Jane Steele(9)

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When I returned to Highgate House many years thereafter, I viewed the ravine again, and felt as distant from it as a child does looking at a terrible cave in a picture book. Thus I can describe it as my twenty-four-year-old self perfectly rationally. Our cottage stood at the edge of the woods, with the sweet brown duck pond lying to the west of us. If one passed the pond, the forest which bordered our property gave way to a ridge and thence to a sharp declivity like a small crevasse populated by violet monkshood and sharp wild grasses.

I felt Mr. Munt’s eyes searing the back of my skull long after my escape was accomplished, so I repaired to the woods.

My curls stuck to my brow when I reached the trees, glued by means of animal fear to my skin, and I smeared them back. We had pinned two braids like a crown atop my head, but several strands had bolted and I must have looked a malicious dryad there, surrounded by leaf and bracken. Light slanted through the branches as if it possessed physical weight that evening, making prison bars of shadows and penitents’ benches of fallen trees. Wandering, I calmed myself.

I should not go to Lowan Bridge with Mr. Munt.

I need not go to Lowan Bridge with Mr. Munt.

I will not go to Lowan Bridge with Mr. Munt.

“Are you hurt, Jane?”

Too frightened to shriek, I spun about with my hand clapped over my mouth. Cousin Edwin stood ten feet away from me, a cautious grin pasted over his face, the sort people who are terrible with horses (as I am not) think will calm skittish beasts.

“What do you mean?” I gasped.

Edwin came no closer, but pointed his index finger. His dull hair was half-lit and half-hid in the shade of a crooked branch; he seemed a stitched-together creature from a puppet pageant, the sort in which spouses are beaten within an inch of their lives.

“You’re bleeding.” He began to walk again.

Looking down, I saw that I had scratched my arm upon a bramble without noticing. A trace of blood wept from the shallow gouge.

“Here,” Cousin Edwin said when he had reached me.

He breathed harder as he wound his handkerchief over my arm: round and round, binding the cut, forehead beetling in concentration. Edwin smelled of lemon cake and the faintly old aroma he always carried, as if he had been born in a bed of camphor and cheese rinds.

“I won’t let them,” he announced. “I hate that she thought to send you to school. I am the man of this house, and you shall stay here with us, Jane. Don’t be afraid.”

I watched him tie off the cloth—like a bandage, yes, and like a silken slave’s cuff, and like the collar at the end of a leash.

“I’m not afraid.”

Edwin glanced up, pale green eyes glowing. “You were afraid—of that horrid Mr. Munt. You needn’t be. He won’t take you away from us.”

Edwin plucked a leaf from my hair and placed the memento in his trouser pocket—a habit I had never liked, but never thought quite so pitiful.

“Did you forgive me?” He rocked on his heels. “About the secrets game—we’ve hardly spoken since. I was only repeating something rude I heard Cook say. Your mother was too beautiful to avoid cruel gossip, don’t you think? Shake hands?”

Edwin’s pudgy hand thrust before my face. I shook; for an idiot, he was clever to perceive that complimenting my late mother would work miracles.

Instead of letting go my hand, he pulled me closer.

“Do you want to know what my favourite secret is?” he breathed into the space between my eyes.

I swallowed. If I said no, he would rage, pout, fume for days, so I angled my head. He put his rosy mouth to my ear.

“The time in the trap when I showed you, and you never screamed. You’re every bit as bad as I am. You liked it.”

He drew back fractionally. His grip tightened, and whilst I searched for words to tell him that no, opening his trousers had not been a bond between us and that screaming clearly ought to have occurred to me, he chewed his underlip until it was scarlet.

Then he grinned brightly.

“You’re not screaming now either.”

“Let go of my arm,” I ordered.

The breeze sent kindly fingertips through our hair, jays calling from their shadowy canopies, and now I was frightened—mortally—of the woods which were leaf curtained and the birds which could not help me with whatever strange sort of trouble this was.

Edwin did not let go. “Let’s start a new game.”

“Stop it, I tell you. What game?” I demanded.

“I want to know what the inside of your mouth tastes like.” Cousin Edwin leant down.

I struck him as hard as I could across the face, and he was startled enough to let go, and I had not known until then what it meant to run.

The light shone brighter, and the wind picked up, and I had just burst through the trees in the direction of civilisation when Edwin caught me. We both tumbled to the ground and I swiped at him, shouting his name and Stop and he laughed easily and pinned my wrists to the earth at the top of the ravine where the twigs pricked my back and the sky seemed a great billowing, purpling tent above the looming forest.

His lips met my neck; his tongue shoved at my mouth. I kicked and kicked, limbs transforming into weapons even as my heart churned pure black fear through my veins. Edwin pinned me with his weight and he had transformed too now, hard where he ground against my thigh, red where my fist had stung his cheek, and My body isn’t working, nothing is working, I thought, so I used something else.