Becoming Jane Eyre Page 10

  By the time she gets him into the hall at home, the house is silent, though the lamp in the parlor is well trimmed, its flame straight and clear, the hearth bright. Her sisters have retired to bed, leaving the room neat. She takes up the lamp from the table and helps him up the stairs to her father’s room. The door is ajar and her father is stretched out on his back in the middle of the small bed, his nightcap on his head. Together they stand side by side at the door and watch his stertorous breathing as he sleeps. She goes toward the bed and puts her hand lightly on his forehead.

  “Don’t wake the poor old man,” her brother says, gently slumping against the jamb of the door.

  She leads him into the small room that was once their study, where the six of them had waited patiently as their mother lay dying. He collapses on the narrow bed, and she helps him remove his boots and jacket. She covers him with a blanket, and he sidles up against the wall, his back turned to her. She lies beside him, exhausted, her limbs against his.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Branwell

  Writing in her room, Charlotte hears her sister and brother return. She still misses Angria, the imaginary world of her adolescence that she shared with him. She remembers the excitement of discovering a new place, as Mungo Park had just done in West Africa. The very word Africa was thrilling: thick vegetation, brilliant light, the burning amber eyes of a lion in thick foliage, forgotten palaces of diamonds and gold. She still remembers the map in Blackwood’s magazine with the account of Park’s voyages of discovery: the long-sought River Niger at Segu, Silla, Bamako, and Kamalia, where he fell ill and owed his life to a stranger, first taken for dead and then returned in triumph to his wife and a huge audience in London. She whispers the names aloud: the province of Ardrah, the Calabar and Etrei rivers, the Kingdom of the Ashantee. The Kingdom of the Twelve. The Angrian Wars.

  She finds herself writing her brother’s name instead of the bully’s, John Reed’s. She confuses their brutality. It was part of her, too.

  A memory comes to her violently, and she feels the blood rush to her face. Her brother must have been eight or nine and she perhaps nine or ten, a small, slender girl, recently brought home from Cowan Bridge after both her elder sisters have died.

  They sit closely side by side in the small room, hunched over a tiny book, writing, drawing up maps, constitutions, laws for the country of their dreams. Her brother, his tousled mop of carroty hair hanging around his pointed face, writes fast, ink staining his fingers.

  “Go downstairs and leave us alone,” the brother has decreed. Charlotte has watched with some satisfaction as Emily and Anne, holding hands, dressed identically in white pinafores over black dresses, hair punished with pins, did as they were told. They have their own games, after all, and sometimes tire of the brother’s gathering armies, the huge numbers engaged, the indiscriminate slaughter.

  She and her brother are alone now in the small room with the sole window that looks onto the church and the graves, the table where they work. She feels he resembles her in a strange way. They are both slight of build, near-sighted, delicate, but her brother is bright and beautiful with his red hair, freckles, and brilliant blue eyes. She thinks of him as some exotic and colorful tropical bird: a bright, many-plumed parrot. He shines in the family firmament, whereas she glimmers palely, almost invisible, a moon shadow beside him. The moon to his sun, she shines only with his reflected light.

  At times he favors one sister and at times another, but she, now the eldest, is often the chosen one. For this giddy moment, she is the one allowed to bask in his reflected glory, in the excitement of the tale that is far more real to her than the dull reality around her. She no longer hears the wind outside, feels the cold in the small room, or sees the pale light. Above all, the crowded graveyard with its many headstones and weeds, the church crypt with all the dead, her mother, both her older sisters so close to the house, is momentarily forgotten.

  She looks up at her brother with all the adoration of a passionate nature. She is convinced of his superiority. He is allowed to go out and play freely with the other rough children in the village, allowed to shout, to whistle, to bang doors, or to sing. No one warns him, as they do the girls, of the dangers in the outer world. What makes them believe he is invulnerable to harm?

  He accompanies his father to the village nearby to buy the newspapers and sees the headlines before anyone else does, discusses the news first with Papa. It is he who received the precious gift of the toy soldiers, which he bountifully shared with his sisters and which has sparked their play.

  He will sometimes, if she is good to him, generously repeat what he has learned. Sometimes.

  Now they are writing their secret story in a small booklet in tiny writing no one else can read, except with a magnifying glass. She is excited to share the story with him, to braid the imaginary threads of her mind with his. Their stories come to her at unexpected moments: when she is obliged to help like an undermaid with the household tasks in the kitchen, peeling potatoes or chopping onions, or when she sits sewing through the long, dull afternoons in the airless room with Aunt. Like music they chime in her ears, sustain her, delight her, soothe her in moments of distress. She lives for these stories, for the moments when they can make them up together.

  Sometimes she thinks of it as swimming, though she has never been swimming. She imagines plunging down into the cool, pale-green depths of the sea with her brother, as they sometimes hurl themselves into the wind, arms outstretched, clothes clinging to their bodies like water, running across the heath. She thinks of them as mermaids, their bodies playfully entwined, as are their minds in the shadowy, flickering light of the underworld of caves.

  All day, she wonders with pleasurable excitement what will happen next: Will the heroine really die and lie cold and alone on a dreary night in the earth? In their stories they are omnipotent.

  He writes as easily with his left hand as his right, writing very fast, not caring about punctuation or spelling or even logic. She does not dare intervene to correct his errors. He lets her sign her name at the end sometimes, and if he tires he allows her to write.

  “Get down on your knees and be my slave,” he says with a grin. She hesitates, but there is something so raw and beautiful about the sight of him with his white arm raised imperiously in the air that she complies. When she looks up at him, a warm feeling rises from her stomach to her throat. She knows every detail of him: his untidy, flame-colored hair falling over the glasses perched on the end of his strong nose, the bitten nails, the faint freckles, the small stature, the adorable imperfections. Each weakness makes him seem more tender, more in need of her help. She bows her head and hears the thrilling swish of a ruler beside her ear.

  “Say, ‘My Master, I am your slave.’”

  “My Master,” she says, and lifts her hands as if in prayer. He smiles a thin smile and kisses her on the lips. She feels his weight against her, the solidity of his boy body. She notices the sound of the wind, the rain beating against the window, the smell of rot and decay, and the pounding of his heart against hers.

  Her brother, only eight or nine but precocious and better schooled than she, at ten, now waves his hands wildly. “They must fight,” he says.

  “Wait,” she dares to say, “we have to say more about the place, the vegetation. Otherwise it doesn’t sound real.” But he sweeps on imperiously. He gives the plotline, the events, action, details of the battle. He likes the story to move forward fast. He wants violence.

  “Hush,” he says. “They have to fight, don’t you see?—with swords.” And he puffs himself up a bit, throws out his chest in his loose white shirt with the ruffle at the neck, makes the gesture with the ruler of parrying with a sword. “This is the infernal world,” he explains grandly—an expression he has read in a book. Like her, he has already read much of Byron and Scott and even Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, and Twelfth Night. But Byron’s satanic outcast is his main hero.

  “Who will fight?�
� she asks, doubtfully.

  “Two black giants, two princes, two outcast brothers, two fallen angels. They are in a grand palace, with jewels and a golden throne. No, it’s four giants, four monsters. All brothers from the same royal house, Ashantee dukes or princes. Eight feet tall with flashing dark eyes, dark skins, dark hair, mustachios, and scars. They cut the duke’s neck. They cut off his hands. The blood spurts. He falls down into the pool, down, down, down!”

  She shudders, makes a face, appalled. “No, no, too awful,” she says.

  “We can always make him come alive again,” he says with a grin. She protests, “No one would believe that. What sort of a palace is it? What time of year? What’s the weather? And why are they fighting now?”

  “For the throne, for power, that’s all,” he says. They are both snobs. They like details of grandeur, the appointing of governors, the adventures of the aristocrats: dukes and duchesses, Wellington and his sons, but she likes to dwell upon the small details that will conjure up something larger: the swing of a walk, a black neckerchief casually adjusted, lightning splitting a tree.

  “That’s the way it’s going to happen!” he says in a sudden passion, his cheeks flushed. Which is when he grasps a lock of her brown hair and twists it round his finger, almost lifting her small, light body up into the air. He finishes this by giving a sharp rap on her fingers with the ruler. She lets him. She would let him do anything. Her mouth tastes salty and her head aches and she is aware of the danger of such passion. Though she already suspects he possesses a quality that is dangerous to him and to her, a quicksilver quality, a wild temper, an inability to accept the unwelcome reality of the world around them, she now thinks of him as a changeling brought in to replace the real baby who once lay quiet in his cradle. He is someone who does not belong to this dutiful circle of quiet, obedient girls. The outcast, the interloper, he comes from a different world.

  At the same time he is what she would be if she dared: her secret double. Her admiration and adoration will now coexist with her lucidity, her knowledge of the dark side of his nature and hers.

  The father, too, hears his boy come up the stairs. Dimly he sees him stand slumped at his door. Such a brilliant, beautiful boy, his heart’s darling. How could this have happened to him?

  After the death of his wife and of his eldest two girls, he has withdrawn from his remaining daughters. How could he not? He could not help thinking that his favorite girl, the most brilliant and saintly, had been taken from him, that he could have spared one of the others more easily. But the boy was different, strange and almost holy.

  He remembers him perched on the arm of his chair, leaning over the page from Blackwood’s. Branwell’s red hair hangs in his pointed face, glasses misted on the tip of his nose in his excitement, and the two eldest girls sitting on the dark sofa with the three little ones huddled together on the mat, their faces lifted up with joy. The boy takes the paper from him in his haste to hear the end and exultantly reads out a passage. They all lift up their hands to applaud the success of the Tories, the aristocrats, the landed power, the Great Duke, their favorite, Wellington!

  Naturally, he had not expected much to come of all that scribbling for his poor girls, though they would keep scribbling, but he had had such high hopes for his darling boy. Perhaps they all had.

  He wonders if it should have been the boy he sent away to school and not the girls. There were too many of them to handle: five small girls tucked away in that cramped nursery space above the door. Still, some had suggested they send the boy away. But neither he nor his sister-in-law thought he could stand it. He had not lasted long in the local grammar school. So they had kept him close, watched over him, sheltered him, adored him. Everyone adored him, particularly Charlotte. Perhaps they all spoiled him. They feared so for him: his fits, his excitability, the great swings of joy and despair, the great sensitivity, and all the gifts.

  Nothing has turned out as he expected. He had considered his son someone of such strange mental and physical energy. Such a curious boy. Nothing he ever did was predictable or without contradiction.

  He remembers coming into his church early one morning to speak to the sexton and hearing someone playing the organ, sweet sounds filling the air. When he looked toward where the sounds came, he thought it was an angel with flaming hair, bent over the keys, pulling out all the stops, his little legs straining to pump the pedals. The boy was hardly twelve years old and small for his age, barely able to reach the pedals, but he was playing the organ, filling his church with heavenly music. He could play the organ, write, draw, paint. The father has taught the son and not the daughters all he knows about the classics. All that Latin and Greek. He remembers the art teacher, hired at considerable expense—at least they all took advantage of that—the studio rented, board provided, not to speak of all the letters of introduction, all unused, the precious pennies they had all scraped up for him for the journey to London, all squandered. Left to his own devices, he was incapable of rising to the occasion. The boy—he continues to think of him as a boy, though he is only a year younger than Charlotte—was crushed with despair, remorse, surely. Perhaps the best loved always suffers most.

  What is to become of him? That wicked woman! That sorcerer! She had bewitched him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Openings

  Charlotte sleeps uneasily through the many cold winter nights. All spring and summer she continues to send their three books out again and again, only to see them return. The poetry book does not sell, and they decide to send complimentary copies to the poets and writers they most admire, so that at least someone will read their work. She continues to work on her new book, writing the chapters that take place in Moor House, where Jane spends time with the two sisters and their brother, St. John. Emily writes her poems, irons, bakes bread, feeds her animals, walks out across the moors, and goes to church. Their father’s sight, though he occasionally complains of spots before his eyes, has been much improved by his operation. He resumes his pastoral work, preaches his sermons on Sundays, and visits his parishioners.

  It is a rare warm day. The three sisters sit together in the dining room after breakfast, the white bowls still on the table, the summer sun glimmering for a moment on the stone floor. Their father is already out. The summer landscape has a luminescence that he has always loved and is delighted to see again. Branwell still lies in his bed sleeping, sketching, or writing pathetic complaints to his friends about his depression, asking them for money for opium.

  A letter arrives. Anne hands Charlotte the familiar brown paper packet, addressed to the three Bells, and asks her to open it. She reaches across the table, across the empty bowls of oatmeal and the milk jug with its familiar illustrations of Pilgrim’s Progress, and takes the packet gingerly with the tips of her fingers, as though it might burn them. She places it beside her empty plate and looks at her sisters. She can see that they, too, have the same cowardly urge to let the packet lie beside the bowl unopened, to hold on to the moment, to preserve hope, as she did nine years ago with the response to her work from Southey.

  “What do they say?” Emily finally asks, her mouth set.

  Charlotte recalls that it is almost a year since their three volumes were first sent out together. This one comes from a little-known publisher, Newby, whom they have tried as a last resort.

  She slips a knife slowly under the fold. Her sisters watch closely, sitting side by side opposite her. She notes that the letter is several pages long and takes hope. She reads the first few lines to herself and looks up at her sisters’ alert faces.

  “Read this. It’s good news,” she manages to say, feeling herself grow old. Emily snatches up the pages and they peer at them together, reading attentively, their heads close. T. C. Newby writes from his offices on Mortimer Street that he will publish two of the volumes: Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, but not Charlotte’s The Professor. Nor are his terms particularly favorable. The authors are required to advance fifty pounds, which he
will refund when two hundred and fifty copies have been sold. Also, he asks for changes in Wuthering Heights, which is to be expanded into two volumes.

  Her sisters look at each other in silence, their gaze deep and searching. Charlotte sees them as though she has never seen them before: such beautiful faces. Two graceful young women, long-necked and slender—ladies, she feels, in every sense of the word, Emily with her dog’s big, ugly head, like a lion’s, on her knee. There is sunlight in their hair and on their pale faces. Their eyes seem bright. A fly buzzes against a windowpane. The brindled cat jumps from Anne’s lap.

  “What are we to do?” the youngest asks, looking from one sister to the next.

  “You must not hesitate for a moment. It’s not a good offer, I admit, but it’s the best we have had,” Charlotte says firmly, though she is convinced they will, they must, refuse this offer. Surely they will not leave her out?

  “But what will you do?” Anne asks.

  “I will send mine out once again.” She can hear the tremble in her voice. She draws herself up, rises from the table, puts the sugar bowl on the sideboard, fusses with the lid. She glances over her shoulder at her sisters, who are sitting in their dark dresses looking at each other. She turns toward them. They stare up at her for a moment, speechless, lips slightly open, the letter before them. Surely, she thinks, they will not spend their legacy to publish their faulty books without her?

  Besides, she knows how stubborn and retiring Emily is, how much she is against changing a word in her text. She has not listened to Charlotte’s advice on her book at all. She has never cared as much as Charlotte about presenting her work to the public. She remembers the great fuss Emily made over publishing her excellent poems.