My Plain Jane

by Cynthia Hand

  Helen had a point. Jane never would have deceived someone so, as Mr. Rochester had deceived her. Not to mention the fact that she never would’ve had someone possessed to get her way.

  The thought made her stomach roll.

  Another knock. “Jane. You are the most radiant thing I’ve ever seen. Remember when you bewitched my horse on that road?”

  Charlotte raised her eyebrows at Jane, and Jane shook her head and pointed at Helen, who shook her flaming head and pointed at Jane.

  “I knew then that you had come here to change my life. I knew then that the happiness, which had eluded me so far, had come to me at last.”

  Jane couldn’t take it anymore. “How can you say such things? I am, by all living accounts, plain.”

  “Did you see what I was married to?” Rochester said.

  “Oh, bother,” Helen said.

  Jane rolled up her sketches and paintings and Charlotte tucked away her brushes.

  “Jane, it doesn’t matter if I’m married, because I would be satisfied having you merely as a companion. A sister, almost. We could live in a villa I have in the South of France.” He knocked again, this time with more force. “Jane, we would have separate living compartments, and we would only spare a kiss on the cheek for birthdays.”

  “Please, stop talking, Mr. Rochester,” Jane said. “I am not interested in that.”

  “You are the love of my life.”

  “Which life is that? Because you seem to be living so many.”

  “But we had something special, didn’t we? I know you felt it, too.”

  Jane stamped her foot. “You lie and manipulate and twist until you get your way. You proposed to me, even though you have a wife, who’s conveniently locked away in the attic, and when I asked for more time, you had me possessed! So no, I don’t think I will live with you in the South of France as sodding brother and sister!”

  The flames in Helen’s hair sputtered out. Charlotte stood frozen. Jane’s eyes were wide as if she couldn’t believe the words that had just come out of her mouth.

  Jane was about to crack a smile, when a loud thump came at the door. And then another. And another.

  “Jane, open the door!” Rochester’s voice was enraged. “Open the door!”

  Louder thuds sounded, as if Rochester were throwing the full weight of his body at the solid oak.

  Jane looked around for something to defend them with, but there was only a hairbrush and then pieces of furniture that were too big for them to wield as weapons.

  “Maybe the window?” Charlotte said.

  “We can’t possibly use the window as a weapon,” Jane said.

  “No, to escape.”

  They ran across the room and looked out the glass, but Jane’s bedchamber was three floors up. And below them, the ground was all packed dirt and grass.

  “I’ll go first,” Helen said. She ghosted through the window and floated to the ground. “Now you!”

  Jane waved her off. “Quick, Charlotte. The dresser!”

  Thud. “Jane, you may not see it now, but soon, I will make you see!” Thud.

  Jane and Charlotte put their full weight against the side of the dresser. It moved an inch at a time. They shoved and shoved and then all of a sudden, the dresser toppled over onto its side, landing just short of the door and in no way blocking it.

  “No!” Jane exclaimed.

  Thud. A piece of the doorframe went flying across the room.

  Jane and Charlotte grabbed hold of each other.

  Thud. The top of the door separated from the hinge and then the entire thing fell to the floor. Rochester stood there in silhouette against the light from the corridor.

  “I asked you nicely,” he growled.

  “You can’t really believe that, can you?” Jane said.

  Rochester raised his foot to come toward them, but just then a figure came barreling against his side.

  “Alexander!” Charlotte exclaimed.

  “Ladies, run!” He huffed from exertion.

  Rochester was momentarily stunned by the blow. Jane and Charlotte scrambled past him and sprinted down the corridor, followed by Mr. Blackwood. Moments later, Rochester’s footsteps followed.

  “Faster!” Mr. Blackwood said.

  “We’re going as fast as we can,” Charlotte said back. “Have you seen the shoes we’re expected to wear?”

  The three of them made it to the great hall, and almost across it, but Rochester caught up and he tackled Mr. Blackwood. Both men flew to the ground.

  Jane and Charlotte stopped.

  The two men lay there, their chests heaving as they tried to regain their breath.

  “Mr. Blackwood, are you all right?” Charlotte said.

  “Yes,” he said, mid-cough.

  The men brushed themselves off and then stood, facing each other, knees bent, hands out, combat position.

  “Go!” Mr. Blackwood said to Jane and Charlotte.

  “Find us at Haworth,” Charlotte said. “We’ll go to Haworth!”

  “I will find you! Now go!” Mr. Blackwood said as he lunged for a sword on the wall.

  The two ladies flew through the door and out into the cold dark night.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Alexander

  Alexander grabbed a sword off its mount on the wall. A sword wouldn’t have been his first choice as a weapon, but he certainly knew how to use one. It wasn’t as though people like Rochester kept pistols mounted to their walls. (Meanwhile, in America . . .) A pistol would have made the intimidation factor much higher, he thought.

  Rochester’s glare settled on him. The sword. The guarded stance he’d taken up. “You’re ruining everything,” Rochester growled. “She’s supposed to be mine!”

  “She won’t have you,” Alexander said.

  “I’m going to get her back no matter what it takes.”

  “Get over it.”

  Rochester scanned the room for another weapon. There. A second sword. “We were meant to be together!” Rochester slid the blade from its mount.

  So it would be a duel, then. That was fine. Alexander could duel. “You had to possess her with a ghost to make her agree to marry you.” And who had that woman been? She’d been young and beautiful, and dressed in some—ah—interesting attire that made Alexander immediately avert his eyes. Yet, somehow she seemed familiar, too. He’d seen that interesting attire before—briefly.

  “She’s like the sun and I am the earth feeling its rays!”

  “The sun and the earth will never be together!” Alexander frowned. Miss Eyre was delightful, sure, but like the sun? That seemed a little over the top. “Who was that woman? That ghost you were about to marry.”

  “Someone who used to be mine.” Rochester attacked with a flurry of maneuvers that would have startled Alexander if Alexander had been less prepared. But he blocked so quickly that steel rang and both men launched into a complicated dance of death.

  Fire roared through his veins. This was what Alexander had wanted all along. “I know it was you,” he said. “And now you’re going to pay.”

  Rochester performed a Marionette’s Demise, a move that involved several smaller moves and lots of feinting. “What did I do?”

  Alexander countered Rochester’s attack with an Artist’s Curse. “My name is Alexander Blackwood. You killed my father. Prepare to—”

  “Who was your father?”

  “Nicholas—”

  “I’ve never met anyone named Nicholas.”

  A lie. Alexander knew it was a lie. Lots of people were named Nicholas.

  He attacked using a new move called the Three Ladies’ Luck, thinking his opponent might not know how to counter it, but Rochester was clearly a man who’d continued his sword studies throughout his life, because two sharp clacks of the blades and Alexander was blocked.

  “You’re outmatched, boy. I’m a master swordsman, unlike my—I mean you. Unlike you.” Rochester growled as their fight spilled across the room, around sofas and chairs, endangeri
ng paintings and potted plants.

  “Prepare to die.” Alexander shot forward, trying to surprise Rochester by going straight for the man’s heart, but the villain darted aside and tapped Alexander’s sword away. “My father was your friend!”

  “I really don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Rochester as the fight moved into the drawing room. “I haven’t killed anyone.”

  Why was the man denying it? What was the point?

  Alexander charged with the Three Ladies’ Luck again, hoping Rochester wouldn’t expect it a second time. The man did. He was a better swordsman, Alexander had to admit. But then Rochester slipped on a pair of spectacles someone had carelessly left lying around, and Alexander pressed his advantage while the man was off balance, shoving him to the floor.

  Chest heaving, Alexander dug the tip of his sword to Rochester’s throat. “I’ve waited fourteen years to avenge my father’s murder.”

  “I don’t know him,” Rochester said. “Truly, I do not.”

  Alexander glared down, hatred making his hand shake. Blood pooled where the sword point pierced skin. He’d never killed a man before, and there was no coming back from it once he took this step.

  “I didn’t kill him,” repeated Rochester.

  At the man’s throat, a small iron key gleamed, and several thoughts crashed through Alexander at once: Mrs. Rochester insisting this man wasn’t her husband, the repeated confused claims about not knowing Alexander’s father, and his description of Miss Eyre’s beauty.

  Alexander slashed the sword to the left, cutting through the chain. The key went skittering across the floor, and abruptly, the ghost of a younger man ripped from Rochester’s body.

  Rochester—the real Rochester—slumped to the side.

  Alexander lunged for the key.

  The ghost glared at him. “You meddling fool. This place was mine. I had everything I wanted. And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for—”

  Alexander bopped the ghost on the head, sucking him back into the talisman.

  Several minutes later, after Alexander had dragged Rochester into his room and laid him out on the bed, he went to find Mrs. Fairfax and the rest of the house staff. He didn’t explain the situation. But now that he wore his mask, they seemed to understand that something of the otherworldly persuasion had occurred there today.

  “Have you seen Miss Brontë and Miss Eyre?” he asked as he waited for Mrs. Fairfax to finish preparing a tray of tea.

  “They ran through here like the hounds of hades were after them. Why, I’ve never seen girls move so fast in my entire life.”

  Alexander had a lot of questions concerning what she knew about the events there, but then the tea was finished and he took it upstairs, along with the lockbox containing the small iron key.

  Rochester was just sitting up in his bed, looking confused as he surveyed the room. He lifted his hands and let his sheets slide between his fingers.

  Alexander poured a cup of tea and offered it to the man. “Can you speak?”

  The man nodded slowly. “I . . . think . . . yes.” His voice wasn’t gravelly. It had been used recently, of course. But after being possessed for years, he’d perhaps forgotten how to use it, how to shape the words on his own.

  Tea would help, though. Tea always helped.

  “Drink up.” Alexander took his seat and nodded to the teacup Rochester had been staring at. “I have questions.”

  “I must—” Rochester tried to stand, but collapsed back to the bed a moment later. “My wife. Where . . . ?”

  Before Alexander could find a kind way to tell him that his wife had been locked in the attic for a decade and a half, realization crossed Rochester’s face.

  “Oh, no.” He dropped his face into his hands and groaned. “He locked her away. That bastard. He—”

  “He?” Alexander said. “Who?”

  “My brother, Rowland. Always Wellington’s lackey.”

  “What do you mean?” Finally, Alexander could get some answers.

  But Rochester lurched to his feet, staggering past Alexander and the tea. “I must go to my wife.”

  “Wait,” Alexander said. “I still have questions!”

  For someone who hadn’t used his own legs in years, Rochester was fast.

  Alexander followed, just in time to hear Rochester say, “You! You know better than to come here. Go back.”

  “Forgive me. I came because—”

  At that moment, Alexander emerged from the room to find Rochester on the stairs to the third floor, and Mason standing just below him. Both men went silent upon Alexander’s appearance.

  “We’ll talk later,” Rochester hissed. Then he ran up the stairs two at a time.

  “What was that?” Alexander said.

  Mason shook his head. “It’s nothing.”

  It had definitely been something.

  Alexander didn’t have time for more mysteries right now. “Good luck with nothing, sir.” Then he headed downstairs and out the door, hoping that he could catch up with Miss Brontë and Miss Eyre before they made it too far away. But he didn’t see them on the road. Charlotte had said they would go on to Haworth. He would have to meet up with them there, later, of course, after he’d had time to properly question the real Mr. Rochester.

  But when he went into the house again, he discovered the Rochesters had disappeared, and no one seemed to know to where. Even Grace Poole was missing.

  How was Alexander supposed to get answers if everyone kept vanishing?

  Just then, a pigeon landed on the windowsill and cooed at him. A small note was wrapped around its ankle.

  Report to me immediately, it read in Wellington’s handwriting.

  Before Alexander left, he returned to the bedroom where the ghost of Rowland had attacked the young ladies. There, he found Miss Brontë’s notebook and tucked it into his breast pocket, resting his hand over it for just a moment.

  Then he gathered the lockbox and the rest of his belongings and left Thornfield.

  At Westminster, he quickly went through all the rituals of gaining entrance to the building, the secret rooms, and strode toward the great library with the lockbox tucked under one arm. Anticipation made his heart beat faster when he knocked on the door and waited for Wellington to answer.

  Then he stepped inside.

  “Good evening, Mr. Blackwood,” said the duke. “What have you brought for me?”

  Alexander approached the desk and placed the lockbox on the side near him. “A ghost.”

  “The normal offerings, then.” Wellington smiled warmly. “I’d wondered where you’d gone off to so quickly. I sent a messenger to your flat the other day, but your landlady said you’d left in a hurry with Miss Brontë and a strange man.”

  “Yes, sir. There was an urgent matter at Thornfield. I received word that Miss Eyre was in danger, and we rushed to her aid.”

  “And is she safe now?” Wellington asked.

  Alexander nodded. “She was forced to flee Rochester. You wouldn’t believe what he’d attempted to do.”

  Wellington’s face shifted into curious dread, exactly what Alexander would normally expect. “What?” he said. “Don’t hold me in suspense. What was that nefarious villain going to do with Miss Eyre?”

  “He was going to marry her. He had her possessed.”

  “Oh.”

  “The talisman was a—” Then, standing here in the library, a discussion of the pearl necklace rushed back at him. They’d spoken of it before. Here. Years ago. It had been the very set of pearls with which he’d captured that opera singer, Selene, and brought the string to the duke. So how had the pearls reached Rochester?

  Unless.

  Unless Wellington had given the pearls to Rowland; Rochester had called his brother Wellington’s lackey.

  “Oh.” Wellington’s expression fell. “I see the understanding on your face. You just remembered the pearls, didn’t you?”

  “What pearls?” Alexander said as he hop
efully scanned the room for a weapon, but there was nothing within reach. “You’ve been lying to me all this time. You’re a lying liar who lies.”

  Wellington sighed. “Of course I’ve been lying. I’m a politician.”

  “But why?” Alexander’s heart sank as his whole world began to crumble apart.

  “For money. For power. To silence those who try to move against me.”

  “Like my father?”

  “Your father lacked vision, and then he decided to stop me, along with the foolish Rochesters. I had to take care of it.”

  And with those simple words, Alexander’s entire world was shattered.

  “Your father was the easy part. It was those Rochesters who’ve given me trouble all these years, even after I had him possessed and her locked away. But I don’t need them anymore, now that I’ve got Miss Eyre.”

  “Have you got Miss Eyre?” They would have reached Haworth by now, Alexander thought. Unless Wellington had somehow intercepted them.

  “No, but I soon will.” And at that moment, Wellington bashed Alexander over the head with the lockbox. Stars popped in his vision, and blood poured from a gash. And though Alexander scrambled to fight, he went down quickly.

  Over the next several moments, he drifted in and out of consciousness, aware just enough to realize he was being dragged through an unfamiliar hall—tinged bright red with blood leaking into his eye—before the stink of the river overwhelmed him.

  “I hoped it wouldn’t come to this,” Wellington said. “I did care about you. I hoped you would see things my way, since I’m the one who raised you, but you’re too much like your father.”

  Then, the traitor rolled Alexander over and dumped him into the Thames.

  Alexander’s last thought was this: at least Miss Brontë and Miss Eyre are safe.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Charlotte

  “We’re going in circles,” observed Jane.

  “We can’t be.” Charlotte lifted a hand to shield her eyes and gazed out at the windswept moors, which spread around them on all sides. There was no town or house or even the merest sign of human activity to mar the landscape. Not that Charlotte could actually see the landscape. Sometime during the scuffle back at Thornfield Hall, she’d misplaced her glasses. (We’d like to pause here to observe a moment of silence for Charlotte Brontë’s tortoiseshell spectacles, which met their untimely demise when she’d dropped them as she was fleeing Thornfield and been subsequently stepped on by Mr. Rochester, inadvertently saving Alexander’s life.) So all Charlotte saw of the moors was a reddish/goldish blur . . . and the unusually large rock that was jutting out of the hill on one side of them. “I know this moss-darkened granite crag may seem familiar,” she said to reassure Jane, “but it’s not the same moss-darkened granite crag we passed an hour ago. This is a different crag. I’m fairly certain of it.”