“Hold tight,” he said, and began to run.
Her world expanded. They were in the crypt, and she was very cold. The room smelled of blood and burning hair. She clutched Augustine, craning her head, trying to see behind them, see the table where she had died, see the table where she hadn’t died. She saw a bowl, and in it a mass with dying flames around it. Her wedding ring was no longer on her finger. It, too, smoldered in the dish, another thing grown out of place sacrificed for their freedom.
Dust rained down from the vaulted ceiling. The house was coming down, as surely as its ghostly inhabitants had fallen to pieces.
Augustine surged up the stairs and down the hallway and Jane held her breath, remembering the great barrier bisecting the foyer, but it was gone. From above them came a great groan of collapsing metal and the shriek of shattering glass as the library fell in upon itself, but ahead of them was the door.
Its frame was already distorting from the great weight upon it, the stone entryway beginning to buckle, but with a great shove Augustine heaved the door open. They spilled down the front steps, onto the mud drive.
Behind them, Lindridge Hall collapsed upon itself.
A huge cloud of dust and force slammed into her, rolling her farther through the muck. Her stitched-up belly burned, but it was outmatched by the cacophony of wreckage falling to the ground. In the distance, she could hear the crackle of flames. She blinked, stunned, trying to see, but found nothing. Then a hand touched hers. She grabbed it with all her fading might.
The noise died to the hiss of fire and the last shifting of metal and stone. The dust settled enough for her to see. Augustine crouched beside her and gathered her up into his arms.
“Is it done?” she asked him. “I saw the statues crumble—I saw something burning on the plinth—”
“It’s done,” he whispered. “The spell worked. But Jane, you died. I felt you die. I saw it.”
I saw you die as well.
She had meant to die. She had accepted death. That she hadn’t died meant—what? That Augustine had worked a spell of his own?
“I died,” Jane agreed.
He kissed her brow. “We need to get down to the road. A carriage. Somebody will find us, they’ll have heard the house collapse.”
The house was gone. She wanted to laugh. She wanted to cry. Of course the house would come down, when the spell that had all but consumed it was untangled at last, and when its original master was dead. The house was gone, and with it, every white wall she had conjured, every scrap of magic that she had added to its teetering edifice.
“The magistrate will come,” Jane said. “He will have me taken away.”
“I will not let him.”
“I told the servants I had killed you.”
“And yet here I am. Come on, we must go—the gas lines will feed the fire. It’s too dangerous to stay.” He staggered upright, favoring one leg, and tried to take her with him. She couldn’t stand, though, not with the stitches in her gut, and she closed her eyes and wept from pain, and confusion, and relief.
They were alive, in one fashion or another.
Then, voices, rising up through the fine shower of mist chilling them both. The sound of horses. More hands, words exchanged, and Mr. Lowell covering her with his cloak before he and Augustine lifted her into the back of a carriage. She heard them arguing, swearing, begging, and then the carriage was off, and Augustine sat across from her, the same way he had the day they were married, before everything went wrong.
She traced a faint circle on the seat of the carriage, willing the wall to grow.
When it didn’t, she smiled and slept.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
SHE SPENT MUCH of the next four days unconscious or barely otherwise, attended to by her husband when she woke. His leg had been injured in the collapse of Lindridge Hall, but it didn’t stop him from curling up beside her, holding her in his arms. The splint on his leg pressed awkwardly into hers, but it was bearable, and she found the feeling of his breathing, their breathing, to be almost as much a balm as the laudanum she took to ease the aching burn of her gut.
The magistrate came, and the servants, and even Abigail Yew, alive and almost well again, asking what had become of the woman who had stayed by her side during her early recovery. Jane hid up in her bedroom from all of them, not ready to sort out her emotions, not ready to perform rationality for an audience. Mr. Lowell, however, was unavoidable, and though all was restored, he did not trust her. She heard him often in the hall outside her room, hesitating, wondering. He did not talk to her when he brought her food. Augustine offered to replace him with somebody less judgmental, but Jane stilled his hand. She had earned his doubt, after all.