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—”
