Jane Steele

by Lyndsay Faye

  Fox refused to say what had happened—they all did—but I heard her whimper I’m not as feckless as I am ugly in my memory as I stepped over the threshold.

  The record lay wantonly open next to an ink pot, pen, blotter, and gleaming letter opener. A silvery charge shot through me, and I dived for the thing; my stomach rose up my gullet as I examined the record of purchases never meant for us to consume:

  20 lbs. cod, alive—at 2d. a pound

  50 bunches turnips—at penny a bunch

  13 pints dried figs for pudding—at 1d. a pint

  Biting my lip, I reached for his pen and dipped it in the inkpot. Keeping track of foodstuffs was rightfully the cook’s province, but considering the profits Mr. Munt made by selling our strength away, it was unsurprising he sought complete control. Meals were planned a month in advance, with decisive check marks next to the supplies that had already been paid for.

  My hands were steady as I hovered over the order to be delivered the next day. It would have been a fatal mistake to cross anything out and rewrite it, so some thought was required; but within three minutes, I had changed 70 bunches cress to 20 bunches cress, 90 lbs. potatoes to 80 lbs. potatoes, and 7 dozen eggs to 4 dozen eggs.

  Granted, I should have to ascertain how to make off with fifty bunches of cress, ten pounds of potatoes, and three dozen eggs, and then hide these items, and then cook them, but these steep obstacles to me seemed mere irritants. The fire languished, and the smiling moon of the standing clock leered at me. My altered numbers were rather strange, but not so very unlike Mr. Munt’s other characters, and I blew upon the page to dry my falsehoods, imagining a great steaming plate of fried eggs and potato hash and cress salad for—

  “I wonder just what you think you’re doing—and then again, I don’t.”

  Dropping the pen as horror gripped me, I sent a bloodlike spatter across the page.

  Mr. Munt stood in the doorway, half smiling as if he were greeting a friend in a tea shop. My dismay was quickly buried under an avalanche of frozen rage.

  “She meant for me to be caught,” I found myself hissing.

  “The kindhearted Miss Lilyvale?” Mr. Munt shut the door and approached with even strides as I backed away. “Come now, I’m not going to hurt you. When have I ever hurt any of you? Madame Archambault is a fine French instructor, and her ways are set, but despite the Bible’s injunctions to spare not the rod, I confess I find violence crude.”

  “What are you doing here?” I demanded, too angry to prevaricate. “What about your sermon?”

  Mr. Munt placed his Bible reverently upon the desk. “The village prelate is delivering his marvellous message upon original sin. One must grasp the squalorous condition of the unredeemed soul in order to be duly grateful for Christ’s intercession. As for your accusation regarding Miss Lilyvale, that is more complicated. I may have mentioned to the cook that I was grateful she was so honest—for were this ledger to be tampered with, I should never know whether our deliveries had arrived intact. Miss Lilyvale may have heard me say so, for she was nearby, though I should never imply she is capable of eavesdropping.”

  Hatred thrust like a stake through my heart.

  “I took advantage of my colleague’s visit in order to settle the books. I ought to have locked the door, in retro—”

  “You planned all of this!” I cried. “This is another of your cruel games.”

  “Cruel?” He feigned hurt, his fine features twisting. “Steele, is your heart so hardened that you can invade my private office—”

  “You left the door unlocked.”

  “Falsify my accounts—”

  “As you indirectly suggested!” I fairly shrieked.

  “Plan to steal food from the mouths of your fellow students—”

  “You’re killing Clarke.” Outrage transformed effortlessly to begging. “Please, even you cannot justify death by starvation.”

  Mr. Munt walked round his desk, the smug uptilt to his lips intact; I have never seen a man enjoy himself so much. “Heavens! Where on earth would you have stored these items, and how would you have cooked them?”

  “I would have found a way,” I spat, but the bitterness lay in the fact that he was correct.

  This had been a fool’s errand, and Miss Lilyvale and I the fools.

  Mr. Munt sat before his ledger. He was dressed for Sunday, wearing a grey waistcoat which made his pale eyes gleam, and a high collar; his garb ever hinted at the parsonical whilst still accentuating his Byronic appearance. Running a hand through his black curls, he emitted a sigh.

  “You will have to be severely punished for this.”

  “Do what you like,” I snarled, confidence bolstered by loathing. “I’ll fight back. Only please,” I added as his sad look shifted into annoyance, “don’t deprive Clarke anymore. I was the one who read the letters first, not she. You know Clarke is half mad, and anyway she’s learnt her lesson.”

  “Half mad,” Mr. Munt reflected, pulling his index finger and thumb along his lower lip. “Do you know, Steele, I don’t think the half-mad one is Clarke.”

  A poisonous silence fell, one which burnt my skin.

  “Do not pretend that this is about my mother.”

  “It is not about your mother. It is about whether you are capable of rational behaviour, or whether the devil works his will through you.”

  “I’m only here to save one of your own students!”

  He laughed, showing straight white teeth. “So you will fight me, you say, and in the next breath you plead the case for the daughter of smut purveyors?” Standing, Mr. Munt strode past me to the opposite wall. “Ah, here we are. The Garden of Forbidden Delights, author anonymous, published in serial by Whittleby and Clarke. Borrow it, and then tell me whether you think Clarke’s judgement of sincere affections is sound.”

  A small red volume, unmarked on its cover but bearing the frontispiece The Garden of Forbidden Delights, was in my hands an instant later. Mr. Munt raised an eyebrow, stony resolve in his granite eyes, and I queasily slid the object into my dress pocket. I saw many more books like them—I saw an entire shelf, as a matter of fact, enough to be termed a collection.

  “Do show that to Clarke when you’ve finished,” he added with a cold smirk.

  He’s actually insane. His power had flooded his brain, eroding it piecemeal. I recalled the phrases I had studied in such repulsed confusion, the thought of your mouth against my cock-stand, and I would lick my way down your spine and lower until—

  “Miss Lilyvale has seemed most upset since you touched her private things,” Vesalius Munt chastised, returning to his desk. “She carelessly left a letter lying out, I take it?”

  I drew a quick breath. “I was in the teachers’ wing looking for food, and one of your letters caught my eye. I told Clarke about the contents. She never … It was all my doing, Mr. Munt.”

  “Perhaps so—I blame myself, you realise. It’s clear as day that Anne-Laure Steele’s unchecked rebellion, her cunning, her willingness to spit in the face of God Himself, all have been passed down to her only child. Pity. Do you long for death too, Steele? Do you think of the Reaper as you would a suitor, turning away from God’s myriad blessings?”

  Hours of conversation with Mr. Munt, I thought, was indeed too hard a bargain when set against a single hot meal.

  “That is why I am contemplating committing you,” Mr. Munt concluded, examining his shirt cuffs.

  The words hung before me like a corpse displayed for public view.

  “It would sadden me beyond words should one of your classmates fall prey to your wild moods.” Mr. Munt’s eyes gleamed, a powerful king protecting his realm from embodied disaster—disaster by the name of Jane Steele. “You could hurt someone, Steele; you could destroy someone, I believe.”

  Vesalius Munt could not possibly have known my secret, but my knees turned to water anyhow; he had seen something in me—a sparking flint where there ought to have been a soul, perhaps. Asylums by all accounts, meanwhile, we
re handy places to be chained to a bed covered in your own filth, subjected to ice baths and mercury doses and leeches on shorn scalps, and fed rather less than was customary at Lowan Bridge School.

  “Don’t expel me,” I breathed. “I’m, I’m not mad—you know that I am not. I’ll behave. Only feed Clarke and I shall do just as you say.”

  Mr. Munt crooked a finger over his full lips as he cogitated. Most would have seen a headmaster wrestling with a convoluted decision; I saw a despot to whom suffering was as amusing as a penny concert.

  “I am moved to be merciful,” he concluded, “but Clarke’s punishment must stand if you remain at Lowan Bridge. The pair of you are potentially harmful to the others when acting together. If you agree to the asylum, Clarke can return to regular meals. If you prefer to remain and repent, her rations shall remain as they are.”

  When I opened my mouth, it was empty—save for my heart, which lay aquiver in my throat. He was inclined to be merciful, and thus was offering me a choice of my life or Rebecca Clarke’s. The seconds elongated, an out-of-tune music box winding ever more slowly to its finish; Mr. Munt, smiling, picked up his pen as if to correct my altered numbers.

  I was not inclined to be merciful, however, and thus gripped the letter opener and plunged the sharp point deep into my headmaster’s neck.

  My earlier metaphor had been wrong, I discovered. The splash of ink from the pen dropping onto the page looked nothing like a spray of blood at all.

  TEN

  … like any other rebel slave, I felt resolved, in my desperation, to go all lengths.

  There is a passage in Jane Eyre: An Autobiography which puzzles me mightily; and because it only tickles at the edges of my understanding, I cannot help but read it over, sitting with a glass of dark sherry as the sun grows teasing and hides behind the elms:

  All said I was wicked, and perhaps I might be so: what thought had I been but just conceiving of starving myself to death? That certainly was a crime: and was I fit to die?

  I present to the reader an enigma: my mother rushed the giddy business of dying along and was almost universally reviled for it. Speaking as a woman who has deserved to die since the age of nine and often thinks death a charming notion anyhow, I burn to know: When Miss Eyre demands philosophically, and was I fit to die? is she asking whether she is wicked enough to earn capital punishment, or holy enough to merit release from the torments of her browbeaten life?

  And if she wanted to die … did she deserve to any longer?

  • • •

  Few among us are aware of how much blood the human body contains—surging in thick waves should it chance to be spilt.

  I had spilled it, meanwhile, and therefore drastic measures were required.

  Mr. Vesalius Munt was felled by a strangely skilful blow—as if I had studied the act, when in fact I had simply decided that he should stop being alive. He gurgled a disbelieving shriek, eyes ablaze with wrath and fear, looking perversely more alive than ever, each muscle taut with severest alarm. He even got halfway to his feet, reaching for me, rich gore soaking the fateful ledger.

  Then his lips bubbled crimson, his blazing eyes hardened, and he slumped forward over the desk. His fingers, so graceful in life, twitched like the poisonous insect he was; his back ceased to shudder.

  I cocked my head and gauged his condition: dead.

  I paused to be medically certain; but as he continued dead, I heaved a breath and looked around me, beginning with the mirror above the fireplace.

  The spray of crimson across my school uniform was not inconsiderable, and another plume of blood had feathered my hand; I carefully wiped these drops on Mr. Munt’s own sleeve. Using the late Mr. Munt’s coat the way one would a handkerchief was an act of sufficient disrespect that I turned away giggling, the giggles followed by a hysterical peal of laughter.

  A bottle of amber spirits sat upon the side table. In for a pound, in for a penny. I poured. The taste was much harsher than the laudanum I had once pilfered from my mother’s dressing table; the sear returned my senses and, after spluttering awkwardly, it occurred to me that I was in a not-insignificant amount of danger.

  My heart pattered a rhythm like spring rain upon a roof; according to the tall clock, I had nearly an hour before the close of Sunday services.

  I rifled through the secretary as well as any drawers I could open without shifting my latest victim, scattering papers and pens. When my pockets contained coins in the neighbourhood of five pounds, a dented silver watch tucked away for repair bearing the initials VOM, and the almost-forgot volume published by Clarke’s family, I shut the door of the study behind me and raced silently down the corridor.

  • • •

  Reader, would you prefer me to have felt remorse in the aftermath of my second slaughter?

  Though the brutality of the act sent fearsome tremors through my small frame for days and weeks afterwards, never have I regretted ending the life of my headmaster.

  Dressed in a too-large brown travelling suit stolen from Miss Lilyvale’s wardrobe as by then I owned nothing save school-issued clothing, having wrapped my bloodied uniform in paper and stuffed it in my trunk, I was raiding the pantry an hour later when Clarke discovered me.

  A small cough sounded, and I whirled around.

  I stood in the windowless room aghast with a single rushlight flickering, shoving bread and fruit into my trunk, preparing to abandon everything I knew—but caught out.

  “I went to his study,” Clarke whispered.

  A word of advice: do not ever kill for love, or you will find yourself tethered, staked to the ground when your cleanest instincts require you to run for your life without a backwards glance. Killing for love is one of the most tangled acts you can commit, reader, in an already twisted world.

  She looked so small, this beautiful friend of mine. Clarke’s madcap blond curls hung loose and tangled, her miniature lips chalk white. Inexplicably, she was dressed in her holiday travelling clothes, an emerald woollen suit and a cap appropriate to her age. I blinked dumbly; Clarke was the colour of goose down, so I promptly deposited her onto a stool.

  “You discovered Mr. Munt, didn’t you?” Her seaweed-green eyes flooded with brine. “I dragged myself to chapel to make a point in front of everyone, but he wasn’t there, so I tried to catch him alone. I had meant to beg him, it was shameful, but I found—did I find what you found?”

  The silent steel cogs of my mind ticked.

  “Yes.” I clutched her to me, cherishing her still-warm bones. “Oh, Clarke, I meant to plead with him myself. But there were drawers open and thieves must have—it was horrible. I’m so sorry you saw it too.”

  Lying had never been easier. Either I informed Clarke that I had shoved a letter opener in Mr. Munt’s throat, or I kept my beloved companion for another half an hour; the decision did not trouble me overmuch. She set her head against my shoulder and quaked as she cried, whilst I attempted to determine the most efficient way never to set foot upon a scaffold. Swift escape seemed the best option; but swift escape had been delayed by my partner in defiance.

  Meanwhile, I reminded myself harshly, Clarke was still dying.

  “Here.” I tore away from her, hands landing upon some plain bread and shoving it unceremoniously into the white butter pot, tearing her off a portion. “Eat slowly. You know when we don’t, it—”

  “I know,” she answered before devouring the hunk in mouselike bites.

  I continued my travel preparations; a paper packet of cheese, a fistful of nuts. For leave I must, and I felt a knife in my own throat when I thought of final separation from Clarke. I wondered why on earth she was wearing ordinary clothing when we were all due at cold Sunday supper in uniform in an hour.

  “Where are we going?”

  Turning, I regarded my friend, who had slid off the stool and was reaching for a lone apple in a basket full of onions and braided garlic heads. Her freckles still glared dark as tiny bruises from the pallor of her cheeks, but her voice was s
tronger.

  “Clarke, I haven’t anyone to go to.” Telling her the truth was always pleasurable, as if I were apologising for the glaring omissions. “My aunt loathes me, and until I’m of age … I simply can’t go back, not to her. You have a family, you can—”

  “They told me they were publishers of poetry and plays.” Clarke’s eyes glinted hard and gemlike. “The older I grew, the more I thought it odd that they had sent me here. When I was home, they barely entertained or received any callers. For a day it would be splendid, and every hour afterwards I would feel more like a guest, Mother making the rounds at her Bohemian salons, Father at his office and clubs, them glancing at the clock during supper. I would ache to know what you were doing—I thought of you whenever they slighted me, whenever they heard my step and seemed almost … disappointed. Every visit, I told them we were tormented here, and every time, they said that school was difficult, and how could I move in artistic circles without an education? Artistic circles,” she repeated in disgust. “By the time I left after a visit, they could barely contain themselves for joy.”

  “You can’t—”

  “They lied to me, Jane.” The name, after so long without hearing it, stole my breath. She blinked in her oddly deliberate manner, polishing the apple against her sleeve. “They sent me away when I was six years old. And now you mean to send me away yourself.”

  “But I—”

  “Please don’t leave me behind to survive this school without you, I couldn’t bear it. Who knows what sort the replacement headmaster will be? We’ll find a new place to live.” Doubt pinched the corners of her mouth. “But perhaps you don’t want—”

  “Of course I do.” A weightless feeling soared inside me, a flock of starlings scattering into flight. “I only—I’ve about five pounds and a silver watch that was my father’s, but that won’t get us far.”

  Smiling slowly, Clarke took a bite of the apple. “You’ll think of something.” Pivoting, she fetched her carpetbag, which I had not even seen previous. “You always think of something—you’re terribly clever, the cleverest one. It’s nearly three—let’s be off before the cooks arrive to assemble the cold supper. When they find what’s in the head’s office,” she added with a shudder, “there will be hell to pay.”