The first act of the ritual had been to isolate Elodie among all the other boundless souls. Augustine had set about finding the world that Elodie had built, drawing on her life lived before, inflected by how she had died: in pain and afraid, her innards displayed in horrific tableau. There were no notes to what Augustine had envisioned, but Jane expected his assumptions had been filled with shame and apologies, crafted to punish himself more than to channel the soul of his beloved. He reached for an understanding of the world of the dead only available by casting off the sensibilities of life. There were terse notes from Augustine about purgings, visions, spasms. He had endured them, focused on how he believed he had made her suffer, marinating in his own guilt.
No wonder, then, that what had come through were the souls of his patients, every one that he feared he had failed. They were drawn to him in all his horrid vulnerability, his sacrificial offering.
With whatever sense was left to him, Augustine had gone through a pageantish sequence of rites, and he had begged Elodie to return to her body. He had placed incense in each of the wounds he had created, then sewn up the flesh. Jane could envision his precise stitching.
And then—
And then, sometime between the closing of the circle and when Augustine had written his final notes, Elodie’s parents had found him, defiling her body, wild-eyed and incoherent, draped in magic that had already failed. His own parents had found him weeping on the floor in filth.
He should have known not to try. He should have left her there, at peace, without him.
“Why?” she asked the empty house. He’d been in love. He’d been convinced he’d failed her. But why go to such lengths, why do it alone, why fail again to save her? He was a doctor. He had seen death, had been its close companion as surely as the undertakers. Jane rose to her feet in the early dawn light, turning slowly in a circle, looking at the monument all around her to his knowledge, his learning, his brilliance.
It was just as she’d told him that night at the surgery. He was selfish. He was so selfish.
What could he have been, if he’d hadn’t confused self-loathing with humility?
“How could you do this to me?” she asked the shelves. “To her? To yourself? You, with your doctor’s arrogance, your loving arrogance! Come back!” Her voice rose until she was shouting, voice booming and strange in her ears. “Come back to me, and make this right!”
The house groaned in response, and for just a moment, she thought she saw Augustine’s face in the wallpaper of the hallway, through the door Orren’s ghost had left open the night before. Tears streaked down her cheeks. “I can’t do this alone,” she whispered. “I killed a boy last night. I killed a boy, and I am just like you. All I could think about was how I failed.”
The wall was blank. The house was still.
She was alone in Lindridge Hall as the sun crested the horizon, the storm clouds cleared away, and light streamed in through the windows.
From below, she heard the front door open and the sound of chattering drift up from the foyer. Mrs. Purl and Mrs. Luthbright. They could not find her like this, and what if they had heard her screaming? Shuddering, she grabbed the book and stepped out of the circle.
She felt nothing as she crossed it. No popping, no membrane, no sign of the wall that she had been so certain she had built around herself. Jane turned back to the line of chalk and ash, frowning. She lifted a hand and felt for the barrier, but there was only air.
Had any of it been real?
Head spinning, Jane went to the bedroom. She made herself crawl beneath the covers of the bed—his bed, the bed she had not been able to look at before—and hugged herself tight, shutting her eyes against the bloody memories of Elodie and Orren. Dr. Nizamiev had called magic a focused kind of madness, but now, as she watched through lowered lashes as Mrs. Purl came in with a basin of hot water, then left again without a word, she wondered if she was simply mad.
She snatched a few fragmented moments of sleep but roused herself before an hour was up; staying abed would only lead to more questions. Jane rose and washed, changed her clothing and reset her hair.
There was breakfast waiting for her in the dining room, soft-boiled eggs and grilled river fish. She ate it despite the solid block where her hunger had once resided. Sleep, she needed sleep before she undertook any more investigations of the door, but how could she explain that to the servants?
She was contemplating asking Mrs. Purl to please build up a fire in the library, then leave her to some unspecified work, so that she might snatch a few hours of rest, when a rider made his way up the road to Lindridge Hall.