Jane Steele (10 page)

“Miss Lilyvale has seemed most upset since you touched her private things,” Vesalius Munt chastised, returning to his desk. “She carelessly left a letter lying out, I take it?”

I drew a quick breath. “I was in the teachers’ wing looking for food, and one of your letters caught my eye. I told Clarke about the contents. She never . . . It was all
my doing
, Mr. Munt.”

“Perhaps so—I blame myself, you realise. It’s clear as day that Anne-Laure Steele’s unchecked rebellion, her cunning, her willingness to spit in the face of God Himself, all have been passed down to her only child. Pity. Do you long for death too, Steele? Do you think of the Reaper as you would a suitor, turning away from God’s myriad blessings?”

Hours of conversation with Mr. Munt, I thought, was indeed too hard a bargain when set against a single hot meal.

“That is why I am contemplating committing you,” Mr. Munt concluded, examining his shirt cuffs.

The words hung before me like a corpse displayed for public view.

“It would sadden me beyond words should one of your classmates fall prey to your wild moods.” Mr. Munt’s eyes gleamed, a powerful king protecting his realm from embodied disaster—disaster by the name of Jane Steele. “You could hurt someone, Steele; you could destroy someone, I believe.”

Vesalius Munt could not possibly have known my secret, but my knees turned to water anyhow; he had seen something in me—a sparking flint where there ought to have been a soul, perhaps. Asylums by all accounts, meanwhile, were handy places to be chained to a bed covered in your own filth, subjected to ice baths and mercury doses and leeches on shorn scalps, and fed rather less than was customary at Lowan Bridge School.

“Don’t expel me,” I breathed. “I’m, I’m not mad—you know that I am not. I’ll behave. Only feed Clarke and I shall do just as you say.”

Mr. Munt crooked a finger over his full lips as he cogitated. Most would have seen a headmaster wrestling with a convoluted decision; I saw a despot to whom suffering was as amusing as a penny concert.

“I am moved to be merciful,” he concluded, “but Clarke’s punishment must stand if you remain at Lowan Bridge. The pair of you are potentially harmful to the others when acting together. If you agree to the asylum, Clarke can return to regular meals. If you prefer to remain and repent, her rations shall remain as they are.”

When I opened my mouth, it was empty—save for my heart, which lay aquiver in my throat. He was inclined to be
merciful
, and thus was offering me a choice of my life or Rebecca Clarke’s. The seconds elongated, an out-of-tune music box winding ever more slowly to its finish; Mr. Munt, smiling, picked up his pen as if to correct my altered numbers.

I was not inclined to be merciful, however, and thus gripped the letter opener and plunged the sharp point deep into my headmaster’s neck.

My earlier metaphor had been wrong, I discovered. The splash of ink from the pen dropping onto the page looked nothing like a spray of blood at all.

. . . like any other rebel slave, I felt resolved, in my desperation, to go all lengths.

T
here is a passage in
Jane Eyre: An Autobiography
which puzzles me mightily; and because it only tickles at the edges of my understanding, I cannot help but read it over, sitting with a glass of dark sherry as the sun grows teasing and hides behind the elms:

All said I was wicked, and perhaps I might be so: what thought had I been but just conceiving of starving myself to death? That certainly was a crime: and was I fit to die?

I present to the reader an enigma: my mother rushed the giddy business of dying along and was almost universally reviled for it. Speaking as a woman who has deserved to die since the age of nine and often thinks death a charming notion anyhow, I burn to know: When Miss Eyre demands philosophically,
and was I
fit to die?
is she asking whether she is wicked enough to earn capital punishment, or holy enough to merit release from the torments of her browbeaten life?

And if she wanted to die . . . did she deserve to any longer?

•   •   •

F
ew among us are aware of how much blood the human body contains—surging in thick waves should it chance to be spilt.

I had spilled it, meanwhile, and therefore drastic measures were required.

Mr. Vesalius Munt was felled by a strangely skilful blow—as if I had studied the act, when in fact I had simply decided that he should stop being alive
.
He gurgled a disbelieving shriek, eyes ablaze with wrath and fear, looking perversely more alive than ever, each muscle taut with severest alarm. He even got halfway to his feet, reaching for me, rich gore soaking the fateful ledger.

Then his lips bubbled crimson, his blazing eyes hardened, and he slumped forward over the desk. His fingers, so graceful in life, twitched like the poisonous insect he was; his back ceased to shudder.

I cocked my head and gauged his condition: dead.

I paused to be medically certain; but as he continued dead, I heaved a breath and looked around me, beginning with the mirror above the fireplace.

The spray of crimson across my school uniform was not inconsiderable, and another plume of blood had feathered my hand; I carefully wiped these drops on Mr. Munt’s own sleeve. Using the late Mr. Munt’s coat the way one would a handkerchief was an act of sufficient disrespect that I turned away giggling, the giggles followed by a hysterical peal of laughter.

A bottle of amber spirits sat upon the side table.
In for a pound, in for a penny.
I poured. The taste was much harsher than the laudanum I had once pilfered from my mother’s dressing table; the sear returned my senses and, after spluttering awkwardly, it occurred to me that I was in a not-insignificant amount of danger.

My heart pattered a rhythm like spring rain upon a roof;
according to the tall clock, I had nearly an hour before the close of Sunday services.

I rifled through the secretary as well as any drawers I could open without shifting my latest victim, scattering papers and pens. When my pockets contained coins in the neighbourhood of five pounds, a dented silver watch tucked away for repair bearing the initials
VOM
, and the almost-forgot volume published by Clarke’s family, I shut the door of the study behind me and raced silently down the corridor.

•   •   •

R
eader, would you prefer me to have felt remorse in the aftermath of my second slaughter?

Though the brutality of the act sent fearsome tremors through my small frame for days and weeks afterwards, never have I regretted ending the life of my headmaster.

Dressed in a too-large brown travelling suit stolen from Miss Lilyvale’s wardrobe as by then I owned nothing save school-issued clothing, having wrapped my bloodied uniform in paper and stuffed it in my trunk, I was raiding the pantry an hour later when Clarke discovered me.

A small cough sounded, and I whirled around.

I stood in the windowless room aghast with a single rushlight flickering, shoving bread and fruit into my trunk, preparing to abandon everything I knew—but caught out.

“I went to his study,” Clarke whispered.

A word of advice: do not ever kill for love, or you will find yourself tethered, staked to the ground when your cleanest instincts require you to run for your life without a backwards glance. Killing for love is one of the most tangled acts you can commit, reader, in an already twisted world.

She looked so small, this beautiful friend of mine. Clarke’s madcap blond curls hung loose and tangled, her miniature lips chalk
white. Inexplicably, she was dressed in her holiday travelling clothes, an emerald woollen suit and a cap appropriate to her age. I blinked dumbly; Clarke was the colour of goose down, so I promptly deposited her onto a stool.

“You discovered Mr. Munt, didn’t you?” Her seaweed-green eyes flooded with brine. “I dragged myself to chapel to make a point in front of everyone, but he wasn’t there, so I tried to catch him alone. I had meant to beg him, it was shameful, but I found—did I find what you found?”

The silent steel cogs of my mind ticked.

“Yes.” I clutched her to me, cherishing her still-warm bones. “Oh, Clarke, I meant to plead with him myself. But there were drawers open and thieves must have—it was horrible. I’m so sorry you saw it too.”

Lying had never been easier. Either I informed Clarke that I had shoved a letter opener in Mr. Munt’s throat, or I kept my beloved companion for another half an hour; the decision did not trouble me overmuch. She set her head against my shoulder and quaked as she cried, whilst I attempted to determine the most efficient way never to set foot upon a scaffold. Swift escape seemed the best option; but swift escape had been delayed by my partner in defiance.

Meanwhile, I reminded myself harshly, Clarke was still dying.

“Here.” I tore away from her, hands landing upon some plain bread and shoving it unceremoniously into the white butter pot, tearing her off a portion. “Eat slowly. You know when we don’t, it—”

“I know,” she answered before devouring the hunk in mouselike bites.

I continued my travel preparations; a paper packet of cheese, a fistful of nuts. For leave I must, and I felt a knife in my own throat when I thought of final separation from Clarke. I wondered why on earth she was wearing ordinary clothing when we were all due at cold Sunday supper in uniform in an hour.

“Where are we going?”

Turning, I regarded my friend, who had slid off the stool and was reaching for a lone apple in a basket full of onions and braided garlic heads. Her freckles still glared dark as tiny bruises from the pallor of her cheeks, but her voice was stronger.

“Clarke, I haven’t anyone to go
to
.” Telling her the truth was always pleasurable, as if I were apologising for the glaring omissions. “My aunt loathes me, and until I’m of age . . . I simply can’t go back, not to her. You have a family, you can—”

“They told me they were publishers of poetry and plays.” Clarke’s eyes glinted hard and gemlike. “The older I grew, the more I thought it odd that they had sent me here. When I was home, they barely entertained or received any callers. For a day it would be splendid, and every hour afterwards I would feel more like a guest, Mother making the rounds at her Bohemian salons, Father at his office and clubs, them glancing at the clock during supper. I would ache to know what
you
were doing—I thought of you whenever they slighted me, whenever they heard my step and seemed almost . . . disappointed. Every visit, I told them we were tormented here, and every time, they said that school was difficult, and how could I move in artistic circles without an education?
Artistic
circles,” she repeated in disgust. “By the time I left after a visit, they could barely contain themselves for joy.”

“You can’t—”

“They
lied
to me, Jane.” The name, after so long without hearing it, stole my breath. She blinked in her oddly deliberate manner, polishing the apple against her sleeve. “They sent me away when I was
six years old
. And now you mean to send me away yourself.”

“But I—”

“Please don’t leave me behind to survive this school without you, I couldn’t bear it. Who knows what sort the replacement headmaster
will be? We’ll find a new place to live.” Doubt pinched the corners of her mouth. “But perhaps you don’t want—”

“Of course I do.” A weightless feeling soared inside me, a flock of starlings scattering into flight. “I only—I’ve about five pounds and a silver watch that was my father’s, but that won’t get us far.”

Smiling slowly, Clarke took a bite of the apple. “You’ll think of something.” Pivoting, she fetched her carpetbag, which I had not even seen previous. “You
always
think of something—you’re terribly clever, the cleverest one. It’s nearly three—let’s be off before the cooks arrive to assemble the cold supper. When they find what’s in the head’s office,” she added with a shudder, “there will be hell to pay.”

It may have occurred to the reader that allowing Becky Clarke to flee the scene of a murder—with the murderess, no less—was not my most shining instance of altruism. I was sixteen years old, however, sixteen and nigh berserk to escape, delirious with the old instinct to run which had brought me to Lowan Bridge in the first place. Only this time, I would not be friendless and bereft; this time, I would have someone beside me who wanted, however inexplicably, to be there.

If sixteen-year-olds are accounted selfish generally, then reader, how much greedier was I in the face of freely offered loyalty?

“London,” I breathed in Clarke’s ear as I took her hand. “Where else would we go save for London?”

•   •   •

W
e fled on foot to the main road, fearing to look behind lest the hornet’s nest had upturned and sent swarms flying after us. The alarm had not yet been raised, however, and the grounds proved as empty as they always were of a Sunday—or had been ever since Granville and Taylor had been caught fleeing years ago and were
returned by an obliging seller of trinkets who thought the sight of two unescorted girls demanded his immediate assistance.

The fact that Granville had died soon afterwards, though Taylor had scarcely been punished at all, surely does not require explanation at this late juncture. As for Clarke and me, we scaled the pocky wall next to the black wrought iron gate and tumbled to the ground with no worse consequences than scuffed shoes—or no worse consequences
yet
, unless I acted with miraculous rapidity.

Clarke threw her apple core at Lowan Bridge School, a final gesture of defiance. Half a dozen times, perhaps, we had all visited the village a quarter mile away to inflict Miss Lilyvale’s Christmas hymns upon the town square, and only gradually did I realise I was taking us there. London sent out new filaments continually, cast shimmering tendrils like the spread of shattered crystal—we had seen this from the roof every year, when London swelled and burst and swelled and burst again—but it was hardly feasible to walk there. Not with Mr. Munt stiffening over his desk.

“Who do you think it was?” Clarke asked.

Swallowing a spike, I shook my head. “The room looked ransacked. Robbers?”

My friend angled her head, curls twice gilded with late afternoon sunlight. “Maybe so.”

My heart constricted painfully. “Why couldn’t it have been?”

“Oh, it could. It’s just that . . . possibly someone wanted to find something other than money.”

“What sort of something?”

“Well, you never returned Miss Lilyvale’s letters. I read them, and then you . . . kept them. As protection, I assumed. But you never returned them.”

At the thought of whey-blooded Miss Lilyvale plunging a makeshift dagger into the cords of Vesalius Munt’s throat, I laughed so
hard that a fox or a badger or some such went crashing away through the bracken.

“All right, she isn’t the bravest woman I’ve ever met,” Clarke agreed, half smiling in a way that sent me into further fits. She slapped my arm. “Jane,
stop
.”

“If she was looking for the letters, she took an unnecessary risk in slaying him, for I burnt them,” I gasped. This was factual, but Clarke need not know that I had shoved them in the dormitory fireplace after stabbing our headmaster. “In any case, why should I have given them to him?”

“What I mean to say is, we hated Mr. Munt—every student, better than half the teachers, the domestics. Isn’t it much more likely that someone he wronged took revenge?”

“He ought to have been at the sermon during that time,” I insisted, abruptly no longer amused, “so it would have been the perfect occasion to burgle his sanctum. It was a complete accident that he was present at all. Someone else was there, someone up to no good, and Mr. Munt caught them.”

My words skated so close to truth telling that I sliced my eyes to Clarke; shrugging, she nodded.

“You’re probably right, but I’m right too—that person could have been any of us.”

I pretended to ponder this theory—as if I were upset at the implication that such a monster could hide in the skin of a young girl or a teacher undetected, when in fact I was upset at the fact we could at any moment be dragged back by our hair. The village inn rose before us, half-timbered and sagging at the roof like the shoulders of an ancient farmer, a comfortable pile of lumber emitting a faint aroma of meat pie. Clarke sagged in concert with the building, swallowing audibly in her ravenous state, even as I stiffened.

“What is it?”

“An idea,” said I, gazing with impetuous hope at the vehicle resting on the cobbles. “Come along, we’re filling you with a hot meal.”

As Vesalius Munt was only my second murder, in the immediate aftermath I imagined that a black reaction would set upon me with razor teeth; such was not the case, however. My mind was piercingly clear, and I recognised the shabby manure-spattered coach which had carried me to purgatory at age nine as soon as I glimpsed it, thinking,
Here—if we are very lucky—perhaps is an ally.