so my love is still fetter'd with vain hope
disclaimer: Dark Shadows is most certainly not owned by me.
She visited the grave from time to time. Pulling her Barracuda to the shoulder of Route 9, she would carefully navigate the soft earth in her heels until she reached the spot where his padlocked coffin lay deep underground: where he had rested, who knew how peacefully, for ten, fifty, then a hundred years and more. She had started by occasionally walking by the site as she ran errands for the new Collinses – the ones who had so swiftly come overseas and taken residence at Collinwood. As she climbed the social ladder while, in the process, ruining them, her jaunts past Barnabas's grave were accomplished first by horse, then by gig, and finally in a carriage all her own. She would periodically leave Collinsport for a few decades and return as her daughter, and with each successive Angelique Bouchard, she grew richer and the Collins family became more and more ragged.
With the carriage came prestige. She was then a woman of some consequence in the town, her ignoble beginnings all but forgotten. But with the advent of the motorcar, she was able to get around by herself without her movements being watched too carefully, with the added benefit of not having to bewitch a driver (which could be rather draining). The 1970s was not her favorite decade, but it had its advantages. Her current car was her favorite means of travel thus far. "I could write testimonials for Plymouth," she mused. "'In my 200 years of experience, I have found this the finest means of getting from point A to point B.'" The women's liberation movement too had made it easier for her to do business. She disliked forcing people to do her bidding. It was so much better to dominate her competition through personality alone. And not using witchcraft prevented her from getting lazy or losing focus on her goal: the Collins family would suffer until it was extinguished. Then she would perhaps dig up Barnabas and tell him he could have a life with her or go back underground. There was nothing else left for him.
Each time she visited, she would stand above the spot she remembered so well, long-covered in grass and bracken, and talk to him, certain he could not hear her but reveling in the feeling of having him all to herself. No one still alive knew where he was buried. He was, for all intents and purposes, hers alone.
In the beginning she would merely taunt him. Josette dead, his parents dead, distant relations moved into Collinwood and their fortunes swiftly turning south, and all this could have been prevented if he had simply not looked at her with those bewildered eyes and said he did not love her. As time passed though, she grew lonely as all she had known vanished and time moved on. She had decided she would forever look as she had the day they buried him – 'Perhaps with a change of hairstyle,' she smiled. She couldn't bear to move on. If everything from their time must change, she at least would remain the same.
The years went by, Angel Bay Seafood grew, and her visits became less frequent. And then came the morning she heard of the dead construction workers.
