Jane Steele(36)

When finished, she sat and stared at her husband; a silence of grotesque dimensions ensued.

“We’ll sup first,” Mr. Grizzlehurst said contritely, “and then—then, mind—we can talk about halternatives.”

Clarke and I ate as Mr. Grizzlehurst slurped from a lobster shell; Mrs. Grizzlehurst only gazed at her plate, relief softening her ratlike features. After supper had ended, I jotted down an account of Mr. Munt’s murder, prudently leaving out my guilt whilst doubling the gore. I did not need to ask whether it would suit; it was a mingling of my memory and imagination, and as such was criminally engaging.

Hugh Grizzlehurst read my work, snorting in approval.

“I decide which crimes deserve hadvertisement,” he admonished.

“Of course.”

“You get not a cent—just lodgings, that’s hessential.”

“Absolutely.”

“And what’ll she do, then?” he demanded, pointing at Clarke.

“Teach music lessons,” Clarke said dreamily. “All we must do is find a piano, and I shall partner with the owner quick as thinking.”

“Well,” said Mr. Grizzlehurst. He regarded his spouse as if struck by sudden melancholy. “They live upstairs, then, it’s settled.”

Smiling, Mrs. Grizzlehurst cleared the plates and uttered not another word that day . . . nor the day after that, nor the day after that, which ought to have set off plentiful warning bells in my ears and did not, more’s the pity for everyone involved.

? ? ?

Clarke set out to partner with a pianist upon the morrow. A week later, having failed in many attempts, she disappeared one morning and sent me into a hair-tearing panic—wondering whether she had met with misadventure, wondering whether she had tired of me. She materialised ten minutes after supper ended (which Mrs. Grizzlehurst always served us whether we had paid her the extra fourpence or not) with three shillings, which she pressed into my palm.

“I stood upon the street corner, practicing, before meeting with Mr. Jones, but I needn’t bother over using his piano.” Her smile engulfed her pretty face despite the small scale of her lips. “I always thought I had a knack for music, though Miss Lilyvale’s praise wasn’t precisely encouraging.”

“You made this much warming up your voice?” I stared stupidly at my hand.

“Imagine what I’ll earn when I’m doing it on purpose,” she concluded, skipping upstairs to wash.

Thus Clarke settled into an unlikely occupation as a street singer, trilling “Cherry Ripe” and “Poor Old Mam” whilst I penned atrocities; had we not been educated at Lowan Bridge School, learning daily despite our sorrows, I shudder to picture what would have become of us. She was even happy, I think, warbling like a strangely technical songbird, whilst I took heinous tales from my employer and translated them to actual English, with sufficient spilt viscera to please everyone.

These might have been idyllic circumstances, but they were not.

Mr. Hugh Grizzlehurst’s behaviour when drunk owned peculiarities which it failed to evince when he was sober; furthermore, these whimsical quirks tended to be visited upon the person of Mrs. Bertha Grizzlehurst. In fairness, Mr. Grizzlehurst only imbibed when he had been unsuccessful, and—as my help and his experience rendered us jointly successful—this was seldom. When every other month, however, the British Empire had been distressingly peaceable, Mr. Grizzlehurst would arrive home with a jug of gin which could either have been imbibed or employed to strip the paint from the chipped green rocking chair.

When Clarke and I had retreated upstairs, ducking to avoid the low slant of the ceiling beams, we would hear shouting. At times, the shouting would prove the climax, and we should find at dawn Mr. Grizzlehurst snoring upon the knotted rug. At other times, shouting would prove insufficient to Mr. Grizzlehurst’s purposes, and the sharp crack of a slap or two would follow, and Clarke’s entire body would flinch alongside mine as I set my teeth hard against each other.

“What can we do?” Clarke whispered the third time this happened, shifting up on one elbow to stare at me with her nightgown slipping over her shoulder.

I did not know. Bertha Grizzlehurst was silent for days on end, ugly as her husband, and relentlessly calm; and now that I knew the reason for her insistence upon our lodging there, I suspected we were already doing the task she had planned for whatever tenant occupied the garret: we were witnesses, which went a long ways towards stopping a real crime from ever occurring.

“Nothing,” said I. “We are here to prevent things going too far. It isn’t our business.”

Clarke settled her head between my neck and collarbone, smelling of starlight and lavender as she always did, and murmured, “Then whose business is it?”

Pondering, I sifted her hair through my fingers. I was not, even at age sixteen, foolish enough to suppose that love and marriage always kept company; my mother had loved my father to distraction, but I had never seen it, and as for the union our former music teacher might have enjoyed, the topic was best left unexplored. Theoretically, however, some form of affection was meant to be involved—and though I could only love hungrily, I could not imagine ever striking Clarke if I had been a man and she a woman, no matter what she may have done.

No, it is not my business, I concluded.

But it could be, I thought next, shifting and afterwards falling into a troubled slumber.