The long walk had given her overwrought mind time to parse out some logical thoughts, the half-formed semblance of a plan. She could not go back to the surgery; of that she was certain. The thought turned her stomach, and she didn’t know what she would do when she saw Augustine again. He had promised her explanations, but could he explain what she had seen? Could he explain why her throat was bruised?
No; she could not face him yet, if ever. She could not live inside those surgery walls that stank of blood, not any more than she could live in Lindridge Hall.
When the Cunninghams had been young, the obvious choice would have been a priest. But the passage of time and the changing of the world had rendered such men useless and almost gone, replaced by magistrates who were just as likely to send her to an asylum or hand her over to Augustine as they were to listen to her.
She still had one option left to her, however. She would go to back to Mr. and Mrs. Cunningham, and beg on their kindness. Impose on them for a night, or two, and then ask if they would take her to Camhurst with them after all. She could bear it, must bear it, in the face of all that had happened. The marriage could not be annulled, now that she had consummated it, but Mr. Cunningham would know some tactic she could use. They would want to help her.
Wouldn’t they?
She threaded her way through the streets, keeping her head down, constructing the narrative that she would offer them. No ghosts, no magic—unkindness, then? Unspecified betrayals? Would it be enough? They had entreated her to move to Camhurst with them, and she had refused, had set herself on this path. With their support, yes, and yet …
Jane reached the familiar lane that she had lived on for so many years, and quickened her pace, lifting up her head at last. She was nearly running by the time she reached the doorstep, her plans cast aside in the face of simple, pure relief. Home.
Jane knocked.
There was no answer.
She stared up at the house’s fa?ade for several long minutes, willing herself to see motion in the upstairs window. Mrs. Cunningham bustling about, or Ekaterina stripping the beds. But there was nothing, and she became acutely aware of the traffic behind her, carts and footsteps, murmuring voices, jarring shouts. The carved face in the lintel above her leered down. She was near the center of town, the house convenient for a solicitor’s clients, and suitable to a solicitor’s standing. She hunched in on herself, imagining a hundred eyes on her, judging, weighing, evaluating. The Cunninghams’ strange ward, falling to pieces now that she had left their oversight.
Jane knocked again. Again, no footsteps. Where could they have gone? It was not market day. Had they gone visiting? Ekaterina could be out doing the shopping, and the Cunninghams away to the next town over for tea and joyous conversation before they left for Camhurst. But she needed them here. Her heart was thundering in her chest, and she tested the latch.
The door opened.
The house was barren.
Jane stepped into the gloom, lifting one shaking hand to her mouth and letting the door fall closed behind her. The house’s inhabitants were gone, and with them all the furniture Jane had grown up around, all the landmarks of her youth. What had once been Mr. Cunningham’s office now stood empty, even the rug that would have borne the impression of the heavy desk’s feet rolled up and carted away. She checked every room, wide-eyed and hoping, hoping that even if the first few carts had gone to Camhurst already, she would find at least the bedrooms untouched. A promise that they would be home by evening.
The bedrooms were empty boxes of wood and plaster.
Stifling a wordless cry, Jane sank to the floor of her old room. She stretched out along the floorboards, rough where the rug had kept padding feet from wearing them smooth over the years. She stared up at the ceiling, searching out the water-stain shapes the way she had when, as a girl, she’d woken up at night hearing phantom shelling in the distance. But the rabbit and the fifteen speckles all in a line were gone. They’d had the ceiling repaired before moving out.
How had they accomplished this all so quickly? It had been not even a week since she was married.
Had they been so glad to be rid of her?
No. The judgeship was important; it made sense that they had set off quickly to their new life. But couldn’t they have left the house to pack up later? A week was not enough. A week should not have been enough. They should have been here.
They should have at least said goodbye.
Jane’s eyes stung with tears, and she tilted her chin up, willing them away. But that last abandonment was the final crumbling of her walls, battered by the carriage nearly slipping over the embankment, by her houseguests’ petty needling, by Lindridge Hall and Augustine and Elodie. Sobbing overtook her, and she rolled onto her front, pressing her forehead against the wood. This had been a mistake, all of it, set in motion when she had decided that marriage was her best option. If she had never made that list, if she had only followed the Cunninghams to Camhurst as they’d wanted her to, she would have been happy. Or, if not happy, at least content; Camhurst’s courts would never have let her serve them, and she would have been bound to socialize and curtsy and smile, and the scars of the war would have resurrected her old terror, perhaps, but it would not have been this.