Becoming Jane Eyre Read online

  A christening. How many babies has he held over the font? “I name thee in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.” It continues to be a moment of joy, exhilaration, and hope for him, this entrance into the community of the blessed, though the christenings are so often followed fast by the death knell in his unsanitary parish. For a moment he is filled again with rage at the authorities who allow this to continue, who have ignored his repeated letters of complaint about the tainted water that runs down from the rotting bodies in the graves.

  He feels a sort of tickling on his chest, so many places all at once. “What is it?” he cries. The image of worms in the grave comes to him. He is being consumed. “Help me!” he cries out.

  “Leeches,” the nurse explains, “to prevent swelling. Be still. It will be brief.”

  “How many?” He wants, oddly, to know.

  “Just six of them, to draw the blood,” she says.

  Compared to the operation, this experience is nothing, surely, the nurse says to him in her calm, reasonable voice. When she removes the leeches, she scrapes at the wounds to make them bleed further.

  “Where is my daughter? Where is Charlotte?” he cries. How could she leave him at such a moment!

  Charlotte comes and sits beside her father, taking his hand. “I am beside you, dear Papa,” she murmurs.

  “Don’t leave me please, darling girl,” he stammers. “My dear, my dear, how glad I am you are there,” he says, and holds her hand tightly to his drumming heart. He reaches out to hold her close. “I hardly wish to gain my sight, that I may keep you beside me, always, always.”

  Now he hears the rustle of skirts and would like to reach out his hand to stroke them, to cling to them. He would like to cry out once again, as he would have liked to during the operation, as his poor wife once did, “Help me for I cannot bear it!”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Origins

  He asks her to read aloud from his Bible. She opens it to the collect for the day and runs her fingers over the fine page. “Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength,” she reads. She imagines him swallowing the holy words like wine. Indeed, he opens his lips like a child on the Words of the Lord. The candlelight flickers on her page and on his face. The room disappears into shadow. The brown leather armchair in the corner crouches down ominously like an Unholy Beast. Regions of sorrow, doleful wastes. At two in the morning, they are both awake and breathe in tandem.

  She remembers the moment when he had suddenly entered their small room while they were playing their game with the toy soldiers. He had another game for them, he said, bringing forth something they had seen hanging on the back of his door, a mask he had kept from his days at Cambridge. He told them to put it on, allowing them to disguise themselves, becoming anonymous. What careful answers the girls gave to his questions; only the boy dared speak his mind. He spoke proudly of the differences in their bodies. Now she has no need for a mask. She can see her father faintly in the flickering candlelight, but he cannot see her. He no longer frightens her. Entirely at my mercy, she thinks, and smiles slightly. Now she can speak and write freely. He is no longer watching over her; she watches over him. He is in her panopticon. She likes this reversal of roles.

  She is absorbed by her task, driven onward here and now by her desire to succeed, to conquer. She will vanquish all those arrogant fools, all those hateful asses, who have passed her by without a glance. How they have humiliated her, again and again. Let the great poet eat his words! Let her employers get down on their fat knees and beg her pardon! Let her Master see what she can do. She will get their attention with this new book.

  She hears him mumble the words of the Agnus over and over, to ward off the danger of eternal damnation.

  She has heard all his stories, the different ones trotted out for different occasions in different accents. Depending on whether the listener needs to be instructed or impressed, he speaks of his early days as examples of application and diligence or of his success as a scholar, his publications of poetry, his novelettes, his letters to the press, his days at Cambridge. In his Northern Irish brogue, which sounds more Scottish than Irish to her, he stresses Carlyle’s motto: Not what I have, but what I do is my kingdom. To the simple sheep farmers of his parish, he describes in detail the dreadful mush of potatoes and cornmeal he was given to eat, which gave him lingering dyspepsia. He never mentions the Irish relatives, especially not the Catholic mother, of course. Apprenticed first to a blacksmith, then a weaver, he had started his own school at fifteen, he tells his awed listeners.

  Her friends from school, the local landowners, such as the Heatons, get nothing of the Irish origins, and instead receive the tales of Cambridge, St. John’s College, and Lord Palmerston, as though he had been a close friend, all in a high Tory accent.

  She shares his Tory beliefs in hard work and discipline and reliance on a traditional elite. Wellington, her hero! Like her father, she was for limited emancipation of the Catholics, with their mumbo jumbo and superstitions.

  “I was afraid if I didn’t send some of you off, Aunt, too, would have left. It seemed the best thing for you. The school came highly recommended, you know. Who could have predicted what would happen there?” her father says.

  She feels the porousness of the paper, and an idea comes scurrying into her mind like a mouse. She knows how to continue her tale. She sees the tall, lean clergyman, all in black, erect as a column in the drawing room. He believes children should not be given a taste for finery and luxury. He would burn their colored boots, as her father once threatened to do. His name comes to her with the first three letters of her own: Bro-Bro-Brocklehurst.

  That night once again she lies awake. When sleep does finally come to her, she dreams one of her recurrent dreams. She sees two strange, shadowy figures standing side by side in profile looking out the window at the gray church tower, the churchyard so crowded with tombstones that the rank weed can hardly push up between them.

  They are dressed in silk gowns with high feathers in their profusion of ringlets. Half-covering their mouths, fans flutter in their gloved hands. They lean toward each other, looking out at the graveyard with a supercilious air. They have rarely had visitors of this quality in the parsonage, yet something familiar about them makes her tremble, afraid.

  “You asked to see me?” she says in a quiet voice. When they turn from the window with a rustle of taffeta, lowering their fans, she realizes they are her two older sisters, dead long ago as children, and now irremediably changed. When she rushes to hold them in her arms, they stare at her as though they don’t know her. They hold her from them as they look around the familiar room disapprovingly. “What a small, dark room this is, after all, isn’t it?”

  All her life she has carried the memories—more scars than memories—of her suffering those ten months, at the boarding school, Cowan Bridge. There were the long walks with wet shoes, the frequent, long church services on Sundays, the bitter cold, the sole privy for seventy girls and teachers, the lack of wholesome food, the constant hunger, and above all the humiliation and anguish of watching helplessly as her eldest sister was slowly tortured and then killed.

  The reality was worse than the picture she gives of it in her book, because her sister’s sufferings, she is aware, would be unbelievable on the page.

  She cannot describe the moment when her ill sister, suffering from the blister on her side, raised by the doctor to relieve her lungs, was thrown from her bed onto the dormitory floor by the teacher, who screamed, “Get up, you lazy girl, get out of bed immediately!”

  She leaves out how she watched the scene and listened in silence, too afraid of punishment to come to her sister’s aid in the dormitory that freezing morning, the water for washing frozen in the basins by the beds. She remembers watching her dying sister struggling to dress herself properly, and how the ten-year-old Maria remained silent with Christlike patience and fortitude, hearing herself called “slovenly and untidy” without re
tort, and was ordered to go about the ordinary business of her day.

  Death was presented to the little girls as the great protector from sin, as the goal, the recompense toward which all children should hurry forward to claim with joy—all children, that is, except for Carus Wilson’s own pampered ones. She will unmask the dreadful director of the institution. She will net him and pierce him. She will immortalize his wickedness and his hypocrisy with a dart of venom.

  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

  Since 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

  She 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.

  Ushered through the grand drawing room, through a library, and along the three-arched passageway linking them, she did not become aware of the true situation immediately. Her employer, a tall, big-boned, handsome woman who did not need rouge to enhance her charms and who was obviously carrying yet another child high up beneath her blue taffeta dress, greeted her with a fussy affability. “How lovely to meet you,” she said, half-turning from the big bowl of spring flowers she was adjusting with a beringed hand. “I’m so glad you have arrived on such a fine day. Did you have a good journey? You must meet my little ones.” She seemed to have forgotten that they had already met and went on volubly without waiting for a response, calling for her two youngest children to meet their governess. She held the solid boy squirming on her knee and wiping his sticky mouth and hands on her gown. The little girl sat on the pink, silk-covered loveseat at her side. The mother spoke of their recent ailments, their delicacy, their susceptibility to colds, their cleverness, their aptitude, especially that of the boy, whom she called a “flower of the flock,” one who even at his young age knew the difference between right and wrong. She admitted that he might at times be a little high-spirited, but then, what boy was not? As for the girl, well, she was perhaps a little nervous, a little sensitive, and a little highly strung. Of course, both of them were used to the most tender of treatment and were unaccustomed to hearing a harsh word.