When News Changes Everything — Far from the Madding Crowd

She belonged to him: certainties bounded her fate, and she contemplated herself as a singular wretch with an outsider's indifference while Troy's absence stretched from hours to days. The first Saturday alone in Casterbridge market she overhears a stranger tell another her husband is drowned at Lulwind Cove; she gasps it cannot be true and falls into Boldwood's arms under the corn-exchange. Boldwood's gloomy face showed suppressed excitement as he bore her to the King's Arms, learned clothes were found by a coastguardsman, ordered her gig, and offered a driver she declined. She drove home in a tortuous back street, silently alighting while news had preceded her by half an hour. Bathsheba refuses mourning because he is still alive, she thinks: death would feel different. Monday's newspaper paragraph and Dr Barker's eyewitness letter, then the returned clothes with pockets examined, shake that hope; she recalls his undressing as if to dress again. Alone she opens his watch as he once did, finds Fanny's pale hair, says they should be gone together, lifts it to the fire, then snatches it back to keep in memory of the poor thing. Hardy closes the arc opened at the watch curl: Bathsheba neither destroys nor claims the relic, suspended between wifehood and nothing.