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Authors: Sheila Kohler

Tags: #Fiction, #General

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BOOK: Becoming Jane Eyre
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On the page, too, she will make Jane lie in the arms of her dying friend, as Charlotte would have liked to do in her sister’s, whom their father finally took home to die. She would have wanted to hold her hand, to soothe her pain, as her older sister had done so often for her, for all of them, as their mother lay dying. She would have liked to kiss her on her smooth, pale cheek before she departed forever. Why had she not been able to keep her safe?
CHAPTER TWELVE
Progress
S
ince she was sent away to school as a young child, she has often been homesick. It comes to her now, alone with her father in the dark, that old feeling of abandonment, the longing for home, for a mother she has never really known, for her dead older sisters, for her brother as he was as a boy, for the closeness of her family as she once knew it. She remembers how she went out into the world to earn her bread for her brilliant brother, so that he could go up to London to become a painter. It was all so much harder than she could have imagined.
Her tooth aches and when she bends her head lower to her page, it is worse. Yet she realizes that she wants only these calm, autumn days in this strange city, days of uninterrupted work in these small, shuttered rooms. She does not want her past, not even her closeness with her brother, nor the brief affection of her black swan.
Sometimes, in the cool of the September night, she takes a blanket from her bed. She collects her pencil and her notebook and wraps the blanket round her bare legs and feet. She sits in the moonlight by her father’s bed and writes. He seems aware of her presence, whether he wakes or sleeps. He seems to talk more to the dead, her mother, her sisters who are gone, or her absent brother. He lies very still, as the doctor has requested, even though his eyes are no longer bandaged. Gone is his old impatience with her. Her name now comes frequently to his lips. “Charlotte! Charlotte! Are you there, child?”
She has her small, square notebooks, where she writes, hardly seeing the words. Her toothache is better, and since she has been writing her bowels, so often obstructed, have moved regularly, as though they were directly connected to the flow of words from her mind onto the page.
“Charlotte, come closer,” he calls her to bend over him.
“What is it, Papa?”
He gropes, finds her arm, draws her nearer still. “Get rid of her,” he says.
“What? What did you say?”
“Tell that woman we don’t require her services any longer. We can manage alone. An unnecessary expense,” he whispers, drawing her closer to him, her arm like a bird’s wing in his hand.
“Soon, soon, Papa,” she whispers close to his ear, thinking of bathing his old, decaying body, the bedpan.
“A few days will suffice,” he says firmly, his hand touching her face, her neck. “An unnecessary extravagance we cannot afford. We can manage alone. Just leave the pan near me. I can do it myself.”
“If you wish, Papa,” she whispers hesitantly.
“I do wish,” he says.
Her girl-child grows up fast and searches for independence. She will advertise, find work elsewhere, leave the school, Lowood, where her memories are of cruelty and neglect mingled with kindness and learning. The good Miss Temple gives Jane a brooch. A response arrives in the form of a letter from a Mrs. Fairfax of Thornfield Hall. A position as governess is offered. She has the chance of moving on.
“We will not require your services any longer,” she says to the nurse when she enters the room. The woman just stares at her. “The doctor said—,” she starts to say.
“We will manage on our own,” her father says from his bed with his old voice of authority. “We will pay you until the end of the week, of course,” he adds.
“As you wish,” the nurse replies, and drops a brief curtsy. Charlotte thinks she looks rather relieved, as she turns to gather up her things. Now that the woman is leaving, she thinks she might miss this Humber.
“I hope you will find your little girls well,” she adds as the woman comes to say good-bye, and Humber smiles at her and takes her hand.
“Good luck,” she says. “Good luck to you with your writing, Miss. It must almost be a book by now. Perhaps I will read it one day.”
“Indeed, I hope you will,” Charlotte dares to say, but in truth she cannot imagine her words in print reaching even this woman.
While she was working as a teacher at Roe Head, where she had once been a pupil, she dared to send off a packet of her poems with an ardent letter expressing her desire to write to Southey, the poet she admired so much. His response arrived more than three months later. When she read it, she wrote on the envelope, “To be kept forever. My twenty-first birthday.”
The poet laureate’s response had arrived at the end of a long day of toil, a day of listening to the stultifying recitations of her thick, dull pupils. How she hated them! The Misses Lister, Marriot, Walker, and Cook seemed unable to comprehend the difference between an article and a noun. She had felt obliged to exhaust herself with a long walk after tea, coming back and slipping silently upstairs to the dormitory for a moment of blessed solitude, drawing the dark curtains around her bed.
She lay there deliciously lost in an erotic fantasy of Zamorna, her young duke and demon, coming to her, plumed and sabred, bare chest heaving, hair disheveled, fiery eye kindling her desire, when Sister Margaret, the eldest of the family of five sisters who ran the school, poked her head through the curtains, shaking her ringlets with enthusiasm and waving the letter in the air. “A letter for you, my dear,” she crooned, smiling kindly, believing, no doubt, she was lightening her favorite teacher’s load.
She rose fast from the bed and took it eagerly, her heart already knocking. Letters were what kept her alive then. Seeing the name of the sender, the walls of the dormitory, even the evening view of the soft valley outside, seemed to swing around her so that she feared she might fall and had to clutch onto the end of the iron bedstead before her.
But with the door closed behind Sister Margaret, she sat with the letter, unable to open it. She huddled in the silence of the bare, narrow dormitory. She clutched the letter to her thudding heart, too fearful to tear it open, preferring now not to know, to keep the hope of a favorable response alive.
Too soon, Sister Margaret’s voice called her forth to attend to her evening duties. She had missed her opportunity. Now there remained Miss Lister’s clothes to be mended, a dumb geographical problem to be solved for some dolt, some ass’s nightcap to be found. She clenched her teeth against the misfortune of this wretched bondage to the daily grind and thought of her brother, who had remained so blithely free.
It was only later that night that she read the words from the famous poet in the flickering candlelight. And what terrible words! They were burned into her mind forever. There was really no need to keep the letter for herself but rather for posterity to judge. “Literature,” he kindly informed her, “cannot and should not be the business of a woman’s life . . .”
For a long time she could not sleep. She lay there in her white flannel nightgown, the light of the moon shining on her face. She was exhausted after a long, mindless day with her pupils, her long walk, her riotous emotions, and yet thoughts continued to race through her head. She turned back and forth, praying to God for some relief. She had long ago refused to take any remedy for the sleeplessness that so often afflicted her and still does. Watching her brother sink into stultified stupidity after imbibing some opiate, she was wary of such a remedy. So she lay there, praying to God for peace of mind. At first light she rose and took up her pen. With furor, the nib scratching at her page, she wrote the poet her most dutiful response, a response steeped in irony and rage. “In the evenings, I confess, though I try not to, I do think . . .,” she wrote.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Governess
S
he left her home, her dear Emily and Anne, her brother, her father, with such misgivings, afraid she had made a terrible mistake, and then, when she came upon the place of her new employment, in the spring sweetness of the day, all the extravagant hopes of youth revived. She was twenty-three. She leaned out of the carriage window, the sun on her face, and saw the broad, clear front of the house, all the windows thrown open, two maids gazing out in black dresses and white caps. Perhaps they were looking for her?
She imagined the children might run across the lawn to welcome her with curtsies and perhaps even a bunch of wildflowers they had picked for her. Her employers might take her to their hearts. She knew them socially, after all. They had friends in common. They were industrialists who had risen in the social scale,
nouveaux riches
. They could hardly treat her as a servant. She was the educated daughter of a distinguished clergyman.
The place stood in a privileged spot, sheltered from the north and exposed to the warm south, at the end of a long driveway, shaded by great trees. It seemed to have come straight out of one of her Angrian stories. From the terrace where she stood waiting to enter, she could see across the valley of the Lother as far as the river Ayre.
BOOK: Becoming Jane Eyre
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