Chapter 9
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.