If his very bones must turn to dust for him to be rid of her, he wills it done.

Merope is a cross without a Christ, a burden with no deliverance, a sin-sickness with no ready cure. Her name no longer tastes saccharine on his lips, but bitter, rusted with fearful disuse and laden with a sombre note of horror and hatred. Tom might allow himself to moan at the memory of her hands on his skin, if he did not know what she was, if he could not see her eyes, those wretched eyes! - one focused on him in a perfectly ordinary way, but the other revolving madly, hideously, unnaturally in its socket, searching for him. Still, the holy bonds of marriage will bind him to her indefinitely, even if she is herself unholiness incarnate, and he is bound by blood and bone to the child he unwittingly helped her to create.

The squire's son sobs out against the confessional wall, clenching the iron grate until his fingertips turn white.

Tom knows that Merope will bring their unholy child into the world, that she will bring the creature to him, even if she must die to see it done; that she and her spawn will haunt him into his own grave. He knows well that Merope will get what she wants, and what she wants is both their deaths.

"Papa will never take me back, not after I've done this." Tom had shuddered at how her voice trailed off into a brooding hiss. "I might as well be dead. Our blood runs thicker than you know."

He had raised his crucifix against her in response, advancing upon her, watching her shrink into the couch as wary puzzlement clouded her face. "Death is the wages of sin," He'd murmured over and over, taking his knee to her ribs to hold her still and pressing the cross against her cheekbone.

"I know I will die, Tom." She'd whispered with the most pained of smiles, writhing with such damned grace against the hissing burn, "But then, death comes to us all, in our turn." She'd kissed the cross then, ignoring the smouldering pain it wrought upon her lips, and then tucked it back beneath his shirt.

He had wrapped his own coat around her shoulders and all but shoved her into the muddy London streets, but he does not, not for the life of him, know why he kissed her sweetly goodbye.

Behind locked mahogany doors, Tom knocks back his '11 cognac laced with holy water. (He has lost his taste for tea these days, as it is never as agreeable as when Merope had made it). Each drop of his improvised remedy flushes his wife's witchery from his body, but also renders her face clearer to the fevered eye of his imagining.

Tom sees her body, lying beside a pauper's grave hewn into the frozen earth. Her garters have been pulled up and straightened, for decency, though as far as Tom is concerned Merope is no more civilised in death than she was in life. Her stockings, which had surely belonged to a better-fed girl before they belonged to her, are splotched with the blood that Tom does not understand. Too-stiff limbs lie useless over a threadbare, much-patched blanket. Her blood-sodden dress freezes to her skin, the neckline askew just enough to show the small, crude crucifix tied about her neck.

An ashen palm lies upturned toward him, inviting his dust to mingle with hers.