When she crouched, her legs gave out beneath her. She fell, exhausted, to her knees. She forced herself to reach, to scribble, to think of eels and walls.
you are so much greater than he, the statue murmured, words sliding across the folds of her brain. so much more resilient. he had so much shame. so much regret. but yours is harder given and sweeter for it.
She reached behind herself with shaking hands and completed the circle.
you tried to live a small life, jane shoringfield lawrence. you tried to have no regrets. you tried to control everything. and now you are here, filled with guilt. how many have died because of your actions? because you married a man who did not want to marry, because you made him care enough to lie to you, because you forced him to confront those lies?
The creature spoke the truth, and the truth was so heavy that it bore her down to the ground. She curled around the pulsing mass within her belly.
what have you lost, it asked, gliding an inch closer, in pursuing the impossible? you have frightened many. forced your care upon them. made them fear you. you have ruined lives, more than you have killed.
“No,” Jane whispered. “I will not regret that. I will not regret any of it, not until I am through. Not until I have saved him.” She glared up at the thing.
It stopped.
It regarded her. Its crescent head did not move. Its carved robes did not shift.
then think back to before. think of when the bombs fell. remember the fear. the guilt, when others around you died but you lived. there is meat enough in that for me. think of it, and i will let you live.
It was close: the hiss of gas, the heat of the flames, cowering in a basement and breathing through the filter of her mother’s skirts. Emerging each morning into the blasted-out streets of Camhurst. All the memories became real around her. She felt again the terror, the deprivation, so many days with so many dead.
Before her, the statue’s lower half became fabric, familiar, the very wool her mother had pulled across Jane’s nose and mouth to save her from the gas.
Beneath her, the stone hallway shook, as if with the impact of shelling.
She stared at it. It wasn’t hard-packed soil. It wasn’t dirty stone. It was white, and chill, and so very different from the buildings in Camhurst. Camhurst was far away, and Larrenton far inland. This was where she had been safe. The war had never reached here.
She must fix the truth in her mind. If she knew she was in the cellar of Camhurst, she would be there again.
And she wanted to be at Lindridge Hall.
She lifted her head, seeing the statue before her in granite only, and built her walls so high that the dim hallway was lit, as if it were all only lines upon a page. Her abdomen exploded with pain. She grasped the outline of the statue, and she tugged, and pulled, and knotted, until there was nothing left but a dense, dark scribble. Beyond her, something smooth and hard dropped from the air, clattering upon the stone. Jane sobbed with relief, then with pain, and dragged herself through the flexing caul of the circle, back into the real world.
Jane stood. Jane thought of Augustine. Jane pitched forward, once more, into the dark.
* * *
NO MORE STATUES appeared before her. There was only empty hall after empty hall, with no sign of Augustine, or of death, or even of herself.
She turned down another pathway, staggering, close to exhaustion. Her vigor drained with her flagging candlelight. The cool air pressed in around her, on the little that was left of Jane Shoringfield Lawrence.
And then, finally, there was a change.
There was the faintest of shapes ahead of her, cloaked in shadow, a pile of dirt or the form of a slumped body. Augustine. The possibility flooded her mind, overtook every inch of her, and she fell to her knees, trying to claw closer to it. But her stomach screamed and her candle guttered. The light went out. She cast aside the candelabra and dragged herself forward, hand over hand along the cold stone, until the pain grew so great that she could not move, until exhaustion made the last of her willpower buckle.
And then she felt warmth, hands against her shoulders, her back, hands that shook with hunger and fear and worry, hands that carried with them the stink of a man trapped in the dark for six days, and beneath that, the faint smell of antiseptic.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
SHE WAS COLD.
It was the first thought to swim into her consciousness, followed swiftly by It hurts. Her stomach was flooded with liquid agony, and even wiggling her toes made the pain spike. She groaned and pressed back against the surface below her, but it did not yield. Around her was darkness.
And then: a light. A candle flame, burning where there was no wax left, above an iron candelabra that she recognized. And there, beside the flame, was a face that she recognized, a face that she had come to know so well she could have conjured it in her dreams. Augustine sat beside her, elbows braced upon his knees, hands tangled in his hair, clawing at his scalp.