His face went scarlet, then pale once more.
“It is not just arrogance, Augustine, it is also cowardice. Because if everything is your fault, you don’t have to face the truth that the world is a cruel, unpredictable place, and that you cannot ever control all of it. Death always wins, Augustine. You cannot stop it. You could not stop it.”
“You don’t understand,” he said. “You can’t understand.”
“I know that my mother and father are dead, and I could not have prevented it, no matter how much I screamed and cried and begged them not to volunteer.” Her heart blazed within her chest, and she stepped forward, desperate to make him hear, make him listen.
And Augustine refused to meet her. “Death always wins,” he said, “except in a world where it doesn’t. Once, I came so close to changing that. And then I failed. This is my punishment; it cannot be denied.”
Death always wins, except in a world where it doesn’t. What if he was right? What if she could have screamed and begged enough to make her parents stay? What if she could do the same here, help him, do anything, if only it would make him heed her? Change the boundaries of the world, change the truth of what rested, rotting, in his brain? If he had come as close as he thought to changing death itself, couldn’t she do at least that much?
She wanted, so desperately, to be happy with him. To build a future by action instead of acceptance.
“Look at the ring on your finger,” he said, interrupting her wild spiral of thoughts.
Jane clenched her hand, feeling the bone curves press into her palm. “What of it?”
“Mr. Aethridge,” Augustine murmured. “Did you read the monograph?”
“No.” A surge of guilt rose in her. She hadn’t had time to.
“As a young man, the planes of his back began to distort. A few months after he noticed the first changes, he was thrown off his horse. He broke his leg, and though it was appropriately treated, bone grew up and around his knee, locking the joint for the rest of his life. From there, the illness crept into his very muscles, injuries that would have been little more than bruises on you causing great sheets of tissue in his arms to transform.
“I tried everything. I cut the bone away with a saw, burned the remaining fragments where they sat in the muscle, gave purgatives and had him fast for weeks, then ordered him to eat only rich foods. Nothing worked.
“He wasn’t the first to suffer so, though it’s rare, and usually afflicts young children. They die before reaching adulthood. Nobody knows what causes it, and nobody knew why he was different. Except me. I knew, because he told me that as a young man, he’d discovered certain books, and had played at spellcraft until he felt something quicken inside of him. It wasn’t until a month later, when he found the first growths, that he realized he had made a mistake. Even still, until the day he died, he remained a magician, trying to fix what he had set wrong inside of him. He failed, Jane. He failed. He died a horrible death, starving, drowning with pneumonia as he was locked inside his own body, and it was because of magic.”
Jane couldn’t respond, overwhelmed with the horrible images Augustine had conjured for her. She thought, too, of Dr. Nizamiev’s photographs: men and women locked in an asylum, heedless of the world outside, trapped in some unknowable suffering. And her parents, putting her in the carriage to Larrenton, turning back toward death.
“Do you see?” he asked, voice softening. “Do you see the danger now? I am lucky to have escaped with so gentle a punishment. It is a reminder not to reach beyond what we can understand.”
His terrible logic made sense. It settled over her like a leaden pall. Why fight? Why reach for something better, greater? But she wanted him to. She remembered his confidence, his kindness, his humanity in the face of Mr. Renton’s surgery, a surgery that had left her feeling half monstrous. She remembered his hands on her hips, his quick wit, his mastery of the scalpel. She remembered the happy piece of her that he had quickened, the way she felt her world expanding just from being near him. She had never realized, until him, that she might love and be loved.
She wanted him to risk it. Because if she could see only the best in him, if they could agree he could be what she had thought he was, he would be the best man in all the world.
She wanted him to try.
“Jane,” he murmured, “I told you from the first that our marriage was inappropriate. If you want to leave, you may leave. If you want to stay, you may stay. But I will always be this man. I will always be tormented, and I will always fight to save my patients, even as it kills me. But now … now you can make your choice honestly. I can at least give you that much.”