Jane Steele (3 page)

I was a precocious actress in her eyes: she sincerely looked on me as a compound of virulent passions, mean spirit, and dangerous duplicity.

I
nvitations to the main house were rebuffed in the rudest manner I could think of: silence. Even adults who are frightened of children come to their senses sooner or later, however, and in early June, I opened a missive demanding I appear before Mrs. Patience Barbary at five o’clock for tea. When I entered the drawing room, I discovered that three people awaited me instead of two.

Aunt Patience presided over the ivory-and-green-striped settee, an expression of foregone success staining her froggish mouth. The fact that her full widow’s weeds looked no different after my mother’s death (how could they have?) made me long to slit wounds in the taffeta. Edwin, lips already faintly dusted with sugar from the lemon cakes, offered me a polite smile.

In that instant, I knew—as I think I had suspected—that Edwin had been the one spying upon me.

“Jane, this is Mr. Vesalius Munt of Lowan Bridge School. Mr. Munt, this is my niece, Jane.”

Doubtless the reader has heard cautionary reports of granite-eyed patriarchs who run schools for profit and, shall we say,
misrepresent their amenities? You are partly prepared for what is to come, then. Mr. Munt was clad head to toe in black; his forehead was high, his sable boots neatly polished, and his mien sober. Here Mr. Munt’s superficial resemblance to fiction ended.

First, he seemed highly intelligent. He watched those around him closely; this was not a man who ignored the way I settled as far as I could from my aunt, nor who would remark upon it until the observation suited his interests.

Second, Mr. Vesalius Munt was handsome. He was aged somewhere between forty and fifty, but the map of his face—from thoughtful wrinkles to clear grey eyes to slender chin—suggested naturally benevolent inclinations and announced his regret at his self-imposed sternness of character.

Third, he was a tyrant, which returns us to the more familiar literary archetypes. He was a great whopping unrepentant tyrant, and he
enjoyed
the vocation, its artistry—I could see it in his perfectly disarranged black hair and his humbly clasped hands. I thought, with a squirming stomach, that here was a man who would set a snake over hot coals simply to watch it writhe.

“Miss Jane Steele,” he greeted me. “You have been orphaned within the month, I am sorry to hear. God’s ways are inscrutable, but trust in Him nevertheless brings light to the darkest of valleys.”

My aunt primly tucked her chin within her neck. “She is a clever enough girl, only mannerless and stubborn, Mr. Munt. Her intelligence needs moulding into humility and her character into an orderly Christian one.”

“Then I won’t remind you of my mother any longer?” I hissed.

Aunt Patience whipped out a glint of lacquered wood and began fanning herself with black lace. She wanted
something
between us, even if a scrap of cobwebby cloth.

Mr. Munt’s gaze flickered between us like stage swords, all shine and speed and subtle games. “Your aunt has informed me that your
mother was . . . troubled,” he said with tremendous care. “It is not unusual for the children of lunatics to—”

“Mamma was
not
a lunatic!” I cried, aghast.

“No
indeed
,” seconded Edwin in a fawning manner which sickened me.

“Her constitution was delicate.” My aunt sounded like the teeth were being pried from her head. “Artists are often highly strung.”

“Art is a curse,” Vesalius Munt agreed, shifting on the hard cane chair. “An infection eating away at godly reserves of abnegation, chastity, and meekness. Show me a contented artist, Mrs. Barbary, and I will show you a dabbler—a pretender, a drudge. True artists belong to a miserable race. Jane, they tell me that your passions are strange ones, and your upbringing . . . eccentric. I run a school, you see, and your aunt thinks you would make an excellent pupil there.”

The word
school
provoked the first sensation other than dull misery I had felt since before I could recall. Mamma had been at boarding school as a girl, in the south of France. On holidays they walked to the glimmering seashore, where pebbles clattered under their slippers and the sea spray chased them shrieking with laughter back to the dunes. She learnt both dancing and painting there.

Going to school already seemed adventurous, but my fingers tingled when I realised it would also be imitative of my mother.

Remembering our cottage, however, I was swiftly anchored back to Highgate House; how could I leave everything familiar when I was already so lost? Fear leached the happy nerves away.

Additionally, I was an artful little liar, and what befell artful little liars at school?

“I should rather not go,” I whispered.

Aunt Patience snapped her fan.

“To send me away with a stranger—”

“Mr. Munt will make you useful, as orphaned children must—”

“Don’t banish me,” I pleaded, standing.

“The matter is settled.”

“It is not either!” I shouted in most unchildlike fashion.

Aunt Patience thrust her heaving bosom forward. “You horrid puppet, only listen to reason for once. You
must
find a vocation, or—”

“I own Highgate House!” I cried. “Mamma told me so. You’re only saying this to me because you
hated her
.”

“I am saying this to you because you must become productive. And if you knew how good I was to your mother after all the suffering she caused, you would drop to your knees and beg my forgiveness.”

Is that what I must do, then?
My lips were quivering, my guts knotted.
Humiliate myself so I might keep what belongs to me?

“Is flattery what you’re after?” I hissed. “But of course, that’s why you loathed poor Mamma so—she was exquisite, and you were never flattered a day in your life.”

Sulphurous silence spread throughout the parlour. Mr. Munt studied me so intently he made my neck prickle, and Cousin Edwin gazed in a horrified stupor, his breaths straining his waistcoat buttons. Aunt Patience only smiled, a smile like a gate slamming closed and locking.

“I didn’t mean that,” I choked out. “Truly. But I want to remain here with . . . with everything I have left of her.”

“As well you should. Mummy, you can’t send her away!” Edwin protested. “Jane is my only playmate.”

Aunt Patience said, in much too babying a tone for a lad of thirteen, “There now, my sweet, soon your tutor will have taught you all he knows and you yourself will go to school and find splendid new companions.”

“No,” Edwin moaned, burying his face in his hands. “No, I will miss her, you
can’t.
It isn’t
fair
.”

“Quite touching to see such devotion in young relations.” Mr.
Munt’s stately wrinkles creased approvingly, and he brushed imaginary dust from the knee of his trouser. “It gives me every hope that Jane is indeed redeemable, to have inspired such affection.”

Finding none of these observations complimentary and growing steadily more unnerved by Vesalius Munt, whose silvery eyes seemed coins at the bottom of a too-deep pool, I edged towards the door.

“Where do you think you are going, my dear little girl?” Mr. Munt asked, kindness seeping from his tone like blood from a gash.

“I cannot stay for tea.” A noose was tightening round my throat.

“Now, Jane,” Mr. Munt purred, rising. “You are only proving your dear aunt’s point by acting so irrationally. Come here, allow me to examine you, determine your strengths, and perhaps we shall yet find a place for you at Lowan Bridge School.”

I was off like a hare; my aunt looked after me in unfeigned alarm, and Edwin gave a small wail.

Mr. Munt, I saw as I glanced behind, meditated on me with his dashing black head cocked: the look of a man who has spied a hill and vowed to crest it, for no reason other than to see what lies upon the other side.

•   •   •

W
hen I returned to Highgate House many years thereafter, I viewed the ravine again, and felt as distant from it as a child does looking at a terrible cave in a picture book. Thus I can describe it as my twenty-four-year-old self perfectly rationally. Our cottage stood at the edge of the woods, with the sweet brown duck pond lying to the west of us. If one passed the pond, the forest which bordered our property gave way to a ridge and thence to a sharp declivity like a small crevasse populated by violet monkshood and sharp wild grasses.

I felt Mr. Munt’s eyes searing the back of my skull long after my escape was accomplished, so I repaired to the woods.

My curls stuck to my brow when I reached the trees, glued by
means of animal fear to my skin, and I smeared them back. We had pinned two braids like a crown atop my head, but several strands had bolted and I must have looked a malicious dryad there, surrounded by leaf and bracken. Light slanted through the branches as if it possessed physical weight that evening, making prison bars of shadows and penitents’ benches of fallen trees. Wandering, I calmed myself.

I should not go to Lowan Bridge with Mr. Munt.

I need not go to Lowan Bridge with Mr. Munt.

I
will
not go to Lowan Bridge with Mr. Munt.

“Are you hurt, Jane?”

Too frightened to shriek, I spun about with my hand clapped over my mouth. Cousin Edwin stood ten feet away from me, a cautious grin pasted over his face, the sort people who are terrible with horses (as I am not) think will calm skittish beasts.

“What do you mean?” I gasped.

Edwin came no closer, but pointed his index finger. His dull hair was half-lit and half-hid in the shade of a crooked branch; he seemed a stitched-together creature from a puppet pageant, the sort in which spouses are beaten within an inch of their lives.

“You’re bleeding.” He began to walk again.

Looking down, I saw that I had scratched my arm upon a bramble without noticing. A trace of blood wept from the shallow gouge.

“Here,” Cousin Edwin said when he had reached me.

He breathed harder as he wound his handkerchief over my arm: round and round, binding the cut, forehead beetling in concentration. Edwin smelled of lemon cake and the faintly
old
aroma he always carried, as if he had been born in a bed of camphor and cheese rinds.

“I won’t let them,” he announced. “I hate that she thought to send you to school. I am the
man
of this house, and you shall stay here with us, Jane. Don’t be afraid.”

I watched him tie off the cloth—like a bandage, yes, and like a silken slave’s cuff, and like the collar at the end of a leash.

“I’m not afraid.”

Edwin glanced up, pale green eyes glowing. “You
were
afraid—of that horrid Mr. Munt. You needn’t be. He won’t take you away from us.”

Edwin plucked a leaf from my hair and placed the memento in his trouser pocket—a habit I had never liked, but never thought quite so pitiful.

“Did you forgive me?” He rocked on his heels. “About the secrets game—we’ve hardly spoken since. I was only repeating something rude I heard Cook say. Your mother was too beautiful to avoid cruel gossip, don’t you think? Shake hands?”

Edwin’s pudgy hand thrust before my face. I shook; for an idiot, he was clever to perceive that complimenting my late mother would work miracles.

Instead of letting go my hand, he pulled me closer.

“Do you want to know what my favourite secret is?” he breathed into the space between my eyes.

I swallowed. If I said no, he would rage, pout, fume for days, so I angled my head. He put his rosy mouth to my ear.

“The time in the trap when I
showed
you, and you never screamed. You’re every bit as bad as I am. You liked it.”

He drew back fractionally. His grip tightened, and whilst I searched for words to tell him that no, opening his trousers had not been a bond between us and that screaming clearly ought to have occurred to me, he chewed his underlip until it was scarlet.

Then he grinned brightly.

“You’re not screaming now either.”

“Let go of my arm,” I ordered.

The breeze sent kindly fingertips through our hair, jays calling from their shadowy canopies, and now I
was
frightened—mortally—
of the woods which were leaf curtained and the birds which could not help me with whatever strange sort of trouble this was.

Edwin did not let go. “Let’s start a new game.”

“Stop it, I tell you. What game?” I demanded.

“I want to know what the inside of your mouth tastes like.” Cousin Edwin leant down.

I struck him as hard as I could across the face, and he was startled enough to let go, and I had not known until then what it meant to
run
.

The light shone brighter, and the wind picked up, and I had just burst through the trees in the direction of civilisation when Edwin caught me. We both tumbled to the ground and I swiped at him, shouting his name and
Stop
and he laughed easily and pinned my wrists to the earth at the top of the ravine where the twigs pricked my back and the sky seemed a great billowing, purpling tent above the looming forest.

His lips met my neck; his tongue shoved at my mouth. I kicked and
kicked
, limbs transforming into weapons even as my heart churned pure black fear through my veins. Edwin pinned me with his weight and he had transformed too now, hard where he ground against my thigh, red where my fist had stung his cheek, and
My body isn’t working, nothing is working
, I thought, so I used something else.

“I’ll tell this time,” I spat as I struggled. “I’ll tell
everyone
.”

His piggish look of glee dimmed. “No, you won’t. You’re a knowing little jezebel just like your mother, Mummy always tells me so.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that you like it.”

“I’ll tell her we
both
like it,” I lied coldly, falling limp. “Then she’ll send me away forever. Get
off
.”

Edwin retreated—biting his mouth, straightening his clothing. When he took in my bedraggled state, he grew agitated, reaching into thin air as I brushed myself off with unsteady fingers.