Pride and Prescience

Four

This one looks innocuous enough.” Elizabeth studied the splintered wooden beam. It was a simple, aged pine log, unremarkable but for a star carved into its center. A circle connected the star’s five points.

“Lintel, circa 1640,” Darcy read from the display card, “taken from the doorway of a Massachusetts cottage. The beam bears a symbol known as a pentagram, evidence of familiarity with witchcraft in New England decades before the infamous Salem Witch Trials of 1692.”

His voice echoed in the empty gallery. She and Darcy had come to the British Museum for the afternoon, drawn by the Towneley sculpture collection and a set of medieval manuscripts Darcy had wanted to see. After viewing the old texts, they had wandered into an exhibit titled “Curiosities from the Colonies.” This room they had all to themselves. Apparently, none of the museum’s other visitors had much interest in New World relics.

In the back of the gallery, they’d discovered a display of items marked “Mysterious Articles.” The beam lay among a dozen or so objects believed to have been used for mystical purposes. She found the assortment particularly intriguing. The shaman’s drum, dreamcatcher, totem mask, vodun doll, and other eclectic offerings reminded her of Mrs. Radcliffe’s novels — symbols of a world in which the supernatural exists alongside the mundane. The fanciful elements appealed to her imagination.

She pointed to another item, a circlet of braided plant roots. “This was believed to ward off illness. Does one wear it, do you suppose? Sleep with it under the pillow? Hang it on the door?”

“Does it matter?” Darcy shrugged. “Superstitious people have all sorts of ridiculous rituals to keep bad luck away. It is not as if the thing actually holds power.”

She cocked her head and gave him a wry smile. “Are you sure?”

“I am.”

Her lighthearted mood ebbed. He might be certain, but she wasn’t. She considered herself a rational woman, one who valued sense above sensibility. She read gothic tales for entertainment not verisimilitude, and believed more strongly in what she could observe than what she couldn’t. Yet a part of her occasionally wondered if there wasn’t something else out there, forces just beyond conscious perception. Not enchantments, or illusions — the sorcery of Merlin or A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But a quieter kind of magic, the power that fuels intuition and enables one to take leaps of faith to places reason cannot go.

At her silence, Darcy’s expression grew more serious. “Come now, Elizabeth. Do not tell me you believe in fairies and hocuspocus?”

Reluctantly, she withdrew from her reverie. “I believe warm weather spoils more milk than elves do, and you’ll never catch me whistling into the wind to keep witches away.”

“Thank goodness.”

“But”—she swept her arm toward the display—“does that mean none of this is real? What was it Hamlet said onstage last night? ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ Do you believe only in what you can see?”

“Excepting God, yes.”

“Perhaps I take a broader view.”

He raised one dark brow. “Explain.”

How to explain what she couldn’t quite articulate in her own mind? He’d enjoyed the play last night, told her it was one of his favorites — maybe she should draw an analogy from it. “Have you ever felt your late father’s presence at Pemberley?”

“His ghost has never informed me that he was poisoned in the garden,” he replied stiffly.

Perhaps referring to Hamlet had been a bad idea. She searched her mind for another example. “Do you ever make decisions based solely on intuition?”

“Never.”

Exasperating man! And yet she knew him to be telling the truth. Even his first marriage proposal to her — as badly worded and poorly tendered as it had been — revealed the extensive deliberation he’d done before allowing his feelings to override material considerations in choosing a wife. Her husband was a man guided by reason. Rational judgment formed the core of his character, whether or not she agreed with all the conclusions to which it led him.

“I’m only saying that I believe — no, that I acknowledge the possibility—that there are elements of this world beyond mankind’s ability to comprehend them. Perhaps the people who created these ‘mysterious articles’ had a better understanding of them than do you or I.”

“Elizabeth, look at those items again. They are nothing more than ordinary objects created by ordinary people in futile attempts to control things about their lives that no one can control. That so-called dreamcatcher is a web of twigs with no more ability to prevent bad dreams than a child’s doll; the circlet holds less medicinal value than a good posset. And, far from demonstrating power, the pentagram thing on that beam probably got its owner hanged.” He gestured toward another item. “What is that, resting on the end?”

She looked at the object, a long wooden staff with a fork at one end. The richly hued, flawless oak was so highly polished that she could almost see her reflection in the wood. She glanced at the display card. “A canceling rod,” she read, then winced. “Used by village cunning men to nullify spells.” She felt foolish speaking the words aloud.

“It’s a stick.”

She stared at the rod. Intellectually, she knew Darcy was right about it. She no more believed that stick could ward off spells — or believed in spells, for that matter — than she believed in Father Christmas. Incantations were a far cry from the kind of intuitive perception she struggled to define. Besides, she didn’t want to quarrel with her husband any longer, particularly on a subject so wholly unconnected with their daily lives.

She cast him a smile. “But you must admit, it’s a really shiny stick.”

His sober expression lifted and he returned her smile. “That, I will grant you.” The tension had passed. As if to physically close the breach between them, he lifted a hand and reached toward her cheek. He stopped himself before actually touching her face — propriety, as always, restraining sentiment in public. But he completed the caress with his eyes. “I do love you,” he murmured.

“And I, you.” She took his hand in hers. “Though tell me, husband,” she said, her spirits once more rising to playfulness, “if you don’t believe the slightest bit in magic, how then do you explain love?”

Despite her teasing tone, he regarded her in all seriousness. “Elizabeth, if it is possible that you fell in love with me, married me, will spend the rest of your life with me, then I believe nearly anything is possible.”

His hand at her back guided her from the room. “But not magic.”