Jane Steele(5)

My thoughts drifted from the horses to the uses I might make of them. I daydreamed of riding to an apple-blossom meadow where my mother and I should do nothing save eat and laugh; I envisioned charging into war, the heads of Aunt Patience and Edwin lying at my feet.

Mamma and I never took more than a light supper in the springtime, and following a departure as precipitous as the one she had just executed, I knew that she would lock herself away with her novels and tonics, and thus I stayed out until the wind began to nip through the slats in the great stable door and the horses’ snuffles quieted under my caresses . . . never realising until the following day, in fact, that I had been left entirely, permanently alone.

The ominous liquorice aroma of spilt tincture of opium drenched our cottage when I arrived home at eight o’clock. I learnt my mother had retired to bed at seven, which was unfortunate timing, as I never saw her again. Our servant, Agatha, found her the next morning, still and cold in her bed, marble eyes directed at the window.





TWO



What a consternation of soul was mine that dreary afternoon! How all my brain was in tumult, and all my heart in insurrection!


You cannot attend,” Aunt Patience explained in a strained drone for the third time. “You are far too hysterical to appear in pub—”

“Please, oh, please—I won’t say a word, won’t make a sound!”

“Gracious, child, show a little restraint!” my aunt cried. “Pray for her soul, and accept God’s will. It is a hard thing to lose your mother so suddenly, but many others have lived to tell the tale.”

I took the news that I would not be allowed at my mother’s funeral precisely as well as I took the news of her inexplicable death. Skilful knives had carved the heart out of me, leaving me empty save for the sick, unsteady fear flickering in my bones telling me alone, all alone. I could not claw my way out of the horror of it. I screamed for my mother on the first day; sobbed for her on the second; and on the third, the day of her funeral, sat numbly in an armchair with my eyes pulsing hellfire red—that is, until my aunt Patience arrived. Being forbidden to attend Mamma’s funeral felt as if I were spitting on her grave, and questions swarmed through my pate like worms through an apple.

What will they do with me now that she has gone? Assurances that I would always reside at Highgate House now seemed reliable as quicksand.

How did my mother come to die at all? She had taken a sudden bad turn, according to Agatha; Aunt Patience muttered of fits.

Why should I not see her put in the ground? Both agreed I should not be present, but neither would explain the reason.

I fell to my knees, tearing at my aunt’s stiff black skirts.

“Don’t bury Mamma without me there,” I begged. “However much you might have hated her, hate me still, please don’t do this. I won’t survive it.”

“Have you no control over your passions?” Aunt Patience’s toadlike face was ashen. “I ask for your own sake, you unprincipled animal. You will come to a bad end if—”

“I don’t care what end I come to, only let me—”

“That is a monstrous thing to say,” she cried, and then slapped me across the cheek.

Falling sideways, gasping, I clutched at the place where my skin throbbed and my teeth rang. Her slap was painful, but her visible disgust far worse.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, reaching for her wrist with my other hand. “Please, just—”

My aunt recoiled, striding towards the hall. “The situation is a hard one, Jane, but what you ask is impossible. Try to calm yourself. God sends comfort to the meek and the chaste, whilst the passionate inflict agonies upon themselves.”

Aunt Patience stopped—hand splayed on her broad belly, eyes frozen into hailstones.

“You are very like her, are you not,” she whispered. “The bitter fruit of a poisonous tree.”

The front door clicked shut.

Grief until then had bound me in spider’s silk and drained me with her pinchers. Afterwards, however, I wanted to inflict exquisite agonies upon Aunt Patience; and had I been informed that a few weeks later, I would serve her the deepest cut imaginable, I am not certain that I would not have smiled.

? ? ?

Morbidity has always been a close companion of mine. Hours were spent meditating on my lost kitten and all the ways it could have (must have) died because of my inflamed temper. My late father was the source of infinite questions—was my slender, sloping nose like his since it was not like my mother’s? After Mamma died, however, I thought of nothing save her lonesomeness under the earth; and when I did think of her in paradise, I next thought, but they’ll never allow me into heaven, and so I still will never see her again.

There are doubtless worse hobbies than meditating upon your dead mother, but nobody has ever suggested one to me.

Agatha knelt with me in the garret a week after the funeral, because I wanted to go through my mother’s trunk. For seven days, life had been a sickening seesaw between fear that calamity would befall me and the desire calamity would take me already and have done with it. Now I wanted to touch Mamma’s gowns and her gloves and her letters, as if I might combine them in a spell to summon her; even today, if witchcraft existed by means of toadstools and tinkers’ thumbs to bring her back, I should do so in an instant.