The Death of Jane Lawrence(84)

Passable. She would have to find another solution before Mrs. Purl could turn it again, but she had time. She had time.

She dragged the bundle of sheets to the bathroom and dumped it into the tub. She grabbed the tap. Stagnant water burst forth from the pipes, stinking of mildew, and then sputtered out.

The main was still closed. The kitchen plumbing was still destroyed.

Another mistake. She should have had Mrs. Purl hire a plumber yesterday when they were in town. The old Jane, the sensible Jane, would have been sure to.

If she could not wash the sheets, she would need to conceal or destroy them. There was no room in all of Lindridge Hall that Jane could reach but Mrs. Purl could not access, but there were hearths she might not check immediately, giving Jane time to make sure no evidence survived. Clutching the sheets to her chest, Jane crept back into the bedroom, looking around for any sign of movement.

Nothing. No lurching patient or fresh spot of blood. Soft rain pattered against the window, and she could hear the croaking chorus of frog song faint in the distance. The hallway was as empty as the bedroom, and the lights burned brightly all the way up to the library.

The hearth there had not yet gone cold, and Jane stoked the fire, sitting close and hugging her knees to her chest. The red-gold light flashed starkly across the sheets, sparking crawling shadows in every fold and hollow. When the fire was so hot Jane could hardly stand to be near it another moment, she pushed the fabric into the flame.

It caught slowly, reluctantly, and where the blood had flowed too thickly, where the fabric had not yet dried, it smoked and sputtered and smelled of horrors. And yet even that burned, given long enough, given gentle tending and prodding. The light it cast illuminated the stains on her own clothing, and as the sheets became ash, Jane stripped out of her dress and fed it, too, to the fire.

When at last every scrap and stain had been consumed, Jane made her way down to the kitchen. There was water drawn into a bucket there, gray and used from washing, and Jane scrubbed her hands clean in its icy depths. Ignoring the murk of it, she splashed it on her face, shocking herself half senseless. The evidence was burned. The spirits were gone. The sun was rising, and she had work to do.

She shivered as she gathered what she needed for the dawn ritual. Salt and a hen’s egg from the kitchen, chalk and benzoin and a fat taper candle from the study. She risked the bedroom to dress again, then returned to the library.

The stench of burned fabric still lingered, turning her stomach, but the room’s remoteness might shield her from prying eyes if the servants arrived before she completed the working. She put down her basket of implements inside the circle she had drawn at dusk. She set the pin and pulled the string taut, and traced it out fresh.

She circumscribed herself with the utmost care, and settled down in the exact center, reaching for the eel inside her. But as she did, she saw again the rotted skull, felt again the writhing of worms. Abigail’s flesh, hot and slick. The eel darted away. She tried again, and this time, it was a pop from the fire that distracted her. The next, it was the memory of Augustine’s desperate voice behind the stone.

“Just get it over with,” she whispered to herself, and abandoned the circle, reaching for the candle instead. It was decorated with lines and shapes that she had inscribed in its surface according to the text. She rubbed benzoin into the hollows, then set the wax before her and lit it. The perfume almost overwhelmed the stink of burned fabric and blood, but instead of feeling stronger, she felt ashamed.

“Let this candle be the light that guides me to knowledge,” she said. Her voice trembled.

She felt nothing.

She wanted the certainty, the ecstasy that had come with the working before. Instead, she felt … normal. Foolish.

A soft thrumming came from the hallway. No—the wall itself. The empty water pipes?

Augustine. He was listening. He needed this as much as she did.

She fixed him in her mind’s eye and reached once more for the eel. She smelled blood. She felt the worms. But her fingers closed over the writhing flesh, and the first bricks fell in place in the circle around her. Power flared in her breast, and she could have cried from the relief.

Jane started the incantation over, reading line after line, her voice tremulous but constant. She anointed herself, invoking her senses.

She whispered her intentions to the ether: the attainment of knowledge, entry to the greater world beyond the limitations of man, and the salvation of Augustine. She bowed low to the candle, so close she could feel the heat on her chin, as she had felt the heat that burned away the sheets. And then she sat back on her heels and reached for the egg.

“The thin shell protects the potential within from harm; it cannot survive unaided, in the way that the grown mind protects the unprepared soul from the expansion of the universe without. But the shell must finally give way; the mind must blossom and allow that which lives within to breathe in its birthright.”

She cracked the egg into a dish with faded flowers painted around the chipped rim. The yolk was vibrant orange, leaking into the clear albumen in a plume on one edge.

On the other was a spot of brilliant crimson.

Jane pressed the fingertips of both her hands into the bowl. The yolk came apart into an undifferentiated mass of gold and she stirred it, each hand going in a different direction.

“The mind is not yet ready to give way,” Jane whispered, lifting her hands from the bowl and painting lines of sticky egg across her forehead, her cheeks, the hollow of her throat. “But through the resonance of the pantomime, I prepare the mind and the soul. I prepare myself for the first glimpses of the unknown.”