Jane Steele Page 2

  Just before arriving home, he had asked whether I wished to touch it next time we were in the woods, and I laughed myself insensible as his flushed face darkened to violet.

  “You are a wicked thing to ignore your own kin so, Jane,” Edwin persisted.

  Kin, kin, kin was ever his anthem: as if we were more than related, as if we were kindred. When I failed to cooperate, he stared as if I were a puzzle to be solved. My dawning fear was that he might think I was in fact a puzzle—inanimate, insensible. Though I no longer presume to have a conscience, I have never once lacked feelings.

  “But perhaps you are only glum. I know! Will you play a game with me after tea?”

  Games were a favourite of my mother’s, and of mine—and though I was wary of my cousin, I was not afraid of him. He adored me.

  “What sort of game?”

  “Trading secrets,” he rasped. “I’ve loads and loads. Awful ones. You must have some of your own. It’ll be a lark to exchange them.”

  Considering my stockpile of secrets, I found myself reluctant.

  I tell Agatha every night I’ll say my prayers, but ever since I skipped them and nothing happened six months ago, I don’t.

  I tried my mother’s laudanum once because she said it made everything better, and I was ill and lied about it.

  My kitten scratched me and I was so angry that I let it outside, and afterwards it never came home and I feel sick in my belly every time I imagine my kitten shivering in the dark, cold woods.

  I did not want Edwin to know any of these things.

  “Fiddle! You aren’t sharp enough to know any secrets worth having,” I scoffed instead, pushing crumbs around my plate.

  Edwin was painfully aware of his own slowness, and hot blood crawled up his cheeks. I nearly apologised then and there, knowing it was what a good girl would do and feeling magnanimous, but then he rose from the table. The adults, still merrily loathing each other over the gilt rims of their teacups, paid us no mind.

  “Of course I do,” he growled under his breath. “For instance, are you ashamed that your mother is no better than a parasite?”

  My mouth fell open as I gaped at my cousin.

  “Oh, yes. Or don’t you hear any gossip? Doesn’t anyone come to visit you?”

  This was a cruel blow. “You know that they don’t. No one ever does.”

  “Why not, Jane? I’ve always wondered.”

  “Because we are kept like cattle on our own land!” I cried, smashing my fist heedlessly against a butter plate.

  When the porcelain flew through the air and shattered upon the hardwood, my cousin’s face reflected stupid dismay. My mother’s was equally startled, but approving; I had only been repeating something she slurred once during a very bad night indeed.

  Aunt Patience’s face practically split with the immensity of her delight, as it is no unpleasant thing when an enemy proves one’s own point gratis.

  “I invite you for tea and this is the way your … your inexcusable daughter behaves?” she protested shrilly. “I should beat the temper out of her if I were you, and lose no time about it. There is nothing like a stout piece of hickory for the prevention of unseemly habits.”

  My mother stood and smoothed her light cotton dress as if she had pressing obligations elsewhere. “My inexcusable daughter is bright and high-spirited.”

  “No, she is a coy little minx whose sly ways will lead her to a bad end if you fail to correct her.”

  “And what is your child?” Mrs. Steele hissed, throwing down her napkin. “An overfed dunce? Jane does not suffer by comparison, I assure you. We will not trouble you here again.”

  “You will not be welcome here again,” Aunt Patience spat. “I must offer you my congratulations, Anne-Laure. To so completely cut yourself off from polite society, and then to offend the one person who graciously allows you to sit at the same table—what an extraordinary effort on your part. Very well, I shall oblige both our tastes. If you cannot control that harpy you call a daughter, do keep entirely to your residence in future. I certainly shall to mine.”

  My mother’s defiance crumbled, leaving a wistful look. Aunt Patience’s plodding nature would have been forgivable had she been clever or kind, I decided; but as she was common and gloating, I hated her and would hate her forever.

  Mamma softly pulled her fingers into small fists.

  “Please in future recall my daughter’s rights, all of her rights, or you will regret it,” Mrs. Steele ordered, giving the table a single nod.

  She departed without a glance behind her. Mamma often stormed away so, however—ferocious exits were decidedly her style, so I remained to assess what damage we had wrought this time.

  Aunt Patience, though purple and fairly vibrating with rage, managed to say, “Would you care for more cake, Edwin and Jane?”

  “I goaded her, Mummy. I’m sorry for what I said before,” Edwin added to me, his tooth clenching his lip. He wore a stiff collar that afternoon, I recall, above a brown waistcoat and maroon jacket, and his neck bulged obscenely from its confines.

  “That’s all right, Edwin. Thank you for tea, Aunt Patience.” Like most children, I loathed nothing more than embarrassing myself, and the sight of the fragmented china was making me physically ill. I rose from the table. “I had better … Good-bye, then.”

  Aunt Patience’s eyes burnt into me as I departed.

  I went to the stables that evening, where I could visit the docile mares and peer into their soft liquid eyes, and I could stop thinking about my cousin. Thinking about Edwin was a private class in self-loathing: I hated myself for indulging his mulish attraction, yet it had been a tidal pull for me over years of reluctant camaraderie.

  Flattery, I have found, is a great treat for those born innately selfish.

  For the hundredth time, the thousandth time, I stood listening to soft whinnies like lullabies, pressing my cheek against sinewy necks; whether the horses at Highgate House liked me or my sugar cubes I have no notion, but they never glowered, nor warned me I teetered upon the hair-thin tightrope of eternal damnation. Smelling sweet hay and their rich, bristly coats always calmed me—and I calmed them in turn, for a particularly fidgety colt often stilled in my presence.

  My thoughts drifted from the horses to the uses I might make of them. I daydreamed of riding to an apple-blossom meadow where my mother and I should do nothing save eat and laugh; I envisioned charging into war, the heads of Aunt Patience and Edwin lying at my feet.

  Mamma and I never took more than a light supper in the springtime, and following a departure as precipitous as the one she had just executed, I knew that she would lock herself away with her novels and tonics, and thus I stayed out until the wind began to nip through the slats in the great stable door and the horses’ snuffles quieted under my caresses … never realising until the following day, in fact, that I had been left entirely, permanently alone.

  The ominous liquorice aroma of spilt tincture of opium drenched our cottage when I arrived home at eight o’clock. I learnt my mother had retired to bed at seven, which was unfortunate timing, as I never saw her again. Our servant, Agatha, found her the next morning, still and cold in her bed, marble eyes directed at the window.

  TWO

  What a consternation of soul was mine that dreary afternoon! How all my brain was in tumult, and all my heart in insurrection!

  You cannot attend,” Aunt Patience explained in a strained drone for the third time. “You are far too hysterical to appear in pub—”

  “Please, oh, please—I won’t say a word, won’t make a sound!”

  “Gracious, child, show a little restraint!” my aunt cried. “Pray for her soul, and accept God’s will. It is a hard thing to lose your mother so suddenly, but many others have lived to tell the tale.”

  I took the news that I would not be allowed at my mother’s funeral precisely as well as I took the news of her inexplicable death. Skilful knives had carved the heart out of me, leaving me empty save for the sick, unstead
y fear flickering in my bones telling me alone, all alone. I could not claw my way out of the horror of it. I screamed for my mother on the first day; sobbed for her on the second; and on the third, the day of her funeral, sat numbly in an armchair with my eyes pulsing hellfire red—that is, until my aunt Patience arrived. Being forbidden to attend Mamma’s funeral felt as if I were spitting on her grave, and questions swarmed through my pate like worms through an apple.

  What will they do with me now that she has gone? Assurances that I would always reside at Highgate House now seemed reliable as quicksand.

  How did my mother come to die at all? She had taken a sudden bad turn, according to Agatha; Aunt Patience muttered of fits.

  Why should I not see her put in the ground? Both agreed I should not be present, but neither would explain the reason.

  I fell to my knees, tearing at my aunt’s stiff black skirts.

  “Don’t bury Mamma without me there,” I begged. “However much you might have hated her, hate me still, please don’t do this. I won’t survive it.”

  “Have you no control over your passions?” Aunt Patience’s toadlike face was ashen. “I ask for your own sake, you unprincipled animal. You will come to a bad end if—”

  “I don’t care what end I come to, only let me—”

  “That is a monstrous thing to say,” she cried, and then slapped me across the cheek.

  Falling sideways, gasping, I clutched at the place where my skin throbbed and my teeth rang. Her slap was painful, but her visible disgust far worse.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered, reaching for her wrist with my other hand. “Please, just—”

  My aunt recoiled, striding towards the hall. “The situation is a hard one, Jane, but what you ask is impossible. Try to calm yourself. God sends comfort to the meek and the chaste, whilst the passionate inflict agonies upon themselves.”

  Aunt Patience stopped—hand splayed on her broad belly, eyes frozen into hailstones.

  “You are very like her, are you not,” she whispered. “The bitter fruit of a poisonous tree.”

  The front door clicked shut.

  Grief until then had bound me in spider’s silk and drained me with her pinchers. Afterwards, however, I wanted to inflict exquisite agonies upon Aunt Patience; and had I been informed that a few weeks later, I would serve her the deepest cut imaginable, I am not certain that I would not have smiled.

  • • •

  Morbidity has always been a close companion of mine. Hours were spent meditating on my lost kitten and all the ways it could have (must have) died because of my inflamed temper. My late father was the source of infinite questions—was my slender, sloping nose like his since it was not like my mother’s? After Mamma died, however, I thought of nothing save her lonesomeness under the earth; and when I did think of her in paradise, I next thought, but they’ll never allow me into heaven, and so I still will never see her again.

  There are doubtless worse hobbies than meditating upon your dead mother, but nobody has ever suggested one to me.

  Agatha knelt with me in the garret a week after the funeral, because I wanted to go through my mother’s trunk. For seven days, life had been a sickening seesaw between fear that calamity would befall me and the desire calamity would take me already and have done with it. Now I wanted to touch Mamma’s gowns and her gloves and her letters, as if I might combine them in a spell to summon her; even today, if witchcraft existed by means of toadstools and tinkers’ thumbs to bring her back, I should do so in an instant.

  “Well, ’ere we are,” Agatha said in her broad rasp as she drew out an iron key.

  Our servant, Agatha, who trudged about with wisps of blond hair falling in her squinting eyes, spoke entirely in platitudes. She was my sole comfort throughout that hellish week; hot broth mixed with sherry and soothing pats on the cheek are greatly cheering, even to juvenile she-devils.

  The lock clicked open and I surged to plunder the trunk’s contents. We had a pair of tapers, but the light was dim and ghostly, and when my seeking fingers struck lace, I hardly knew what I held.

  “Ah, what ’ave we ’ere?” Agatha rumbled from my right.

  “Mamma’s summer parasol,” I recognised as I lifted it.

  “Aye, Miss Jane, and what a parasol.”

  There was no refuting this, so I drew out more relics—cracked men’s reading spectacles, a fawn carryall. We went on until I was so sated with untrimmed hats and books of pressed flowers that I scarce noted I held a pair of empty laudanum bottles.

  Agatha placidly took them away. “Now, Miss Jane, them’s in the past, them is, over and emptied, so you just put ’em clean out o’ yer mind.”

  I supposed Agatha meant Mamma was no longer ill, so I nodded. Diving into the trunk once more, I emerged with a lock of nut-brown hair very like mine woven into a small lover’s knot and pressed under silver-framed glass. I had seen it before, when it sat on Mamma’s mantelpiece, but it had long since vanished.

  “This was my father’s. Were they married long before he died, Agatha?”

  “Not as long as yer mum would’ve liked, poor dear.”

  “Cousin Edwin told me she was no better than a parasite,” I whispered.

  “Now, Miss Jane,” Agatha growled kindly, “there’s sorts as you can trust to speak plain, and there’s sorts as will say whatsoever suits. And if those two kinds o’ folks were only obvious, wi’ signs or marks o’ Cain or the like, a heap o’ trouble would be saved.”

  A worm of guilt stirred in my gut. I had lied to her that very morning, when I said I would take buttered porridge and then dumped it by the pond so as not to worry her.

  Lying has always come as easy for me as breathing.

  “Did my father prefer living at the cottage too?”

  “Bless you, he never lived ’ere after marrying yer mum. They met in Paris, where Mr. Steele dun banking—I figure he preferred being wheresoever she was.”

  My head fell upon her burly shoulder. Agatha smelt of lye and the mutton she had been stewing, and just when I was too exhausted to contemplate getting my weakened legs under me and leaving the darkening garret, I pulled something I had never seen before from the trunk.

  It was a letter—one in my mother’s elegant Parisian script with its bold downstrokes like a battle standard being planted. It read:

  Rue M——,

  2nd Arrondissement,

  SUNDAY

  Dear Mr. Sneeves,

  Pardon, s’il vous plait, for my writing in haste, but I can hardly shift a muscle for the grief now oppressing me: my J—— has expired finally. The doctors could do nothing, and I am desolate. Doubtless your legal efforts upon my behalf and that of my daughter have been heroic, but in the absence of my husband, I must confirm our complete readiness for relocation to Highgate House. Si ce n’est pas indiscret, as my beloved J—— was ever a faithful client of yours, I request an immediate audience, for every second may prove invaluable. And please return this letter with your reply, as I live in horror our plans will be anticipated by those who would prevent us.

  Veuillez agréer mes salutations empressées,

  Mrs. Anne-Laure Steele

  At first I had imagined that the letter was two pages, but it was kept together with the reply in a crabbed male English hand:

  Rue du R——,

  1st Arrondissement,

  SUNDAY

  Chère Mme. S——,

  My most heartfelt condolences upon behalf of the firm. Mr. S—— was a highly valued patron of Sneeves, Swansea, and Turner. I await your arrival and assure you that the documents have already been drawn up to the late lamented Mr. S——’s satisfaction.

  Humbly,

  Cyrus Sneeves, Esq.

  I could only understand that these documents referred to my eventual ownership of Highgate House; puzzled, I passed them to Agatha, who carefully folded both letters together again and returned them to the trunk.

  “Well, that weren’t what I’d been expecting.” Agatha’s squi
nting eyes narrowed further.

  “My mother wrote that when my father died?”

  “A wise hen always sees her chicks are looked after. Now, there’s pickled ’erring and toast to be had. Your mother’s things seem to ’earten you, and this trunk will be ’ere tomorrow, and the day after that.”

  Agatha was again strictly correct, but mistaken in her accidental assumption that I would be present.

  “Did you ever meet my father, Agatha?” I questioned as she shut the trunk and heaved herself upright.

  “Why, bless your ’eart, Miss Steele, what a question.” Agatha tsked fondly and trudged downstairs.

  Infants own memories, perhaps, but by the time I was nine, hazy visions of Jonathan Steele were locked away like mementoes in a safe to which I knew not the combination. The bread crumbs I had gathered into his portrait scarce made a crust, let alone a meal.

  Your father was un homme magnifique, and his eyes were the brown of sweet chocolate just as yours are, and he never stopped thinking of ways to make us safe, from my mother.

  ’E was as good a man as any, and no worse than some, from Agatha.

  Don’t speak of him, for God’s sake, from Aunt Patience.

  Now I knew he was a banker in Paris with an English solicitor friend my mother trusted; I imagined Jonathan Steele a positive hero of finance with sweeping moustaches, who had rescued my mother from penury with a flourish of his fancifully enormous pen.

  “How did he meet Mamma?” I called from the top of the creaking garret stairs.

  “You’ll use up all your chatter and be clean out o’ words, and then ’owever shall we pass the time, Miss Jane?” Agatha chided, beckoning.