Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
Aweek taught Elizabeth things about herself she had not asked to learn.
She could gut a fish swiftly and efficiently, using a knife not made for the task, on a flat rock by the water.
The first time, she gagged. The second time, she did not.
By the fifth, the motion was automatic; the blade slid under the skin, and she flicked the entrails into the shallows for the crabs without hesitation.
Its ease should have unsettled her. She was a gentleman's daughter from Hertfordshire, raised on embroidery, Fordyce's sermons, and the confident belief that fish arrived at the table already cooked and arranged on a platter.
The distance between that woman and this one, kneeling in salt-stiffened cotton with blood on her hands, was significant.
Sleeping on stone was also, apparently, within her capabilities. She did not sleep well; she woke at intervals to shift her bruised hip off the unyielding flagstones. Nevertheless, she could sleep. It was a victory she refused to diminish.
What she could not do, it transpired, was stop being angry with Fitzwilliam Darcy.
This discovery she had not anticipated. She had expected the anger to burn itself out.
Anger required fuel, and the island had replaced the drawing rooms and social performances that fed her outrage at Hunsford with a different set of concerns: water, food, fire, and shelter.
Anger was a luxury; she had expected it to be rationed along with everything else.
Instead, the anger grew. It grew precisely because the immediate necessities of staying alive had been met.
Darcy had found the tower, repaired the roof, and built the signal fire.
He hauled water without being asked and caught fish with a patience she did not wish to admire.
His relentless competence made it impossible to maintain her previous opinion of his character: a proud, cold man who judged her family and separated her sister from the man she loved.
Her assessment was wrong. She had known it since receiving his letter.
Standing in the grove at Rosings with shaking hands, she had realised the man who wrote those words was not the man she had accused.
That knowledge had not erased the anger; it had merely complicated it.
Her anger regarding Wickham was unjust—she could admit this now, with no audience but the gulls. But her anger regarding Jane was not.
She thought of Jane's heartbreak, and her careful, determined cheerfulness. That cheerfulness was worse than weeping; weeping could be comforted, whereas determined cheerfulness could only be witnessed.
That anger was justified. Elizabeth held it close because it was the last piece of the old Darcy—the one she understood.
She could be angry at him without the bewildering sensation of being angry at the man currently rebuilding their chimney stack with his bare hands and an obstinacy identical to her own.
It happened on the seventh evening.
They were eating by the fire. Their menu consisted of fish and figs, as it had every night and would every night for an unforeseeable duration.
Darcy sat across from her, eating with methodical attention.
The firelight softened his sharp angles, making him look entirely unlike the arrogant gentleman she had met in Hertfordshire.
She did not want to notice the softening of his features. It happened regardless, just as she noted the temperature, the wind, the specific set of his jaw when his wound troubled him. She refused to examine any of it.
“You have been quiet today,” he said.
“I have been thinking.”
“About what, if I may ask?”
“You may not.”
He accepted the refusal with quiet courtesy. He accepted most of her refusals this way. The courtesy was perhaps not new, but she had certainly never seen it at Netherfield or Hunsford. The difference between the man she had known in England and the man on this island remained inconvenient.
“Mr Darcy,” she said.
He looked up. The firelight caught his eyes, and she looked away.
“Your letter,” she said. “At Rosings. You wrote that you believed my sister to be indifferent to Mr Bingley.”
His jaw tightened. She watched the muscle move. She knew this expression by now: the careful assembly of composure over whatever lay beneath. “I did.”
“And you acted on that belief.”
“Yes.”
“You separated them.”
“Yes.”
The word was steady and offered no defence. She hated the simple admission because it denied her an argument. Darcy was not resisting; he was sitting across a fire, agreeing with her. The agreement was maddening. She could not fight it.
“My sister loved him,” Elizabeth said. The words were unplanned, rushing out after a week of suppression. “She loved him, and you decided she did not. You looked at her composure and read it as indifference. You were wrong, and your error cost her everything.”
Darcy did not speak.
“You did not know her. You saw a gentle, reserved woman who was pleasant to everyone, and concluded she could not possibly feel deeply. You took that conclusion to your friend and told him to leave. He left, and my sister spent four months pretending she was well when she was entirely broken.”
Her voice was unsteady. She was aware her hands were clenched on her knees and her shoulders were tight. The control she had maintained for seven days was fracturing over Jane. It had always been Jane.
“The letter I found in her room,” Elizabeth said.
“Half-written. To Miss Bingley. Asking, in the politest possible language, whether Miss Bingley's brother had been well, and whether his business in London had concluded, and whether there was any prospect of the Netherfield party returning to Hertfordshire. She did not finish it. Finishing it meant admitting she still hoped. Jane would rather suffer in silence than admit to an unwanted hope.”
The fire cracked. A log shifted and sent sparks up through the chimney. Darcy was looking at the fire, not at her, and his face in the shifting light was very still.
“You did not know about that letter,” she said.
“You did not know about the mornings she spent walking to Meryton and back, hoping for post that did not come. You did not know that she stopped playing the pianoforte because she had played duets with Miss Bingley and the instrument reminded her. You did not know any of it, because you did not trouble to look.”
“No,” he said. His voice was quiet. “I did not.”
“You looked at her face and called her composure indifference. The arrogance of that judgement, Mr Darcy—the absolute certainty that you could read a woman's heart from across a ballroom—is what I cannot forgive.”
The wind moved through the scrub outside the tower. A lizard clung frozen to the wall above the archway.
Darcy spoke. “You are right.”
He offered no elaboration, qualification, or counterargument. She had been bracing for counterarguments, rehearsing her responses during long afternoons of gathering figs and carrying water. Her case was sound, her arguments were ready, and he was using none of them.
“I was wrong about your sister,” he said. “I knew it before I left England. I knew it when I wrote the letter, though I did not say so plainly enough. I told you her composure suggested indifference. I believed it when I said it, but I was wrong.”
His hands rested on his knees, mirroring hers. She noticed the posture and wished she had not.
“On the ship,” he said. “Before the attack. I wrote to Bingley.”
Elizabeth went still.
“I wrote a letter telling him the truth. I confessed that I had concealed your sister's presence in London, and that I had advised him to leave Hertfordshire based on an incorrect judgement of Miss Bennet's feelings. I advised him to return when circumstances allowed.”
“You wrote to him.”
“Yes.”
“Telling him to go back.”
“I told him the truth. What he does with it is his concern. The truth was mine to give; I gave it too late and poorly, but I gave it.”
She stared at him. The firelight flickered between them. His face was steady, tired, and entirely undefended. The letter to Bingley was an unexpected fact she did not know how to accommodate.
“The letter was on the merchant ship,” she said. “It may not have survived.”
“It may not.”
“It may never reach Mr Bingley.”
“It may not.”
“Then what is the use of it?”
He looked at her directly. The firelight was in his eyes and she did not look away this time because the question was real and she wanted the answer to be real.
“The use of it,” he said, “is that I wrote it. I sat in my cabin and told my closest friend that I had lied to him. I believed I knew better than he did about the woman he loved. I was wrong, and I was sorry. Whether the letter reaches him matters enormously. Whether I wrote it matters more.”
Elizabeth's hands loosened on her knees. The physical release was involuntary, a response to the unvarnished honesty of a man offering no excuses.
The anger was still there, familiar and necessary. It had carried her through Hunsford, the voyage, the shipwreck, and seven days on this island. But the foundation of that anger had shifted. She was no longer certain of her footing, nor was she sure whether the shift brought relief or loss.
She stood and walked out through the archway, down the hill, and across the beach to the far end of the cove, where she sat on a flat stone above the waterline, looking out at the dark sea. The last light faded from the horizon. The water moved against the rocks with steady, ancient patience.
She sat there until the stars came out. Her thoughts were disjointed. The anger, his admission, and the letter to Bingley moved through her mind without settling. He had been wrong, but he had admitted it and tried to make amends. The attempt might fail, but the effort mattered.
The effort mattered.
She did not want it to matter. She wanted the anger clean and justified.
Justified anger was armour, and she needed armour on an island where she slept four feet from the man who had broken her sister's heart.
Yet this same man had rebuilt their chimney with his bare hands.
The contradiction could not hold. Eventually, she would have to decide what to do with it.
But not tonight. Tonight she would merely sit on the rock, listen to the sea, and allow her resentment to settle.
She went back to the tower when the air turned cold. The fire was low. Darcy was lying on his pallet with his back to the room, and whether he was asleep or awake she could not tell and did not ask.
She lay down on her own pallet. The flagstones were hard beneath the grass and sailcloth. His breathing was even; he was either asleep or feigning it perfectly.
She was four feet from him, looking at the ceiling, at the sailcloth patches and the stone and the one gap where a star was visible, a single bright point in the dark.
She was closer to him than she had been the night before. She had placed her pallet an inch, perhaps two, nearer to his. The movement was so small it might have been accidental, but it was not. She closed her eyes and did not move it back.