Jane Steele(8)

My aunt primly tucked her chin within her neck. “She is a clever enough girl, only mannerless and stubborn, Mr. Munt. Her intelligence needs moulding into humility and her character into an orderly Christian one.”

“Then I won’t remind you of my mother any longer?” I hissed.

Aunt Patience whipped out a glint of lacquered wood and began fanning herself with black lace. She wanted something between us, even if a scrap of cobwebby cloth.

Mr. Munt’s gaze flickered between us like stage swords, all shine and speed and subtle games. “Your aunt has informed me that your mother was . . . troubled,” he said with tremendous care. “It is not unusual for the children of lunatics to—”

“Mamma was not a lunatic!” I cried, aghast.

“No indeed,” seconded Edwin in a fawning manner which sickened me.

“Her constitution was delicate.” My aunt sounded like the teeth were being pried from her head. “Artists are often highly strung.”

“Art is a curse,” Vesalius Munt agreed, shifting on the hard cane chair. “An infection eating away at godly reserves of abnegation, chastity, and meekness. Show me a contented artist, Mrs. Barbary, and I will show you a dabbler—a pretender, a drudge. True artists belong to a miserable race. Jane, they tell me that your passions are strange ones, and your upbringing . . . eccentric. I run a school, you see, and your aunt thinks you would make an excellent pupil there.”

The word school provoked the first sensation other than dull misery I had felt since before I could recall. Mamma had been at boarding school as a girl, in the south of France. On holidays they walked to the glimmering seashore, where pebbles clattered under their slippers and the sea spray chased them shrieking with laughter back to the dunes. She learnt both dancing and painting there.

Going to school already seemed adventurous, but my fingers tingled when I realised it would also be imitative of my mother.

Remembering our cottage, however, I was swiftly anchored back to Highgate House; how could I leave everything familiar when I was already so lost? Fear leached the happy nerves away.

Additionally, I was an artful little liar, and what befell artful little liars at school?

“I should rather not go,” I whispered.

Aunt Patience snapped her fan.

“To send me away with a stranger—”

“Mr. Munt will make you useful, as orphaned children must—”

“Don’t banish me,” I pleaded, standing.

“The matter is settled.”

“It is not either!” I shouted in most unchildlike fashion.

Aunt Patience thrust her heaving bosom forward. “You horrid puppet, only listen to reason for once. You must find a vocation, or—”

“I own Highgate House!” I cried. “Mamma told me so. You’re only saying this to me because you hated her.”

“I am saying this to you because you must become productive. And if you knew how good I was to your mother after all the suffering she caused, you would drop to your knees and beg my forgiveness.”

Is that what I must do, then? My lips were quivering, my guts knotted. Humiliate myself so I might keep what belongs to me?

“Is flattery what you’re after?” I hissed. “But of course, that’s why you loathed poor Mamma so—she was exquisite, and you were never flattered a day in your life.”

Sulphurous silence spread throughout the parlour. Mr. Munt studied me so intently he made my neck prickle, and Cousin Edwin gazed in a horrified stupor, his breaths straining his waistcoat buttons. Aunt Patience only smiled, a smile like a gate slamming closed and locking.

“I didn’t mean that,” I choked out. “Truly. But I want to remain here with . . . with everything I have left of her.”

“As well you should. Mummy, you can’t send her away!” Edwin protested. “Jane is my only playmate.”

Aunt Patience said, in much too babying a tone for a lad of thirteen, “There now, my sweet, soon your tutor will have taught you all he knows and you yourself will go to school and find splendid new companions.”

“No,” Edwin moaned, burying his face in his hands. “No, I will miss her, you can’t. It isn’t fair.”

“Quite touching to see such devotion in young relations.” Mr. Munt’s stately wrinkles creased approvingly, and he brushed imaginary dust from the knee of his trouser. “It gives me every hope that Jane is indeed redeemable, to have inspired such affection.”

Finding none of these observations complimentary and growing steadily more unnerved by Vesalius Munt, whose silvery eyes seemed coins at the bottom of a too-deep pool, I edged towards the door.

“Where do you think you are going, my dear little girl?” Mr. Munt asked, kindness seeping from his tone like blood from a gash.

“I cannot stay for tea.” A noose was tightening round my throat.

“Now, Jane,” Mr. Munt purred, rising. “You are only proving your dear aunt’s point by acting so irrationally. Come here, allow me to examine you, determine your strengths, and perhaps we shall yet find a place for you at Lowan Bridge School.”

I was off like a hare; my aunt looked after me in unfeigned alarm, and Edwin gave a small wail.

Mr. Munt, I saw as I glanced behind, meditated on me with his dashing black head cocked: the look of a man who has spied a hill and vowed to crest it, for no reason other than to see what lies upon the other side.