Jane Steele(28)

“I’m only here to save one of your own students!”

He laughed, showing straight white teeth. “So you will fight me, you say, and in the next breath you plead the case for the daughter of smut purveyors?” Standing, Mr. Munt strode past me to the opposite wall. “Ah, here we are. The Garden of Forbidden Delights, author anonymous, published in serial by Whittleby and Clarke. Borrow it, and then tell me whether you think Clarke’s judgement of sincere affections is sound.”

A small red volume, unmarked on its cover but bearing the frontispiece The Garden of Forbidden Delights, was in my hands an instant later. Mr. Munt raised an eyebrow, stony resolve in his granite eyes, and I queasily slid the object into my dress pocket. I saw many more books like them—I saw an entire shelf, as a matter of fact, enough to be termed a collection.

“Do show that to Clarke when you’ve finished,” he added with a cold smirk.

He’s actually insane. His power had flooded his brain, eroding it piecemeal. I recalled the phrases I had studied in such repulsed confusion, the thought of your mouth against my cock-stand, and I would lick my way down your spine and lower until—

“Miss Lilyvale has seemed most upset since you touched her private things,” Vesalius Munt chastised, returning to his desk. “She carelessly left a letter lying out, I take it?”

I drew a quick breath. “I was in the teachers’ wing looking for food, and one of your letters caught my eye. I told Clarke about the contents. She never . . . It was all my doing, Mr. Munt.”

“Perhaps so—I blame myself, you realise. It’s clear as day that Anne-Laure Steele’s unchecked rebellion, her cunning, her willingness to spit in the face of God Himself, all have been passed down to her only child. Pity. Do you long for death too, Steele? Do you think of the Reaper as you would a suitor, turning away from God’s myriad blessings?”

Hours of conversation with Mr. Munt, I thought, was indeed too hard a bargain when set against a single hot meal.

“That is why I am contemplating committing you,” Mr. Munt concluded, examining his shirt cuffs.

The words hung before me like a corpse displayed for public view.

“It would sadden me beyond words should one of your classmates fall prey to your wild moods.” Mr. Munt’s eyes gleamed, a powerful king protecting his realm from embodied disaster—disaster by the name of Jane Steele. “You could hurt someone, Steele; you could destroy someone, I believe.”

Vesalius Munt could not possibly have known my secret, but my knees turned to water anyhow; he had seen something in me—a sparking flint where there ought to have been a soul, perhaps. Asylums by all accounts, meanwhile, were handy places to be chained to a bed covered in your own filth, subjected to ice baths and mercury doses and leeches on shorn scalps, and fed rather less than was customary at Lowan Bridge School.

“Don’t expel me,” I breathed. “I’m, I’m not mad—you know that I am not. I’ll behave. Only feed Clarke and I shall do just as you say.”

Mr. Munt crooked a finger over his full lips as he cogitated. Most would have seen a headmaster wrestling with a convoluted decision; I saw a despot to whom suffering was as amusing as a penny concert.

“I am moved to be merciful,” he concluded, “but Clarke’s punishment must stand if you remain at Lowan Bridge. The pair of you are potentially harmful to the others when acting together. If you agree to the asylum, Clarke can return to regular meals. If you prefer to remain and repent, her rations shall remain as they are.”

When I opened my mouth, it was empty—save for my heart, which lay aquiver in my throat. He was inclined to be merciful, and thus was offering me a choice of my life or Rebecca Clarke’s. The seconds elongated, an out-of-tune music box winding ever more slowly to its finish; Mr. Munt, smiling, picked up his pen as if to correct my altered numbers.

I was not inclined to be merciful, however, and thus gripped the letter opener and plunged the sharp point deep into my headmaster’s neck.

My earlier metaphor had been wrong, I discovered. The splash of ink from the pen dropping onto the page looked nothing like a spray of blood at all.





TEN



. . . like any other rebel slave, I felt resolved, in my desperation, to go all lengths.


There is a passage in Jane Eyre: An Autobiography which puzzles me mightily; and because it only tickles at the edges of my understanding, I cannot help but read it over, sitting with a glass of dark sherry as the sun grows teasing and hides behind the elms:

All said I was wicked, and perhaps I might be so: what thought had I been but just conceiving of starving myself to death? That certainly was a crime: and was I fit to die?

I present to the reader an enigma: my mother rushed the giddy business of dying along and was almost universally reviled for it. Speaking as a woman who has deserved to die since the age of nine and often thinks death a charming notion anyhow, I burn to know: When Miss Eyre demands philosophically, and was I fit to die? is she asking whether she is wicked enough to earn capital punishment, or holy enough to merit release from the torments of her browbeaten life?

And if she wanted to die . . . did she deserve to any longer?

? ? ?

Few among us are aware of how much blood the human body contains—surging in thick waves should it chance to be spilt.

I had spilled it, meanwhile, and therefore drastic measures were required.