Jane Steele (34 page)

“I’m a murderess, sir.”

“Does she suppose me deaf and blind?” he cried incredulously. “Does she suppose I simply forgot that she—”

“Five times over.”

Charles Thornfield began to say something. Then, brushing his thumb under my damp eyes once more, he began to say something else. Finally, after puffing a vexed sigh, he muttered something else entirely, by which time I was prepared to die on the spot. I think my heart must have only commenced beating once more when the wry creases around his brows smoothed into softer seams, as he looked when he spoke with Sahjara or picked up a delicate antique volume from his library—as he looked when he wanted to take especial care. He passed me his kerchief, counting on his left hand.

“The first?” he questioned, and his rough voice had gentled.

“When I was a girl, my half brother tried to rape me and I pushed him,” I whispered. “He died. I used to— I no longer think that was entirely my fault; but it was the most important, for it was the first, and made me who I am.”

Mr. Thornfield’s eyes frosted over entirely. “Oh, my darling Jane. Next?”

“My headmaster gave me the choice of watching my friend starve or being sent to a madhouse. I stabbed him with a letter opener.”

He whistled, continuing to count. “Much more impressive. The third?”

“My landlord beat his wife until she lost their unborn child, so I pushed him into the Thames.”

“It’s not many corpses as can foul the Thames, bless ’em. You accomplished a miracle. Go on?”

“A judge wanted to buy my friend’s little girl and turn her into his dollymop. I gave him inheritance powder and he died dreadfully.”

“Not so dreadfully as he should have done. And I know Jack Ghosh personally, my darling, so does that make up the full roster?”

“Yes.”

Reader, I wanted with every cell in my bloodstream to fly from the room and weep for days, but I was prevented; the grim line above his clear-cut nose appeared, and he pursed his lips sternly.

I waited, frozen in terror.

“I don’t think much of your list, y’see,” he declared, and though his eyes were warm they were wet as well. “A more sorry lot of rubbish than you’ve dispatched I’ve not heard tell of. Why, in battle, Karman killed dozens of strapping British and Bengal gents who’d not have pissed on these dregs if they were on fire. We simply must raise your killing standards, my darling, because I’m frankly ashamed at the quality of chaps you’ve—”

We were both laughing through tears by the time I had flung myself the short distance into his lap and was kissing him, so warm and so real underneath me. His shoulders under my questing hands were at first as tense with worry as mine, I think, for I had alarmed him; but soon, they calmed, and he cradled me more softly, and dropped his lips against my neck with a breath like a prayer.

“That was egregiously unfair of you,” he murmured against my skin. “I thought you were about to confess to fatal consumption, or a fellow whose company you prefer, or the fact you’ve been called back to faerie, something bloody
important.
”

“Do you know that you’re entirely insane?” I had pulled the black ribbon from his head and buried my hands in his hair.

“Yes, actually, but this form of madness is far preferable to that of a fortnight since, don’t y’agree?”

“God, yes.” I calmed myself. “And I never thought that mad, only tragic.”

He set his hands softly at my waist, frowning in thought.

I passed quiet fingers over his hairline and waited, wondering whether his torment had been constant or more like owning a heart which had stopped like a broken watch; I wondered whether he knew himself.

“I hated the hands which couldn’t help her,” he concluded hoarsely. “And all those dead, Jane . . . Even after coming here, when I would walk into a pub or a square, I couldn’t look at humans without seeing them as corpses.” He shook his white head. “Then I saw you. You are so
alive
, Jane Steele, you make my breath catch, as if a glowing creature from the depths of the forest had lit upon the end of my finger. You had already endeared yourself to me by greeting Sahjara so courteously, as if somehow it were a happy circumstance for you to accidentally enter our madhouse. When I saw you fall from Nalin that night, I knew you were dead, my darling, I knew it with such certainty, because how could anyone I had liked so well from the first survive such an accident? Then you sprang up wielding invective and knives and I adored you. I thought it lunacy that you should take such a frank interest in my history.”

“Only insomuch as your history makes you who you are today. I dreaded your knowing mine, sir.”

His eyes, so wistful seconds previous, narrowed in amusement. “Had you not better call me Charles?”

Laughing, I pressed my forehead to his. “I love you, Charles Thornfield.”

He placed his hand over my heart, and I could not help but wince at the sting; where once he had been about to speak, he stilled in chagrin, and I realised any further intimacy would reveal the injury inflicted by Mr. Sack. This was distressing. I wanted no words on the subject of the Company to distract us; I wanted fewer articles of
clothing between, and ideally a bed, though the nearby sofa would do, or the rug barring that.

“It’s nothing, only a scratch.”

“A scratch from what manner of animal?” he demanded.

Clearly I was to be thwarted in any attempt to keep the injury secret; I unbuttoned my dress at the neck a few inches, and then several inches more than was necessary, and watched as my love’s heated gaze darkened to black. The gash was indeed an ugly one, a crusted purple line.

“Very well, precisely whom am I meant to murder this evening?” he snarled.

“I thought I was the expert on that activity.”

“Jane, I demand satisfaction!”

“Might we employ other avenues in our search for satisfaction?” I said in his ear.

“There have been too many outrages upon your person in our brief acquaintance, and it will
not
be tolerated a moment longer, not while I have breath, do you hear me?”

I placed my hands along his stony jaw, set upon having my own way.

“Charles,” said I. “While you have breath in your body is, I hope, a long period of opportunity. Now, if you will forgive me for being coarse, I should like your breath on my body. I am a wicked woman, and I should like for us to go upstairs and wash this blasted scrape, and see that my head is mending well—because that will please you upon a professional level, and because you enjoy being tender with me—and then I should like for you to express that tenderness in positively filthy fashions.”

The scowl did not vanish, but now his sculpted mouth and eyes both softened at their corners. “Is that truly how you wish to pass the night?”

“Oh, I do, sir.”

“Had I not better ask you to marry me?”

“I don’t know. Do you want to?”

Finally, he chuckled and drew me closer, pulling slack lips over the hollow of my throat. “Yes.”

I shivered. “I don’t see any ministers here, do you?”

“Drat, we seem to have run dry of prelates. Happens at the worst possible times. Jane, we are doing this all out of order.”

“Are we?” My nose crinkled in confusion.

“Indeed so.” His voice lowered, its warm burr scraping over me softly. “I love you, Jane Steele. I love you. I’ve loved you since you fell from my horse. I love you, and I’m a damn fool. That should have been said by this time. Now, I’ve a confession to make.” He rose easily to his feet, and I rose with him, for he had slipped his arms round my back and under my legs. “You, my darling, must vow to me on your honour never to fall down another staircase. But you’ve no idea how cruel it was to have you in my arms like this every night, thinking you should only ever be my friend Jane, so I shall indulge your desire to shift our plans from murder to other sins.”

We did exactly so.

At first there was great tenderness, and kissing until our lips were supple and rosy whilst he was still learning for himself that I was all right; and if later there was passion, and muffled cries, and Charles’s
No, I want to hear you, please let me hear you,
and expanses of skin being tasted until we were both panting with exertion and simple love, then it is not the polite place of autobiography to address the subject.

When we had more than once exhausted ourselves, however, and Charles in sleep rolled to his belly and I spent long minutes tracing the scar marring the muscles of his back, I thought that this would be the memory I would treasure best, and I was right. As soon as I could leave off stroking his skin, I touched the mark at my own neck and blessed it; for we are doers of deeds, he and I, and as such lose
parts of our flesh along the way, and can only pray to meet friends and lovers who can help to stitch us back again, and that we can make them whole in turn.

•   •   •

I
did not marry Charles Thornfield until some few years after I began sharing his bed.

I am today Jane Thornfield, née Steele—but I am also, though few outside the household saving Mr. Quillfeather know it, Jane Kaur. Sardar Singh performed the ceremony in June, in the garden at midnight as my mother would have wanted, as Charles and Sahjara looked on proudly. Mr. Singh filled a ceremonial iron bowl with clear water and then poured into it a quantity of sugar; this he stirred with one of the swords from the billiards room, a double-edged one, as he called out in his lion’s voice, “
Sri Wahe Guruji Ka Khalsa, Sri Wahe Guruji Ki Fateh.”

The passage is a pretty one, even in English: “The Khalsa belong to God, and God’s truth will always prevail.”

Charles says that he does not care what sort of Jane I am so long as I am his Jane; Sardar says that he does not care what sort of Jane I am so long as I am my own Jane; Sahjara says that she does not care what sort of Jane I am so long as she is my Sahjara. Thus I am daily three Janes, and so the luckiest of all.

When corpses arrive at Highgate House, they speak to Charles, and he reports to Sam Quillfeather—sometimes they died naturally, but sometimes not, and these occasions are much preferable, for we share adventures, and I cannot imagine a happier circumstance than leading a life spiced with murder and intrigue alongside the man I love.

I hope that the epitaph of the human race when the world ends will be:
Here perished a species which lived to tell stories.

We tell stories to strangers to ingratiate ourselves, stories to
lovers to better adhere us skin to skin, stories in our heads to banish the demons. When we tell the truth, often we are callous; when we tell lies, often we are kind. Through it all, we tell stories, and we own an uncanny knack for the task. In
Jane Eyre
, the wise author writes, “Reserved people often really need the frank discussion of their sentiments and griefs more than the expansive.” I have lived this—should we neglect the task of expressing our passions, our species should perish upon the vine, desiccated and desolate.

Mr. Rochester after being married to Miss Eyre announces that their honeymoon “will shine our life long; its beams will only fade over your grave or mine.” As I am not a prognosticator, and have been witness to myriad calamities, I can make no such claim regarding my own marriage. Confident I remain, however, and I find myself hopeful as well—if the world is wide enough for me to find someone, who knows what miracles lurk behind each and every closed door? Charles Thornfield and I are far from perfect; but we are perfect for each other, and perhaps in the end, our chains bind us more closely than anyone who has never been a prisoner can imagine.

While
Jane Eyre
needs no introduction, I should mention that Charlotte Brontë’s preface to the infamous second edition thrilled me from the instant I first set eyes on the quote, “Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion.” While the author continues to lob great Molotov cocktails of scriptural invective at her critics for perhaps a trifle longer than necessary (if Brontë lived today, it wouldn’t be impossible to picture her replying to troll tweets and one-star Amazon reviews), the spirit of the thing is marvelous, and to anyone who has read the novel without the preface, know that it was a major inspiration for this satirical riff off the classical Jane.

The position of women in the nineteenth century was notoriously fraught with economic peril and rife with class divisions, and nowhere is this more evident in
Jane Eyre
than when the haughty Blanche Ingram rails against governesses as if they are repulsive insects children have every right to squash ruthlessly. Marriage to a rich man was a respectable way to make a fortune—but to be educated and servile at once, raising the children of others simply due to reduced circumstances, was considered a ghastly fate. Richard Nemesvari, who edited the careful scholarly edition of
Jane Eyre
I myself used, suggests regarding Blanche’s tirade announcing “half of them [governesses] detestable and the rest ridiculous” that:

On one level this is purely a rude attempt to put Jane in her place, but it is also an attempt by Blanche to establish her own place . . . It is absolutely essential for Blanche to despise all governesses, because only in this way can she ensure (in her own mind and others’) that there is no connection or potential relationship between them.

Naturally, this made the notion of writing a serial killer governess who was also in all likelihood a wronged heiress cracking good fun, and while Jane Steele is a far more egalitarian soul than Blanche Ingram, she also has no strong objection to pretty frocks, good whiskey, large estates, expensive horses, or marriage to a brooding Byronic hero.

It would be ludicrous to pretend that I could have grasped Sikhism after only six months’ research, but a few books in particular were of immense help. First,
The Sikh Religion
by Max Arthur MacAuliffe (1842–1913) was written by an Englishman whose love of the Punjabi religion was roundly ridiculed by his associates within the Indian Civil Service, who really didn’t think converting was quite the done thing, by gad. Responsible for producing the first UK translation of the Sikh holy book, the
Guru Granth Sahib
, MacAuliffe continued to pen English-language volumes about Sikh history with the help of Pratap Singh Giani, a brilliant linguist and calligraphist who among other prestigious accomplishments worked as a scripture-reader in Amritsar, the holy city. Second,
The First and Second Sikh Wars
was commissioned by the British Army in 1911, and military historian Reginald George Burton executed his mission with tremendous care and detail—for which I’m grateful, as it’s nigh impossible to picture a battle when you’ve never been in one.

Thirdly,
The Sikhs
, written by political activist, magazine publisher, and scholarly author Patwant Singh, proved crucial. While
Charles Thornfield and Sardar Singh are romanticized versions of nineteenth-century warriors, the bloody battles and corrupt politics were real, and long continued to plague the region. Patwant Singh attempted to intercede for peace during a tragic modern-day confrontation (the 1984 crisis at the Golden Temple, in which three hundred fifty extreme Sikh separatists and seventy Indian soldiers died), and he worked tirelessly to present a faithful and well-rounded picture of a much-misrepresented culture. An entire chapter of
The Sikhs
is titled “Grievous Betrayals, 1839–1849,” and describes how gross mismanagement—or more likely, outright treachery—by powerful Sikhs led to the slaughter of the Khalsa, and the eradication of what had once been an opulent empire. Based in personal sacrifice and responsibility, monotheism, pacifism, meditation, but also military prowess, the people who were once massacred for rejecting the inhumanities of the caste system grew into a legendary army, and Patwant Singh did us an incredible service by placing these disparities in vivid context. His books have my highest recommendation, as they are full of what he refers to as the “invasions and inquisitions, triumphs and tragedies, piety and sense of divine purpose, devotion and depravities, loyalties and betrayals, courage and convictions” of his religion.

Finally, it would be disingenuous of me to suggest that this book isn’t rather ridiculous, and be it known that its ridiculousness is based in both truth and in fiction. While Mr. Squeers, who “had but one eye, and the popular prejudice runs in favor of two” was not real, the terrible school called Cowan Bridge that Charlotte Brontë claimed took the lives of two of her sisters was. While George MacDonald Fraser’s fine novel
Flashman and the Mountain of Light
is almost too deliciously ridiculous to exist, the defeated Sikhs were in fact required to hand over the Kooh-i-Noor diamond to Queen Victoria, which was cut from 186 carats to 105.6 carats and is now part of the
Crown Jewels. And while it may appear ridiculous that an accidental avenger should find a home with refugees from Punjabi battlefields, as Nicholas Nickleby mentioned to his friend Smike, “When I speak of home, I speak of the place where—in default of a better—those I love are gathered together; and if that place were a gypsy’s tent, or a barn, I should call it by the same good name notwithstanding.”