Chapter 21
Chapter Twenty-One
Elizabeth counted days by figs.
The drying operation produced six to eight figs per batch, with each batch requiring three days of sun.
She had completed fourteen batches, which meant the island had held them for approximately six weeks.
It was longer than any house party she had ever attended, and considerably less comfortable.
However, the company was better, and the conversation was far more honest. The host—the island itself—asked nothing of its guests beyond the simple ability to survive.
Elizabeth found this standard refreshingly clear compared to the shifting expectations of Hertfordshire society.
She was darker than she had ever been, with a deeply tanned face, arms, and legs below her torn dress hem.
Her hands, rough from work, had short, broken nails, and her feet were calloused from the rocks.
She could gut a fish in under a minute and light a fire even in strong wind.
She identified four types of edible seaweed by sight, although she was only moderately enthusiastic about eating any of them.
Darcy, however, had no enthusiasm at all.
His expression when offered the boiled kelp she had prepared as a nutritious paste was one she planned to describe to his housekeeper at Pemberley; Mrs Reynolds needed to know that the master of the house could be so visibly disturbed by aquatic plants.
She had stopped missing mirrors and shoes.
She had stopped missing the small, daily comforts that had constituted her life in England: tea, proper bread, a chair with a back, and a door that closed.
She no longer even missed the privacy of a bedroom that was hers alone, rather than shared with a man, the Mediterranean wind, and whatever insects had colonised the tower walls that week.
She had not stopped missing her family.
The grief arrived at inconvenient moments.
It struck while laughing at something Darcy said about the Italian novel they could not read, or while swimming in the cove with the sun on her face.
It returned while lying on the pallet with his arm around her waist, the night so quiet she could hear the sea shift on the sand below the hill.
The happiness was real, and the grief was equally real.
That the two could coexist so violently was the particular cruelty of her situation.
She thought about her father most in the mornings, when the light was new and the island was quiet.
The thoughts had not yet been crowded out by the day's work.
He would be in his library with the door closed.
He would be reading, or rather, performing the physical motions of reading while his mind was elsewhere.
He would be imagining wherever his second daughter had gone, and the imaginings would be terrible.
Mr Bennet's imagination was considerable, and his capacity for envisioning disaster was a talent he had passed to Elizabeth, along with his wit, his love of books, and his habit of laughing at things that were not strictly funny.
He would blame himself. This was the thing she could not bear.
Her father, who blamed himself for nothing, who met every family catastrophe with the detached amusement of an audience member at a comedy of errors, would blame himself for Elizabeth's disappearance.
She was the one he loved best. Losing her would break his detachment.
What lay beneath that detachment was not amusement, but deep grief, and that grief would have nowhere to go, for Mr Bennet had never built a place for it.
Jane would be holding the family together.
She would be managing their mother, who would be hysterical; their younger sisters, who would be frightened; and their father, who would be retreating.
She would do it with her particular selfless competence, placing everyone else's needs above her own.
Jane would not cry in front of anyone. She would cry at night, in her room, the same room where she had wept over Bingley.
The crying would be private and prolonged, and no one would bring her tea, because Elizabeth was the one who brought Jane tea.
And Elizabeth was on an island in the Mediterranean, finding happiness with the man who had caused half of Jane's tears in the first place.
Were the Gardiners alive? The question was a heavy stone she carried and turned over, but could not set down.
She remembered the pirate attack, the confusion, and the ship burning.
The Gardiners had been below decks. Had they reached the boats?
Had the boats survived? Were they in Naples, in Sicily, or at the bottom of the sea?
The ignorance was worse than any terrible truth, because her mind populated the silence with infinite possibilities, and most of them were tragic.
She did not share these thoughts with Darcy. It was not because she was hiding them, but because speaking them aloud served no purpose beyond transferring the weight. The burden was hers. Bearing it alone was a necessity, and Elizabeth had always done what was necessary.
He knew anyway. He watched her closely. In the mornings, when her thoughts were loudest, she could not compose her features fast enough. Her unguarded expression told him everything her composure was designed to hide.
He did not press her. He merely brought her a fig, touched her shoulder, or said something dry about the Italian novel's hero, who had apparently been proposing for nine chapters and counting.
The sail appeared on a Tuesday. She recognized it as Tuesday because she had been keeping track of days, and Tuesday was her fishing day.
She was on the rocks at the southern end of the cove with her line in the water when the white rectangle showed up on the eastern horizon, small and crisp against the blue sky.
She did not shout. She had shouted the last time, and the shouting had produced hope, which in turn produced despair.
The resulting despair had been far worse than the emptiness that preceded it.
She stood slowly and watched the sail, assessing its distance, direction, and speed with clinical precision.
It was closer than the last one, heading northwest, which would bring it nearer before it passed.
She thought it was a merchant vessel from the shape of the rigging, though her knowledge was limited to what Darcy had taught her.
His own knowledge was limited to what he remembered from two voyages and a conversation with a captain who had been more interested in his wine than instructing a passenger.
She climbed the hill. Darcy was at the tower, repairing a section of wall that the wind had loosened. He saw her face before she spoke. He immediately set down the stone he was holding, already calculating fuel and wind direction.
They lit the fire in the permanent pit on the tower's upper level.
The fuel was stacked and ready, a preparation they maintained in shifts.
The dry wood caught instantly, and the green branches produced thick, white smoke.
The column rose straight in the still air, and should have been visible from miles away.
The ship was close—two miles, perhaps less. It was close enough to see the individual sails, and to make out the dark line of the hull against the water. Elizabeth frantically waved the sailcloth while Darcy fed the fire. The thick smoke climbed higher.
The ship altered course.
Elizabeth's hands went quite still. She watched, her body rigid with the effort of suppressing her hope. The effort failed. Hope rose through her defences like water through sand, unstoppable and wholly unwelcome.
The ship turned further, shifting from northwest to north. It was turning towards them. The angle of approach was consistent with a vessel responding to a signal; it was the turn of a captain who had seen smoke and decided to investigate.
“It is turning,” she said. Her voice was flat, controlled, the voice of a woman who had been broken by hope once and would not be broken again.
“It is turning,” Darcy said. His voice was the same.
The ship turned further north, then northeast, and finally east. The turn continued in a long, slow arc that had nothing to do with their signal, and everything to do with the wind.
The breeze had shifted, driving the ship's course away from the island.
It moved steadily away from the smoke, and away from the two people standing on a hilltop with their lungs full of shouting.
The great hope they had felt was, even as they watched, curdling back into despair.
The ship sailed east, and the sail grew steadily smaller. Elizabeth watched it go with her arms hanging at her sides, the sailcloth trailing from one hand. Her face was set in an expression of frozen blankness; she had run out of both despair and composure.
She sat down heavily on the stone ledge. The smoke continued to rise from the fire beside her, quite purposeless. She sat and watched the empty horizon, and the horizon remained perfectly, indifferently empty.
She did not cry. She had cried the last time, and it had not helped. She was not going to cry again. Tears served no function on a deserted island, and she refused to waste her strength on them.
She sat for hours as the sun and the shadows moved across the stone. The smoke died as the fire burned through its fuel. Darcy did not rebuild it. Rebuilding it would have been a pretence that the fire still held a purpose, and they were long past pretending.
He sat beside her. He remained close, but did not touch her. Company was required, but comfort was not, and he understood the distinction.
They sat together on the upper level of the tower with the dead fire between them. The sea spread out in every direction, blue, flat, and enormous. It was beautiful, but its beauty was quite irrelevant, which was perhaps the cruellest thing about it.