The Death of Jane Lawrence(83)

He didn’t respond.



* * *



JANE WALKED THE halls into the darkest part of the night.

She must not sleep. The dictate consumed her, her head already foggy after the vigil she’d sat the night before. The longer she went without the house creaking, without the sound of ghosts or the moaning of her husband, the more unreal her world became. There were instructions she was meant to follow this first night, small workings, small sacrifices: blood upon the hearth stone, inhaling the smoke of three rooster feathers, walking in circles while reciting chants, and all of them felt like games. None felt powerful. None felt useful.

Magic was real. Of that, she had no doubt now. But her intoxication had been tempered, adulterated with a child’s first failures. She had not removed the stone. She had not fed her starving husband.

A few hours before dawn, she found herself in the bedroom she had shared with Augustine. She stared at the mattress, its indentations. For most of its existence, it had held only one body, but she could already see a faint blurring of the edges where two had lain, tangled and sweaty, both desperate to believe a fiction.

“A clear purpose,” she murmured to herself, and turned away. Dr. Nizamiev’s instructions had been specific: she must fix herself upon the work, the work that she wanted to do. Her willpower was great. She could do it, if only she began.

Something moved in her bed.

Confused hope swelled in her, and she froze, unable to turn around and look. Was it Augustine, somehow returned? From behind her came wheezing, rattling breaths. The sheets rustled in the soft sounds of suffering. Weak legs pushed at the sheets, a heavy head tossed and turned upon the pillow.

Jane knew those sounds.

Jane did not want to know those sounds.

Abigail Yew.

A thousand warring impulses leapt to life inside her and left her paralyzed: drop to her knees and cower, or flee, or scream in rage, or ignore the impossible, or take up her chalk and draw a circle. But all she could do was clutch at the wardrobe and whisper, “No, no, no.”

Not Abigail. Not here. She was not dead. Jane remembered the weight of Abigail’s chin as she guided broth to her lips. She remembered her strengthening pulse, and her eyes, gradually focusing on her nurse. But then Jane thought of the room she had not checked at the surgery. A scream built inside her.

These ghosts, these specters, came in the form of failed patients. Dead patients.

Abigail Yew was dead.

And if Abigail Yew was dead, if her ghost had come to Lindridge Hall, then Jane needed to guard herself, as she had against Orren. She needed …

What?

Why did she need to protect herself? Orren had not attacked her. He had only said what she knew to be true, what she did not want to face. And she had fled. She had abandoned him and failed him again. How selfish was she, that she would do it once more, and to the woman whom she had so faithfully tended to for days?

She forced herself away from the wardrobe and came to the bedside. Abigail Yew lay beneath sheets and coverlet, feverish and pale. Her chest rose and fell with a wheezing whisper. Her hair clung to her flesh, and her fingers curled atop the blanket.

Shame and guilt surged inside Jane.

“I am afraid,” Abigail whispered, and remembering Augustine, Jane nearly retched.

A dark stain spread across the coverlet. Blood, and too much of it. The stench filled the air, and Jane jerked forward as if on strings, hauling back the blanket. Below, Abigail’s body was hemorrhaging, great gouts of blood surging forth from her pale, limp body. Abigail’s head lolled back, etherized, even as her fingers gouged into the incision in her belly.

“You missed something,” Abigail whispered. “You always miss something. Get it out of me. Get it out!”

But Jane couldn’t move, and so Abigail grabbed her wrists and dragged her close, forcing her hands into her abdomen. The flesh parted, revealing a skull festooned with rot, worms writhing in every crevice, every shadow. Slick ropes of intestines wound around her fingers while her thumbs pressed into the dark, impossible softness of the skull’s eyes. It wasn’t an unborn child, but the head of a full-grown person, erupting into reality and dying before it could be born.

Jane cried out and dug her fingertips into the crumbling bone, pulling and twisting, desperate to free Abigail of it. But it did not move, and Abigail screamed, tears streaking her cheeks. Her head rocked from side to side on the pillow, and Jane remembered herself, brought to ecstasy in that same bed by a surgeon’s brilliant hands.

Please, she begged of herself. Please, discover a way to save her. Be brilliant. Be mad. She looked to the window, too, searching for Elodie.

The window was empty.

And when Jane looked back, the bed was empty, too. Only the blood remained.





CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO


MRS. PURL COULD not know what had happened.

Jane stared at the empty bed, at her bloodstained hands. The sun would rise soon. The servants would return. Strange dinners and chalk circles could be explained, but this? Here? There was no lie she could offer, no gentle misdirection. This bed looked and stank as if a woman had died in it, and Jane stood there, still alive, still hale.

Jane tore the sheets off the bed. The fabric clung to her, cold and wet. Real. As real as the ghost had felt. As real as Abigail had been.

The ticking of the mattress was stained scarlet as well. Jane stared at it helplessly, then cast aside the sheets and knelt, pressing her hands up through the bedsprings to feel at the mattress’s bottom. Not cold. Not wet. She grabbed the cover and heaved, flipping the dense horsehair mattress.