But I could drive myself out of my head considering these possibilities.
“Perhaps he will,” I said.
So, it was decided.
My aunt was not pleased to know that I was holing up in the dowager house with Elizabeth, and she raged at me, but she also helped me to procure food so that we might have a private supper together.
We ate, and then we retired together to a bedchamber.
When I held her small, soft body against mine, I knew that we belonged this way, together, joined, one flesh, that our love was bigger than all the evil malevolence contained in that vile pocket watch.
The pocket watch…
Sleepily, I tried to remember if it had been in my pocket when I shed my clothes.
It must have been, mustn’t it? I could never get rid of the damnable thing, no matter how I tried. It had fallen into the English Channel and survived. I had destroyed it over and over. It had traveled from the bottom of a lake to my pocket in Meryton.
It was there.
I was not going to leave off holding my perfect and beautiful wife to go and look.
But the thought plagued me, even as she slipped off into slumber and I gazed at her lovely face on the pillow next to mine.
So, eventually, I got up and I found my waistcoat.
The pockets were empty.
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.
