Chapter Ten
CHAPTER TEN
fitzwilliam
“Well, now,” said the Catholic father to the both of us, “I don’t think I believe in curses, truly, and not really cursed objects .”
We were outside St. Mary’s, a small and somewhat ramshackle building, quite old, probably built in the twelfth century or some such. Many Catholic churches had been demolished back several hundred years ago when England went mad during the Reformation. For quite some time, it had been all but illegal to be Catholic in England, but that sort of ridiculousness had been mostly repealed and righted these days. This building, however, seemed to have survived all that.
The clergyman, however, seemed wary of us, but this was likely not because we were Protestants and more because we sounded mad, talking about living the same day over and over again and magical pocket watches.
“But it could be possible?” said Elizabeth. “Why, in the bible, there are stories about witches. The Witch of Endor even summoned the spirit of Samuel from the beyond, so we know that witches existed and they had power.”
The priest hemmed and hawed for a moment. “Yes, yes, but that was a different time. God appeared in burning bushes and parted the Red Sea and did all manner of signs and wonders that no longer happen in our time. At any rate, I don’t think there are any stories in the bible about objects having magical powers.”
“Certainly there are,” said Elizabeth, glaring at him. “Doesn’t Moses strike a rock in the wilderness to get water for the Israelites? Either the rock was magical or the rod he used to strike it was.”
“That was God, working through Moses,” said the clergyman.
Elizabeth’s face got a pinched expression.
I was holding out the pocket watch. I pushed it at the priest. Gingerly, he took it from me. He turned it over in his palm and then opened it. “I could… bless the pocket watch for you? With holy water?”
“Please, would you?” I said.
“With Latin,” said Elizabeth.
“Well,” said the priest, “actually, the water itself has already been blessed. With Latin. But by God . It isn’t about the words one says. It’s not a spell. It’s just the way to focus oneself to…” He shook his head at both of us. “Oh, never mind. Come along then.”
We entered into the sanctuary of the church, where there a stoup, a font of water near the entrance.
The clergyman shrugged at us. He dropped the pocket watch into the font, peered down at it and muttered, “Hmm, well, there’s no Latin word for pocket watch, but we could use horologium , I suppose. Which is a second declension noun, and in the blessing, we’d likely want it in the accusative, so…” He cleared his throat, fished the pocket watch out and intoned in a deep, important voice, “ Hanc horologium, te quaesumus, benedicas. ” He surveyed it, shrugged, and then handed the pocket watch back to me.
“You’ve blessed it?” said Elizabeth. She looked at me. “Can you translate that?”
“Maybe if I saw it written down,” I said.
“It’s a standard blessing,” said the priest. “If there’s anything unholy in the pocket watch, it has been sanctified. If there’s nothing else?”
“No, that’s quite good,” I said, closing my hand around the watch. “We’re ever so grateful, Father.”
“If you wish to drop something in the poor box on your way out, we’d be obliged,” said the priest.
Right, then. Get a blessing, pay God for it. Catholics. What should I have expected? Well, perhaps that wasn’t fair, in the end. I supposed the priest had taken a vow of poverty, and from the looks of this place, he was honoring it. I left some coin.
I clutched the wet and dripping pocket watch as we got back in the carriage.
“Perhaps,” I said, “even if it was nothing, the water will get into the gears and rust it shut?”
“Perhaps,” she said, looking out the window.
But the next morning, it was Thursday again.
We walked together, listless.
The April sun was shining as bright as ever, and she was still lovely, and I was beginning to wonder what it was exactly that was preventing me from taking advantage of this situation.
I wanted her as my wife.
We could do it. There was a small house on the grounds of Pemberley, and there were no servants there. We could travel there, and we could live, just the two of us, every Thursday, and if we saw no one else, it would be as if we were living a life together as husband and wife, would it not?
Lord, I could take her to Scotland. I could marry her, in front of God, at the least. What did it matter that any papers we signed would be wiped out of existence at midnight? It would be done for us, and the covenant between us would be all that mattered.
“It’s foolish to think that some superstitious belief in making water holy would do anything,” she said bitterly. “He said it was not a spell, but what else could it be, and we all know magic isn’t real.”
I didn’t say that the pocket watch was evidence that magic was real, nor that she had pointed out several instances in the bible that confirmed the existence of magic. I said, “We shall smash it.”
She looked up at me, light in her eyes, and she was beautiful and fierce. “Just so,” she breathed.
The first time we smashed it, Thursday dawned, just as it always did, and the pocket watch was sitting out, whole and perfect, but not in the chamberpot where I had discarded the pieces of glass and bent pieces of metal. Instead, it was taunting me, sitting out on my bedside table.
The second time we smashed it, we sat up together on the grounds of Rosings, around a fire, just as we had before. We watched as the thing remade itself before our very eyes.
The third time we smashed it, we threw it in the fire, but the fire wasn’t hot enough to melt metal, so it only got blackened and by the next Thursday morning it wasn’t even covered in soot anymore.
Trying the blacksmith’s forge was foolish and complicated and the blacksmith was not pleased with us at all—perhaps he remembered all the times we’d come and taken his daggers in the recesses of his brain somewhere? No, they didn’t remember, none of them did, and melting the watch down in the forge didn’t work.
But it was quite obvious it was the watch.
We discussed, during the deluge of days in which we tried in vain to destroy the thing, that perhaps we could give the watch to someone else and draw them into our endless string of Thursdays.
We could not discern how the watch had done it, however. It wasn’t as if Elizabeth had touched the thing before she started to repeat her days. I had left it at the parsonage—or had I? The watch could move. If I destroyed it, the next morning, it was there on my bedside table. So, it stood to reason that I had not left it, not at all, but that it had somehow gotten itself down there for her to find.
As to why?
Perhaps it wanted us to know.
Perhaps it was a demon in the form of a watch or a mischievous trickster god, like something out of a Greek myth, or some shifty gift from the fair folk…
Perhaps it was playing a game with us.
So, we did not know how to use the watch to snare someone else with us.
And in the end, we could not bear the idea of cursing anyone else we knew or loved to this existence.
After the forge, we decided it was a lost cause to try to destroy the watch, anyway. We made the decision and then we wandered aimlessly in the woods behind Rosings. I leaned against a tree and she sat on the ground in front of me, her skirts askew. She picked up dead leaves from the forest floor and picked them off the veins.
We talked without looking at each other’s faces.
“Perhaps it’s a gift,” she said. “Immortality of a sort, I suppose. We shall never grow old. We shall never get ill again. We shall never suffer a lingering injury.”
“True,” I admitted.
“But there is no future,” she said. “And what is life without a future? I shall never have children. I shall never see my sisters have children. I shall never have a wedding. I shall never have a household of my own. I shall never—”
“We can go to Gretna Green,” I said.
She looked up at me then, her expression startled.
“When we get there, it will still be Thursday, of course, but we can say our vows over an anvil and we can declare ourselves to belong to each other.”
“You can’t marry me, though,” she said. “You have said it. If it had worked, if we had destroyed the watch—”
“Oh, I don’t care anymore,” I said. “If tomorrow, it was Friday, I should march myself straight down to the parsonage and ask for your hand in marriage. And anyone who didn’t like it could go and hang himself.”
She gave me a wounded look. She went back to her leaf.
I studied her in profile.
Her eyes were glittering now with unshed tears.
I rubbed my face with my hand. “Well, I suppose that was also a dreadful marriage proposal, was it not? I can do better. Go and wait for me, and I shall come to the parsonage at tea time, and I shall propose to you in the way you deserve.”
Her mouth twisted, but she still was not looking at me. “You don’t really mean it, is the thing.”
“I do mean it,” I said, and my voice wasn’t strong.
She shook her head, furiously ripping at the leaf. “No, no, you do not. It’s so funny you must insist on some ceremony, that we must elope, even though we shall not be actually married, no matter what we do.”
“Look, I have been thinking about a house on the grounds of Pemberley. It once belonged to a housekeeper, before the current one, Mrs. Reynolds. It is small, a simple place, but there would be no one there but us, and we could go there—”
“Yes, tuck me away in some house where no one can see us together, yes, of course.” Her words were bitter.
“No, I didn’t mean it like that.”
She sprang up to her feet and faced me, her hands clenched in fists. “This is all your doing, you know.”
I tried to back away, but I had nowhere to go, so I simply flattened myself against the tree trunk. “My doing?”
“You wanted this,” she said with a shrug. “It is perfect for you. You get out of all your responsibilities and you can live like the man you aren’t. You can be carefree and wild and do all manner of shocking things. And you can have me, the woman you want but can’t have. You can’t marry me, so you have created a world in which you can have me, anyway. A world in which I am your dirty little secret, where no one will ever know how you have sullied yourself with such an inferior match. A world in which a man can choose who he wants in his own bed.” She spat the words at me.
I narrowed my eyes. “Elizabeth, if all I wanted was to lift your skirts, I could have done it already.”
She lifted her chin. “Oh, is that so?
“You are the one who said—”
“I know what I said.”
“That there was no point in waiting,” I said, and I was feeling furious right now.
“I know this!” Her voice was rising. Tears were starting to spill out of her bright eyes.
“If I’d wanted it, I could have convinced you to find some room at Tiewater and just divested you of your virtue right then and there. You were all but asking for it.”
“And this is what you think of me, in the end,” she said, dashing at her tears. “You shouldn’t have wished on the stupid pocket watch, Mr. Darcy. You should have just asked me to be your mistress. After all, I must have a man if I am to survive, and you could have convinced me it was worth the ignominy since I had no other choice.”
I gasped. “That is appalling . How dare you? I am not that sort of man.”
“Yes,” she breathed in disgust, “yes, you are.”
And then she fled from me, running wildly through the trees.
I should have gone after her, but her words seemed to pin me to the spot. I could hardly breathe, let alone move.
When I finally got myself together, there were tears in my eyes, too.