Jane Steele (11 page)

The instant we entered the tavern, Clarke leaning weakly against my arm, I spied him: Nick, the driver who had conveyed me here so long ago. Swiftly, I ushered us to a table. A cheerful wench wearing an apron which perhaps had been used to muck out the stables previous to dinner service grunted at my order and, upon her departure, I leant across the table to grasp Clarke’s frail hands.

“Eat your curry when it arrives,
slowly
. I need to speak with someone.”

“Who could you possibly know here?” Clarke asked, but I was already striding towards the coachman.

Nick sat, nursing a pint, staring at grooves carved in the bar by time and dissolution. The same forces had done a workmanlike job with his face, for his mouth was bordered by stark crevasses, and his once-red nose had abandoned its unheeded alarums and subsided to a sulky yellow.

“Nick, I think.” I nearly coughed at the ripe cloud surrounding him. His boots were worn, which gave me hope, and his fingernails were cracked. “It’s a long time ago we met, but I hope you—”

“I dun’t know ye,” he slurred, slurping at the beer. “I live on the highway, Lunnon to Manchester, Manchester to Lunnon, picking up fares. Never a respit’, never two nights i’ the same bloody place. Unless yer a sprite after hauntin’ my carriage, and ye
look
a sprite right enough, by Jesus, I dun’t—”

“You brought me here when I was a girl. I gave you a potted rabbit luncheon I couldn’t eat for nerves.”

“Chestnut—he’s a horse, mind—knows me better than me own pillow, us having spent considerable more time together, and I’ve never clapped eye on ye before. I tell ye, I
never stop moving
—”

“‘The world is a hard place, and I live in it alone,’” I whispered.

Flinching, Nick narrowed red-rimmed eyes at me. “By George,” he husked at length. “Is that ye in the flesh, then? The wee miss wi’ the tragic eyes I dun brought here from Highgate House? Yer alive?”

“And in need of your help.”

Nick spat, recalling to my mind his alacrity at this skill. “
Help
, ye say? What daft breed o’ thickheaded are—”

“I gave you a basket full of food once. Now I’ll pay you six shillings to carry my friend and me to London.”

“Stomached enough o’ Lowan Bridge, then?” he puzzled, wiping his brow with his wrist.

“You couldn’t have chosen a more appropriate phrase.”

“And now I’m meant to risk my hide when Vesalius Munt hasn’t let a charge disappear in nigh—”

“He’s dead.” My eyes brimmed—for myself and Clarke, for dread of shackles and scaffolds. “There will be no consequences to you, Nick, upon my honour.”

Were I to picture my honour, I imagine it might resemble a less attractive than usual tadpole; Nick owned no inkling of this, however, and his bleary eyes boggled.

“Mr. Munt dead? The shite-arsed bastard what bilks the factory lads from here to three counties hence?”

“Bilks them?”

“Bilks them!” Nick cried, livening at last. “Aye, he never delivers a meal at discount save he’s less ten portions promised. Says as
benefactors can’t give beyond their means or they’d turn paupers themselves! I’d love to see that feller stuck through the—”

“Someone beat you to it. Oh, please, Nick! We can’t go back, and you know how hard the world is.”

Nick considered, thoughtfully gathering spittle. I thought then that kindness had not deserted him, and I think now that he needed my money, for he did not look well. We are all of us daily decaying, after all; the speed is our only variant.

Nick spat; Nick finished his beer.

“I’ll oblige ye, after I’ve rounded up the other fares what have already paid.” He took my coins and dropped them straightaway upon the bar as he nodded to the serving lass. “But if ye thought the world was hard before . . . cor, will Lunnon ever throw ye to the wolves. She were suckled by a wolf mother, they say,” he added with a faint flash of his old dire humour.

“At least she was fed,” I muttered as Nick called for the bill to be settled.

When he departed, I returned to our table and passed a gentle hand over Clarke’s pallid brow, promising to return upon the instant after using the privy and imploring her to be patient as she finished her modest meal. The pressure within my cranium had grown nearly unbearable by then; half-frantic with fear, sidling behind her so that my semi-conscious friend might not see, I bore my trunk to the outhouse, barred the door, and deposited my bloodied uniform therein. It was not a perfect solution—but it was foul enough to serve, and anyhow, I reminded myself grimly, it seemed that most of my solutions to conundrums fell considerably shy of the mark.

•   •   •

B
y nightfall, Clarke and I were seated together upon the same threadbare object masquerading as a cushion on which I had ridden to Lowan Bridge seven years previous. Across from us sat a
lean farmer and full-bosomed girl with a fresh cap and apron who I thought must be seeking domestic employment, as she looked such equal parts terrified and jubilant.

“London,” Clarke whispered, resting her head upon my shoulder. The meal had thoroughly drained her, her body flummoxed by bounty; lacing our fingers together, she settled our hands in her lap. “We’ll find a new home, a better one. Anyhow, you’re home.”

Wincing freely since Clarke could not see me with her head tucked under my chin, I squeezed her fingers. I ought to have felt trepidatious, reader; I ought to have felt both culpable and contrite.

I felt thrilled in knowing that upon the morrow, a worthy battle could be fought—even if I, poor leaky vessel of the devil’s and never of God’s, was chosen as its champion. No less, I felt achingly grateful, and I watched the blue sweeps of blood through Clarke’s emaciated wrist for an hour or more. Knowing that home was hateful to us both, I imagined that her calling me by the word meant I was expedient, or sturdy; but if I could only keep her hand in mine, I knew I would give my four limbs and my heart for the privilege, becoming instead four walls and a roof.

Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.

S
hortly, reader, you shall experience chronological leaps which may startle the timid.
Jane Eyre
contains the delightful passage,
A new chapter in a novel is something like a new scene in a play
, thus I likewise embrace abrupt shifts even as I abhor the imminent subject matter.

We arrived in London, Clarke and I, homeless and horridly inexperienced, as coral dawn lit the charred air draped over the centre of the British Empire.

“Oh!” Clarke snatched at me as we crossed a deep wheel gouge, further slowing the already painfully lethargic Chestnut.

I steadied my friend, but said nothing; for never had I fathomed such a sight as passed before me like a parade through the coach window.

Some cities bustle, some meander, I have read; London blazes, and it incinerates. London is the wolf’s maw. From the instant I arrived there, I loved every smouldering inch of it.

A lad hunched against a shoddy dressmaker’s dummy slumbered on, cradled by his faceless companion. The atmosphere was redolent—meat sat piled up to a shop door’s limit of some six feet, the butcher sharpening massive knives before his quarry. Yesterday’s cabbage was crushed underfoot, and tomorrow’s cackling geese were arriving in great crates, ready to kill. So early, the square we passed through ought to have been populated only by spectres. Instead, sounds reverberated from all directions—treble notes from a bamboo flute; the breathy scream of a sardine costermonger; the bass rumble of a carrot vendor, his cart piled with knobby red digits, shouting as his donkey staggered in the slick.

It was not welcoming, but it was galvanising. Arguing with London was useless; she was inexorable, sure as the feral dawn.

“Where
are
we?” Clarke fretted. “This is nowhere near where my parents live.”

“I haven’t the faintest notion.” Bending, I touched my brow to hers. “Are you ready, though?”

Clarke grinned—an easy grin which made me long to buy her hearty sausage and pastry breakfasts. The carriage halted before a dingy public house with a small paved yard. Clarke stumbled out with her carpetbag and I followed, sharp pinpricks running up and down my legs.

“Thank you,” I called up. Nick sat like a turtle in his shell on his high plank seat. “I hope that one day—”

“Neither of us hope to see t’other again, ye mad child.” He took a long pull from his flask.

“I’m grateful, though. With all my heart, I am.”

“Then let it be fer this advice. I’ve food enough and drink enough to keep what they call a life, but that’s all’s I can say on the subject.
Treat yerself better—keep yerself a good girl, and sleep in a bed wi’out interruptions. Can ye manage that?”

“Yes.” I stepped back, passing an arm around Clarke’s horridly small waist. “I can, I promise.”

Nick had already snapped the jangling reins and pulled away—a man who lived not much better than his horse did. Meanwhile, I knew precisely which vice he was warning me against, and in starker detail than he might have imagined; words like
virtue
and
chastity
and
fallen
were lobbed over our heads like so many shuttlecocks at Lowan Bridge, but I had read Mr. Munt’s “love letters,” and so understood the mechanics of the practice.

Some form of employment had to be found, and at once, for when I caught Clarke’s bright green eye and thought of all which could befall her—rough hands against her freckled shoulders, chapped lips at her slim throat—a swell of disgust rose. Becky Clarke, in a way which had not been true since my mother’s sad, soft-edged smile and her cool hand against my cheek, belonged to
me
.

“First, a celebratory breakfast,” I decided. “The man across the street with the sign for hot ham sandwiches—doesn’t he seem like an expert toaster of cheese and meat?”

“Indeed. And after eating the best ham sandwiches in all of London?”

I lifted my luggage as the smile faded from my face, willing myself not to say,
I haven’t the faintest idea.

•   •   •

D
ark days followed, and far darker nights.

After inquiring after lodgings, all priced too dear, we passed the night in the back room of a public house, Clarke’s flaxen hair mingling with the straw strewn across our shared pillow. We passed a night in the spare room of a cottage outside town when we retreated;
but we could think of no employment thereabouts and returned to the city. We passed a night hemorrhaging precious funds upon a cheap hotel, knowing we had no means of replacing the currency. We passed a night propped one against the other on an empty crate, dozing fitfully, until a peeler arrived to tidy the red-brick alleyways he imagined belonged to him.

Sssshriiiek!
cried his whistle, and off Clarke and I went like arrows from a bow, both knowing that we could not live this way for long.

For five days we wandered, growing steadily, silently despairing, washing our faces with rainwater trapped in old cisterns and weathered statuary. We were not wretched, nor were we rich. We simply did not appear to be trustworthy—we were blue dirt, green clouds—nothing about us made sense. Over and over, we crossed the fat, sombre river seeking new neighbourhoods, but all were either putrid hovels with mutton bones scattered about for the snarling dogs or else brick buildings with maniacally pristine windowpanes, and both frightened us. If approaching a cheery town house with a few cracked vases in the window and a
ROOMS TO LET
sign, we were turned away for want of references. Should we broach a wreck reeking of sewage and solitude, we would be sent packing on suspicion of thievery (which was, I own, a fair criticism).

“It isn’t like I thought,” Clarke said.

We had crossed London Bridge again, and I believe now that we were in Southwark, for though the street names blurred feverishly, I recall the thick sparks and steam and soot of the train station and the tooth-jarring clatter of the engines. Having located a squat public house with dull brass fixtures, we had stopped for a pot of tea, and were now loath to leave the place, instead having rested upon an empty wine barrel in the alley behind, the remains of trampled lettuce surrounding us.

“It isn’t like I thought either. There’s so . . .”

“So much of it,” Clarke sighed.

Her skeletal arm slid off my waist when I stood. “You rest here—you look positively done and I’ve a lucky feeling. I’ll be back directly.”

Clarke wanted to believe me and did not, which hurt horribly; she watched me quit the corridor.

“Don’t leave me.” For the first time, she sounded frightened. “You wouldn’t, would you?”

“Never,” I called back.

I meant it, but which direction was I to take? Clarke and I were educated innocents, a condition resembling stupid clerks or intelligent kitchen slaveys, which is to say useless. Cognisant we would be desperate enough to sell practically anything unless we found regular employment, and terrified of watching the small nest egg I had stolen crack and dribble away, I ploughed through piles of mismatched boots and discarded nut husks, knowing that I had never yet failed to find an opportunity when I set my mind to it and still at age sixteen foolish enough to trust myself.

My stomach was empty, my mind echoing its cavernous snarl. The twisting streets with the brown water trickling between the stones led me farther from Clarke, and it occurred to me then that, were I a good person, I should leave her. Becky Clarke would live better without the hindrances of my demons and my doubts. Surely, were I to vanish, she would return to her parents, and surely being ignored was preferable to being penniless? Kicking through clamshells as I neared the great sluggish foul river, I hesitated.

Do I love Clarke enough to say good-bye to her?

I did not, I realised.

Then I heard a strange voice calling out.

“Most ’orrible and beastly murder done! Most haudacious and black crime committed!”

A man of middle age stood with a sheaf of yellow papers,
crying out the latest atrocities. He was bent over—I hesitated to call him hunchbacked, but he flirted with the appellation—a heavy, downward-leaning human whom I could imagine tracking rabbits like a bloodhound. He owned a bloodhound’s jaw too, a great slab on either side of his face framing his crooked teeth with fleshy drapery. His hair was russet and his eyes a hard yellowish hazel like petrified wood.

“Murder most ’einous!” he cried. “Murder most hunnatural! Penny a page, miss.”

Blinking in astonishment, I reached for the broadside. He growled and I paid him belatedly, walking a few paces away to read:

MOST FOUL AND DELIBERATE MURDER OF A COUNTRY SCHOOLMASTER.

Mr. Vesalius Munt, a most upstanding gentleman of E—— parish, was found stuck like a pig through the gullet and left to die in a pool of his own red gore. The villain what competrated this most perspicable act, an act sufficient to strike thunderific fear into the hearts of even the most auspicillary citizens, remains at large. Many schoolgirls of Lowan Bridge have gone missing; thirty or so have vanished into the idyllious countryside, two hundred more staying under the most dutiful and meritransible guard of their teachers, the rest having returned home.

Mr. Munt was lauded as the most distinguished philanderist, and a knife was shoved so far into his throat that his molars suffered renumerous damages, according to experts. The most authoritive and ingeniable Inspector Sam Quillfeather has been assigned the task of hunting
his killer, and the townspeople are most certifitive that his quest will end in the stringing up of the traitorious fiend’s neck like the most veriable chicken.

A finger snapped beside my ear.

I had not fainted, but a murky tide swam before my eyes, all grey silt and shrinking terror. The patterer’s fleshy face—for he was a patterer of dark deeds, and I had been identifying every way possible to obtain money whilst preventing my legs from parting company—hovered over mine, seeming at once fascinated and annoyed that I had been so affected. He wore funereal black, but had enhanced this theme with a scarlet cravat and trousers to answer, the effect being that one grew fretful over whether he had just been stabbed in the throat and the legs.

“What ails you?” he demanded.

“I went to school there,” I murmured, scarcely knowing what I was saying.

Secrets, reader, are tidal—they swell and recede, and my greater misdeeds had forced this lesser intelligence from my lips, a river spilling over its bed; at the unexpected name
Sam Quillfeather
, the constable like an embodied question mark who had peppered me with queries after Edwin’s death and apparently been promoted, my spine turned to jelly. The only good news the article contained was that so many had disappeared, for our absence—should it occur to Inspector Quillfeather that a schoolgirl was capable of stabbing her headmaster—would thereby seem much more natural.

“Eh?” he exclaimed. “You were there, ye say?”

“I merely—I was confused. I’ll just—”

“A man in my line o’ work would pay dear in order to print someone’s hinsider perpinion, ’specially if you saw the cold dead corpse, like. Did you?”

He winked, and then I understood—he expected me to lie in order to earn a commission in exchange for the tale.

“Yes,” said I, attempting to appear a bad perjurer, which is a bemusing trick and not one I recommend the layman acquire.

The man chuckled, jowls quaking. “Name’s Mr. Hugh Grizzlehurst. And yours?”

“Miss Jane Steele.”

We shook hands, I and this purveyor of tragedy, as an idea gently hatched in my brain.

“There’s another Lowan Bridge girl with me, and we’ve need of lodgings for the night. I’ll exchange my story for our board.”

Mr. Grizzlehurst nodded. “If it’s an hextraordinary story, I’d not begrudge two nights. Tell Bertha—Bertha’s me wife—that ’appy circumstance sent you, and I’ll be along when I’ve hexpleted my stock. The ’ouse is twelve Elephant Lane, Rotherhithe—if you hespy the White Lead Manufactory and the Saltpetre Works, you’ve gone too far.”

Weak with shock and relief, I shook hands. Meeting Mr. Grizzlehurst seemed one of those felicitous coincidences which occur so seldom in fiction—for in fiction, such blessings can scarce be believed, whilst in life they are shared with future generations as thrilling tales of danger averted and luck seized.

I say that it
seemed
just the gift we had been seeking; I have since grown more cautious. Nature’s boons are equally plentiful and random, but I have never yet encountered a more capricious mistress—save perhaps for her daughter, madly mercurial London.

•   •   •

C
larke and I, pulses thin with nerves, trudged past warehouses and shipyards, past a harelipped Italian organ boy whose eyes followed us soulfully as he ground his instrument, past earnest
geranium boxes tucked under begrimed windows, and finally entered Rotherhithe where it perched upon the edge of the Thames. A whaler, salt in his beard and a blue marine glint in his single eye, directed us to Elephant Lane and trudged away as we knocked at number twelve.

The door creaked open. Mrs. Grizzlehurst stood there, blinking—a dull woman with flat greyish hair and an overbite which rendered her resemblance to a rodent more profound than she might have ideally preferred. Bertha Grizzlehurst’s close-set eyes were amiable, however, and her dry lips even spasmed in a theoretical smile.

“I am Miss Rebecca Clarke and this is Miss Jane Steele,” Clarke introduced us.

No answer emerged.

“We’re looking for Mrs. Bertha Grizzlehurst?” I explained.

The woman who was probably Mrs. Grizzlehurst continued affably saying nothing.