We were at the bottom of the steps, eyeing them to make sure Wickham was not free, speaking in very soft voices.
“I think I shall not do it,” he was saying to me. “It is not fair, if you won’t retain the memories. Without your memories, it is as if you are not yourself, Elizabeth. You’ll be someone entirely else. If I do this, it’s like I kill you.”
I started at this pronunciation.
“Well, this version of you, anyway,” he said. “And you are not like the others, because you remember, so it is as if you are real, the only other real person in the entire world. And if I take your memories away, you are like them, and you are…”
“Not real?” I said softly, horrified.
He ran a hand through his hair, seemingly at a loss for words.
“But it is as we have just been saying,” I said. “The suffering that is visited upon these people is real, and they are really feeling it, even if they forget.”
“I shan’t lose you,” he said, and this was firm.
“You would not,” I said. “I would still be here.”
“Yes, and if I come and propose to you, you will refuse me.”
“Well, perhaps don’t spend the entire proposal dwelling on why you are asking against your better judgment!” I snapped.
He looked up at me. “You are not truly suggesting that I erase all of this, everything that has happened between us?”
I wrapped my hands around my own waist, almost embracing myself, as if I were trying to hold myself together. “I don’t know,” I whispered. “But this is no life, Fitzwilliam, it is no life at all.”
He shook his head. He walked away from me, up the stairs, towards where Wickham was being kept.
“If there is a way to end this endless repetition, and we do not take it—”
“We don’t even know if it would work,” he said, not looking at me, still going up the stairs, going farther and farther away.
“You could tell me!” I called after him. “Tell me of it, tell me what passed between us?”
He scoffed, not dignifying that with a response.
I would think he was mad, I supposed, if he tried to spin this tale to me.
I drew in a breath and then let it out, trying to make sense of all of this. I should feel some horror, I supposed, at the idea of having all of my memories erased, but I didn’t feel anything at all, just a sort of numbness. We had been trapped in some living nightmare for so long, it only made an awful sort of sense that the way out of it would be nightmarish as well.
I climbed the stairs behind him. “I suppose that we also have to contend with the other part of it, that perhaps I would be damaged in some way. Lady Catherine seems to believe it harmed Anne, even if she could not remember.”
“Just so,” he said gruffly.
He reached the top of the stairs and rounded the bend, going for the room where Wickham was locked up.
I alighted on the top step. “Well… perhaps we wait? This situation with Wickham, it is untenable, but if we could think of some way to solve it, perhaps we could be happy here, living this Thursday forever. I did say it was a sort of immortality, I suppose. But if we know we have a way out, if we cannot bear it, we could take it.”
“No,” he said. “No, it is as I have said, I shall not lose you.”
I rounded the bend.
He had stopped in front of Wickham’s door. “I don’t know anyone who dies, Elizabeth, so I should have to seek someone out, anyway, someone to give the pocket watch to.”
I closed the distance between us. “Yes, and perhaps it was symbolic in some way, her giving the watch to her husband. It meant that she had finally accepted his death and was ready to move on.”
“You said we should have learned some moral lesson from this,” he said to the door.
“We have learned many moral lessons,” I said.
