Mackie laughed. “You’re wrong about it, though, Cap’n. Men aren’t meant to never touch a woman. I know you never take any company when we’re in port. That’s why you couldn’t resist. You put it off too long, it builds up in you.”
“Thank you, but if I want your advice, Mackie—”
“What I want is a cut,” said Mackie.
“Yes, yes, you’ve got it,” said Darcy. “But the rags. You’ll tell me if she asks.”
“You know, if you’re really worried, I could punch her in the stomach pretty hard. I’ve been known to dislodge unwanted babes before.”
“No.” Darcy glared at him.
“She might welcome it,” said Mackie. “The last two times I done it, it was at the request of the woman I took my fists to.”
“Just tell me about the rags,” he said. “And bring her dinner tonight. Tell her that I won’t be dining with her anymore.”
“Now why’s that, Cap’n?” said Mackie. “You seem to have got her willingly, which is more than makes any kind of sense. She’ll be off the ship soon enough. I should think you would take your pleasure while you could.”
“No.” Darcy shook his head. “If she is lonely, tell her she can eat with the men.” He pointed. “Now, to the tea? What is your count?”
CHAPTER NINE
“But why?” Elizabeth said, staring at the tray that Mackie had brought her. “Did he say why he didn’t want to dine with me?”
Mackie sighed. “No, miss.”
She turned away, feeling her stomach twist. “And he truly said he would not dine with me at all? Not for the rest of the trip?”
“I’m sorry, miss.”
She turned around, shaking her head, forcing herself to laugh. “No, it’s no matter. I don’t care, truly. It’s only that I was used to having someone to speak to at dinner.” Her voice was shaking, and she sounded near tears, but she didn’t know how to get that under control.
“He did say that if you were lonely, you could begin to take meals with the men,” said Mackie. “But I imagine you’ll want to be alone tonight.” He gave her a look of sympathy.
“I’m fine,” she said, pasting a smile on her face.
“As you say, miss.” Mackie backed out of the room, leaving the tray behind.
She waited until he closed the door, and then she sank down to the ground. What had she done to displease him?
She must have been very terrible at what they had done together. He must be frightened that she would want to do it again, and he didn’t want anything to do with her.
But he had whispered to her that she felt like heaven. A man didn’t say that if he wasn’t enjoying himself.
She covered her face, and then she did start to sob.
All that time in England, trying to find a husband, she had never once allowed herself to wallow in self-pity. She sometimes wondered if something might be wrong with her, but she made herself evaluate herself as objectively as she could, and she couldn’t find anything wrong. She knew that women who were poorer and uglier than she made matches all the time. So, she had told herself that it was simply bad luck, that she must keep on.
She knew that if she began to think that there was something wrong with her, she would become bitter. The bitterness would become a fault, and it would drive men away all on its own.
She had fought so hard to keep away that bitterness.
But now…
She had to face the truth. There was something wrong with her. She didn’t know what it was, and she had no idea how to fix it, if she even could fix it, but it was obviously there. That was the only reason she could think of that Fitzwilliam—no, Mr. Darcy—would reject her in this way. He didn’t want anything to do with her now, and it was because she was flawed.
Or maybe she hadn’t been flawed before, but she was flawed now.
She had read Pamela, after all. She was not so innocent as to understand nothing. Surrendering her virtue was ill-advised because it would cause a man to lose respect for her. Once she had given it, he would not be interested anymore. Now that she had allowed him to couple with her in that way, he had no more reason to associate with her. If she had been like Pamela, holding out against his advances—
Oh, dear Lord. He had not made any advances. She had flung herself at him.
She choked on a sob.
She had been in the process of falling in love with him. Maybe she already had.
And he had tossed her aside without a thought.
She was so, so stupid.
She hugged her knees to her chest. She cried.
* * *
At first, she felt too hurt to possibly take her meals anywhere but in her room. She didn’t even leave her room for a whole day. But then Patrick Horn and a few of the other men came looking for her, wanting to know what happened next in Gulliver’s Travels. She couldn’t leave them hanging, so she said she would read a bit after dinner that night. And then she went to the men’s mess to eat with them.
They asked why she wasn’t eating with the captain anymore.
She said she was sick of his company and preferred theirs, and they liked that.
Reading to them gave her joy. She felt as if she was doing something good for them.
She read more and more to them as the weeks wore on. She also spent time with Patrick, teaching him letters and words. He wanted to be able to read to the men after she left the ship.
It was only about three more weeks that she spent, but it felt like a lifetime.
Sometimes, she caught sight of Darcy, and a tight, painful band wrapped around her ribcage. She couldn’t breathe. It hurt so much. She wished he cared about her the way she cared about him. She wished she could take back—
But that wasn’t true. She was glad of what had happened between them. She wouldn’t take that night back for anything, actually. She would cherish it always as a wonderful experience, so sweet and perfect and good.
Still, it hurt that he rejected her, and she wished she could know what exactly it was that had caused it. Was it because he had lost respect for her when she became so wanton? Or was it because of some other fault that she didn’t know about?
She didn’t speak to him, though.
She didn’t speak to him until the night before they would arrive in India. She knew they were close to their destination, because the men kept her abreast. They showed her charts and pointed to stars in the sky and tried to explain to her their navigation. She didn’t understand it all, but she was glad of the knowledge and glad that the journey would be over.
This had been her adventure, and it had ended sadly, but that was somewhat of a good thing, because if it had been blissful all the way up until the end, she wouldn’t have wanted to leave.
She read to the men at dinner that night, and they were upset because she would not be there tomorrow.
“You really think we’ll arrive on the morrow?” she’d asked them.
“We’re sure of it,” said one of the men.
“Who will read to us?” said another. “We’re only halfway through Gulliver’s Travels.”
“Patrick will,” she told them.
“We don’t want Horn, we want you,” said one of them.
“Hey,” said Patrick. “I’m doing all right at it, I am. I’ll only get better with practice.”
They begged her for another chapter, and she couldn’t help but oblige them. It was quite late before she wandered down into the ship towards her bedroom.
When she arrived in the hallway, the door to Darcy’s quarters were open.
She saw him in there, seated at his table, the remnants of his supper still out.
He looked up and saw her too. “Miss Bennet.” He beckoned. “I wonder if I might have a word.”
Now he wanted to speak to her? “And if I say no?”
He nodded slowly, and then spoke to the table, his face downcast. “I just wanted to apologize, I suppose.”
She hovered in the doorway. “Apologize for what?”<
br />
He still didn’t look at her. “For everything. For all of the bad things that have happened since I appeared in your life.”
She smiled sadly. “Not all of them were bad.”
He raised his gaze.
It was her turn to look elsewhere. She picked a point on the wall above his head. “They tell me that we’ll arrive in Bombay tomorrow.”
“Yes, it seems so.” He was getting up from the table and coming towards her.
“Well,” she said, backing up, “it has been a good journey, Captain. I bid you farewell, I suppose.”
He caught her by the arm. “Wait.”
Now, she did look him straight in the face. “What?”
“Come in and sit down for a minute,” he said. “Let me talk to you.”
“I wanted to talk to you weeks ago,” she said. “You weren’t interested then.” But when she thought of refusing him, it made something ache inside her. So she stepped inside the room.
He shut the door behind her.
They were close.
He reached out with one hand, put his palm against her cheek.
She let him touch her, gazing into his eyes, feeling confused and like she might cry. Why was he being tender now? And why was she feeling the tethers that had been between them before get stronger when she had thought them broken?
“I have used you badly,” he whispered. “But it will be all right. I know that you have begun to bleed. Mackie said that you—”
She pulled away, blushing. “I don’t want to speak to you of that.” It was bad enough that there were no other women on board and she had to talk to Mackie about it. He was the one who emptied her chamberpot, though, so he was the one who would see anyway.
“It’s a good thing,” he said. “You are not with child.”
She was speechless. Such a thing had not even occurred to her. Darcy knew her body better than she knew her own. She was positively idiotic.
“I was worried,” he said. “I didn’t think I could bear it if…” He turned away, sucking in an audible breath. “You asked about why I duelled Mr. Wickham all those years ago?”
She furrowed her brow. Why was he changing the subject? But when it came down to it, she was curious. “Why did you duel with him?”
“He used my sister badly,” said Darcy, grimacing. “She was only fifteen years old. She knew nothing of… of anything. He convinced her to surrender her virtue and then told her they must elope. I caught wind of the elopement and I stopped it.” He laughed, then, a bitter laugh. “I took her home and patted myself on the back for having saved her. And she never admitted to me what had passed between her and Wickham. How could she? She didn’t even know what it was that he had done. When I came back months later, she was already increasing. Too far along to marry him. Too far along to…”
Elizabeth licked her lips. “What happened between us is not the same. I was not… I knew what I wanted.”
“Oh, you did?” He raised his eyebrows. “Really?”
She looked away.
“I was angry with her. I called her dreadful names. She ran from me. She said she was going to take her horse from the stables and ride until she found Wickham, who would be kind to her in the way that I wasn’t. But the horse tripped over a stone. She was thrown… I suppose you heard the rest.”
Elizabeth reached for him, putting her hand on his arm. “I’m so sorry.”
He turned to gaze into her eyes. “It was my fault she left. My fault she died.”
“No, it was an accident.”
He was quiet.
She patted his arm, and then she drew her hand back. Why was she touching him? “What would you have done if I had been with child?”
“There’s nothing I could have done,” he said.
She nodded. “Right. Nothing.”
“I put a bullet in the throat of George Wickham because of what he did to my sister, but I am the same as that villain. In the end, I am worse than him, because I killed Georgiana, and I took advantage of you, and I nearly destroyed you.”
She licked her lips. Nothing he could have done? Truly? So, he would never have married her or even allowed her to sail on this ship with him as his mistress or anything of that nature. There was something wrong with her. “Please tell me what fault you find with me. What is it within me that is poorly made?”
He furrowed his brow. “I don’t know what you’re speaking of, Miss Bennet. There is no fault with you. The fault is with me. You were an innocent. I was the one who took advantage of you. You would have borne the brunt of the consequences if you had conceived, but you have been spared that, somehow. And now you can go back home, and you can find a husband.”
“Find a husband?” Her lips parted in disbelief. It was as if he had never heard anything she had ever said on this subject.
“I know that you’re no longer a maiden, but no one will know that unless you tell them. You didn’t have a maidenhead for me to break anyway, which is no matter. Lots of women break them doing all manner of things, like horseback riding. And so no one will be suspicious. Lie about your time here, say that you were chaperoned, and you will still be able to make a good match.”
“No, I don’t think I will,” she said. “And you know very well that I won’t.”
“I know you’ve been unlucky before, but you’ll be back from an adventure, and you’ll be exotic and exciting and the men will—”
“There is a fault with me,” she said. “You know it, you must, that is why you rejected me.”
“Rejected you?’
“Avoided me for these three weeks.”
“It was for your safety I stayed away. You must not think that it is easy to be in your presence, Miss Bennet. Even now, I see you, and I think of what passed between us, and I want you. I know that I must not give in to that, because we could not possibly tempt fate again. If I had you over and over again, there would be a child, and everything would be ruined.”
She swallowed. She had not thought of it that way. But she couldn’t help but feel herself surge at the idea of him having her over and over. She even liked the sound of it—being had. She bit down on her lip. “But if you want me, and there is nothing wrong with me—”
“I believe I have made myself plain.”
She toyed with the fabric of her skirt. “All right then. Well, I suppose I shall go, then. But you must realize that no one in England is going to marry me. I have been through years of balls, and I have been to India, and you are the only man who has ever seemed the slightest bit interested—”
“That is ridiculous.” He stroked her cheek. “You are quite lovely. You are perfect.”
She thought she was going to cry.
“There will be a man. You will have a husband.”
“But it won’t be you.” Her voice cracked.
He dropped his hand, a funny look coming over his face. “Why would you say such a thing? I am here on this ship, smuggling opium, living as a pirate. I can’t get married.”
“You said that when you had gotten your fortune, you would come back to England, and then you would have to get married.”
“It could be five years, Miss Bennet. Seven years. I don’t know. I would not ask you to wait that long for me.”
She looked down at her hands. “By that time, I would be too old and you would not be interested.”
He sputtered. “I killed people. You were disgusted with me. I took advantage of you. I took your virtue. Why would you want to be with someone like me?”
“I don’t know,” she said in a small voice. “When you put it like that, you make me sound like an idiot. But I only know that when I think of the future, and you are not in it anymore, it makes me feel like I’m drowning in murky water.”
“Don’t be melodramatic.”
“I am in love with you.”
“No, you are a young girl who has never had anyone pay attention to you, and I’ve turned your head, because you don’t know what you are worth.” He leaned clos
er. “You must find someone better than me. You deserve someone better than me.”
Her eyes were filling with tears.
“You don’t love me.” He laughed a little. “I am so sorry, Miss Bennet. I have made such a mess of you. I…” He massaged the bridge of his nose.
She was going to start crying soon, really crying. She needed to get away, because she had embarrassed herself. She had never heard of a courtship that went this way. Why, it was unheard of for a woman to declare her love so. It was unseemly and idiotic, and that’s what she was. But she couldn’t go yet. Not yet. “Let me stay, then,” she whispered.
“What?”
“Let me stay on the ship,” she said. “You don’t have to marry me. We could just… what you said about having me over and over, I—”
“Stop it,” he choked.
She was making an ass of herself, but she didn’t care. “Don’t send me away. I don’t think I could bear it.”
He wrapped his arms around her suddenly, pressing his mouth against her temple. “I can’t do that.” His mouth on her cheekbone. “This is all my fault, what you are feeling.” His mouth on her jaw. “You need to be away from me.” His mouth on her neck. “I won’t cause you any more pain.”
She clung to him, sighing.
But then, abruptly, he pushed her away, holding her at arm’s length. “I’m sorry,” he said again. And he pushed her out of his cabin and shut the door in her face.
She stood there, feeling numb, feeling destroyed.
And then, broken, dejected, she went back to her room. But once there, she found she didn’t even have the strength to cry about it.
CHAPTER TEN
Elizabeth was standing in the middle of the docks of Bombay, her trunk next to her. Mackie had carried it off the ship earlier, when he escorted her off. She could still see the ship in the harbor, but she was alone now. She had simply been left in the middle of the docks. She didn’t speak the local language, and it was all she heard.
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