Chapter 25
Chapter Twenty-Five
Elizabeth Bennet was engaged to be married. The engagement had been announced to a population of four lizards, an indeterminate number of seabirds, and a single, ancient fig tree.
She picked three figs from the lower branches, inspected them for soundness, and added them to the juniper-bark basket, which could only hold eight before it began to collapse.
She was engaged. The reality of it was difficult to grasp.
In Hertfordshire, an engagement meant calling cards and morning visits; it meant her mother's voice ringing at an unbearable pitch throughout the house.
It meant a ring, a breakfast, a settlement, a date, and a church.
It meant a clergyman who was not Mr Collins—though if Mr Collins were the only available clergyman, she would have endured his homily without complaint, simply to be married to Fitzwilliam Darcy.
Here it meant figs.
She carried the basket up the hill to the tower, where Darcy had been constructing something since dawn. The fever had kept him quite still for seven days. He was now compensating for that forced idleness with a relentless energy that deeply concerned her.
“You are overdoing it,” she said.
He was on the upper level of the tower. The storm had taken the roof and a section of the east wall, leaving a platform open to the sky.
On this platform, Darcy was building a fire pit from the flat stones she had collected during his convalescence.
Beside it sat a growing pile of green juniper branches, cut and stacked with exact, geometric precision.
“You are building a signal fire six days after a fever nearly killed you,” she observed.
“This fire will burn longer and produce more smoke,” Darcy replied without looking up.
“It will be visible from a greater distance than anything we have managed. The green wood creates a column of white smoke that can be seen for miles in clear weather. The stone pit retains heat, which means we can bank coals overnight and relight in the morning. And this elevation gives us the highest point on the island.”
He had clearly been planning this during his confinement on the pallet.
He presented the scheme with great fluency, as though reading from notes he had composed while she was forbidding him to stand.
Planning was the thing Fitzwilliam Darcy did instead of resting; forbidding it would have been quite useless.
“The fire pit is sound,” she said. “But the man building it must sit down and drink water before he falls off the tower.”
He drank the water, though he refused to sit down. The drinking was at least a minor concession, and she had learnt to take what was available.
The engagement required absolutely no adjustment to their daily life.
In England, an engagement restructured everything.
The households negotiated; the families met, carefully assessing one another's connections and fortunes.
The woman's days filled with linens, menus, and the endless opinions of aunts.
The man's days filled with solicitors and settlements, converting honourable intentions into binding legal documents.
On the island their days filled with fish.
She caught four bream that morning. Darcy, who was restricted from swimming but allowed to fish from the rocks, caught two.
She proudly announced her victory. He immediately observed that his two fish far outweighed her four, and that a just reckoning would award him the victory based on size rather than count.
She replied that she had established the rules based on numbers, and she would not allow him to change them after the fact merely because he was losing.
“I am not changing the rules,” he countered. “I am merely proposing a fairer method of measurement.”
“You are proposing it because the existing method does not favour you.”
“I am attempting to improve the game, Elizabeth.”
“The game requires no improvement,” she said brightly. “I counted the fish. I had more fish. The game worked perfectly.”
One corner of his mouth rose higher than the other. It was a smile he had probably never performed in a drawing room, and she intended to provoke it at least once a day for the rest of her life.
She was going to marry this man. She would live in his house, sit across from him at a proper table, and eat food that was not fish.
She would have his children. The thought arrived suddenly—a child with his eyes and her mouth—and it was so vivid and reckless that she forced herself to look away and return to the fishing.
She planted the garden in the afternoon.
It was not a garden in any sense that Longbourn's gardener would have recognised. It was merely a patch of earth beside the tower's south wall. She had cleared it of stones and softened the soil with ash from the fire, enriching it with the remains of fig skins and fish bones she had been saving.
She transplanted wild herbs from the hillside. She planted rosemary, which grew everywhere, alongside hardy thyme and oregano.
She dug with a flat stone, pressing the roots deep into the loosened soil with her fingers. The herbs were real, and the soil was real. The engagement, Pemberley, and children—those were concepts she could not yet truly touch.
She was planting a garden she might never harvest. Rescue might come tomorrow and render it irrelevant, or rescue might not come at all.
Faith was putting rosemary in the ground without knowing who would eat it.
She watered the rosemary and the thyme from the cistern. The herbs stood in the dark soil, looking small but decidedly alive.
Darcy appeared beside her. He had descended from the tower, which meant his work on the fire pit was quite finished.
“A garden,” he said.
“A garden.”
He knelt beside her. His hands moved to the soil with a familiarity that surprised her, though it should not have; he was the master of ten thousand acres in Derbyshire.
He pressed the earth around the thyme with his thumbs. It was the firm, careful pressure of a man who had watched the process done correctly and remembered the exact method.
“My mother had a kitchen garden,” he said. “At Pemberley. Behind the south wing, where the wall holds the warmth. She grew herbs and lettuces and strawberries. After she died, the gardener maintained it for a year, then converted it to ornamentals. I did not object. I should have.”
“You were young.”
“I was twelve. Young enough to be forgiven for not objecting, old enough to have noticed what was lost.”
She looked at the small, wind-bitten herbs, rooted in island soil that was more rock than earth. She looked at Darcy kneeling beside her, with dirt on his hands and the scar visible through his open shirt. When he spoke of his mother, his expression carried an open, quiet grief.
“We will plant a kitchen garden at Pemberley,” she said.
The we was wholly deliberate. She was making real plans that included Pemberley and a kitchen garden behind the south wing. Such planning required immense faith—a luxury a sensible woman from Hertfordshire could ill afford on a deserted island.
She made the plans anyway. Sensible women from Hertfordshire had not survived pirates, shipwrecks, and fevers. She was no longer that woman.
The cove in the late afternoon was warm, private, and washed in gold. The rocks curved inward, and the sand held the day's heat. The brilliant light turned the water into a startling, vivid blue.
They swam. His body was noticeably thinner from the fever; she could clearly see the ribs she had pressed her ear against during the worst night. But the water invigorated him. He dove under and surfaced with his hair streaming, his face alive with sheer pleasure.
She floated on her back beneath a depthless, cloudless sky. She knew she would genuinely miss this vivid blue when they returned to the pale, grey skies of England.
She was going to miss the sky, the water, and the very version of herself that this island had produced. She had become a woman who caught fish, planted gardens, and loved a man without anyone's permission.
She was, however, not going to miss the food.
Darcy surfaced closely beside her, treading water as the current gently pushed them together.
“I have finished the signal fire,” he said.
“I gathered.”
“It is the best we can build with available materials. The stone pit will hold coals for eight hours. The green wood will produce a smoke column visible from three miles in clear weather. We can maintain it in shifts.”
“You are reporting to me as though I am your governess,” she teased.
“You have governed my every action for the past week,” he replied. “I am merely accustomed to following your orders.”
She laughed, splashing backward into the water. She came up coughing and laughing simultaneously, wholly abandoning her dignity. He watched her with an expression that was exceedingly warm, and dangerously close to desire.
She swam to him, closing the distance between them. She rested her hands on his shoulders, her legs brushing against his beneath the water.
“We are engaged,” she said.
“We are.”
“And you have built me a signal fire.”
“I have.”
“Is the signal fire my engagement present?” she asked. “Because in England, the convention is a ring. The ring is typically made of gold, rather than whatever coarse mineral you have been stacking on the tower.”
“I will get you a ring in England.”
“I do not want a ring in England. I want a ring on this island. This is where you asked, and this is where I accepted. We should mark the occasion with whatever is available.”
He looked at her. There was water on his face and in his eyelashes, the drops catching the gold light. His unguarded expression made her chest tight, and her resolve to be witty completely faltered.
He suddenly dove beneath the surface. She treaded water and waited. He quickly surfaced with his hand closed, water streaming from his hair. He looked quite serious.