Chapter 7
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.