The Crossing: A Pride and Prejudice Variation

Thirty-two days. One ship. No escape. Elizabeth Bennet boards the Meridian at Liverpool with her aunt and uncle, bound for Boston and expecting, at most, an interesting change of scene. What she does not expect is Fitzwilliam Darcy on the same dock, boarding the same vessel, for entirely separate reasons that are about to become irrelevant. The Atlantic crossing takes thirty-two days in fair weather.
Neither of them has anywhere to be except here, at sea, in a space too small for the distance they have been keeping since Hertfordshire. Jane Bennet and Bingley are also aboard. They are getting along splendidly. It is, in its way, instructive. A storm arrives on Day Twelve and extends the crossing by eight days. By the time the American coast appears on the horizon, thirty-two days of open water and one very honest storm have done what no Hertfordshire drawing room ever managed: stripped away everything that was performance and left only what was real.
The ship was never the destination. It was what the crossing made of them that mattered.