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 inWickham’spocket 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.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
fitzwilliam
Everything was pristine and perfect in the wee hours of April ninth.
I wandered in the darkness and came to the rectory, remembering the time before I had tried to gain entry and found the door locked.
Yes, but that had been thenightof April ninth, had it not? This was the morning. I tried the door and, miraculously, found it unlocked. I carefully and quietly let myself in.
I found her bedchamber, and she was there.
She was asleep and she looked…
Well, I suppose I had not realized it, the way the ordeal we had gone through had changed the set of her countenance, how it had weighed on her.
Would she be damaged? Like Anne?
She did not look it now. She looked younger, less careworn, as if a heaviness had been taken from her.
I watched her sleep for too long. But I did not wake her.
Instead, I wandered.
I went to the lake and I looked into it, and I swear, out in the midst of the waters, I saw the watch floating—just for a moment—glittering gold in the moonlight. And then it slipped down under the gleaming waters and drifted into the darkness of the water, gone.
When morning came, I was in my aunt’s bedchamber, seated on a chair that I had pulled to face it. I sat at the foot of the bed and waited as the sun stole into the sky, as the morning made everything grow lighter and lighter.
I waited until she woke.
