Jane Steele(21)

You haven’t missed a meal yet, I thought. You could be very good at this. And the others might be made better off as well.

“Steele?” came a piping voice.

“Yes?” I answered Clarke.

“Good night,” said she, as Taylor’s warning toes jabbed me.

Grief is a strange passenger; it rides on one’s shoulder quiet as a guardian angel one moment, then sinks razor talons into one’s collarbones the next. No sooner had Clarke offered me this kindness than hot salt tears were soaking my pillow. My mother had once bid me good night, and good morning too; and my mother had loved me, and she had died for no reason I could discern, and was never coming back.

I would cry often for Mamma’s loss, as children are wont to do—but I could never have guessed that my own melancholy would lead to discoveries which once more dashed my world from its orbit.

? ? ?

The event which caused me fully to embrace my true nature took place some six months later.

By this time, I had come to know many facets of Lowan Bridge School. I knew that Taylor was secretly terrified not of being a governess but of being married to someone tyrannical, as her mother daily hid fresh bruises under flounces and lace; I knew that the curse of Fiona Fiddick’s life was that she was the funniest creature on earth, which meant that she weighed a stone less than she ought to have; I knew that under Fox’s dour attitude hid a girl who somehow always had an apple in her pillowcase, and never kept it for herself.

I knew that there were stables, unlocked ones, and horses available for caressing. I knew that the roof above our dormitory was accessible if one crept carefully, and that Clarke’s eyes as she mapped the swath of glittering black not obscured by the reek of London to the south of us were mossy pools in the moonlight, and that though she seldom laughed, she laughed at a stolen glimpse of the night sky most blithely of all, and her laugh was like the treble of a silver flute.

Sunday was both beloved and dreaded, for while we had no classes and were allowed to play on the lawn or read in quiet nooks, we were compelled to attend chapel. As we marched towards the elegant stone building on the day my life altered forever, a parade of dull blue soldiers plodding under stony November skies, the casual observer might have supposed we were going to be executed.

Sunday, after all, was the day Mr. Munt performed a weekly Reckoning, in order to catch out any sins we might have foolishly neglected to mention.

“Steele, will you help me with the Catullus assignment?” Fox’s ungainly form landed beside me in the third pew. “I can’t make heads or tails of it, and even if Miss Werwick doesn’t have a cane—”

“Of course,” I agreed. Censure from Madame Archambault was humiliating and painful, but Miss Werwick of all the teachers relished referring us to Mr. Munt, as if we were chess pieces (or, better still, ninepins).

Clarke sat upon my other side. “Anything immediate, mi’ladies?”

Clarke was wont to trill when she was well fed, as if beginning to compose a folk tune, and I adored her for it. I was about to answer in the negative when Miss Lilyvale advanced to take her seat before the pipe organ and commence our two hours of agony.

“With a true spirit of praise, girls, sing with me!” Miss Lilyvale called out.

A veil of authorial privacy will be drawn here; it would behove neither the reader nor the author to dwell upon musical atrocities which reside wholly in the past and cannot now be remedied.

After the initial three hymns had been sung, Mr. Munt ascended to the pulpit. Vesalius Munt was never more happy than when every student’s attention speared in his direction, fixed to him like nails as he stood before the crucifix.

“Happy Sabbath to you, my girls,” he announced, beaming, and the my stuck in our thorny throats, for it was the truest sentiment he would admit to all morning. “I encourage you to rest peacefully upon this holiest of days, and repose knowing that Christ died to save you from your own ignorance and infamy. Let us proceed with our weekly Reckoning, that we might cleanse our souls.”

A hand raised. Mr. Munt devised a demeaning punishment for the accused—and often for the accuser. There were no rules in this jungle, no trails we might tread so as to escape the tiger’s tooth. We were paying as much mind as we ever did, Fox and I and Clarke, ears pricked for danger, when I startled at the sound of my name.

“Steele means well,” my bedmate was drawling exhaustedly from two pews distant. “And she’s as clever and helpful as everyone says, and oh, it’s dreadful, but she . . . she doesn’t mean to, and I hate to say it.”

I turned to gape at her. Taylor’s face was bloodless, a mere illustration: black hair thickly inked, eye and lip hinted at in delicate pen strokes. Her beauty had been marred of late by her uselessness at memorisation, and she had forsaken sleep in favour of struggling alone over data which meant nothing to her; now she embraced the only option guaranteed to merit a hot meal. I did not marvel that it was me—I was a proximal target, even a sensible one, already having earned a reputation for lying my way out of scrapes.

“What is it that Steele did not intend to do, Taylor?” Mr. Munt rested a poised arm against the pulpit.

Taylor’s round eyes flew to my queer tilted almond ones. “She dreams.”

“What in God’s name is Taylor doing?” growled Fox.

“It’s my fault,” I assured her quietly. “I didn’t notice she had got so frail. She has every reason to lie about me.”