And if Abigail Yew was dead, if her ghost had come to Lindridge Hall, then Jane needed to guard herself, as she had against Orren. She needed …
What?
Why did she need to protect herself? Orren had not attacked her. He had only said what she knew to be true, what she did not want to face. And she had fled. She had abandoned him and failed him again. How selfish was she, that she would do it once more, and to the woman whom she had so faithfully tended to for days?
She forced herself away from the wardrobe and came to the bedside. Abigail Yew lay beneath sheets and coverlet, feverish and pale. Her chest rose and fell with a wheezing whisper. Her hair clung to her flesh, and her fingers curled atop the blanket.
Shame and guilt surged inside Jane.
“I am afraid,” Abigail whispered, and remembering Augustine, Jane nearly retched.
A dark stain spread across the coverlet. Blood, and too much of it. The stench filled the air, and Jane jerked forward as if on strings, hauling back the blanket. Below, Abigail’s body was hemorrhaging, great gouts of blood surging forth from her pale, limp body. Abigail’s head lolled back, etherized, even as her fingers gouged into the incision in her belly.
“You missed something,” Abigail whispered. “You always miss something. Get it out of me. Get it out!”
But Jane couldn’t move, and so Abigail grabbed her wrists and dragged her close, forcing her hands into her abdomen. The flesh parted, revealing a skull festooned with rot, worms writhing in every crevice, every shadow. Slick ropes of intestines wound around her fingers while her thumbs pressed into the dark, impossible softness of the skull’s eyes. It wasn’t an unborn child, but the head of a full-grown person, erupting into reality and dying before it could be born.
Jane cried out and dug her fingertips into the crumbling bone, pulling and twisting, desperate to free Abigail of it. But it did not move, and Abigail screamed, tears streaking her cheeks. Her head rocked from side to side on the pillow, and Jane remembered herself, brought to ecstasy in that same bed by a surgeon’s brilliant hands.
Please, she begged of herself. Please, discover a way to save her. Be brilliant. Be mad. She looked to the window, too, searching for Elodie.
The window was empty.
And when Jane looked back, the bed was empty, too. Only the blood remained.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
MRS. PURL COULD not know what had happened.
Jane stared at the empty bed, at her bloodstained hands. The sun would rise soon. The servants would return. Strange dinners and chalk circles could be explained, but this? Here? There was no lie she could offer, no gentle misdirection. This bed looked and stank as if a woman had died in it, and Jane stood there, still alive, still hale.
Jane tore the sheets off the bed. The fabric clung to her, cold and wet. Real. As real as the ghost had felt. As real as Abigail had been.
The ticking of the mattress was stained scarlet as well. Jane stared at it helplessly, then cast aside the sheets and knelt, pressing her hands up through the bedsprings to feel at the mattress’s bottom. Not cold. Not wet. She grabbed the cover and heaved, flipping the dense horsehair mattress.
Passable. She would have to find another solution before Mrs. Purl could turn it again, but she had time. She had time.
She dragged the bundle of sheets to the bathroom and dumped it into the tub. She grabbed the tap. Stagnant water burst forth from the pipes, stinking of mildew, and then sputtered out.
The main was still closed. The kitchen plumbing was still destroyed.
Another mistake. She should have had Mrs. Purl hire a plumber yesterday when they were in town. The old Jane, the sensible Jane, would have been sure to.
If she could not wash the sheets, she would need to conceal or destroy them. There was no room in all of Lindridge Hall that Jane could reach but Mrs. Purl could not access, but there were hearths she might not check immediately, giving Jane time to make sure no evidence survived. Clutching the sheets to her chest, Jane crept back into the bedroom, looking around for any sign of movement.
Nothing. No lurching patient or fresh spot of blood. Soft rain pattered against the window, and she could hear the croaking chorus of frog song faint in the distance. The hallway was as empty as the bedroom, and the lights burned brightly all the way up to the library.
The hearth there had not yet gone cold, and Jane stoked the fire, sitting close and hugging her knees to her chest. The red-gold light flashed starkly across the sheets, sparking crawling shadows in every fold and hollow. When the fire was so hot Jane could hardly stand to be near it another moment, she pushed the fabric into the flame.
It caught slowly, reluctantly, and where the blood had flowed too thickly, where the fabric had not yet dried, it smoked and sputtered and smelled of horrors. And yet even that burned, given long enough, given gentle tending and prodding. The light it cast illuminated the stains on her own clothing, and as the sheets became ash, Jane stripped out of her dress and fed it, too, to the fire.