Jane Steele

by Lyndsay Faye

  “You look well too,” said she.

  “Hmm?” I had been studying my coffee with more interest than that beverage had ever previously inspired.

  Clarke smiled—the indulgent one which meant I had journeyed too far into the wilderness of my head. “You look very smart. I’m happy over that, your clearly having plentiful coin. So often I wondered whether—”

  “Me too, every single day,” I blurted.

  When she blushed, she looked more herself again, for her previous pallor had been alarming. Clarke had never blushed often, however, and never lacking a sound purpose, so I wondered at the expression.

  “Well.” She pretended to polish her pince-nez as I pretended to add sugar to my coffee. “I probably did not wonder quite as much as you did, for I used to hear news of you.”

  “You have the better of me, then,” I marvelled. “How?”

  Clarke’s head found the much-loved angle it adopted when thinking harder than usual; as if remembering something, she spoke. “‘I always knew my grip upon the thread of time was tenuous, and the harder I clutched, the sooner it would break. Therefore, do not weep for me, my tender sweet love—we must all resign ourselves to the final snapping of that bond between soul and breath, and though it is a present unworthy of your grace and beauty, you must know that I gift my soul to you.’”

  Jaw dropping, I laughed. Clarke gave me a faint smile.

  “I wrote that!” I exclaimed. “John Jacob Holdworth, hanged at Newgate in eighteen forty-seven.”

  “Precisely so. When your gallows confessions started selling at newsagents’ and tea shops, occasionally I would purchase them, though I never caught a glimpse of you delivering the papers or picking up your earnings.”

  “But of course my name wasn’t on them, only the names of those executed—however did you know it was me?”

  “That wasn’t very difficult,” she said quietly. Brightening, she attempted to adopt a brisk air. “And now what are you doing with yourself? Good Lord, that frock and those jewels—I didn’t suppose last confessions brought in ready enough chink for those togs.”

  I glanced down at my new dress, and my pulse sped, for she was right.

  “I had better not say,” I confessed softly. “It’s complicated.”

  The set of her shoulders grew brittle after she shrugged. “You always did keep secrets, and everything is complicated these days.”

  Extraordinary contradiction, I thought, that she could always condone even the most operatic of my falsehoods, so long as none were directed at her.

  “I’d tell you if it didn’t mean betraying another party.”

  My friend took rapt interest in the traffic outside the window. “It’s all one to me.”

  “Where did you learn slang?” I teased, wanting the light to return to her eyes. “You always spoke so properly, even in Rotherhithe.”

  “We were speaking with each other mainly, so it was easy to keep pure back then.” Surely I imagined the dryness in her tone, having spent too long in Mr. Thornfield’s company.

  “Oh, won’t you say what you’ve been doing?” I begged. “The matter which brought me to London doesn’t involve just myself, you see. Pax, please. I’m desperate to know—you never bought that rigging with street-chaunting coin either, and my vocabulary is every bit as disgraceful, and you really must take pity on me. We were so lucky, when we arrived here, to find shelter so quickly, and afterwards when I pictured you …” Faltering, I cleared my throat. “If anything had happened to you, it should have been my fault.”

  Clarke’s gaze grew a shade less hard.

  “No.” She sighed. “I was the one who left, after all.”

  “But what came next?”

  “I continued singing, but finding lodgings was harder than I imagined, since for all those years you’d taken care of me—I was sharp enough at school, but a complete ninny when loosed to the streets. At times, I slept in doss-houses with the dollymops, and it was … Don’t frown like that, Jane. Most of them were kind, for all that they were filthy and coarse. I could have gone straight back to my parents. I did, for a fortnight,” she admitted, wincing. “When they seemed only half relieved to see me, I asked them for a few pounds and struck out again. They claimed what I was doing was ‘admirably Bohemian.’”

  She sounded so bitter at this last that I hastened to inquire, “How did your fortunes change?”

  A wistful look glazed Clarke’s eyes. “I was singing near to Elephant and Castle when a woman—Mrs. Priscilla Pellanora is her name—stopped to speak with me. She asked if I had ever sung in a company before, harmonies and the like, and of course I had at Lowan Bridge, and she offered me a place in the chorus of her production.”

  “But that’s absolutely wonderful!” Laughing, I imagined Clarke in a wooden-walled theatre, her freckles blurred by the faint glow of the footlights, the smell of peanuts and ale thick in the air. “You excelled, of course, which is why now you are so fashionable.”

  Clarke lifted one shoulder, though she seemed pleased; she had always been peculiarly uninterested in her own talents, the same way she viewed everyone else’s attributes and shortcomings as stamped in the stars, inevitable. “Mrs. Pellanora is an excellent tutor.”

  “Oh! May I come see you? Do please say yes. Are you at the Olympic, or maybe the Delphi?”

  Biting her lip, Clarke shook her head.

  “The Lyceum, then! I know you must think …” I stopped, eyes prickling. “That is, I don’t know what you must think of me, but I should so love to hear you sing again.”

  “I’m not at the Lyceum,” she husked strangely.

  “Do you sing for penny concerts, then? I’ll come to the Surrey side to see you, only tell me which it is. The Victoria? The Bower Saloon?”

  “Jane, I sing at Mrs. Pellanora’s private club,” she snapped.

  My ears buzzed in the ensuing silence, drowning out the soft clinking of tableware and the susurration of strangers’ voices. A man with a Yorkshire accent was demanding to know where his pudding had got to as the words private club echoed in my skull.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Clarke groaned, then abruptly lowered her voice. “Surely this cannot be quite so surprising as some of your own past revelations. Wipe that expression off your face, if you please—no one touches me, the stage is gorgeously appointed, I’ve room and board with a set of bang-up girls, I’m petted and toasted all over town, and the costumes are nothing like what you’re picturing. They’re not far off from what I’m wearing now, come to that, only more … theatrical, and with trousers, and apt to get kohl stains.”

  “I’m sorry,” I protested. “I wasn’t thinking anything, only that you were always so scrupulous, you see, but now I comprehend it’s all quite aboveboard.”

  “No, it isn’t either,” she hissed.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s outrageously bawdy, the content of the programme.”

  “Oh,” was all I could muster.

  “That must please you, that I work in a dirty cabaret.”

  “No! I mean I’m happy—so long as you are.”

  “You don’t look happy, Jane.”

  “I’m delighted for you, only … surprised, I suppose. You were always so honourable.”

  “Well, honour wasn’t doing anything for me.” The waiter had dropped a salver on the table and she signed her bill with a flourish. “Mrs. Pellanora’s establishment does.”

  “I don’t think any the less of you,” I said fiercely, panicked at the thought of losing her again so soon—here one heartbeat, gone the next. “I could never think less of you.”

  Wincing, Clarke shook her head. She was so striking in her boyish clothing, the curve of her throat and the flash of her eye beneath the glass half-moons, that save for the skirts and the curls she really did seem a young rake cooing over watch fobs and walking sticks in Regent Street.

  “I’ve an appointment to rehearse with our pianist in half an hour.” She tugged on a pair o
f gloves. “You should know I don’t regret seeing you, Jane, and that I don’t any longer harbour a … Hang it, nothing I say will do any good to anyone. When I think of you, it’s altogether fondly.”

  “Clarke, please don’t—”

  “Will you say my name at least?” Flushing again, she adjusted her pince-nez. “I don’t know why you do that, I never did. Rebecca is my name, Becky what my parents called me, Becca what the four other company girls call me. Take your pick. Why should you want to remind us of Lowan Bridge?”

  Because the only shaft of sunshine in all that endless midnight was meeting you.

  “Rebecca.” The name tasted strange, like salt where sugar was expected. “Let me contact you, please. Have you an address?”

  “That would be unwise.”

  Desperate, I snatched up her bill and stole the pencil from the salver, scribbling my room number at the Weathercock and the street address. I thrust it at her.

  After breathing tensely through her nose for a few seconds, she took it. Clarke placed the paper in a pocket beneath her jacket lapel and pressed her lips together.

  “I always loved you as a sister.” My hand was so near to hers that taking it was a thoughtless act, the only right one.

  My old friend cocked her head at our joined fingers, cogitating; she was a self-made woman, a singer of questionable provenance, and otherwise she had not changed a whit since she was six years old, and I was speaking the truth: I had always loved her.

  “I never loved you so,” she said.

  Clarke freed her hand from my tightening grasp as two tears fell soundlessly from beneath the pince-nez. Had she trussed me up like a slaughtered buck, I might have thought it my just deserts for the web of lies in which I had entangled her—this, though, seemed to exceed the boundaries even of cruelty. When my breath hitched, she rose to depart.

  “Do you recall the book you had—the one my father published? The Garden of Forbidden Delights?”

  My mouth must have worked; but sepulchres cannot produce sound, and I was a monument to wishes ungranted and tenderness left to rot unused.

  The whisper of fingertips touched my cheek, and then Clarke was kissing me.

  It was only a brief press, but it was neither dry, nor chaste, nor seeking. It was the kiss of a person who has thought about variants of the same kiss for a very long time, as if it were a hundred kisses, all of them passionate and all of them hopeless. I was startled and—in the moment—grateful enough even to reciprocate, did so before even thinking why I should not, and I tasted years in that kiss. I tasted years of dying hope, and the sweet bellyache of longing, and coffee, and Clarke herself, before she pulled away, running her thumb over my open lips.

  “That was how I loved you,” she told me.

  Women often embrace, sisters often kiss, and no one regarded us as she bowed her head, closing her eyes for a fleeting instant, and then turned and walked out of the tea shop.

  I floated to the window, following her as she strode into the street. She did not look back, gauging the traffic at the corner with a practised tilt of her head; therefore I was the one turned to salt, and not Rebecca Clarke, when I watched her hand leave the front of her bodice and drop my address to the cobbles, the paper fluttering prettily before it landed in the filth and the straw.

  For minutes which stretched before me like miles, I stood at that window, still seeing the ghostly afterimage of her slim back and gleaming hair the instant before I lost her for the second time. Carriages and buses clattered over the bill, no longer visible in the road, but that was for the best—I had never wished Clarke harm in all my days, and if seeing me grieved her, I renewed my vow never to seek her out.

  An unexpected peace flooded the air around me.

  Some tragedies bind us, as lies do; they are ropes braided of hurt and bitterness, and you cannot ever fully understand how pinioned you are until the ties are loosened.

  Other tragedies free us, as Clarke’s confession freed me.

  You cannot know what it means, reader, to have thought yourself despised for your unworthiness for a period of years—to have supposed your very nature poison, and your friend right to have thus abandoned you—and to learn thereafter that you were loved not too little but too well.

  • • •

  East India House was a fortress; the building loomed over me like a conqueror, the lower two floors absurdly high-ceilinged, and the entrance guarded by six positively enormous Ionic columns. A frail wind whined in my ears, tugging the tailcoats of the men dancing about with their arms full of papers in a chaotically choreographed tribute to wealth. Never had I set eyes on a place which so pungently reeked of power and money, and I hesitated, fearing the consequences should I provoke the lion in its den.

  Better you than the residents of Highgate House, I thought. You have been Jane Stone, Jane Smith, and today you will be Jane Steele—the only woman suited to this task.

  I adopted an aloof air and entered the front hall.

  If the shareholders were already assured of the Company’s ruthless dominance by the exterior of East India House, the interior hammered the point home; everywhere I looked was marble and crystal and carvings and paintings of faraway lands. Finding Augustus P. Sack’s office would have been daunting, but a clerk with waxed grey moustaches escorted me, somehow exuding hauteur and deference simultaneously. A knock produced an instant reply of “Come in!” and the stranger presented me to Sack, making a prompt exit.

  “Well, well, Miss Stone,” Augustus Sack purred, quitting his desk to drop a kiss above my outstretched hand. “I was very intrigued indeed by your letter.”

  “Yes, I suppose you must have been.”

  “Do sit down. Tea or a little wine, perhaps?”

  “The latter, if you will join me.”

  “Miss Stone, a beautiful woman need hardly ask that question—and may I state in addition that your present costume quite takes my breath away?”

  It had not escaped my attention that Mr. Sack’s shrewd eyes had examined my attire, landing with a spark of lust upon the Punjabi diamonds.

  “Governesses are expected to be such drab creatures. It is a life of terrible drudgery even when one is not living in fear of one’s employer, Mr. Sack.”

  “Frightened you, did they, the scoundrels?” Mr. Sack commiserated. “Happily, you are safely under the care of John Company now, Miss Stone.”

  Mr. Sack poured claret from a decanter on a carved mahogany sideboard; he was just as I remembered him, doughy and pink faced, with gleaming cheeks and fat fingers. Now I saw that his rich attire—a maroon coat on this occasion, with a yellow silk necktie—matched his office, for everywhere I looked were signs of needless expense. From ivory cigar box to silver-chased gasogene, Company executives seemed to display wealth like peacocks spreading their plumage.

  He ushered me into a chair, equipped us with wine, and perched on the front of his desk. “First, Miss Stone, let me offer my solemn oath that you may tell me anything in complete confidence—I gather that you departed Highgate House in great anxiety, which I confess does not surprise me, considering the dark history of Thornfield and his shadow, Singh. If we are to be friends, we must trust each other.”

  So I am already promised immunity for stealing the trunk, I thought, delighted.

  “I am yours to command, Mr. Sack, so harrowed was I by my recent experiences.”

  The sympathetic frown he manufactured was revolting, so sharply did his eyes cut from my necklace to my face and back again. “We speak of desperate men, Miss Stone. Please—tell me everything.”

  I did not tell him everything, and several of the things I told him were bold-faced lies.

  Tremulously, I informed Mr. Sack that after the knives had driven him away at breakfast, I had feared for my life. However, I had determined to wait at least until I was given my first quarterly wages, having no other means of returning to London. In the meanwhile, I had launched a secret investigation of the house’s occupants and learnt what
Mr. Sack had been doing visiting Highgate House thanks to covert eavesdropping (not untrue); thus had I heard the story of the trunk and its contents.

  “The tale sounded to me quite preposterous, but I continued in my quest to discover all I could,” I informed him shyly. “There seemed no other choice if I wished to escape their clutches.”

  “None at all, none in the world, Miss Stone—you did quite right,” the Company diplomat soothed. “Please go on.”

  Leaving out the pieces of the story which reflected badly on Sack was simplicity itself. I knew my employer had robbed David Lavell and his wife, Karman Kaur, but said nothing of Sahjara’s kidnap; I knew John Clements and Jack Ghosh were both dead, but implied Mr. Thornfield or Mr. Singh were to blame. The Company man’s ruddy cheeks creased in sympathy whilst his stare bored into me with all the gentility of a bullet.

  “This Jack Ghosh person’s death was the final straw,” I lamented. “Oh, Mr. Sack, it was so horrid—their claims it was an accident, the blood on the floor. I redoubled my search for the trunk, and …” I allowed myself to blush.

  “And enterprising woman that you are, you found it, and you took it in order to escape the clutches of these fiends,” he said softly.

  Pretending a coquettish version of guilt, I said nothing.

  “The trunk was hid amongst Mr. Sardar Singh’s things, I imagine?”

  Dumbfounded, I blinked at him.

  “Why do you say so, Mr. Sack?”

  “Because it’s that posturing heathen who taunted me with word of it upon my arrival back in England. This was before the loss of John Clements, of course—wretched business, that, and I don’t know that this Inspector Quillfeather will ever get to the bottom of it, more’s the pity. I thought Thornfield to blame at first, and told the Director so, but now I have reached another conclusion.”

  These assertions sounded nonsensical—that either man would ever stoop to poisoning anyone (as I had once done) was ludicrous, I thought, and the notion that Sardar Singh had made any communication to Augustus P. Sack whatsoever beggared belief.