The Madwoman Upstairs

by Catherine Lowell

“I have an idea. Let’s go to the Ashmolean.”

  I followed him. In about ten minutes, we arrived at a large, ornate structure with grandiose columns and the self-importance of a Wordsworth poem. A museum. There was a sign outside advertising the special exhibit: Early Women Writers. I turned to Hans with a grimace, but he seemed strangely excited at the prospect of a museum, like he hadn’t used his brain in years and wanted to give it a go again.

  I must have looked as unpleasant as I felt, because Hans said: “What’s wrong?”

  “I hate women.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I meant writers.”

  He led the way inside. The foyer was a vast marble chamber that smelled like hot glue. The red-cheeked man at the door handed us each a pamphlet and told us not to miss the official opening of the exhibit in a few weeks, when Sir John Booker of the Brontë Parsonage would be doing a book signing, alongside some other notable speakers. I feigned disinterest and followed Hans upstairs, past the Pre-Raphaelite display, and past a statue of a headless Roman, until we arrived at the main attraction: Early Women Writers.

  Judging from the brochure, the exhibit featured the sketches and notebooks of a handful of women: Mary Wollstonecraft, Frances Burney, Eliza Haywood, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, and, of course, the Brontës. These were the ballsy “early adopters”—the women who became novelists long before it was cool. At the time they lived, a woman who ventured outside the domestic sphere ran the risk of pernicious public scrutiny. Yet all of these ladies gave the finger to everyone and did it anyway.

  “Are you all right?” Hans asked.

  “Yes,” I lied. I was sweating profusely. I started walking quickly, head down. I felt like I was lost in Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors. Rationally, I understood that the gallery was meant to glorify freedom of speech and gender equality. But all I could see was a tribute to suffering. The history of these particular writers was a history of censorship. Their work was defined not by what they wrote, but what they had been forced to cut out. Frances Burney—poor Fanny! Hers was the first gallery we visited. She burned all her writing at age fifteen, due to her family’s scorn. And Jane Austen—dear Jane! I charged through her gallery so quickly that at one point Hans had to jog to keep up. After her death, her letters were painstakingly edited—entire pages ripped out—to the point where the Jane Austen we know today was not the woman who actually lived. I walked quicker and quicker. I felt a ringing in my ears. All the portraits on the walls stared down at us from their cages as if they were instead looking out the window of a strange asylum. I could not help feeling like someone was screaming very loudly, only from a great distance.

  Which brought us to the Brontës. Their gallery was on the third floor, up another flight of stairs. The bright sign read, A Life in Art: Charlotte, Emily, Anne. I stood outside for a moment to calm myself down. There was a girl in the center of the room, who, judging by her suit and badge, was either an intern or a very new employee. She was speaking to two Indian tourists. We walked inside.

  “She’s young,” I muttered to Hans, motioning toward the tour guide.

  “She’s hot,” he said.

  “What?”

  “She’s not,” he corrected. “Not young.”

  She couldn’t have been older than I was. Her hair was the color of saffron. There was a shy streak of crayon purple in her bangs.

  “What most people don’t realize is that it’s possible to understand the Brontës solely in terms of their attention to visual art,” she was saying. Her voice echoed around the hollow chamber.

  Hans and I began to wander. My heart was still banging in my chest. I recognized most of the drawings here from the Brontë history books my father had owned. Hans pointed out various sketches the way he might have pointed to a breaching whale from the lido deck. I smiled and nodded each time, and he would look at me expectantly, as though storing my response for future reference. I hated seeing the sketches in frames. It was the same way I didn’t like to see stuffed deer heads mounted on a wall.

  “Pretty,” I lied when we stopped in front of one of Charlotte’s larger paintings. I didn’t recognize this one. It depicted a prince leaning over a sleeping woman draped in elegant sheets.

  “Would you mind not standing so close to the art?” said the museum employee with the purple streak. She had come up behind me. The Indian couple had left.

  “Sure,” I said. I took a step away from the wall and said to Hans: “See how morbid this all is? It really gives a picture of what was going on in Charlotte’s mind.”

  The girl cleared her throat. I turned around. She was right behind us.

  She said, “This drawing is an exact copy of A. B. Clayton’s painting The Atheist Viewing the Dead Body of His Wife.”

  Hans tilted his head to the side. “The Brontës copied someone else’s work?”

  “Naturally,” the girl said. She had a squirrelly voice. “Copying existing prints was the way women learned to draw. No one expected them to become artists. Drawing was a use of time, like embroidery.”

  I blinked and didn’t smile. “What was your name?”

  “Amanda.”

  She was pretty. Stretchy pants. I looked between my two companions. I registered how objectively attractive Hans was. Big blue fish eyes. Trimmed, corn-blond hair. He looked like a well-dressed Visigoth. The two of them belonged together far more than Hans and I did.

  He pointed to another painting on the wall. “Look at this one.”

  “Another copy,” said Amanda.

  Hans pointed to another one. “That one?”

  “Copy.”

  “Those three over there?”

  “Copy. Copy, copy.” She smiled, revealing a gap between her two front teeth. “As I said, civilized ladies copied existing prints.”

  “What about uncivilized ladies?” I asked.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “There are several known original Brontë paintings out there,” I said.

  “Very few, and they are quite dull,” said Amanda. “But if it helps, what little visual creativity the girls had, they more than made up for with their writing. They learned how to paint pictures with words. Their books, you could argue, were translations of their paintings.”

  She was very young to be speaking in such assured, textbook sentences, and I wondered if she had recently written a graduate thesis. My breath grew short. I didn’t like people insulting the Brontës’ originality. That seemed like a job only I had the right to do. I also didn’t like being interrupted with the facts. The Brontë world I had in my own mind was clean and tidy and didn’t have a ton of room for the opinions of outsiders.

  “I wager, then, that there are more than just a few original Brontës out there,” I said. “Jane Eyre herself starts out copying prints, but develops into a creative artist. I’m sure Charlotte did the same.”

  “Perhaps.”

  I could feel my face growing heated, so I turned around and walked toward another side of the room. I stopped in front of a painting I had spied in the corner earlier—it was of an unattractive woman in her even more unattractive profile, which lacked dimension and resembled an Egyptian hieroglyphic. Bonnet strings encircled her neck like chains. I recognized this painting. I had seen it over and over and over again as a child, in my dad’s books.

  “Would you say this is a copy?” I asked Amanda, who had appeared behind me.

  “No,” she conceded. “That one is not.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “Do you know who it is?” she asked, looking vaguely impressed.

  “Ann Marshall,” I said.

  She gave me a gap-toothed smile, as if we were about to become great friends. “I see you know about Thorp Green.”

  I thought about responding that yes, I knew about Thorp Green, and no, I was not a savage, but I thought better of it. Instead, I took a small amble around the room, trying to calm myself. I was angry with Hans for bringing me here. It was as insensitive as bring
ing an alcoholic to a beer factory. He seemed far less curious about the exhibit than he was about my reaction to it. But in a moment, he came up behind me and rested his hand on the small of my back. Immediately, I felt calm; his skin must have had a sedative property to it. His voice was sweet when he whispered, “Let’s go, yeah?” My heart gave a small contraction. I took a final peek around the gallery and pointed to one last painting on the way out, eyebrow raised.

  Amanda answered my unasked question: “Copy.”

  We thanked her and left.

  Hans and I went for ice cream at Moo-Moo’s, then made an aimless circle around a deserted park. On the way home, we walked by the Oxford eatre, which, in addition to Jane Eyre, was also playing The Grapes of Wrath: A British Musical Comedy. When evening fell, we walked home. I felt proud. I was having fun. If anyone asked, which they wouldn’t, I could tell them all the exciting, borderline romantic things I had done today.

  “I think it’s admirable that you’re not giving people what they want,” said Hans as we neared Old College. We were walking slowly.

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “It means you’re not telling anyone what your father really left you. I assume you must have a reason, which I find loyal and charming.”

  “I really don’t know how else to explain this to people. I don’t have anything.”

  “Suit yourself,” he said, smiling. “But let me congratulate you on becoming the icon of the decade. A beautiful orphan locked in a tower? Male imaginations around the country are running wild.”

  I made a face. “Have you ever been to my tower? It’s really not that great.”

  “No, but I’d love to see it.”

  I gave a shaky laugh. The Old College gates were locked, so we entered through the side door, at the south side of campus. We passed the deer park and the pond. Hans told me to look at the stars, and I did. I didn’t see any. I saw only a smear of clouds, as though someone had written something obscene across the sky and then tried to blot it out. When I turned back to find Hans smiling at me, I wondered if it hadn’t been something of a trick.

  We found ourselves on the backside of the Faculty Wing. I recognized the ugly freshwater well I had observed once before.

  “Halford’s Well,” Hans said, answering my unasked question. “Named after an old student.”

  “What is it used for?”

  He shrugged. “People dump their stuff in it sometimes. Old lecture notes, beer bottles. Rumor has it that once someone fell in and died once.”

  “Was it Halford?”

  His answer was to take my hand in his. Nothing, I learned, brings you into the present quite like holding hands. The past seemed irrelevant; the future, unnecessary. I became aware of a new emotion pulsing through me—I think it was relief.

  Hans turned to me. “Want to go upstairs?”

  I blinked. The calm I was feeling quickly dissipated. I could see my tower in the distance, gleaming in the moonlight like a giant fang. I said, “No.”

  “What?”

  “Sorry. I didn’t understand the question.”

  He said, “Come upstairs.”

  “I live upstairs.”

  “That’s why I asked.”

  “Where do you live, again?”

  He smiled. “Your place is closer.”

  “No—I meant, where do you live in the world.”

  “London.”

  “Wow, London.”

  Conversation fizzled. There was nothing to do, it seemed, but go to my tower. The tone changed. We spoke in choppy, scripted statements. I can’t remember what we said. We seemed to be reenacting a play. By the time we reached the fifth floor, I was panting. I fumbled for my keys, dropping them once before I managed to get the door open. I barely registered that it wasn’t locked.

  Inside, I half expected to find the tour group, ready to take some pictures of Bloody Mary’s secret assignation. But the room was empty. It smelled vaguely of aftershave, and I wondered who was hiding in my wardrobe. Then I realized that the aftershave belonged to Hans. He had taken off his jacket and was standing right in front of the Governess, examining her watery struggle. He seemed most interested by the bird in the painting, the one carrying the bracelet in its beak. Had my bedsheet fallen off, or had Marvin done a dramatic unveiling? Either way, there it was—her awful face. And was it my imagination, or had the painting actually changed since the last time I saw it? The woman’s frown seemed to have grown deeper, her condition more serious. She was drowning faster; she was about to get swept under. She wasn’t looking directly at me anymore. She was looking past me. For the first time, she seemed to be trying to tell me something—something important.

  Hans said, “She looks like you.”

  “Thank you?”

  He made a swift tour of the rest of the room, picking up random objects and setting them back down in place like an appraiser.

  “Who etched those initials?” he asked.

  I followed his gaze. He was looking at the patch of defaced wall near my bed. J.H.E.

  I just shrugged.

  “There must be a lot of history here.”

  I fumbled with my boots until I managed to yank them off. My hands were clumsy and felt swollen. When I stood up, Hans was standing very close to me. There was a half smile on his face. I had the impression that he had done this many times before. He came closer and brushed a strand of cold hair away from my face. My lips, all of a sudden, felt very fat.

  “You’re a fraud, you know,” he said, smiling.

  “What?”

  I looked down at his hands and gave a gasp. He had my father’s Agnes Grey in his hands. For one horrible moment, I thought that he knew to whom that book had belonged.

  “Pardon?” I said.

  “You seem to care so little for your relatives. But you have all their books.”

  “Just the one,” I said. My heart thumped loudly. I was sure he could see the blood pulsing through my face.

  He brushed the bangs away from my eyes. “I think it’s sweet.”

  “What’s sweet?”

  “You keep Jane Eyre on your pillow.”

  He leaned in for a kiss, but I stopped him. Frantic, I spun around. He was right. There, on the small, lone blue pillow on top of my sheets, was Jane Eyre. I froze in terror. It was my father’s tea-stained copy, the size of a brick. The same Jane Eyre that should have burned in an ill-fated house fire five years ago. It stared up at me like a runaway child returning for more money.

  My breathing was quick, panicked. Hans didn’t seem to care, or else he seemed to like it, because he moved toward me and snaked his entire arm around my waist. We had a brief and incoherent conversation about me being pretty, or maybe about him being pretty. My cheeks flamed as he brushed his lips over my closed eyes. Jane Eyre, Jane Eyre. I was trembling. What was Jane Eyre doing here, and how had it gotten inside? Agnes Grey had at least had the dignity to wait outside. Hans started kissing my neck—no, no!—and then his lips found mine, again and again. My brain was working overtime and I let out small, strangled noises. Hans misinterpreted my reaction and kissed me with more fervor. He began a journey down my neck, then around my ear, and then back to my neck again, while all the time a voice seemed to be calling to me from somewhere else: Jane, Jane!

  Finally, I broke away, shaking violently. Something was falling apart inside me, and it was not anything I wanted someone else to see. I told Hans good night. I don’t remember much after that except for the look of hurt on his face, and the click of the door when he left. I sat at the edge of my bed, rocking myself slowly. This was what happened when you tried to date a Brontë, I recall thinking: a book always got in the way. I suppose I had a species of fit, because unconsciousness closed the scene.

  Later—much later—I descended the five flights of stairs like Mad King George and stumbled into the evening air. If I stayed in my tower any longer I was sure my mind would slowly unravel and leak everywhere. Outside, the dewy courtyard looked l
ike it was covered in cold sweat. I was right: the afternoon sun had been a cruel trick. A storm was on its way. The wind circled overhead like a hawk; the clouds were pregnant with rain. I had Jane Eyre firmly clutched in my hands as I walked. The asphalt was slippery and I caught myself from falling more than once.

  I was left to devise a series of suspects who might have been responsible for tonight’s cryptic and borderline illegal delivery. First—my mother. How was I so sure that she was still in France? I hadn’t seen her in years. Perhaps she was really camped out in the Old College dungeon. But she would never have had access to my father’s books, not after she stormed out of our lives, and especially since the library had burned. The second possibility was Rebecca, who was so very, very dead. The third option was Blanche from the National Bank. But she seemed equally as unlikely. A bank associate would hardly steal a client’s family heirlooms and then give them back to her in secret. Lastly, I supposed, there was Sir John, the curator of the Brontë Parsonage, who by process of elimination seemed like the only option, since he was the only Family Nemesis I knew of. But I had never even met him, and how could he have come by a book that to anyone else in the world would mean nothing? It was not a valuable first edition. My father’s copy of Jane Eyre had been purchased at a Barnes & Noble.

  Desperately, I replayed the afternoon in my mind. There had been so much fluff to the day—Hans, the museum, Amanda—that I wished I had thought to focus on the one part of it that mattered: Marvin and his damn tour group. Had the culprit been the Russian? The amazon? Why had I kept my eyes fixated on the floor? And why hadn’t he locked the door on his way out?

  I was panting, and for a moment I imagined the book was too. This was not a novel. It was a force of nature. Here, in my hands, was the collective imagination of a million teenage girls. Jane Eyre was one of the most famous novels ever written. It was the book that put the Brontës on the map. It was the reason Charlotte Brontë became a celebrity who hobnobbed with Thackeray. It was the reason that women today secretly fantasized about mystery, danger, and brooding men. Jane Eyre was a twisted Cinderella story, about an emotionally brutalized child who grows up and finds a job as a governess in a dreary manor. She falls in love with the surly master of the house, Mr. Rochester, who conveniently forgets to tell her that he already has a wife, named Bertha, a thrashing madwoman who, by the way, he has locked up in his attic. Rochester asks Jane to marry him, but his insane wife’s brother interrupts the wedding to tell Jane the inconvenient truth. Then, to make a long story short, the shit hits the fan.