The Death of Jane Lawrence(56)

Elodie was gone.

No blood coated the floor below her; the stone was no longer slick. Her other hand sought behind her. There—her fingers hooked around the doorframe. She backed through it, then felt along the wall toward the stairs, eyes darting around the darkness. She couldn’t see more than a foot on any side of her, but she came across no bloody ghosts, no lurking creatures.

She found the stairs and climbed.

She didn’t stop moving until she was in the foyer. Melted wax coated her fist, and her knees were bloodied, but she couldn’t feel the sting anymore, and the ichor that had soaked her skirts had disappeared. She fumbled with the latch to the front door, glancing back at the hallways, at the decaying grandeur of the staircases. The latch gave way, and she stumbled out into the sticky, humid brightness of midday, nearly falling down the front steps.

The front gardens stretched out ahead of her, tangled and half dead. Staggering, she made her way down the drive past withered trees and the desiccated remnants of old blooming vines. She could feel the sickness rolling off the edifice at her back, the lies clinging to the shingles of the roof, the menace rising up from the cellars. She could still smell old blood. Augustine had killed Elodie; Elodie would have killed her; Elodie was telling the truth; Elodie was lying. She could not sort one thought from the other, and it was all she could do to start off down the dirt lane, headed back to town.

She had to get out.

She had to escape.





CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO


SHE REACHED LARRENTON hours later, her feet aching, her house shoes in tatters. She held her skirts carefully, trying to disguise the tear across the front. The noises of town immediately pressed in on her from all sides and she flinched away from people who passed too close. She would have turned and fled, except that she had nowhere else to go.

The long walk had given her overwrought mind time to parse out some logical thoughts, the half-formed semblance of a plan. She could not go back to the surgery; of that she was certain. The thought turned her stomach, and she didn’t know what she would do when she saw Augustine again. He had promised her explanations, but could he explain what she had seen? Could he explain why her throat was bruised?

No; she could not face him yet, if ever. She could not live inside those surgery walls that stank of blood, not any more than she could live in Lindridge Hall.

When the Cunninghams had been young, the obvious choice would have been a priest. But the passage of time and the changing of the world had rendered such men useless and almost gone, replaced by magistrates who were just as likely to send her to an asylum or hand her over to Augustine as they were to listen to her.

She still had one option left to her, however. She would go to back to Mr. and Mrs. Cunningham, and beg on their kindness. Impose on them for a night, or two, and then ask if they would take her to Camhurst with them after all. She could bear it, must bear it, in the face of all that had happened. The marriage could not be annulled, now that she had consummated it, but Mr. Cunningham would know some tactic she could use. They would want to help her.

Wouldn’t they?

She threaded her way through the streets, keeping her head down, constructing the narrative that she would offer them. No ghosts, no magic—unkindness, then? Unspecified betrayals? Would it be enough? They had entreated her to move to Camhurst with them, and she had refused, had set herself on this path. With their support, yes, and yet …

Jane reached the familiar lane that she had lived on for so many years, and quickened her pace, lifting up her head at last. She was nearly running by the time she reached the doorstep, her plans cast aside in the face of simple, pure relief. Home.

Jane knocked.

There was no answer.

She stared up at the house’s fa?ade for several long minutes, willing herself to see motion in the upstairs window. Mrs. Cunningham bustling about, or Ekaterina stripping the beds. But there was nothing, and she became acutely aware of the traffic behind her, carts and footsteps, murmuring voices, jarring shouts. The carved face in the lintel above her leered down. She was near the center of town, the house convenient for a solicitor’s clients, and suitable to a solicitor’s standing. She hunched in on herself, imagining a hundred eyes on her, judging, weighing, evaluating. The Cunninghams’ strange ward, falling to pieces now that she had left their oversight.

Jane knocked again. Again, no footsteps. Where could they have gone? It was not market day. Had they gone visiting? Ekaterina could be out doing the shopping, and the Cunninghams away to the next town over for tea and joyous conversation before they left for Camhurst. But she needed them here. Her heart was thundering in her chest, and she tested the latch.

The door opened.

The house was barren.

Jane stepped into the gloom, lifting one shaking hand to her mouth and letting the door fall closed behind her. The house’s inhabitants were gone, and with them all the furniture Jane had grown up around, all the landmarks of her youth. What had once been Mr. Cunningham’s office now stood empty, even the rug that would have borne the impression of the heavy desk’s feet rolled up and carted away. She checked every room, wide-eyed and hoping, hoping that even if the first few carts had gone to Camhurst already, she would find at least the bedrooms untouched. A promise that they would be home by evening.

The bedrooms were empty boxes of wood and plaster.

Stifling a wordless cry, Jane sank to the floor of her old room. She stretched out along the floorboards, rough where the rug had kept padding feet from wearing them smooth over the years. She stared up at the ceiling, searching out the water-stain shapes the way she had when, as a girl, she’d woken up at night hearing phantom shelling in the distance. But the rabbit and the fifteen speckles all in a line were gone. They’d had the ceiling repaired before moving out.