The parcel was one of the mysterious ones Bella had received—ever.
It was not that pocket watches were inherently mysterious, but rather that it had come out of the blue, from Arthur Pettigrew, with a note that was mysterious. She would have been more than pleased to hold onto it for him—she owed him a favor, and this was much less worse than a favor she might have conjured up if he had owed her one—but there was something so ordinary about it that seemed... off.
She held it in her hand. It was old, it was heavy, and more than anything it was expensive—it was exactly the sort of thing someone should not trust her, a girl in poverty after years in the comfort of high society, with, and yet he had sent her without so much as instructions for its care.
But that was not the most mysterious part about it. It was the last sentence, the second sentence, which was the strangest: Someone else will tell you when I need it back. What did that even mean? Somehow Bella felt as though she was forbidden from asking, as though he would have told her in the initial letter if he intended to tell her at all.
She put aside he questions long enough to pull out the shoebox of her personal belongings from under her bed. She still had a few things from her past: her old healer's intern badge, a miniature of her and her twin sister that had been painted the summer after her first year, the small journal she'd used to take notes for Malcolm MacFusty during her time as his research assistant, and now Arthur Pettigrew's pocketwatch. Her gaze lingered on it for a moment, but then she closed the box and shoved it back under her bed, where she hoped it would stay out of sight and out of mind.
And then, she sat down to write.
It was not that pocket watches were inherently mysterious, but rather that it had come out of the blue, from Arthur Pettigrew, with a note that was mysterious. She would have been more than pleased to hold onto it for him—she owed him a favor, and this was much less worse than a favor she might have conjured up if he had owed her one—but there was something so ordinary about it that seemed... off.
She held it in her hand. It was old, it was heavy, and more than anything it was expensive—it was exactly the sort of thing someone should not trust her, a girl in poverty after years in the comfort of high society, with, and yet he had sent her without so much as instructions for its care.
But that was not the most mysterious part about it. It was the last sentence, the second sentence, which was the strangest: Someone else will tell you when I need it back. What did that even mean? Somehow Bella felt as though she was forbidden from asking, as though he would have told her in the initial letter if he intended to tell her at all.
She put aside he questions long enough to pull out the shoebox of her personal belongings from under her bed. She still had a few things from her past: her old healer's intern badge, a miniature of her and her twin sister that had been painted the summer after her first year, the small journal she'd used to take notes for Malcolm MacFusty during her time as his research assistant, and now Arthur Pettigrew's pocketwatch. Her gaze lingered on it for a moment, but then she closed the box and shoved it back under her bed, where she hoped it would stay out of sight and out of mind.
And then, she sat down to write.
21 March, 1891
Mr. Pettigrew,It's safe with me. Please assure me that in keeping it I will not be putting my housemates at risk of being arrested or killed.
Thank you.
— MJ is MAGICAL —