She was so tired, and yet she didn’t think she would ever sleep again.
She kept the walls at a manageable height, not tall or thick enough to cause more than a twinge of pain in her gut. The pain was too sharp, too distracting, too liable to make her panic and do something else. Instead, she built just high enough to see, in the angles and lines of the joinery of the house, a subtle structure. Perfect solids inscribed one within the other, transections of angles, a sequence of numbers processing in orderly fashion and adding up toward infinity. She could reorganize it, change the rules upon which the sequence grew. All she need do was reach out and grasp it, and her fingers itched to do it.
But she didn’t, because she did not know enough to reset the bones of the world without causing unintended harm. The walls lowered, and Lindridge Hall was once more just a house.
A familiar cough from behind her roused her from her reverie sometime later; Mr. Cunningham, smoking his cigars. The room glowed with the light of a well-built fire in the hearth, a fire she had not lit.
She covered her face with her hands, unwilling to look.
No. No, please no. She could take no more of this. She was heartsore and exhausted. Dreaming. You are dreaming. Waking dreams, can they not come to the sleepless?
“Come, now, Jane,” Mrs. Cunningham said. “Have a brandy with us.”
Jane thought that she would surely cry, but her tears had dried days ago. Her mouth had dried, too, and her bones and sinews. She felt made of dust. If the Cunninghams were here, it was because they were dead. Augustine’s impact upon the world, his reordering of the patterns of death, had drawn their spirits here. That had clearly not unraveled at his passing.
But she was sure she would have known. If they were dead, she would have been sent a letter, by … by … someone. By nobody, her thoughts whispered. Nobody else connects you to them. You left, and now they are gone. They had been her world, but she had been only a small part of theirs. Fifteen years of guardianship where she had never demanded their attention, compared to four decades of the Cunninghams raising their own children and building Mr. Cunningham’s career—it wasn’t enough. She had squandered so many chances.
Why did that hurt so much? Why had standing in their empty house hurt so much? She had chosen to relate as she had to them. She had decided to spare them her expense in Camhurst. She had been a good child, an easy child. She could understand pain from grief, but not from the distance between them.
“Jane,” Mr. Cunningham said, pulling her back to the present so firmly she swayed where she sat. “Come sit with us.”
Jane turned. They were real in every detail, down to every age spot, every wrinkle. Jane knew the bobbin lace on the collar of Mrs. Cunningham’s gown. She knew the smell of the cedar blocks Mr. Cunningham’s jacket had been packed with during the summer months.
Mrs. Cunningham came to the very edge of Jane’s circle, frowning down at her. “Why are you on the floor, dear? Come, get up, let me have a look at you. Tell me what has happened.”
“He’s dead,” Jane whispered, and then began to laugh, helplessly, hysterically. “You’re dead.”
But that, too, seemed wrong. This all seemed wrong. What could have killed the Cunninghams, so soon after they had left for Camhurst? Even illness rarely moved so quickly. A carriage accident? A robbery gone wrong?
“Jane!” Mrs. Cunningham chided. “You’re being foolish. Are you ill? Are you feverish? You should be in bed.”
“You cannot be here.” She recited the facts she knew. “You went away, to Camhurst—”
“Can we not visit you? Come, at least sit with me a moment.” She reached out a hand. Jane stared at it.
Yesterday, in the study, she had dreamed of this. Oh, not the Cunninghams; she’d thought to summon her mother, indistinct and lovely. But the Cunninghams would do just as well, now that they were just as deceased. Jane could reject their comfort and feel her shame, or lie down in the warm sunlight of their regard until she, too, starved.
It was an easy choice.
Jane reached across the chalk line and took Mrs. Cunningham’s hand. The walls she had built up came crashing down in a shiver inside her skull.
Mrs. Cunningham smiled and drew her to the couch. Her skin was cool, as if she’d been walking in the autumn air, and her cheeks were pink to match. She felt solid.
“You look well,” Mrs. Cunningham said once they were seated, heedless of Jane’s turmoil. She settled a hand onto Jane’s belly, where the seams of her dress strained, unable now to contain the knotted swelling. “To be with child so soon after your marriage is a lucky thing.”