The Death of Jane Lawrence(60)

She looked at him, truly looked at him, and saw his heaving breath, his feverish brow, smelled the stink of his illness. “At night, you must return to Lindridge Hall,” she said. She remembered how he had winced from his headache the night he had returned to her, and saw again his untouched dinner plate tonight. Remembered Dr. Nizamiev telling her about his mysterious illness.

How could he run, if staying away just two nights made him retch and burn with fever?

He nodded. “Each night I don’t, I worsen. I am sorry, Jane; I tried to tell you all I could, when I knew I would be too weak to cast you aside. I thought if we obeyed your rules, perhaps I could be happy again, and perhaps you could get out of life everything you desired. I wanted it to be enough. I wanted all of it to be enough. I thought I could keep you safe.”

Jane clenched her fists into her skirts. “But I didn’t want to follow my rules. And then the carriage crashed.”

“And you came to me, and saw nothing that first night, though I had heard Mr. Renton howling in the halls before you arrived,” Augustine said. “And nothing the next night, though I was not there to protect you. I began to hope. They stopped coming to me, Jane. I saw nothing, I’ve seen nothing, since you stepped foot in Lindridge Hall.”

“But now I have,” Jane said. “You lied to me, told me it was a nightmare, but I remember. And I have seen Elodie, in that crypt.”

“That is the only thing I don’t understand,” Augustine said, leaning forward. “I have never seen her, not once. And all the ghosts that haunt me have never once laid a hand on me. They have terrified me, yes, and pursued me, and mired me in the knowledge of my own failures, but—to have seized you—”

Jane stood slowly, leaning heavily against the couch. She spread her hands so that he could see the great tears in her skirt. She lifted her chin and hoped that there were bruises there for him to mark. “I ran all the way back to Larrenton,” Jane said. “You saw my feet. Do you think I would have done that for anything less?”

He bowed his head.

“That night,” Jane said, “I did not see your patients. I did not see Mr. Renton. I saw inhuman figures headed for your study, and I went to save you. I thought you were in danger, and that, together, we could fight it.”

“Jane,” he whispered, pained.

“Fight it. Fight it now. You cannot live like this. The creatures of Lindridge Hall would kill me, Augustine. Fix this.” For both of us.

He shook his head violently. “I am condemned,” he snapped. “It is not something to be fixed. You will never go back to Lindridge Hall and I will suffer the way I am destined to. I am not like Andrew or Georgiana, who believe that because of our medical degrees, we can do no wrong. They think we are like gods. If we err, it is never our fault; it’s the patient’s choices, or the weather that day, or a hundred other things. They think magic is their birthright, a game they are entitled to play. But I know what I do. I know what I have done to deserve this.”

Jane’s lips pulled back into a snarl, anger cracking through her like a whip. “Augustine, listen to yourself. You may not be like them, but you are their exact inverse. You believe you are just as much a god, that every illness can be stopped, that every injury can be repaired, if only you do the right things, exert enough effort.”

His face went scarlet, then pale once more.

“It is not just arrogance, Augustine, it is also cowardice. Because if everything is your fault, you don’t have to face the truth that the world is a cruel, unpredictable place, and that you cannot ever control all of it. Death always wins, Augustine. You cannot stop it. You could not stop it.”

“You don’t understand,” he said. “You can’t understand.”

“I know that my mother and father are dead, and I could not have prevented it, no matter how much I screamed and cried and begged them not to volunteer.” Her heart blazed within her chest, and she stepped forward, desperate to make him hear, make him listen.

And Augustine refused to meet her. “Death always wins,” he said, “except in a world where it doesn’t. Once, I came so close to changing that. And then I failed. This is my punishment; it cannot be denied.”

Death always wins, except in a world where it doesn’t. What if he was right? What if she could have screamed and begged enough to make her parents stay? What if she could do the same here, help him, do anything, if only it would make him heed her? Change the boundaries of the world, change the truth of what rested, rotting, in his brain? If he had come as close as he thought to changing death itself, couldn’t she do at least that much?

She wanted, so desperately, to be happy with him. To build a future by action instead of acceptance.

“Look at the ring on your finger,” he said, interrupting her wild spiral of thoughts.

Jane clenched her hand, feeling the bone curves press into her palm. “What of it?”

“Mr. Aethridge,” Augustine murmured. “Did you read the monograph?”

“No.” A surge of guilt rose in her. She hadn’t had time to.

“As a young man, the planes of his back began to distort. A few months after he noticed the first changes, he was thrown off his horse. He broke his leg, and though it was appropriately treated, bone grew up and around his knee, locking the joint for the rest of his life. From there, the illness crept into his very muscles, injuries that would have been little more than bruises on you causing great sheets of tissue in his arms to transform.