Mrs Darcy.”

“Again.”

“Elizabeth Darcy.” His hips drove deeper. “My wife.”

The words and the driving force of his body tightened every muscle from her thighs to her ribs. She arched wildly against him, her nails digging into the hard muscles of his shoulders.

He increased his punishing rhythm, his hand sliding between them to thumb exactly where she needed. The overwhelming combination of his depth, his touch, and his rough voice shattered her remaining control.

She came with a long, open cry, her body clenching violently around him, his name in her mouth.

He followed her instantly. His rhythm broke, his hips driving deep against hers as he poured into her. He came with a harsh, guttural groan, burying his face in her neck.

Afterward, they lay tangled in the soft sheets as the lamplight burned low. Elizabeth rested on her back, her breathing slowly returning to normal. Darcy lay beside her, his warm palm resting heavily over her stomach.

“Wife,” she whispered.

“Yes.”

“The word feels strange upon my tongue.”

“Give it time,” he said softly, pressing a kiss to her temple.

“It is a good strangeness,” she decided. “Like the weight of this ring. It is unfamiliar, but I would not part with it for the world.”

She rolled towards him, her face close to his on the soft pillow. His features were shadowed in the low lamplight, fiercely familiar and hers.

“I am happy,” she said.

“So am I.”

“I was happy on the island, but this is different. There, our happiness was a fragile thing we built against the elements. Here, we have a foundation.”

“We do,” he agreed.

“We have a legal certificate, a locked door, and the blessing of my family. It feels permanent.”

“It is permanent, Elizabeth,” he promised.

He kissed her gently.

The lamp finally guttered out. Silver moonlight streamed through the window, illuminating the sheets and his face beside hers. She lay in the quiet dark with her husband.

The pink shell rested on the bedside table, and the heavy gold ring encircled her finger. The island was behind them, and England was ahead.

She fell deeply asleep in his arms, held safe behind a locked door, as his wife.

It was a softer, warmer sleep than she had known on the island. She had nothing left to fear, and nothing left to carry.

She slept, and he held her as the moon moved across the harbour. They had survived the fire and the sea, and what they had built between them was sound.

Chapter Thirty

During the long voyage from Valletta to England, Darcy discovered that being married to Elizabeth was consuming. Beds, proper meals, and the presence of other human beings were welcome improvements, but they did not alter the fundamental reality: Elizabeth commanded his attention. He conducted the business of his life with the distracted efficiency of a man who cared for very little else.

The voyage aboard the Fortuna, a passenger ship bound for Portsmouth, would take three weeks. Their passage had been arranged by Mr Gardiner. Elizabeth's favourite uncle had proven to be highly competent, unpretentious, and possessed of a quiet authority that required neither volume nor rank. He had effortlessly secured passage for four using nothing but excellent manners and the commercial contacts he had cultivated over twenty years of importing goods.

Darcy genuinely liked Mr Gardiner. It surprised him only because he had previously dismissed the Gardiners as mere trade. It was a cruel word he had used to categorise and diminish a couple whose warmth and practical intelligence exceeded that of any three families in the ton. He knew he would not forgive himself for that arrogance easily.

Mrs Gardiner's affection for Elizabeth was obvious. She treated her not as a young person requiring guidance, but as a woman whose judgement was trusted and respected. Elizabeth responded to her aunt with a visible ease that she displayed with no one else but Darcy.

Mrs Gardiner and Elizabeth talked for hours on the deck in the afternoon sun, their heads close together. Their conversation was low, frequently punctuated by Elizabeth's bright laughter. Mrs Gardiner filled in the missing weeks: the pirate attack, the terrible confusion, and their rescue by the Prosperità. She detailed the weeks of frantic enquiry, the letters sent to every consulate on the Italian coast, and their refusal to surrender hope.

“Your uncle refused to accept it,” Mrs Gardiner told Elizabeth. Darcy stood near enough to hear, but kept a deliberate distance to preserve their privacy. “He wrote to the Admiralty. He wrote to the consuls in Naples, Palermo, and Malta. He wrote to your father every single week, and every letter contained the same vow: We have not found her, but we have not stopped looking.”

Elizabeth's face was very still. She was absorbing the terrible truth of her family's suffering, finding the reality far worse than she had imagined.

Mrs Gardiner spoke of Longbourn. She described Mr Bennet's short, controlled letters, his deteriorating handwriting revealing what his words would not. Mrs Bennet's nerves had escalated from their usual theatrical pitch to a genuine, frightening collapse, proving the depth of her love for her second daughter beneath all her scheming. Jane had held everyone together, though Mrs Gardiner confessed that Jane's calm letters had begun to crack under the strain.

Darcy heard enough to understand the terrible damage their absence had caused. The grief was deep and ragged, and it was going to take a long time to heal. It would be his responsibility as much as Elizabeth's; he had married into this family, and their wounds were now his to tend.

The conversation with Mr Gardiner happened on the fifth day at sea.

They were leaning against the railing, watching the grey, vast Atlantic. Mr Gardiner was smoking a pipe. The scent of the tobacco was a luxury Darcy had not encountered in weeks, and he found the smell unexpectedly pleasant.

“I should like to ask you some questions,” Mr Gardiner said quietly. His tone was mild, but his gaze was extraordinarily sharp. He was a man who had built a successful business by asking precise questions and listening carefully to the answers, and he intended to apply that same thoroughness now.

“Ask,” Darcy said.

“You were alone with my niece for six weeks.”

“Yes.”

“On a deserted island with no chaperone, no society, no oversight.”

“Yes.”

“And you are now married.”

“We are now married. The ceremony was performed in Valletta by an Anglican clergyman. The marriage is legal and registered.”

“I am not questioning the legality. I am asking about the sequence.”

Darcy met Mr Gardiner's gaze. They studied each other with the directness of two men who respected each other enough to dispense with drawing-room polite fictions.

“The sequence,” Darcy said, “was this. I proposed to your niece at Hunsford, four months before the shipwreck. She refused me. The refusal was deserved. I had proposed with pride, with condescension, and with a catalogue of her family's failings that demonstrated every defect of character she accused me of. She refused me, and I wrote her a letter, and the letter was the last communication between us before we found ourselves on the same ship.”

“And on the island?”

“On the island, we had nothing but each other and the truth,” Darcy said softly. “I loved her long before the shipwreck. She had not loved me, and I had given her no reason to do so. The island changed her understanding of me, just as it changed my understanding of myself. That change was genuine; it was not produced by desperation or the mere absence of alternatives.”

“The change produced a marriage.”

“The change produced a deep attachment,” Darcy corrected firmly. “The marriage followed because my love for her is entire, and because her reputation required my protection. Above all, I wanted to make her my wife more than I have ever wanted anything in my life. It was not an obligation. It was my greatest privilege.”

Mr Gardiner drew on his pipe. The smoke trailed into the Atlantic wind.

“My niece is not the sort of woman who requires rescue,” Mr Gardiner said.

“No. She is not.”

“And yet the world will say she was rescued,” Mr Gardiner noted heavily. “They will say that you did the honourable thing, interpreting your marriage as a discharged obligation rather than a free choice. That perception will attempt to diminish her in every drawing room in England.”

“I am aware.”

“Are you prepared for that?”

“I am prepared,” Darcy said, his voice hardening into steel. “I will spend the rest of my life correcting any person who attempts to diminish my wife. I will use every ounce of my influence to ensure she is treated with the respect she deserves. Your niece spent six weeks teaching me that the world's opinion is not the measure of a person's worth. I have learnt that lesson, and I intend to fiercely enforce it.”

Mr Gardiner studied him in long silence. He was taking the measure of the man before him, and he found Darcy's fierce sincerity acceptable.

“My niece,” Mr Gardiner said, “is the cleverest woman I know. She is also the most stubborn. The two qualities together produce a person who is either quite right or spectacularly wrong, and she is rarely wrong twice about the same thing.”

“She was wrong about me once.”

“She was. She tells me she is not wrong now.”

“She is not wrong now.”

Mr Gardiner nodded and drew on his pipe. It was not overt approval, but a solemn acknowledgement. He had heard what he needed to hear, and he would reserve his final judgement for the years ahead.

“Welcome to the family, Mr Darcy,” he said.

“Thank you, Mr Gardiner.”

“You may call me Gardiner. The family does.”

“Gardiner, then.”

The pipe smoke trailed into the wind. They stood together at the railing, two men connected by their love for the woman below decks.

Elizabeth was preparing for England.

Darcy watched her with deep admiration. His wife possessed a brilliant, formidable mind, and he found her determination captivating.

She sat at the desk in their cabin with paper Darcy had purchased in Valletta, writing careful notes. She was composing the conversations she knew she would soon have to endure in Hertfordshire.

“My mother,” she said, glancing at her notes. “She will be wholly ecstatic, and quite unbearable. She will cry, and she will embrace me, and then she will immediately begin calculating your income to determine if Pemberley's dining room is larger than Lady Lucas's. I will endure her vanity because her initial emotion will be genuine. It is simply how she expresses her affection.”

“That is generous of you.”

“The island taught me patience,” she replied. “My mother's love is flawed, but it is true, and I must learn to accept it without resentment.”

She looked down again. “My father will be difficult. He will be very quiet, and he will take me to his library. He will ask me if I am happy, and that question will contain everything he cannot bring himself to say. I will tell him yes, and the conversation will likely last no more than three minutes.”

“And if he asks about the island?”

“He will not ask,” she said softly. “He will choose ignorance as a way of protecting me, and I will allow him that kindness.”

She turned a page. “Jane is the conversation I am both dreading and desperately anticipating. Jane will hear everything without judgement. We will hold each other and cry, and that will be our healing.”

“And Bingley?”

“I will tell her that you wrote to him, admitting your terrible mistake. I will tell her that he may return to her, though I cannot promise it. The path is open, and Jane must decide what she wishes to do.”

He said nothing, watching her.

“You are magnificent,” he said.

“You have said that before.”

“It bears repeating. You intend to manage the social expectations of an entire county with nothing but a borrowed pen and your own fierce determination.”

“And my husband's support,” she reminded him, offering a warm smile.

“You have that,” he promised softly. “Always.”

The Fortuna sailed westward through the Mediterranean and out through the Strait of Gibraltar into the grey Atlantic swell. Elizabeth continued her careful writing while Darcy sat quietly beside her. The Gardiners were on deck above them. They were all heading home towards England, and their lives were only just beginning.

Chapter Thirty-One

Elizabeth had not expected this. She had anticipated tears, noise, and her mother's shrill exclamations. She received all of that, but the familiar house seemed to have changed dimensions, much the way a childhood room shrinks when revisited by an adult. The alteration was not in the house, but in herself. Having survived the vastness of the sea, the house in Hertfordshire with its awkward angles and overgrown hedgerows now looked remarkably small. Yet it contained her family, and they were irreplaceable.

Darcy had managed their journey from Portsmouth with his customary efficiency, securing a private coach and fresh horses at Guildford. He had also sent a letter ahead to Longbourn to announce their arrival. Elizabeth suspected he had carefully calculated the timing: it arrived just early enough for the household to prepare, but too late for Mrs Bennet to assemble the entire neighbourhood to witness their return.

Her mother met them at the door. Mrs Bennet did not merely walk out to greet them; she burst forth with unstoppable, spectacular emotion.

“Lizzy! My Lizzy! My dear, dear girl!”

Her mother held her tightly, smelling of the same rosewater she had worn for twenty years. Mrs Bennet's voice, which had spent Elizabeth's entire life saying the wrong thing, now said the only right thing, repeating her daughter's name in a genuine outpouring of love.

Elizabeth held her mother. The embrace felt different from the fierce equality she had known on the island. Here, her mother was shaking, and Elizabeth was steady. She offered that steadiness as a quiet gift.

“I am here, Mama. I am well. I am here.”

“Pirates! My daughter taken by pirates! I said to your father, I said Mr Bennet, something must be done, and he did nothing, he sat in his library, and I wrote to your uncle, and I told Lady Lucas, and Lady Lucas said⁠—”

“Mama.”

“—that you were surely dead, and I told her you were not dead, I told her my Lizzy was too clever to be dead, and I was right, I was right, Lizzy, I am always right⁠—”

“You were right, Mama.”

Mrs Bennet finally pulled back. Her face was wet and her cap askew. Her bright eyes immediately darted towards the man standing three feet behind her daughter. He represented ten thousand a year, Pemberley, and the complete, permanent triumph of the Bennet family over the Lucases.

“Mr Darcy,” Mrs Bennet cried, her voice shifting instantly from maternal hysteria to a honeyed, reverent warmth. “Mr Darcy, you have saved my daughter. You have brought her home. I cannot express⁠—”

“He did not save me, Mama. We saved each other. The distinction is important.”

Mrs Bennet did not hear the distinction. She responded with an effusiveness that would have deeply embarrassed Elizabeth three months ago, but which she now accepted with quiet patience.

Darcy bore the lavish praise with patience. When Elizabeth glanced at him, his expression held a faint, private amusement. The proud master of Pemberley, who had once so cruelly catalogued her family's failings, was now standing in their hallway being embraced by their matriarch without the slightest objection.

Her sisters rapidly appeared. Lydia demanded wild details about the pirates, Kitty pressed for stories of the shipwreck, and Mary attempted to deliver a prepared homily on the moral perils of sea travel.

Elizabeth hugged all three of them tightly, unfazed by the overwhelming, familiar noise of Longbourn.

Jane was not in the hallway. Elizabeth noticed the absence immediately. She knew Jane's quiet retreats were always deliberate; her sister was waiting upstairs, knowing they required privacy.

After surviving the hallway and gently redirecting Mrs Bennet towards the subject of tea, Elizabeth quietly slipped away to her father's library.

She knocked on the door, a formality she had never observed before. The library had always been her sanctuary, a place where she and her father shared a quiet, unspoken understanding.

“Come,” he said.

She opened the door. Her father sat at his desk, surrounded by his familiar books, with the garden visible through the window behind him. The room was exactly the same, but her father was not.

He had aged terribly. Silent grief had carved deep lines and dark shadows into his face. His hair was greyer and his frame was thinner. When his eyes found hers, he stared at her with the raw shock of a man who had spent weeks mourning his favourite daughter.

“Papa,” she said.

He stood up slowly, as though he did not quite trust his own legs. She hurried across the room, and he held her fiercely.

It was a long, unprecedented embrace. Mr Bennet was a man who observed and commented from a safe, philosophical distance. He had retreated to his library to escape a wife he had married in haste and a household he had no temperament to govern. But now, that detachment was gone.

“I thought I had lost you, Lizzy.”

His voice was fractured and raw. Hearing those simple words broke Elizabeth's heart, filling her with a fierce, protective tenderness for the man who had suffered so deeply in her absence.

“You did not lose me,” she said against his chest. “I am here. I am married. I am happy.”

He pulled back, keeping his hands on her shoulders. He examined her face with a thorough, loving scrutiny.

“You are brown,” he said.

“I am brown.”

“You are thin.”

“I am recovering.”

“You are married.”

“I am married.”

“To Mr Darcy.”

“To Fitzwilliam Darcy. Yes.”

“The man you refused at Hunsford.”

“The man I refused at Hunsford,” she agreed gently. “He was a different man then, or perhaps I was too blinded by prejudice to see his true character. The island changed both of us, Papa.”

Her father studied her carefully, reading in his daughter's face a history she had never seen before.

“Are you truly happy, Lizzy?” he asked quietly.

“I am happier than I ever knew it was possible to be,” she answered firmly. “He is a good man, Papa, and I love him very much.”

“You refused him.”

“I refused a man who was proud and condescending. The man I married is none of those things. The island stripped away all his arrogance. I made my choice with my eyes open.”

Her father fell quiet, returning to his familiar, assessing silence.

“You will forgive me,” he said drily, “if I reserve the right to determine for myself whether Mr Darcy is truly worthy of my favourite daughter. He proposed terribly once and successfully once. I shall require further evidence before I grant him my full confidence.”

She gave her first real laugh since arriving at Longbourn. She had missed her father's sharp, familiar humour.

“Give him time,” she urged gently. “He improves greatly upon acquaintance.”

“I sincerely hope so, for both your sakes,” Mr Bennet replied, a tired, genuine smile finally touching his eyes.

Jane was waiting in Elizabeth's bedroom. It was the room Elizabeth had slept in for twenty-one years, looking out over the familiar garden. The bed seemed far narrower than she remembered.

Jane sat quietly on the bed. She was dressed neatly in pale yellow, her face set in the tragic, rigid composure Mrs Gardiner had described in her letters.

Elizabeth closed the door. They stared at each other, two sisters reunited after a terrifying, seemingly permanent separation.

“Lizzy,” Jane whispered, her composure instantly shattering.

Elizabeth hurried to the bed and took her sister's hands. Jane gripped her with a desperate, crushing force, betraying the months of silent fear and lonely courage she had endured.

Jane wept openly. It was not her usual quiet sorrow, but the messy, uncontrolled crying of a woman who had been brave for too long.

Elizabeth held her tightly. She offered the same steady, quiet comfort Darcy had given her on the island, allowing her sister to simply weep.

When the crying finally subsided, Jane wiped her face, offering a weak, trembling smile.

“Tell me,” Jane said.

Elizabeth told her everything. She spared no details, speaking of the tower, the arguments, the terrifying storm, and the desperate fever. She confessed how her prejudice had broken, and how Darcy had proposed in the dark of their shelter.

She did not speak explicitly of their nights, but she did not need to. Jane heard the intimacy in the warmth of Elizabeth's voice, and she understood exactly how deeply her sister loved her new husband.

“You love him,” Jane breathed, her eyes wide.

“I love him more than I ever thought possible,” Elizabeth confessed.

“And he loves you.”

“He has loved me since Hertfordshire,” Elizabeth said softly. “His pride blinded him then, but the island stripped it all away. The man I married is honourable, steadfast, and devoted.”

Jane sat quietly, holding her sister's hand in a warm, comfortable silence.

“Jane,” Elizabeth said. “I need to tell you about Mr Bingley.”

Jane's serene mask instantly shattered. In the privacy of the bedroom, her expression betrayed the one thing she had denied herself for months: desperate, vulnerable hope.

“Fitzwilliam wrote to him before the shipwreck,” Elizabeth explained gently. “He confessed that he had separated you, and admitted how terribly wrong he was to judge your heart.”

Jane gasped. “He wrote that?”

“He is an honourable man, Jane. He felt compelled to right the terrible wrong he had done you.”

“What did Mr Bingley reply?”

“We do not know; the letter was sent just before the pirate attack. But Fitzwilliam wrote again from Valletta, urging Mr Bingley to return to Hertfordshire immediately and discover the truth for himself.”

Jane's eyes were brilliantly bright, shining with a sudden, overwhelming possibility.

“I cannot promise that he will come,” Elizabeth cautioned. “But the obstacle that separated you has been removed.”

Jane squeezed her hand fiercely, her gentle nature momentarily replaced by a fierce, undeniable resolve.

“Thank you,” Jane whispered.

“Do not thank me. Fitzwilliam is the one who wrote the letters.”

“I will thank him as well. But I am thanking you for coming back to me, Lizzy.”

Elizabeth held Jane's hand. The small bedroom smelled faintly of Longbourn's lavender. Downstairs, she could hear her mother's voice performing its daily opera of domestic management. It was the beautiful, chaotic sound of home.

She was home. She touched the small pink shell resting safely in her pocket. The island was behind her, and her future with Fitzwilliam Darcy had just begun.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Wickham was in Meryton. Darcy learnt this unfortunate fact at dinner from Mrs Bennet, who had heard it from Mrs Hill, who had heard it from the butcher's boy. She shared the news with the tremendous enthusiasm of a woman who had no idea of its true significance.

“Mr Wickham has been quite out of sorts since you left, Lizzy. His debts, you know. And that business with the shopkeeper's daughter, though Mrs Long says the girl was willing enough, and I do not see why the whole town must make such a fuss, for the girl is nothing to look at and Mr Wickham is so very charming⁠—”

“Mrs Bennet,” Darcy said.

Mrs Bennet stopped instantly. Darcy's voice held a quiet, chilling authority that immediately silenced her, commanding the deference of ten thousand a year.

“Mr Wickham's debts and his conduct are matters I will address,” Darcy said. “I would be grateful if the subject were not raised again at this table.”

Mrs Bennet blinked, looking to Elizabeth. Elizabeth returned her mother's gaze with steady, unwavering calm, silently confirming her husband's authority.

Darcy addressed the matter on a Tuesday morning. It required methodical preparation, executed with the cold precision of a man who had spent months imagining this exact confrontation.

He had written to his solicitor from Valletta. Kensington had responded swiftly, producing a comprehensive accounting of Wickham's local debts by the time Darcy reached Hertfordshire: a tailor, a bookseller, two public houses, a wine merchant, and a farmer whose sixteen-year-old daughter Wickham had been inappropriately courting.

The debts totalled one hundred and forty pounds. It was a trivial amount for Darcy, but insurmountable for Wickham. Wickham had already squandered the thousand pounds Darcy's father had left him, along with the three thousand pounds Darcy had given him in lieu of the living. He had produced nothing but debts, lies, and a deep trail of damage for others to repair.

Darcy paid the debts quietly through Kensington, anonymously. His action was not born of generosity, but of cold necessity; he had to remove every obstacle that kept George Wickham near the Bennet family.

Then he went to see Wickham.

Wickham was lodging above the draper's shop on the high street. Darcy climbed the narrow stairs and knocked sharply. The door opened, and George Wickham stood before him in a soiled shirt. His face registered rapid surprise, then shrewd calculation, before finally settling into his practised, deceitful charm.

“Darcy,” Wickham said, his smile failing to reach his eyes. “I had heard you were returned from the dead.”

“I am very much alive,” Darcy replied coldly.

“And married, I understand, to Miss Elizabeth Bennet. I must offer my congratulations.”

“You will offer me nothing. You will listen,” Darcy commanded, his voice like iron.

Wickham's pleasant surface instantly thinned, revealing the sharp, calculating gaze of a man reckoning his disadvantage.

“Come in, then,” Wickham said, stepping back.

“No.” Darcy remained deliberately on the threshold, refusing the informality of entering.

“Your debts in this neighbourhood have been settled,” Darcy said. “The settlement was anonymous and will remain so. You owe nothing to anyone in Meryton.”

Wickham's face shifted with genuine surprise, quickly followed by shrewd recalculation.

“That is remarkably generous.”

“It is not generous; it is a necessity. With your debts cleared, you have no reason to remain in Hertfordshire. You will leave immediately.”

“And if I choose not to leave?” Wickham asked softly.

“Then I will ruin you. I hold a sworn letter from Mrs Younge detailing your vicious scheme at Ramsgate regarding my sister. If you remain in Hertfordshire, or if you ever approach any member of my family or my wife's family, I will publish it.”

A heavy, dangerous silence fell between them.

“That is blackmail,” Wickham said, his eyes darkening.

“It is justice,” Darcy replied. “You attempted to elope with a girl of fifteen. You escaped the consequences then, but if you defy me now, I will see you utterly destroyed.”

“Your sister's reputation would suffer.”

“My sister's reputation is my concern,” Darcy countered coldly. “The letter describes your villainy, not hers. You will never be received or employed again. You will be universally despised.”

Wickham stared at him, all pleasantness gone. What remained was the selfish, ruthless face Darcy had known since boyhood—a man who took whatever he could and felt no remorse.

“How much?” Wickham demanded quietly.

“A commission in the regulars, purchased in your name. It will be effective upon your immediate departure from Hertfordshire. It is far more than you deserve. Take it and leave, or face the letter.”

“You have planned this carefully.”

“I have,” Darcy said simply.

Wickham fell quiet, rapidly calculating his self-interest. A commission offered money and escape; the letter offered utter ruin.

“When?” Wickham asked tightly.

“Tomorrow. Kensington will have the paperwork at the inn by noon. You will sign it, and you will leave Hertfordshire by the following morning. You will not return, nor will you ever contact the Bennet or Darcy families again. The terms are final.”

“They always are, with you,” Wickham sneered.

“Yes.”

Darcy turned and walked down the stairs without looking back. The brutal conversation was finished. He felt the cold, hard satisfaction of a dangerous threat permanently removed.

He had wanted to break the face of the man who had tried to ruin Georgiana and brought such distress to Elizabeth. But the island had taught him restraint. He had extracted Wickham from their lives without a single raised voice.

Lady Catherine de Bourgh arrived on Saturday. Her enormous carriage, drawn by four massive black horses and attended by servants in grand livery, swept up to Longbourn with terrifying speed. Her fury was visible through the glass before the carriage door even opened.

Darcy was in the garden when the thunderous knock struck the door. The sheer violence of the sound communicated Lady Catherine's outrage.

Mrs Hill opened the door, and Lady Catherine swept in. Elizabeth stood to meet her. Darcy remained in the garden, just outside the open window. Elizabeth had expressly asked him not to intervene, facing the confrontation with unwavering calm.

“You must not intervene, Fitzwilliam,” she had told him that morning. “She is coming to demand answers from the woman who dared marry her nephew, and I will be the one to answer her.”

“She is my aunt, Elizabeth. It is my duty to protect you from her insults.”

“I survived a shipwreck,” she had said, touching his face gently. “I am not afraid of Lady Catherine de Bourgh.”

He had reluctantly conceded. His every instinct was to stand between Elizabeth and any threat, but he respected her fierce independence.

Through the window, he heard Lady Catherine's shrill, commanding voice delivering furious pronouncements.

“—married without my knowledge, without my consent, without the slightest regard for the honour of my family!”

Then came Elizabeth's voice. It was lower and perfectly steady. Darcy could not hear every word, but the measured, unhurried cadence was a formidable power of its own.

Lady Catherine's voice rose sharply. “—compromised, ruined, the scandalous talk of every drawing room in London!”

Elizabeth's reply remained measured and devastatingly polite.

A sudden pause followed. Lady Catherine was uncharacteristically silenced for a moment, clearly shocked by a woman who refused to be intimidated.

Elizabeth's voice rang clearly through the open window.

“I chose your nephew, Lady Catherine. I chose him on a deserted island where no one could judge us. I was not compromised, and I was not rescued out of pity. I fell deeply in love with a good, honourable man, and I chose him with my eyes open. I will not apologise to you, or to anyone, for my marriage.”

The drawing room fell silent.

“Your nephew loves me,” Elizabeth continued fiercely. “Our trials have made us both better than we were before. This marriage is not a scandal; it is a blessing. I say this with full respect for your position, Lady Catherine, which is far more courtesy than you have shown me this morning.”

There was no further argument. The truth of her words hung in the air.

Lady Catherine left shortly thereafter. The grand carriage departed, but the great lady's fury had been extinguished by a woman who refused to yield.

Elizabeth appeared in the garden a moment later. Her face was flushed and her dark eyes were brilliantly bright.

“Well?” she asked, catching her breath.

Darcy looked at his wife. She had just faced down Lady Catherine de Bourgh with courage, requiring no protection or assistance. He was prouder of her in that moment than of anything he possessed in the world.

“You are magnificent,” he said softly.

She smiled, stepping into his arms. “Take me home to Pemberley, Fitzwilliam.”

Chapter Thirty-Three

Darcy was in the library when the carriage was heard. Mr Bennet had gruffly told him he could seek refuge there if he wished, which Darcy recognised as a gesture of goodwill. He had eagerly accepted; the library was quiet, whereas the rest of Longbourn was consumed by Mrs Bennet and her daughters fiercely debating the relative merits of silk versus muslin for a journey to Derbyshire. The discussion had raged for three days with no sign of concluding.

The sound of the carriage was distinct. It was not a farmer's cart or a hired post-chaise, but a private, well-sprung carriage driven at a reckless speed. Darcy and Mr Bennet exchanged a loaded glance.

“That will be Mr Bingley,” Mr Bennet noted quietly.

“Yes.”

“You wrote to him?”

“Twice,” Darcy confirmed. “The second letter included a comprehensive account of my dreadful interference, and my unqualified admission of fault.”

“A difficult admission for a proud man.”

“It was necessary,” Darcy said firmly. “I am attempting to correct my mistakes, sir.”

The carriage stopped, and the front door opened. Mrs Bennet's voice instantly achieved a piercing pitch, greeting the immensely eligible visitor with her characteristic, overwhelming enthusiasm.

Darcy remained in the library. He had wrongfully managed Bingley's departure; he would not interfere with his return.

He heard Bingley's voice, pitched slightly higher than usual. The words tumbled over each other with eager, breathless joy. Darcy had once viewed his friend's open, unguarded heart as a vulnerability; he now recognised it as courage he himself had lacked.

He heard Jane's quiet voice in reply. He could not make out the words, nor did he need to.

Mr Bennet turned a page of his book with theatrical slowness, making it obvious he was listening rather than reading.

“He sounds terrified,” Mr Bennet observed.

“He is,” Darcy agreed.

“Should he be?”

“He should. Between the two of us, we robbed your daughter of seven months of happiness, and the fault was primarily mine.”

Mr Bennet slowly removed his spectacles, cleaned them on his handkerchief, and replaced them, carefully considering his words.

“You are unlike the man I expected, Mr Darcy.”

“I have changed, sir.”

“You are uncommonly honest about your own failings,” Mr Bennet noted quietly. “I find that unexpectedly reassuring.”

Bingley's animated voice drifted from the drawing room, chased by Mrs Bennet's excited chatter and Lydia's sharp laugh. Beneath it all, Darcy heard the soft, unmistakable warmth returning to Jane's voice—a gentle joy he had not heard since Netherfield, before he had ruined it.

He had caused this terrible damage, and now he had facilitated the repair. It did not erase his guilt, but it was a beginning.

Elizabeth watched from the hallway, hiding behind the tall clock. She accepted the total lack of dignity because she desperately wanted to observe without interfering.

Bingley stood in the centre of the drawing room, staring at Jane with naked, desperate devotion. He was attempting to make polite conversation, but his words stumbled over themselves in his anxious rush to speak. His utter lack of artifice made Elizabeth's throat tighten.

Jane sat in her usual chair, her hands folded tightly in her lap. She was fighting to maintain her serene composure, though the effort was visibly costing her. Sitting across from the man she loved without breaking down required a heroic strength of will.

“Miss Bennet,” Bingley stammered. “I hope—I wanted to say—I have been a perfect fool.”

“You have not been a fool, Mr Bingley,” Jane said softly.

“I have! I should never have left. I was told... I was informed wrongly, but that is no excuse. I should have trusted my own heart.” His face was deeply flushed, his hands gripping his hat as if it were a lifeline.

Jane's composure finally slipped. Her mouth softened, her eyes brightened with unshed tears, and she leaned slightly towards him.

“Mr Bingley,” she whispered. “Please sit down.”

He practically collapsed into the chair beside hers, his eyes never leaving her face.

Mrs Bennet was chattering with manic, triumphant energy, her shrill voice dominating the room.

“Mama,” Elizabeth said, stepping from the hallway. “I believe Kitty requires your assistance in the breakfast room.”

“Kitty requires no such thing,” her mother retorted.

“She does, Mama,” Elizabeth insisted, fixing her mother with a fierce, commanding stare that brooked no argument.

Mrs Bennet finally yielded, herding Lydia and Mary out of the drawing room. Jane and Bingley were left alone. Across the hall, Darcy stood in the library doorway, offering Elizabeth a quiet nod of approval.

Elizabeth quietly retreated.

Bingley came every day. He called on Friday, and again on Saturday. He even called on Sunday, cheerfully ignoring the conventions of polite society in his desperation to be near Jane.

On Monday, he brought wild flowers plucked hastily from a hedgerow. The sweet, informal offering proved he had been thinking of her while walking, too eager to see her to wait for a formal bouquet.

Jane arranged them in water with tender care, her flushed face turned downward. When she finally looked up at him, her love was naked.

On Tuesday, Bingley took Jane walking. The short distance to Lucas Lodge somehow required an hour and a half. Elizabeth tactfully intercepted Mrs Bennet in the hallway to prevent her mother from commenting on their lengthy absence.

On Wednesday, Bingley and Jane talked in the drawing room for three hours. Mrs Bennet worked at her embroidery and, by some miracle, refrained from saying anything foolish enough to break the spell.

On Thursday — one week after his arrival — Bingley asked Darcy to walk with him.

They walked the quiet lane towards Meryton. Bingley's usual brisk pace was replaced by slow, deliberate steps as he carefully arranged his thoughts.

“I am going to ask her,” Bingley said.

“I know.”

“Today. This afternoon. If she will see me. If she — Darcy, do you think she will have me?”

The question was painfully earnest. Bingley's hope was so naked that Darcy found it difficult to look at him. He had nearly destroyed this man's happiness; he felt he had no right to predict its fulfilment.

“I am the last man in England qualified to judge Miss Bennet's feelings,” Darcy said heavily. “My blindness nearly cost you everything. But Elizabeth assures me that her sister never stopped loving you during your absence. I owe you an apology for my arrogant interference, Charles.”

Bingley was quiet for a moment.

“You have already delivered it,” Bingley said warmly. “You wrote to me with honesty. I could not ask for a better friend.”

“I proved a very poor friend to you last winter.”

“That is in the past,” Bingley insisted, clapping Darcy on the shoulder. “Now, tell me, should I wear the blue coat or the grey?”

“The blue,” Darcy said immediately.

“You did not even consider it!”

“The blue coat fits you perfectly, Charles. It will lend you the confidence you currently lack.”

Bingley ran a hand through his hair. “I have been pacing my room for a week trying to compose a speech.”

“Then you certainly need the blue coat,” Darcy offered a rare, genuine smile.

Bingley laughed, the sound nervous but happy. Darcy felt a surge of affection for the friend he had nearly lost, humbled by Bingley's easy grace.

They walked back to Longbourn in companionable silence. Bingley was preparing to change his life, and Darcy knew from recent experience that no amount of preparation would be adequate.

Elizabeth was in the garden when she saw them come through the gate. Bingley wore the blue coat, his face pale with determination. Darcy walked beside him like a steadfast second.

Bingley hurried into the house. Darcy crossed the lawn to Elizabeth.

“He is going to ask her,” Darcy said.

“I know,” she smiled softly. “He has been gathering his courage all week.”

“He asked me whether I thought she would accept him.”

“And what did you say?”

“I told him I was unqualified to judge her feelings, and advised him to wear the blue coat.”

“The blue coat was an excellent choice.”

“I thought so.”

They stood quietly in the warm September garden. The drawing room window was open. They could not hear the words, but they heard the cadence of the voices change. Bingley's nervous chatter ceased. He spoke again, his tone low, steady, and far more serious than Elizabeth had ever heard it.

A long silence followed.

Then came Jane's voice. Elizabeth could not distinguish the word, but she knew the joyous, weeping tone.

“Yes,” Elizabeth whispered into the quiet garden.

Darcy took her hand, threading his fingers through hers. They stood together, grateful that they had managed to repair the damage they had caused.

Mrs Bennet's triumphant voice suddenly erupted from the house, startling the birds from the garden hedge. The volume of her joy was extraordinary, and for once, appropriate.

Elizabeth laughed aloud. Darcy smiled, a deep, genuine expression of relief.

“Two daughters married,” Elizabeth mused. “My mother will be unbearable for a month.”

Inside the drawing room, Bingley and Jane were finally beginning the life they should have started seven months ago. It was late, but they were together.

Elizabeth leaned against Darcy's shoulder, and he pulled her close. The garden smelled of late roses and cut grass. Darcy's hand was warm in hers.

She was going to have to write to Georgiana.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Pemberley was larger than Elizabeth remembered. She had recalled it as vast, but in the intervening months, the estate seemed to have grown even more magnificent.

The carriage rolled through the park in the late afternoon. The August light turned the Derbyshire landscape into a vivid tapestry of green and gold. The ancient trees formed great arches over the winding drive. When the house finally appeared through the dappled shadows, it was a moment Elizabeth had anticipated since the island. But no amount of imagination could have adequately prepared her for the sheer scale of the stone, the water, and the glass.

First came the lake. She had admired it on her visit with the Gardiners, but seeing it now carried a different weight. This was the lake she was going to look upon every morning for the rest of her life—a truth she needed time to absorb.

Then came the house. The warm stone was perfectly symmetrical, its proportions grand but never ostentatious. It stood with the quiet confidence of an estate that had endured for centuries.

She was going to live here. She was going to walk through those doors as the mistress of Pemberley. The great staff would look to her for the endless decisions that made such a vast household function. The immense responsibility felt daunting, rivalled only by the terrifying burden of keeping Fitzwilliam alive through his fever on the island.

Darcy was watching her. She could feel his steady attention. His gaze held the quiet devotion that had begun in Hertfordshire, endured the island, and was now bringing them both home.

“Breathe, Elizabeth,” he murmured, taking her hand.

She offered a shaky smile. “I am trying. The lake is somewhat overwhelming.”

“It is only water and stone,” he promised softly. “It is your home now.”

The carriage stopped. Footmen immediately materialised to open the doors and lower the steps, their service perfectly seamless and silent.

She stepped down from the carriage. Her new London shoes landed softly on the immaculately raked golden gravel. She stood before Pemberley, finally arriving as its mistress.

Georgiana was waiting at the door. Elizabeth had spent hours preparing for this meeting, carefully composing her words. She had braced herself for shyness and anticipated the delicate difficulty of meeting a young woman whose beloved brother she had married in secrecy.

She had not prepared for Georgiana's actual expression. The young girl stood in the doorway, her hands clasped tightly, fighting a desperate battle for composure. Her face was so full of naked, hopeful anxiety that Elizabeth's prepared speech instantly evaporated.

“Georgiana,” she said, and held out her hands.

Georgiana hesitated, then took them. Her grip was tentative, the nervous gesture of a girl who had been rigidly trained to curtsey but longed to be embraced.

“I have so deeply wanted to meet you,” Elizabeth said warmly. “Fitzwilliam spoke of you constantly on the island. He told me how clever you are, how kind you are, and how you prefer reading in window seats with your shoes off.”

Georgiana's face softened. Her anxiety gave way to a startled, genuine warmth—the relief of a girl who realised she was not going to be strictly managed by a demanding new sister.

“He told you about my shoes?” Georgiana asked, a faint smile appearing.

“He told me everything,” Elizabeth promised gently. “Including the fact that you practise your curtsey when you are nervous. You may stop doing that immediately, Georgiana, for we are sisters now.”

Georgiana finally relaxed her rigid posture. She looked past Elizabeth to Darcy, who stood watching the two women he loved most in the world with quiet gratitude.

“Fitzwilliam,” Georgiana breathed. “You did not tell me she was so kind.”

“I told you she was extraordinary,” Darcy smiled warmly.

Elizabeth laughed, breaking the final barrier of formality between them. They stood together in the doorway, breathing the fresh Derbyshire air, smelling of grass and warm stone. It smelled like home.

Mrs Reynolds was waiting in the great entrance hall. When Elizabeth crossed the threshold as the mistress of Pemberley, the housekeeper's professional composure immediately gave way to an expression of unguarded satisfaction. She had waited sixteen years to welcome a new mistress.

The name—Mrs Darcy—spoken in this hall carried the immense weight of centuries of history. Elizabeth felt the sudden, heavy truth of her new position.

“Thank you, Mrs Reynolds,” Elizabeth replied gracefully. “Fitzwilliam has told me that you have managed this great house with distinction for thirty years. I shall rely heavily on your guidance.”

Mrs Reynolds beamed, her strict posture softening. “It is our greatest joy to have you here, madam. The household is at your disposal.”

Darcy offered the housekeeper a rare, genuine smile. “I believe Pemberley is in excellent hands, Mrs Reynolds.”

Pemberley was an entire world. Elizabeth had known this from her visit with the Gardiners, but walking its grand halls as the mistress was different from admiring it as a visitor.

She walked through the vast rooms with Georgiana, who had happily attached herself to Elizabeth's side. The young girl eagerly showed her the bright morning room, the grand music room, and the magnificent library.

“Your rooms are in the south wing,” Georgiana told her. “Fitzwilliam had them specially prepared.”

The suite was enormous, comprising a private sitting room, a dressing room, and a vast bedroom. The tall windows looked south over the grounds and east over the lake. It was the exact view Darcy had described to her while lying on a rough pallet in the stone tower. The reality was far more breathtaking than his quiet descriptions.

A massive four-poster bed dominated the room, draped in heavy, cream-coloured fabric that shifted gently in the breeze. The sheets were the finest white linen, stacked with deep feather pillows.

Elizabeth sat on the edge of the bed, pressing her hand into the luxurious mattress. She remembered the unforgiving hardness of the stone floor and the rough sailcloth of the island. It seemed impossible that the woman who had survived that brutal exile was now sitting on feathers in Derbyshire.

She carefully withdrew the small pink shell from her pocket and set it on the mahogany dressing table. The smooth nacre caught the late afternoon light. It sat between a heavy silver hairbrush and a crystal vase of fresh flowers, a quiet, permanent piece of the island surviving in Pemberley.

Night fell slowly over the great estate. Elizabeth had eaten dinner in the vast dining room with Darcy and Georgiana. The table was impossibly large for three people, but the warmth between them made the cavernous room feel intimate.

Georgiana soon retired, and Mrs Reynolds completed her evening rounds. The house fell quiet, settling into its heavy, two-century history.

Elizabeth walked slowly to the master suite. It was the room where she would wake every morning and sleep every night for the rest of her life.

Darcy was waiting by the window. The heavy curtains were drawn back, allowing the silver moonlight to spill across the floor. He turned when she entered. In the soft light, he looked exactly like the man she had loved on the island and married in Valletta.

“You are home,” he said softly.

“It is very large,” she whispered.

“It is.”

“It is beautiful, Fitzwilliam. But it is daunting. I am still learning how to be the mistress of all of this.”

He offered her a deep, warm smile—the same unguarded expression she had first coaxed from him on the island.

She walked to him, resting her hands against his chest and tilting her face up to his.

He kissed her — slow, certain, nothing tentative in it. He was home, and his mouth said so.

She unfastened his coat first, then his waistcoat. The buttons were small and numerous, and she worked through them with a patience she had not always possessed. On the island she had simply pulled his shirt over his head. England required layers.

“There is a great deal of you,” she said.

“The penalty of living in society,” he replied against her hair. “You may take it as a compliment to your patience.”

She removed the coat and the waistcoat and laid them over the chair. His shirt came next. She drew it from his trousers, lifted, and he helped her, and then it was gone.

She placed her hands flat on his bare chest. The scar on his side gleamed silver in the moonlight — the long line she had pressed cold cloths against during the fever, the wound she had thought might take him from her. Here it was simply part of him.

She pressed her lips to it, briefly and firmly.

He exhaled above her — short, unguarded.

She looked up. He was watching her with the expression she recognised: his formal composure set aside, nothing in his face but her. She undressed him the rest of the way. He undressed her with a deliberateness borrowed from the island — the slow attention of a man who had learnt her body over weeks and intended to reacquaint himself with every part of it.

He slipped the London dress from her shoulders. His mouth followed the fabric down — her neck, her collarbone, the curve of her shoulder. The fine shift came next, and then she was bare in the moonlight, in the great bedroom that was hers.

“Pemberley suits you,” he said.

“Pemberley is very dark,” she said. “I cannot see much of it.”

“I can.”

His mouth found her breast. She caught her breath, her fingers tangling in his hair. The feather mattress received her weight differently from anything before — not the stone tower, not the narrow ship bunk, not the Valletta bed with its borrowed sheets. It yielded deeply, drawing her in. She sank into it, and above her his weight was the one solid thing in the room.

He moved lower. His mouth traced her ribs, her stomach, the curve of her hip. His hands found her thighs, and she parted for him with a familiarity that required no instruction. His fingers found her slick and ready; his thumb circled her with a patience she recognised as deliberate. He was in no hurry. They had a locked door, an estate, and the rest of their lives.

“Fitzwilliam,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You are lingering.”

“I am.”

“Is this the Pemberley approach to everything, or specifically to this?”

He laughed against her hip. The warm sound of it reached her skin. “Specifically to this,” he said. “The estate is managed quite efficiently.”

She pulled him up by the shoulders. He came, settling between her thighs, his forearms braced either side of her head. His face was close to hers in the dark, and the moonlight caught the familiar serious look he wore just before his composure gave way.

“Come here,” she said. “Now. I have waited long enough.”

He entered her slowly. The feather mattress gave beneath them both, drawing him deeper than the tower or the ship had permitted. She gasped against his cheek, and his breath caught in answer.

They held still for a moment.

“Well,” she managed. “That is the feather bed.”

He laughed again — and the laugh became a groan as he began to move, slow and powerful, finding the rhythm she had taught him. Her hips rose to meet his. The soft mattress yielded with each thrust, producing a deep, rolling sensation that built steadily without urgency. They were not racing towards anything. They were home.

She held him with her legs and her hands, her fingers pressed flat into his back. He moved inside her with the focused, thorough attention he had brought to everything since the first night on the island — wholly concentrated on her response. His mouth found the sensitive place below her ear. She turned her face into his neck.

“Stay there,” she whispered.

He stayed.

His hand moved between them, his thumb finding her. The combination of his rhythm and his touch built the familiar, fierce pressure deep in her body. She pressed her forehead to his shoulder and surrendered to it.

Her release came slowly — a long wave that moved through her and left her gripping him hard, her body clenching around him in steady, shuddering pulses. She breathed his name against his collar.

He followed. His rhythm broke and his hips drove deep against hers as the shudder went through him. He pressed his face into her neck — the groan against her skin, the warmth of him, the full weight of his body settling onto hers at last.

Afterward, they lay tangled together in the silver moonlight, at peace within the vast, quiet walls of Pemberley.

Elizabeth rested her head on his chest. The steady thud of his heartbeat under her ear was the same sound she had listened to through the stone floor of the tower. It was the undeniable sound of survival.

She could see the small pink shell resting on the mahogany dressing table, its nacre gleaming softly in the moonlight.

“Fitzwilliam?” she whispered.

“Mm.”

“I am going to be very happy here,” she promised softly. “Not because the house is grand, or the lake is beautiful, but because it is yours. Because you are here.”

He tightened his arms around her, kissing the top of her head. The great house settled quietly around them in the cooling air.

Elizabeth Darcy closed her eyes and fell asleep in Pemberley. Her husband held her close, and the long, beautiful life they had fought so hard to build was finally ready to begin.

Also by Ella Paul

The tomatoes were a scandal.

Darcy had expected this. He had braced himself from the moment Elizabeth announced her intention to plant a kitchen garden behind the south wing. For two centuries, the patch of ground had been an untouched ornamental border. Mr Fenton, the head gardener, considered its pristine, useless roses the crowning achievement of his forty-year career.

Mr Fenton had not taken the news well. He received Elizabeth's instructions with a grim, thunderous silence.

“Tomatoes,” Mr Fenton had repeated, his voice thick with dismay.

“Tomatoes,” Elizabeth had confirmed cheerfully. “And beans, and herbs. And a fig tree, if one can be persuaded to survive in Derbyshire.”

The fig tree struggled fiercely against the Derbyshire climate, but Elizabeth refused to abandon it, tending it with the same stubborn devotion she applied to everything she loved.

The tomatoes, however, flourished spectacularly. They produced a massive harvest that delighted Mrs Henderson, the cook, and deeply offended Mr Fenton. The displaced roses had been moved to the east border, producing blooms that Mr Fenton sourly described as 'adequate'.

Darcy found the entire conflict quietly amusing. Before Elizabeth, he had possessed very little humour regarding the management of his estate, but his wife's cheerful defiance of Pemberley's stuffiest traditions brought him endless joy.

It was August, exactly a year since their arrival. Pemberley in summer was breathtaking: the grounds were lush, the lake reflected a brilliant blue sky, and the warm stone house buzzed with quiet, happy life.

Elizabeth and Mrs Reynolds managed the great household together in perfect, seamless harmony. The breakfast kitchen had been reorganised, the morning room repapered, and the south drawing room outfitted with bright new curtains. Darcy admired his wife's improvements immensely, grateful for the life she had breathed back into his home.

Through the open window, Darcy could hear Georgiana practising the pianoforte. Her playing had changed since Elizabeth's arrival. It was less rigid and far more adventurous. She occasionally missed a note, but played with a bold, joyful passion she had never possessed before, and had stopped practising her anxious curtseys.

Georgiana had blossomed under Elizabeth's care. She finally spoke her mind at dinner and during their long walks, offering bright, thoughtful opinions about novels, music, and the neighbourhood. She had found an ally in her new sister.

“You have transformed her,” Darcy had told Elizabeth one evening.

“I have only encouraged her to be herself,” Elizabeth had smiled.

He had agreed. The honesty they had forged on the island had not diminished with the comforts of Pemberley.

Jane and Bingley had married at Longbourn in October. Bingley had provided everything Jane desired with the uncomplicated enthusiasm of a man wildly in love. Mrs Bennet had been in her element, weeping loudly and triumphantly throughout the entire service.

They had taken Netherfield. The sisters visited each other often, their deep bond unbroken by the harrowing separation they had endured.

Jane was expecting a child. The joyous news had arrived three weeks ago, buried modestly in the third paragraph of a letter about the garden and a recipe for seed cake. Elizabeth had wept with joy, and Darcy had held her, grateful for her happiness.

The Gardiners were coming for midsummer. Darcy corresponded regularly with Mr Gardiner, finding a steady friendship with the quiet, capable merchant who had never stopped searching for Elizabeth.

Mrs Bennet wrote weekly. Her letters were inexhaustible catalogs of the social triumphs of having two daughters married to such wealthy men. Darcy bore them with patience, accepting his mother-in-law's flaws out of love for his wife.

Mr Bennet wrote briefly every month. The letters were addressed to Elizabeth, but they always contained a dry, witty line directed at Darcy. It was Mr Bennet's quiet, unmistakable form of paternal approval.

The most recent letter had ended: “I trust Pemberley continues to withstand the improvements. Your father built well; the house should survive one Elizabeth.”

Elizabeth had read the line and smiled softly, carefully folding the letter into her writing desk. She kept it in the drawer with the things she treasured most: her father's correspondence, a pressed fig leaf from the island, and the small pink shell from the Mediterranean cove.

He found her on the grounds in the late afternoon. She was standing at the very edge of the south lawn, looking out over the valley and the river towards the distant green hills.

Her hands were dirty, and there was a smudge of dark soil on her cheek where she had pushed her hair back. She looked radiant.

He walked softly across the grass, but she turned as he approached, always sensing his presence.

“Mr Fenton has finally capitulated,” she announced with a bright smile.

“Has he?”

“He ate one of my tomatoes this morning. I saw him standing by the garden wall, enjoying it in secret.”

“And yet you witnessed this secret.”

“I was tending the beans,” she laughed. “I saw everything.”

The afternoon light caught her dark eyes. It was the face he had watched across a drawing room in Hertfordshire and loved by firelight on a beach. But the terrible, desperate vigilance of the island was gone. She was settled, safe, and home.

“I have bought a house,” he said quietly.

Her eyebrows rose. “You have bought a house? We already possess a house with forty rooms, Fitzwilliam. What possible use have we for another?”

“It is on the coast in Devon,” he explained. “It is a small stone cottage, sitting on a cliff above the sea.”

Elizabeth fell silent.

“There is a secluded cove below it,” he continued softly. “The water is clear, the beach is white sand, and the sound of the waves easily reaches the bedroom window.”

She looked up at him, her dark eyes shining with sudden emotion. It was the same look she had given him on the island the night he proposed, and in the chapel in Valletta when she had taken his hand.

“For when you miss the waves,” he murmured.

She took his hand. Her fingers were warm and slightly gritty with soil from the garden she had so stubbornly coaxed into life.

“I do not miss the waves,” she whispered. “I have never missed them. The island was not the point, Fitzwilliam. You were the point. You always were.”

He pulled her into his arms, kissing her deeply under the wide Derbyshire sky.

“I do not need the sea,” she said, resting against his shoulder. “I have everything I could ever want right here.”

They gathered at the lawn's edge, gazing over the stunning green valley. Behind them, Pemberley stood vibrant with warmth, music, and life. As the afternoon sun lowered, it cast long, golden shadows across the grass they remained in the warmth, holding hands.

Other books and Series

A Pride and Prejudice Variation Romance Series

The Duke of Derbyshire

The Duke of Pemberley

Winning Mr Darcy

Shipwrecked with Mr Darcy

THE PATHS TO PEMBERLEY SERIES

Read the other books in the Paths to Pemberley Series

Fortunes’s Folly

The Cravat Scandal

The Earl of Pemberley

Vows of Convenience

The Pemberley Ball

Snowbound at Pemberley

Beneath Pemberley Skies