Becoming Jane Eyre Read online

  Back in the garden, a light breeze blows the ribbons from her cap about her plump arms, and the thin cypresses sway. She enters the dark, redbrick building and glances into the dingy, ground-floor kitchen. She nods good-day to Biddy, who seems rather deaf and uncommunicative and is peeling potatoes over the sink. Her work is not difficult, she will admit, as Dr. Wilson has promised, and the parson is a quiet, uncomplaining patient, but there is always the danger of infection in such cases. She is a great believer in the efficacy of leeches. She must suggest this to the doctor when he calls later today.

  What the doctor has not foreseen is that living in close proximity, day after day, with these two does not appeal to her. She climbs the stairs and reenters the darkened room. For a moment it looks as if her patient has disappeared. Then she sees him, lying patiently on his back in the shadows, his daughter dutifully at his side in her bilious, dark-green dress.

  The scant provisions are not the only signs of hardship. The daughter’s dress—with the old-fashioned gigot sleeves, the gray fichu, the petticoats without a flounce or a wave, the way the dress hangs on her body, though neat enough—looks out of date and dowdy, after all, to one who has worked for some of the better families in Manchester. These two may not realize it, but she has been in some demand. She can pick and choose her cases. Nursing work may not be distinguished, but there is no shortage of it for the young, strong, competent, and, if she says so herself, attractive.

  The silence in the room weighs on her, as she bustles around, straightening things up. The daughter goes on scribbling in her book without lifting her head. What would a spinster like her have to say? The old man lies so still, he might be dead. He takes his lot with grim resignation and has been told not to talk or move, of course. But the daughter puts on unnecessary airs, hardly saying a word or, when she does utter a few, muttering them almost incomprehensibly and in such a soft, doleful voice she can hardly be heard. The daughter appears almost as blind as the father, as she lifts the book up to her nose or bends down low to it.

  She wonders if she should say something about the scant provisions. The daughter looks up, as if she senses this thought, and even in the dim light the nurse sees a momentary flash, a spark of smoldering fire in the large, luminous eyes behind the glasses, which surprises her. Perhaps not as mild and meek as one might think at first glance.

  The daughter turns from her immediately and plunges her nose back into her writing book. Who do you think you are, dearie? She is accustomed to a bit of a bustle, a friendly word now and then, an appraising glance, even from the most aristocratic of her patients.

  When she worked for Lady Sedick last summer at Thornton, there were the housekeeper who chatted with her at length in her cozy sitting room in the evenings and the groom, who had his eye on her. She can still see him as he was early that spring morning when she took a turn in the dew-wet garden: a big, sandy-haired, strapping young fellow, standing astraddle in the sunlight in his mire-flecked boots, offering her a big bowl of wild strawberries he had picked from the garden, swimming in cream. Irresistible.

  Even Lady Sedick, herself, whose husband was absent most of the time, liked to converse about her ailments at some length, particularly in the middle of the night when she could not sleep. She would call her at moments like that, plaintively, and ask her to bring her a tisane and perhaps a little biscuit. She would dip the biscuit into her cup and wet her lips, the dark hair on the upper lip damp. Sometimes she would even hold her hand or have her brush out her thin hair. “My dear, my dear, if you knew how I suffer,” she would say, and press her hand to her heart. Sometimes, when she had asked her to massage her shoulders and back, and if the nurse would allow the tips of her trembling fingers just to touch her décolleté with delicacy, she would make a little moaning sound and say, “What healing hands you have, my dear.”

  She wakes in the night, unable to sleep. “Forgive me, God. Just to let me sleep,” she whispers, and places her hand between her thighs, strokes gently, crosses her legs on her hand. She groans with relief. Still, she does not fall asleep. She needs something more solid in her stomach than the watery fish they had again for dinner. She would like a piece of cheese, a little of the lamb left over from the day before.

  She climbs out of her bed, pulls a shawl over her shoulders, and barefooted, candle in hand, creeps quietly down the stairs. She goes into the basement kitchen and takes the lamb bone from its dish in a cupboard, pours herself a pint of porter, and sits down at the table. She takes the bone in both hands and gnaws at it, ravenously. Nothing quite as delicious as the flesh near the bone. She is grinding on a delicious piece of gristle with her good back teeth when the kitchen door swings open and someone stands staring at her, a flash of surprise in her eyes. It is the daughter in her white nightgown, her hair around her shoulders.

  “What are you doing here?” she asks, though it is perfectly obvious.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” she says, embarrassed, dropping the bone, springing to her feet, wishing she had put on shoes. She wipes the grease from her chin with the back of her hand and lowers her gaze like a guilty child.

  The daughter looks at her for a moment and then smiles. “Neither could I,” she says, not unkindly.

  “Would you like something to eat—drink?” the nurse asks, gathering her wits about her.

  The daughter hesitates, eyeing the lamb bone and the porter. There is a flash of greed in her eye.

  The nurse pours her a generous glass of porter, and the daughter makes a gesture to her to sit down. They sit facing each other across the kitchen table in the night silence, sipping. She can see the traces of the porter in the fine hairs on the daughter’s upper lip. What a small, dainty woman!

  “Such long, lonely nights,” the daughter says, and in the soft light, her pretty hair down, her eyes bright, the nurse finds herself thinking she looks almost beautiful.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Hope

  Charlotte, too, has had difficulty sleeping. She has heard footsteps on the stairs. She has gone down to see who was roaming around. She found the nurse sitting before a candle on her own in the kitchen, her shawl around her shoulders, chomping on the lamb bone left from dinner, grease shining on her broad cheeks, blunt chin, and wide mouth, her big, bare feet splayed on the kitchen floor. She had wanted to giggle with her like a naughty school-girl. She had drunk a whole glass of porter and even climbed the stairs with her, taken her hand, and wished her a good night.

  She has found an imaginary name for her: Humber.

  She is goaded on by the letter in her pocket, containing the rejection that had come on the morning of her father’s operation from the publisher who had turned down their three volumes; and by the poor sales of her poems and her sisters’. She is still convinced of the merit of Emily’s poetry, though little good has come of it as yet. The moor-lark in the air / The bee among the heather-bell. The line with its precise details, its hidden rhythms, still makes her shiver slightly. Surely it will remain? They have had to pay for the publication themselves, and so far only two volumes of 165 pages have been sold, at four shillings each.

  She is determined not to write any more pathetic, begging letters to her professor, her Master, and to stop thinking about him, other than to use him in her work, the ultimate revenge. She has given up all hope for her once-beloved brother. Her disillusionment with him is now complete and commensurate with her former adulation. Their physical similarity, their susceptibility to passion, make her determined to detach herself from him. She will transform these fallible creatures into objects that will serve her purposes. She will use all those who have snubbed and ignored her. She will write out of rage, out of a deep sense of her own worth and of the injustice of the world’s reception of her words. She will write about something she knows well: her passion.

  She has the habit of writing with her eyes closed, shutting out the world. There is no need for this. She has written so many words in her short life, many of them with her brother. They wer
e two beings with one sensibility, one imagination, their nerves vibrating to the same chords. Was that but practice for this moment?

  She would like to reach other women, large numbers of them. She would like to entertain, to startle, to give voice to what they hold in secret in their hearts, to allow them to feel they are part of a larger community of sufferers. She would like to show them all that a woman feels: the boredom of a life confined to tedious domestic tasks. Perhaps she can reach even this nurse, with her busy beneficence, whose quack-quack voice and loud laugh grate upon her ears, who bustles around them so officiously and feeds her face.

  Charlotte dozes and wakes in her chair, and for a moment is not sure where she is. She becomes aware of a red glow in the room from the low fire in the fireplace. Of course: she is in Manchester. A stranger stands before her. She rises quickly to her feet and adjusts the lace collar of her dress. “I must have dozed,” she says.

  The doctor, for it is he, gives her his hand. Not a tall man, he has a sharp, narrow, but kindly face; large, deep-set eyes; thick, wavy white hair. The nurse, who has retreated to the other room, has ushered him in. He goes to her father’s bedside, a comforting presence as he stands there, bending over, his bright head a white glimmer of light like a halo over her father, speaking softly to him. She watches him in the candlelight as he removes the bandage carefully, lifts the eyelid. His slender, well-kept hands hold her attention—quick, active, and unconstrained hands. She approaches and looks down at her father’s eyes, which seem to stare back at her. Can he see her?

  “Do you see anything?” the doctor asks.

  “I see something dimly, as through a glass darkly,” her father says.

  “Ah! and can you make out any object, or any light?” the doctor asks.

  “I can see a glow—a ruddy haze,” he says, looking in the direction of the fire.

  “And the candlelight?” he asks.

  “A luminous cloud,” her father says.

  The doctor pronounces himself entirely satisfied with the results of the operation. In her enthusiasm Charlotte reaches out her hand. He takes it first in one, then in both of his. “Oh, thank you,” she says. “You have saved our . . .” but she is unable to finish her sentence, the thrill of his healing hands running all through her body like warm water.

  At the same time an idea comes to her for her book. Moments of hope will come to Jane with the kind apothecary’s words. Perhaps Jane will leave her aunt and cousins, the Reeds’ house, her unkind relatives, and go away to school.

  Charlotte would so like to detain the doctor, to put her head on his shoulder, to lean against him. She imagines saying, Do stay and take tea with us, offering him tarts, buttered crumpets, strawberry jam, seed-cake, though they have not, of course, ordered such delicacies. But he is in a hurry, he says; there are other patients to visit, he explains, and he is too soon gone. Her moment of exhilaration disappears.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Awakening

  The nurse folds back his blanket but leaves the sheet over his old, stiff body. She takes out first a hand, then an arm, and then a leg, without looking. She wipes his skin carefully with a warm, damp cloth, so as not to move his head. She sees how he unclenches his fists, lets himself go.

  She murmurs, “Lie very still,” as she uncovers his chest. “You will hardly feel this.”

  He is suddenly glad to be lying here resting in silence, his sight gradually healing, forms and faint light flickering. A calm falls on him like gentle and consoling rain. My prayers have been answered. Thanks be to God. He lies still, still, obedient in this woman’s competent hands. What a blessing not to have to go anywhere or listen to anyone, not to have to comfort, to search for soothing words, not to have to reassure with false hope or help with brave words or actions.

  As far back as he can remember, he has worked. As a boy in the fields, he worked with his hands; later he worked with his mind. He sees himself as a small boy, sitting in the hut, with the mud floor, the whitewashed walls, the one small window, the visible thatched roof with its beams exposed, and the odor of roasting corn in the air. Everyone else sleeps heavily, while he bends over the rough table, straining his eyes on the fine print of the family Bible. He is reading it from cover to cover, learning word after beautiful word by heart, even the dull “begat” chapters. Despite his exhaustion, the aching of his limbs after a day in the fields, his hunger for food, he is desperate to acquire the learning that will allow him to advance in the world so that he can become a gentleman.

  There were few books beside the Bible, Milton, and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in their house. His mother had no time for them. He was obliged to help his father in the fields or to care for the many young ones. He didn’t want his own boy to have to suffer like that.

  He remembers leaving Ireland at the age of twenty-two with seven pounds in his pocket. He has survived through the Church. He thinks of himself as a crusader, a soldier in the Army of God. All his life, he has felt an energy, a sort of fever, sealed too tightly, one that has sometimes escaped his control. At times, he has almost lost his temper even with his own God. He thinks of the famous lines: “Else a great prince in a prison lies.” His favorite ones are Blake’s:

  Bring me my bow of burning gold:

  Bring me my arrow of desire:

  Bring me my spear:

  O clouds unfold!

  Bring me my chariot of fire.

  He has refined his own name, dubbed himself anew in a moment of pride and brilliance, drawn himself close to Lord Nelson by using his title, Duke of Brontë. He has reinvented himself.

  He recalls the blacksmith pointing him out to a passerby who had brought his horse for shoeing.

  “See this peasant boy, with his blackened hands and face,” he had said. “He is one of nature’s true gentlemen.” He must have been six or perhaps seven and working hard for a blacksmith in his forge, bending over his fire, the sparks in the air. It was a moment he would never forget. Pride and shame: I will become a real gentleman, I will. It had made him both proud and aware of his miserable condition. From that moment on, he had aped his betters, watching the way they ate and dressed and, above all, what they read.

  He is ashamed of his parents and of his shame—particularly of his mother, that someone would find out that she had renounced her Catholicism on her marriage to his father. In the dead of the night, with everyone sleeping, he would hear her muttering her popish prayers in Latin.

  He has taught his son Greek and Latin. He has let him read freely from all the books in his library and those of the wealthier families around them. Education has been his salvation, and he hopes it will save even these poor, plain girls. He has even allowed his girls to join the boy, to take a hand at a translation of Horace or Catullus. He has found Charlotte with Byron’s Don Juan, and remembering his own youth, he has not voiced his opprobrium.

  He remembers the things his children brought back to him from their rambles on the moors: little Emily rushing into his study, smelling of wind and wildness, with a lapwing’s plume, a tuft of moss. Her gift reminds him of a line from one of his poems: Sweet Philomel and cooing dove. The milk-white thorn, the leafy spray. Not a bad line.

  He remembers the Reverend Tighe’s amazement at his memory. He stood awkwardly, aware of his heavy boots, his ill-fitting trousers, his frayed shirt cuffs in the elegant parlor, before a company of amazed Evangelicals. Staring at the yellow silk curtains, the painted cream wainscoting, the silver, the flowers, he quoted passages from the Bible by chapter and verse. “As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God. For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear. . . . For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.” On and on he galloped through Romans fearlessly and without a fault, only coming to a halt when Tighe said, “Now this is the kind of mind useful to our cause,” smiling and turning to the others with a proprietary gesture, as if he had invented him
.

  That which has been taken for learning, for love of the Word of the Lord, for courage, he realizes now is also rage, one that wells up within him even now and has made him act foolishly. Perhaps he should have gone into the Army rather than the Church. Does he lack the empathy that his calling requires? Is that why he is being punished? Does he not know how to love even his own girl, who has been sitting so quietly at his side?

  He remembers with shame now his disapproval of his poor wife’s innocent gay dress, which he had never allowed her to wear, but kept firmly locked away in a drawer.

  Yet there were moments when his rage was not misplaced. He sees the crowd of raucous children, taunting the poor idiot boy and then pushing him into the dark, icy, swirling water, into which he plunged to drag the boy onto the bank and lay him down gently in the grass; he remembers rising from his bed in the middle of the night, stuffing the loaded pistols into his belt and tramping across wet moors, to succor the mill owner who had need of him during the Luddite uprising when misery had generated such hate for the machines and their masters who took away the workmen’s bread.

  What an unexpected boon to have no demands at all made on me, to lie here idle and resting in the quiet and the dark, these kind hands on my body, to be able to return to a state of innocence. If only this could go on forever. If only this woman could immerse me completely in warm water. Water. Holy water. I am anointed. My cup runneth over. I know that my Redeemer liveth.