The Death of Jane Lawrence(61)

“I tried everything. I cut the bone away with a saw, burned the remaining fragments where they sat in the muscle, gave purgatives and had him fast for weeks, then ordered him to eat only rich foods. Nothing worked.

“He wasn’t the first to suffer so, though it’s rare, and usually afflicts young children. They die before reaching adulthood. Nobody knows what causes it, and nobody knew why he was different. Except me. I knew, because he told me that as a young man, he’d discovered certain books, and had played at spellcraft until he felt something quicken inside of him. It wasn’t until a month later, when he found the first growths, that he realized he had made a mistake. Even still, until the day he died, he remained a magician, trying to fix what he had set wrong inside of him. He failed, Jane. He failed. He died a horrible death, starving, drowning with pneumonia as he was locked inside his own body, and it was because of magic.”

Jane couldn’t respond, overwhelmed with the horrible images Augustine had conjured for her. She thought, too, of Dr. Nizamiev’s photographs: men and women locked in an asylum, heedless of the world outside, trapped in some unknowable suffering. And her parents, putting her in the carriage to Larrenton, turning back toward death.

“Do you see?” he asked, voice softening. “Do you see the danger now? I am lucky to have escaped with so gentle a punishment. It is a reminder not to reach beyond what we can understand.”

His terrible logic made sense. It settled over her like a leaden pall. Why fight? Why reach for something better, greater? But she wanted him to. She remembered his confidence, his kindness, his humanity in the face of Mr. Renton’s surgery, a surgery that had left her feeling half monstrous. She remembered his hands on her hips, his quick wit, his mastery of the scalpel. She remembered the happy piece of her that he had quickened, the way she felt her world expanding just from being near him. She had never realized, until him, that she might love and be loved.

She wanted him to risk it. Because if she could see only the best in him, if they could agree he could be what she had thought he was, he would be the best man in all the world.

She wanted him to try.

“Jane,” he murmured, “I told you from the first that our marriage was inappropriate. If you want to leave, you may leave. If you want to stay, you may stay. But I will always be this man. I will always be tormented, and I will always fight to save my patients, even as it kills me. But now … now you can make your choice honestly. I can at least give you that much.”

“You have given me nothing at all,” Jane whispered, and left the study.





CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR


ALONE IN HER bedroom, Jane couldn’t sleep. When she closed her eyes, she smelled blood, or felt again Elodie’s cold hands on her throat, or heard Augustine’s retching echoing from the washroom. Her mind twisted and turned, fighting to reorder her newly disordered world. Magic and death, lies and desire, all of it upending everything she’d thought she knew as surely as zero destroyed the logic of mathematics.

He had killed Elodie. Yes, she would have died no matter what. Yes, he had been desperate to save her. But in her final moments, he had cut her open and gripped her heart, and all for nothing.

And yet, when Mr. Renton had been dying, Augustine had plunged his hands into his body in an attempt to save him, and she had seen him as a hero, not a butcher. And even though Mr. Renton had died, Jane did not feel the same disgust for the surgeon’s actions that she felt now for what had been done to Elodie.

Had Elodie trusted him? Had Elodie believed that, no matter what Augustine did, he did for her benefit?

If he was not a murderer, then he was still a liar. Yet a liar was a far smaller thing than a murderer. And what did Jane’s hurt matter, now that it was done? He couldn’t do worse to her. It had been painful, to learn this lesson, but it was learned.

So she was left to go on, and build for herself a life that would satisfy her, a life she could comprehend. In time, she might forget ghosts. She might forget a dying woman she could never have saved. She might forget magic. None of them were her responsibility.

The worst of it, she decided, was that she did not hate Augustine. The more honest he became, the more tragic he grew and the less she knew how to be happy with him; but she did not hate him. It would have been far easier to hate him.

It would have been easier to fear him.

She looked for a long time at her mathematical treatise, brought back to her with her gowns. It was not so different from Augustine’s magic. She could bury herself in figures and equations, follow footnotes and stray thoughts until she’d filled sheaves of paper with annotations and experiments, practice and exploration. The book held the impossible, as surely as Lindridge Hall did.

There was no need for her to learn such a thing. There was danger in it, and danger in her fascination, too.

She cast the book aside and turned off her light.



* * *



WHEN AT LAST she dozed, she dreamed of Augustine’s arms around her. She dreamed of tearing out a rotted pit inside of him where his martyrdom resided, and of Lindridge Hall burning to the ground, and of Elodie, laid gently to rest, and made reparations to for the desperate horror Augustine had worked upon her.

She dreamed of Elodie, her hands gentle upon Jane’s cheeks, her lips on Jane’s brow, her blood-soaked gown clinging wet to Jane’s flesh even as Jane tried to flee.