Strange and gruesome, all of it. Jane drew back and made to turn, then noticed a newer addition, free from dust. It was a large glass jar, filled with a lump of something floating in pale golden liquid, somewhat cloudy, sediment already accreting at the bottom.
It took her a moment, but then she recognized the mass. It was the warped tissue Dr. Lawrence had excised from Mr. Renton’s abdomen yesterday morning.
The specimen. Was this what Dr. Nizamiev had wanted to see? She frowned but could not take her eyes away from it, even as she remembered it lying, inert, on the operating table, even as she remembered that Mr. Renton’s lifeless body still lay below her.
Would he get rid of it now that his patient was dead? Why keep it in his study? But even as she questioned, she began to suspect the answer.
It was fascinating.
She traced the curves of it, and, this close to it now and with less panic clouding her mind, she could see that it did disappear into itself, the way she had perceived the day before. It twisted not in the way of rope or sausage, nor was it knotted like string. She could not make sense of its exterior and interior, its top or bottom. It made her head ache.
Footsteps on the stairs. She turned to face the door just as Dr. Lawrence entered, still looking worn, drawn. He regarded her silently, then looked behind her to the cabinet.
“What do you think of it all?” he asked. “I confess, I forgot you would see my collection when I recommended you come up here.”
“What is it for?” Jane asked, caught between disgust and interest.
He came to her side and poured himself his own small glass of whiskey, then leaned back against his desk, regarding the shelves filled with stones and wood and jars. “My own education. I collect curiosities,” he said. “I have for many years. Models or samples of medical oddities, strange natural phenomena, that sort of thing.”
“Including that,” she said, nodding to the jar. “Mr. Renton’s…”
“His large bowel, yes,” Dr. Lawrence said.
“Do you intend to keep it?” she asked. “After…?”
“Yes. I’ve never seen anything like it. I may never again. Does that trouble you?”
After some consideration, she said, “No, I don’t think so.” She did still step away from it, and pressed a hand to her eyes. It smelled faintly of death, though she had not touched the foul seepage.
She shuddered and thought again of Renton’s blood on her hands the day before. Her hands inside the wound.
The wound that had been fouled. She had scrubbed her hands before she’d touched it, but she might have done it wrong.
She quailed at the thought. Another mistake. Another misstep that rendered her unfit for … whatever this was.
“What is it, Jane?” Dr. Lawrence murmured, seeing her distress.
“You … blamed yourself down there, for Mr. Renton’s death,” she said, not looking at him. “Do I not share equally in it? I am inexperienced. I distracted you. I—”
“No,” Dr. Lawrence said fervently, setting aside his glass and taking her free hand in his, drawing her farther away from the cabinet. “Don’t think like that, Miss Shoringfield. Jane. Please promise me you won’t think like that, not ever.”
“Dr. Lawrence,” she murmured, stunned by the warmth of his skin and the passion flashing in his eyes.
“Jane, if the fault lies in anybody, it lies in me. I am the one with training and, more than that, I was the one in charge of the operating room. You cannot blame yourself. That shame is a path you cannot come back from, once you start down it,” he said firmly. “I am a doctor; I am built to carry that load. I have sworn to do so. You were simply there, willing to help. You did all you could, and that is all anybody could ask of you.”
“And so did you.”
That stopped him, his jaw working. “Perhaps,” he said at last. “But I’m the one who can bear it, not you. I can’t ask that of you, not even if we are engaged.”
Jane stopped breathing. Her thoughts raced, unable to maintain her guilt, her fear, her confusion all at once. “Engaged,” she repeated, voice barely more than a breath. Her head was full of buzzing, too many emotions in too short a time. She wanted to flee into the night, but also wanted to be here, only here, and for him to look at her again. Instead, he withdrew and straightened his cuffs.
“That is,” he said, “even if you are my potential wife. Forgive me.”
“Dr. Lawrence,” she said.
“I find my thoughts are quite out of order today,” he continued. He was blushing, she realized, beneath his worn pallor. “I should not have asked you to stay; we have hardly agreed to—”
“Augustine.”
His given name stopped him cold.
“Yes?” he asked.
Take it back. He must take it back. She had been impulsive, foolish, wild to come here just to see him again. She could not let him do this, unknowing of how she’d betrayed his trust. She had demanded a business arrangement, and he had agreed to it. Anything else was against both their wishes.
And yet … and yet she wanted, more than anything, for him to say it again. She set her glass aside and clutched her hands together, so tightly that the skin looked bleached. She hoped wildly, in two antithetical directions.
“Engaged?” she asked.
Without a word, Augustine reached for her, then past her, to the cabinet. He drew out one of the lower drawers. Several small curios were arrayed on the velvet-lined interior, and right in the center were two rings.
“I meant to give these to you,” he said. “Not today, of course. Even if—even if Mr. Renton had lived, it is still much too soon, but now it seems the most inauspicious start possible.” He glanced at her at last. “As I said, please forgive me.”
She joined him and looked more closely at the rings. They weren’t simple bands of metal, or even gem-studded jewelry, but instead made of many interlocking pieces of something white and matte.
Carved bone.
She reached out and traced one porous curve. At her ear, Augustine murmured, “I had a patient once, a man whose entire body ossified over his lifetime. I removed a series of growths that locked his elbow in place, and he had them fashioned into these.”
“The bones of a man,” she repeated. A man with an uncommon illness, one she had until now never imagined—she was beginning to see a pattern.
He picked up one of the rings and turned it around in the palm of his hand. “His name was Julian Aethridge. He had a unique sense of humor and asked that he be allowed to keep whatever we removed. Said he’d made it himself, after all. So we gave him the pieces, and he had some of them made into these rings. He tried to give them to his son and his son’s new wife, but they were disturbed. When he offered them to me, I accepted.”
Really, what better gift for a blood-soaked surgeon to give to his bride than a ring made of the fruits of his labor? And perhaps it was best that she bore a reminder of the inevitability of death, to chill her fevered thoughts.
She plucked the other ring from its velvet nest. She turned it over, looking at how the white bone had been carved so finely, with such care. A gentle touch with the pad of her thumb pushed the pieces into a new configuration, the hoop they formed narrower but taller than before. Genius, to take such a one-of-a-kind material and design the rings in such a way that they could fit throughout the seasons of life, on any number of people. The geometric figuring to make such a thing would have been extensive. She wished she could see the plans.