Jane Steele(7)

Your father was un homme magnifique, and his eyes were the brown of sweet chocolate just as yours are, and he never stopped thinking of ways to make us safe, from my mother.

’E was as good a man as any, and no worse than some, from Agatha.

Don’t speak of him, for God’s sake, from Aunt Patience.

Now I knew he was a banker in Paris with an English solicitor friend my mother trusted; I imagined Jonathan Steele a positive hero of finance with sweeping moustaches, who had rescued my mother from penury with a flourish of his fancifully enormous pen.

“How did he meet Mamma?” I called from the top of the creaking garret stairs.

“You’ll use up all your chatter and be clean out o’ words, and then ’owever shall we pass the time, Miss Jane?” Agatha chided, beckoning.

I wondered over the unsettling notion of words running dry. My footsteps as I followed her made no more sound than the virtuous dead, fast asleep beneath their coverlets of stone.

? ? ?

Slowly, I recovered my appetite—and concurrently, my keen interest in rebellion.

My aunt Patience thought girls ought to be decorative. Indeed, Jane Eyre tucks herself away in a curtained alcove at the beginning of her saga, and thus at least attempts docility.

I was not a fictional orphan but a real one, however. Waking in the full blaze of the May afternoons, I would eat nothing save brown bread and butter for lunch, and the steaming milk soup Agatha made with sweet almonds, eggs, and cinnamon for my tea. My ugly—dare I say French—opinion of Aunt Patience kept her away temporarily, and the rest of the time I spoke low nonsense to the horses or slunk through the woods where the marsh grasses swooned into the embrace of the pond. In the stables, I could allow the stink of manure and clean sweat to calm me as I brushed my last remaining confidants; but in the forest, my musings turned darkly fantastical.

I will set fire to the main house, and then they will be sorry they made Mamma unhappy.

I will run away to Paris, where I will be awake only when the stars shine through the window and the boulevards are empty.

I will find my mother’s grave and live there off of dew and nectar.

True peace did not visit me; but at times, an edgy calm like falling asleep after a nightmare descended when I lost myself in melancholy.

At times, I suspected I was not alone.

As the days passed, my sense of being watched increased. Agatha gave me free rein apart from unlocking Mamma’s trunk every evening and packing satchels of apples for me to carry to the stables; she would never spy on me, I felt certain. The gardener was a wizened old thing, and the grooms paid me as little mind as did the servants at the main house. Patience Barbary thought the out-of-doors a treacherous bridge meant to convey her from one civilised structure to another.

Still I caught glimpses of another creature there in the trees, one with round eyes and a predator’s hungry stare; but by the time I understood that I was the prey, my fate had already been sealed.





THREE



I was a precocious actress in her eyes: she sincerely looked on me as a compound of virulent passions, mean spirit, and dangerous duplicity.


Invitations to the main house were rebuffed in the rudest manner I could think of: silence. Even adults who are frightened of children come to their senses sooner or later, however, and in early June, I opened a missive demanding I appear before Mrs. Patience Barbary at five o’clock for tea. When I entered the drawing room, I discovered that three people awaited me instead of two.

Aunt Patience presided over the ivory-and-green-striped settee, an expression of foregone success staining her froggish mouth. The fact that her full widow’s weeds looked no different after my mother’s death (how could they have?) made me long to slit wounds in the taffeta. Edwin, lips already faintly dusted with sugar from the lemon cakes, offered me a polite smile.

In that instant, I knew—as I think I had suspected—that Edwin had been the one spying upon me.

“Jane, this is Mr. Vesalius Munt of Lowan Bridge School. Mr. Munt, this is my niece, Jane.”

Doubtless the reader has heard cautionary reports of granite-eyed patriarchs who run schools for profit and, shall we say, misrepresent their amenities? You are partly prepared for what is to come, then. Mr. Munt was clad head to toe in black; his forehead was high, his sable boots neatly polished, and his mien sober. Here Mr. Munt’s superficial resemblance to fiction ended.

First, he seemed highly intelligent. He watched those around him closely; this was not a man who ignored the way I settled as far as I could from my aunt, nor who would remark upon it until the observation suited his interests.

Second, Mr. Vesalius Munt was handsome. He was aged somewhere between forty and fifty, but the map of his face—from thoughtful wrinkles to clear grey eyes to slender chin—suggested naturally benevolent inclinations and announced his regret at his self-imposed sternness of character.

Third, he was a tyrant, which returns us to the more familiar literary archetypes. He was a great whopping unrepentant tyrant, and he enjoyed the vocation, its artistry—I could see it in his perfectly disarranged black hair and his humbly clasped hands. I thought, with a squirming stomach, that here was a man who would set a snake over hot coals simply to watch it writhe.

“Miss Jane Steele,” he greeted me. “You have been orphaned within the month, I am sorry to hear. God’s ways are inscrutable, but trust in Him nevertheless brings light to the darkest of valleys.”