Jane Steele (16 page)

“If you’ve finished translating the entire passage, I’ll correct it—then of course you may check in on Dalbir.”

Sahjara’s pony, Dalbir, was named “brave soldier,” a moniker I should have thought droll for a pony had he not been more along the lines of a petit dragon, dappled-grey and wonderfully irritable with everyone save Sahjara and myself; the unfortunate beast had suffered a badly chipped hoof that morning.

My pupil ambled over with her French essay, handed me the papers, and then unselfconsciously sat upon the luxurious carpet with her head against my knee.

I patted her awkwardly at first, then drew my fingers over glossy braids smelling of the almond oil she used to smooth out the tangles. Sahjara was demonstrative with everyone, adorably so, and it did not mean anything, I told myself; she probably expected a tyrant, but I recalled tyranny and preferred rebellion. Anyhow, I had neatly solved the problem of attention to her lessons by making each and every subject horse themed. She painted horses in watercolours, explored their anatomy, learnt geography specific to legendary cavalry marches, and translated French passages about horses, as she was doing now.

“We
will
be great friends, won’t we?” she mused as I shifted to correct her work.

“I hope so. Did you expect a shrivelled old crone with a cane and a pocket Bible?”

Sahjara shrugged against my calf. “Not precisely. I feared someone who would think me unnatural, though.”

This gave me pause, even as I marked an improper conjugation of
avoir
: she was almost exactly the age I had been when I left Highgate House, and Sahjara in five short days had already revealed her character; she was headstrong, impulsive, recklessly affectionate, and had gifted me with thirteen possessions of Mr. Thornfield’s to date. What did a murderess four times over care if Sahjara was browner skinned than I, forward in her speech, and was familiar with the housemaids? If surnames were to be taken as given, they could be her aunties for all I knew.

“Would you have seemed unnatural at home—or do you remember?”

“That’s a hard question,” Sahjara said slowly. “The Punjab comes out all jumbled when I try to remember. I see pictures without any story to them.”

“Do any of the pictures stand out?”

“The flap of the tent was ripped by a sword, and I was afraid of who would come through the gap, but it was Charles, and he carried me away and fed me. I was very hungry, I recall. And soon after, I was sent to England for safety’s sake. I was five.”

Well, there is a remarkable fragment indeed.

I pressed, “Did England improve matters?”

“Oh, yes!” she exclaimed. “Yes, before England, men had always been asking me questions. How was I faring, but also
Where is it?
and I hadn’t the faintest, you see, and so kept quiet. Keeping quiet made them very cross.”

“I can imagine.”

Where is it?
is a very specific question. Had Sahjara been caught in the middle of the First Anglo-Sikh War and interrogated at so young an age as five? A startling surge of protectiveness coursed through me. I liked Sahjara and wanted her to erase the other little girl, the one who had wandered these halls suffocating on her aunt’s hatred.

“Look, I’ve scored eighty percent!”

“You have indeed. What were the men looking for?”

“A trunk,” said she, taking her translation and glaring at the errors. “It had my dolls in it. Though they couldn’t have wanted my dolls, so perhaps they thought something else was inside—there was a terrible row when it went missing, I know. I just wanted my dolls back, as I was only a
chico
.”

“Perfectly natural.”

“I was very upset over losing them.”

A trunk.

I swear upon my copy of
Jane Eyre
that my interest in Sahjara’s tale was based in both fascination and goodwill; I wanted to know more about her, and I badly wanted to know more about Mr. Charles Thornfield, who had callously flouted my poor pupil’s request and stayed away longer than a few days.

“What else do you remember?”

Her eyes grew unfocused, as if peering through fogged glass. “Our house in Lahore, its balcony. It smelled like livestock and incense in the streets, which were very busy with all the Afghani horse traders, and the merchants bargaining over oranges and goats, and the fortune-tellers at tables divining from maps of the stars. I remember huge walls with heavy guns, white mosques like turnips.” She charmingly screwed her face into a pucker. “It’s still an awful muddle. I don’t even know what the wars were
for
.”

Mindful of my role, I cudgelled my brains and drew embarrassing blanks. The Sikhs’ Khalsa army was by all accounts a ferocious
one—sharp as a pistol crack, and just as keen to hack our East India Company to bits after the first war ended as they had been at the starting gate. Predictably, they had emerged thirsty for blood two years later, and countless British and Punjabi soldiers had blown one another’s pates off before the Sikh Empire went the way of the Roman one. I knew this meant outrageous riches for Her Majesty; when I opened my mouth to unmuddle the situation for my pupil, however, I found I knew nothing whatsoever else.

“Did Mr. Thornfield never recover your trunk?”

“No, though he tried.” Sahjara stretched upon the rug like a lean little cat. “It must be lost forever now.”

Voice quite composed, I said, “Sahjara, I know we’re strangers, and you needn’t speak of your parents, nor the past—but you may if you wish, all right?”

She stood, outlined now against the dimming December sunset, for we had not turned up the lamps. “Oh, were you curious over my parents? Charles says my father was a Company man and my mother a Sikh princess. It’s horrid but I can’t recall them. There was the sword through the tent flap, and the trunk went missing, and I had horses to tend to, I think—but I don’t recall much from the Punjab other than Charles.”

Sahjara fetched her warmest cloak from where she had thrown it two hours previous, her governess too slovenly a creature to have noticed.

“Give Dalbir my best,” I instructed.

“If Charles returns, send someone to fetch me?”

“Of course.”

“Charles likes you,” she added as she skipped towards the door. “I’ve never seen him like anyone so fast. He actually shook your hand.”

Following this obscure observation, she disappeared, and I was left once more to ponder the enigmas of my new household. Then,
lacking other occupation and knowing I had an hour till supper, a subtle electric pulse thrumming in my boot soles, I likewise donned my warmest things and quit the main house in the opposite direction, marching silently for my cottage and whatever—whomever—I might find there.

It is one of my faults, that though my tongue is sometimes prompt enough at an answer, there are times when it sadly fails me in framing an excuse; and always the lapse occurs at some crisis, when a facile word or plausible pretext is specially wanted to get me out of painful embarrassment.

I
f you expected to find yourself in a Gothic snowscape, reader, ears tickling with spectral whispers as the plucky protagonist breaks into a cottage haunted by the shades of her past, regrettably you are mistaken.

The door was already unlocked. Opening the panel of the small lantern I had brought, I discovered that my erstwhile home was carpeted in grit and vermin droppings, and furthermore that spiders are the most industrious creatures alive.

Slowly, my ears adjusted; no ticking of clocks greeted me, no exclamations of alarm. The place had been emptied, and not merely of its few antiques—even the bedding and the better chairs were dispatched. A pang struck me at the thought of faithful, nonsensical Agatha turned out to pasture—or worse, deceased—but I could do her no better service than to press on, so press on I did.

The kitchen was mouldering, the parlour decrepit, my mother’s bedroom sacked and empty, which hurt my chest terribly, and still I could not bring myself to quit the place. Creeping up to the garret
was a whim; I knew I must be back soon to sit with Sahjara over another brilliantly orange curry, swallowing questions down my gullet.

I will have a peek at the attic space, then be done
.

And what did I behold but my mother’s old wooden trunk, resting in a corner. I dived for its dust-soft handle and heaved open its lid; an explosion of dry grime and a short stack of letters met my gaze, and my fingers discovered the papers were indeed corporeal. I think I had been half expecting leprechaun gold in that cottage, or at least small, strange men proposing dangerous quests. Instead I held foolscap with ink scrawled over it, ink which might very well tell me what I had inherited and what I might venture to do about it.

To escape with the sole prize I had come seeking, save Agatha herself, seemed altogether too good to be true: but I did, and twenty minutes hence had stowed my treasure under my mattress without a single person knowing I had left the main house at all.

•   •   •

W
hat became of the original staff?” I asked, sniffing at a plate of heartily spiced potato and cabbage with mustard seeds. “Surely this place was populated by English servants, before.”

“I regret to say that they were made to feel rather unwelcome.” Mr. Sardar Singh spooned out portions of chicken curry and saffron-scented rice to Sahjara and me; twice before he had dined in our company, and I found myself avidly hoping he would do so again. “We brought with us an unknown master, foreign tastes . . . their defection was natural.”

“But never forced?” I questioned, envisioning my elderly Agatha scrubbing floors in some rot-ridden dispensary.

“Of course not—heavens, I hope none of them ever felt so. Some had family they wished to return to, others dreams of travel. They were all of them dismissed with a thousand pounds, after all.”

“A thousand . . .” I echoed. It was the sort of money a titled
landholder or a City purveyor of stocks might have brought in yearly, and it was a princely figure to a domestic worker.

“Miss Stone, I hope that I haven’t overstepped the bounds of English propriety. The figure is irre—”

“Of course it isn’t irrelevant—Mr. Thornfield could have got away uncensored distributing bonuses at a hundredth the price.”

“The master of the house saw no need to be parsimonious,” he returned, but I saw he was pleased.

“Not often the way,” I quipped, “with masters. Please do sit down.”

Mr. Singh laughed, seating himself several places distant and helping himself to the steaming dishes. “At any rate, there were alterations to be effected, and long-time occupants are always dismayed at usurpers renovating their domain.”

Mr. Singh was correct; the cellars, at least, were being subjected to significant changes, and it dismayed me. Workmen arrived before I rose in the morning, greeting me with the distant invisible
clink, clink
of chisels and spades as I walked to the morning room to breakfast with Sahjara; at five in the afternoon when I released her, they filed by me out the servants’ entrance, anointed with mineral-smelling mud. Twice had I begun marching down the dank stairs I already knew so well, but a member of the staff always materialised with a cordial
Might I assist you?
and all attempts at reconnaissance rendered thereby impossible.

The work rankled. Our cellars had been inhospitable, the remnants of ancient foundations—neither crypts nor vaults, simply stones and pillars
.
I did not know what Mr. Thornfield could possibly want with caves not even fit to store wine properly (a failing of which Aunt Patience was surpassingly proud).

“When did the cellar renovations commence?”

“Three months ago,” Sahjara replied. “Six months after we moved in and began redecorating—the place was dreadful, all stuffy chintzes.”

I smiled, for I agreed with her. “Is the cellar to house a wine collection? Mr. Thornfield seems to own a connoisseur’s soul.”

“He does indeed,” Mr. Singh agreed.

This was less than forthcoming.

“Is it for storage, then? This household—the exotic spices, the incense—it must be difficult to maintain here in England?”

“Not so difficult as you might imagine. Mrs. Garima Kaur, who is a highly competent individual, travels monthly to London to meet with merchants who import Punjabi essentials. She sees to it that Mrs. Jas Kaur is kept in basmati and dhal and so forth, and the rest we can easily buy from neighbouring farms.”

“Then perhaps a Sikh chapel for your rituals?” I ventured next.

“Oh, I’m sure he has plans for the place, Miss Stone.” Mr. Singh smiled effortlessly, passing me a dish of what appeared to be yogurt. “I myself shall be contented when these local stonemasons—good men but rather untutored—stop tracking filth through Mrs. Jas Kaur’s kitchen. I knew her in the Punjab as a saintly woman, and here in England, she is ready to dissolve into fits.”

As am I,
I thought,
over lack of headway.

•   •   •

A
few hours later, I washed my face and hung my sober black dress and sat in Aunt Patience’s room with the letters from the cottage in my hands, nearly in silent tears already at the prospect of voices from beyond the grave. Wrapping my dressing gown tighter, I edged my chair towards the fireplace. This first missive was written in an older, more palsied version of Agatha’s hand:

Dear Missus Jane, supposing ever you return,

Your aunt weren’t about to do the job herself, but know that I searched and searched for you. Should you find this, well and
good, I’ve done what I’m meant to. Should you not, I hope no harm to anyone who may come across it.

That school was as awful as awful can be, I’d wager, and I don’t fault your quitting the place—send word, and we’ll all be just as happy as fish in a lake. I’m to go to——Court,——shire to be with my sister, who’s always been my elder and thus an old woman now in need of some comfort.

This new fellow what owns the estate, Mr. Charles Thornfield, seems both a decent sort and terrible peculiar. He has his winning ways, and his peevish ones, but there’s no faulting a soldier for quirks—they catch them abroad, and there’s an end to the matter.

Mr. Cyrus Sneeves can explain something of the papers. Write to him should you have any questions, but supposing you want to leave well enough alone, I shouldn’t fault you either.

Best of luck always,

Agatha

I examined the rest of the stack. Here were more correspondences between Anne-Laure Steele and Cyrus Sneeves and, like the ones I had read so long ago, they dealt mainly with ensuring our claim to Highgate House; my mother’s penmanship appeared next, her faintly accented voice in my ear as I read:

Rue M——,
2nd Arrondissement,

TUESDAY

Dear Mr. Sneeves,

I wish to thank you for having granted me such a thorough understanding of our situation. The difficulty as I see it lies in the
honouring of our arrangement in perpetuity. Patience Barbary is dead set against us—and when I imagine myself in her shoes, I cannot bring myself to censure her.
On ne peut rien y faire
, however, and it only remains to discover a trusted party willing to visit consequences upon Mrs. Barbary should she ever attempt to disinherit my Jane.

Suggestions to this purpose will be met with gratitude; in the meanwhile, please move forward as discussed.

Je vous prie d’agréer,

Mrs. Anne-Laure Steele

The hairs at my nape bristled. My mother had regarded Patience Barbary with as much affection as she held for dung stuck to the sole of a heeled French boot; yet I read a curious reluctance in her wording, regret over the fact Aunt Patience would be angry, which I had never glimpsed in life.

The reply told me little, meanwhile:

Rue du R——,
1st Arrondissement,

WEDNESDAY

Chère Mme. S——

Trust that our regard for Mr. S——’s memory will allow nothing less than perfect diligence regarding this most delicate of subjects. A local agent must be appointed to make real the fact that thwarting our designs will only lead to unpleasantness, and I should be ashamed to suggest anyone of less standing in the firm than my partner, Mr. Aloysius Swansea. I shall make haste to apprise him of all details, but should you ever require direct contact, he may be found at:

SNEEVES, SWANSEA, AND TURNER

No. 29C Lisle Street, Westminster

Humbly,

Cyrus Sneeves, Esq.

I think it took me eleven seconds to locate a pen and paper and begin a letter to Mr. Aloysius Swansea:

Highgate House,

December 20, 1851

Dear Mr. Swansea,

My name is Jane Steele, and I recently came across documents suggesting that you conducted business with my father, Mr. Jonathan Steele, and my mother, Mrs. Anne-Laure Steele. I would be grateful for any information you could give me upon this topic, and should the written form prove too cumbersome, I can travel to London. Letters will reach me here, but I beg that you address them to Miss Jane Stone, as the unfortunate circumstances of my mother’s unhappy end have necessitated caution in revealing my true origins.

Gratefully,

Miss Jane Steele

The remaining correspondence confirmed what I already knew. I must needs await further instruction—supposing instruction would come. Stuffing the papers beneath my mattress again, I lay down, waiting for sleep to arrive.

No such guest called, however; ants seemed to crawl beneath my sheets, and the dawn greeted a weary soul. Head thinly humming, I
stumbled out of bed and splashed enough frigid water over my face to appear human at breakfast.

After all
,
Mr. Thornfield may have returned.

He had not, though, and I smiled sunnily at Sahjara across the table, a sealed letter resting in the pocket of my dress ready to be posted at my earliest convenience.

•   •   •

E
very brittle, branching fork of each bare tree seemed frost-spangled sculptures worthy of auction at Christie’s private parlour that afternoon. Sahjara had insisted I take to riding again—in particular a bay mare far too perceptive for her own good, for she kept questioning me, and I was not accustomed to surrendering the reins to anyone.

The three-year-old bay’s name was Nalin, or “lotus,” and on the sixth day following Charles Thornfield’s departure, she flew over rills and creek beds as if we had crafted a fragile truce. I sincerely hoped so, for I was remembering the beauty of Nature and questioning why I had abandoned it for the narrow streets of a soiled city. Having a horse beneath me again made me feel as if the wide world and myself were more akin than separate, and that as much as I remained a poisonous creature, I was related to the contrary being under my legs. Admittedly I had no proper riding habit, which vexed me only marginally less than it vexed Sahjara; still, my plain grey governess’s disguise, when topped with a cape-backed cloak and a cloth cap, suited well enough for the countryside.

I had given Sahjara a Sunday holiday, so I never thought of returning to Highgate House until my letter had been posted and the sun sagged and the skies—of a woollen complexion all day—began dusting me with powdery motes of ice. These were not the fat snowflakes one so loves to see in wintertime but the ground glass which
stings one’s skin, and thus I cut across a familiar clearing to take the road home rather than risking the half-obscured thickets.

The daylight was nigh expired, but the moon had risen, and the lane to Highgate House was scarce ever used save by the occupants—so I never considered how foolhardy it was to steer Nalin into a leap over a stunted hedgerow until it was too late.

We landed, a shadow materialised, and Nalin reared as she emitted a shrill neigh.

My own sharp cry echoed hers as I fought to regain control; but when she bucked the second time, I flew through the air and landed with a heavy thud upon the frozen dirt.

Bloody hell,
I thought, and then yelled it aloud, and then enunciated several more expressions learnt in London.

Crunch, crunch, crunch.

The shadow approached me; its steps blended with the mocking trill of the last birds left awake in the thickets.

Had I possessed a superstitious spirit, I should have been terrified to look, lest the traveller prove a goblin or a ghoul. One of the advantages to being a cold-blooded killer, however, was that I thought nothing in the woods much more dangerous than I was, so I heaved myself onto one elbow, panting with shock and exertion.

“Stay back!” As if lightning had illuminated my peril, I realised the footfalls were a man’s, and I incapable of flight. “I’ve no money, and a knife in my skirts!”