Jane Steele(22)

“She isn’t lying,” I thought Fox muttered.

“Steele has simply terrible nightmares about her mother,” Taylor declared. “She doesn’t mean to scream, but she won’t stop.”

My heart stuttered.

Yes, I often awoke covered in sweat and raw-throated as a carrion crow and, yes, I dreamt of my mother; but I did not scream for her. Did I? Once or twice had I bitten back cries, but these were rarities, accidents.

Rising, I clasped my hands before my white apron. “I’m sorry for giving any trouble, but my mother died recently.”

“Over half a year hence,” Mr. Munt corrected.

“Mourning her is only natural. But please forgive me for disturbing the peace.”

“Natural?” Mr. Munt struck the flat of his hand against the podium as if smiting sin itself. “Let our hearts go out, girls, to this wayward lamb, who meditates on death when in the midst of God’s abundance.”

I bit the inside of my lip until I could taste all I had left of my mother, which was her blood.

“Steady,” Clarke chimed softly.

“Let Steele,” intoned Mr. Munt, “come to thank You, Lord, for your grace in orchestrating her removal from her mother’s evil influence.”

My hands gripping the pew had transformed into bleached bones.

“And let us never give up the hope that she may return one day to honest Christian practices!”

“Steady,” Clarke squeaked, gripping my skirt.

“Mourning my mother is not dishonest!” I cried.

I may as well have set off a bomb in the chapel; every eye swept to me in dismay. Contradicting Mr. Munt was tantamount to suicide; unfortunately, I had not yet grasped that suicide was the topic.

“Your mother,” Mr. Munt enunciated, relishing every syllable, “was a debauchee who perished deliberately by means of self-administered laudanum. She was thus buried with minimal services by the only minister willing to overlook her Gallic Catholic affiliations and willful self-slaughter, and your sainted aunt spared you the indignity of witnessing such a barren sight. Tell me, why should mourning your mother be praised as any sort of virtue when her tainted spirit so obviously haunts your own immortal soul? Your mother was a disgrace to the natural order—an embodied disaster.”

He had known all along, I realised.

There had been no mourners in crepe at my mother’s funeral, I understood: only the overripe aroma of earth unwilling to accept yet another unpaid houseguest. Suicide was high treason, for what greater violation existed than thwarting God’s will?

My sentence (a week of missing dinner) was announced and Taylor invited to rejoin the ranks of the fed; but the pit of my stomach swelled into a cavern long before hunger descended.

Mr. Munt had won; I had not been prepared for the truth. A small hand interlaced with mine.

“You don’t cry out so very often,” Clarke whispered, wide-eyed and earnest.

“I will now,” I managed hoarsely before disengaging myself and opening our prayer book with palsied fingers.

? ? ?

Ihave learnt since that a great many people are ill intentioned and yet behave well. I might have followed suit—winked into the mirror of a morning and worn a white sheep’s coat all the livelong day. Jane Eyre was told to pray to God to take away her heart of stone, that she might be gifted a heart of flesh; but my heart of flesh bled for my mother, my mother whom I would apparently never see again if I was good.

The wind howled that November night as if mourning a lost love; and the decision I reached in my hard bed with Taylor’s cold toes prodding my calves, sobbing as silently as I could, went as follows:

If I must go to hell to find my mother again, so be it: I will be another embodied disaster.

But I will be a beautiful disaster.





EIGHT



“I might have been as good as you,—wiser,—almost as stainless. I envy you your peace of mind, your clean conscience, your unpolluted memory. Little girl, a memory without blot or contamination must be an exquisite treasure—an inexhaustible source of pure refreshment: is it not?”


It would have been possible for me to survive Lowan Bridge for longer than the bleak seven years I spent there had Mr. Munt not taken it into his head to kill Clarke.

Oh, we were subjected to daily indignity, each Reckoning more creatively vicious than the last; but small moments of happiness touched us deeply. In a mansion, blessings are lost amidst bric-a-brac; in a pit, they shimmer like the flash of dragonfly wings.

There was Miss Lilyvale’s boundless capacity to ruin even the simplest music. There was Fiona Fiddick’s faculties for both humour and sewing, which enabled her to hide the words FEED ME in an embroidered nosegay of coral peonies which Miss Sheffleton proudly hung upon the classroom wall. There were horses, and riding lessons, and I learnt to love galloping through the daisy-dotted meadows, pretending I need never return. There were the holidays, when Mr. Munt was out lecturing, and there was Clarke’s fierce, small-lipped smile when she arrived back after Christmas with her carpetbag and delivered an impetuous peck to my cheek.

Reader, I had miraculously acquired a companion; Clarke’s existence owned me, opened me, left me helpless with stifled giggles at midnight. Becky Clarke was brilliant and ridiculous, an effortless scholar who insisted on honour when honour led only to missed meals; she was three years my junior, so I could shrug her off as an irritating protégée the instant anyone raised an eyebrow; and she responded to both compliments and criticism with the same casual piping responses, as if baffled anyone had noticed she was there at all. Her simplicity was droll, her mind captivating—had anyone asked whether I thought her a genius or an idiot, I should not have had a satisfactory answer.