The Death of Jane Lawrence(111)

Time is only onionskins marked with similar drawings of place and actor, arranged in different scenes. Unexcavated earth presses in around her, all worms and soil and water. Men and women move within a warren of chambers, draw out circles, perform faded incantations. Initiations, desperate workings, children’s games. Workers lay down white stone in heavy slabs. Spells pull at the bones of the world, failing and changing reality, ripple after ripple.

She lies unconscious in the passage where she meets her mother. She touches the cellar door for the first time, and all her body is ice and pain. She watches flames consume her bloodstained sheets, and kisses her husband, and works at sums.

She sits in a chair in the dining room, happy, newly wed, still deep in dreaming of the possibilities before her, unknowing of what will come. But in her mind coils the first stirrings of confusion and distrust. She does not yet know Elodie’s name, but she knows her face: red-eyed Elodie, quiet in the windows.

But the windows are empty.

Is this that night? Or is it another? There are many nights during which Jane sits in that chair, the window frames holding only night-black glass. But there is no sea grass or sprouted grain tangling down her throat. Her clothing is not torn, her body not shivering with exhaustion. She can still do her figures, would not short the servants, is in control of herself and does not seek to control more beyond.

For an eternity, a lifetime, the blink of an eye, Jane is happy, even knowing what comes next if Elodie appears. But Elodie is absent and if she does not come—there is only a void, a yawning white expanse that Jane cannot cross. There is something on the other side. She does not experience hope when she looks at it, because to hope is to imagine, to conceive of new worlds, but she lies curled in her mother’s arms, in Augustine’s arms, as if the past is the future, as if time is mirrored, and she feels safe and loved and whole. Perhaps this is what exists, on the other side.

But the white void remains. It spreads. Jane sits in the dining room at Lindridge Hall and does not see Elodie. The world beyond the windows disappears. She sees Augustine and the Lawrences and the Pinkcombes in a stone-hewn room, and sees the nothing that is Elodie. It spreads. It is everywhere. Jane can no longer tell where it ends and where the white expanse of her own paradox begins.

She is afraid.

She takes the measure of herself, of her boundaries, and she unplies the skein of her existence into its component strands, one following the other. It warps, bows, threatens to snap. Without Elodie in the glass at Lindridge Hall, she does not have the information needed to understand her circumstances. Two impossibilities rise, fall, struggle to resolve.

She steps into the windowpane herself.

She looks close enough. Her eyes are bloodshot from days of sleeplessness, her hair tangled, her dress bloodstained. Jane, living, looks up from the dining room table, sees herself, then quickly turns away. She tells herself it is nothing.

Jane, dead, goes in search of Elodie.

Statues stand motionless in the halls. They have no faces; there is nothing human about them except for their vague form, their uprightness. Augustine steels himself for the suffering to come, and she sits in the library with her tome of the impossible.

Elodie is absent.

The white spreads.

Jane steps in for her again, feeling worry now, feeling dread. Her death unravels. She must remember time if she is to fix this. She must sort the onionskins, lay them out in order, find the mistakes.

She follows statues that march motionlessly down the stairs into the study. Augustine carries her to bed, tucks her in with loving care, goes to meet the ghosts in what he thinks is bravery but is only cowardice.

And where is Elodie?

She is not in the darkness of the crypt. Jane does not see her as she staggers through the impossible maze of passages and does not see her as she lies on the slab. Where is she? She is meant to be trapped, but she is as absent now as she was in the windows up above.

This is a problem. This is a problem not because Jane wants Elodie there to suffer, or even to be freed, but because without Elodie’s spirit, there is no death, or life, or Jane. Without Elodie, Jane is lost a hundred times over, and time, incomprehensible and tangled, falls apart to dust.

What has happened? What has gone wrong?

Jane’s initiation. Her vision. She must resurrect it into bloody, screaming life, study it for clues. Jane peels herself from the flow of time, the ply of her life twisting back on itself. She sees Elodie split open on the plinth, her heart in Augustine’s hands, and then—

Nothing.

Elodie is gone.

Forward and backward, she is gone. In the past, the great nothingness of where she was still grows. There is wrongness. There is rupture. Jane touches the margins of Elodie and feels cold, feels her fingertips fragment away. Shame coalesces in their place. She draws back, stunned, then turns once more to herself. The white has slowed its advance, held back by her redefinitions. The variable of Elodie must be replaced, the fragmentary rupture of the past papered over with Jane’s will, until Elodie can be restored.

So she exists in those moments Elodie comes to her, searching for that yawning nothing. Does it climb out from Jane’s vision and jump from moment to moment, obliterating as it goes?

But there is no blankness in the windows. Elodie is simply not there.

She continues to search. She hides in the study, pursued by a hungry thing wearing the face of a boy dead before his time. She gives herself Augustine’s text. She builds the circle, learns magic, begins stumbling down the path again.