The Death of Jane Lawrence(116)

From the road came the sound of carriage wheels, closer than usual. She tensed, reading forgotten, anticipating some disaster, but there was no screaming when the door below opened.

And then Dr. Avdotya Semyonovna Nizamiev appeared in her doorway.

She was much the same as Jane had last seen her: slight, dark-haired, sharp-featured, and entirely focused on Jane. She did not wait to be invited in, but came to Jane’s bedside without introduction.

“Where is my husband?” Jane asked. She was not ready for this meeting.

“With a patient, downstairs,” Dr. Nizamiev replied, settling into the chair Augustine had placed at her bedside.

“Did he send for you?”

“No. Your housekeeper wrote to me after you threw her out of Lindridge Hall. She said she found you naked, covered in filth, at which point you fired her. And that when she came to fetch you to a doctor, you screamed about having killed your husband.”

Jane flinched with embarrassment. She glanced at the doorway, half expecting to see orderlies waiting to swoop down upon her, but to all appearances, Dr. Nizamiev was alone.

“Not exactly,” Jane said. “But I understand why she was distressed. It was a trying time.”

She expected Dr. Nizamiev to understand, to cite the ritual steps she had sent to Jane, to ask how things had gone.

The woman withdrew a small notebook instead.

“And why was that?” She was the solicitous doctor, searching for symptoms, arranging a diagnosis.

“I was grieving,” Jane said, confused. “And ill. Dr. Lawrence has explained that such a growth as I had places an inordinate amount of stress on one’s faculties.” Along with the lack of sleep, the lack of food, the constant focus required of the working. Surely Dr. Nizamiev understood that.

“Grief can certainly perturb the mind.” She scrawled a few lines, and Jane realized, with creeping discomfort, that she spoke in a different tone from the one she had the last time they met. Then, Dr. Nizamiev had been sharp, engaged, didactic.

Now she sounded like she was only humoring Jane. She made no mention of her own contributions, of the excerpt from The Doctrine of Seven, of her warnings and guidance.

“That night at Lindridge Hall,” Jane ventured warily. “You made me promise to accept everything you told me.” And when she had repeated it to her husband, he had remembered to believe in magic. It had unlocked something in him.

It was intentional, echoed Renton’s voice.

Dr. Nizamiev gazed back, placid. “Did I?”

Jane’s heart gave a sideways lurch. She remembered that conversation with piercing clarity, more than all that came after.

She weighed her words carefully. It would be better not to press, not when everything behind her now felt like shifting sand. But she could not bear not to know, not after everything that had happened.

“You’re not just a doctor, are you?” Jane whispered.

“I am many things besides my profession. You will have to be more specific, Mrs. Lawrence.”

“You told me you were not a sorceress.”

“And I am not.”

Her throat was dry. Her belly clenched with frustration and fear.

“Is it a matter of semantics? Do I only have to guess the right word? Are you—” She cut herself off, clutching at the counterpane. She must not show distress or agitation. One deep breath steadied her, and then she asked, “You do not play games with Dr. Hunt and the others, but do you—do you believe that magic is possible?”

“If it were, it would hardly be a matter of belief,” Dr. Nizamiev responded.

True, but in what direction?

“Do you claim to be able to do magic, Mrs. Lawrence?”

Nizamiev was a rational doctor. And Jane knew what answer to give her, the answer that was simplest. The answer of a rational woman.

“No,” Jane said. “Of course not. Magic is impossible.” She met Dr. Nizamiev’s gaze and refused to flinch, refused to back down.

Magic was real, but they were not magicians. Of course they were not. If Jane began to believe otherwise, she might be lost again. But if Jane could know there had been no magic at Lindridge Hall, it could all be over. She could no longer raise a circle, there were no spirits, and her husband was as whole as any man—so what was there tying her to that fiction?

A useful fiction, yes. A fiction wherein a sort of truth lay. But there were other truths.

“And your husband?”

“He no longer plays such games.”

“I’m sorry, I will clarify—your husband, does he know what happened to him?”

Jane’s breath caught.

In the long, blurred days of her recovery, it had been easy enough to forget what she had seen in that indistinct, unreal place at the edge of death. The holes in Augustine, the yawning gaps that proved he was not the same man who had married her. When those memories came, as if from dreams, they came, too, with a vision of the final piece of the working, the mass of hair and eye and flesh, grown from the both of them and destroyed to set them free. It was easy to believe she had succeeded, or that there had been no trial to best at all. Because to bring a man back from the dead was impossible, and he was there, and present, and warm, and did that not mean that he was as he seemed?

But there had been moments. Glimpses in the mirror. Gaps in his memory. Inescapable evidence that he was not a man at all, but something else.