The Death of Jane Lawrence by Caitlin Starling

Author:Caitlin Starling [Starling, Caitlin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

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.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.