Her heart ached, her head pounded. She did not have room in her soul for Elodie the woman, not on top of Elodie the tragedy and Elodie the monster. She barely had room for Augustine, crushed in beside her own racing thoughts, her own desperate heart.
She slipped the journal back into the couch and fled.
She took refuge in Augustine’s study, taking up her old seat at the desk and putting on her spectacles, reaching not for magic but for her mundane work. She had not brought the ledgers back with her, but she would do her figuring, write a letter to the bank to send for the servants wages; all simple, all steadying.
But exhaustion clawed at her, worse than before. She dropped her pen more than once, botched a simple subtraction. She found herself looking at odd corners of the room, no longer remembering what she had meant to do. She thought of the cocaine and syringe stashed nearby, then recoiled from the thought.
Jane was no doctor. She could not imagine piercing her flesh, and feared drawing the wrong dosage. No, she would wait until she could stand it no more before reaching for the syringe.
In the meantime, she would find other solutions. She would cinch her stays more tightly, reset her hair with sticking pins, fill her shoes with grain to dig into her still-aching feet as she paced. And she would give herself over to work. Work would keep her awake.
But inevitably, the work ran out. The figuring was finished, the letter written and delivered to Mrs. Purl to be sent off. Magic, then, was all that was left. She selected a tome from Augustine’s collection—The Unveiling of the Panoply—along with the mathematical treatise and a half-empty journal, and brought them with her to the library. She also took a chair from the dining room, when she was certain Mrs. Purl was upstairs and Mrs. Luthbright was occupied. It would be a small enough thing to explain, but she didn’t want to speak.
She placed the stolen chair in the far corner of the library, faced away from the door. She removed its cushion and then, clutching a candlestick, she sat. The chair had no arms and was desperately uncomfortable, just as she had hoped for. The candlestick wasn’t too heavy in her hand, but it took focus not to drop it, and when she did, it clattered loudly against the floorboards, sharp enough to wake her from the edge of sleep. She settled Augustine’s text in her lap and set to reading.
The hours crawled by. Down the hall, Mrs. Purl dragged furniture in the master bedroom, muttered to herself, went up and down the stairs. Outside, the road was still. Jane drifted in and out of full wakefulness, and each time she came too close to sleep, she dropped the candlestick and lurched forward, heart pounding.
Noon came. She ate again, bread baked with goat’s milk. She continued her studies. She felt stronger now, surer, with the lowering arc of the sun. She dropped the candlestick less often. She read of other worlds—fanciful stories, but stories the author claimed were true, or at least full of truth. Worlds where humans were as dust motes, worlds governed by will alone, worlds under five suns and seven moons. Nonsense. All nonsense. And where it wasn’t, she could pick out the threads of stolen stories, tales from Ruzka and farther abroad. She’d heard some from Ekaterina, read others during the course of her schooling, and here it all was, jumbled together, removed from any meaningful context.
How many hours remained until sunset? Until privacy, and the flare of power inside of her? She wanted to set aside the theoretical. Reach for the real.
Heat grew at her back. A fire in the hearth? But Jane hadn’t heard Mrs. Purl enter, and if she’d seen any scrap of fabric in the grate, surely …
But this had happened once before. She twisted in her seat, breathless.
All the shelves were now full of books.
Heavy tomes and slim treatises, leather bound and barely bound at all. A crackling fire danced in the hearth, illuminating everything. The library was beautiful, resplendent and enticing. Plush armchairs stood by the fire, so much more comfortable than her own seat. The floor below was polished to a mirror finish, and the air was no longer still and dusty, but fragrant with wood smoke and furniture polish and a faint floral perfume. An unfamiliar woman stood in the library doorway. She was dressed in robes not dissimilar to Dr. Hunt’s, her dark hair loose around her shoulders. She clasped a branch in one hand, a candelabra in the other.
“Augustine?” the woman called.
Jane’s fingers tightened around her own candelabra, for Augustine was sitting by the fire.
He was younger and better rested than she had ever seen him. His hair was trimmed fashionably short. His clothing looked expensive. “Is it time, then?” he asked. His voice was light and affable, easy, unaffected.