The Death of Jane Lawrence(30)

She took her emptied dishes to the kitchen, then retrieved her books and repaired upstairs, forcing herself to turn down every light on the way. In the study, she added logs to the banked coals and tended the hearth until between it and the gasolier above, the room was warm and bright. She ignored the strange shadows cast by the skulls on the shelves and settled down at the desk.

Working through the remainder of the ledger should have taken at most an hour, but her mind fought the yoke of focus every step of the way. She glanced over her shoulder at the slightest sound, and found herself flinching each time she looked up at the window and saw herself reflected there.

“Just ghost stories,” she admonished herself. “And you’ve never believed in ghosts.”

Never ghosts, never spirits, never monsters; her parents and the Cunninghams had raised a practical girl who knew better than to fear the unknown when she could fear bombs and armies. She had always been the logical one, the child obsessed with rules and procedure and schedule. A practical girl was frustrated and annoyed when her plans were disrupted; she didn’t feel this sort of distracting fear.

What was she becoming?

The last page of the old ledger had only three lines filled in, and once they were copied, she stared at them, willing them to create more. She didn’t have the focus for her mathematical text, with its philosophical discussions on the implications of the number zero and its uses in novel arithmetics, and she was in no state to read Augustine’s monograph on Mr. Aethridge, but her brain needed to be occupied.

What of the thin volume that had come tucked between the ledger books?

A quick glance inside revealed it to be Augustine’s personal accounts, kept meticulously since he had begun his medical studies. The entries were written in the tight, messy script Augustine used when he wasn’t taking his time, just like his first-draft patient notes, but after a week of going through his records, she could make out the majority of the words. There were notes for trips to clubs with friends, as well as entry after entry of university gowns, new equipment, daily meals.

She could learn a lot about Augustine from his ledger. She’d known Mr. and Mrs. Cunningham very well by the time she began keeping their books, and so she’d never realized it before, but here she could make out the edges of a man she’d only just begun to know. Where and how he ate, if he cared enough about food to mark it (and he did, at least in his younger years, eating out frequently and recording specific dishes), where he traveled, what sort of apartment he kept … it all spread out at her fingertips.

She dawdled in his young life, luxuriating in now-meaningless indulgences. She found his time in Sharpton, two years prior. Her thoughts went to Mrs. Luthbright’s story, and the arrival of the undertakers, and so she skimmed ahead, through his return to the capital, and then a town on the far southern border—the government posting Mrs. Cunningham had mentioned.

Finally, she reached his arrival in Larrenton.

Jane turned to the back half of the accounting book, then pressed a ribbon into the gutter to mark the point of change. From there, she began copying out the relevant expenses line by line, making a small mark of her initials beside each original. She didn’t go so far as to cross them out; she wasn’t sure if he’d want to keep his funds somewhat commingled as they were now, or if he’d want to separate them out as she was doing. The record she was making might only serve as a quick reference, rather than as an active tool.

Food purchases, tea for the patients’ families, restock of bandages—she copied the last two over—and …

A payment to a Mr. and Mrs. Pinkcombe for a large portion of his recorded balance, described only as Elodie. It was still marked as pending, though it had been entered nearly a month ago. Paging back to before he’d moved to Larrenton, Jane found similar entries every few months. None had actually been subtracted from the ledger balance, as if the Pinkcombes had rejected the cheques.

Elodie.

She shifted uneasily in her seat as she kept paging through the ledger. The Elodie entries persisted back to just shy of two years ago. Two years ago, when he had left Sharpton. Two years ago, when a woman had come to live at Lindridge Hall. Two years ago, when the undertakers had been called and all the Lawrences had left the area.

A red-eyed woman looked out from the windows when Mr. Purl came by in the evenings.

You will never stay the night at Lindridge Hall.

She sat back in her seat, limbs leaden, skin crawling. The timing might have been a coincidence, but Jane couldn’t convince herself of it, even as a possibility. Something had happened to a young woman, perhaps named Elodie, and it had happened in this house.

Mrs. Cunningham had proclaimed Jane had married Augustine under no illusions, but no, she’d had them, basic ones she hadn’t questioned the logic of. She’d assumed he was a good man, and that his reasons for keeping apart from the rest of the town were as harmless as her own requirements.

Could she have been that much of a fool, so deceived by her desires and his apparent kindness?

Elodie. She touched the entry in Augustine’s ledger. It didn’t matter. These cheques were never cashed. It wasn’t a present threat to the stability of his practice. There could be other explanations, ones that weren’t half so dark, but perhaps more lurid still. Perhaps there had been an affair with Mrs. Pinkcombe, perhaps a daughter named Elodie. Maybe a payment to a brothel. Neither was her business, and ghost stories even less so.