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 beactuallymarried, 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.”
