“If I had simply left it there,” Augustine said, after a long pause, “I might one day have forgiven myself. But I was arrogant, and I was ashamed, and I was grief-stricken, and so I turned to magic. You heard that Elodie was initiated; so was all my family, and all of hers. We had books upon books of magic ritual, and a thousand empty beliefs, a hodgepodge of old religions and practices cobbled together into an entertaining whole, and I believed. I believed in it, and I thought our families would understand. Down in that cellar, I worked a ritual that I thought would bring her back.”
“But you cannot bring back the dead,” Jane whispered.
“No,” he replied. “No, you can’t. But you can open the doors to something—somewhere else, and your house can fill with the ghosts of every patient you have failed, their ranks added to with everybody who dies under your knife. And your family can find you in that cellar, with their daughter-in-law’s chest cracked open, the woman who is the child they always wished they’d had for their own, and they can blame you, and abandon you. I ran after that, unwilling to set foot in that house, unwilling to face the punishment that I had earned with every candle I lit and every incantation I said, but it made me sicken.”
She looked at him, truly looked at him, and saw his heaving breath, his feverish brow, smelled the stink of his illness. “At night, you must return to Lindridge Hall,” she said. She remembered how he had winced from his headache the night he had returned to her, and saw again his untouched dinner plate tonight. Remembered Dr. Nizamiev telling her about his mysterious illness.
How could he run, if staying away just two nights made him retch and burn with fever?
He nodded. “Each night I don’t, I worsen. I am sorry, Jane; I tried to tell you all I could, when I knew I would be too weak to cast you aside. I thought if we obeyed your rules, perhaps I could be happy again, and perhaps you could get out of life everything you desired. I wanted it to be enough. I wanted all of it to be enough. I thought I could keep you safe.”
Jane clenched her fists into her skirts. “But I didn’t want to follow my rules. And then the carriage crashed.”
“And you came to me, and saw nothing that first night, though I had heard Mr. Renton howling in the halls before you arrived,” Augustine said. “And nothing the next night, though I was not there to protect you. I began to hope. They stopped coming to me, Jane. I saw nothing, I’ve seen nothing, since you stepped foot in Lindridge Hall.”
“But now I have,” Jane said. “You lied to me, told me it was a nightmare, but I remember. And I have seen Elodie, in that crypt.”
“That is the only thing I don’t understand,” Augustine said, leaning forward. “I have never seen her, not once. And all the ghosts that haunt me have never once laid a hand on me. They have terrified me, yes, and pursued me, and mired me in the knowledge of my own failures, but—to have seized you—”
Jane stood slowly, leaning heavily against the couch. She spread her hands so that he could see the great tears in her skirt. She lifted her chin and hoped that there were bruises there for him to mark. “I ran all the way back to Larrenton,” Jane said. “You saw my feet. Do you think I would have done that for anything less?”
He bowed his head.
“That night,” Jane said, “I did not see your patients. I did not see Mr. Renton. I saw inhuman figures headed for your study, and I went to save you. I thought you were in danger, and that, together, we could fight it.”
“Jane,” he whispered, pained.
“Fight it. Fight it now. You cannot live like this. The creatures of Lindridge Hall would kill me, Augustine. Fix this.” For both of us.
He shook his head violently. “I am condemned,” he snapped. “It is not something to be fixed. You will never go back to Lindridge Hall and I will suffer the way I am destined to. I am not like Andrew or Georgiana, who believe that because of our medical degrees, we can do no wrong. They think we are like gods. If we err, it is never our fault; it’s the patient’s choices, or the weather that day, or a hundred other things. They think magic is their birthright, a game they are entitled to play. But I know what I do. I know what I have done to deserve this.”
Jane’s lips pulled back into a snarl, anger cracking through her like a whip. “Augustine, listen to yourself. You may not be like them, but you are their exact inverse. You believe you are just as much a god, that every illness can be stopped, that every injury can be repaired, if only you do the right things, exert enough effort.”