There were no spectators to shock, no one to hide from. She squared her shoulders and called out, “Augustine?”
The door was silent.
The pipes of Lindridge Hall did not groan. No weeping echoed from the rock. Had she heard such, truly, just that morning? But she knew that here had once stood a heavy door, and inside it a staircase, and a cellar, and a table.
“Augustine, I am coming,” she whispered.
There—a weakened sob, an aimless prayer, addressed to no god that had ever existed, or that had ever listened to the cries of man. Augustine.
She placed her hand against the stone slab. “Wait, please wait,” she whispered, then went in search of a sledgehammer.
She found it in an outbuilding, a dilapidated shed with a roof that threatened to collapse at every gust of wind. She wrenched the hammer free from the tangle of abandoned rakes and shears and axes. She could barely lift its great weight, struggling back across the brackish yard and into the house, stopping every few minutes. Her arms burned.
A small price, this discomfort.
Her first blow rang out shrill and shockingly loud in the empty hallway, reverberating up her arms and into her shoulders with a sharp ache. The head of the hammer struck the wall at an angle, then glanced away, pulling her off balance. She staggered, catching herself on the handle and crouching there, gasping.
There was no mark upon the wall.
Her next blow struck true, and her bones screamed in agony at the impact. But again, there was no scuff or dent, and none appeared after the third blow, the fourth, the fifth. At the sixth, she screamed in frustration and threw the sledgehammer away from her. It clattered down the hallway and took with it splinters of polished wood.
Jane stood there, panting, staring, wishing. But nothing changed.
Nothing changed, because this was not just stone. The slab was not impossible only in its appearance, but in its very makeup. She pressed her hands against it once more, and shoved, but only hissed at the pain it sent through her abused shoulders.
“Augustine?” she asked. There was no answer, not even a sob. The crack of the hammer against stone must have driven him away.
Defeated, Jane retreated to the sitting room, rubbing at her arms. She sank into a seat, trembling convulsively, unable to tell if she was cold from her journey to the shed, or too distraught to remain still. She thought of Orren, of his tiny body shivering by the fire, and dropped her head into her hands.
It was a good thing, she decided, that the Cunninghams were gone. They would not see how much harm she had caused. But word would reach them eventually. What would they think of her?
When she lifted her head, she half expected to see Elodie watching her from the darkened glass before her, the outside world obliterated in the gas lamp glare. Judging, perhaps, or even pleased at what Jane had done.
But the gas lamp was not on.
The room was not dark; light spilled from behind her, curling around her bloodstained skirts, but it did not come from any of the sconces on the wall, or the fixtures in the hallway beyond that had burned so brightly when she had arrived. Slowly, she turned to face the hearth that crackled with a roaring fire that had not been there ten minutes ago.
Jane gripped the arms of the chair, knuckles white and bulging.
She had not kindled the fire; she knew she had not, though perhaps she should have when she first entered. She also knew she had not turned the lights out. But that was the first sign, always, the darkening of the hallway lights. She had missed it in her preoccupation. And where were they, Lindridge Hall’s ghosts? Were they closing in even now?
Outside, lightning arced across the sky, followed half a heartbeat later by the crash of thunder.
Jolted from her frozen dread, Jane ran, out into the hallway, into the blackness. She ran for the front door. She had walked all the way to Larrenton once; she could do it again. She could not remain here without daylight, not with these wretched spirits. But outside, the storm that had burst once more over Lindridge Hall brought with it pounding rain. It sheeted down the glass, and it fought her as she hauled at the door, desperate to be free despite the danger.
Finally, the door gave, and she looked out on sheeting water, on brilliant lightning. The drive had had no time to dry from that morning’s storm; it was awash in mud, as silty-slick as it had been on her wedding night. She heard again the screaming of the horse as her carriage threatened to wash out over the ridge, and she retreated back inside, slamming the door shut behind her and breathing hard.
The house was quiet compared to the maelstrom outside. Summoning up what was left of her courage, she made her way to the nearest light switch and turned it on, praying that the pilots would rise into full flame once more, that they hadn’t been extinguished entirely, to let creeping gas fill the hallways and choke the life from her.