“This is the first I’ve heard of a trust.”
“What does it matter? Mine would become yours, yours would become mine. As it happens with any husband and wife.”
The blow to my head is taking its toll. I blink, dizzy, my knees seem to lack strength, my vision blurs.
My own money. A “tiny bit.” Yet significant enough that nobody has ever confided it to me.
It is too much deception, all at once. I’m all out of fight. I lean back against the struts of the bridge, as far away as I can get from Quinn without inciting him.
“Jennie, it’s not a queen’s ransom, believe me. Besides, I’d love you if you didn’t have a penny.” Quinn closes the space between us. “How can you doubt my love? Think of it this way. It was the luckiest thing in the world for both of us that you’d thought Will wrote that stupid confession. On some level of your unconscious mind, I think perhaps you secretly wanted Will to have written it, to absolve me. To put the war behind us and start fresh. With me.”
“No, that’s madness…” Uttering this word, I am fearful of it, for it seems too apt a description.
Quinn waves me off. He speaks with utter conviction. “I’d assumed you’d gone a bit off anyway. Burying your own necklace, drawing on the windows. I wanted to help you. I still do.” His hands grip my shoulders in entreaty. “In time, I’d hoped, you’d grow to love me for it.”
The necklace, the heart, the presence in Pritchett House. All along, Will has been trying to warn me. “You were never going to tell the truth,” I realize aloud. “You’d have taken this secret of yours to your death.”
Quinn’s grip intensifies. “You promised we’d be happy again,” he says. “You promised.”
“With you?” I have to laugh. Unwise, I gauge, too late.
“Have you been playing with me all along, then?” Something in him has died, gone empty. His tone is as cold as his eyes. “It makes me wonder, how could you have cared for me at all if you can turn venomous so quickly? I’ve been a fool.” He releases my shoulders to catch my wrists with hands rough as rope. “Suppose it’s a mistake we’ll both have to live with.” He shoves me back, as if shaking out a handkerchief. “Not that yours will be a particularly long life.” As my spine slams against the guardrail, fresh pain breaks through my body. “But I’ll think of you a little, Fleur. I promise I will.”
“You’re hurting me!” But he won’t stop. “Let’s go home,” I find myself saying. Pleading. “Where it’s warm and dry, and we can talk like sensible beings.”
Quiet astonishment passes into his face as he considers this. If there is a moment when he hinges between this suggestion and another action, it is far too short. His brother, ever the rescuer, steadfast in his desire to do right by his loved ones, hadn’t realized what he was up against. He had been the same young man right to the end. And the Quinn standing before me now was the same Quinn. The beast he always was. Determined to have everything he wanted and sure that he was entitled to it.
I have seen him every day since his return. And yet I’ve not managed to see this.
“No more talking. I’m tired of your tricks, and I won’t live a life where you wrangle your stupid secrets over my head.” He turns faintly seductive as he caresses the side of my cheek. “You never did learn to swim, did you, Jennie?” He smirks. “Don’t worry, love. When you’re closer to death, it won’t be as painful as you think. In fact, I believe it might be a bit like falling asleep.”
“No…you wouldn’t…”
“And then you can join them both. Your twin and your beloved.”
He will kill me. No doubt about it. He has killed before. And killed and killed. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”
“What I am doing,” he responds, dulcet as a choir boy, “is playing the part of your bereaved fiancé. Not a soul will argue that your suicide was caused by heartbreak…after all, you still love my poor, dead brother. You visited that preposterous spiritualist often enough everyone’s borne witness to your endless melancholia. Marrying would have gotten me the money. But so will your death, almost as easily. My father is your next of kin, after all, and he is not as young as he once was. I’ll inherit all the same. I’ll just have to wait a little longer for my fortune than I expected…or maybe I can speed that along as well.”
His grip is squeezing out my breath. My eyes float closed. I can’t bear to look into a face that has deceived me so utterly.
“You’ve figured out everything, haven’t you?”
“I’d never planned on loving you, Jennie. I never planned on a that. It made everything so complicated. And, yes, I do blame you for it. But your spell on me is over, my dear. I’ve decided I don’t want my brother’s used goods after all.”
Then Quinn dips forward and kisses me, licking the blood from my split lip down to my chin before he pushes me backward over the bridge with such brute intention that I hear the splintering, then the crunch and snap of wooden railing as I lose balance and fall.
29.
My own clothing is my coffin. My heavy hoop wire, the whalebone corset, the layers and layers of underskirts. Pinned and hooked and buttoned to my body, they drag me under. My arms and legs twist in helpless panic as water closes around the crown of my head. I’m sinking, drowning, imprisoned in my cage of finery.
Swim. The word terrifies me. Once I saw an old man’s body washed into harbor. His bloated flesh and lips blue as meat have held in my memory ever since and are what I see in my mind’s wild eye. My legs and arms flail; my skirts billow up over my face.
As if it is being tugged by invisible fingers, I feel my ring loosen from my finger. I open my eyes and watch it drop, a chunk of red and gold light through black water, and then out of sight. So this is my death.
Any consecrated space. The ruined sketches, the stain of ink. Will had wanted me to remember his fury. That afternoon had been the angriest I’d ever seen him. He’d come to me in rage, not guilt. Betrayed by a brother who, in the end, had been a stranger to him. A stranger to us both. A murderer to us both. Will’s fate is now mine.
Water is heavy like sand, and it is pushing me deeper. I’m insignificant as a pebble down a well. My death will be silent. No screams, no wailing witnesses, no grip of hands hauling me to safety.