Chapter 10 #2
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.