Jane Steele(15)
“Straight down the path,” he ordered. “Best o’ luck to ye, though brains’ll be of better use—and mind the headmaster.”
“I mean to.”
“Good,” Nick grunted, clicking his tongue at his weary horse. “Ye’ll live longer.”
I walked with a palpitating heart, dragging my trunk, up the lane under the brightening glare of midafternoon. The sun had sliced through the cloud bank, leaving an unmendable gash of blue across the sky’s face, starkly lighting the battlements before me. Reaching the front entrance, I hesitated and then knocked; the door was of thick wood strapped with iron as if bound in a strait waistcoat. A uniformed servant girl with a pockmarked face answered and beckoned me inside with the instruction, “Mind you wipe your boots. This way.”
We marched through corridors lined with carpets of forbidding black and blue, lit with wall-mounted dips rather than gas, featuring art suggesting that a great love of our Lord would be rewarded by the righteous being pelted with rocks. Half having expected a mean hovel lined with manure-seasoned straw, my childish jaw dropped; wherever my aunt had sent me, she had paid a pretty penny to do so, for this was no barnyard masquerading as a school, but rather the castle of a malevolent monarch. Had a dragon inhabited the dungeons, I should not have been in the least surprised. When we reached a smaller side room with books dimly lining the shelves, the servant said merely, “I’ll fetch someone,” and I was left with my trunk at my feet and mind in turmoil.
About ten minutes later, the door swung open. The woman standing there was quietly dressed in grey, her blond hair parted in the middle and her slender hand lifting a rushlight towards the darkened interior. She had a classically lovely face, features calling to mind a songbird or a sonnet, with a sweet afterthought of a nose and pale blue eyes. I thought her around twenty-five, which seemed a most distinguished achievement and one I felt unlikely to duplicate.
“Are you Jane Steele?”
I nodded.
“Welcome. I am Miss Amy Lilyvale, and I teach music here. If you apply yourself at Lowan Bridge, you will be a valuable addition to any great household in the world. If you are feckless and idle, you will find life hard.”
She said these words as if required to deliver them; then she smiled. “You must be weary—you can have a wash before supper, and lie down if you like. Come.”
Lifting my little trunk, I followed her light step back into the corridor and up a stately central staircase. We had not halfway climbed it when a bell clanged loudly enough to summon the dead, and the sound of pattering feet from all directions met our ears.
Girls poured into the murky corridors, books clutched to flat bosoms and full ones, for they seemed to range in age from as young as I was to as old as eighteen. They were all dressed in navy blue stuff frocks—coarse material which must have chafed—with quaint white aprons, and a queer cloth cap fastened over their hair. I must have glanced down at my trunk, for Miss Lilyvale touched my elbow gently.
“Your own clothes will still serve you for holidays when you return to see your family.”
“I have no family,” I answered without thinking.
“Surely you must have a provider, or you could not afford to attend Lowan Bridge School.”
“Yes, I am very grateful to my aunt,” I replied, recovering my wits, “but she is not fond of me. She means to keep me away.”
“Oh, Miss Steele . . . and to impart a sound education to you, surely?”
This, I was coming to realise, was undoubtedly true—for had my absence been Aunt Patience’s whole design, I might have landed in a Yorkshire sty and been left to moulder there. Meanwhile, the rush of footsteps and the jostling of elbows all around us unnerved me; most of the girls murmured words I could not catch, as if fixing something in their minds, whilst the few who were silent cast brushing looks at me like the scrape of minnows in a shallow brook.
“Here we are.” Having reached the dormitories on the topmost level, Miss Lilyvale pushed a door open.
She revealed a long rectangular room furnished with two rows of double beds, several pine tables with basins and unadorned white pitchers thereon, unlit fireplaces at either end, and a window granting us a view of fragmenting clouds. The ceilings were high and imposing, the air as chill as it ever is within a stone tower, where we were to be kept prisoner like dozens of forlorn princesses. Suddenly weak with fatigue, I clutched the nearest bed frame, all but dropping my poor trunk.
“Goodness! That was a very brave show, but now I see the way of it,” Miss Lilyvale tutted as she snatched the luggage from my trembling fingers. “Take off your shoes and lie down for a while. Here is your bed, and later you will meet your bedmate, Sarah Taylor, but for now no one should disturb you until I return to fetch you for supper at half six. Till then, rest quiet, dear, and remember to thank God for your safe arrival.”
Miss Lilyvale departed. The bedclothes, though cheap and stiff, were clean, and the bed suitably big for the unknown Sarah to share henceforth. I wondered whether she was a good girl, a bright one, a pretty one; I wondered whether Nick would remember the potted rabbit if I ever required precipitate escape.
Sleep was finally weighing down my lids when I spied a ghost in the stark bedchamber.
Gasping, I tightened my loose grip upon the coverlet.
A lump of sheets had transformed into a child who could not have been above six years old—a blond apparition with a pale, freckled face and a tiny mouth. She regarded me stoically with her head on her palm.