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.
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.”
“I have given up trying to explain Randolph’s behavior.”
Her thoughts tumbled forward. “She fairly exploded at Randolph the day I sat with them. At the time, I believed her complaint was of the bandage, but now that I look back on it, I think she was trying to remove her ring.”
Darcy made a reply, something about Mrs. Parrish attempting to ease her discomfort, but Elizabeth’s mind raced too fast to hear him. She recalled her mother’s visit upon their arrival at Netherfield, and Caroline half- removing her ring then. That had been before the fire, before her burns.
She remembered Caroline holding up her left hand when she appeared, ghostlike, on the balcony; Caroline showing off the ring at her wedding breakfast… the last time Mrs. Parrish had truly seemed herself. She recollected the way the ring had radiated intense cold when she herself had removed it this morning — the same way Professor Randolph’s watch was unnaturally warm to her touch.
Her heartbeat accelerated. “Darcy, there is something baleful about that ring.”
A sigh was his only reply. But his expression revealed his thoughts. Once again, he did not believe her.
“Caroline has not been the same since she started wearing it.”
“Elizabeth,” he said gently. “If gaudy, overpriced jewelry caused madness, all the
She bristled at his facile dismissal. “A simple object she’s been trying to remove almost from the day she started wearing it.”
“She has an injured hand. It chafes.”
“Maybe she injured her hand
Darcy closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. “Elizabeth…”
“Perhaps she scratched Mr. Parrish with it for the same reason. So he would take it from her.”
“Now you have strayed into absurdity. If Mrs. Parrish is that desperate to remove her wedding ring, why does she not simply take it off herself?”
“Because she doesn’t want to wound her husband’s feelings. Or—” The image of Professor Randolph intruded her thoughts once more. Somehow, she knew with certainty, the supernaturalist was involved. “Perhaps she physically cannot.”
“If you could slide it from her finger, what prevents her?”
“Randolph. He charmed or cursed it somehow, as part of whatever plot he’s working against the Parrishes.” At his scornful look, she pressed. “Consider, Darcy — he stood up with Mr. Parrish at the wedding. The ring was probably in his possession before the ceremony. He had ample opportunity to work his dreadful sorcery upon it.”
He looked heavenward, like a man praying for patience. “Elizabeth, I will not give credence to these
