“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.”
