Jane Steele(10)

“I’ll tell this time,” I spat as I struggled. “I’ll tell everyone.”

His piggish look of glee dimmed. “No, you won’t. You’re a knowing little jezebel just like your mother, Mummy always tells me so.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that you like it.”

“I’ll tell her we both like it,” I lied coldly, falling limp. “Then she’ll send me away forever. Get off.”

Edwin retreated—biting his mouth, straightening his clothing. When he took in my bedraggled state, he grew agitated, reaching into thin air as I brushed myself off with unsteady fingers.

“It was only a game,” he offered. “I never meant to—I would never hurt you. I’m sorry, Jane.”

My wrists were bruised, my back scraped, my sleeve torn, my heart unbroken but dirtied, as if he had pulled it through the mud. Walking a few paces away, Edwin retrieved something from the ground. It was his pocket handkerchief, which had fallen from my arm, and he passed it back to me as if giving girls pocket handkerchiefs could atone for any offence under the sun.

“Jane, will you be my friend again?”

Rage poured from scalp to sole at this request.

“We were never friends,” I lied, and—preparing to run once more—I shoved his chest as hard as I could.

The rock he staggered back upon was loose under his footing; it set off a tiny slide into the ravine, a hushed skidding of granite and dead bracken. That accidents happen is a universal principle—and perhaps the only universal principle worth mentioning, for it governs an enormous percentage of our daily lives.

That my entire being, every last ounce of me, had been put into that violent push, however, is undeniable.

When I peered over the top of the short decline and met Edwin’s eyes as he sucked in his last breaths with a broken spine and a look of pure disappointment, I did nothing to aid or comfort him.

I walked away.





FOUR



“Do you know where the wicked go after death?”

“They go to hell,” was my ready and orthodox answer. . . .

“What must you do to avoid it?”

I deliberated a moment; my answer, when it did come, was objectionable: “I must keep in good health, and not die.”


Edwin is dead, I thought.

Perhaps he only fainted.

You killed him, you idiot, I thought next, and giggled, and stumbled under star-scarred skies.

I fell to my knees and would have screamed then had I the air to do so, but all I could manage was gasps through a throat which had shrunk to the breadth of a hay wisp. My fists clutched the sod as if the planet were trying to buck me off and, after a few harrowing seconds, a whimper escaped and the tears came flooding.

That night, I learnt that horror could not physically kill me; wave after wave crashed over my head without my drowning, and yet . . . I think that I would rather die than experience such overwhelming wrongness ever again.

Curling onto my side on the lawn—visible peripherally to the cottage but not to the main house—I sobbed for an hour or more. When the torrent was a trickle, I passed a sleeve over my eyes and sat up. The sun had sunk well below the tops of the elms, and whether it would ever rise again, I could not have said. In the mire of my misery and confusion, three thoughts emerged:

You really are as wicked as everyone says.

Shame spread like a pox over my skin.

Mamma isn’t here to help you, and now you will be hanged.

Like all children, I had read the Newgate Calendar raptly, that ostensibly educational account of gruesome violations enacted by the law upon ne’er-do-wells within Newgate Prison. No one embarks upon a life of mayhem because hanging (or drawing and quartering, or slow death by pressing, come to that) sounds like a pleasant Saturday afternoon lark, but parents in those days still supposed the illustrations highly effective deterrents, and I had devoured Edwin’s copy. I cried a little longer. A vague shape I knew to be Agatha floated past amber-lit windowpanes.

You are going to have to lie like the very devil to live through this.

Having no stock of tears left, I plotted my escape with hollow bones and shaking fingers.

? ? ?

You’ve said it all out plain once, Miss Jane, so I knows as ye can say it all out plain twice,” Agatha declared the next morning. She sat on our burgundy settee, one arm around my waist.

My return to the cottage had been a lighting storm: searing flashes of you’ve killed Edwin interrupted a savage downpour of lies. They poured from my mouth, flooding my throat. When the falsehoods had been exhausted, Agatha had said, pulling the coverlet over my head, There, there, poor girl. Nothing like this lasts forever, for ye’ll ken that time passes whether we will it or nae.

I had meant to pray for forgiveness the instant Agatha left, but instead a deathly slumber took me. I don’t know the term for a child who falls asleep after her first murder and before confessing her sins, but I suspect it is not an intensely complimentary one.

Now it was ten o’clock in the morning and my head felt filled with hornets. I had been ill the night before into my porcelain pot, sour acid bleaching my throat, and now more lies were required—this time for the benefit of Constable Sam Quillfeather.

Constable Quillfeather, seeing I was numb with dread following Agatha’s prompt, pretended a sudden rapturous interest in a decorative pillow.