Carrie Bebris - Pride and Prescience

“Forgive me, Mr. Parrish,” Elizabeth said. “Removing the ring was my idea. It seemed to make the maid nervous. Every time Mrs. Parrish moved her hand—” She stopped, not wanting to add further tension by reminding him of his own injuries inflicted by the ring. The scarcely healed cuts lent his handsome countenance a piratical aspect.

Too late. “What, the little baggage thought her face would end up looking like mine? Caroline is so mad the servants fear her?” His jaw muscles flexed in anger. “She may be ill but she is still my wife! I gave her that ring — I alone have the right to remove it.”

She bowed her head. “I apologize. I should not have presumed—”

Mr. Parrish took a deep breath and slowly released it. “No, Mrs. Darcy. It is I who should apologize. Pray forgive my outburst just now. It is only that…” He seemed to search for words. “The ring symbolizes the promise I made to Caroline on our wedding day.”

With the thumb and fingers of his right hand, he absently stroked his own ring, the companion to Caroline’s. “Perhaps it is foolish of me to place such heavy significance on so small and light an object. But so long as she has the ring with her, I am with her, and in this difficult time, it’s important to us both to remember that.”

“I am lucky to have you, Frederick,” Caroline said softly.

He stroked her cheek. “And I, you, dearest.” He turned back to Elizabeth and shrugged. “You have been more fortunate than us in the early days of your marriage. Perhaps you cannot understand.”

Pity moved her. He was right — she and Darcy were fortunate. Their little quarrel the night before amounted to nothing when compared with the trials the Parrishes faced. “I do understand,” she said.

Caroline sank back to the vanity bench. Parrish sat down next to her and drew her to his side. She leaned into him.

Elizabeth left in search of her own husband.

Elizabeth sent her maid for Darcy, with the message that she awaited him in their chamber. She regretted their fight and wanted to smooth things out, but in a place where they were assured of privacy. No one else need inadvertently learn they’d quarreled, let alone over what.

Professor Randolph and his powers — real or not — continued to occupy her thoughts. That watch was more than a simple timepiece, of this she was certain. He’d used it somehow with Mrs. Parrish, and again with Mr. Kendall. She recalled the image of Randolph standing over Caroline, pressing it into her hand, and shuddered. Would Caroline have met the same fate as Kendall if Elizabeth hadn’t happened to walk in?

She glanced to the highboy. Did the watch yet rest in the top drawer, or had Darcy removed it that morning? Something told her it remained there, and she crossed the room to confirm her intuition. Sure enough, it lay right where she’d dropped it the night before. Apparently, Darcy thought it impotent enough to leave unattended.

She wanted to touch it — to pick it up, to feel its weight in her palm again. Why? Every reasonable thought told her to leave it alone. It was dangerous. Cursed. Why not just stick your hand in the fire while you’re at it? Yet instinct urged her to reach for it.

She did.

The silver again felt warm to her touch but did not sear her this time. Again, she wondered if she’d only imagined the previous sensation. She pushed the drawer closed and carried the watch to the window, to better study it.

She popped open the case to examine the characters inscribed within. Randolph had said the strange symbols belonged to an ancient alphabet, but they bore little resemblance to English words. Opposite, the clock face was intriguingly designed. The hands were, quite literally, hands — shaped to resemble slender arms with pointing index fingers. The numbers were absent, replaced by images of the moon in successive phases, with the full moon at twelve.

The watch’s back side held the same pentagram symbol as the front. Even in daylight, the image of a spread-eagled man seemed to appear and disappear at its center. Who was the figure? Some dark pagan god Randolph had tried to invoke?

A noise at the door startled her. She slipped the watch into her pocket and turned to face the door.

Darcy entered. He closed the door behind him and paused, regarding her uncertainly. Once, there had been many such awkward moments between them, when prejudice and lies and pride and misunderstandings had clouded their vision of each other and themselves. But then they’d found their way to each other, and not since then had such tension hung between them as it did now.

“Eliz—”

“Dar—”

They spoke in unison, then stopped. She offered a half smile and saw relief enter his eyes. They were in accord once more.

After they embraced, she told him of the scene she’d witnessed between the Parrishes. “I felt sorry for her when Mr. Parrish got so angry,” she said, “and then I felt sorry for them both. The strain of recent weeks…”

“Yes, one can readily excuse a brief show of temper on Mr. Parrish’s part.”

“Still, to insist on his wife continuing to wear her wedding ring.” She fingered her own shiny band. “I can understand its significance to Mr. Parrish, but Caroline seemed to very much desire its absence for a while.”

Sliding Caroline’s ring from her finger had caused obvious pain, yet she had encouraged — indeed, silently begged — Elizabeth to remove it. The metal, further weighted by the oversize gem, must irritate the damaged skin beneath. Elizabeth recalled how, the night Caroline had suffered the injury, she had also encouraged its removal despite the agony caused by each attempt.

How had she suffered the burn, anyway? Now that Professor Randolph was implicated in other recent terrifying events, Elizabeth reconsidered her suspicions from that night. Had Caroline set the fire, or merely been injured by it? She posed the question to Darcy.

He shrugged. “With Kendall dead and Randolph gone, we may never know exactly what happened that night. It still might have been an accident — though one wonders how that dress came to be where it was — just as Mrs. Parrish’s injury may well have been accidental. Perhaps her nightdress caught fire and she hurt herself trying to put out the flames. That could explain how she came to be wearing servants’ clothes instead of her own.”

Darcy’s theory made sense on the surface, but something nagged at the fringes of her consciousness. She tried to imagine Caroline batting at a flaming nightgown. “Were that the case, would she not have suffered burns elsewhere on her person?”

“I suppose so.”

Elizabeth continued to envision other scenarios. “And if she tried to smother flames elsewhere, or started the blaze herself…” The mental pictures still didn’t look right. Something wasn’t fitting together. Something she couldn’t quite — She recalled Caroline scrawling her retort in the professor’s notebook during their interview.

“Darcy, is Mrs. Parrish right-handed?”

He mused a moment. “Yes, she is.” He caught her line of reasoning. “Yet she injured her left hand — and only her left.”

“Is that not curious?”

He concurred. “One would think she’d use her dominant hand out of instinct in such a situation.”

“Instead, she uses her off-hand. Why?” Another image flashed through her mind. “Professor Randolph was holding his watch to Caroline’s left hand when I walked in on his ritual.”