Chapter Eight
CHAPTER EIGHT
elizabeth
It took two days to get away clean with the carriage and the servants. The first time we tried, we were accosted by Colonel Fitzwilliam who wanted to know where it was we were going, all alone, together, in the midst of the afternoon.
We tried just telling him the truth and seeing if he wanted to come along, but he seemed to find it all very odd, and he would not go along with it quietly, saying we ought to tell Lady Catherine what we were about, and that the invitation had come to her household.
So, the next day, we simply avoided him.
We made it out.
Traveling in the carriage was nice. I had not realized how difficult it had been to be cooped up in the same place for so long. I spent the journey drinking in the scenery as I looked out the window.
I was seated next to a girl named Emily, who had been brought along as my maid. She was excited as well. Mr. Darcy’s valet was riding on the back of the carriage. Mr. Darcy sat opposite Emily and me, sprawled across the entire seat, looking pleased with himself.
“If I ever saw a man more self-congratulatory, Will, I should be surprised,” I said to him.
He smirked. “I’m not congratulating myself.”
“Oh? No? What’s that expression on your face, then?”
He ducked down his head, blushing. He’d been blushing a lot lately, hadn’t he? “Nothing.”
“You’re embarrassed, I see, but it won’t save you from admitting that you’re quite pleased with yourself for bringing this off, even though it has taken us nearly a week since we conceived of the idea to even get this far. I’m not sure you should be so very proud of yourself.”
He looked up at me, shaking his head. “I’m not embarrassed. Or… if I am, it’s only because you caught me staring at you. Which I find myself doing too often.”
I sucked in a sharp breath and looked away. I felt that as a warmth in my belly. It was good, but it…
“Apologies.” His voice was very deep.
“No, it’s all right,” I said. I was blushing, too. I glanced over at Emily. “Erm, perhaps we should play a road game? A visual scavenger hunt. Whoever sees all of the things first wins.”
“Capital idea!” he said, too vigorously.
So, we distracted ourselves rather easily and we passed the hours on the road until we arrived at Tiewater Hall. It was evening now, the sun beginning to sink in the horizon. We took the time to walk about, stretch our legs, and to eat something, for there would likely not be food at the ball until the midnight supper.
After that, we dressed separately, each taking time in the carriage to get ourselves prepared. Emily did quite a nice job at seeing to my hair there, without the comforts of a dressing room. I was quite impressed.
Mr. Darcy seemed impressed too.
He stared at me again as I alighted from the carriage. He looked quite debonair as well, coiffed and fancy. I stared back.
He offered me his arm.
I took it.
We entered the ball. Everyone knew who he was; no one knew who I was. It was a little bit scandalous, of course, us arriving in this manner. He had brought me, all alone, an unchaperoned, unmarried woman, to a ball.
However, this seemed to only make me more mysterious and interesting. Or perhaps it was the dress, which was finer than anything I could have ever afforded to have made for myself. It fit much better than it had any right to, even though it had been made for Anne de Bourgh. It was only a little bit tight, really.
My dance card filled up right away.
Mr. Darcy laughed, scolding me for not saving my first two dances for him.
“Is that the way of it, sir?” I said, teasing him.
“Well, I don’t know anyone here,” he said.
“Oh, please,” I said. “You know everyone. Besides, this makes it apparent that it is quite easy to be introduced in a ballroom.” I shook the dance card at him. “See?”
“Yes, this is how you repay me for these introductions, I see,” he said. “Leaving me to fend for myself, all alone, watching you dance with other men.”
“Go ask someone to dance with you, Will,” I said.
“I haven’t the skill to converse with strangers,” he said. “Not with ease, not as you do.”
“Well, we neither of us perform to strangers,” I said. “Mark my words, I shall have offended half of my dance partners before the end of the night.”
He smiled at me, and I smiled back, and we stood there, looking into each other’s eyes, for some time.
And then I danced.
One half hour with one gentleman and another half hour with another.
And then I abandoned my dance card entirely and danced only with Mr. Darcy, and we made fun of all the people and rebuffed anyone who dared to criticize us.
But midnight came quickly.
I don’t know what we were expecting, truly. We had not thought that part through, clearly.
We were standing at the edge of the ball, together, and he was hiding me from the men whose dances I had agreed to and then skipped out on. There had been no announcement of the midnight supper, but it was not uncommon for balls to be loose when it came to time. The clock in the corner started to chime, though, and we both looked at each other, and I think we both realized it just then.
We thought about what had happened when we tried to stay up late with the tea.
And then, it came crashing down, and we both knew what was about to happen.
Seeing it, though (and it actually happened before the clock had finished chiming midnight. The clock must not have been set exactly properly) was something else.
One moment, the room was full of dancing and music and people chattering and the next it was dark and empty and open. Obviously, the room on Thursday morning had been cleared in preparation for the ball.
But it was now Thursday morning.
The clock was chiming midnight to a dark and empty house.
“Well,” said Mr. Darcy. “Obviously, this was going to happen.”
“We are very, very stupid,” I said.
He nodded. “We are, because…”
“The carriage,” I said.
He groaned.
We went out to check, anyway, even though we knew it wouldn’t be there.
I fingered my skirt, furrowing my brow. “It’s interesting this is here, isn’t it?”
He nodded, touching his own clothes. “Yes, do you suppose it’s because we’re touching it? Maybe that’s how the pocket watch got to the parsonage?”
I flushed deeply, glad it was dark outside where the carriage should have been and that he couldn’t see, because I remembered that I had plucked that stupid pocket watch out of my cleavage like a right idiot, in front of him, and I could not understand what had gone wrong with me to have done that. I hadn’t meant to transport it there, but I did sometimes put things there where then was nowhere else handy to put things. It was smooth and metal and not uncomfortable and I’d sort of forgotten it was there.
He hadn’t said anything about it, and I hadn’t said anything about it, and it was going to remain that way.
Forever.
“I mean, that pocket watch…” He cleared his throat.
Oh, Lord above, he remembered that. It had to have been seventy Thursdays ago. “Nothing to say about the pocket watch,” I said quickly.
“No, forget it,” he said with a nod.
“We can just take a carriage from this house,” I said.
“We can,” he said. “Though I’m realizing what this means.”
“It means something?”
“We can’t travel through time, but we can travel through distance,” he said. “I assume we could keep going in this direction until midnight again, and it would still be Thursday, but we would be even farther from Rosings. Everything would reset, of course, but we’re not stuck there.”
“Oh,” I said, nodding. “True enough. We are not.”
“We could go anywhere,” he said. “If you wanted to visit your family, for instance, we could go do that. We could have as many Thursdays with them as we liked. I could go and kill George Wickham over and over again. Do you suppose he’s still in Meryton?”
“We don’t have to go see my family,” I said. “What about your sister? We could go see her?”
“Could,” he said.
“We could go to London,” I said.
“We could,” he said.
“We might have trouble,” I said. “We’d rent a room on Thursday night, and go to sleep, and likely wake up at midnight on Thursday morning with the people who rented the room that night.”
“I had not thought of that,” he said, nodding. “Travel will be tricky.”
“Well, you had said we must avoid inns anyway,” I said. “Because of… danger.”
He nodded. “I had said that.”
It was very quiet.
“But if we are truly stuck this way forever, Will,” I said, “then it seems foolish in some ways to keep following rules that obviously have no meaning for us.”
He gave me a sharp look. “What are you saying?”
“Nothing,” I said, shrugging. “You say you wish to wait for marriage, and I find that very admirable. It is only, we are not ever going to get married, not to anyone. We are going to keep living this Thursday over and over. So, unless there’s a way we can fix ourselves, there’s no point in waiting.”
His jaw twitched. He blew out a huff of air.
Then he walked off, leaving me there.
“Where are you off to?” I called after him.
“Getting us a carriage,” he called back. “Let’s go back to Rosings.”
fitzwilliam
The thing about a carriage, of course, is that it needs a driver. There were no drivers ready at midnight in the stables of Tiewater Hall.
Horses, though, plenty of horses, and plenty of saddles, including side saddles.
We had a long and heated discussion about her riding a horse.
She protested a great many times that she was not afraid of horses, and I said that if that was the case, she shouldn’t be frightened of riding a horse, then, and she said that she didn’t understand why we were even going back to Rosings, that we were just giving up, and I said that I didn’t know where else to go, and what did she want us to do, anyway?
No reason to wait, she had said.
Damnation.
Finally, she convinced me that we could take the carriage and drive it together. “When I was a girl, I used to sit up with our driver, and he taught me how to move the reins,” she said. “I’m sure I can do it.”
“So, we are stealing a carriage,” I said. “And four horses.”
“Oh, Will, it will all reset!”
“But we could just as easily ride horses,” I said.
“I hate you,” she told me. “I hate you ever so much.”
This stung.
She hung her head. “I am afraid of horses, all right?”
Obviously, I knew she was afraid. Why was I being so awful about it?
“Please?” She rubbed her forehead. “Please, don’t make me get on a horse.”
I shook my head. “I’m sorry, Elizabeth. I don’t know why I was being so horrid to you. We’ll take the carriage.”
She looked up at me. “We could stay. Go to the ball again tonight.”
I thought about that. It might be more convenient than going all the way back to Rosings.
“I promise not to fill up my dance card this time,” she said in a small voice. “I shan’t leave you all alone when you are shy and frightened of new people. No wonder you—”
“Now, see here, I’m not frightened of people ,” I said.
“All right, of course not,” she said, smiling up at me.
“It’s not the same,” I said and I reached down and took hold of her hand for no reason that made any sense. My voice gentled. “I’m not frightened of people the way you’re frightened of horses.”
“No?” she said.
I lifted her hand, and now I was holding her hand in both of mine. I rubbed my thumbs over her knuckles. “No, it’s nothing the same.”
“Even so, I’m sorry,” she said.
“I don’t need you to look out for me, Elizabeth,” I whispered. “I can take care of myself.”
She nodded. “I can take care of myself, too.”
“As long as it doesn’t require riding horses,” I said in a soft voice, tracing my thumbs over her fingers.
She gasped. “Yes, and you’ll be fine as long as you don’t have to talk to strangers.”
I chuckled. I lifted her hand. I turned it over and surveyed the inside of it. Then, I did something very awful. I planted a kiss in the middle of her palm.
She sucked in an audible breath.
We gazed into each other’s eyes.
I swallowed. “We need to try harder first,” I said in a guttural voice.
“You mean, we need to try to get to Friday harder?” she said.
“I won’t just ruin you because of… we’ve barely tried.”
“Would I be ruined if no one knew?”
I nodded. “I think so.”
She looked up at me, there in the stables, in the moonlight, and she was impossibly lovely and impossibly small, and I knew she was mine, that she’d been mine now for a string of Thursdays, and that if I wanted her, I could just… have her.
I kissed her forehead.
She shut her eyes.