Chapter Twenty-one
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
fitzwilliam
I searched all of the pockets in all of my clothing.
I retraced my steps, throughout the dowager house.
No, I knew when it must have fallen out!
In the scuffle with Mr. Wickham in the grass. It must have been then. We were grappling with each other, going over and over and punching and kneeing each other.
I debated simply leaving it there.
I would wake in the morning, and it would be there, in my pocket or perhaps taunting me on the bedside table next to my head, magically appearing there while I slept through its dark and awful arts.
I lit a lamp, trudged through the darkness, and went to seek it anyway.
I could not find it.
A thought struck me as I was on my knees, combing through the grass, a horrid thought.
Once I had thought it, I could not bear it. I seized the lamp and ran back to the dowager house, back to the place where Wickham’s body lay.
We had not moved him. He was bent in a strange way, his neck broken, and the smell of the body was starting to become putrid. He had gone stiff.
I spied it, though, dangling out of the pocket of his trousers, attached by its golden chain.
The watch.
He’d had it when he died.
Had he taken it from me? Or had the watch gone to him? Would the watch… end this of its own accord?
I yanked the thing out of Wickham’s pocket and stuffed it into my own.
No sooner had I done so than the weight of it was gone from my person.
It was back in Wickham’s pocket now, as if it had never moved.
I tried to take it again.
I must have tried to take it twenty times.
And then I noted what time it was.
I left Wickham and rushed back into the house. I puffed up the stairs and hurled myself onto the bed with her. I took her by the shoulders and shook her awake.
“Elizabeth, Elizabeth!” I gasped.
Her eyes opened and she fixed me with a look of agitation. “Will?”
“I love you,” I whispered. “I love you, I love you, I love—”
And it was midnight.
And there was nothing in my grasp.
And the bed was reset, as if no one had slept in it.
And when I staggered through the house to look out the window, to peer down on where Wickham’s body should have been, there was nothing there anymore.