“I’ve been down here—so long,” he said, brow furrowed. “I’ve had time. Time to think. My obsession with the impossible cost me the dignity of Elodie’s death. It has almost cost me you. And none of it is real.”
“But you’ve seen them. The spirits. And you thought me ill when I was not.”
His forehead creased more deeply. He twitched. “I … I…”
“You saw them; they tormented you.”
“Guilt. Only guilt. Jane, there are other explanations. We can send for Dr. Nizamiev. She can help.”
“If magic is not real,” Jane gasped out, her last desperate volley, “then where did the door go? Why haven’t you died from thirst? It has been six days, Augustine.”
His entire body shuddered, his flesh rippling, and Jane cried out, sobbed, expecting him to fall into nothing, another apparition, another spell. But he remained. He shook his head violently. “Jane, Jane,” he mumbled.
“You must do this working for me, or else we have no chance at all. Look at me, please.”
He met her eyes. His were filled with tears and panic, deep panic, and beneath that a layer of paralytic confusion.
How to go on? How to settle him? Dr. Nizamiev would have known what to do.
And then it clicked.
“You must promise me one thing,” she said to Augustine, repeating Dr. Nizamiev’s words. Her words, which Jane now recognized as an incantation. An establishment.
“Anything,” Augustine said.
She smiled, trembling. “That you will accept as true everything I am about to tell you. It will not be easy, but it must become a part of your understanding of the world, or else I will have wasted my time.”
A beat of silence. A held breath.
“I promise,” he said.
“Magic,” she said slowly, with all the weight of ritual, “is real.”
And with that, the panic left his eyes. Simple. Simple, and terrible, and she did not have time now to think of what must have happened to her those weeks ago in the sitting room, facing down a specialist of madness.
“This is it,” she said instead, exultant. “It is the unspooling of everything that has gone before—down to the moment when you held Elodie on this plinth and could not save her life. Save yourself instead. This mass is magic itself. We can remove it, make it the centerpiece of a spell, do a working so that you, at least, are freed. The spirits that feed on you, gone. The tether to this house, the sickness—all gone, and you free to help others, to save lives.”
“And you?”
“You have told me I will die either way,” she said. “But maybe, maybe there is a chance. Knowing is the thing. Do the surgery, and I will know that I will survive, and we will see what happens. Undo the magic that is killing me.”
Augustine stared back at her for a long moment, then nodded. “I will do the working.”
* * *
THERE WERE CANDLES in sconces along the stairwell wall. Augustine collected them and lit them from the impossible flame clinging to the candelabra. Illumination spread, dancing across the banquet hall, the burial room, the esoteric mausoleum that the Lawrences had built.
They were not alone.
Shadows gathered in the hallways that branched off the room, shadows with misshapen heads and still bodies. Augustine watched them warily as he scraped caked chalk and egg yolk from Jane’s fingertips and used it to draw out the thinnest of circles around the table. Jane called the base of the wall up when it was done, building until she cried out in pain.
Augustine stepped in to build the wall the rest of the way. It took the pressure off her, and the pain subsided.
Her husband stripped off her soiled, torn dress and pushed her chemise up above her stomach. She kept her gaze fixed on him, not on the figures that glided closer, coming to the very edge of the circle. When he looked at them, he did not flinch; he, too, must have seen the truth at last.
“Do you see their gowns?” he asked.
She did. All the gathered statues were in full surgical gowns, pristine white to better show the blood on them at the end of the day.
“They are dressed as nurses and surgeons,” he said wonderingly. “They have come to watch the operation. This is to be theater for them.”
“They wish to see us work.”
“They wish to see us fail.”
Jane grimaced but could not argue. “If you fail,” she said instead, “you must promise me you will not feel ashamed. You will not feel guilty. It only feeds them, Augustine.”
He nodded, pulling himself away from his audience to tend to his patient. He settled a hand against her belly, palpating the margins of the mass. “Ovarian, I think,” he said. “Over the intestines. Better than it could have been. With ether—”