Jane Steele (12 page)

The wind from the Thames scraped across our necks as I glanced worriedly at Clarke; we had made our way from the bridge through market gardens and occasional meadows, rejoicing as the stench of refuse faded and the aromas of maritime saline and humble beds of mint met our nostrils. Rotherhithe was actively being bullied by the metropolis, however; upon nearing the waterfront, the sunlight failed to reach the cobbles as the rickety buildings grew thicker and taller. Huge draught horses lugging wagons of timber passed, making us feel even tinier than we did already. I badly wanted a meal and a bed, and the same for Clarke.

“Your husband asked for our testimony regarding a recent murder,” Clarke attempted.

Mrs. Grizzlehurst’s smile spread towards her ears; this time she stepped back, and we followed.

The place was shabby, but so impeccably kept that no one could
sneer at it; the hearthstone shone like a riverbed, and the irregular panes of glass fitted into the windows had been carefully cut, sparkling in a frenetic rainbow of tonic greens and medicinal ambers and bottle blues. The chimney leaked smoke in a friendly fashion, as if it wanted to join in the conversation, and a misshapen iron pot was just coming to the boil.

“Lodgings.” Mrs. Grizzlehurst jerked her head upwards; her voice proved harsh but friendly, like the buzzing of a bee.

“Excuse me?” I replied.

“Low rates, breakfast gratis. He’s only been gone these two days, has Mr. Buckle, but I’ve cleaned it plenty thorough.” Mrs. Grizzlehurst waved her knife at a narrow staircase, then dropped a coarsely chopped onion into the pot. A pair of lobsters from a basket followed, flailing against their demise as they were boiled alive.

Clarke and I ascended the staircase, confused but equally curious. There we found a half-height garret room complete with bed, pot, washbasin, and—wonder of wonders—a skylight through which the coral and violet sunset yet gleamed. My friend sucked in a happy breath.

“Might we—”

“I hope so,” I agreed instantly.

“But how will—”

“I’ve a plan,” I discovered.

Our hostess, when we returned downstairs, lifted a cleaver as she prepared to make two lobsters do for four bellies. In our absence, a skillet of roasted potatoes had appeared along with a cask of porter, two glasses already poured.

“Day after tomorrow,” Mrs. Grizzlehurst concluded, as if she had been conducting a conversation between her ears.

“Beg pardon?” Clarke requested.

“He’ll trade two nights for two accounts. You can start paying the day after tomorrow.”

Holding up my hands, I said, “We’ve only modest—”

“The room can’t be empty.” Gooseflesh sprang to life along Mrs. Grizzlehurst’s wiry arms. “You’ll pay the day after tomorrow.”

I took this to mean that the Grizzlehursts danced upon the lip of penury. My conscientious Clarke had just opened her mouth to explain our own lack of gainful occupation when Mr. Grizzlehurst burst through the door, booming exultations in great volleys.

“If I never see such a day for hexceptional sales, it ain’t my fault.” Laughing, Hugh Grizzlehurst showed teeth resembling indifferently worn pencils. “This young lady with the fey looks is a good homen, Bertha—a positivical homen, I tell you.”

His wife set out potatoes and a modest pat of butter.

“Is this the other heyewitness?” Mr. Grizzlehurst captured Clarke’s delicate hand, which I found myself irrationally resenting. “An ’onour, miss.”

“Likewise,” Clarke managed.

“Mr. Grizzlehurst,” I interjected, “I should like to propose that we lodge upstairs; in exchange, rather than pay you directly, I would assist you.”

A silence fell; our host’s twiglike masses of eyebrows descended.

“’Ere now.” Mr. Grizzlehurst thrust his face into mine, jowls swinging like pendulums. “True enough Mr. Buckle hasphyxiated down at the granary, but you’ve habsconded from school by your own hadfession. Now I’m to suffer the keeping o’ you?”

Clarke bristled, and I pressed her toe with my boot.

“You write up murders for a living,” I reminded him. “Well, I’ve read the
Newgate Calendar
back to front, and I’ve been educated by the renowned Mr. Vesalius Munt. I know you didn’t believe me, but it’s true. I offer stylistic improvements and new material in exchange for room and board.”

“’Eavens above us, hexisely what manner of improvements are
you a-thinking of?” Mr. Grizzlehurst growled. “My customers dote on my turn o’ phrase.”

“Think what fields we could expand into together!” I coaxed. “Gallows ballads, last confessions!”

“They live upstairs and will work for breakfast,” Mrs. Grizzlehurst said.

Hugh Grizzlehurst slammed a fist upon the table, still vigorous despite his bowed back and drooping face. “Why them? We’ve money enough for the room to be hempty a few nights.”

“They live upstairs,” Bertha Grizzlehurst insisted, though her face paled to match the lobster flesh peeking from the shells.

“I’ve no need o’ hassistance when it comes to my broadsides! My broadsides is known ’ither and yon and every street betwixt!”

“I don’t think
positivical
is a word,” Clarke observed.

“Can you prove positivically that it hain’t?” he shouted in high dudgeon.

“No,” I hastily owned, “but wouldn’t it be better to employ words which actually exist?”

“Hexistence
nothing
.” He regarded me with an outraged eye. “You lot will hexplicate how Mr. Vesalius Munt came to have his neck spitted like a guinea fowl, and then—”

“The room
can’t be empty
!”

The shriek—high but thin, like the feral cry of a shrew—rendered all three of us mute. Following this decree, Mrs. Grizzlehurst, three plates balanced on her left arm and a fourth in her right hand, set the meal upon the table.

When finished, she sat and stared at her husband; a silence of grotesque dimensions ensued.

“We’ll sup first,” Mr. Grizzlehurst said contritely, “and then—
then
, mind—we can talk about halternatives.”

Clarke and I ate as Mr. Grizzlehurst slurped from a lobster shell;
Mrs. Grizzlehurst only gazed at her plate, relief softening her ratlike features. After supper had ended, I jotted down an account of Mr. Munt’s murder, prudently leaving out my guilt whilst doubling the gore. I did not need to ask whether it would suit; it was a mingling of my memory and imagination, and as such was criminally engaging.

Hugh Grizzlehurst read my work, snorting in approval.

“I decide which crimes deserve hadvertisement,” he admonished.

“Of course.”

“You get not a cent—just lodgings, that’s
hessential
.”

“Absolutely.”

“And what’ll
she
do, then?” he demanded, pointing at Clarke.

“Teach music lessons,” Clarke said dreamily. “All we must do is find a piano, and I shall partner with the owner quick as thinking.”

“Well,” said Mr. Grizzlehurst. He regarded his spouse as if struck by sudden melancholy. “They live upstairs, then, it’s settled.”

Smiling, Mrs. Grizzlehurst cleared the plates and uttered not another word that day . . . nor the day after that, nor the day after that, which ought to have set off plentiful warning bells in my ears and did not, more’s the pity for everyone involved.

•   •   •

C
larke set out to partner with a pianist upon the morrow. A week later, having failed in many attempts, she disappeared one morning and sent me into a hair-tearing panic—wondering whether she had met with misadventure, wondering whether she had tired of me. She materialised ten minutes after supper ended (which Mrs. Grizzlehurst always served us whether we had paid her the extra fourpence or not) with three shillings, which she pressed into my palm.

“I stood upon the street corner, practicing, before meeting with Mr. Jones, but I needn’t bother over using his piano.” Her smile engulfed her pretty face despite the small scale of her lips. “I always
thought I had a knack for music, though Miss Lilyvale’s praise wasn’t precisely encouraging.”

“You made this much warming up your voice?” I stared stupidly at my hand.

“Imagine what I’ll earn when I’m doing it on purpose,” she concluded, skipping upstairs to wash.

Thus Clarke settled into an unlikely occupation as a street singer, trilling “Cherry Ripe” and “Poor Old Mam” whilst I penned atrocities; had we not been educated at Lowan Bridge School, learning daily despite our sorrows, I shudder to picture what would have become of us. She was even happy, I think, warbling like a strangely technical songbird, whilst I took heinous tales from my employer and translated them to actual English, with sufficient spilt viscera to please everyone.

These might have been idyllic circumstances, but they were not.

Mr. Hugh Grizzlehurst’s behaviour when drunk owned peculiarities which it failed to evince when he was sober; furthermore, these whimsical quirks tended to be visited upon the person of Mrs. Bertha Grizzlehurst. In fairness, Mr. Grizzlehurst only imbibed when he had been unsuccessful, and—as my help and his experience rendered us jointly successful—this was seldom. When every other month, however, the British Empire had been distressingly peaceable, Mr. Grizzlehurst would arrive home with a jug of gin which could either have been imbibed or employed to strip the paint from the chipped green rocking chair.

When Clarke and I had retreated upstairs, ducking to avoid the low slant of the ceiling beams, we would hear shouting. At times, the shouting would prove the climax, and we should find at dawn Mr. Grizzlehurst snoring upon the knotted rug. At other times, shouting would prove insufficient to Mr. Grizzlehurst’s purposes, and the sharp crack of a slap or two would follow, and Clarke’s entire body
would flinch alongside mine as I set my teeth hard against each other.

“What can we do?” Clarke whispered the third time this happened, shifting up on one elbow to stare at me with her nightgown slipping over her shoulder.

I did not know. Bertha Grizzlehurst was silent for days on end, ugly as her husband, and relentlessly calm; and now that I knew the reason for her insistence upon our lodging there, I suspected we were already doing the task she had planned for whatever tenant occupied the garret: we were witnesses, which went a long ways towards stopping a real crime from ever occurring.

“Nothing,” said I. “We are here to prevent things going too far. It isn’t our business.”

Clarke settled her head between my neck and collarbone, smelling of starlight and lavender as she always did, and murmured, “Then whose business is it?”

Pondering, I sifted her hair through my fingers. I was not, even at age sixteen, foolish enough to suppose that love and marriage always kept company; my mother had loved my father to distraction, but I had never seen it, and as for the union our former music teacher might have enjoyed, the topic was best left unexplored. Theoretically, however, some form of affection was meant to be involved—and though I could only love hungrily, I could not imagine ever striking Clarke if I had been a man and she a woman, no matter what she may have done.

No, it is not my business,
I concluded.

But it could be,
I thought next, shifting and afterwards falling into a troubled slumber.

“Dread remorse when you are tempted to err, Miss Eyre: remorse is the poison of life.”

I
f early reading of the
Newgate Calendar
carved a mark upon my girlish character, I was for two years grateful for the scar.

We were housed thanks to me, kept in ribbons and pub fare thanks to Clarke, and when our presence leashed the mongrel inside Hugh Grizzlehurst, so much the better. Mrs. Grizzlehurst never failed to greet us with buttered porridge or Sunday eggs and herring, so I supposed that her scheme was working, despite occasions when the lilac circle beneath one eye looked darker than the other. Clarke and I hemmed loudly at the occasional nocturnal scuffle, stomping to fetch a glass of water, returning to bed in the widening pool of quiet.

There are households which would have considered this arrangement paradise—and in retrospect, at times, I did myself.

In the frigid January of the year 1845, Mrs. Grizzlehurst grew thicker about the middle and began to whistle when she was not speaking (which was nearly all the time). Jane Eyre insists,
Human beings never enjoy complete happiness in this world,
and I agree with her—but as Mrs. Grizzlehurst slowly swelled with child, I thought
what a lucky chance it was that humans do not often suffer complete unhappiness either.

Mr. Grizzlehurst produced clownish smiles as he bent to kiss her cheek in the morning, his expressions tinged a helpless shade of ash when he went through his account books in the evening. He began to toss me worried glares, meaningless winks and clucks, a pleading slackness hanging heavy in his chops before he whispered:

Miss Steele, hadvantitious as this ’ere week has been, is there nary another penny we might’a misplaced somewhereabouts?

This verse is downright halliterative, Miss Steele, and I happlaud you. . . . Can we not keep it to a single page? Paper is that dear these days, and we don’t want to look ’eathenish.

Just before everything fell apart, he handed me this gem:

MOST BRUTAL STABBING RIPS HOLES IN NUBILOUS YOUNG VICTIM—.

Sighing, I dipped my pen; I sat at the rickety table in our garret in the coral glow of a February afternoon, preparing myself to rescue our native tongue from worse than death once more. The chipped yellow vase which I generally filled with weeds—Queen Anne’s lace and wild flowering parsley—sat empty in February save for some whimsical thistles Clarke had brought me to cheer my spirits when English had been dealt cruel blows.

We discover a most unforewitted tragedy struck in Church-lane, St. Giles’s, shocking even the most hardened of that irascilacious realm. A comely lass of seventeen years was most untimely struck down by a delinquitorious scallywag, a blade thrust twixt her ribs some scores and dozens of times, and left to bleed. Whilst chances the scurrible fiend will be brought to justice are most
uncertificable, the humble author prays that he will be left to dangle like the most inconseterial string of garlic.

Since two years previous, “Grizzlehurst’s Daily Report of Mayhem and Mischief” had trebled in sales as far afield as Southwark and Deptford, thanks to my style and to Hugh Grizzlehurst’s genuine talent for scouting out the rankest misdeeds imaginable; had it occurred to me to be proud of the fact, I should have tried it out. Still—I watched Bertha Grizzlehurst gather up scattered flour from her breadboard as if it were gold dust, listened monthly for the sound of the landlord’s hobnailed boots and his rat-a-tat, and understood her husband’s wheedling for “Just an extra three days, guv’nor, as yer a charititious Christian.” I worked as many hours at the “Daily Report” as he, longer if it sold quickly, and there were four of us in that dear, dingy house, Clarke helping with laundry and mending and mopping, so our hosts never asked us for rent even if they wanted to. At the time, however, I had little notion of what a drinking habit cost, nor did I realise that some landlords considered the worth of their tenants more relevant to pricing than the square footage of their lodgings.

Small wonder, not knowing how hard the world truly was, I sat so peaceably over my paper and nibs in those final hours; small wonder that I lost something when I never knew what I had in the first place.

I felt Clarke’s graceful steps entering. Her feet sounded satisfied, her gentle shutting of the door weary; she had passed a good day in the Rotherhithe marketplace, crooning sweet ballads and the occasional comedic patter song. Her forearms met my collarbone as she rested her chin upon my head; I was ludicrously smaller than she when seated, for where the younger Clarke had grown tall and willowy, I had remained a slight, sparrowlike creature.

“How bad is it?”

I shut my eyes since she could not see me, simply grateful for her; I thought us sisters, partners, the perfect duo save that I was unworthy of her affections. Tapping my pen against the word
irascilacious
, I nuzzled my head against her neck like an overgrown cat. She chuckled into my crown.

“That is almost too inventive to edit out.”

“You’re an evil temptress and I shun your wiles,” I returned in a passable impersonation of the late unlamented Vesalius Munt. It thrilled me to call Clarke evil when the reverse was true—as if every time she laughed, I knew my own secrets remained buried.

Of course, murder was not the only secret I kept from Clarke.

By the time I was eighteen, I had read her father’s publication
The Garden of Forbidden Delights
an indecorous number of times—always in the sleepy midmorning, when Clarke was out singing and I had spent half the night replacing gibberish with words, dependent upon Mr. Grizzlehurst’s voluminous lungs to sell our goods each morn. Unlike Mr. Munt’s letters, the erotica printed by Clarke’s family failed to sicken, only caused a joyous, clamorous sensation I could not help but mistrust, since it meant that Edwin was right about me.

I liked it.

The people in the slim red book thirsted for closeness, unfolded themselves in turgid metaphors like the petals of a spring rose. Everything they did, they did for wild love—women practically scooped out their hearts and passed them to one another, men discovered these Sapphic passions and assisted in their explorations, brothers-in-arms aided one another when the women were exhausted by pleasure. Even quarrels ended in a dizzy swell of bosoms and trouser fronts; I blame my superb memory on the fact that I had memorised entire chapters.

At age sixteen, it had been too much to take in, let alone tell Clarke about; at age eighteen, I had kept the secret for so long that I
should no longer be presenting Clarke with a fresh discovery, a tomcat delivering a mouse—I should be informing her that I was perfectly capable of keeping mum. Though I could not be disgusted over their stock in trade, I could understand Clarke’s hurt over being snubbed by her parents, and this delicacy led to my complete failure to bring the subject up at all. As the reader has never faced a similar predicament, I warn the tempted: secrets decay, as corpses do, growing ranker over time.

“Mr. Grizzlehurst seemed disturbed,” Clarke reported. She passed a glass of port over my shoulder. “What did he print yesterday?”

“Oh.” I sipped, leaning into Clarke’s—now blessedly filled out—torso. “Tripe about a robber who stole a boat along with its cargo of sardines. None of the people interested in that story can read, but never fear, I’ll set it all right tomorrow.”

I had never been more mistaken.

•   •   •

T
hat night, rather than the high percussion of slaps, the deep thud of blows met our ears.

Clarke and I both were out of our bed instantly, praying for the sound resembling a rolling pin striking a veiny beefsteak to stop; it did not stop.

“What are we to do?” Clarke whispered. She dived for her robe, mindless magnanimity surging through her. “I’ll go down and—”

“You’re not going anywhere!” I captured her elbow.

My throat was tight with
he could so easily harm you
—by mistake, in the braying torrential rage from which some men suffer; but Clarke tore from my grip.

We heard, “Get up, you haudacious piece of baggage!” and luckily we were already tearing down the staircase, for God knows what He might have allowed if we had not done so.

When I reached the ground floor, Clarke stood with her fingers
hovering before her own mouth. Mr. Grizzlehurst had wheeled to face her, chest brokenly wheezing and fists knotted. Mrs. Bertha Grizzlehurst lay upon the floor exercising her habitual silence with her arms clutched around her belly and her temple bleeding . . .
but no, not just her temple,
I thought,
for there is so very much—

“Bertha.” Mr. Grizzlehurst looked as if his favourite toy had somehow come to life and bitten him—as if
he
were the one hurt.

Mrs. Grizzlehurst made a sound through her nose, more a whisper than a whimper, which caused a strange calm to descend as if a cannon had fired next to my ear.

My fingers circled Clarke’s wrist and I pulled her back, keeping the link between us gentle. The blades in my eyes I saved for Mr. Grizzlehurst and, when I swept them to him, sweat broke out over his shaking jowls.

“Get out,” I ordered. “I’ll take care of everything, just don’t hurt her anymore. Get out.”

We bundled an unsteady Hugh Grizzlehurst out the door, Clarke and I; he blubbered a bit, stumbled, groaned as we pushed him into the street.

His wife made not a sound until the heavy bar across the door scraped into place, and we had gathered flannels and hot water and the shallow hip bath, and I had scrubbed the too-solid stain from the floor; then we all wept long and low at the waste the world produces, and the way in which a baby might have been born to a doting mother but was not.

All is colourful flashes when I remember that night—scraps of scarlet emotion, the pale violet sound of soft keening. I think of Mrs. Grizzlehurst’s grey head as Clarke cradled it, rocking, and the throbbing sensation that I ought to have been doing more: as if I had been summoned there following a terrible incantation, a spiteful Greek goddess dressed in radiant sapphire and Mrs. Grizzlehurst the supplicant at my altar, offering more blood than I ever wanted to see
again for the rest of my life. It was easier to think myself an observer from another realm than merely a parentless child who had just watched something unspeakable take place.

So I scrubbed the floor thrice and made everyone tea with extra brandy and milk, and I soaked rusty linens and watched the sun rise and periodically glared down from our garret window to check for Mr. Grizzlehurst’s return, not feeling anything.

When I think of that morning, I remember how I felt, however; I remember that morning very clearly indeed.

•   •   •

P
eople vary widely in their opinions of female usefulness; my aunt Patience, for instance, preferred them to be approximately as useful as antimacassars. I had, in the wake of two murders, no illusions about what I was capable of—and Clarke, when we retreated to our room that dawn after settling Mrs. Grizzlehurst in bed, seemed to be developing dangerous faith in our combined capabilities.

“He’s no better than a murderer.”

Clarke paced as the moon dissolved like a sugar cube in the spreading sunlight. At fifteen, she was strikingly lovely, with her champagne curls pinned up into a cloud and her freckles grown more populous from singing in the midday square. I watched her, a queer ethereal creature myself, fretting as she stalked from wall to wall with a rose-patterned robe tied over her nightdress. Beyond the horrible fact Bertha Grizzlehurst’s dreams had been shattered, Clarke’s vexation pulled at me with the drag of a hundred tiny fishhooks.

“He’s . . . a little better than a murderer, Clarke,” I corrected, lighting two tapers on my desk.

“He just killed his own baby!” she hissed.

Pondering how easy it was to lose control, I developed an intense interest in retying my grey dressing gown.

“She has to leave him! Jane. Jane, are you listening? She has to
get away from here, she’ll never be able to look him in the face again without knowing
—
can you imagine the torment?”

I sat upon the edge of the bed so as to concentrate on the tie, which was proving unexpectedly taxing.

“We have to help her,” Clarke decided.

“How?”

“Surely she can seek out a relative—have you ever heard her speak of parents or siblings?”

Raising an eyebrow, I wordlessly reminded Clarke of the number of sentences we had heard Mrs. Grizzlehurst utter.

“We’ll just have to ask—and if she has somewhere to go, we can help her. I have it now!” Clarke exclaimed, clapping her hands.

Diving at the bed we shared, Clarke pulled my trunk from beneath the frame. I recall the exact set of her shoulders, the quizzical turn of her head as she searched, the way I sat watching her, not understanding, until the instant I did understand, and horror clawed at me, and I stupidly gasped, “Wait, don’t—” just as Clarke chirped, “Here!” and darted to the brightening window with her prize.

“Don’t touch that,” I growled in the voice of a cornered beast.

Clarke had already lifted the dinted silver watch to the light, however; at my outburst, she nearly dropped it, but she had seen the initials
VOM
etched onto the metal. Pushing a curlicue of hair away from her eyes, she slowly turned.

“You said you had a silver watch of your father’s when we left.” Her high voice was considered but flat, as she had sounded when working out algebraic equations, which positively wrecked me. “This . . .” She stopped, her head whipping up. “This is Vesalius Munt’s watch, isn’t it?”

Desperate, I cast my mind in all directions for a lie which might serve, any lie, every lie, the
right
lie.

“Yes. I . . . I was leaving school, alone I thought, and had hardly any money.”

“What else do you have of his?” Clarke’s tone had frosted, placid as a winter lake.

Stomach churning, I pulled out
The Garden of Forbidden Delights
. Clarke took the book, pursing her lips in puzzlement. I committed this insane blunder for two reasons which, in my distress, seemed actually sound. First, aware that Clarke possessed zero tolerance for my falsehoods when directed at her, I offered her a secret like a penance; and second, it seemed prudent to remind her that I may have had a lunatic mother and a history of stealing from dead headmasters, but was her own father not also subject to trivial quirks of ethics?