He was silent only a moment. Then he murmured, “It leads to the old cellar, but it’s dangerous,” pressing a kiss to her temple as he drew the coverlet over them. “The tunnels could collapse.”
“What’s down there?” she asked, eyelids heavy, voice thick.
“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
SLEEP CAME, BUT did not remain for long. Sometime after midnight, rain drumming on the windows of Augustine’s room, Jane rose and pulled on her nightgown. She’d woken up, overheated by her husband’s body in the narrow confines of the bed. He had been right; it was not built for two.
And yet she could not help but feel pleased at the stiffness of her limbs. She looked down at him, wondering, a moment longer. He had wanted her, and she had wanted him in return, and it had been miraculously simple, past a certain point.
Buttoning her housecoat by touch, she shuffled across the bedroom floor until she reached the door to the hallway. With one last glance at the bed, she slipped out of the room, then felt for the knob mounted on the wall that would bring up the gas lighting. The study couch had been good enough for him, and so it would serve for her.
But though the couch proved comfortable, the hearth was cold, and the shadows cast by the skulls and other oddities unsettled her too much to sleep. She left the study behind and climbed up to the third floor instead, her mathematical treatise and Augustine’s monograph on Mr. Aethridge clutched to her chest. The library hadn’t been piped for gas lighting, likely due to the arching glass ceiling, but a candelabra was set on a small table by the door. She took it, lighting it from one of the sconces in the hall. Inside the library, the air was still thick and musty, but no longer unpleasant, and the room was warm despite the ceaseless drum of the rain on the glass above, courtesy of a fire Mrs. Purl had built that morning to help dry the room out.
The sitting room would have been a more comfortable spot, perhaps, but she did not intend to sleep now—only to read long enough to exhaust her mind, so that she could return to bed, worn out enough to slumber once more.
Mrs. Purl had freshly polished the long table in the center of the room, and chairs now sat around it, clean and handsome. Jane set the candelabra down. The library’s green, liquid light folded around her, bathing her like water.
After a moment’s thought, she set aside Mr. Aethridge for the daylight. Instead, she opened to the first page of her mathematical philosophies. The writing was dense, the type small, and deciphering the logic took up the whole of her attention within minutes. Her only regret was that she hadn’t brought her pen to make notes in the margins, but sliding her finger along the text worked almost as well. As she read, the rain came down harder, the sound echoing across the high-ceilinged room.
The book sketched out the possibilities of seemingly impossible mathematics, derived from division by zero. Zero did not function the same as one, or two, or twenty; it erased or expanded beyond the bounds of reality. And so, this text argued, one could use zero to take the volume of a rounded barrel without needing to fill it and measure the contents in a more standard container after. One could find the area below a theoretical curve, calculating smaller and smaller regular areas below it into infinite nothingness. One could find the answers that must exist, but that no Breltainian scholar had ever been able to reach with exactitude.
Magic. It sounded like magic.
Reaching the end of the second chapter, Jane paused to rub her eyes. Tendrils of sleep were beginning to tug at her shoulders, but she knew herself; if she went back down now, she’d just be wide awake again after a few minutes. Still, the words were starting to dance before her eyes. Sighing, she looked up and gazed out the darkened windows.
Something was there.
Her breath caught, and she stared, willing the shadow to resolve. “Augustine?” she called, but her voice was barely above a whisper. Her pulse racing, she rose from her chair and picked up the candelabra.
Whatever it was moved. As it turned its head, she made out a fall of golden hair—not her own, for she was perfectly still. And then she saw the terrible red eyes. She fell back a step, a cry beginning to build in her throat. The empty shelves surrounding her seemed to grow in size, to loom and pen her in.
Elodie.
No. No, it wasn’t Elodie, couldn’t be Elodie. And yet who else could it be? She pinched at her fingertips, as if that would dispel the illusion, but Elodie remained. Her features were indistinct, her face seeming to warp and blur around those red eyes, but her gaze stayed fixed on Jane.