Becoming Jane Eyre (11 page)

Ushered through the grand drawing room, through a library, and along the three-arched passageway linking them, she did not become aware of the true situation immediately. Her employer, a tall, big-boned, handsome woman who did not need rouge to enhance her charms and who was obviously carrying yet another child high up beneath her blue taffeta dress, greeted her with a fussy affability. “How lovely to meet you,” she said, half-turning from the big bowl of spring flowers she was adjusting with a beringed hand. “I’m so glad you have arrived on such a fine day. Did you have a good journey? You must meet my little ones.” She seemed to have forgotten that they had already met and went on volubly without waiting for a response, calling for her two youngest children to meet their governess. She held the solid boy squirming on her knee and wiping his sticky mouth and hands on her gown. The little girl sat on the pink, silk-covered loveseat at her side. The mother spoke of their recent ailments, their delicacy, their susceptibility to colds, their cleverness, their aptitude, especially that of the boy, whom she called a “flower of the flock,” one who even at his young age knew the difference between right and wrong. She admitted that he might at times be a little high-spirited, but then, what boy was not? As for the girl, well, she was perhaps a little nervous, a little sensitive, and a little highly strung. Of course, both of them were used to the most tender of treatment and were unaccustomed to hearing a harsh word.

Was this good news? she wondered. She told herself that it would take time to get to know this place. She would try hard to please: she would be diligent; she would win them over, and surely they would see what mental wealth, what moral certainty, she had to offer. She thought of all the books she had read, her French, her talent for painting. She thought these people would gradually see inside her; they would be interested, surely, in the value of her mind.

She caught a brief glimpse of the master of the house, a blond, ruddy, and energetic-looking man who was coming down the stairs with rapid steps, a riding crop in his hands, a large Newfoundland bounding at his side. He impressed her rather more than the wife. Sticking his crop in his boot and restraining his dog with one hand, he was gracious enough to extend the other to her and welcome her with sincerity and good humor.

It was only when she realized that the maid was leading her up to the third floor, the servants’ quarters, that the crash came, a rapid descent from a high cliff of expectations. Alone in the room, she looked down through the paned Georgian windows and watched the guests’ carriages arrive. She listened to the sound of the men’s and women’s gay voices as they descended and entered the house. She heard a woman say, “You will not!” followed by a man’s laughter. No servants, these. What had she done to deserve this lonely fate? Why was she destined for nothing but toil and solitude?

The next morning she rose, hungry and filled anew with expectations. She would show them all what she knew. Had she not read all of Scott, Bunyan, Byron, Milton, the Elizabethans, and even George Sand? Her employers probably had no idea who George Sand was!

By the end of breakfast, which she took with her two very young charges on the second floor, in the nursery, it came to her that she was to be the
nursery
governess. She was in charge only of the two youngest children and not the older two. There would be no need for Byron or Scott. She would be obliged to eat upstairs in the nursery-cum-schoolroom on the second floor, with her turbulent charges, or in her own room and not, as she had hoped, with the family or their many guests whom they entertained below in the dining room.

She sat stiffly at the table, starving but unable to swallow a mouthful of oatmeal all through this first meal, or to enjoy the radiant scene of the park in the May sunshine beyond the three bay windows. It was only thanks to the good-natured Irish housemaid that her charges were kept at the table rather than under it, and the food from flying through the air.

One hand on her waist, the other holding firmly on to the platter of fried eggs and rashers, the housemaid turned her head and said to the little boy, “Now you stop playing with your porridge or you won’t get any of these nice fresh eggs.” This command, which had consequences, he listened to. Humiliated, hungry, her hands shaking, their governess was obliged to wipe the boy’s smutty nose and shovel his thick porridge into his mouth. She rose again and again to fetch the little girl’s pinafore from the floor.

“If you don’t behave, I’ll have to tell your Mama,” she said finally, and tucked a napkin around the stout little boy’s thick neck. He looked up at her with his wide face, waved a plump arm in the air, and shouted, “You are a servant and stupid, and she won’t believe you. She will punish you instead!”

She understood then that these people would never know her, nor the children look up to her. On the contrary. She was simply a necessary commodity, brought in to perform certain services, which she was beginning to suspect herself quite unfit to perform. Her employers hardly glanced at or addressed a word to her or, if they did, treated her with obvious condescension. “Would you mind fetching my shawl, my dear? Like a fool I’ve left it in my bedroom,” a guest asked her as she sat in her deck chair on the lawn.

On her first morning she was brought in for a brief interview with the housekeeper and given a lengthy list of chores to be performed. “Of course, in your spare time, there will be the sewing to attend to,” said the woman, who had a frizz of false curls on her forehead, which reminded Charlotte of her aunt’s. It was made abundantly clear that she was here to perform the greatest possible quantity of labor for the least amount of money.

When she wrote home to Emily and Anne, telling them not to show her letter to her father or her aunt, informing them that her days began at six and ended at eleven, she suspected that they would not believe her. It was slavery: thankless work without dignity. The two small, rude children had no notion of obedience. Unable to resort to any sort of punishment, she had only the weapons of perseverance and firmness. She was obliged to resort to holding the little boy down on the floor until his fury abated, in order to avoid his hands and feet.

She realized, too, to her consternation that, like her father, she did not enjoy the constant presence of children—or certainly not these children, spoiled, indulged in every way, who treated her with no respect, yet expected her to follow them wherever they led. The boy was principally interested in the traps he kept for birds or moles in the garden. When he rode his hobbyhorse in the house, he whipped it mercilessly and dug his heels into its flanks. To teach them anything, she was obliged to catch and hold them in their seats, while they screamed and kicked and bit and spat in her face.

They had been forbidden to play in the stable yard, because of the danger of the horses’ hooves. But one morning, the little boy slipped from her grasp and ran after his older brother into it. “Come back here immediately!” she found herself screaming. The little boy stopped, looked back at her, and grinned. He picked up a stone from the dust, and before she realized what he intended, reached back with his arm and threw it at her with all his strength. It struck her on the forehead and narrowly missed her eye.

Stepping into the schoolroom the next morning to see her children, her employer stood briefly by the fire and remarked on her governess’s swollen eye. “You have injured yourself ?” the woman asked without much interest.

When Charlotte shrugged and said nothing, the boy was moved to say that he loved his governess. She praised her son’s affectionate nature and sailed out of the room.

After the children had gone to bed, there was the pile of sewing to be done. She sat alone in the schoolroom, listening to the sounds of merriment, the strains of music and adult conversation coming from below. While she toiled, the others dined and conversed or danced. She could not even hide in her room with a book or take up her pen. She was expected to sit up mending or hemming or sewing dolls’ clothes by candlelight, straining her already weak eyes on a tiny muslin bonnet, wee socks, or a minuscule petticoat before finally climbing the stairs to the servants’ floor, where she lay awake.

During the day she slipped silently through the grand rooms. She never looked at herself in the mirrors. Occasionally, she caught a glimpse of her shadow in the grass. She knew she was growing thin. She was constantly hungry, but unable to eat at the table with the wild children. She wanted nothing fancy, not the trifles or blancmange or hare’s tongue she saw being taken into the dining room below, just a moment of quiet on her own with a simple dish and a book. Above all what she missed was a new idea or a stirring thought coming from without. She became increasingly aware of intellectual stagnation. She was afraid that she might become like these people, her intellect deteriorating, her heart petrifying, and her very soul contracting.

Nor did her employer’s husband show much interest. She rarely saw him except on Sundays, when the family went to church. During the week he was busy with various employments, roistering around the countryside, foxhunting or horse-jockeying. He was a practical farmer and a hearty
bon vivant
. If he caught sight of her, he would offer a cheery greeting of some kind, which would give her a momentary lift in spirits.

How different these fashionable people acted from those in her Angrian fantasies. There she could perform heroic acts herself or wait lovingly for the hero’s return. Here, as the days went by, she began to wonder who she was. In the evenings, surrounded by groups of guests, she would feel most alone. She sat still in her corner with her knitting until she could not bear it, then slinked off to her own room. Her breath grew short; her hands trembled; she often found herself on the verge of tears.

Her employer admonished her one wet June morning as she followed her charges down the stairs. “You really must endeavor to acquire a more sociable and cheerful disposition, for the children’s sake. Something franker, more natural, as it were,” she said as the children ran to embrace their mother. “Such a long face is not good for them, is it, my darlings?”

She stood there before her employer, battling with tears. The woman drew herself up and launched into one of her sermons.

“You are a victim of wounded vanity, my dear,” she said, “You are proud and therefore ungrateful. You are, after all, paid a handsome salary, and if you don’t make an effort to quell your ungodly discontent, you are likely to go to pieces on the rocks of morbid self-esteem and end up in an insane asylum.”

Humiliated thus before the children, who stared up at her with some satisfaction, she lost all self-control and burst into tears. She rushed back up the stairs and threw herself on the bed, in a passion of grief and rage. She sat weeping and drumming her fists against her knees in the window seat, studying the garden in the mist and cloud, a dismal scene of wet lawn and storm-beaten shrub. How could the woman speak to her thus!

In what way was this woman, with her animal spirits and limited mind and education, better than she? Her husband had inherited his position from his father, whose wealth and, indeed, this estate were procured by the efforts of children working thirteen hours a day. Yet she, the governess, was ordered to walk at a distance behind the family when they went to church on Sundays. Or if permitted to ride in the carriage with them, she was placed in a position far from the window and with her back to the horses, stifled to the point of sickness.

She considered leaving the place. There were moments when she would have preferred to be dead. But she decided to stay and survive. She would toil on. With the thought of her father’s example, her family’s affection, her intellectual and moral superiority, she determined that she would not give in; she would preserve her dignity.

Then, one July morning, there was a visit with the family to the house with the battlements. The girl, in her pink satin frock and lace gloves, was quiet for once, and the noisy boy was left behind with the maid. On her best behavior on this summer ride in the open carriage, the girl even tried out a few words of French that she had learned from her governess. She turned her pale, small-featured face up to the sun, which shone serenely on the still, green fields. “
Quelle belle journée, n’est-ce pas, Mademoiselle?
” she said almost pleasantly. As they entered the gate, the church bell was tolling the hour.

Charlotte looked up at the gray front of the three-storied mansion with its battlements and rookery, listening to the cawing of the dark birds that circled the sky, swooping down low into the thornbushes or taking wing, disappearing in the direction of the lonely blue hills.

Inside she stood in the entrance hall by the door, which was half glass. She looked at the suits of armor and a bronze lamp hanging from the ceiling. The amiable and garrulous housekeeper took them first through the library, then a grand dining room with one large stained-glass window, a Persian carpet, and dark-paneled walls, and next through a pretty drawing room with a boudoir with white moldings and floral carpets and red glass sparkling on the mantelpiece. She thought of snow and fire. “Bohemian glass,” the housekeeper sang out before leading them up the oak staircase through the chambers and finally to the third floor, with its long dark corridor and muffled, low-ceilinged rooms, filled with fine old furniture.

The little girl was moved to ask if there were any ghost stories about this house. “It looks like the perfect place for a ghost,” she said, holding Charlotte’s hand tightly. The housekeeper replied that there were no ghosts but there was, indeed, a strange story the villagers told of a madwoman, the wife of the master of the house, confined up here during the eighteenth century.