Chapter 3 #2
Elizabeth had come up for air. The cabin below was warm. Mrs Gardiner's silence was loud — she had seventeen questions and was restraining every one of them. Elizabeth needed air unoccupied by someone reading her face.
She walked to the railing. She breathed. The air tasted of salt and the faint sweetness of warm wood. The ship moved under her feet with a rhythm she was beginning to learn: a steady rise and fall, like breathing done by something very large and indifferent.
She heard his step before she saw him. She knew it was his; she had spent an entire dinner cataloguing the sound of his boots on the cabin floor. It was a pathetic use of an excellent mind. She acknowledged this freely and did not stop listening.
He appeared at the railing. Not beside her — six feet away. It was either a respectful distance or cowardice. She was not going to help him by closing it.
“Miss Bennet.”
“Mr Darcy.”
Silence lingered. The ship slowly creaked, while a wave slapped against the hull with the wet, casual violence of a nighttime sea.
“I did not know you would be aboard,” he said.
“Nor I you.”
“If my presence causes you discomfort, I can — arrangements might be made — I could take my meals separately, or—”
“Mr Darcy.” She turned to face him. He was a shape in the dark — tall, rigid, his hands on the railing in a grip that suggested he was holding on to something more than wood.
“We are passengers on the same ship. No arrangement will make this vessel larger. I am capable of dining in your company without requiring accommodation.”
“I did not mean to suggest otherwise.”
“You suggested precisely otherwise. You suggested my composure is so fragile that the sight of you at a dinner table would undo it.” She heard herself and knew she was being unfair.
The knowledge did not slow her down. Unfairness was easier than the alternative: admitting the sight of him at the dinner table had very nearly undone her, though not in the way he imagined.
He was quiet. She wished he would argue.
She was equipped for his arguments. She had rehearsed them, refined them, polished her responses until they gleamed.
She was not equipped for his silence. It was new and unsettling.
He seemed to have learnt something since April.
She did not want him to have learnt things.
A Darcy who was learning was considerably more dangerous than a Darcy who was certain.
“You are right,” he said. “I apologise.”
She stared at him. The apology landed in a part of her that she had not defended, because she had not expected to need defences there.
Mr Darcy did not apologise. Mr Darcy explained.
Mr Darcy justified. Mr Darcy wrote eight-page letters outlining the precise moral reasoning behind his every decision.
He did not stand on a dark deck and say, “You are right, and I apologise,” meaning both words and expecting nothing in return.
“For what, precisely?” She heard the edge in her own voice and did not soften it. She was not ready to be soft with him. She was not certain she ever would be. Softness required trust. Trust required her to set down the thing she was carrying. The thing she was carrying had Jane's face.
“For the presumption.” He paused. “And for other things. I will not enumerate them. The deck of a ship is not the venue, and you did not come up here to receive an inventory of my regrets.”
“You have regrets.”
“I have a considerable collection. I have been adding to it steadily.” The faintest edge of something that was not quite humour. “It is my primary occupation, of late.”
She should not have smiled. She caught it before it reached her mouth, but the impulse had been there, and the impulse was a traitor, and she would deal with it later, in the privacy of her cabin, where she could have a stern conversation with her own reflexes.
A gust of wind. Her hair pulled loose from its pins — a single strand, whipping across her face. She reached up to catch it.
He looked at the strand of hair with an expression she had never seen from him before. She could not classify it and was not going to try.
“Goodnight, Mr Darcy.”
“Goodnight, Miss Bennet.”
She left the deck. She walked the narrow corridor to her cabin, closed the door, leaned against it, and pressed her hands to her face.
He apologised.
She had accused him of arrogance, conceit, and selfish disdain.
She had refused his proposal with the delicacy of a cannon shot.
She had spent months reading his letter and rearranging her understanding of the world.
The rearrangement had left her angry — not at him, or not only at him, but at herself.
She had been wrong with considerable assurance.
She had been placed on the same ship as him before she had finished deciding what she thought of him.
She thought of Jane. Thin, composed, performing cheerfulness, refusing to grieve in public.
Mr Bingley's departure had broken Jane's heart.
Mr Darcy had engineered Mr Bingley's departure.
Mr Darcy had just apologised to her on a dark deck with a voice that sounded like it had been dragged over gravel.
She did not know what to do with any of it.
Two truths. She had misjudged his character.
He had destroyed Jane's happiness. The letter had resolved one and confirmed the other.
The resolution did not redeem the confirmation.
The confirmation did not invalidate the resolution.
She was sharing a ship with him for four weeks.
The ship was not large enough for her contradictions.
She lay down on the narrow bed. The cabin rocked gently. Through the window, the stars continued their display, indifferent to Elizabeth, who stared at the ceiling, arguing with herself; she was losing on both sides.
The memory of his apology surfaced—spoken, without performance, the words plain, and without artifice.
Against it pressed the image of Jane's collarbones, sharper than they should have been.