Jane Steele(3)

Certainly my uncle Richard was never mentioned nor seemed he much missed, which I found curious since his portraits were scattered throughout the house—a wedding watercolour from a friend in the drawing room, an oil study of a distinguished man of business in the library. Uncle Richard had owned a set of defined, almost pouting lips, an arched brow with a tuft of dark hair, and something rakish in his eyes made him seem more dashing than I imagined “men of business” ought to look—ants all walking very fast with their heads down, a row of indistinguishable umbrellas. I thought, had I known him, I should have liked him. I wondered what possessed him to marry Aunt Patience, of all people.

Thankfully, Patience Barbary was blessed with a face ensuring that conjugal affronts would not happen twice, which did her tremendous credit—or at least, she always threw beauty in the teeth, as it were, of my own mamma, who smiled frigidly following such ripostes. Aunt Patience had a very wide frog’s visage with a ruddy complexion and lips like a seam in stone-masonry.

“So much time passed in our great Empire.” Aunt Patience sighed following my mother’s uncertainty over vocabulary. “And despite that, such a terrible facility with our language. I ask you, is this a proper example to set for the—as you would have it—future mistress of Highgate House?”

“It might not be,” my mother replied with snow lacing her tone, “but I am not often invited to practise your tongue.”

“Oh!” my aunt mused. “That must be very vexing.”

I yearned to leap to my mother’s defence, but sat there helplessly dumb, for my aunt hated me only marginally less than she did my mother. After all, I was awkward and gangly, possessed only of my mamma’s too-thin neck and too-thoughtful expressions. My eyes were likewise catlike—voluptuous, in truth—but the plainest of ordinary cedar browns in colour. My mother ought to have done better by me, I thought on occasion. Her own irids were a strange, distant topaz like shards of frozen honey.

I never blamed my father, Jonathan Steele, for my shortcomings. I never expected anything of him—not remembering him—and thus could not expect more of him.

“Aimes-tu ton gateau?” my mother asked me next.

“Ce n’est pas très bien, Maman.”

Aunt Patience simmered beneath her widow’s weeds; she supposed the French language a threat and, in retrospect, she may have been correct.

“Pauvre petite,”* my mother commiserated.

Mamma and Aunt Patience embarked upon a resounding and communicative silence, and I felt Cousin Edwin’s eyes on me like a set of hot pinpricks; when the adults abandoned decorum in favour of spitting false compliments and heartfelt censures at each other, he launched his offensive.

“I’ve a new bow and arrows I should show you, Jane,” he murmured.

For a child’s tones, Edwin’s were weirdly insinuating. The quick bloom of instinctual camaraderie always withered upon the instant I recalled what my cousin was actually like. Meanwhile, I wanted to test his new bow very much indeed—only sans Edwin or, better still, with a different Edwin altogether.

My cousin was four years my elder, thirteen at the time. Our relationship had always been peculiar, but as of 1837, it had begun to take on a darker cast. I do not mean only on his behalf—I alternately ignored and engaged him, and was brought to task for this capriciousness by every adult in our household. I let them assume me fickle rather than snobbish when actually I was both. Granted, I needed him; he was closer my own age than anyone, and he seemed nigh drowning for my attention when no one else save my mother noticed that I breathed their cast-off air.

Edwin, on the other hand, was what his mother considered a model child; he was brown-haired and red-faced and sheepdog simple. He chewed upon his bottom lip perennially, as if afraid it might go suddenly missing.

“Have you seen the new mare yet?” he inquired next. “We might take a drive in the trap tomorrow.”

I maintained silence. On the last occasion we had shared a drive in the trap, the candied aroma of clover in our noses, Edwin had parted his trouser front and shown me the flesh resting like a grubworm within the cotton, asking whether I knew what it was used for. (I do now; I did not then.) Other than gaping dumbly as he returned the twitching apparatus to its confines, I elected to ignore the incident. Cousin Edwin was approximately as perspicacious as my collection of feathers, which made my own cleverness feel embarrassingly like cheating. It shamed me to disdain him so when he was my elder, and when the thick cords of childhood proximity knotted us so tightly to each other.

Just before arriving home, he had asked whether I wished to touch it next time we were in the woods, and I laughed myself insensible as his flushed face darkened to violet.

“You are a wicked thing to ignore your own kin so, Jane,” Edwin persisted.

Kin, kin, kin was ever his anthem: as if we were more than related, as if we were kindred. When I failed to cooperate, he stared as if I were a puzzle to be solved. My dawning fear was that he might think I was in fact a puzzle—inanimate, insensible. Though I no longer presume to have a conscience, I have never once lacked feelings.

“But perhaps you are only glum. I know! Will you play a game with me after tea?”

Games were a favourite of my mother’s, and of mine—and though I was wary of my cousin, I was not afraid of him. He adored me.

“What sort of game?”