Shipwrecked with Mr Darcy (A Pride and Prejudice Variation Romance #4)

Chapter 1

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.