The darkness closed in around her.
CHAPTER ZERO
Jane stands at the head of the banquet table, looking out across the cellar of Lindridge Hall. There is no pain left in her. Where her stomach was is a gaping wound of blood and absence that does not match the form of her corpse on the slab in front of her. She wonders about that, but only distantly.
All around her, Lindridge Hall spreads out in a scaffolding of half-sketched lines, atrophying ligaments that flex and contract. Echoes of the dead ring her, wearing a hundred faces, layered one atop the other, none and all at the forefront. Augustine stands before her, too, hands inside her corpse, still and silent.
She leans forward, looking at her face. Agony. Is that what she feels? No; she feels nothing but a deep placidness, a calm, a level of detachment she has longed for all her life.
But even in the moment of her death there is more, multitudes upon multitudes, condensed until she cannot breathe, condensed until it is nothing at all. She dissolves, spreads, coalesces, shifts.
Time is only onionskins marked with similar drawings of place and actor, arranged in different scenes. Unexcavated earth presses in around her, all worms and soil and water. Men and women move within a warren of chambers, draw out circles, perform faded incantations. Initiations, desperate workings, children’s games. Workers lay down white stone in heavy slabs. Spells pull at the bones of the world, failing and changing reality, ripple after ripple.
She lies unconscious in the passage where she meets her mother. She touches the cellar door for the first time, and all her body is ice and pain. She watches flames consume her bloodstained sheets, and kisses her husband, and works at sums.
She sits in a chair in the dining room, happy, newly wed, still deep in dreaming of the possibilities before her, unknowing of what will come. But in her mind coils the first stirrings of confusion and distrust. She does not yet know Elodie’s name, but she knows her face: red-eyed Elodie, quiet in the windows.
But the windows are empty.
Is this that night? Or is it another? There are many nights during which Jane sits in that chair, the window frames holding only night-black glass. But there is no sea grass or sprouted grain tangling down her throat. Her clothing is not torn, her body not shivering with exhaustion. She can still do her figures, would not short the servants, is in control of herself and does not seek to control more beyond.
For an eternity, a lifetime, the blink of an eye, Jane is happy, even knowing what comes next if Elodie appears. But Elodie is absent and if she does not come—there is only a void, a yawning white expanse that Jane cannot cross. There is something on the other side. She does not experience hope when she looks at it, because to hope is to imagine, to conceive of new worlds, but she lies curled in her mother’s arms, in Augustine’s arms, as if the past is the future, as if time is mirrored, and she feels safe and loved and whole. Perhaps this is what exists, on the other side.
But the white void remains. It spreads. Jane sits in the dining room at Lindridge Hall and does not see Elodie. The world beyond the windows disappears. She sees Augustine and the Lawrences and the Pinkcombes in a stone-hewn room, and sees the nothing that is Elodie. It spreads. It is everywhere. Jane can no longer tell where it ends and where the white expanse of her own paradox begins.
She is afraid.
She takes the measure of herself, of her boundaries, and she unplies the skein of her existence into its component strands, one following the other. It warps, bows, threatens to snap. Without Elodie in the glass at Lindridge Hall, she does not have the information needed to understand her circumstances. Two impossibilities rise, fall, struggle to resolve.
She steps into the windowpane herself.
She looks close enough. Her eyes are bloodshot from days of sleeplessness, her hair tangled, her dress bloodstained. Jane, living, looks up from the dining room table, sees herself, then quickly turns away. She tells herself it is nothing.
Jane, dead, goes in search of Elodie.
Statues stand motionless in the halls. They have no faces; there is nothing human about them except for their vague form, their uprightness. Augustine steels himself for the suffering to come, and she sits in the library with her tome of the impossible.
Elodie is absent.
The white spreads.
Jane steps in for her again, feeling worry now, feeling dread. Her death unravels. She must remember time if she is to fix this. She must sort the onionskins, lay them out in order, find the mistakes.
She follows statues that march motionlessly down the stairs into the study. Augustine carries her to bed, tucks her in with loving care, goes to meet the ghosts in what he thinks is bravery but is only cowardice.