When she thinks she can see him without crying again, she holds her baby close and walks silently back to Rana's.
The room has been replaced with - something else. She has no idea what this means. She has nobody to ask but Rana. Everything she asks places her further in his debt, of course, but it hardly matters now.
She steps inside.
And on Sunday the landlord comes by to take anyone who wants to go to church.
Catherine would like to go. She would also like all of her children to go. The older ones are not very enthusiastic but this is very important to her.
Karen kind of suspects that any church Catherine likes will be one that she gets absolutely nothing out of, but there isn't actually enough room in the landlord's car for all of the kids, and she kind of feels like these people need some English-speaking supervision, so she drives there too.
It's a big old Catholic church. Stained glass windows and good acoustics and so on.
They have mass in Latin. She doesn't know enough about this time period to recognize it as unusual, but it's the way things are supposed to be, and it's wonderful. She cries. Her kids are less impressed, but not annoyingly so.
She is... sort of self-conscious about the fact that she has six children and no husband. Not painfully so, everyone will probably assume she's a widow or otherwise not at fault, but it stings.
He has not attended mass because then he'd be indebted to the priest, the owners of the building, and everyone who participated in the singing. He is back from riding horses by about the time they are, though.
"How was it?"
"Very good. It changed some, in a thousand years, but - the important parts were there."
"Yes. I thought so. It's - good to have it back. And eventually I'll have enough English to make a proper confession."
"You go to a priest and explain to him everything you've done wrong since your last confession, and that you regret it and would like to do better, and he offers you penance and absolution from your sins, and after that you're forgiven and allowed to receive the Eucharist again. He's sworn never to speak of it to anyone, so even if you confess something horrible, everyone else can't think any less of you for it."
He thinks about this for a while and can't seem to make any sense of it. "Okay."
"It... probably makes more sense if you understand how evil works. But it'll be good to do it."
Hug.
They continue to work on learning English. In addition to Zana there is television to learn from.
The kids pick it up faster than Catherine, but it still takes a while before they know enough to go to school. They need a lot of help with homework, and the Connors report that everyone thinks they're pretty weird, but they do have a secret future Nintendo console at their house, and this helps them a fairly significant amount on the socialization front.
Catherine learns how to bake snacks for the slightly absurd number of children who appear in her house every afternoon. While the kids are at school she talks about poetry with researchers, and sometimes she sits with Cassie's great grandmother, who is the oldest human she has ever met. She'll probably die pretty soon, she thinks. Until then, she likes the company.
She's not sure she's happy, exactly, but she isn't miserable, either.
He picks up enough English to apply for a job as a zookeeper, and gets it seamlessly; his debt to Alex jumps enormously when he does, but he thinks Alex wants to pretend that he got it on his merits or something. He figures out how to manage entanglements at work. He gives Alex and Cassie his money.
Not exactly miserable is a fine description of it. Animals are neat. Feeling like he and Catherine have put on hold everything else to survive this is not as neat.
Yeah, it's really not. Kind of hard to feel like her life isn't in an indefinite holding pattern. A better holding pattern than before, sure, but that's still what it is.
Occasionally she asks Alex how long he thinks it'll be before his family figures out how immortality works. This doesn't actually have anything to do with how long they're stuck here, but at least if it happens this time won't be counting against her chance to do anything else.
"Milliways doesn't really work in a reasonable way on that kind of thing, I'm sorry. I checked in once and they were pursuing some promising ideas but then I checked in later and they were annoyed to be interrupted again only five minutes later - if it's getting close to you dying of old age and they haven't figured it out yet we'll just stick you somewhere where time isn't passing, there's no chance we'll just run out of time."
So she carries on the way she is, marking months until her children are grown, hating herself a little bit for it, drawing energy to mother them out of some invisible well that she can only hope is deep enough to carry her through the next decade.
She tries going to church events. Her English is good enough to talk to people now, and Cassie thinks it'll be good for her to make friends. An elderly woman asks her where her husband is. Catherine replies that she's not married. She says something a little incredulous about the number of children, and Catherine replies that she wasn't married to their father, and the woman says something about it being good that she's come back home now, anyway.
"I don't know how I would have done it without my husband, and we only had four," says the woman, oblivious to the fact that Catherine kind of wants to sink into the floor. "Are you looking? Meeting people? Must be hard to find the time, with all those kids, but the parish does have a lot of events for single people."
"I'm - not really looking," she says.
"No?"
"It doesn't seem like a good time for it."
"Well, you don't want to put it off too long, you know. You're still very young now, but we're none of us getting any younger, are we. Besides, I wouldn't think you'd have such a difficult time finding someone, even with the children - the little ones always look so attentive during mass, and you know you're very pretty."
"I suppose so."
"But you can't get anywhere if you don't look. Why don't you - "
"I'm sorry, I just remembered I need to do something."
The thing she needs to go do is cry in the bathroom about her stupid life, actually, but she really does need to do it, so she doesn't think that counts as a lie. She's not even sure what she's crying about, besides the fact that she's never going to get married and she's going to be finally made immortal when she's as old as Karen's great-grandmother and then stuck that way, probably, after having spent her entire life marking time until the next year that she knew wouldn't even be any better than the last, and she can't change this, any of it, because she's already fallen in love with the fairy who kidnapped her, and his world doesn't have enough food for her, and this world is shaped all wrong for him, and she certainly can't ask the fairy to marry her, so they're just going to go on like this exactly as they are, and it'll never be bad enough to complain about but it also won't really make her happy.
She is still kind of despondent when she gets home.
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