The Death of Jane Lawrence(40)

“I can’t imagine him going so far afield,” Jane said, taking refuge in bitterness.

“A pity. We have missed him, these last two years.”

Two years. Two years ago, a patient had died in this house. Jane paused halfway to another swallow of brandy. It seemed the eyes of all gathered had turned on them in that moment, as if sensing the sudden quiet that had come over her thoughts.

“He’s been a hard man to track down since then,” Hunt confided, sitting on the arm of the nearest chair, crossing her legs and leaning one elbow on her knee. “He was under consideration for a lead surgical post, and then he was gone. Off to the southern counties, treating chronic injuries left over where the gassing was worst. It was all very sudden.”

Just the government posting. That was all. She was still jumping at shadows.

“I still can’t believe he accepted the job,” Vingh sighed. “Giving up his future … and for what? Of course, it was a hard thing, Elodie’s death.”

Jane went very still.

Elodie.

Vingh continued, heedless. “But surely he—”

“Did you know her?” Jane blurted, before they could devolve to sniping about achievements and the lack thereof.

Vingh bared his teeth in an unconvincing smile, as if he was very rarely cut off. He adjusted his cuffs, shot a look at Hunt. “Who, Elodie? Of course, we all did. Georgiana stood up at the wedding.”

The wedding.

The wedding.

Jane could not breathe. She choked down another mouthful of liquor to hide her pain, her panic.

“She was in residence with her family while we were attending university,” Hunt offered, “and was a frequent guest at the parties we attended. She was a wonderful woman. It was a terrible shame, what happened. And,” she said, with a glare in Vingh’s direction, “no surprise at all that it hurt Augustine so deeply.”

Those payments weren’t to a patient’s survivors. They were to his in-laws. The parents of his wife. She felt a scream building in her chest, and it took all her willpower to wrestle it down, to only wince and look away.

Her hands trembled, and she clasped them both around the base of her snifter to hide their shaking. “And what did happen?” she asked, fighting every inch of her that wanted to strain forward, to grab Vingh and shake the truth from him. She had no idea how she sounded as she croaked out, “All my husband has told me is that she was sick.” And that she wasn’t his wife, that she was only a patient, that everything was safe in this house.

Her guests did not seem to mark her distress. “Sick, yes,” Vingh said. “She died of yellow fever. She and Augustine had moved into this house, I believe, while he covered some physician’s posting in Sharpton, and when he was no longer needed, Augustine joined us on holiday. She’d been under the weather recently, so she stayed behind. A week into the trip, he received word that Elodie had taken ill, and by the time he reached home, she was dead. Even if he had received the message three days sooner, he wouldn’t have been able to return in time to do anything.”

Jane rocked back on her heels, the picture of polite, sympathetic grief, while inside she burned. Lies building upon lies—she could not support it all. He had lied about his dead wife, a wife she now saw haunting the windows at night, a wife with bloody eyes who looked at her from behind Augustine and held a finger to her lips.

It was all impossible, and yet it seemed more and more real with each new revelation. Had Augustine told the truth, that he hadn’t been able to save her?

Jane chanced a glance at the window. The sun was still solidly above the horizon, but sunset could only be an hour out, two at most. And suddenly, she wanted to stay. She wanted her guests to remain, to bear witness to what she had seen the night before. They could tell her the truth of it.

She so desperately needed the truth.

“It was a tragedy,” Vingh continued, and a scrap of real emotion crept into his voice. Elodie, it seemed, had been one of them—unlike Jane. “It’s a wretched, horrific illness—destroys the organs, great gouts of blood everywhere, and nothing that can be stitched up—but I’ll never understand why he would blame himself so much for it that he would take himself off to the hinterlands to atone.”

That shame, that flight, meant something. Jane sank into a chair, sure of it, unmanned by it, gaze firmly fixed on the road back to Larrenton.

“That’s because you are far too cold,” Hunt answered, as if Jane were not present. “Even ignoring the fact that she was his wife, he became a doctor to save lives. As, I would hope, did all of us.”

“A man’s skills have limits. And if he can’t handle losing a few patients, he certainly shouldn’t have pursued surgery, or doctoring at all, no matter his natural talent.”

“He told me,” Jane said woodenly, “when our patient died that I should never blame myself. That he would take the blame.”

Vingh snorted. “Martyr of a man. Bring him back to Camhurst and we’ll quickly cure him of his weakness.”

“I do not think I could entice him to go,” Jane said. Her head had begun to ache. One night ago, this had all been so much simpler, so much easier, and for a moment she once more wished she had never found out the lie.

But if it had not been last night, or this morning, then it would have happened now. Despite his best efforts to keep his old companions away from her, they had come, and they had broken his illusions with their idle chatter.