Jane Steele (28 page)

“However did that happen?” I marvelled.

“I fear that
I
lost it, Miss Steele,” he declared, eyes twinkling. “In a lit fireplace. Clumsy of me, I know—can you imagine? And they call me a steady policeman!”

So saying, he donned his hat, tipped it, and walked straight out the door.

•   •   •

I
had planned to pay a call upon Augustus Sack that evening regardless of the outcome of my meeting with my solicitor; however, the reader will likely empathise when I confess I was too prostrate with nerves following my identity exploding in multiple fashions to infiltrate the East India Company. A message dispatched via the boots conveyed my intention to call upon the morrow. Moving as if in a dream, I unfastened my fine jewellery, brushed and hung my clothing, donned my soft new nightdress, and crawled into bed with a wineglass full of whiskey and
Jane Eyre
within arm’s reach.

I was a rich woman now, even without Mr. Thornfield’s assistance. Time drifted sluggishly, distorted by the whiskey and the warmth. Everything about me had changed, and yet I could see the slender bend of my wrist at the end of a white forearm, looking the same as it always had, could see the tiny mole between my left thumb and index finger, assuring me that I was still myself.

I was not myself, however. I was a Jane with an imaginary surname, one who apparently was not to blame for failing to scream. It was too mad to comprehend in an instant, or even an hour, so I burrowed farther into the bedclothes to puzzle over it all. My life’s sole mission had once been a simple one: to carve out a tiny sliver of human affection, having none of the commodity for myself. For all that I so thoroughly disapproved of my own character, however, Mr. Sneeves and Mr. Quillfeather had proven that day I was capable of grievous errors upon the subject of Jane Steele.

I rolled clumsily onto my belly, reaching, and flipped to a passage from my new copy of my favourite book:

To this crib I always took my doll; human beings must love something, and, in the dearth of worthier objects of affection, I
contrived to find a pleasure in loving and cherishing a faded graven image, shabby as a miniature scarecrow. It puzzles me now to remember with what absurd sincerity I doted on this little toy; half-fancying it alive and capable of sensation. I could not sleep unless it was folded in my night-gown; and when it lay there safe and warm, I was comparatively happy, believing it to be happy likewise.

Upon first reading, I had found it bizarre that the adult Jane Eyre regarded this exercise as either puzzling or absurd; upon subsequent readings, I marvel still more at her derision. Lacking interest in dolls, I had once—not unlike my poor, sweet Sahjara—gathered crumbs of pleasure by spoiling horses. This seemed to me neither worship of a false idol nor a quirk of an infantile mind; it did no one any harm if I treated a horse well, and made my days less miserable.

Did I deserve misery for the things I had done?

Yes, of course I did. Even apart from being the tainted bastard offspring of a suicidal mother and a lying father, I was a murderess five times over.

As I seemed incapable of turning myself in, however, would any harm come to the world if for the moment I thought of this newly reborn Jane—Jane without legitimate parentage, Jane without legitimate surname—as a creature worth treating gently?

There was no one else volunteering for the task, after all.

•   •   •

B
risk footfalls outside my bedroom door woke me at eleven the next morning; the anonymous movement dragged me from a weirdly sweet slumber. The sun was high, however, and breakfast long concluded, and the whiskey’s solace had left me with an empty belly, so I clambered from bed and washed. Then I donned another
of my fashionable frocks, a floral silk with a dramatic shawl collar, all save the white lace sleeves emerging from fabric printed in grey and silver and a blue which reminded me of Mr. Thornfield’s eyes.

Today is for you,
I thought,
wherever you are and however you fare,
and was seized with such a longing that my breath caught.

My set of modest Punjabi diamonds completed the picture, and I deftly swallowed the remainder of last night’s whiskey, fortifying myself as I quit the Weathercock.

Noontide bells rang as my soles struck the cobbles. I had been too disoriented to give Mr. Sack a specific time the day before, so I did not feel rushed. Luncheon was the first order of business, and I knew of a beautiful tearoom Clarke and I had used to frequent mere blocks away from East India House; I was seized with a longing to see it again, its gliding servers and polished brass rails, so I hailed a hansom and directed the driver to the City.

Cox’s Tearoom was just as I recalled it when we pulled up before its door, and by the time I had paid the driver, both the wind and my stomach bit sharply. A liveried gentleman led me to a table, where I was soon equipped with Darjeeling and a tower of sandwiches. After a few sips and bites, however, I thought I should be more comfortable with a newspaper; I visited the rack and selected a late-morning edition, glancing at the headlines as I returned to my table. Nearly colliding with a waiter, I looked up, murmuring an apology.

I stopped dead, staring in astonishment.

Rebecca Clarke sat at a table by the window, shafts of illumination waltzing through the golden corkscrews of her pinned-up hair.

But I ought to forgive you, for you knew not what you did: while rending my heart-strings, you thought you were only up-rooting my bad propensities.

M
y heart, so egregiously taxed of late, rung in my breast like a great gong—I thought it must have been audible, so painfully glad was I to see my schoolmate, my companion, nay, my
sister
, again after so long a time.

Once the initial shock had worn off, I ceased marvelling and allowed happiness to spread like a virus through my chest. We had shared the same tastes once, Clarke and I, moved in twin orbits like binary stars. It was not very surprising, therefore, that in this labyrinth of a town I should stumble upon my lost great friend, particularly considering I had sought the place out because it reminded me of her.

Clarke was twenty-one years old, and where once she had been thin and ethereal, now she was beautiful—as freckled as ever, with the tiny mouth of an inquisitive porcelain doll. So many times had I pictured her starving that the sight of her hale was a gift, the unlooked-for sort which pierce deeper than the expected. Her clothing was fine but eccentric: a long bronze skirt, a close-fitted ivory waistcoat, a dark copper jacket with tails and lapels to it, a golden cravat. This elegant but oddly mannish ensemble was completed by a
miniature top hat, and she peered through a pair of half-moon pince-nez at the afternoon edition of the
Times.

My feet had carried me farther than I realised during this reconnaissance, and I found myself before her, my eager shadow brushing the hem of her skirt.

“Just put it on my account, if you—
oh!
” Clarke exclaimed, her cup clattering into its saucer as she glanced up.

Say something,
I thought.

Nothing emerged.

I’ve missed you terribly and deeply regret the fact you learnt I am a homicidal maniac.

I hesitated.

Not that.

“It’s good to . . .” I swallowed, for Clarke had turned as pale as the milk brought for her coffee. “That is—we needn’t speak, only I saw you, and . . .” I battled the urge to prove myself the pinnacle of urbanity by throwing myself in her lap and sobbing. “You look well, and I’m glad.”

At this juncture, I considered that a sound from Clarke—any sound—would be taken as a boon. Instead, she stared at me with wide green eyes, her hands vibrating hummingbird-fast.

“I’m upsetting you.” The admission stung. “I can’t tell you what it meant to see you again. I’ll just—”

“No.” Clarke trapped my wrist with the strength of a steel manacle. “Sit down.” She blinked, hard. “I mean, won’t you sit down?”

Slowly, she released me.

I sat down.

Clarke folded the newspaper with care; then she took a long breath and sat back, nodding at the silver coffeepot. “Would you like a cup?”

“Please.”

A waiter came with an additional service and poured, a civilised
piece of pageantry which enabled us both to pretend we were friends meeting for coffee to discuss our summering plans, rather than friends meeting for coffee to discuss whatever we were going to discuss. My teapot and sandwiches appeared, and I gestured for her to help herself; Clarke shook her head, eyes wide under pale lashes, and I looked away.

“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 of 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.