Jane Steele (5 page)

I wanted to be glad of her ruin—but I was only sad in a sweeping, sky-wide way, and sorry for myself despite the unforgivable thing I had done. I wanted Edwin back, and months previous, so that I could scream when I was meant to and none of this would be my fault.

“Tell me,” Aunt Patience demanded. “You are the one who found him. I must know all.”

Hesitating, I cast my eyes down. My silences were beginning to shift from weapons into shields. Now I have a wide array, a blood-crusted and blow-battered arsenal; but then I was still learning.

“He was already peaceful, Aunt.” My throat worked. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know anything.”

“You know more than I do.” Her voice had been ground to sand with weeping.

“Nothing that can
help
.”

We talked—or rather, Aunt Patience questioned, and I lied. The untended fireplace watched us. No, I did not think Edwin had been in any pain. Yes, it must have been an accident. No, he had not been angry with her any longer when we parted ways.

“He loved me very much,” Aunt Patience choked, pressing smelling salts to her flat nose. “He loved you too, his only close kin—he
was as affectionate a boy as I ever saw. Why did Edwin have to die in such a meaningless way? It ought to have been you
.
”

Numbly, I digested this; and then I understood.

As if a prophecy had been painted in the carpet’s flourishes under my feet, I knew what I must do to survive my cousin’s death. I loathed the prospect; but then I pictured my existence with only Agatha for company, and I knew I was right.

What I did not know was that an inexorable force tugged at my torn sleeve.

Scientists believe that the Earth twirls upon a great pole like a spinning top; this rotational point is theoretically located in the Arctic North, where the land is so desolate and lovely that daylight and nighttime cannot bear to give it up, and trade shifts in six-month intervals. These scientists are mistaken about the Arctic North; for I know in my heart that though the Earth does spin, and spin far too quickly for many of us to bear, London is the centre of the axis.

London is the eye of the circle and the heart of the globe, and London would be the saving of me. I did not know then that Highgate House was a mere overnight journey’s away; neither did I know that Lowan Bridge School was even closer to its suburbs. What I did know was that if Aunt Patience looked at me for another second, I would scream.

“Perhaps I see too much of your mother staining you,” she husked. “But—”

“Aunt Patience,” I announced, “I want you to send me away to school with Mr. Munt.”

Probably, if I had lately left a good home and kind parents, this would have been the hour when I should most keenly have regretted the separation: that wind would then have saddened my heart; this obscure chaos would have disturbed my peace; as it was, I derived from both a strange excitement, and reckless and feverish, I wished the wind to howl more wildly, the gloom to deepen to darkness, and the confusion to rise to clamour.

I
f the reader has ever prized solitude, you can imagine my revulsion when a vortex of attention formed in the wake of my desiring an education.

“Well, ye knows what’s best for yerself,” Agatha said doubtfully, laying out my supply of dresses, pinafores, and pantalettes. Her scrunched rabbit’s eyes had a wary cast to them, and a hurt one.

“Here there is no scope,” said I.

“Well, if that don’t beat everything,” Agatha muttered, rolling my hair ribbons and tucking them into a muslin bag. “Nature will out, though, sooner or later.”

“What do you mean, Nature will out?” I asked, thrilling with fear.

“Why, only that children can’t ’elp a-taking after their parents.
And if innocent lasses pretend to need
scope
when meaner sorts are driving ’em away, ’arassing and pestering-like, then the world ain’t what it ought to be.”

I flung myself at Agatha, helpless to check the gush of feeling; my spindly form met her strong arms, and I held her tight. “No one is driving me off. I only . . . I can’t stand it any longer.”

Agatha pulled me away from her embrace, shifting her hands to my temples so that she could read me like one of her pudding receipts. I lapped up the attention, for when would anyone ever waste sentiment on the likes of me again?

“Penned creatures suffer, but the more so when they imagine a pen what ain’t there,” Agatha said softly. “Can ye tell me the difference afore ye leave your ’ome behind?”

“I’m not penned—I’m frightened.”

“Ye said that before, in front o’ the main house. Of what, lass?”

“Of myself.”

Agatha set about mending the worst of my stockings. She stole glances at my mother’s painting, however, the one like a sunset seen through tears. I easily divined her secret fear, but knew it to be rootless. Edwin Barbary was ugly in life, uglier still in death; but many lovely things died with him, and one was my desire to be exactly like my mother.

I could no longer afford to be like my mother; my heart must be carried not on my sleeve but deep in my breast, where the complete darkness might mask the fact it too was black as pitch.

•   •   •

T
he day before my departure, Edwin was placed beneath the grass and the buttercups before a very small assembly. Aunt Patience would have sobbed if she could, but only swayed, murmuring; she may have been addressing Edwin, or the droning minister, or the shovel in the gnarled hands of the gravedigger—who could say?

I stood in silence with my head bowed, wondering whom she would talk to at all without me left to hate.

This morose thought followed me home, where a cold meat supper awaited. Directly before sleep finally captured my twitching eyelids, I mused over whether Aunt Patience would rouse herself and march—froglike, determined, hateful, as she used to be—down to the gate and see me off.

She did not . . . only Agatha kissed my cheek as I was helped onto the rickety wooden step of the coach, with my trunk strapped above.

•   •   •

T
here is no practice more vexing than that of authors describing coach travel for the edification of people who have already travelled in coaches. As I must adhere to form, however, I will simply list a series of phrases for the unlikely reader who has never gone anywhere: thin eggshell dawn-soaked curtains stained with materials unknown to science; rattling fit to grind bones to powder; the ripe stench of horse and driver and bog.

Now I have fulfilled my literary duties, I need only add that other girls travelling to school may not have dwelt quite so avidly upon the angular faces of police constables as I.

We had journeyed for some seven hours, and I had flicked the curtain aside as the towns came thicker along our misty route, blinking into view as faint collections of red roofs and stone chimneys. I tugged at the rope strung above the window. The otherwise empty coach stopped abruptly, nearly throwing me from the hard seat. A few seconds later, the driver’s whiskered face appeared in the act of spitting upon the side of the roadway. He gestured at the string tied to his arm as if my signalling him were the final straw in a long list of liberties I had taken with his person.

“Are we stopping at all before we reach Lowan Bridge?” I asked.

“Stopping!” He rubbed as if to wipe the red from his nose. Even had he succeeded, the pistol flask peeping from his lapel pocket would have replaced the stain in short order. “Are ye sick?”

“No.”

“Faint?”

“No, but—”

“Hoongry?”

Glancing at the basket Agatha had lovingly filled with bread and pickles and potted rabbit, I shook my head. “I only need some air.”

“Air!” repeated the driver. He shook his head as if from this day forward, no offence would ever be met with surprise. “Ye’ll have air enough in half an hour, when we reach yer destination. Ye’ll live on the stuff.”

“Is the board a frugal one?” I asked, desperate for a hint.

“Ye might say so. Ye might say scraps tossed to pigs are a point of frugality.”

“What is your name, sir?”

Rolling his eyes so I could see every feathery red vessel, the man answered, “Nick. What of it?”

“Nick, is life
very
hard at Lowan Bridge? I only want some warning, as Mr. Munt seemed . . . peculiar.”

Nick tapped his finger to the side of his ruddy nostril. “Peculiar! Aye, he is that. Ye’ll learn a plentiful heap o’ facts, if all goes well.”

“And how if all goes ill?”

“Then ye’ll not need to worry yerself—” he coughed “—as it’s prodigious difficult to trouble a corpse.”

This intelligence was punctuated by the stomping of boots as the coachman returned to his high post, a friendly cry of “Damn you, Chestnut, you bloody useless sack o’ glue!” and we were off again.

Quaking, I ate some pickles and a small piece of bread—however ill I felt, it seemed a prudent precaution. When the carriage ground
to a halt, my door opened; Nick tugged the rope line off his sleeve as I stepped down to the road.

We had stopped before a tall iron gate set in a stone wall, a gate with sinister floral embellishments and brutal points like demons’ teeth. Half the entrance stood open, a portal to a grim new world; a gravel path drew my eyes into the grounds, which were dotted with weeping trees lamenting my arrival. The building I guessed comprised Lowan Bridge School was grey as a feudal fortress. It possessed three stories, narrow windows excellently suited for a gaol, and a crenellated roof; if it had featured actual cannons thrusting through the stone gaps, it could not have made a clearer impression.

Nick harrumphed, and I turned to see that he had fetched my trunk from the roof and my basket from the coach.

“How can you leave children here to die?” I asked tremulously.

Setting my basket next to the trunk, Nick shrugged. “There’s a real education to be had here—that’s better than can be said for most o’ these governess manufactories. Anyhow, the world is a hard place, and I live in it alone—what’s it to me if you do too?”

“Here.” I offered the considerable remains of my luncheon. “If they don’t want me to have this, they need only take it away. You keep it.”

“Keep it! What the devil are ye a-doing of? I’ve been paid already, ye daft child,” Nick said, frowning.

“This is payment for something else.”

“What, then?”

“The world is a hard place, and I live in it alone.” I swallowed back my tears. “If you don’t remember the others, remember me.”

Nick studied me; in the end, he merely accepted my basket and shook my hand. Turning, he strode towards the dingy coach and Chestnut, who stood stamping and generally articulating his desire to be rewarded with a bag of hot oats. I could sympathise.

“Straight down the path,” he ordered. “Best o’ luck to ye, though brains’ll be of better use—and mind the headmaster.”

“I mean to.”

“Good,” Nick grunted, clicking his tongue at his weary horse. “Ye’ll live longer.”

I walked with a palpitating heart, dragging my trunk, up the lane under the brightening glare of midafternoon. The sun had sliced through the cloud bank, leaving an unmendable gash of blue across the sky’s face, starkly lighting the battlements before me. Reaching the front entrance, I hesitated and then knocked; the door was of thick wood strapped with iron as if bound in a strait waistcoat. A uniformed servant girl with a pockmarked face answered and beckoned me inside with the instruction, “Mind you wipe your boots. This way.”

We marched through corridors lined with carpets of forbidding black and blue, lit with wall-mounted dips rather than gas, featuring art suggesting that a great love of our Lord would be rewarded by the righteous being pelted with rocks. Half having expected a mean hovel lined with manure-seasoned straw, my childish jaw dropped; wherever my aunt had sent me, she had paid a pretty penny to do so, for this was no barnyard masquerading as a school, but rather the castle of a malevolent monarch. Had a dragon inhabited the dungeons, I should not have been in the least surprised. When we reached a smaller side room with books dimly lining the shelves, the servant said merely, “I’ll fetch someone,” and I was left with my trunk at my feet and mind in turmoil.

About ten minutes later, the door swung open. The woman standing there was quietly dressed in grey, her blond hair parted in the middle and her slender hand lifting a rushlight towards the darkened interior. She had a classically lovely face, features calling to mind a songbird or a sonnet, with a sweet afterthought of a nose and
pale blue eyes. I thought her around twenty-five, which seemed a most distinguished achievement and one I felt unlikely to duplicate.

“Are you Jane Steele?”

I nodded.

“Welcome. I am Miss Amy Lilyvale, and I teach music here. If you apply yourself at Lowan Bridge, you will be a valuable addition to any great household in the world. If you are feckless and idle, you will find life hard.”

She said these words as if required to deliver them; then she smiled. “You must be weary—you can have a wash before supper, and lie down if you like. Come.”

Lifting my little trunk, I followed her light step back into the corridor and up a stately central staircase. We had not halfway climbed it when a bell clanged loudly enough to summon the dead, and the sound of pattering feet from all directions met our ears.

Girls poured into the murky corridors, books clutched to flat bosoms and full ones, for they seemed to range in age from as young as I was to as old as eighteen. They were all dressed in navy blue stuff frocks—coarse material which must have chafed—with quaint white aprons, and a queer cloth cap fastened over their hair. I must have glanced down at my trunk, for Miss Lilyvale touched my elbow gently.

“Your own clothes will still serve you for holidays when you return to see your family.”

“I have no family,” I answered without thinking.

“Surely you must have a provider, or you could not afford to attend Lowan Bridge School.”

“Yes, I am very grateful to my aunt,” I replied, recovering my wits, “but she is not fond of me. She means to keep me away.”

“Oh, Miss Steele . . . and to impart a sound education to you, surely?”

This, I was coming to realise, was undoubtedly true—for had my absence been Aunt Patience’s whole design, I might have landed in a Yorkshire sty and been left to moulder there. Meanwhile, the rush of footsteps and the jostling of elbows all around us unnerved me; most of the girls murmured words I could not catch, as if fixing something in their minds, whilst the few who were silent cast brushing looks at me like the scrape of minnows in a shallow brook.

“Here we are.” Having reached the dormitories on the topmost level, Miss Lilyvale pushed a door open.

She revealed a long rectangular room furnished with two rows of double beds, several pine tables with basins and unadorned white pitchers thereon, unlit fireplaces at either end, and a window granting us a view of fragmenting clouds. The ceilings were high and imposing, the air as chill as it ever is within a stone tower, where we were to be kept prisoner like dozens of forlorn princesses. Suddenly weak with fatigue, I clutched the nearest bed frame, all but dropping my poor trunk.

“Goodness! That was a very brave show, but now I see the way of it,” Miss Lilyvale tutted as she snatched the luggage from my trembling fingers. “Take off your shoes and lie down for a while. Here is your bed, and later you will meet your bedmate, Sarah Taylor, but for now no one should disturb you until I return to fetch you for supper at half six. Till then, rest quiet, dear, and remember to thank God for your safe arrival.”

Miss Lilyvale departed. The bedclothes, though cheap and stiff, were clean, and the bed suitably big for the unknown Sarah to share henceforth. I wondered whether she was a good girl, a bright one, a pretty one; I wondered whether Nick would remember the potted rabbit if I ever required precipitate escape.

Sleep was finally weighing down my lids when I spied a ghost in the stark bedchamber.

Gasping, I tightened my loose grip upon the coverlet.

A lump of sheets had transformed into a child who could not have been above six years old—a blond apparition with a pale, freckled face and a tiny mouth. She regarded me stoically with her head on her palm.

“Miss Lilyvale told you to give prayers of thanks, and you haven’t done.”

Her voice was high even for her age—queerly so, like the tinkling of a bell.

“Why aren’t you at lessons?” I returned.

“Ill.” Indeed she looked it, for her skin was nigh transparent and her eyes dull, apart from the green circles of her irids. “You’ll own up to it and not be angry with me? You forgot your prayers after Miss Lilyvale reminded you?”