“Find out what?” said a voice from across the room.
Elizabeth snapped her head over to look at the opening to the hold. She couldn’t believe who she saw standing there. It was Mr. Darcy. He wasn’t dressed the way he usually did. Instead, he looked like a sailor. But she would recognize that face anywhere. She had only met him once, at the Meryton Assembly years ago, but he had made an impression on her.
“Sir,” she said. “Mr. Darcy, help me!”
Darcy rushed across the room, tearing Ned away from her.
Her heart soared. She was saved.
But Darcy only slammed her against the wall in much the way that Ned had. His voice was at her ear, quiet but sharp. “Where did you hear that name?”
“I—” she choked. “You must remember me, sir. At the Meryton Assembly, when my sister met her husband, Mr. Bingley. He is your dear friend. You would not dance, and then you heard about some soldier being in town, and you left in a flurry, and—”
“That’s enough.” He drew back.
And the next morning, we heard there had been a duel, she finished. Bingley told us. He was there as your second. You had killed the man you dueled with. Mr. Wickham, I think his name was. No one is certain what the quarrel was between the two of you, except perhaps Bingley, who would not say. It was whispered, though, that it had something to do with your dead sister.
“I’m sorry about this, Miss…”
“Miss Bennet,” she supplied. “You do not remember me?”
Darcy turned away, to the pirates. “Why is she still alive? Didn’t I tell you to kill everyone on board?”
What? Elizabeth choked on a sob. She wasn’t saved after all. This man, this proper gentleman, was talking about killing her. How could this be?
“We were getting ready to kill her,” said Ned. “We really were, but… well, she’s got such creamy skin and—”
“You idiots,” said Darcy. “I’ll have to kill her myself.”
“No,” said Elizabeth. “No, please, I beg you—”
“Shut up,” Darcy said between clenched teeth.
“I won’t,” she said. “You are a gentleman, at least you used to be, and I am an innocent woman, and if you kill me, it will mean that you are a horrible man, and I don’t think you are a horrible man, I really don’t.” But that wasn’t strictly true, maybe. She had heard rumors about him, after the business with the duel. Rumors about drinking and gambling and general unrighteousness, but they hadn’t even hinted at murder.
Darcy sucked in breath through his nose. “It’s nothing personal, Miss Bennet, I assure you. It’s only that I am going to sink this ship so that no one finds it, and if I leave you on board, you’ll drown to death, and a stabbing is surely a mercy compared to that sort of torturous death.”
“Why are you sinking the ship?”
“I told you, I don’t want anyone to find it.”
“But… but…”
“Listen, Miss Bennet, everyone else is dead already. I’m sorry to kill an innocent woman, as you say, but I’m afraid that you’re mistaken about me. I really am a horrible man.” He put his dagger to her throat.
“No!” She seized his hand, trying to push away the hilt. “Don’t do this. Please don’t do this.” Tears were streaming down her face. This couldn’t be happening. This couldn’t be real. Only a half hour before, she had been thinking of writing a letter, even though she knew that no one would get it until she arrived back in England. Everything had been completely normal then. Couldn’t she go back in time, take away all of this?
His face twitched. He didn’t lower the dagger, but he didn’t keep pushing either. “I can’t keep you alive. What would you have me do? Take you onto my ship?”
“Yes. Why not?” she said, seeing some ray of hope in the unworldly darkness that had somehow become her reality.
“Because having a woman on a pirate ship is a recipe for disaster. There simply is not enough of you to go around, and trust me, stabbing you now would be a mercy to being passed around in that way.”
She gazed at him, uncomprehending. “P-passed around?”
“Oh, dash it all, they would destroy you, Miss Bennet, and unless I put you under my protection—”
“So, do that,” she said. “Put me under your protection. Don’t kill me.”
He sighed heavily. “I can’t.”
“Please.”
He moved the dagger.
She let out a little breath.
“We’ve been talking too long,” he said. “It’s most difficult to kill a woman after having a conversation with her.”
“That’s what I told Ned, Cap’n,” said one of the pirates. “If he would have listened to me, this one would already be dead.”
“Pity he didn’t.” Darcy slid his dagger back into its sheath. He looked Elizabeth over. “Miss Bennet, I will take you back to Bombay, and I’ll do my best to keep the men off you. That’s all I can promise.”
* * *
Elizabeth stepped gingerly over the bodies of the crew, walking behind Mr. Darcy. She was surprised that she was standing upright. She had never truly considered being caught up in a situation such as this, but a cursory consideration always left her with the notion that she would faint straight away in the face of so much death.
Surprisingly, she was moving, she was speaking, and she had somehow kept herself alive.
She felt vaguely numb, but oddly alert, as if some primitive part of her had taken over her body and was holding the reins, guiding her. She took even, steady breaths, and she put one foot in front of the other, and she kept moving. She was alive, and that was the important thing.
“…my protection, and if I find that anyone has laid so much as a finger on her, I shall be most cross,” Darcy was saying. “Is that clear?”
The men were all looking at her, except the ones who were bringing up the rear with her trunk, and they had a hungry look in their eyes that she didn’t like at all.
She looked down at her feet so as not to have to see that look.
“She will be off the ship as soon as I can manage it,” Darcy said. “And we will stop in port somewhere to find women, I promise.” He reached back for her, yanking her after him. He lowered his voice. “Miss Bennet, you are ruining everything. I need to get more opium, and now I have no idea when I will be able to. But I can’t very well tell the men to keep clear of you and not promise them some touch later on. Why, I ought to just kill you right now.”
She let out a tiny squeak.
He tugged on her. “Oh, don’t worry. I won’t.” He pointed. “We’re going down into a lifeboat and over into my ship across the way, do you see that?”
She nodded.
“Good.” He raised an eyebrow. “You haven’t thanked me.”
“Thanked you, Mr. Darcy?”
“For your life,” he said.
She swallowed.
“And don’t call me that.”
“What?”
“Mr. Darcy. Or any of that. I’m Captain Thorn to the men, only Captain most of the time. They don’t know who I am, that I have land in England. And I’d it to stay that way, if you don’t mind.”
She nodded again.
“Good. You can call me Captain, like all the others. Not that you’ll have much of a chance to speak to me, because you won’t be on my boat for very long. Don’t get comfortable.”
She blinked hard, suddenly fighting tears again. It was odd. The sight of all the dead men on the ship didn’t cause her to feel this way, but a harsh word from Darcy, and she was about to sob. Damn the man.
And she wasn’t going to thank him for her life, not at all.
He was awful, really awful.
She allowed him to lead her across the deck and to help her into one of the lifeboats. From there, it was as he said. They were lowered down onto the choppy sea. She felt dizzy and a bit scared. There was nothing between them and the water. The salty air whipped around them, tearing at her hair, which had been put into a nic
e braid by Mrs. Graham that morning. She didn’t have a maid on board—couldn’t have one, no maids to be spared. The woman who had waited on her in India was Indian, and it wasn’t as if she would go back to England with her.
The lifeboat pitched and rocked on the ocean as the men rowed them over to Darcy’s ship.
So, how had Mr. Darcy become a pirate? She had heard that he had no money, that he’d gambled his fortune away, and that there was little left except his family estate. His sister had been killed in some tragedy. Elizabeth wasn’t certain, but she thought the girl had been flung from a horse to her death. Darcy had no other family. He had apparently taken the loss of her hard. How Mr. Wickham figured into it, she couldn’t say. Whatever the case, it seemed that Darcy was desperate. He’d turned to piracy because he had nothing else to lose.
But she had never imagined a man that she had once seen in polite society could become so bloodthirsty. It was absolutely dreadful.
Still, she supposed that neither of them were in the same position that they’d been that day in which they’d exchanged polite greeting at Meryton. Both of them had changed, and for the worse.
She hadn’t turned to piracy, and she wasn’t running about with daggers threatening to kill people, but she had fallen as well.
It had been years ago. Six years ago. Back before she’d watched every single one of her four sisters marry, one after the other, while she got no offers.
Even Mr. Collins, the man on whom their estate was entailed, should have asked for her hand, by all rights. Jane was engaged, and she was the next oldest sister. But he had skipped her and gone straight to Mary. Of course, Elizabeth had to admit that Collins and Mary did have rather twin dispositions, and they were made for each other.
A year after Kitty had made a match with a man wealthy in the silk trade, Elizabeth’s father had died. Longbourn had passed to Collins and her sister Mary. Elizabeth was welcome there, but she found the two of them frightfully difficult to be around. Everything was a sermon. Everything was about suffering, and the lessons one learns from such a state, and how Elizabeth must be marked by God to learn many, many lessons, somewhat like Job or Abraham. It was enough to make Elizabeth want to tear out her own hair.
So, then Elizabeth began to spend all her time moving from relation to relation, like a stray cat going wherever they would feed her.
At some point, she supposed they had all grown rather sick of her, because they had gotten together and put the money together to send her to India. She thought that Kitty’s husband—the man’s name was Bolton—had contributed the most funds to the pot, but she was embarrassed to say that she thought they all had, even Lydia’s pisspoor military husband who was rather bad with money. He was like Darcy in that way. Too much gambling. Lydia did not have excellent taste in men.
At any rate, Elizabeth thought they had meant for her to be pleased by the gift of the trip to India, but Elizabeth had only felt as if she was so unwanted that she had to be shipped across the ocean to find a husband.
More and more, men of good breeding were coming to India to work for the East India Company, and when they got there, they were all alone, because there were no women besides the locals. The men of India were eager for English women, and the women who came here were always married off.
True, it would mean that Elizabeth might live out the rest of her days in a foreign land, never seeing her family or friends again, but they didn’t seem to want her underfoot, and they had gone to some trouble to put the voyage together for her. She didn’t feel as though she could refuse.
It was true that never getting married meant that she would be worthless. She would be a bother to her family, not useful in any way, and she would be no one of consequence. She would live out her years in the way and lonely. So, she told herself that India was a worthy alternative.
However, she hadn’t found a husband here either. She didn’t know why. All of the other women who’d accompanied her six months ago were married by now, some even already with child. She had gone to all the same events as they, danced with men, smiled, curtsied, and made small talk. Sometimes, she thought that someone was interested.
But nothing ever came of it.
No one asked for her hand.
And so, it must mean that something was wrong with her. She wasn’t sure exactly what it was. She knew that she had her faults. All people did. She wasn’t a flawless beauty, for one thing. Her lips seemed a little to big for her face and her nose perhaps a bit too small. She was thin, but not as thin as some, and her hips were perhaps too wide.
But the other women who had come over with her were no more or less pretty than she was, at least not on any level that she could understand.
Why hadn’t she found a husband?
Well, sometimes people didn’t.
She had known the women who had been spinsters in England and had often thought to herself that they looked just the same as the other married women of their own age. The truth was that sometimes, a woman just got left out. There was no man for her, and she had to live out her life on her own.
Apparently, Elizabeth was such a woman.
It was odd, truly. When she had boarded the vessel that she was now leaving behind, she had thought to herself that her life was over and that there was really no point in living anymore. She had known that she was bound back to England, to be an annoyance to everyone she loved.
But strangely, when her life had been threatened, she hadn’t given in, allowed death to take her.
No, she’d found that she fiercely wanted to live. A life without a husband was sure to be a sad one, but it was better than no life at all, it seemed.
She shut her eyes and held onto that feeling, to the joy of being alive. She had felt so little joy in so long. But it was amazing how living through a life-threatening experience managed to realign her priorities.
When they reached the pirate ship, Elizabeth looked around with curiosity. She half expected the ship to look quite different than any other, as if the fact it was used for piracy would mean that evil oozed out of its boards.
But the truth was, it was disappointingly ordinary, like every other ship she’d ever seen.
The captain took her down into the belly of the ship, throwing open the door to a small room that only contained a bedroll. The place smelled faintly of onions.
He had the men deposit her trunk on the floor and then told them to leave. He looked around the room. “Until recently, this was food storage. I had the men clean it out for you, because it is just down the hall from my quarters.” He pointed.
She looked and saw a door a few feet away. It had a brass handle.
“If anyone comes and gives you trouble, come and find me,” he said.
She nodded.
He looked her over.
She raised her chin.
“You still haven’t thanked me, Miss Bennet.”
“Oh, haven’t I?”
“No,” he said.
She didn’t say anything.
His nostrils flared, and he leaned close. “Have a care, Miss Bennet. I might change my mind and kill you any time I like.”
“And that is precisely why I shall not thank you, sir.”
He raised his eyebrows at that. And then, recovering, he chuckled slowly. “Have it your way.” He shoved her inside her room and shut the door.
At once, she was plunged into darkness. He hadn’t even given her a lamp.
CHAPTER TWO
“Don’t see why you didn’t just kill her,” said Mackie. “Would have, if it was me.”
“I meant to,” said Darcy, sighing. “But I changed my mind at the last minute.”
“You’re the one always saying a woman on a ship is nothing but trouble.”
“And she will be,” said Darcy. “Nothing but trouble, I’m sure of it.”
“So? Why didn’t you kill her?”
Darcy made a sour face. “Are you in the habit of murdering lovely young ladies, Mackie?”
&nbs
p; “Well, no, I suppose not, but we all have to do things we don’t like sometimes. I know that, and you know it, too. If you’re feeling squeamish, Cap’n, I’d be happy to stick her for you.”
“No, that won’t be necessary,” said Darcy. He turned, looking around his quarters. “I didn’t call you here to talk about whether or not it was a good idea to keep her alive. I know it wasn’t.”
“Well, I don’t see why you did it then.”
“There’s no reason for it.” Darcy glared at him. “Just stop it, why don’t you? I don’t want to discuss that.”
Mackie crossed his arms over his chest, but he didn’t say anything.
Truthfully, Darcy wasn’t exactly sure why he’d kept her alive. He did remember her, at least vaguely. Not enough to recall her name or her family or anything about her. But he remembered the night that he had confronted Wickham. Of course he remembered that. And he remembered Bingley’s bride. She had been pretty, and she’d had a bevy of sisters, some of them horrid. The mother had been abominable. He remembered that.
But Darcy had been to many balls, and been introduced to many English women, many of whom had been at least as winsome as this Miss Bennet. She didn’t stand out or anything. There was nothing significant about her.
That wasn’t the reason he hadn’t killed her.
But perhaps it was uncomfortable to kill someone that he knew, that he had been introduced to in England. As improper and wicked as he was, perhaps that was a line he didn’t want to cross.
And what he had said to Mackie was true. He wasn’t in the habit of murdering lovely young ladies. He preferred not to kill anyone at all, in fact. He was a pirate, but he liked to get his loot by trickery and conniving rather than by violence. He could kill when he needed to, and he did. He wasn’t squeamish or anything. He just didn’t… well, he didn’t enjoy killing, and it was a messy and tiring sort of business, so if he could avoid it, he would.
In this case, it hadn’t been avoidable, but in the case of Miss Bennet…
Oh, dash it all, it made no sense. She knew who he was. If she got back to England somehow, she’d probably spread it all over, telling everyone how he’d become a bloodthirsty pirate. He really should kill her just to shut her up.
Mr. Darcy's Indiscretions Page 39