She smiled at me, clutching my face with both of her hands. She kissed me, hard, and then pulled free, twining our fingers and tugging on me. “Please, let us make haste, Will.”
“I need trousers at least!” I exclaimed, pulling free enough to find a pair in the wardrobe and stepping into them. “So, he did not shoot you first thing yesterday, I take it.”
“No, he has some awful interest in me,” she muttered.
“Monstrous,” I breathed, buttoning up the falls of my trousers. “And I was dead, and you were alone—”
“It’s all right,” she said, pulling me out of the room. “He had everything quite predictably handled through trial and error, but then you and I showed up and it changed everything, so simply my presence was enough to disrupt his plan.”
“But what is his plan?”
“He’s…” She squeezed my hand as we went down the steps in Rosings together. “He’s lost his mind. I don’t know. He seems to relish the violence or else he simply feels nothing about it, I cannot say. He says that living the same day over and over again has made him into a madman—”
“Obviously,” I murmured, moving close to her as we continued across the floor of Rosings towards the front door. “Obviously, it would have done so. It made both of us lose ourselves, but he is already a terrible sort of person. It tipped him right over the very edge, clearly.”
“Yes, we left him—”
“We cannot bewithhim,” I said.
“Well, what are we to do?” she said.
“Kill him,” I said. “I have been wishing to do it, after all.”
“Well, if we kill him, he will awaken in Meryton, with the regiment,” she said. “And he will be quite close to my family, to my sister Lydia, who he has already… many times… debauched.”
I stopped, swallowing. “Oh, Lord, Elizabeth. I’m ever so sorry.”
“She does not remember it, and she is not here anymore.”
“Here?”
“Oh, it’s all so very complicated,” she said.
I shook my head, rooted to the spot. “What if he went for Georgiana?”
“I can’t think he would not,” she said, pulling on me.
I went with her, moving again. We went through the front door and we were outdoors. We started down the steps on the front of the building.
“Now that he knows he can antagonize us, he will be quite happy to do so,” she said. “It is now going to be our responsibility to keep him from harming anyone, I think.”
I blinked, thinking that through. “Wait, forever?”
“I don’t know,” she said, as we got to the bottom of the steps. “I don’tknow, Fitzwilliam.”
“Go back to what you were saying,” I said. “You say your sister was here?”
“Yes, he brought her somehow.”
“How?” I said.
“Well, I suppose it’s like with horses,” she said. “If you were touching a horse during the reset, you could keep it.”
“So, you could do the same with a person,” I said, nodding. “Of course.”
“She did not remember it, but he had kept her here with him for days and days,” I said. “He taunted me with the things he’d done to her.”
I stopped again, pulling her against me. “Oh, Elizabeth, how horrid!”
