Chapter 30
Chapter Thirty
During the long voyage from Valletta to England, Darcy discovered that being married to Elizabeth was consuming.
Beds, proper meals, and the presence of other human beings were welcome improvements, but they did not alter the fundamental reality: Elizabeth commanded his attention.
He conducted the business of his life with the distracted efficiency of a man who cared for very little else.
The voyage aboard the Fortuna, a passenger ship bound for Portsmouth, would take three weeks.
Their passage had been arranged by Mr Gardiner.
Elizabeth's favourite uncle had proven to be highly competent, unpretentious, and possessed of a quiet authority that required neither volume nor rank.
He had effortlessly secured passage for four using nothing but excellent manners and the commercial contacts he had cultivated over twenty years of importing goods.
Darcy genuinely liked Mr Gardiner. It surprised him only because he had previously dismissed the Gardiners as mere trade.
It was a cruel word he had used to categorise and diminish a couple whose warmth and practical intelligence exceeded that of any three families in the ton.
He knew he would not forgive himself for that arrogance easily.
Mrs Gardiner's affection for Elizabeth was obvious. She treated her not as a young person requiring guidance, but as a woman whose judgement was trusted and respected. Elizabeth responded to her aunt with a visible ease that she displayed with no one else but Darcy.
Mrs Gardiner and Elizabeth talked for hours on the deck in the afternoon sun, their heads close together.
Their conversation was low, frequently punctuated by Elizabeth's bright laughter.
Mrs Gardiner filled in the missing weeks: the pirate attack, the terrible confusion, and their rescue by the Prosperità.
She detailed the weeks of frantic enquiry, the letters sent to every consulate on the Italian coast, and their refusal to surrender hope.
“Your uncle refused to accept it,” Mrs Gardiner told Elizabeth.
Darcy stood near enough to hear, but kept a deliberate distance to preserve their privacy.
“He wrote to the Admiralty. He wrote to the consuls in Naples, Palermo, and Malta. He wrote to your father every single week, and every letter contained the same vow: We have not found her, but we have not stopped looking.”
Elizabeth's face was very still. She was absorbing the terrible truth of her family's suffering, finding the reality far worse than she had imagined.
Mrs Gardiner spoke of Longbourn. She described Mr Bennet's short, controlled letters, his deteriorating handwriting revealing what his words would not.
Mrs Bennet's nerves had escalated from their usual theatrical pitch to a genuine, frightening collapse, proving the depth of her love for her second daughter beneath all her scheming.
Jane had held everyone together, though Mrs Gardiner confessed that Jane's calm letters had begun to crack under the strain.
Darcy heard enough to understand the terrible damage their absence had caused. The grief was deep and ragged, and it was going to take a long time to heal. It would be his responsibility as much as Elizabeth's; he had married into this family, and their wounds were now his to tend.
The conversation with Mr Gardiner happened on the fifth day at sea.
They were leaning against the railing, watching the grey, vast Atlantic. Mr Gardiner was smoking a pipe. The scent of the tobacco was a luxury Darcy had not encountered in weeks, and he found the smell unexpectedly pleasant.
“I should like to ask you some questions,” Mr Gardiner said quietly. His tone was mild, but his gaze was extraordinarily sharp. He was a man who had built a successful business by asking precise questions and listening carefully to the answers, and he intended to apply that same thoroughness now.
“Ask,” Darcy said.
“You were alone with my niece for six weeks.”
“Yes.”
“On a deserted island with no chaperone, no society, no oversight.”
“Yes.”
“And you are now married.”
“We are now married. The ceremony was performed in Valletta by an Anglican clergyman. The marriage is legal and registered.”
“I am not questioning the legality. I am asking about the sequence.”
Darcy met Mr Gardiner's gaze. They studied each other with the directness of two men who respected each other enough to dispense with drawing-room polite fictions.
“The sequence,” Darcy said, “was this. I proposed to your niece at Hunsford, four months before the shipwreck.
She refused me. The refusal was deserved.
I had proposed with pride, with condescension, and with a catalogue of her family's failings that demonstrated every defect of character she accused me of. She refused me, and I wrote her a letter, and the letter was the last communication between us before we found ourselves on the same ship.”
“And on the island?”
“On the island, we had nothing but each other and the truth,” Darcy said softly.
“I loved her long before the shipwreck. She had not loved me, and I had given her no reason to do so. The island changed her understanding of me, just as it changed my understanding of myself. That change was genuine; it was not produced by desperation or the mere absence of alternatives.”
“The change produced a marriage.”
“The change produced a deep attachment,” Darcy corrected firmly.
“The marriage followed because my love for her is entire, and because her reputation required my protection. Above all, I wanted to make her my wife more than I have ever wanted anything in my life. It was not an obligation. It was my greatest privilege.”
Mr Gardiner drew on his pipe. The smoke trailed into the Atlantic wind.
“My niece is not the sort of woman who requires rescue,” Mr Gardiner said.
“No. She is not.”
“And yet the world will say she was rescued,” Mr Gardiner noted heavily. “They will say that you did the honourable thing, interpreting your marriage as a discharged obligation rather than a free choice. That perception will attempt to diminish her in every drawing room in England.”
“I am aware.”
“Are you prepared for that?”
“I am prepared,” Darcy said, his voice hardening into steel.
“I will spend the rest of my life correcting any person who attempts to diminish my wife.
I will use every ounce of my influence to ensure she is treated with the respect she deserves.
Your niece spent six weeks teaching me that the world's opinion is not the measure of a person's worth. I have learnt that lesson, and I intend to fiercely enforce it.”
Mr Gardiner studied him in long silence. He was taking the measure of the man before him, and he found Darcy's fierce sincerity acceptable.
“My niece,” Mr Gardiner said, “is the cleverest woman I know. She is also the most stubborn. The two qualities together produce a person who is either quite right or spectacularly wrong, and she is rarely wrong twice about the same thing.”
“She was wrong about me once.”
“She was. She tells me she is not wrong now.”
“She is not wrong now.”
Mr Gardiner nodded and drew on his pipe. It was not overt approval, but a solemn acknowledgement. He had heard what he needed to hear, and he would reserve his final judgement for the years ahead.
“Welcome to the family, Mr Darcy,” he said.
“Thank you, Mr Gardiner.”
“You may call me Gardiner. The family does.”
“Gardiner, then.”
The pipe smoke trailed into the wind. They stood together at the railing, two men connected by their love for the woman below decks.
Elizabeth was preparing for England.
Darcy watched her with deep admiration. His wife possessed a brilliant, formidable mind, and he found her determination captivating.
She sat at the desk in their cabin with paper Darcy had purchased in Valletta, writing careful notes. She was composing the conversations she knew she would soon have to endure in Hertfordshire.
“My mother,” she said, glancing at her notes.
“She will be wholly ecstatic, and quite unbearable.
She will cry, and she will embrace me, and then she will immediately begin calculating your income to determine if Pemberley's dining room is larger than Lady Lucas's. I will endure her vanity because her initial emotion will be genuine. It is simply how she expresses her affection.”
“That is generous of you.”
“The island taught me patience,” she replied. “My mother's love is flawed, but it is true, and I must learn to accept it without resentment.”
She looked down again. “My father will be difficult. He will be very quiet, and he will take me to his library. He will ask me if I am happy, and that question will contain everything he cannot bring himself to say. I will tell him yes, and the conversation will likely last no more than three minutes.”
“And if he asks about the island?”
“He will not ask,” she said softly. “He will choose ignorance as a way of protecting me, and I will allow him that kindness.”
She turned a page. “Jane is the conversation I am both dreading and desperately anticipating. Jane will hear everything without judgement. We will hold each other and cry, and that will be our healing.”
“And Bingley?”
“I will tell her that you wrote to him, admitting your terrible mistake. I will tell her that he may return to her, though I cannot promise it. The path is open, and Jane must decide what she wishes to do.”
He said nothing, watching her.
“You are magnificent,” he said.
“You have said that before.”
“It bears repeating. You intend to manage the social expectations of an entire county with nothing but a borrowed pen and your own fierce determination.”
“And my husband's support,” she reminded him, offering a warm smile.
“You have that,” he promised softly. “Always.”
The Fortuna sailed westward through the Mediterranean and out through the Strait of Gibraltar into the grey Atlantic swell.
Elizabeth continued her careful writing while Darcy sat quietly beside her.
The Gardiners were on deck above them. They were all heading home towards England, and their lives were only just beginning.