Jane Steele

by Lyndsay Faye

  No, it is not my business, I concluded.

  But it could be, I thought next, shifting and afterwards falling into a troubled slumber.

  TWELVE

  “Dread remorse when you are tempted to err, Miss Eyre: remorse is the poison of life.”

  If early reading of the Newgate Calendar carved a mark upon my girlish character, I was for two years grateful for the scar.

  We were housed thanks to me, kept in ribbons and pub fare thanks to Clarke, and when our presence leashed the mongrel inside Hugh Grizzlehurst, so much the better. Mrs. Grizzlehurst never failed to greet us with buttered porridge or Sunday eggs and herring, so I supposed that her scheme was working, despite occasions when the lilac circle beneath one eye looked darker than the other. Clarke and I hemmed loudly at the occasional nocturnal scuffle, stomping to fetch a glass of water, returning to bed in the widening pool of quiet.

  There are households which would have considered this arrangement paradise—and in retrospect, at times, I did myself.

  In the frigid January of the year 1845, Mrs. Grizzlehurst grew thicker about the middle and began to whistle when she was not speaking (which was nearly all the time). Jane Eyre insists, Human beings never enjoy complete happiness in this world, and I agree with her—but as Mrs. Grizzlehurst slowly swelled with child, I thought what a lucky chance it was that humans do not often suffer complete unhappiness either.

  Mr. Grizzlehurst produced clownish smiles as he bent to kiss her cheek in the morning, his expressions tinged a helpless shade of ash when he went through his account books in the evening. He began to toss me worried glares, meaningless winks and clucks, a pleading slackness hanging heavy in his chops before he whispered:

  Miss Steele, hadvantitious as this ’ere week has been, is there nary another penny we might’a misplaced somewhereabouts?

  This verse is downright halliterative, Miss Steele, and I happlaud you… . Can we not keep it to a single page? Paper is that dear these days, and we don’t want to look ’eathenish.

  Just before everything fell apart, he handed me this gem:

  MOST BRUTAL STABBING RIPS HOLES IN NUBILOUS YOUNG VICTIM—.

  Sighing, I dipped my pen; I sat at the rickety table in our garret in the coral glow of a February afternoon, preparing myself to rescue our native tongue from worse than death once more. The chipped yellow vase which I generally filled with weeds—Queen Anne’s lace and wild flowering parsley—sat empty in February save for some whimsical thistles Clarke had brought me to cheer my spirits when English had been dealt cruel blows.

  We discover a most unforewitted tragedy struck in Church-lane, St. Giles’s, shocking even the most hardened of that irascilacious realm. A comely lass of seventeen years was most untimely struck down by a delinquitorious scallywag, a blade thrust twixt her ribs some scores and dozens of times, and left to bleed. Whilst chances the scurrible fiend will be brought to justice are most uncertificable, the humble author prays that he will be left to dangle like the most inconseterial string of garlic.

  Since two years previous, “Grizzlehurst’s Daily Report of Mayhem and Mischief” had trebled in sales as far afield as Southwark and Deptford, thanks to my style and to Hugh Grizzlehurst’s genuine talent for scouting out the rankest misdeeds imaginable; had it occurred to me to be proud of the fact, I should have tried it out. Still—I watched Bertha Grizzlehurst gather up scattered flour from her breadboard as if it were gold dust, listened monthly for the sound of the landlord’s hobnailed boots and his rat-a-tat, and understood her husband’s wheedling for “Just an extra three days, guv’nor, as yer a charititious Christian.” I worked as many hours at the “Daily Report” as he, longer if it sold quickly, and there were four of us in that dear, dingy house, Clarke helping with laundry and mending and mopping, so our hosts never asked us for rent even if they wanted to. At the time, however, I had little notion of what a drinking habit cost, nor did I realise that some landlords considered the worth of their tenants more relevant to pricing than the square footage of their lodgings.

  Small wonder, not knowing how hard the world truly was, I sat so peaceably over my paper and nibs in those final hours; small wonder that I lost something when I never knew what I had in the first place.

  I felt Clarke’s graceful steps entering. Her feet sounded satisfied, her gentle shutting of the door weary; she had passed a good day in the Rotherhithe marketplace, crooning sweet ballads and the occasional comedic patter song. Her forearms met my collarbone as she rested her chin upon my head; I was ludicrously smaller than she when seated, for where the younger Clarke had grown tall and willowy, I had remained a slight, sparrowlike creature.

  “How bad is it?”

  I shut my eyes since she could not see me, simply grateful for her; I thought us sisters, partners, the perfect duo save that I was unworthy of her affections. Tapping my pen against the word irascilacious, I nuzzled my head against her neck like an overgrown cat. She chuckled into my crown.

  “That is almost too inventive to edit out.”

  “You’re an evil temptress and I shun your wiles,” I returned in a passable impersonation of the late unlamented Vesalius Munt. It thrilled me to call Clarke evil when the reverse was true—as if every time she laughed, I knew my own secrets remained buried.

  Of course, murder was not the only secret I kept from Clarke.

  By the time I was eighteen, I had read her father’s publication The Garden of Forbidden Delights an indecorous number of times—always in the sleepy midmorning, when Clarke was out singing and I had spent half the night replacing gibberish with words, dependent upon Mr. Grizzlehurst’s voluminous lungs to sell our goods each morn. Unlike Mr. Munt’s letters, the erotica printed by Clarke’s family failed to sicken, only caused a joyous, clamorous sensation I could not help but mistrust, since it meant that Edwin was right about me.

  I liked it.

  The people in the slim red book thirsted for closeness, unfolded themselves in turgid metaphors like the petals of a spring rose. Everything they did, they did for wild love—women practically scooped out their hearts and passed them to one another, men discovered these Sapphic passions and assisted in their explorations, brothers-in-arms aided one another when the women were exhausted by pleasure. Even quarrels ended in a dizzy swell of bosoms and trouser fronts; I blame my superb memory on the fact that I had memorised entire chapters.

  At age sixteen, it had been too much to take in, let alone tell Clarke about; at age eighteen, I had kept the secret for so long that I should no longer be presenting Clarke with a fresh discovery, a tomcat delivering a mouse—I should be informing her that I was perfectly capable of keeping mum. Though I could not be disgusted over their stock in trade, I could understand Clarke’s hurt over being snubbed by her parents, and this delicacy led to my complete failure to bring the subject up at all. As the reader has never faced a similar predicament, I warn the tempted: secrets decay, as corpses do, growing ranker over time.

  “Mr. Grizzlehurst seemed disturbed,” Clarke reported. She passed a glass of port over my shoulder. “What did he print yesterday?”

  “Oh.” I sipped, leaning into Clarke’s—now blessedly filled out—torso. “Tripe about a robber who stole a boat along with its cargo of sardines. None of the people interested in that story can read, but never fear, I’ll set it all right tomorrow.”

  I had never been more mistaken.

  • • •

  That night, rather than the high percussion of slaps, the deep thud of blows met our ears.

  Clarke and I both were out of our bed instantly, praying for the sound resembling a rolling pin striking a veiny beefsteak to stop; it did not stop.

  “What are we to do?” Clarke whispered. She dived for her robe, mindless magnanimity surging through her. “I’ll go down and—”

  “You’re not going anywhere!” I captured her elbow.

  My throat was tight with he could so easily harm you—by mistake, in the braying torrential rage from which some men
suffer; but Clarke tore from my grip.

  We heard, “Get up, you haudacious piece of baggage!” and luckily we were already tearing down the staircase, for God knows what He might have allowed if we had not done so.

  When I reached the ground floor, Clarke stood with her fingers hovering before her own mouth. Mr. Grizzlehurst had wheeled to face her, chest brokenly wheezing and fists knotted. Mrs. Bertha Grizzlehurst lay upon the floor exercising her habitual silence with her arms clutched around her belly and her temple bleeding … but no, not just her temple, I thought, for there is so very much—

  “Bertha.” Mr. Grizzlehurst looked as if his favourite toy had somehow come to life and bitten him—as if he were the one hurt.

  Mrs. Grizzlehurst made a sound through her nose, more a whisper than a whimper, which caused a strange calm to descend as if a cannon had fired next to my ear.

  My fingers circled Clarke’s wrist and I pulled her back, keeping the link between us gentle. The blades in my eyes I saved for Mr. Grizzlehurst and, when I swept them to him, sweat broke out over his shaking jowls.

  “Get out,” I ordered. “I’ll take care of everything, just don’t hurt her anymore. Get out.”

  We bundled an unsteady Hugh Grizzlehurst out the door, Clarke and I; he blubbered a bit, stumbled, groaned as we pushed him into the street.

  His wife made not a sound until the heavy bar across the door scraped into place, and we had gathered flannels and hot water and the shallow hip bath, and I had scrubbed the too-solid stain from the floor; then we all wept long and low at the waste the world produces, and the way in which a baby might have been born to a doting mother but was not.

  All is colourful flashes when I remember that night—scraps of scarlet emotion, the pale violet sound of soft keening. I think of Mrs. Grizzlehurst’s grey head as Clarke cradled it, rocking, and the throbbing sensation that I ought to have been doing more: as if I had been summoned there following a terrible incantation, a spiteful Greek goddess dressed in radiant sapphire and Mrs. Grizzlehurst the supplicant at my altar, offering more blood than I ever wanted to see again for the rest of my life. It was easier to think myself an observer from another realm than merely a parentless child who had just watched something unspeakable take place.

  So I scrubbed the floor thrice and made everyone tea with extra brandy and milk, and I soaked rusty linens and watched the sun rise and periodically glared down from our garret window to check for Mr. Grizzlehurst’s return, not feeling anything.

  When I think of that morning, I remember how I felt, however; I remember that morning very clearly indeed.

  • • •

  People vary widely in their opinions of female usefulness; my aunt Patience, for instance, preferred them to be approximately as useful as antimacassars. I had, in the wake of two murders, no illusions about what I was capable of—and Clarke, when we retreated to our room that dawn after settling Mrs. Grizzlehurst in bed, seemed to be developing dangerous faith in our combined capabilities.

  “He’s no better than a murderer.”

  Clarke paced as the moon dissolved like a sugar cube in the spreading sunlight. At fifteen, she was strikingly lovely, with her champagne curls pinned up into a cloud and her freckles grown more populous from singing in the midday square. I watched her, a queer ethereal creature myself, fretting as she stalked from wall to wall with a rose-patterned robe tied over her nightdress. Beyond the horrible fact Bertha Grizzlehurst’s dreams had been shattered, Clarke’s vexation pulled at me with the drag of a hundred tiny fishhooks.

  “He’s … a little better than a murderer, Clarke,” I corrected, lighting two tapers on my desk.

  “He just killed his own baby!” she hissed.

  Pondering how easy it was to lose control, I developed an intense interest in retying my grey dressing gown.

  “She has to leave him! Jane. Jane, are you listening? She has to get away from here, she’ll never be able to look him in the face again without knowing—can you imagine the torment?”

  I sat upon the edge of the bed so as to concentrate on the tie, which was proving unexpectedly taxing.

  “We have to help her,” Clarke decided.

  “How?”

  “Surely she can seek out a relative—have you ever heard her speak of parents or siblings?”

  Raising an eyebrow, I wordlessly reminded Clarke of the number of sentences we had heard Mrs. Grizzlehurst utter.

  “We’ll just have to ask—and if she has somewhere to go, we can help her. I have it now!” Clarke exclaimed, clapping her hands.

  Diving at the bed we shared, Clarke pulled my trunk from beneath the frame. I recall the exact set of her shoulders, the quizzical turn of her head as she searched, the way I sat watching her, not understanding, until the instant I did understand, and horror clawed at me, and I stupidly gasped, “Wait, don’t—” just as Clarke chirped, “Here!” and darted to the brightening window with her prize.

  “Don’t touch that,” I growled in the voice of a cornered beast.

  Clarke had already lifted the dinted silver watch to the light, however; at my outburst, she nearly dropped it, but she had seen the initials VOM etched onto the metal. Pushing a curlicue of hair away from her eyes, she slowly turned.

  “You said you had a silver watch of your father’s when we left.” Her high voice was considered but flat, as she had sounded when working out algebraic equations, which positively wrecked me. “This …” She stopped, her head whipping up. “This is Vesalius Munt’s watch, isn’t it?”

  Desperate, I cast my mind in all directions for a lie which might serve, any lie, every lie, the right lie.

  “Yes. I … I was leaving school, alone I thought, and had hardly any money.”

  “What else do you have of his?” Clarke’s tone had frosted, placid as a winter lake.

  Stomach churning, I pulled out The Garden of Forbidden Delights. Clarke took the book, pursing her lips in puzzlement. I committed this insane blunder for two reasons which, in my distress, seemed actually sound. First, aware that Clarke possessed zero tolerance for my falsehoods when directed at her, I offered her a secret like a penance; and second, it seemed prudent to remind her that I may have had a lunatic mother and a history of stealing from dead headmasters, but was her own father not also subject to trivial quirks of ethics?

  As Clarke flipped through the pages, her grip began to tremble; we had encountered the obscene on London’s streets before, but never produced by her own parents. I darted to her, tossed the book away, and took her hands, kissing one and holding the other over where my heart ought to have been.

  “It’s all right, their business doesn’t affect my opinion of you,” I breathed. “Oh, please don’t look like that! I took the watch thinking I would be friendless and I’m sorry I lied to you, but you’re so particular. That book—you should never have seen it. Mr. Munt wanted to turn me against you, but I never loved you any less.”

  I fell silent as Clarke’s eyes grew swollen with dread. She snatched her hands away, staggering back, knocking one of the candles over; wax spattered the floorboards, began to congeal and to harden.

  “Wait, I only meant to say that you—you’re family to me. Are you hurt? What’s come—”

  “He gave this to you that day, to spite the pair of us?”

  “Yes, but it didn’t work, I told—”

  “When you found Mr. Munt in his study, you said he was already dead, Jane!” she shrieked.

  Time seemed to ripple, an eddying effect which left me reeling. Clarke shook her head back and forth, back and forth, like a metronome without any click, click.

  “It’s not what you think,” I whispered.

  It was, however.

  “I never realised,” she said hollowly. “I thought how natural it was that the same thing should happen to both of us, we were always so kindred, but it never entered my mind that … you … and you scour the papers for crimes every day and they never found his killer, Jane, never found any clue.”


  This was not precisely true; Sam Quillfeather had released a statement that, thanks to the complete lack of witnesses, his privately held suspicions could never hold up in court, and thus should remain unspoken for the sake of peace and healing. This ambiguous, insinuating news had eradicated my appetite for four days, which I explained to Clarke as a nasty attack of la grippe.

  “You murdered him.” Clarke swayed, pulling at handfuls of her curls.

  “Sit down, you’ll hurt yourself,” I pleaded. “Oh, Clarke—”

  “How could I never have worked it out?” She collapsed on the bed with rote obedience.

  “Well, it wasn’t the likeliest scenario on earth, was it?” I laughed, and she looked at me as if I had turned lupine, as if all my absences during the full moon now made perfect sense.

  Kneeling before her, I seized her elbows. “Listen to me. You’ve always listened to me, and I’m sorry I lied about the watch, and—”

  “Being sorry for lying about murdering our headmaster might be more—”

  “He was killing you.” The tears which had risen were not lies, reader. “He would never have let you eat again, and I went to the study, meaning to alter his food supply records, and he caught me, and I never meant to hurt him.”

  “By hurt him, do you mean stab him in the neck with a letter opener?”

  Laughing again did not help my cause. “I’m sorry, that was—I’m so sorry. Please understand, I had to choose between being sent to an asylum or watching you starve. What could I have done?”

  “Attempted escape?” she offered hoarsely. “I would have gone with you, you know. Into the woods, the faraway cities. I would have gone with you anywhere.”

  The past-tense construction of this sentiment spread invisibly around us, graphic as a battlefield.

  Disengaging herself, Clarke pulled off her robe and her nightdress; I stayed on the floor, too numb to move as I watched her cover her creamy skin with her underthings and one of her daytime frocks, methodically shoving the others hanging in the wardrobe into her carpetbag. When this horrifying ritual had been completed, she retrieved a few songbooks and snapped the latch on the bag, which sounded to me like a pistol shot.