Jane Steele (27 page)

As for my half brother,
I reflected with the cold scrape of an icicle down my spine,
the less contemplation of Edwin the better.
Everything I knew about my blood and bones had been stripped from me, leaving me bare.

“Is my name even Jane Steele?”

“If you like—we’ve no documentation save that name, so if it suits you better than Jane Fortier . . .”

“It does.” I sighed, draining the second brandy. “Mr. Sneeves, supposing as the illegitimate daughter of Richard Barbary I can do nothing whatsoever regarding Highgate House, what is the wrong you meant to put right?”

Mr. Sneeves wheezed in disbelief. “I should have though that was obvious.”

“It isn’t,” said I, with some asperity.

“Miss Steele, I am sorry for what you have learnt today,” Mr. Sneeves replied, clasping his fingers together. “But the wrong I meant to right was that you should
know
who you
are
, as I had strong suspicions that no one ever bothered to tell you
.
You are not without inheritance.”

“Oh.” It was all I could summon.

“You have an allowance of three hundred a year.” Cyrus Sneeves wrote a note to himself, as if that clinched matters. “You do not possess any part of Highgate House, but your independence is assured,
as guaranteed by Mr. Richard Barbary. I have your current address here from your last correspondence, I take it? Very good. I shall lose no time in setting up an account for you to draw upon and transferring your yearly allotments there, which after all this time amounts to a tidy nest egg. Lacking your whereabouts but hoping you lived still, I held the funds in trust. Now. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

Dazed, I glanced again at the newspaper sketch of my father. As a child, I had felt about his portraits as I would an imaginary friend; trying to summon greater depth of feeling now, however, I found the task impossible. He was a collection of pen strokes who resembled me vaguely. I ought to have felt grateful to know him at last; instead, I felt grateful for his money.

“Yes,” I said quietly. “Burn any evidence of their wrongdoing save documents attending to my stipend, including the letters I brought you from my mother. All of it—and then tell me your fee.”

•   •   •

B
y the time I left my solicitor’s office, I was no longer dwelling upon my mother’s attempts to escape the cage she had locked herself within, nor my father’s inability to ponder future catastrophes of his own making.

No, reader: by then I was mourning the death of my world entire. I did not even know my own name.

Oh, I knew who I
was
—a scarlet-toothed tigress, one forever burdened by the iron weight of her own black stripes. I was apparently also the illegitimate daughter of a two-faced stockbroker (as if there were any other kind).

Until something has been taken from you, it is difficult to gauge what sort of holes will be left by its absence. Guessing that Clarke’s departure would make a yawning cavity would have been obvious, the loss of Charles Thornfield an equally predictable pit; but I hope,
reader, that you have never lost something you took entirely for granted, like your name.

Returning to the Weathercock in Orchard Street was a blur of draughty omnibuses and crooked roads, a dreadful numbness settling over me. All I wanted was to call for a hot bath and read Mr. Thornfield’s letters. Trudging into the lodging house, I waved a vacant hand to the clerk who had come, however contrarily, to like me.

“No visitors of any kind, please!”

“Wait, Miss Smith!” he called, but after the strangely painful thought
that isn’t my name either,
I paid him no mind.

My alias rang out twice more, and urgently too, but my eyes flooded and I fled—up the stairs, half stumbling in my beautiful new dress, desperate for sanctuary. When I reached my room, I fetched the key from my reticule and was surprised to find the door already unlocked. Hesitant, I felt for the knife in my skirts with one hand and turned the knob with the other.

“Hello, Miss Steele,” Inspector Sam Quillfeather said when I discovered him occupying my own room.

Much enjoyment I do not expect in the life opening before me. . . .

D
iscovering the man who could see me hanged sitting on my striped chaise, smiling peaceably with his hat in his hand, might have been unbearable had I been in a merry humour; I am sure I could never have withstood the shock had I not just learnt I was the bastard child of a philanderer and an extortionist, which had invested me with a certain flexibility.

“Mr. Quillfeather,” I whispered.

“You are surprised to see me?” He rose and bowed, gangly limbs folding inward. “But . . . no, I see that you are dismayed? Forgive me, but I was eager to have a discussion with you, a very
frank
discussion, and you quit Highgate House quite precipitously. It was clear that I was the cause, Miss Steele, and I found myself unable to rest until I had located you?”

“How . . .” Swaying, I hid my weakness by leaning on the door as I shut it.

“Only by the most careful searching, Miss Steele! I knew after speaking with Mr. Sardar Singh—interesting man, that, and I’m glad to have made his acquaintance—you had taken the coach to London,
and there the trail went quite cold. But doggedness, you will find, works miracles, and I canvassed every respectable guesthouse I could locate where single women of independent temperament might lodge, asking if a woman of your description had recently taken rooms. When I learnt a young lady named Jane Smith had lived here for precisely the right amount of time, could I ignore the possibility it was you?”

Broken in every way imaginable, I turned away from where I had stood with my head bowed before the door.

“Miss Steele!” Mr Quillfeather exclaimed. He crossed quickly to me, hand extended. “Have I already upset you so?”

The ground seemed to heave. For the briefest of moments, I considered a knife to his heart and a mad flight through alleys and over stiles until I had reached another sort of freedom, a true outlaw’s comfortless existence—but it was not Sam Quillfeather’s fault he was a police inspector, and it was entirely my fault I was a killer.

So I stayed my hand and reached for his instead.

“I know your mind, Miss Steele,” he said quietly. “I will share mine with you, and we will reach an understanding after many years of poisonous secrets—does that suit you?”

Such an overwhelming dread possessed me that I thought my faculties must shatter. I opened my mouth, and just as I was about to make an idiot of myself, Mr. Quillfeather urged, “Oh, please, Miss Steele—won’t you sit down before you do yourself an injury?”

I obediently sat upon the chaise he had vacated, neck tingling with terror.

“Now, Miss Steele,” said he, seating himself upon the chair opposite and leaning forward in his sweeping fashion. “I have some hard words, and want you to understand—I don’t wish to say them? But I simply must, and I frankly regret not having said them to you when you were a little girl. I know, you see, why you lied to my friend Thornfield about your name, why you ran without even taking your luggage. You must know . . . I told him nothing? He believes you to
be Jane Stone still. But I know the entire contents of your biography, and of your secret fears.”

“This is about Edwin, then.” My voice was parchment thin.

“Could it be about anything else?” he asked softly.

Yes,
I thought, and swallowed what felt like a bullet.

“The fact is that I know . . . everything, Miss Steele, absolutely everything, about the events leading up to your cousin’s unfortunate demise.”

My eyes fell shut; so I was to lose my name, my claim to Highgate House, and my freedom, all in a single afternoon. In a way, I thought, it was kinder—in a way, it was better than I deserved.

“You were so young then, so . . . vulnerable? I never saw such a sensitive little girl in all my days. Now I have found you, however, and you have grown into such a lovely young woman, could my cowardice
still
, to this
very day
prevent my speaking out?”

A strong wind seemed to blow, a strangely silent one, and I was a leaf floating upon it.

“Oh, Miss Steele, please don’t take on so!” To my shock, I opened my eyes to find Sam Quillfeather’s beaked nose inches away, his dry, calloused hands grasping mine. “Listen here, my girl—take a few deep breaths, if you can?
Very
good. I must say the words now, and you can hear them bravely, can you not?”

A faint nod was all I could manage at this point.

“I know that your cousin, Edwin, attacked you, and the nature of that attack.”

I waited; I continued to wait. When he said nothing further, I heaved a breath as if I had been drowning. Inspector Quillfeather nodded, squeezing my limp fingers. He continued to say nothing of murder, and I continued to gape at him, utterly speechless.

“There, I knew that would be difficult. Shall I go on?”

Shaking my head in disbelief, I managed to husk, “Yes,” after which contradictory signals Sam Quillfeather smiled paternally.

“I cannot help but feel that I have done you an . . . injustice? There was evidence,
so much
evidence, but how can one conscience putting a mere child through such trials? Had I to do it over, I think that I should have acted differently? I can only claim misplaced propriety, though I hope you lived the better for my choice, I truly do.”

“Evidence,” I echoed.

“Oh, evidence in
spades
!” he cried. “The torn button upon your cousin’s clothing might have been explained as you suggested, by the idea that you were playing. However! Though I do not claim to be the world’s finest policeman, I can assure you that I
aspire
to be, and the tear in your dress sleeve combined with the bruising beneath? Shaped, even what little I could see of it, like a handprint?” Inspector Quillfeather’s already clifflike brows surged into bolder protrusions. “Miss Steele, you never got
that
injury playing a game, that was as plain as the nose on my face!”

“Very plain indeed, then,” I accidentally said aloud.

“Ha!” exclaimed the policeman. “Oh, may I state how gratified am I that even after such unspeakable liberties being visited upon your person, you retain your sense of humour?”

Pressing my hands a final time, he released them and sat back, though between the hair and the brows and the nose and the chin, this did nothing to diminish the impression that he was a train hurtling towards me. “If you could know the nights I’ve kept vigil over this affair, would you wish to? No, don’t answer that; I think not. But your very attitude that day, Miss Steele—your ramrod posture, your
obvious
terror, your inexplicable distress which, like a puzzle piece which is the right colour but the wrong shape, did not match grief over the death of your cousin . . . The truth was obvious. I asked myself so often,
What can I do?
Such cases of unspeakable violence, particularly against the young, are impossible to prosecute.”

“I see.” I pressed my still-shaking hands into my skirts.

“Yours would have been, I assure you. And with the perpetrator
of the assault, who was likewise the second principle witness,
dead
by tragic accident? Imagine! A nine-year-old girl dragged through the assizes, pointed at, questioned, shamed, her reputation forever soiled, her heart broken, her mind subjected to not merely a single gross indignity but multiple others?
No,
I said—not when the guilty party could not be punished by a mortal court.”

“I didn’t scream,” I blurted out.

“I beg your pardon, Miss Steele?”

“I didn’t scream.” Suddenly the tears were an ugly waterfall, hot and gushing, and
someone has to know after all this time
, I had to tell
someone.
“He . . . Edwin made a mistake, you see, because I was so shocked that I stayed quiet, which misled him, so it was entirely my fault, you understand, that he . . . that he . . . because I didn’t scream.”

If a man can look simultaneously exquisitely gentle and boiling with rage, that man is Sam Quillfeather. He pursed his lips and curved towards me.

“You listen to me, Miss Steele, and you listen
ardently
,” he grated. “That a lady’s succumbing to shock at exposure to such villainy could ever be considered a black mark against her—put the thought from your mind this very
instant
, do you hear?”

Opening my mouth, I was prevented by a sharply upraised hand.

“Mark me now!” Inspector Quillfeather ordered. “It is a gentleman’s greatest privilege to protect the fair sex, and when he abandons that privilege, when he casts it aside in favour of
lechery
, why then he is no longer a gentleman, and therefore the lady in question owes him
nothing
, because he is a coward and a blackguard, and for a lady to doubt her own behaviour in the presence of a coward and a blackguard is
lunacy
, I tell you, from stone silence to violent caterwauling, because she owes him
no interaction whatsoever
from the instant he discards his honour, and I won’t have it. Promise me something?”

“Um,” I said. He was handing me his pocket handkerchief, I
realised, and I took it, though the flow of tears had dried under the blast of his vehemence. “If I can.”

“Promise me,” he urged, eyes shining, “that you will put this aborted scream from your mind forever?”

“I . . . well . . .”

“You owe your attacker
no debt
, Miss Steele. It is, as I have proven, a logical impossibility? Promise to
try
?

“Yes,” I whispered. For the second time in as many hours, I felt as if I had been blown apart and put back together again. “I promise to try.”

“I can ask no more of you than that.” He stood to his full scarecrow’s height, setting his hands against his scrawny hips as if satisfied that a hard task had been seen to. “Well, I think we can both agree I have taxed you enough, yes, Miss Steele? Please forgive me for any harm I may have caused you inadvertently. Now I must return to work, for there are several urgent matters which require my attention, and I have neglected them in favour of finding you. You have eased my mind, Miss Steele.”

“Here is your handkerchief,” I said, offering it.

“Handkerchiefs should remain where they are needed, don’t you agree?”

Weakly, I laughed at this, and Inspector Quillfeather beamed at me as he retrieved his hat and gloves from the table.

“I hope you will trust my complete sincerity in vowing never to reveal your secret to Thornfield?” he pressed. “I ought to say, however, that should you elect to reveal your true name to my friend, I believe he would treat you honourably.”

I haven’t any true name,
I thought in despair,
and he treats me too honourably by half.

“Forgive me—my words pain you. Here is my card, should you wish to contact me for any reason, great or small? You are looking
well, very well indeed, Miss Steele, and I see by your attire that you have no need of governess work. But in any case, don’t stay away from Highgate House on my account?” he added kindly.

“I won’t.” Mr. Thornfield’s likeness appeared in my mind’s eye, deep-blue eyes and pure-white hair, and I banished the image. “I promise.”

He turned to go. We had not finished yet, however—nothing could be this simple. Though the thought of deliberately broaching the subject sent leeches slithering through my belly, I could not allow him to exit without truly mapping the miracle of my safety.

“Mr. Quillfeather, did you know that I was at Lowan Bridge School when . . .” I forced myself to look at him. “When Mr. Vesalius Munt was murdered?”

He lifted his overhanging brows, and the neat set of horizontal lines appeared along his forehead. “Miss Steele, I regret to say that I did, for you were included in the roster of some thirty missing girls? I always wished you well, you know, and I did seek you for a time.”

My heart slammed against my rib cage as if attempting escape. “Did you ever suspect anyone in particular?”

“Ah, that would be telling, wouldn’t it?” he mused. “But between us, yes, there was a clear suspect.”

“You cannot mean it!”

“I must assure you I do.”

“For my own peace of mind, then, I beg you to inform me who the culprit was.”

“It won’t upset you to hear the truth?”

“Not after that . . . other truth,” I replied in a hushed tone, and he smiled at me.

“Quite so. Do you recall Miss Amy Lilyvale?”

“Very clearly.”

“Yes, she gave me testimony that every single girl without
exception had been present at chapel that fateful day, which quite clinched the matter.”

“Did it?” I questioned, feeling sick again.

“Oh, I should think decisively?” He began ticking people off on cadaverous fingers. “Miss Rebecca Clarke was not present—ill-usage, I gather, was the cause; you were not present, doubtless comforting your friend; and Miss Davies was laid up with a bad case of the croup. Therefore, Miss Lilyvale was not actually at chapel to check, and wished not to falsely throw any students under suspicion. Other teachers claimed she was there, but the inaccuracy of her attendance report convinced me they were lying in order to shield her.” Scowling, Mr. Quillfeather passed his hand forward over his head, a familiar gesture that made him resemble a ruffled bird of prey. “Your headmaster, Miss Steele, was no saint. He kept a diary? Oh, yes, I found it! In it he recorded, in the foulest language, the most disgusting perversions he could conjure, planning to visit all upon Miss Lilyvale. He wrote that he had been sharing such filth with her for years, the villain . . . One is not gladdened by any death, but some touch the heart rather less than others, do they not?”

“Undoubtedly.”

“Miss Lilyvale it was, that is certain, but I make a habit of never pursuing an unwinnable case, you see? I cannot find the good in it? And the evidence was
so
circumstantial! Nothing could be done.”

“Surely the diary counted for something?”

“Oh, the
diary
.” He made a subtle bow of acknowledgement. “Yes, that would have gone a very long way indeed, but sadly it was lost.”