Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
The tinderbox dried on the second morning.
Darcy's hands shook when he struck the flint.
The spark caught on the third try, and the tinder glowed.
He blew on it with careful, measured breath.
He understood that this small flame was the difference between eating raw shellfish for the foreseeable future and not doing so.
The flame held. He fed it dried grass, then twigs, then a splintered hull plank. The fire took.
Elizabeth had been watching from three feet away with her arms crossed and her body perfectly still. She was not going to interfere, but she was prepared to have opinions about the outcome. She exhaled.
“Well,” she said.
“Well,” he agreed.
They looked at the fire. Given driftwood and sea air, it smoked considerably and crackled without enthusiasm. Its heat was weak. But it was fire, and they had made it. For a long moment, neither spoke.
He had not built a fire since he was fourteen.
His father had taught him on a grouse hunt in Derbyshire, delivering the practical lesson with his usual quiet authority: here is the tinder, here is the steel, here is how you hold your hands.
Darcy had lit a fire on a moor in September and been proud of it.
He had not thought about the skill for twelve years.
Since then, servants had laid fires in every room he entered.
The gap between that boy on the moor and this man on the beach was precisely the width of everything he had taken for granted.
“I am going to explore inland,” he said. “There may be structures. Ruins, a cistern, shelter better than what we can rig from sailcloth.”
“And if there is nothing?”
“Then I will know there is nothing, and we will work with what we have.”
Elizabeth looked at his side. The bandage she had tied was holding, darkened with dried blood at the edges but clean enough.
His wound ached with a persistent, grinding heat.
He chose to interpret this as the body's natural healing process rather than anything concerning.
The alternative involved fever, infection, and a woman with no medical supplies nursing him on a beach.
That interpretation was entirely unhelpful.
“You should not climb with that wound,” she said.
“I should not do many things. I should not be on this island, eating limpets, or wearing a shirt lacking buttons. The list has grown so long that adding one more item will make no material difference.”
Her mouth moved. The almost-smile he had noticed on the ship was becoming a regular feature of his mornings.
He noted the variations: the slight curve when she was amused but unwilling to show it; the broader smile when amusement won; and the full expression he had seen precisely once, on the beach after the shipwreck.
He climbed.
The island was small. He could see most of it from the ridge above the cove: a rough oval, perhaps two miles long and a mile wide, the coastline rocky and irregular except for their sheltered cove on the southern side.
The vegetation was low and tough, the grey-green scrub of the Mediterranean macchia: myrtle, juniper, something aromatic he could not name but could smell, sharp and clean, carried on the wind.
Wild fig trees grew in clusters in the sheltered hollows, their broad leaves dark against the pale rock.
Prickly pear cactus clung to the steeper slopes, its flat pads studded with spines and, on some, the bulbous beginnings of fruit.
No buildings. No paths. No sign that anyone had set foot here in recent memory.
He kept climbing. The ground rose towards the island's highest point, a rocky hill at the northern end, and as he came over the last rise he saw it.
It was a stone tower. It stood two storeys high on the hilltop, affording a commanding view of the sea in every direction.
It was old; the mortar crumbled between the stones, and the upper walls had partially collapsed.
The lower storey was intact, its walls thick and solid, with a stone archway serving as a door.
It was a watchtower—a torre di guardia, the kind Italians had built along their coasts two centuries ago to watch for pirates.
It had been built to watch for the very men who had brought him here. The irony was acute.
He ducked through the archway. The lower room was perhaps twelve feet across, round, with a flagstone floor covered in bird droppings and debris.
A fireplace was set into the far wall, its chimney still intact, rising through the ceiling to the open sky above.
A stone staircase, narrow and steep, spiralled upward to the second level.
The walls were thick enough to keep out weather and solid enough to last another two centuries if no one asked them to do anything more ambitious than stand.
He climbed the stairs. The upper room had lost half its roof; the other half, stone slabs laid across timber beams, still held. The view was extraordinary. The sea spread in every direction, blue and glittering, and a ship passing within ten miles of this hill would be visible from where he stood.
A cistern sat at the base of the tower, a stone basin built to catch rainwater from the roof. It was dry, cracked, half-filled with blown leaves and dust. But the stonework was sound. Rain would fill it.
Darcy stood in the ruined upper room and looked at the sea and thought about the estate at Pemberley.
Not the house, not the drawing rooms or the library or the music room that Georgiana loved.
The land. The tenants' cottages that needed re-roofing every fifteen years.
The drainage ditches his father had taught him to inspect in spring.
The wall that ran along the north pasture, rebuilt three times in his lifetime, each time by a different stonemason with a different opinion about the proper way to lay Derbyshire grit.
He knew how to manage land and assess structures.
He understood the difference between critical damage and damage that could wait.
He could distinguish a failing wall from one that had merely settled into its age and would hold.
This tower was the second kind. The floor needed clearing, the fireplace required testing, and the roof needed sailcloth over the gaps. Nevertheless, the structure was sound.
He went back down the hill to tell Elizabeth they had a house.
She came to see it herself. No piece of information arrived in Elizabeth Bennet's life without being personally inspected and cross-examined.
Darcy was learning this by direct observation, without the barrier of drawing rooms and dinner parties.
The social artifice of their previous acquaintance had, he realised, prevented him from seeing her clearly.
She walked through the archway, standing in the centre of the lower room and turning slowly.
Her gaze moved over the walls, the fireplace, the staircase, and the floor.
He could see her mind working—assessing the space, noting what was sound, and ordering her concerns.
She brought the same efficient management to a stone ruin that she presumably brought to Longbourn's accounts.
“The fireplace,” she said.
“The chimney draws. I tested it.”
“The roof.”
“Sailcloth over the gaps. Timber for the beams where they have rotted.”
“The floor.”
“Needs clearing. Bird nests, debris, a decade of accumulated filth.”
“Filth,” she repeated, looking at the flagstones with an expression that suggested the filth had made a personal enemy. “We shall need to carry water from the spring. And something to scrub with. The myrtle bushes have stiff branches that might serve.”
She was already working. He watched her climb the stairs to the upper room.
He heard her footsteps on the stone and the small sound she made upon seeing the view.
Elizabeth Bennet did not gasp; it was a caught breath, quickly released, followed by silence.
It was her version of admiration, and it proved more eloquent than any exclamation from women who exclaimed more freely and meant less by it.
She came back down. “We can live here,” she said.
The word live carried more than either had said aloud.
It suggested more than the temporary occupancy they had managed on the beach, sleeping on sand under sailcloth.
It implied an unspecified duration, perhaps weeks.
It meant the two of them, in this tower, building a life from nothing on an island where no one was looking for them.
“Yes,” he said. “We can.”
They spent the rest of the day making it possible.
Darcy cleared the lower room, hauling debris and bird nests through the archway and dumping them down the slope.
The work pulled at his wound with every lift, but he ignored the bright, insistent pain in his side.
The tower needed clearing. Elizabeth carried water from the spring in the salvaged barrel, trip after trip up the hill, her dress stained dark at the hem from kneeling in the mud by the pool.
She scrubbed the flagstones with myrtle branches and seawater until the stone showed through, grey and clean, and the room smelled of wet rock and the sharp herbal bite of crushed myrtle instead of decay.
He patched the roof. He stretched sailcloth over the timber beams, lashed it down with rope, and wedged smaller pieces of canvas into the stone gaps with rock chips.
It was neither watertight nor permanent, but it would suffice for a night without rain.
Adequacy was their standard; perfection was a luxury that belonged to the world across the sea.
She arranged two pallets, separated by a careful distance of approximately four feet. It was less than propriety demanded, but more than the room comfortably allowed. Like everything else, it was a compromise between the correct and the possible.