“You have given me nothing at all,” Jane whispered, and left the study.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
ALONE IN HER bedroom, Jane couldn’t sleep. When she closed her eyes, she smelled blood, or felt again Elodie’s cold hands on her throat, or heard Augustine’s retching echoing from the washroom. Her mind twisted and turned, fighting to reorder her newly disordered world. Magic and death, lies and desire, all of it upending everything she’d thought she knew as surely as zero destroyed the logic of mathematics.
He had killed Elodie. Yes, she would have died no matter what. Yes, he had been desperate to save her. But in her final moments, he had cut her open and gripped her heart, and all for nothing.
And yet, when Mr. Renton had been dying, Augustine had plunged his hands into his body in an attempt to save him, and she had seen him as a hero, not a butcher. And even though Mr. Renton had died, Jane did not feel the same disgust for the surgeon’s actions that she felt now for what had been done to Elodie.
Had Elodie trusted him? Had Elodie believed that, no matter what Augustine did, he did for her benefit?
If he was not a murderer, then he was still a liar. Yet a liar was a far smaller thing than a murderer. And what did Jane’s hurt matter, now that it was done? He couldn’t do worse to her. It had been painful, to learn this lesson, but it was learned.
So she was left to go on, and build for herself a life that would satisfy her, a life she could comprehend. In time, she might forget ghosts. She might forget a dying woman she could never have saved. She might forget magic. None of them were her responsibility.
The worst of it, she decided, was that she did not hate Augustine. The more honest he became, the more tragic he grew and the less she knew how to be happy with him; but she did not hate him. It would have been far easier to hate him.
It would have been easier to fear him.
She looked for a long time at her mathematical treatise, brought back to her with her gowns. It was not so different from Augustine’s magic. She could bury herself in figures and equations, follow footnotes and stray thoughts until she’d filled sheaves of paper with annotations and experiments, practice and exploration. The book held the impossible, as surely as Lindridge Hall did.
There was no need for her to learn such a thing. There was danger in it, and danger in her fascination, too.
She cast the book aside and turned off her light.
* * *
WHEN AT LAST she dozed, she dreamed of Augustine’s arms around her. She dreamed of tearing out a rotted pit inside of him where his martyrdom resided, and of Lindridge Hall burning to the ground, and of Elodie, laid gently to rest, and made reparations to for the desperate horror Augustine had worked upon her.
She dreamed of Elodie, her hands gentle upon Jane’s cheeks, her lips on Jane’s brow, her blood-soaked gown clinging wet to Jane’s flesh even as Jane tried to flee.
She dreamed of blood.
Blood.
Lurching from her bed in confused panic, Jane at first could not separate reality from her vision of Elodie, the stench of blood filling her nose and turning her stomach. She gripped her dresser, begging reason to reassert itself. A glance out the window showed that it was midmorning. She took deep breaths, fighting to drive away the nightmare.
But the stench remained. Fearful, she opened her bedroom door.
Mr. Lowell had just reached the head of the steps. “Ma’am, you’re needed downstairs, in the surgery.”
A patient.
She had the wild urge to refuse. Her hands trembled from exhaustion and her feet were still painfully swollen. She had no real training and no real experience. She had been married only to do the books.
But she could not abandon a patient. Augustine would not have sent for her unless he needed her, and the stench of blood would not be so strong if things were not dire.
“Of course,” she said, and disappeared back into her room. She threw on her simplest gown, ignoring half the fasteners, ignoring her plaited hair that had grown wild and bulging from its confinement through the night. She stuffed her feet into shoes, ignoring the pain, and rushed down the stairs.
The surgery doors were shut, but not latched, and they opened at her touch. There, on the table, was the body of a woman. Younger than Jane. Pale, too pale. Her head lolled, her eyes heavy-lidded and unfocused. Her chemise was pushed up around her breasts, her bared flesh stained scarlet, and she was dying.
And all Jane could see was Elodie, Augustine’s hands inside her chest. She felt the pulsing of hot blood across her arms as if she were already cradling the body on the slab. It took every ounce of strength within her not to fall upon her husband, black clad and bloodstained, and tear him away from the pale woman on the altar, the woman dying in her dreams.