My Plain Jane (The Lady Janies #2)(10)

“I could get a job.”

“What job?”

“I could be a seamstress.”

“Your sewing is terrible,” Helen pointed out. “I love you, but you know it’s true.”

“I could wash clothes and press them.”

“Think of how chapped and red your little hands would get.”

“I could be a governess.”

Helen nodded thoughtfully. “You are a good teacher. And you like children. But you’re far too beautiful to be a governess.”

Helen was no different from the other ghosts in this regard. She thought Jane was beautiful, even though it was Helen, with her porcelain complexion, blue eyes, and long golden hair, who would have turned heads if she were still alive. “What does my appearance have to do with anything?” Jane asked.

“You’re so lovely that the master of the house wouldn’t be able to help falling in love with you,” Helen explained. “It would be a terrible scandal.”

Jane didn’t think that sounded so terrible. “I could handle it.”

“Trust me. It would end badly,” Helen said stubbornly.

“Please, Helen. We must do this. Say you’ll come with me. Say you’ll try.”

“All right. I’ll come with you. I’ll try,” said Helen.

They fell silent again. From outside Jane heard the mournful coo of a dove. Daylight was fast approaching. In a few hours, she had a French class to teach. She was quite good at French. And some Italian. She could conjugate Latin verbs. She could do maths. In spite of Lowood being such a hard place to grow up, she’d received a good education here. She’d studied classic literature and history and religion. She knew the rules of etiquette. She could embroider a pillowcase and knit socks (well, she’d only ever been able to finish one sock—two seemed overwhelming). She was adequate on the pianoforte, and more than proficient at painting and drawing and any kind of art. And she was a good teacher, she told herself. She’d make an excellent governess.

“You want to be a painter,” said Helen, as if she’d read Jane’s mind. “That’s what you should do. Be a famous painter.”

Jane scoffed at the idea of being a famous anything. “Yes, well, people aren’t posting job advertisements for famous painters at the moment.”

“They aren’t posting job advertisements for governesses, either.” This was true. Every week Jane scoured the job ads in the newspaper, seeking her escape from Lowood, and there had been nothing for governesses lately. It seemed that all the wealthy children in England were already being cared for.

“So we won’t be going anywhere at the moment,” Helen said.

“No,” Jane agreed glumly. “I suppose not.”





THREE


Alexander

The moment he stepped onto the grounds of Lowood, Alexander Blackwood was surrounded by ghosts.

Twenty-seven of them, in fact. An unusually high number.

Now, Alexander was no stranger to ghosts. Ghosts were his job. (His main job, that is. The job that paid the bills. His side job—well, more about that later.) But he wasn’t here for ghosts. He was here for a girl, the one he thought could be a seer. But instead he ended up with twenty-seven ghosts, twenty-six of whom were young girls, and one of whom wanted his murder solved.

“Are you listening?” asked the ghost. “I’ve been murdered.”

Alexander made a note in his notebook: Twenty-seven ghosts. One claims he’s been murdered.

The girls were all different ages, with different color hair and skin and eyes, and different—uh—names, too, presumably (although Alexander didn’t bother to make formal introductions), but the one thing they all had in common was the sad expressions that spoke of short, difficult lives without affection.

Well, that and the fact that they were all dead.

“Mr. Brocklehurst killed me,” said a transparent girl wearing a dress of colorless burlap. Her lips were tinged blue, as though she’d been very cold when she’d died. “He locked me in a closet for five hours. By the time anyone came to find me, I was dead.”

Alexander’s eyebrows rose.

“You needed to think about what you’d done,” said the ghost of Mr. Brocklehurst.

“He killed me, too,” claimed another girl. This one had red welts all over her arms and neck, with angry slashes across her skin like she’d tried to scratch the welts right off. “I’m allergic to burlap.”

(Hey, reader, it’s us again. We did some digging, and it seems as though burlap wasn’t produced until 1855. At least, that’s the popular theory. We did a little more digging and it turns out that Brocklehurst actually invented burlap just to make his students miserable, but it wasn’t widely known about until much later. Now you know.)

Alexander looked at the ghost of Mr. Brocklehurst, who just shrugged.

“Itching is good for the soul,” he said. “It inspires prayer.”

As Alexander walked up the stairs to the crumbling school building, the ghosts continued offering grievances against the late Mr. Brocklehurst, who countered every accusation with an excuse of some sort.

The door squeaked open before Alexander could knock, and another girl squinted out at him. This one was alive, we should mention.