Jane Steele (13 page)

As Clarke flipped through the pages, her grip began to tremble; we had encountered the obscene on London’s streets before, but never produced by her own parents. I darted to her, tossed the book away, and took her hands, kissing one and holding the other over where my heart ought to have been.

“It’s all right, their business doesn’t affect my opinion of you,” I breathed. “Oh, please don’t look like that! I took the watch thinking I would be friendless and I’m sorry I lied to you, but you’re so particular. That book—you should never have seen it. Mr. Munt wanted to turn me against you, but I never loved you any less.”

I fell silent as Clarke’s eyes grew swollen with dread. She snatched her hands away, staggering back, knocking one of the candles over; wax spattered the floorboards, began to congeal and to harden.

“Wait, I only meant to say that you—you’re family to me. Are you hurt? What’s come—”

“He gave this to you that day, to spite the pair of us?”

“Yes, but it didn’t work, I told—”

“When you found Mr. Munt in his study, you said he was
already dead,
Jane!” she shrieked.

Time seemed to ripple, an eddying effect which left me reeling. Clarke shook her head back and forth, back and forth, like a metronome without any
click, click
.

“It’s not what you think,” I whispered.

It was, however.

“I never realised,” she said hollowly. “I thought how natural it was that the same thing should happen to both of us, we were always so kindred, but it never entered my mind that . . . you . . . and you scour the papers for crimes every day and they never found his killer
,
Jane, never found any clue.”

This was not precisely true; Sam Quillfeather had released a statement that, thanks to the complete lack of witnesses, his privately held suspicions could never hold up in court, and thus should remain unspoken for the sake of peace and healing. This ambiguous, insinuating news had eradicated my appetite for four days, which I explained to Clarke as a nasty attack of
la grippe.

“You murdered him.” Clarke swayed, pulling at handfuls of her curls.

“Sit down, you’ll hurt yourself,” I pleaded. “Oh, Clarke—”

“How could I never have worked it out?” She collapsed on the bed with rote obedience.

“Well, it wasn’t the likeliest scenario on earth, was it?” I laughed, and she looked at me as if I had turned lupine, as if all my absences during the full moon now made perfect sense.

Kneeling before her, I seized her elbows. “Listen to me. You’ve always listened to me, and I’m sorry I lied about the watch, and—”

“Being sorry for lying about murdering our headmaster might be more—”

“He was
killing you.
” The tears which had risen were not lies, reader. “He would never have let you eat again, and I went to the study, meaning to alter his food supply records, and he caught me, and I never meant to hurt him.”

“By hurt him, do you mean
stab him in the neck with a letter opener
?”

Laughing again did not help my cause. “I’m sorry, that was—I’m so sorry. Please understand, I had to choose between being sent to an asylum or watching you starve. What could I have done?”

“Attempted escape?” she offered hoarsely. “I would have gone with you, you know. Into the woods, the faraway cities. I would have gone with you anywhere.”

The past-tense construction of this sentiment spread invisibly around us, graphic as a battlefield.

Disengaging herself, Clarke pulled off her robe and her nightdress; I stayed on the floor, too numb to move as I watched her cover her creamy skin with her underthings and one of her daytime frocks, methodically shoving the others hanging in the wardrobe into her carpetbag. When this horrifying ritual had been completed, she retrieved a few songbooks and snapped the latch on the bag, which sounded to me like a pistol shot.

“Please don’t do this,” I begged.

Clarke paused, looking down at me almost regretfully. “Do you remember what I just said about Mrs. Grizzlehurst?”

A sob rose in my throat, for I did.

She’ll never be able to look him in the face again without knowing—can you imagine the torment?

“I lied at school every day.” I sounded angry; but I was not angry, never that, only trying to haul myself out of the rubble. “I lied for you constantly, lied for everyone—and even if you never lied, you stole
,
and if I would lie for you, and you would steal for me, why . . . why not this too?”

Clarke’s eyes had grown dragonfly bright, but there was something else there, an emotion I could not pinpoint, one which looked like shattered glass.

“Because I don’t know who you are,” she rasped. “You were always so cunning at school, but so gentle, as if you couldn’t bear to
watch anyone go hungry. Even the beastly ones, like Taylor—yes, she
was
, Taylor was horrid, only you never noticed—and, oh, I so admired you. You have a terribly romantic air about you, you know. And I knew you carried secrets, you’ve no notion of how sad you look at times, but I thought that if I took enough care, you might trust me one day. I only wanted to know you, the heart of you, for you to
show me
. But . . .”

Trailing off, Clarke glanced at the desk where a stack of half-finished broadsides sat, my odes to every variant of death and damnation.

“I saw that room, after the murder,” Clarke said softly. “And I don’t know you at all
.
”

She turned to go. At the last moment, she snatched up
The Garden of Forbidden Delights
, hastily shoving it amidst her clothing as if the binding were aflame; then she departed, closing the door behind her.

•   •   •

I
did not go to bed; instead I dressed and, at seven in the morning, I brushed a hand over Bertha Grizzlehurst’s arm. She seemed alert in a way she had not been the night before, absent-eyed and weeping like a lost soul.

“Has the bleeding stopped?”

She nudged her head against the pillow, indicating it had.

“Have you anyone to go to? Clarke has received terrible news,” I lied. “Her mother is poorly—I intend to offer what solace I can, I’ll be quite at home there, and that means we shan’t be living in the upstairs room.”

Bertha Grizzlehurst absorbed this information. Had she not been quite so mousey or quite so silent, she might have been a friend, I thought, for she took in blows and bitter news with a stoicism her husband entirely lacked.

“What happened last night—that changes everything. Now he has wounded you, who is to say how far he can go?”

She said nothing, but her face grew whiter than the leadworks dust which blew down Elephant Lane.

“This is for you.” I pressed the cursed silver watch into her hand, exactly as Clarke had wanted me to do. “No, no! You’ve been feeding us supper for two years without payment. I ought to have made you take it before now—forgive me. If you pawn this, you should have enough money for travel expenses and some left over to settle elsewhere. After, you’ll have to take life as it comes, but we all do, don’t we?”

She gave me a thankful blink; I brushed her cheek and she took the watch, tucking it into the bosom of her dress.

“My brother has a farm near Canterbury.” Her voice always grated unexpectedly in my ears, as if a toast rack had spoken. She sat with an effort; apart from her other unspeakable injury, her lip was fat as a bloodworm and her ribs much abused.

“I’ll help you sort everything. Come.”

“What will Hugh think?” She sounded as if he were a small boy who needed minding.

“I’ll take care of Mr. Grizzlehurst,” I vowed. “You may count upon that.”

•   •   •

Y
ou will see Bertha again soon enough. She needs time to recover,” I soothed, pouring two more generous glasses of head-splitting gin.

Hugh Grizzlehurst had returned to find me cooking supper, a jug of gin on the table. He was rheumy-eyed, his jowls hanging like nooses and the whites of his eyes nearly as crimson as the puddle I had cleaned. It fell to me to improve his spirits: thus the gin and the two beefsteaks and the mashed turnips with butter and thyme.

“Poor Bertha.” He snorted back tears and mucus; I had set about
returning him to blind drunkenness and was by seven in the evening approaching success. “I never . . . I ’ate to think of ’urting my girl. It was an haccident, you savvy?”

I spooned gravy over the plates, seating myself. “Bertha understands.
I
certainly do as well. I only regret that Clarke had to leave so precipitously.”

We ate, Mr. Grizzlehurst sniffling into his beefsteak; when we had finished, I placed both my palms upon the table.

“This house is too empty without Clarke and Mrs. Grizzlehurst.” I traced the wood with my finger, playful. “Finishing this gin at Elephant Stairs would be just the ticket—the stars are out, and the night is quite clear.”

You used to watch the stars through the skylight with Clarke wrapped around you, lazy as a pair of kittens, just as you did back at school on the rooftop, and now you won’t feel the weight of her arm over your waist ever again.

Hugh Grizzlehurst hoisted the half-empty gin bottle; he had far outpaced me, and his mouth wore a slack, wet quality. “Gimme ’alf a tick to fetch me coat.”

It was a three-minute walk to the waterfront, which was littered with crumbling stairways to the Thames—Princes Stairs, Church Stairs, Rotherhithe Stairs; so late, the streets had cleared and the air lost the graininess of a long day’s labour in an ashen metropolis. A single dustman passed us, tipping his flat cap, and a vague, chill sweetness overlay the perennial aromas of fish and refuse.

Hugh Grizzlehurst and I sat at Elephant Stairs with the treacly brown water lapping at our feet, and Mr. Grizzlehurst lapping up the gin. He would make it all up to Bertha, he claimed; he would buy her trinkets, take her on holiday to Brighton, compose poems in her honour. His arms swept like scythes, winding down in a jerky, mechanical fashion until he collapsed against the stone step.

“What that woman is, she is
hexceptional.
The habsolute
devotion—and after losing two wee ones. Well, never again, Miss Steele, I can hassure you.”

“Two?”

Dread crawled up my neck as I recalled her silence following a very important question.

Now he has wounded you, who is to say how far he can go?

Hugh Grizzlehurst returned to the theme, muttering in spasmodic fashion that he would forgive her for running from him.

“And if she tries to stay haway again, well.” Mr. Grizzlehurst shook his head regretfully. “Then I’ll ’ave to learn the bitch twice over that marriage is a sacramentation. She’ll not hescape me, not my Bertha—never you fear for that.”

We fell silent. The waves churned and I thought of going to bed that night alone, thought of the many times when I had jolted awake shaking and felt Clarke’s soft lips murmuring against my shoulder, remembered the way she would reach up to trace loving patterns on my collarbone until I fell asleep again, and that she never chided me come morning. Then and there I vowed that Clarke should escape me; I should never seek her out, never threaten her fragile freedom, for all that my chest felt as empty as the wide spaces between the stars she so adored.

When my employer lost consciousness, I was not surprised; and when it was discovered by fishermen that Mr. Grizzlehurst had been deep in his cups and fallen into the Thames, drowning, I was not surprised either, for I had pushed
him.

“Know, that in the course of your future life you will often find yourself elected the involuntary confidant of your acquaintances’ secrets: people will instinctively find out, as I have done, that it is not your forte to talk of yourself, but to listen while others talk of themselves; they will feel, too, that you listen with no malevolent scorn of their indiscretion, but with a kind of innate sympathy. . . .”

A
partial veil must be drawn over the subsequent period, reader—not because I wish to conjure a false portrait, but because redundancies are the enemy of narrative, and I rehearsed the same self-annihilating scene long after Clarke’s departure.

After killing Hugh Grizzlehurst, for instance, I carried the remainder of the gin home and drank my fill. Upon the morrow, my skull felt as if a horse had kicked it, and my stomach practically leapt into my chamber pot, but
there’s more gin where that came from
, I thought, and Clarke was gone, would be gone always, and I only faced what I deserved.

Days followed, then weeks; I had a yellow velvet purse which I had stuffed with spare coin, and the supply rapidly dwindled after I paid our landlord for a further month’s rent (with tears in my eyes for poor, unlucky Mr. Grizzlehurst).

Did I mourn him? After a fashion, and this baffled me; where
Edwin’s demise had devastated me, and Mr. Munt’s was a pinprick, I found myself morose over murdering Hugh Grizzlehurst, as if I had smashed a spider which ought to have been shooed out the door. I felt an echo over him of the anguish I once suffered for letting my misbehaving kitten out of doors, and to this day, I sometimes daydream that he approaches me insisting,
Cannivoristic
habsolutely is a word, by Jesus, Miss Steele, a genuine word.

Meanwhile, I concluded: love is a terrible reason for committing murder. I adored Clarke because she was good, and that very goodness had stolen her from me.

Your badness stole her from you.

Sleepless in the hollow hours, I meditated on her love of the night sky, her wonder at vast, unknowable things; I obsessed over her facility at music, her mathematical precision tied to ethereal tones. I thought to write broadsides, but there was no one to hawk them; I thought to follow my former employer into the Thames.

Instead, I walked the streets, passing the sky-piercing spire of St. Mary the Virgin at a beggarly pace, hoping that I could garner solace outside a church if not inside; this did not work, nor did it assuage the hunger I studiously avoided thinking about. Instead of eating, I supped on gin and melancholy, and watched my shillings disappear.

The day before rent was next due, I struck out for more dismal pastures.

Quoting the fictional Mr. Rochester seems simplest:
In short, I began the process of ruining myself in the received style; like any other spoony.
I slept on mice-gnawed mattresses in public houses, wrote more broadsides, hawked my wares until I sounded like a saw against a board, and then understood what Mr. Grizzlehurst meant when he said,
I’ve a hunnatural talent for ’awking—not the most dulcedious tones, mind, but I never wear out.

I did not thank my alma mater for propelling me into the world
with expert skills in deportment, Cicero, and decorative needlework, for I could find no crying need for any of these disciplines along the docksides. In the depths of my melancholy, I fear it did not even occur to me to be equally grateful to Lowan Bridge for its tutelage in thieving, swallowing unpalatable food, and hiding from authority figures, though these proved more useful talents. When I could not sleep in public houses, I slept on the floors of the desperate and the greedy; when I could not hawk, I stole. Discovering that some men pay scant attention to waifs hovering near their pocketbooks, I relieved them of their banknotes. Often these men were cherry cheeked, laughing bright whiskey clouds, and to these men I apologise; others had eyes the colour of scaffolds, muddy and vicious, and to them I simply say thank you.

Through it all I loved Clarke, and wanted her back. When I was caught by a costermonger and he gave chase, clutching at my sleeve and tearing it, I wanted her back; when I took to sleeping rough, half-stupefied with gin and risking the law as I settled under gorse bushes, I wanted her back; when I began to be invisible, strangers’ glances sliding off my tangled hair and my veiny eyes, I wanted her back. When I was accosted by leering men, fighting each off with a fury that I think astonished them, I wanted her back.

I ought to have died, reader, but I did not.

•   •   •

’E
re, what in Christ’s name d’you think you’re doing?” Tilly laughed, slapping my forearm as I stole her pipe from her; I inhaled, dark fumes and buzzing light filling my lungs.

“Helping the day along, just as you are,” said I, passing it back.

We were at home before my crackling fire, sipping honey-coloured dreams. It was tobacco mixed with scant enough opium to be perfectly respectable, as neither Tilly nor I had any intention of overindulging—or not on that occasion, anyhow.

Reader, we find ourselves six years later, in December of 1851, when I was twenty-four years of age, and you doubtless wonder whether I ignored Nick the coachman’s admonishment and was an unfortunate, as we call those not always entirely unfortunate women who pleasure men for frocks and food.

I was not; I was friendly, however, with those who lodged in my building near Covent Garden. Tilly Cate was my favourite, because Tilly was fond of me, the daft sot. Tilly was big bosomed, with yards of wiry dark blond hair, her complexion porous but rosy; and she was motherly, which characteristic made perfect sense when one learnt she had a daughter named Kitty Cate (an appellation which the child, I am thankful to report, did not deserve in the slightest degree).

My bedchamber contained two maroon damask chairs with a bedraggled green ottoman between, a bed beneath a window overlooking Henrietta Street, and a greying basin with funereal lilies edging the bowl. Secondhand books lay piled along the peeling green-papered walls, and my desk with its pen and ink was tucked in the corner.

The desolate period following Clarke’s departure ended when a cartman whose pocket I picked, rather than whistling for a bobby and thereby bestowing upon me a stint in Newgate (which I was not fascinated enough by to fancy living there), instead gave me two cracked ribs under a dank archway in Whitechapel. As I recovered from this blessing in disguise, I realised destitution was growing tiresome and—selfishness restored—schemed over how best to earn my bread and cheese. Single pages were all I could afford to print, so I tried my hand at “last confessions,” which were the fanciful one-page admissions of the recently executed.

It will surprise no one to learn that I was
marvellous
at them.

Last confessions were quite a different thing from broadsides and
from gallows ballads; with our broadsides’ contents you are familiar, but as for gallows ballads, here is an excerpt from “Mary May,” that you may determine why I did not go in for that line of work:

Before he long the poison took

In agony he cried;

Upon him I in scorn did look,—

At length my brother died.

Since I laughed myself silly over them, I thought it imprudent to write them myself. But oh!—the confessions! The soaring imagination I lent them, the lecherous details, the pathos I could render as if it had been splayed upon a rack before me. I chose my subjects with alacrity and experience; I did not want Samuel Green, who drunkenly bludgeoned a guardsman, but I did want Hezekiah Pepper, a new father who strangled a maiden on the outskirts of St. Giles. The stories were all that mattered—how dark the deed, how deep the despair. Writing them required two to three hours of ink rippling over pages to the tune of my black heartbeats and the street soprano below, who—despite her great rolls of belly fat—reminded me achingly of Clarke.

“Me little one’s off raising ’ell, I shouldn’t wonder.” Tilly ventured to my window to see if she could glimpse Kitty playing amidst the lost violet blooms and the chestnut shells; it was freezing, but Kitty was a reckless, towheaded thing with thick mittens, and no weather could touch her.

I shifted in my chair, wrapped in a brown dressing gown with lace at the collar, sifting through newspapers as the draught of poisoned smoke trickled into my brain.

“You know I’ll buy next time,” I mentioned, regarding her pipe. “If you’re short of chink—”

“Not I, I’m rich as butter.” She winked, adjusting a tatty purple shawl over the friendly spillage of her bosoms. “Nay, it’s . . . we’re nigh out o’ hard up, and I’ve Judge Frost arrivin’.”

My friend Tilly’s speech was thick with local slang, which made me wish I were more fluent, since I rather adored the dialect of society’s underbelly (though I certainly understood
hard up
meant
tobacco
). Meanwhile, most of Tilly’s clientele were no more dangerous than horseflies—pimpled youths with sweaty hands, hawkers who had sold their stock of Barcelona nuts in the market below, sad widowers with silver hair; but Judge Frost was what Tilly liked to call a right scaly customer.

I gasped sharply, and Tilly pivoted. “Lord, Jane, you done give me a turn. What’s up, then?”

Folding my lips together, I reread:

WANTED, at Highgate House,——shire. One young lady to see to a nine-year-old ward. Estate recently taken possession of by Mr. Charles Thornfield, heir of the Barbary family, late of the Sikh Wars, whose household requires the services of a qualified governess. Compensation——— pounds per annum with room and board, apply care of Mr. S. Singh, with references.

“Ye look like someone just slapped ye in the quim with a fish.”

I restored myself to my full senses with a hard shiver. “It’s nothing. But . . . I used to live there, you see those words—Highgate House. They want a governess.”

The previous August, I read with passionate interest the obituary of Mrs. Patience Barbary, who died abroad; Highgate House had passed into the care of that most universally respected profession, the law. My aunt’s death hurt shallowly, like a mishap made peeling
potatoes—she had never searched for me, never even advertised, an omission which made me equal parts grateful and furious.

Meanwhile, the thought of Highgate House provoked a queer unease. My mother insisted that it was mine, but died before explaining how or why. I was not unhappy in London; I adored the metropolis, the way I could disappear in it, but approaching a group of gouty men wearing pince-nez had not seemed wise. I was not destitute, but neither was I remotely respectable any longer; I wore jolly frocks with the fronts cut low and slung brightly coloured shawls about my elbows, teased my favourite costermongers with vocabulary that would have quite soured my aunt’s digestion. Neither did I have paperwork, nor any means whatsoever of proving I was the Jane Steele who had disappeared so long ago, and thus the idea of knocking up a powder-wigged gentleman to say
How de do, may I have this estate, please?
frankly frightened me. In any case, ought I claim to be Jane Steele when Inspector Sam Quillfeather could be waiting with his ear to the ground, a hunter wise enough to allow his prey to trap herself and save him the bother?

Now, however—the thought of a stranger inhabiting the place smouldered in my stomach. Was the cottage occupied? Was my bedroom? Was Agatha yet living, and would she even know me if she was?

“Lived at a place named Highgate House!” Tilly teased. “Well, I never. Ye was a genuine lady, like, with silks and velvets and a stick up yer arse.”

“No velvets. No silks.” I folded the paper.

“But the stick?”

“Of course, they equip us with bum sticks from the cradle.”

“I’ll bet ye had a great bed wi’ acres and acres o’ white sheets,” she surmised dreamily.

“All you ever think about is linens. It’s actually impressive.”

She shrugged. “Never ’ad naught but a straw tick, so, aye, it occupies me mind.”

“Admittedly if I spent as much time in bed as you do . . .” Her face clouded. “Tilly, I’m only joking—you know I’m no better than I should be.”

“How
is
Jeremiah, come to that?”

She passed the pipe and I took another slow puff. “I’ve thrown him over. He snores, and he wasn’t much cop at . . . well, anything. He may as well have been winding up his watch.”

“Bloody hell, if ye net a guppy, toss ’im back in the river.” Tilly giggled.

At my lowest tide of spirits and highest of gin swilling, I had discovered that I enjoyed the practice of lovemaking as much as the theory. My swells were acquaintances from Rotherhithe, mainly—the curly-haired boy from the saltpetre works, the tap man at the Mayflower Pub. By giving the lads some fun, I could at least make a human being happy for a quicksilver moment; and once I had got the knack of pessaries and slow touches and the faint scrape of teeth over hipbones, I enormously enjoyed myself, just as I had imagined I would when gasping alone in my bed with
The Garden of Forbidden Delights
.

“I’ll find someone else soon enough,” said I.

“Yer doin’ it wrong, ye realise,” Tilly repeated, shaking her head. “They’re meant to pay for the privilege.”

Clattering on the stairs interrupted us, and in tumbled Kitty Cate. She had turned twelve in June and moved with that coltish energy of girls who are about to shoot up like fireworks; her great wiry corkscrews of hair were flecked with snow, and she held a golden ribbon.

“Look at what Mr. Frost done give me, mum,” she exclaimed, waving it. “’E said as it would bring out me eyes.”

Tilly’s mouth wrenched to one side. “Judge Frost done give that to you? In the street, like?”

“Aye.” Kitty stroked it, studying the colour. “Won’t it look smart, though? I’ve that green frock, when the weather turns, and—”

“Good afternoon, all,” a nasal voice sounded.

Judge Frost stood in the open doorway, belatedly rapping at the wood. Tilly often visited me, “taking the air,” and thus I was familiar with her regular customers; I liked Judge Frost so much less than the others that the figure landed in the negative. He was thin and wispy, with dandelion fluff sprouting from his cheeks and neck and ears. Indirectly, he was useful, as he had caused scores of people to be hanged at Newgate and Tyburn; directly, he was petulant and insinuating.