They already thought her eccentric. She could last another week.
CHAPTER THIRTY
SILENCE BLANKETED THE surgery as Jane eased the door open. If Mr. Lowell was there, she could not hear him. She sagged against the wood, taking a moment to breathe.
Outside, it was the middle of the afternoon, and Mrs. Purl would soon be finished with the shopping Jane had tasked her with. The roads were soft but passable, as long as they returned to Lindridge Hall before the next inevitable storm came. There was much Jane needed to gather before she could lock herself away. She had sent Mrs. Purl by excuse and authority to fetch candles and attar of rose and lavender oil from the shops crowding the center of Larrenton, as well as fresh eggs and other, particular food stores, placing every purchase under Augustine’s name to be paid for at a later date. The cart that had brought them from Lindridge Hall had left hours ago, and Jane would need to hire their return carriage soon. She had stressed to Mrs. Purl that she should take her time, visit with friends, but that would not occupy her forever. Jane had to make quick work of this last stop.
But as she looked around the quiet surgery, she felt a curdling in her breast. How many patients had she missed over the last day and a half? How many had Mr. Lowell turned away, begging forgiveness? Even one was too many.
Focus. She had memorized the instructions from Dr. Nizamiev’s text and had more to do here before she could return to Lindridge Hall. She slipped into the ground-floor office and penned a quick letter requesting a locum, then crept upstairs. She gathered books on magic from Augustine’s study and avoided looking at the couch where they had shared so much. She took, too, her mathematical treatise, the one talisman of her life she allowed for herself. She packed all the texts away with fresh clothing and her spectacles.
There remained only the last few supplies on her list, the easiest of them all to acquire. As she descended to the storeroom, Jane’s skirt hem and shoes left a trail of bog muck. They were still damp from a few hours ago, when she’d gone out to the western edge of Larrenton, where the ground had shivered and sagged. Two handbreadths of moss from the great stands that floated above old, still waters were tucked into her bag. Beside it, a packet of soil. She had wandered the winding, confusing paths of Larrenton’s graveyard for too long that morning, too embarrassed to take what she needed, until her eyes fell on a fresh grave marker that read:
NICHOLAS RENTON
His death had been her initiation into magic, though she had not known it at the time, and that, more than any guilt she felt at disturbing such a fresh grave, let her act. As she had gathered fresh-turned loam from three inches below the surface, she’d tried not to dwell on the nature of luck, or on synchronicity. No groundskeeper had seen her, though they surely were near.
Now, this last theft, too, seemed fated to be unsettlingly easy. She hurried to the storeroom and began scanning the shelves for tincture of benzoin.
Benzoin, she had learned at Augustine’s side, was a wonderful fixative for bandages. From Dr. Nizamiev’s notes, she had discovered that it was also a fixative of the spirit, something to steady a magician when she reached for the impossible. Were the two concepts related? And was it chance, or something more, that a magician from over two centuries ago called for a substance Augustine stocked at his surgery?
There, a dark bottle of compounded benzoin that she had filled the fourth day of their courtship, as Mr. Renton was laid to rest. She plucked it from the shelf and placed it in her valise, alongside the bog moss and grave dirt. She turned to go, then stopped, her gaze alighting on the jar of cocaine.
Seven days without sleep awaited her.
The front door opened. Mr. Lowell’s heavy footsteps echoed in the hall. She snatched down the jar, and a syringe kit besides, along with everything she would need to compound the powder into a serum. She stuffed it all into her case just as Mr. Lowell appeared in the doorway.
“Mrs. Lawrence,” he said, frowning. “Have you news, then?”
She turned to face him, trying for a brittle smile, unsure if she succeeded at looking anything but stricken. “No,” she said. “No, nothing.”
“Then are you come to stay?”
His tone made it clear that any other choice would make little sense to him. He had been kind to her over that first week of courtship. He had been overjoyed at the marriage. And now, here she was, a presumptive widow, about to shirk her duty.
She took refuge in emotionality. “I cannot. What if he returns to Lindridge Hall? What if—” There she let her throat close up, thinking about the missing cellar door, the way the hammer had made no dent. There was no harm in him assuming it was merely at the disappearance.