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 usehorologium, 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 itwasthe 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…
