CHAPTER ONE
fitzwilliam
On my thirtieth Thursday, April ninth, I asked Elizabeth Bennet to marry me, on a lark. For me, every day was Thursday, so there was effectively no yesterday and no tomorrow, only today, again and again andagain.
It may not truly have been the thirtieth Thursday in a row.
In the beginning of this malady which afflicted me, I was not keeping strict count, I must admit. One will agree that waking and living the same day over again is quite an alarming experience, so one might be excused for not keeping good track of such things in the beginning.
However, to the best of my knowledge, it was nearly the thirtieth Thursday. Perhaps it was the twenty-ninth or the thirty-fourth, but it was near about there, anyway.
The first ten or so days were marked primarily by an air of disbelief. I kept thinking that this was some dream, or that I had gone quite mad, or that I must certainly wake the following day on Friday, April tenth.
But as Friday never came, and every day was the same Thursday over and over, I began to become accustomed to the truth of the matter. The next ten or so iterations saw me engagedin looking for answers or for some solution. Everyone I spoke to thought me quite out of my head, of course, but it didn’t matter because tomorrow—today—they would not remember whatever it was I had said. I remembered every single one of these Thursdays, but no one else did. I could say or do anything, then, with no consequence whatsoever.
So, this was when I began to do ridiculous things, simply to see what would happen. I had proposed marriage to my cousin Miss Anne de Bourgh in various ways over the past seven Thursdays. First, I simply did it in private. Then I did it in various public ways. The previous day, I had even engaged the cook at Rosings to make an elaborate tart with spring berries for the occasion.
I had no interest in marrying my cousin Anne, I must say, but my aunt, Lady Catherine, wished me to do so, so I thought I might as well see what it would be like.
At first, it was amusing, but I had grown tired of it quickly.
Anne was rather sickly and timid, a sort of mouse of a girl, and she was grateful to be married but seemingly unable to summon anything approaching excitement at the prospect. “Oh, heavens, shall I have to leave Rosings?” she said, every single time I asked her.
At any rate, I began to think of who else it was that I could ask to marry me, and I settled on Elizabeth Bennet almost immediately. I had no desire to marry her either, of course. She was sharp-tongued, not entirely handsome (though perhaps her features and figure had been growing on me lately, I could not say), and altogether inappropriately connected. To be frank, she was beneath me. She had an uncle who made a living as a tradesman, who lived on Gracechurch Street, for heaven’s sake. I could not go to Gracechurch Street, could I? Imagine if I were seen there! It would be insupportable.
Of course, it didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to marry her. I was going to wake up tomorrow, and it was going to be Thursday again. I might as well amuse myself as best I could.
So, I went directly to the parsonage, which was where Miss Bennet was staying. She was a guest of the rector here, a Mr. Collins, and of his wife Mrs. Collins. There was some strange whiff of gossip to it, I understood. At some point, Mr. Collins had asked Miss Bennet to marry him and she had refused. I supposed I should have paid more attention to that before I settled on this course of action, but I did not.
No, I simply checked my pocket watch to see if it were close to the time when the entire party was supposed to be engaged at tea with my aunt, my cousin Colonel Fitzwilliam, and myself at Rosings and then, seeing that it was, I left and went to the parsonage.
Miss Bennet never came for tea on Thursday. Mrs. Collins always said that she had a headache, and my cousin Colonel Fitzwilliam always inclined his head and said, “Oh, dear, that’s dreadful.”
But I would see none of this today, because I was not there. I supposed my absence might create some consternation, but since I was to face no consequences for any of my actions anymore, I had come not to care much about how anyone reacted to me.
Perhaps I could have done better with the proposal. I suppose I had proposed too often to Anne, who said yes without even hearing me out, giving me a small, rather bored smile, and would always say, “I say, Fitzwilliam, I always knew you would ask. Yes, of course, I shall marry you.”
So, perhaps I spent too much time explaining to Miss Bennet why I was there in the first place. I thought she would never believe that I was even interested, as I had shown no interest in her, owing to the fact that I was not, in fact, interested.So, I concocted some idea that I had been in love with her all along, desperately in love, ardently in love, but that I had been wrestling with the fact that she was such an inappropriate match that I could not show her it, because I was trying tonotbe in love with her.
Even as I’m describing it now, I see it’s quite convoluted.
I don’t think she believed me.
I really was shocked when she refused me, though.
Shocked, quite immeasurably so. I said that she was sharp-tongued, of course, but she was especially sharp-tongued when she refused me. She was not even a little bit flattered.
Miss Elizabeth Bennet did not like me.
That much had been made plain.
She told me that she would not marry me if I were the last man in the world.
No, wait, it wasn’t quite that, was it? Perhaps I would propose again just to hear it again. The last man in the world she could be prevailed upon to marry, that is what she said.
She had a number of reasons, too, something about her sister and Mr. Bingley, and it is true that I separated them, because the Bennet girls, I tell you, inappropriate matches for marriage! I would never have let Bingley attach himself to that family, never.
The bit about Mr. Wickham, however, that was simply beyond the pale. That she could believe that wretch and his lies!
