Jane Steele Page 4

  That night, I learnt that horror could not physically kill me; wave after wave crashed over my head without my drowning, and yet … I think that I would rather die than experience such overwhelming wrongness ever again.

  Curling onto my side on the lawn—visible peripherally to the cottage but not to the main house—I sobbed for an hour or more. When the torrent was a trickle, I passed a sleeve over my eyes and sat up. The sun had sunk well below the tops of the elms, and whether it would ever rise again, I could not have said. In the mire of my misery and confusion, three thoughts emerged:

  You really are as wicked as everyone says.

  Shame spread like a pox over my skin.

  Mamma isn’t here to help you, and now you will be hanged.

  Like all children, I had read the Newgate Calendar raptly, that ostensibly educational account of gruesome violations enacted by the law upon ne’er-do-wells within Newgate Prison. No one embarks upon a life of mayhem because hanging (or drawing and quartering, or slow death by pressing, come to that) sounds like a pleasant Saturday afternoon lark, but parents in those days still supposed the illustrations highly effective deterrents, and I had devoured Edwin’s copy. I cried a little longer. A vague shape I knew to be Agatha floated past amber-lit windowpanes.

  You are going to have to lie like the very devil to live through this.

  Having no stock of tears left, I plotted my escape with hollow bones and shaking fingers.

  • • •

  You’ve said it all out plain once, Miss Jane, so I knows as ye can say it all out plain twice,” Agatha declared the next morning. She sat on our burgundy settee, one arm around my waist.

  My return to the cottage had been a lighting storm: searing flashes of you’ve killed Edwin interrupted a savage downpour of lies. They poured from my mouth, flooding my throat. When the falsehoods had been exhausted, Agatha had said, pulling the coverlet over my head, There, there, poor girl. Nothing like this lasts forever, for ye’ll ken that time passes whether we will it or nae.

  I had meant to pray for forgiveness the instant Agatha left, but instead a deathly slumber took me. I don’t know the term for a child who falls asleep after her first murder and before confessing her sins, but I suspect it is not an intensely complimentary one.

  Now it was ten o’clock in the morning and my head felt filled with hornets. I had been ill the night before into my porcelain pot, sour acid bleaching my throat, and now more lies were required—this time for the benefit of Constable Sam Quillfeather.

  Constable Quillfeather, seeing I was numb with dread following Agatha’s prompt, pretended a sudden rapturous interest in a decorative pillow.

  “Such fine work as I’ve seldom seen, and the elegance of the lilies—their shape, their exquisite colour? Remarkable! Did the late Mrs. Steele create this masterpiece?”

  Dear old Agatha nudged me as if this were a serious inquiry.

  “Yes,” I managed.

  Constable Quillfeather was very tall and very thin—a friendly skeleton, in fact—clad in brown flannel with a red-and-yellow-checked shawl-collared vest and tall leather gaiters. His face boasted a jutting chin, an aggressively hooked nose, deep-set hazel eyes, a looming brow, and a great framing shock of forward-swept hair of a dark brown not unlike mine. Everything about Constable Quillfeather seemed to lurch forward on a parabola; I guessed him to be above middle age, but his lanky limbs were puppyish in their urgency, a propulsive quality matched only by his incessant questions. Though he was far from handsome, he exuded a riveting aura of eager enthusiasm.

  “Ha! I thought she must have done?” Constable Quillfeather’s soft tenor lilted so much at the ends of his sentences, statements became queries. “Was she fond of sewing?”

  “Sometimes.” My mother had enjoyed needlework, but not as much as she relished throwing new projects across the room.

  “I never had the pleasure of meeting her but once, in the village, at the stationer’s?” The policeman’s bright eyes swept to Agatha’s. “She was so charming, and … I think a little sad? But I presume too much—Miss Steele, may we talk about how you discovered your poor cousin’s body?”

  Swallowing, I nodded. No speech was forthcoming, however.

  Constable Quillfeather clapped his hands to his bony knees. “Miss Steele, do you require water? A sip of wine to strengthen you?”

  I shook my head.

  “But you shiver—are you cold?”

  Helpless to stop myself, I emitted a hysterical trill of laughter.

  Frowning, Agatha attempted, “She’s been so poorly, she don’t know which end is up, left, or ’indmost, Constable.”

  “Naturally, naturally!” Constable Quillfeather smiled, a warm horizontal spread which failed to check his air of headlong momentum. “Will you tell me the origins of the magnificent work above the mantelpiece?”

  The constable’s nose crinkled as he gazed at a wild collection of pinks and yellows incidentally suggesting a landscape, one reminiscent of Turner’s works when important structures are burning down. He rose to study it—or perhaps to give me the illusion of unfettered space.

  “Mamma was a painter,” I rasped.

  “And a fine one! Now, this is not a picture set in England? Where, then?”

  “In the countryside near Paris.”

  “Ah, just so. Did she like it here?”

  “Why?”

  Constable Quillfeather’s eyes, dappled with green and brown and amber, twinkled compassionately. “Neighbourly curiosity?”

  “I don’t think so,” I admitted. “But we were safe.”

  Sam Quillfeather returned to his armchair. “Safety and the comforts of home—what more can one ask of life?”

  “Longer life?” I returned without thinking.

  The constable winced ruefully. “Quite so. Miss Steele, do you grasp how brave you are being? I know of grown women who, after the multiple tragedies you have undergone, would be prostrate! But here you are, so steady and sure. Might we begin again, and you tell me what happened yesterday?”

  He was one of the most engaging men I had ever encountered, and anyway there was nothing for it: I set to.

  I informed Constable Quillfeather in a voice trembling like a plucked harpsichord string that I had been to tea at my aunt’s residence and that there had been a great row over my going to school. Following this dash of truth, I said that Cousin Edwin and I were so upset that we quit the main house. After planning to run away together to London, and planning to build a tree fortress, and planning to live as highwaymen, we had decided to play a game.

  “A game?” Constable Quillfeather repeated slowly.

  Yes, I told him, a game called Robin Hood.

  Constable Quillfeather rubbed his hands as he leant forward, inquiring what this game involved.

  “Hunting for deer in Nottingham Forest.” My words may have been false, but my tears were true. “We separated so as to meet again and show what we’d killed for supper. But it was all pretend. Then I went to the meeting place—there’s two fallen logs crossed like a crooked X not far from the cottage—and, and no one was there. Then I thought Edwin must have …”

  “There, there,” Agatha said as a sob escaped. “There, now.”

  Like a fever dream, I saw Edwin approaching with a hemmed square of cotton he imagined was an apology.

  “I thought he must have been playing one of his tricks,” I forced out. “But, oh, I was so vexed he’d left me alone in the woods when it was getting dark. I searched everywhere. I thought of the ravine because we collect things down there sometimes.”

  “What sort?” Constable Quillfeather desired to know.

  “Bright rocks, wildflowers, bones. When I found him, dusk was nearly finished, and … he wasn’t breathing.”

  “He had already expired?”

  I drew a shuddering breath. “His eyes looked—I can’t stand to think of how his eyes looked, don’t ask me, please!”

  This was the truth: his eyes had looked utterly be
trayed before they had glazed to an unseeing shimmer like ice crusting a pool.

  “And no one else saw you?”

  “No.”

  “And no one else saw him?”

  “No one I know about.”

  “And then you returned here?”

  “Yes. Slowly,” I whispered, hedging my bets as to whether Agatha had noticed the gap between twilight and my return. “I felt so weak. This morning, I should have thought it all some horrid dream, except … except it’s true.”

  “Miss Jane, that was very complete,” Constable Quillfeather complimented. He brushed his hands over his head, and the wiry locks like accusers arrowed towards my face all the surer. “May I ask you a few more questions?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “The courage in this one, the pluck!” Whistling, Constable Quillfeather winked at Agatha. “She’s been raised by a paragon of a mother, but that’s in addition to a few stout friends, I think?”

  “I hope so, but judge for yerself, sir,” Agatha answered calmly.

  “That I shall, ma’am. Miss Steele, was Edwin in any sort of fight that evening?”

  Either the clock which had been ticking stopped, or I went deaf with panic.

  “His button was missing?” Constable Quillfeather indicated the top button on his own waistcoat. “Hereabouts? Seemed to have been torn away?”

  “We played at highwaymen before Robin Hood, to practise.” I glanced up at Agatha. “We staged a fight. Edwin … he’d not have wanted Aunt Patience to know about that, she likes everything to be so proper.”

  The policeman blew out a breath. “It gave me a turn, you understand? Didn’t know what to think—signs of a struggle?”

  My stomach heaved. As suddenly as he had introduced the subject, however, Constable Quillfeather abandoned it.

  “You’ll miss your playmate, Miss Steele, and the blow comes too soon on the heels of another, and it hurts me to see it,” he averred, shaking his head. “There’s an … incongruity? About grief in the very young. It doesn’t belong on you? Well, I’m for the grieving mother now.”

  Constable Quillfeather came to stand before me on spindly stork’s legs, bending over like a question mark.

  “You’ll take care of yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s happened to your dress sleeve?”

  We looked at my blue-and-grey-patterned dress sleeve and the short tear in it made by Edmund’s final game. Agatha’s vision was as keen as a whiskered mole’s, and she had brushed off my dress the night before without seeing the rip; since I donned the nearest thing I could find that morning, there it was, a grisly cotton wound with a lurid smoke-coloured bruise beneath.

  “I—I don’t know,” I stammered. “It must have been torn when we were playing highwaymen, just like Edwin’s button. It’s the only explanation.”

  After a pause, Constable Quillfeather shook my hand and stood tall as a beanpole, gently frowning. “Well, I am in tremendous debt to you, Miss Steele. If that is the only explanation, then I shall never have to seek out another one, shall I?”

  Constable Quillfeather settled a brown beaver hat on his head, bowed to us, and set off for the main house—and only when the ridiculously tall pipe shape of his headgear departing passed our front window did I allow myself the highly literary indulgence of losing consciousness.

  • • •

  After recovering my wits that afternoon, I stood before the broad white steps of the main house with Agatha, preparing myself to enter. My aunt wished to see me, a request which could not be refused. Vacillating, I paced, staring miserably at the lofty leaded windows.

  “Sooner a thing’s started, sooner as it’s done,” Agatha mentioned.

  “I’m frightened.”

  “That’s neither ’ere nor there,” she advised, and since this was again inarguable, I made a proud church spire of my spine and walked inside.

  No one greeted me; up I went towards my aunt’s bedroom. The servants ought to have been bustling, making arrangements for the inevitable condoling relations and dealers in the commerce of death, but Aunt Patience must have sent them off; the only faces I saw were painted ancestors whispering murderess from the cages of their carved gilt frames. I felt as if I were going to my doom.

  I was perfectly correct—but it was a doom of my own making, not my aunt’s. Of this I can at least be proud, if of nothing else.

  Following a knock at Patience Barbary’s half-opened door, I entered. The light here was dimmer, keeping its distance as if out of respect for the bereaved. My aunt lay on a fainting couch. She beckoned; it was not until I drew within three feet that I could see her plain, and I stiffened.

  “You,” Aunt Patience spat.

  Her careful mourning attire had been abandoned for a capacious black robe fastened with silk ties. Patience Barbary had shed her smug bravado as snakes do skins; everything about her was new, from the swollen pink edges of her eyelids to her raw expression, tender as a cut where the scab has peeled away. Years of trials I did not know about had hardened her, but now here she was—in desperate need of a shell, and stripped of her defences as she had been stripped of her son. Her habitual mourning was an ostentation, I realised, maybe even a dig at my mother’s pale Parisian frocks; this was her, bared to the ravages of the whimsical world.

  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.”

  FIVE

  Probably, if I had lately left a good home and kind pa
rents, 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.

  If 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.