by Lyndsay Faye
“And you think her correspondent is making her ill?”
“No one can say,” Clarke owned, tossing her flaxen curls though they were restrained under her chaste cap. “But if ever it looked as if a letter were strangling someone …”
The ensuing silence fairly crawled with questions.
Does Clarke wish me to intervene? I wondered, heart thrumming eagerly.
I had countless times thwarted hunger at Lowan Bridge, taking as much joy in naughtiness as in success; I had forged grades, pilfered supplies, told positively operatic lies. Queerly, Clarke had never minded these untruths, though I supposed that was thanks to her natural compassion, or else her practicality. In any event, I had learnt the principle swiftly: if I lied to Mr. Munt (or anyone else to do with the ultimate act of lying to Mr. Munt), I would be praised; if I lied to Clarke—all of these accidental falsehoods, bred of forgetfulness—I would be shunned until her ire burnt itself to cinders and she nuzzled into my shoulder like a cat seeking company.
So I had lied, and grown still better at it—for myself, and for my fellow prisoners. It only followed, since Miss Lilyvale was our unquestioned ally despite being a teacher, that I ought to ferret out what was wrong with her.
I wonder about the verb to ferret now I am grown. If a conjugation of a similar verb, to snake, existed, I believe that would have been closer to the truth—for my slithering, slinking capabilities had been honed by age sixteen to a nearly reptilian pitch.
• • •
I did not dream of inviting Clarke to raid Miss Lilyvale’s office that night, which in hindsight was a monstrous error; had we made the discovery together, we might have talked through what was best to be done.
Quietly, I eased my coarse frock on and skipped the apron, that material being too pale for untrammelled moonlight. I flinched as the door creaked, but no one stirred; if the girls knew one thing, it was that my disobedience tended to benefit the majority. Shutting the door behind me and risking further noise would have tempted Fate, so I stepped into the hallway, leaving a draught of air in my wake.
It had cost me two weeks’ practice with a bent nail to pick my first lock at the age of ten, aptitude for larder raids being a highly esteemed skill. As I knelt before Miss Lilyvale’s music-room door, however, I felt strangely inept—my fingers were clubs, my ears abuzz with fanciful susurrations. At last, I prised open the lock and was greeted by the predictable midnight sight of an empty room within a sinister stronghold, its shuttered windows and watchful walls.
The desk was also locked. After fiddling with the nail, I substituted a hat pin, which swiftly worked its magic, and I pulled open the drawer.
As Clarke had suggested, a stack of letters rested there.
I lit the lamp with a lucifer from my dress pocket, hid the light under the desk, and sat upon the floor Indian-style. At first glance, I thought the letters must have dated back at least a year or two, for how else could some of the eggshell-coloured paper have deepened to pale yolk in tone? The envelopes were blank save for the addressee, Miss Amy Lilyvale, and I frowned in concentration as I slid the thin foolscap out.
Then my lips parted ways as I gazed upon the contents of what seemed the oldest correspondence.
They were confessions.
Dear Miss L——
I can suffocate no longer under this mask, nor daily live a falsehood when such misplaced secrecy makes hypocrites out of honest Christians. I do beg your forgiveness for what I am about to say, and indeed, begging your forgiveness ought to have been a duty I performed years previous; if I cannot confess all to you now, however, my integrity is meaningless, and my boundless love nothing finer than a canker eating away at my swollen tongue.
I long to put my mouth upon you; yes, your lips, but I confess to far more fervidly desired locales. I wish that when your eyes met mine, they travelled a slow route to my trouser front. I wish that I could taste you where you must ache for me as I do for you. My mouth upon your sweet flesh, and then my journey back up your body, and your face when I finish the first slow thrust into you, the one I compelled you to beg for; these images soak my dreams until there is nothing left of my free will, and I urge you to answer me: Are you innocent regarding my torment?
My hope is that you will not shun me after these disclosures. I am your employer, after all, and so must promise that your reputation as well as my own rests in my careful palms—safe from the censure of a prurient world, I assure you. I only hope that you can help to absolve me now I have disclosed my desires, and that we may unite forever as one flesh, or else live as forthright and forgiving siblings in Christ.
In brotherly love,
Vesalius
After blinking for what seemed hours, I edged under the desk beside the sour-smelling metal lamp with what I have subsequently learnt was a pile of ripe erotica.
Reading the second letter took me ten minutes, as half my body physically shrank from looking; reading the remaining thirteen took half an hour; I was, in this as in all other vices, a fast learner. I hoped that subsequent missives would deplore his initial one, but they were all of a kind, save that vocabulary like breast and cunny and arse and rut liberally seasoned later disclosures.
When I had finished, I scrambled out and leant over the desk, feeling a profoundly strange admixture of nausea and high-pitched excitement like the sensation of dismounting after a hard gallop.
Had this been what Edwin had meant?
You’re every bit as bad as I am. You liked it.
I did not like this feeling, this unsettled tingling wrongness; I felt it with Clarke sometimes at the edge of the rooftop when I thought, How easy it would be to simply step off, and my heartbeat soared, and I flinched away from the edge, unspeaking and ashamed of myself and giddy with quicksilver nerves which fired from scalp to spine and lower.
I did not strictly dislike the sensation either, however.
I stole the letters and stole back to our dormitory. Crawling into bed next to Taylor following questionable excursions by now carried no risk, and she snored through my manoeuvres; Clarke, however, was aquiver with attention in the next bed, her eyes dancing over me in the grey not-light as I pulled back the coverlet.
“I was right, wasn’t I?” she asked.
At a loss for words, I passed Clarke the letters and curled up with my back to her golden curls.
This was not my first mistake, but would prove to be the most careless—no matter how confused I was by the strange pulse of blood in my groin. Sharing my findings with Clarke seemed the only option; the thought of digesting those letters alone, without her to partake in the disgusting yet exotic meal, revolted me—I girlishly wanted someone else to be as agitated as I was.
And yet, it was more than that. Clarke made me mindlessly, achingly happy. I wanted us to share in everything; I wanted us to sail to faraway China, for us to attend a lavish costume ball, for her to be threatened with a pistol and for me to throw myself in the path of the bullet. Often as I fell asleep I fantasised she had been forced to name me as a murderess in a Reckoning, so that I might be sentenced to starve in a frigid straw-lined aerie, and as I lay dying she would visit and we should watch the stars fading through the window and I should whisper in the shell of her ear with my last breath, Never mind.
I forgive you.
I didn’t mind.
That never happened, but apparently the worst things I can imagine still fall short of reality.
• • •
At the next daily Reckoning, we were witness to an act akin to watching a tree sprouting from the sky, or rains bursting forth from the grounds like perverse fountains. I have never been so shocked; and were you, reader, to suggest greater surprises are in store for me, I should suggest you invest in the purchase of a strait waistcoat without delay.
“I name Mr. Munt,” Clarke said soberly.
The remark was so unreal that I laughed, choked, and then planted my palm firmly over my lips.
To say that Clarke turned he
ads would be an understatement. The announcement slammed into my chest like a physical blow. I have been thrown from a horse, attacked by multiple men, fallen down a flight of stairs; none of these events ever struck me so hard, because none of them so explicitly announced, this is your fault.
Mr. Munt initially could not believe his own ears. “Whom do you mean to name, Clarke?” he inquired.
“I already did. You’ve subjected Miss Lilyvale to unwanted attentions, Mr. Munt. Say you’re sorry.”
Mr. Munt’s handsome face paled. He glanced at Miss Lilyvale, who was not looking at him, because Miss Lilyvale was looking at me. I understood then what I had not before: she had wanted us to find the letters. Miss Lilyvale was vacillating and weak, and Clarke and I were neither, and others had noticed. Miss Lilyvale’s lake-blue eyes dimmed in shame as the other teachers whispered oh my and but it can’t be true, can it?
“Clarke.” Mr. Munt by now seemed outwardly composed save for his throat, which was ropy with rage under his white collar. “Do you truly mean to falsely accuse your headmaster when your own situation here is so precarious?”
“I don’t understand,” Clarke said, lifting her chin.
“Oh, I should never have troubled you with the information had you not made a mockery of the Reckoning,” Vesalius Munt hissed. “Your parents have told you they publish books, I presume? That they are among the literary set?”
Clarke said nothing.
“I believe in the value of education for every child, including even females, a position which has garnered me much criticism!” Mr. Munt cried with an arm raised. “And here this beggar at the gates of paradise accuses me of misconduct! Her parents print lurid erotic fiction, which it pains me to say in your company, ladies,” he added, flushing nicely before the rapt teaching staff. “They donated beyond Clarke’s fee to consign their daughter to my care; I accepted, hoping to save the child from heinous influences; and now she—the viper!—tells me that I have made Miss Lilyvale the subject of my unwanted attentions?”
“Oh my God,” breathed Taylor, morbidly fascinated.
We watched as Miss Lilyvale clutched at her voiceless throat and fled the room. When I think of the anger I felt, I will always recall ice and not fire, the way snow sears into one’s flesh.
Clarke’s face was rigid save for the tremor in her tiny lips.
“Yes,” said she, “that’s exactly what I mean to tell you.”
“Excellent,” said Mr. Munt, enjoying himself again. “You can confine yourself to porridge at breakfast for the foreseeable future. Next confessor?”
NINE
“I am very happy, Jane; and when you hear that I am dead you must be sure and not grieve: there is nothing to grieve about… . By dying young I shall escape great sufferings. I had not qualities or talents to make my way very well in the world: I should have been continually at fault.”
Within a fortnight, Clarke was a shade haunting hallways where no one saw or spoke to her, carrying such slight weight that the desk seats must have thought her a spring breeze. Her skin grew ashen, her lips cracked, her eyes mirrors.
“I am so ashamed of myself,” Miss Lilyvale whispered.
We were in the choir room on a Sunday before the service, only she and I, for I had left a note in her drawer demanding she meet me. Outside, the merry May breezes wanted only blithe girls with ribbons for their dance to be complete, and I pitied Miss Lilyvale for the necessity of my company a little; she had already endured unwanted attentions, veiled threats, and now a scheming schoolgirl. The choir room was neat and orderly, save for a dainty rug under the practice piano which had been gnawed by mice and reminded me of my music teacher.
“What can be done?” I urged, outwardly calm and inwardly frantic. “And what did you think would be done, anyhow? You must have wanted us to find them, but I can’t imagine what—”
“And I can’t either!” she cried, eyes wild, before her mouth pressed into a tormented dash. She hugged her own arms. “You must forgive me. No—no, you mustn’t, I’ve no right to even ask. My father is a country parson, my mother an industrious invalid, and they are happy when they’ve oxtails for their soup. Their parish is just outside London, but poor and plain for all its proximity. I learnt piano, thinking I could give private lessons. Well, I’m an utter shipwreck at music, and Mr. Munt when visiting our parish lecturing hired me anyhow, I arrived just a year before you did though I was far older, and this position pays—oh, don’t look at me, I can’t bear it.”
“You think you’re lucky to have the place.” I tentatively touched her forearm.
“I think he wanted me and not my music—who could want my music! He courted me for years without ever proposing before the letters started, and now I’m trapped, for what decent woman would have kept a job of all things with such correspondences plaguing her?” She shuddered. “Last month, he stopped me in a deserted corridor to, to pray for me, and he put his palms on my brow and here, over my heart.”
I required answers, and so increased the pressure on her arm. “Have you spoken with him since Clarke’s Reckoning?”
“Not a word. Did you burn the letters?” Miss Lilyvale whispered. “I thought them proof of his disgusting attentions, but that was unspeakably foolish—they are merely evidence of my complicity. Did you destroy them?”
“Yes,” I lied.
It was better than saying I reread them nightly because I do not understand their effect on me and I am studying it in the cause of science.
“Thank you. I was … terrified, paralysed.”
“We’ve tried everything,” said I, implacable. “We’ve shared, we’ve stolen, we’ve foraged spring greens when we were meant to be playing hopscotch. Clarke will not survive. What can we do?”
Pressing her sleeve to her eyes, Miss Lilyvale glanced in naked fright at the clock in the corner. “God forgive me. I’m your teacher, I ought to have … Yes, there is one thing to be done. Mr. Munt is his own bookkeeper. If you altered his accounts, and then took food on the day of its delivery, he would not know you had done so. Tomorrow the farm will deliver the week’s eggs and produce.”
The information echoed like the clap of a gong, for Clarke that morning had confessed herself bedridden. Porridge, lawn weeds, and rare stolen roast potatoes would no longer suffice.
“I take it I’m meant to perform this little magic trick,” I could not help but mention.
“Oh, Steele—”
“Never mind. I’ll do it. Does he keep the ledger in his study?”
Miss Lilyvale nodded, righting her hunched posture. “He invited me there for tea once. I shall never forget that occasion, no matter how I try.”
“When girls refuse to return their food, they’re told to visit his study, and no one speaks of it afterwards,” I said lowly. “Why?”
“He tells them who he thinks they really are, and what they must sacrifice to save themselves from hellfire,” Miss Lilyvale answered against a raw throat. “Sometimes he shows them pictures, suggests things … things he accuses them of secretly longing to do. For hours. Can you imagine?”
I could, but the service was about to commence. “I must know why you placed me in this position.”
Two feverish blots glared from her cheeks. “Please understand that I never meant for Clarke to—”
“Do the idiotic thing she did. I still deserve an explanation.”
Miss Lilyvale was a sweet, toothless, impressionable creature, but she was also an honest one, and finally she looked me straight in the eye.
“I know your past is … chequered. I also know that you forgive others more readily than anyone I have ever encountered, and I cherish it—you have a great talent, you know, for accepting people. Have you ever kept a secret,” Miss Lilyvale asked me, all the blood in her body seeming to drain straight through the floor, “which was not precisely your fault, but which would—if discovered—ruin you? Have you ever awoken to nothing save dread of daylight?”
“You know I have,”
I answered, comprehending that she spoke of my mother’s bad end.
“Mr. Munt means to destroy me if he cannot have me,” Miss Lilyvale murmured. “Please forgive my inexcusable actions. I only … I simply couldn’t do it anymore.”
Watching her, I thought about secrets. One can grow accustomed to carrying unseeable scars, as if the tattoo one wears is inked in flesh tone over flesh tone; but nevertheless one is still covered in secret, painted with secret, stained by it. I would have done anything to shed Edwin’s dead eyes glazed fish-scale grey.
Solving Miss Lilyvale’s problem and saving Clarke at once would have to suffice, however, lest I defy the restful nature of the Sabbath.
“I’ll be in Mr. Munt’s study during the service.” I turned on my heel. “If you might make any excuses necessary which prevent my being looked for? That would be rather the least you could do.”
• • •
Shadows are curious entities; they are lightless and yet cast a shape into the world, just as I do. As I ventured through the empty hallways, I did not think of myself as myself at all but as another Jane, a shadow given form. This curious phenomenon echoed the way I had come to think of my cousin’s murder—Edwin was no more, due to regrettable events somehow removed from the Jane Steele who had mastered translating Cato and gliding along with a spine straight as a pikestaff. My mother was also no more, but that was another matter, I thought as I tiptoed, flinching at each creak. I had been wicked, in an impulsive fashion; I had been devious, in minor targeted ones.
This time I would invade a headmaster’s private office, forge records, and escape, which would be a sure step on the road to perdition.
The unlocked door to Mr. Munt’s study swung open. The shelves were crammed, boasting titles from phrenology to poetry, and the dwindling fire’s aroma mingled with book must and tobacco. I had visited the coffer-ceilinged chamber twice—once, I realised to my own horror, as a trusted messenger delivering Vesalius Munt a note from Miss Lilyvale; and once, after our late lamented Fox had insisted upon eating, I was sent there to escort the sobbing girl back to our dormitory.