The Death of Jane Lawrence(44)

And Jane was caught.

She had no solid ground to stand upon anymore; all her assumptions had been torn apart. She would take all the data she could get to measure out this new reality. Make sure she missed nothing, figured everything correctly this time.

She could see her guests silhouetted in the warm lamplight of the other room, and heard Augustine’s laughter among the voices, but she sat in the chair the doctor pulled out for her.

Dr. Nizamiev remained standing, studying Jane’s face. “I had never thought he would marry again, not after Elodie.”

That unwelcome pang in her chest again; was it growing gentler yet?

“I do not believe he intended to,” Jane replied. “But he did.”

“I take it that your arrangement is … uncommon, given our first meeting.” Her words were clipped and controlled. Cold. Analytical. She sounded like Jane did when Jane was deep in her work, and though Jane had never felt ashamed of it before, now it made her skin crawl.

Dr. Nizamiev saw something. She was at work, even here. Doing what?

“Yes,” Jane said, warily. “Yes, it is uncommon.”

“And do you stay often at Lindridge Hall? Had you visited it before the marriage?”

Jane’s hands fisted in the fabric of her skirts. Her gaze drifted to the window behind Dr. Nizamiev, half expecting to see Elodie there, watching.

Only her reflection looked back.

Dr. Nizamiev canted her head, a falcon judging the distance of its next strike. “You know,” she said after a moment. “You’ve seen things.”

Seen things. An unwise admission to an asylum’s specialist, and yet Jane could not stop her forward lurch, her desperate query of, “You know?” Her pulse began to pound. “He told you?”

“Yes. He’s told me.”

Jane could no more leave the conversation now than she could follow the Cunninghams to Camhurst.

“There are some things you should be aware of,” Dr. Nizamiev said, pulling over another chair and settling into it.

“But why?” she asked. “Why tell me?”

“Don’t you want to understand?” Dr. Nizamiev asked. “I marked you for a creature of curiosity, not a coward.”

Jane bristled. “Of course I want to.”

Dr. Nizamiev sat back with a self-satisfied smile. Her voice dropped low, so as not to carry. “When Elodie fell ill, your husband was a guest at a retreat organized by the others in this house. The purpose of the retreat was to practice magic.”

Jane stared.

“I certainly have—seen things here, but—”

But what?

If spirits were real, if she could see the imprint of Augustine’s dead wife in a darkened window …

No. Blanching wedding rings in sunlight, wearing a shirt inside out—those were not spells, they were hope. The world was governed by logic and emotion, not esoteric power. Magic was not real. It was a fantasy, an impossibility, something from old superstitions.

But then she thought of Mr. Renton, of Mr. Lowell’s whispering, of chalk and salt.

“Magic is very real, Mrs. Lawrence,” Dr. Nizamiev said. “But what they were doing that week wasn’t. They were schoolmates reunited after several years of being separated by their residencies, and they were playing. At university, we were all part of a particular eating club, a covert gathering that performed rituals and had shared secrets. There are many of them in many universities across the country—and outside of it, too—and most are playacting at best. Ours was no different. We had gathered that week just to relive our younger days.

“And then the news came that Elodie Lawrence was deathly ill.”

Jane found herself leaning in, desperate to hear more. “And he left, but not in time to save her.”

“Correct. What happened next I wasn’t present for, but he told me some of the details when he came to me for help three months ago.”

Just before he came to Larrenton. At the end of the long disappearance that Vingh had wondered over. Jane felt the pressure increasing inside her skull.

“What did he tell you?”

“He was distraught after Elodie’s death, and both his family and hers blamed him for it. He was desperate. So he worked a spell. He tried to fix what he felt he had broken.”

Her skin crawled, and she hunched forward, shivering. “He tried to … bring her back?”

“Yes.”

Impossible. But she had seen Elodie, holding her finger to her lips. And so had Mr. Purl, and others, too, no doubt. “It didn’t work, though.” She breathed, desperate to maintain the foundations of her world, the logical constructs that had bounded her decisions, led her here to this moment, married to a man who believed in the ridiculous. “It couldn’t have worked. Elodie is not here. He—he is married to me.”

“You’re right, it didn’t work,” Dr. Nizamiev said, and Jane’s eyes watered with relief. But the doctor was not finished. She said, “It didn’t work, because transmutation of that sort is impossible. I don’t know where he found the spell, but at most it should have let him speak to her spirit, not make her body so much as twitch. Except nothing happened at all. The families found out and were disgusted. They felt he had profaned their home. And so they left him.”

Jane scrambled to slide all these new fragments into the expanding portrait of her husband. They fit easily.