The Death of Jane Lawrence(33)

That he was as good as she knew him to be.

“I was afraid that I would have to hate you,” she confessed, intoxicated by his breath against her mouth, by the intensity of his gaze. “And angry that I had to.”

He did not answer, but closed the bare distance between them and kissed her fervently, heedless of who might be listening, watching. She was momentarily stunned; he had touched her fondly the morning after their wedding, but that had been all, and she realized she’d thought, perhaps, he might not ever touch her so again, let alone with desire, with passion.

But no, it had only been the house between them. Bad nerves.

His kissed her slowly but with such intensity that her knees weakened, and she wrapped her arms around him as if to keep herself upright. His hand slid along her waist, down and around her hip, and nudged her closer to him.

What had she been afraid of? Nothing; there was nothing to fear, especially not as she drank him in, learning how to kiss by each touch of his lips. She followed him as he pulled away, as he took her hands again and led her after him.

On the second-floor landing, Augustine pulled her close once more, stealing another kiss, as if the distance between the top of the stairs and his bedroom was an unfathomable, unmanageable distance, as if he would die without another drink from her lips.

Then the bedroom, where he fumbled with the fasteners of her dress, and she with his waistcoat. She forgot to be ashamed of her nakedness as soon as she could see his shoulders, his collarbones, every inch revealed to her becoming a marvelous whole. She kissed him again, let him lead her to the narrow bed, tumbled to the mattress wrapped around him.

After, they lay quiet together among the pillows, tangled together. She studied him, how his dark hair clung to his skin from sweat, how his brow no longer held its near-constant furrow. He looked at ease, as at ease as she felt, and she stretched out along the sheets, breathing in that freedom.

What had she been afraid of?

Isolation was the culprit, not this house. The burned doctor’s bag, Mr. Purl’s drunken stories … why should she fear them?

She had only one question left, one last worry, inexplicable and whispering.

“What of the door?” she asked as she nestled beside him. “There are so many locks.”

He was silent only a moment. Then he murmured, “It leads to the old cellar, but it’s dangerous,” pressing a kiss to her temple as he drew the coverlet over them. “The tunnels could collapse.”

“What’s down there?” she asked, eyelids heavy, voice thick.

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all.”





CHAPTER TWELVE


SLEEP CAME, BUT did not remain for long. Sometime after midnight, rain drumming on the windows of Augustine’s room, Jane rose and pulled on her nightgown. She’d woken up, overheated by her husband’s body in the narrow confines of the bed. He had been right; it was not built for two.

And yet she could not help but feel pleased at the stiffness of her limbs. She looked down at him, wondering, a moment longer. He had wanted her, and she had wanted him in return, and it had been miraculously simple, past a certain point.

Buttoning her housecoat by touch, she shuffled across the bedroom floor until she reached the door to the hallway. With one last glance at the bed, she slipped out of the room, then felt for the knob mounted on the wall that would bring up the gas lighting. The study couch had been good enough for him, and so it would serve for her.

But though the couch proved comfortable, the hearth was cold, and the shadows cast by the skulls and other oddities unsettled her too much to sleep. She left the study behind and climbed up to the third floor instead, her mathematical treatise and Augustine’s monograph on Mr. Aethridge clutched to her chest. The library hadn’t been piped for gas lighting, likely due to the arching glass ceiling, but a candelabra was set on a small table by the door. She took it, lighting it from one of the sconces in the hall. Inside the library, the air was still thick and musty, but no longer unpleasant, and the room was warm despite the ceaseless drum of the rain on the glass above, courtesy of a fire Mrs. Purl had built that morning to help dry the room out.

The sitting room would have been a more comfortable spot, perhaps, but she did not intend to sleep now—only to read long enough to exhaust her mind, so that she could return to bed, worn out enough to slumber once more.

Mrs. Purl had freshly polished the long table in the center of the room, and chairs now sat around it, clean and handsome. Jane set the candelabra down. The library’s green, liquid light folded around her, bathing her like water.

After a moment’s thought, she set aside Mr. Aethridge for the daylight. Instead, she opened to the first page of her mathematical philosophies. The writing was dense, the type small, and deciphering the logic took up the whole of her attention within minutes. Her only regret was that she hadn’t brought her pen to make notes in the margins, but sliding her finger along the text worked almost as well. As she read, the rain came down harder, the sound echoing across the high-ceilinged room.

The book sketched out the possibilities of seemingly impossible mathematics, derived from division by zero. Zero did not function the same as one, or two, or twenty; it erased or expanded beyond the bounds of reality. And so, this text argued, one could use zero to take the volume of a rounded barrel without needing to fill it and measure the contents in a more standard container after. One could find the area below a theoretical curve, calculating smaller and smaller regular areas below it into infinite nothingness. One could find the answers that must exist, but that no Breltainian scholar had ever been able to reach with exactitude.