Chapter Nineteen
CHAPTER NINETEEN
fitzwilliam
I was endeavoring to find an opportunity to leave. Being here, whilst everyone was in a state of mourning and panic over my cousin, who was not, in fact, truly dead, was grating against my nerves.
I wished to be back with Elizabeth, not least because she’d been left alone with that fiend.
As I was checking the pocket watch—the damnable thing, which I always had with me—for the time, to see how long I had been gone from her, my aunt abruptly got to her feet across the room. “Fitzwilliam Darcy!” she cried in a warbling voice, very loud. “With me, this instant.”
I sighed. “Madam, may I appeal to you to wait until later for this?”
“No, it can’t wait.” She was severe. She was striding across the room, even as she spoke. When she noticed I was not moving from the spot, she cried, “This instant!” and kept walking.
I sighed again, and decided I might as well see what it was she wanted. I accompanied her into the hallway.
“You have the watch,” she said in a tight and tremulous voice. “When I found it, when I knew was no longer mouldering at the bottom of the lake, I should have realized it would happen sooner or later, that someone would find it. Oh, heaven help us both, Fitzwilliam!”
I stopped moving, startled. “Aunt Catherine, you know about the watch?”
“Who do you think had the infernal thing made?” she said, nostrils flaring. She continued to walk down the hallway, slow and plodding, shaking her head.
I came after her. “Why…? How…? What is it?”
She looked up at me. “The day that Lewis died was the worst day of my life.”
Lewis had been her husband, the late Sir Lewis de Bourgh. I remembered him, of course. He had been rather slavishly devoted to my aunt, which I always thought was a bit strange, given the differences in their dispositions. She was loud and opinionated. He was easy, laughed a lot, took very little seriously. I still remember him calling her ‘Cathy’ in mixed company, and how she didn’t even seem to mind.
“I am sorry for that,” I said to her. “I was too young at the time, perhaps, to understand what that must have been like.” Lizzy and I, after all, were opposites in certain ways. The ways that Lizzy was different than me seemed to fit perfectly into me, however, our weaknesses compensated for by the others’ strengths, and I began to realize that perhaps it had been somewhat the same for my aunt and her husband.
“I did not think I could bear it, living without him,” she said. “At first, I did not even know how it had happened. That first time, that first day, I just found him, you see, floating out there. I had no notion how he got into the lake at all. But eventually, I… let it happen, just observing, and I discovered that he simply slipped in and got stuck in the muck on the bottom and then… he could not swim, you know. He called for help; no help came.”
“The first time?” I whispered.
“She came that night, the first night, the woman came. She had strange eyes, sort of multi-faceted eyes, like prisms. She wore normal-looking clothes and she seemed proper, but those eyes. She gave me the watch.”
I took it out of my pocket. “This watch?”
“I don’t even know why I spoke to her, you know. But it was all madness, in the wake of finding his body. Everyone was there, going to and fro through the house, and all the people were urging me to eat or to do this or to do that, and I suppose I didn’t think too much of this stranger in my house. She offered me what I most wanted, you see?”
“For him never to die,” I said softly.
“At the end, he died every day,” she said. “I began to let him die, because I wanted out of it!”
“The watch made you relive that day with him,” I said. “His last day, because you could not bear to let him go.”
“I didn’t want to be a widow, Fitzwilliam,” she whispered. “I didn’t think I could bear it. I didn’t want to be without him. He was the best part of my life. I looked into a future with him gone, and I…”
“No, I quite understand.” I opened the watch and shut it. “But you grew tired of it, eventually.”
“You are repeating this day,” she said to me. “Are you not?”
I nodded.
“It explains everything,” she said. “Now, of course I see it. Why you have not even been saddened over the death of Richard. For you, he will simply wake tomorrow, as if nothing has happened. Yes, I well remember that, the sheer endless awfulness of it.”
“You got out of it, though,” I said.
“Well, I might not have,” she said with a little shrug. “Because there were elements of it that were awful, of course, but I had Lewis, and I could stop him from drowning and we could have that last day together, any number of ways, and I…”
“How long?”
“I think it may have been a year,” she said. “I did not keep count. But then, poor Anne got caught up in it.”
“Anne?” I said, alarmed.
“Yes, she was just small, only a small girl. And—of course—some part of me had known that I did not wish to live this way, to never see my daughter grow, but…”
I shook my head, because I was remembering what had been said, back then, about Anne and how she had become so wan and sickly in the wake of her father’s death, and I was realizing it was not the wake of his death that had done it but the wake of living one day in repetition.
“She does not remember,” said Lady Catherine. “I remember living the day over and over again. I remember how it terrified and frustrated and angered her. I remember how she raged at me that she would never grow up!” Her voice twisted. “Anne remembers none of it, but she’s never been the same. It broke her.”
“She doesn’t remember?” I said in a very small voice. “Only you remember?” So, did that mean, if I ended this, that Elizabeth would never remember? Oh, God.
“Do you know how it spread to her?” I said.
“No, I think the pocket watch is evil,” said Lady Catherine. “Pure evil, stitched together by malevolent magic. I think that woman with the prismatic eyes was some kind of demon. It went to her, to my sweet, small daughter, and…” She drew in a noisy breath. “If Anne’s health had permitted it, she would be quite good at piano-forte, you see? If Anne’s health had permitted it, we should have gone to London for every Season. If Anne’s health had permitted it—”
“Yes,” I interrupted.
“It’s my fault,” said Lady Catherine in a dull voice. “It’s on my head. My poor little girl.”
“It is not your fault,” I said. “Anne’s malady seems physical in a number of ways. Who is to say it’s related?”
She stopped walking and glared at me.
I looked away. “I suppose I’m saying this because… I am not the only person who is repeating the day.”
“Ah,” she said, sighing. “That’s unfortunate, then. I don’t know what the effect will be on them if you put an end to it.”
“How did you put an end to it?”
“Well, I tried a number of things.”
“I’ve obviously tried all sorts of things,” I said. “I have destroyed the pocket watch only twenty ways—”
“Yes, that doesn’t work,” she said with a shrug. “What I did, eventually, was to tuck it into Lewis’s pocket that morning and let him go off and drown to death with the watch in his pocket.” Her face twisted. “I kissed him goodbye that day, but I had no real hope it would work.”
“But it did?”
“Well, I woke and it was that day again. So, I thought it hadn’t. But Anne was behaving the way she had before, and she seemed to have no memory of anything. And Lewis would not be deterred, you know? It was as though, even if I tried to convince him otherwise, he would only stick to the original way the day had been shaped, as if it were fate. And then, he died, everything went as it had on the first time through, and… I woke up the morning after, and he was gone.”
I furrowed my brow, thinking that through. “So, the watch needs to be on a dead man? But I personally have died a number of times while having the watch on me—”
“Oh, yes, that doesn’t work,” she said. “It can’t be you.”
“Perhaps it needs to be someone who is supposed to die today?” I shook my head. “But no one died, not that I know of.”
She tilted her head to one side. “I’m ever so sorry. I suppose this watch just latched itself onto you somehow. It lingered at the bottom of the lake for years, you know. And then one day, I found it.”
“Yes, you said something about that,” I said.
“One day, it was just sitting out, on a table in the sitting room. I saw it and snatched it up in horror. Then I had touched it, you know, so I worried that I should start reliving the day. However, that didn’t happen. So, I began trying to get rid of it, to bury it, to melt it down, to smash it… nothing worked. Eventually, I shut it up in a trunk in the depths of the attic, somewhere out of everyone’s way.”
“And then it found a way to present itself to me,” I said. “I wonder if I drew it to me in some way. You wished for the day to repeat, and perhaps I wished…” But I could not quite make that work. I had not wished for this at all.
“I don’t think it’s quite so tidy,” she said with a shrug. “As I said, I think it’s simply malevolent.” She held out her hand. “I shall take it from you, if you like. I don’t think it will make any difference, but we could see if it does.”
I shoved it back into my pocket. “No, not yet. I need to speak to Elizabeth.”
“That Bennet girl?” Lady Catherine made a face as if something smelled bad. “Well, that’s horrific, Fitzwilliam. I can’t imagine anything more dire. How long have the two of you been gallivanting about, living this day together?”
I shrugged.
“So, you think you’ll marry her, then. And not Anne, when she has suffered so much already and when you could take care of her, just as she needs? Your mother promised—”
“Aunt Catherine,” I said firmly.
“Well, you’re selfish, that’s what you are, Fitzwilliam.”
“I am not,” I said. “I actually take responsibility rather seriously, madam. But there is more to love than responsibility, you see. There is a bit of vulnerability to it, too. I could rescue Anne, yes, but she could never rescue me.” I closed my hand around the watch, gripping it tightly, and then I quit the hallway, leaving my aunt behind.
I walked past everyone to leave the house entirely.
I had to get back to Elizabeth.
elizabeth
We were at the bottom of the steps, eyeing them to make sure Wickham was not free, speaking in very soft voices.
“I think I shall not do it,” he was saying to me. “It is not fair, if you won’t retain the memories. Without your memories, it is as if you are not yourself, Elizabeth. You’ll be someone entirely else. If I do this, it’s like I kill you.”
I started at this pronunciation.
“Well, this version of you, anyway,” he said. “And you are not like the others, because you remember, so it is as if you are real, the only other real person in the entire world. And if I take your memories away, you are like them, and you are…”
“Not real?” I said softly, horrified.
He ran a hand through his hair, seemingly at a loss for words.
“But it is as we have just been saying,” I said. “The suffering that is visited upon these people is real, and they are really feeling it, even if they forget.”
“I shan’t lose you,” he said, and this was firm.
“You would not,” I said. “I would still be here.”
“Yes, and if I come and propose to you, you will refuse me.”
“Well, perhaps don’t spend the entire proposal dwelling on why you are asking against your better judgment!” I snapped.
He looked up at me. “You are not truly suggesting that I erase all of this, everything that has happened between us?”
I wrapped my hands around my own waist, almost embracing myself, as if I were trying to hold myself together. “I don’t know,” I whispered. “But this is no life, Fitzwilliam, it is no life at all.”
He shook his head. He walked away from me, up the stairs, towards where Wickham was being kept.
“If there is a way to end this endless repetition, and we do not take it—”
“We don’t even know if it would work,” he said, not looking at me, still going up the stairs, going farther and farther away.
“You could tell me!” I called after him. “Tell me of it, tell me what passed between us?”
He scoffed, not dignifying that with a response.
I would think he was mad, I supposed, if he tried to spin this tale to me.
I drew in a breath and then let it out, trying to make sense of all of this. I should feel some horror, I supposed, at the idea of having all of my memories erased, but I didn’t feel anything at all, just a sort of numbness. We had been trapped in some living nightmare for so long, it only made an awful sort of sense that the way out of it would be nightmarish as well.
I climbed the stairs behind him. “I suppose that we also have to contend with the other part of it, that perhaps I would be damaged in some way. Lady Catherine seems to believe it harmed Anne, even if she could not remember.”
“Just so,” he said gruffly.
He reached the top of the stairs and rounded the bend, going for the room where Wickham was locked up.
I alighted on the top step. “Well… perhaps we wait? This situation with Wickham, it is untenable, but if we could think of some way to solve it, perhaps we could be happy here, living this Thursday forever. I did say it was a sort of immortality, I suppose. But if we know we have a way out, if we cannot bear it, we could take it.”
“No,” he said. “No, it is as I have said, I shall not lose you.”
I rounded the bend.
He had stopped in front of Wickham’s door. “I don’t know anyone who dies, Elizabeth, so I should have to seek someone out, anyway, someone to give the pocket watch to.”
I closed the distance between us. “Yes, and perhaps it was symbolic in some way, her giving the watch to her husband. It meant that she had finally accepted his death and was ready to move on.”
“You said we should have learned some moral lesson from this,” he said to the door.
“We have learned many moral lessons,” I said.
“Well, Wickham hasn’t,” said Will, glaring at the door.
“Perhaps if we could teach him…” But I knew that was not the way of it. The watch was like the winds of a storm. It moved and destruction happened its wake, but a storm wasn’t a storm because of anything. It simply was.
“Wickham?” called my husband.
There was no answer.
Will huffed. He felt about in his pocket for the key to the door, and thrust it into the lock. He opened the door and made a little exclamation.
“What?” I said.
He rushed into the room and I followed him.
The room was empty.