Chapter 13
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.