Jane Steele (8 page)

“What is it that Steele did not intend to do, Taylor?” Mr. Munt rested a poised arm against the pulpit.

Taylor’s round eyes flew to my queer tilted almond ones
.
“She dreams.”

“What in God’s name is Taylor doing?” growled Fox.

“It’s my fault,” I assured her quietly. “I didn’t notice she had got so frail. She has every reason to lie about me.”

“She isn’t lying,” I thought Fox muttered.

“Steele has simply
terrible
nightmares about her mother,” Taylor declared. “She doesn’t mean to scream, but she won’t
stop
.”

My heart stuttered.

Yes, I often awoke covered in sweat and raw-throated as a carrion crow and, yes, I dreamt of my mother; but I did not
scream
for her. Did I? Once or twice had I bitten back cries, but these were rarities, accidents.

Rising, I clasped my hands before my white apron. “I’m sorry for giving any trouble, but my mother died recently.”

“Over half a year hence,” Mr. Munt corrected.

“Mourning her is only
natural
. But please forgive me for disturbing the peace.”

“Natural?” Mr. Munt struck the flat of his hand against the podium as if smiting sin itself. “Let our hearts go out, girls, to this wayward lamb, who meditates on death when in the midst of God’s abundance.”

I bit the inside of my lip until I could taste all I had left of my mother, which was her blood.

“Steady,” Clarke chimed softly.

“Let Steele,” intoned Mr. Munt, “come to thank You, Lord, for your grace in orchestrating her removal from her mother’s evil influence.”

My hands gripping the pew had transformed into bleached bones.

“And let us never give up the hope that she may return one day to honest Christian practices!”

“Steady,” Clarke squeaked, gripping my skirt.

“Mourning my mother is not dishonest!” I cried.

I may as well have set off a bomb in the chapel; every eye
swept to me in dismay. Contradicting Mr. Munt was tantamount to suicide; unfortunately, I had not yet grasped that suicide was the topic.

“Your mother,” Mr. Munt enunciated, relishing every syllable, “was a debauchee who perished deliberately by means of self-administered laudanum. She was thus buried with minimal services by the only minister willing to overlook her Gallic Catholic affiliations and willful self-slaughter, and your sainted aunt spared you the indignity of witnessing such a barren sight. Tell me, why should mourning your mother be praised as any sort of virtue when her tainted spirit so obviously haunts your own immortal soul? Your mother was a disgrace to the natural order—an embodied disaster.”

He had known all along, I realised.

There had been no mourners in crepe at my mother’s funeral, I understood: only the overripe aroma of earth unwilling to accept yet another unpaid houseguest. Suicide was high treason, for what greater violation existed than thwarting God’s will?

My sentence (a week of missing dinner) was announced and Taylor invited to rejoin the ranks of the fed; but the pit of my stomach swelled into a cavern long before hunger descended.

Mr. Munt had won; I had not been prepared for the truth. A small hand interlaced with mine.

“You don’t cry out so
very
often,” Clarke whispered, wide-eyed and earnest.

“I will now,” I managed hoarsely before disengaging myself and opening our prayer book with palsied fingers.

•   •   •

I
have learnt since that a great many people are ill intentioned and yet behave well. I might have followed suit—winked into the mirror of a morning and worn a white sheep’s coat all the livelong day. Jane Eyre was told to pray to God to take away her heart of stone,
that she might be gifted a heart of flesh; but my heart of flesh bled for my mother, my mother whom I would apparently
never see again
if I was good.

The wind howled that November night as if mourning a lost love; and the decision I reached in my hard bed with Taylor’s cold toes prodding my calves, sobbing as silently as I could, went as follows:

If I must go to hell to find my mother again, so be it: I will be another embodied disaster.

But I will be a beautiful disaster.

“I might have been as good as you,—wiser,—almost as stainless. I envy you your peace of mind, your clean conscience, your unpolluted memory. Little girl, a memory without blot or contamination must be an exquisite treasure—an inexhaustible source of pure refreshment: is it not?”

I
t would have been possible for me to survive Lowan Bridge for longer than the bleak seven years I spent there had Mr. Munt not taken it into his head to kill Clarke.

Oh, we were subjected to daily indignity, each Reckoning more creatively vicious than the last; but small moments of happiness touched us deeply. In a mansion, blessings are lost amidst bric-a-brac; in a pit, they shimmer like the flash of dragonfly wings.

There was Miss Lilyvale’s boundless capacity to ruin even the simplest music. There was Fiona Fiddick’s faculties for both humour and sewing, which enabled her to hide the words
FEED ME
in an embroidered nosegay of coral peonies which Miss Sheffleton proudly hung upon the classroom wall. There were horses, and riding lessons, and I learnt to love galloping through the daisy-dotted meadows, pretending I need never return. There were the holidays, when Mr. Munt was out lecturing, and there was Clarke’s fierce,
small-lipped smile when she arrived back after Christmas with her carpetbag and delivered an impetuous peck to my cheek.

Reader, I had miraculously acquired a companion; Clarke’s existence owned me, opened me, left me helpless with stifled giggles at midnight. Becky Clarke was brilliant and ridiculous, an effortless scholar who insisted on honour when honour led only to missed meals; she was three years my junior, so I could shrug her off as an irritating protégée the instant anyone raised an eyebrow; and she responded to both compliments and criticism with the same casual piping responses, as if baffled anyone had noticed she was there at all. Her simplicity was droll, her mind captivating—had anyone asked whether I thought her a genius or an idiot, I should not have had a satisfactory answer.

“Would you like to watch the sun rise?” Clarke would ask when the weather was fine, and madly I would accompany her to the roof, yawning and cracking sluggish joints, and we would sit there quite contented, always gazing at the murky haze of London not so very far away from us, and seeming—as was perfectly true—nearer to its outskirts every year. She would hum soft songs whilst gazing at the firmament, and her head would find its way to my shoulder.

Meanwhile, we all grew longer limbs and harder hearts every year.

Granville passed away during the fever which swept through our school when I was eleven years old. Taylor wept dreadfully, saying that Ettie Granville had been the only person ever to understand her; I raided the charity salvage pile and delivered her monogrammed kerchief to my bedmate, who clutched me about the shoulders for all the world to see.

Influenza claimed Fox when I was thirteen; I orchestrated the theft of a bushel of apples to store in her memory and was caught out during a vengeful Reckoning. Clarke smuggled me broth in a hot-water bottle and watched me guzzle it as we both hid behind the bed frame.

We became adept at grieving, suffering agonies for a day or two, and then returning to our altered orbits. I grew accustomed to the facts of my mother’s death more slowly, the horrible truth that she had finally managed the trick she must have attempted long before, which was to die. The others treated me predictably poorly for a spell—who can escape the stigma of a lunatic for a mother—but we all hated Mr. Munt so ferociously, with every red pulse of life, that we had not time to hate one another.

All fell to pieces, however, when I had been at Lowan Bridge for seven years, and Clarke’s preoccupation with honour swerved from pleasant foolishness into fatal lunacy.

There we stood before Miss Lilyvale’s desk, awaiting instructions.

“Would you girls please study . . . oh, goodness, I’m that scattered . . . the piano part, Steele, and this soprano vocal part, Clarke, for the end-of-year gala? I can think of no one better able to demonstrate our talents. Won’t you say yes?”

We glanced at each other; excelling at any course was a coveted position, but evidence suggested that our favourite teacher’s praise was not so complimentary as her censure. Meanwhile, Clarke was an outstanding vocalist—her tones were dizzyingly high, hovering midair as if a magical harp had been strummed. Students came to a bewildered halt in hallways whenever she practised her scales with that mathematical precision which was so innate in her.

“Of course.” Clarke took the small bundle of songs.

Then a strange thing occurred: head folding, Miss Lilyvale leant forward against her desk briefly. Her rosy cheeks had lost their blush during the course of the past two years, as if she had been bid to shoulder a stone up an endless mountainside; every month Miss Lilyvale became more of an automaton with something terribly pleading beneath the waxworks. She drew her fingers along the knob of her drawer, eyes briefly falling shut.

“Do you want something else of us?” Clarke asked.

She answered softly, “I can never have the things I truly want.”

“Are you all right, Miss Lilyvale?” I inquired, concerned.

“Oh! Heavens yes, I was only . . . distracted. Thank you for being so obliging,” our teacher said, smiling, and the strange moment was shattered.

“It’s in the desk,” Clarke announced as Miss Lilyvale bustled off to see that some younger girls were given appropriate parts. I was sixteen, Clarke thirteen, and thus as model pupils we were often left to our own devices—save for the inevitable Reckonings.

“What’s in the desk?”

“Whatever is haunting Miss Lilyvale.” Clarke studied her music. The charm of her distraction lay in the fact it was genuine; Becky Clarke could not lie if her life hung in the balance, and I shall soon cite statistical evidence to this effect. “This is rather high even for me, though I do like G major.”

“Never mind music,” I whispered as we quit the classroom. “Miss Lilyvale is stretched as tight as the catgut on her violin strings. You really mean to say you know what ails her?”

Clarke lifted the choral part as we walked. The birds outside the gloom-shrouded staircases were dumb that April afternoon, the carpets mute beneath our footsteps. “I went into the music room at half four yesterday because I thought I left my sketchbook, and Miss Lilyvale was reading a letter. When I appeared, she shoved it in the drawer she just touched so sadly.”

“And you think her correspondent is making her
ill?
”

“No one can say,” Clarke owned, tossing her flaxen curls though they were restrained under her chaste cap. “But if ever it looked as if a letter were strangling someone . . .”

The ensuing silence fairly crawled with questions.

Does Clarke wish me to intervene?
I wondered, heart thrumming eagerly.

I had countless times thwarted hunger at Lowan Bridge, taking
as much joy in naughtiness as in success; I had forged grades, pilfered supplies, told positively operatic lies. Queerly, Clarke had never minded these untruths, though I supposed that was thanks to her natural compassion, or else her practicality. In any event, I had learnt the principle swiftly: if I lied to Mr. Munt (or anyone else to do with the ultimate act of lying to Mr. Munt), I would be praised; if I lied to Clarke—all of these accidental falsehoods, bred of forgetfulness—I would be shunned until her ire burnt itself to cinders and she nuzzled into my shoulder like a cat seeking company.

So I had lied, and grown still better at it—for myself, and for my fellow prisoners. It only followed, since Miss Lilyvale was our unquestioned ally despite being a teacher, that I ought to ferret out what was wrong with her.

I wonder about the verb
to ferret
now I am grown. If a conjugation of a similar verb,
to snake
, existed, I believe that would have been closer to the truth—for my slithering, slinking capabilities had been honed by age sixteen to a nearly reptilian pitch.

•   •   •

I
did not dream of inviting Clarke to raid Miss Lilyvale’s office that night, which in hindsight was a monstrous error; had we made the discovery together, we might have talked through what was best to be done.

Quietly, I eased my coarse frock on and skipped the apron, that material being too pale for untrammelled moonlight. I flinched as the door creaked, but no one stirred; if the girls knew one thing, it was that my disobedience tended to benefit the majority. Shutting the door behind me and risking further noise would have tempted Fate, so I stepped into the hallway, leaving a draught of air in my wake.

It had cost me two weeks’ practice with a bent nail to pick my first lock at the age of ten, aptitude for larder raids being a highly esteemed skill. As I knelt before Miss Lilyvale’s music-room door,
however, I felt strangely inept—my fingers were clubs, my ears abuzz with fanciful susurrations. At last, I prised open the lock and was greeted by the predictable midnight sight of an empty room within a sinister stronghold, its shuttered windows and watchful walls.

The desk was also locked. After fiddling with the nail, I substituted a hat pin, which swiftly worked its magic, and I pulled open the drawer.

As Clarke had suggested, a stack of letters rested there.

I lit the lamp with a lucifer from my dress pocket, hid the light under the desk, and sat upon the floor Indian-style. At first glance, I thought the letters must have dated back at least a year or two, for how else could some of the eggshell-coloured paper have deepened to pale yolk in tone? The envelopes were blank save for the addressee,
Miss Amy Lilyvale
, and I frowned in concentration as I slid the thin foolscap out.

Then my lips parted ways as I gazed upon the contents of what seemed the oldest correspondence.

They were
confessions.

Dear Miss L——

I can suffocate no longer under this mask, nor daily live a falsehood when such misplaced secrecy makes hypocrites out of honest Christians. I do beg your forgiveness for what I am about to say, and indeed, begging your forgiveness ought to have been a duty I performed years previous; if I cannot confess all to you now, however, my integrity is meaningless, and my boundless love nothing finer than a canker eating away at my swollen tongue.

I long to put my mouth upon you; yes, your lips, but I confess to far more fervidly desired locales. I wish that when your eyes met mine, they travelled a slow route to my trouser front. I wish that I could taste you where you must ache for me as I do for you. My
mouth upon your sweet flesh, and then my journey back up your body, and your face when I finish the first slow thrust into you, the one I compelled you to beg for; these images soak my dreams until there is nothing left of my free will, and I urge you to answer me: Are you innocent regarding my torment?

My hope is that you will not shun me after these disclosures. I am your employer, after all, and so must promise that your reputation as well as my own rests in my careful palms—safe from the censure of a prurient world, I assure you. I only hope that you can help to absolve me now I have disclosed my desires, and that we may unite forever as one flesh, or else live as forthright and forgiving siblings in Christ.

In brotherly love,

Vesalius

After blinking for what seemed hours, I edged under the desk beside the sour-smelling metal lamp with what I have subsequently learnt was a pile of ripe erotica.

Reading the second letter took me ten minutes, as half my body physically shrank from looking; reading the remaining thirteen took half an hour; I was, in this as in all other vices, a fast learner. I hoped that subsequent missives would deplore his initial one, but they were all of a kind, save that vocabulary like
breast
and
cunny
and
arse
and
rut
liberally seasoned later disclosures.

When I had finished, I scrambled out and leant over the desk, feeling a profoundly strange admixture of nausea and high-pitched excitement like the sensation of dismounting after a hard gallop.

Had this been what Edwin had meant?

You’re every bit as bad as I am. You liked it.

I did
not
like this feeling, this unsettled tingling wrongness; I felt it with Clarke sometimes at the edge of the rooftop when I thought,
How easy it would be to simply step off
, and my heartbeat soared, and I
flinched away from the edge, unspeaking and ashamed of myself and giddy with quicksilver nerves which fired from scalp to spine and lower.

I did not strictly
dislike
the sensation either, however.

I stole the letters and stole back to our dormitory. Crawling into bed next to Taylor following questionable excursions by now carried no risk, and she snored through my manoeuvres; Clarke, however, was aquiver with attention in the next bed, her eyes dancing over me in the grey not-light as I pulled back the coverlet.

“I was right, wasn’t I?” she asked.

At a loss for words, I passed Clarke the letters and curled up with my back to her golden curls.

This was not my first mistake, but would prove to be the most careless—no matter how confused I was by the strange pulse of blood in my groin. Sharing my findings with Clarke seemed the only option; the thought of digesting those letters alone, without her to partake in the disgusting yet exotic meal, revolted me—I girlishly wanted someone else to be as agitated as I was.

And yet, it was more than that. Clarke made me mindlessly, achingly happy. I wanted us to share in everything; I wanted us to sail to faraway China, for us to attend a lavish costume ball, for her to be threatened with a pistol and for me to throw myself in the path of the bullet. Often as I fell asleep I fantasised she had been forced to name me as a murderess in a Reckoning, so that I might be sentenced to starve in a frigid straw-lined aerie, and as I lay dying she would visit and we should watch the stars fading through the window and I should whisper in the shell of her ear with my last breath,
Never mind.