Becoming Jane Eyre Read online

  Though Charlotte was his elder by more than a year, Branwell, the boy, was the little king, always the center of the family’s attention, even her mother’s. Charlotte sees her now, a beautiful shadow standing against the window at twilight in the parlor of the parsonage, her head thrown back, smiling up at him, lifting him high with delight. The lingering sunlight plays on his small, delicate head and his laughing eyes, which resemble his mother’s, though he has his father’s flaming Irish coloring.

  Aunt would make sure he got the best morsels of meat, whenever they were allowed any, or the choicest piece of cake. “Don’t eat so much of that,” she would say to the girls, snatching away a plate of something particularly tasty to keep for the boy. Or again, “Come now, let us tidy up the room and keep up a good fire; you know your brother likes one.”

  Charlotte would watch as he sidled up to stroke Aunt’s plump arms. She would smile down at him, tousle his hair, lift him into her lap to nestle contentedly against her large bosom. He knew how to bring her the first spring snowdrop, to hold it up to her face. “For you,” he would say delightfully, as she sat huddled over the fire for warmth. “I like your curls, Aunt,” he would say, staring up with apparent sincerity at the frizz of her false front of what she called auburn hair. When he impudently asked for a pinch of snuff from the gold snuffbox, one of the few treasures she had brought from Cornwall and kept proudly on her mantelpiece, she let him take one. When he sneezed loudly and dramatically and made a play of rolling around on the floor, she smiled at him indulgently.

  Aunt put the girls to work with the cooking, the making of beds, the dusting, and the sewing, explaining grimly they would need to know how to make themselves useful if they were to survive. Without the mother’s extra fifty pounds a year, money was tight. She told them that plain girls without a dot were not likely to marry. Destined at best to be teachers or governesses, they must prepare for their fate.

  Charlotte conjures them all up sitting in Aunt’s airless room, the windows firmly closed on any possible draft, only the baby girl allowed to play on the floor with her toys. While the others hemmed and turned and made their samplers as best they could, all through the long afternoon, Aunt sat tight-lipped and severe, probably dreaming of her sunny home. She read aloud to them from her mad Methodist magazines, terrifying them with their view of hellfire and damnation.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Waiting

  Emily thinks how the pains of love have ravaged the three people dearest to her. Anne has been the most valiant, keeping her loss to herself and going on with her work. Charlotte, she fears, still longs for her professor. Emily glances at her sister’s censorious face and wonders if she is still sorrowfully waiting for letters from him. Is she still writing to her Master? Has he responded? She has read some of Charlotte’s poetry recently. She thinks of the lines: Even now the fire / Though somewhat smothered, slacked, repelled, is burning, At my life’s source.

  Branwell, in his position as a young tutor, was seduced by his employer and then discarded for false reasons, just as Emily has made Catherine Earnshaw do when spurning her Heathcliff.

  Emily stares at Anne’s hair, dampened and smoothed down, which gleams with a clear light when she moves her round head. When she raises her eyes to the lamp, her translucent eyes become milky blue. She stares at the small moths that have emerged out of the darkness and become prisoners inside the lethal glass around the lamp.

  Emily leans her thin cheek up against Anne’s, and Anne closes her eyes. Poor, dear Anne. So brave. Still waiting for him. Emily says the others should go to bed. She is accustomed to bringing her brother home.

  From the start she has known better than her sisters how to handle him. “What do we do with your brother?” her father had asked. Emily gave her response anonymously from behind the mask, as they all had been asked to, when she was six: “Reason with him, and if he won’t listen, whip him.” But no one had ever reasoned with him, and perhaps it would not have made any difference if they had.

  Both her sisters refuse her offer to wait up alone. They could not sleep in any case. “We will wait for him together,” Charlotte says firmly but with a dispirited sigh. She has little pity left for him. She turns her back on him when he enters the room, as though she cannot bear the sight of him. Why has she turned against him so completely? Why is she so preoccupied with her own small problems of love when her brother’s are so much more serious? Still, Emily pities her.

  It was out of pity for Charlotte, a fear that she might make herself ill after suffering for two years from unrequited love, that she had agreed to publish her poems prematurely. Still, Emily cannot forgive her for exposing her most secret experiences to the public. It was not that she had never intended publishing them, but she had no desire to expose their mystery at that moment. Indeed, though they have favored her, commended her originality, her power of wing, have expressed what she knew in her heart—that Ellis Bell had the strongest voice—the reviewers have not understood the spiritual quality of her own vision. And why were none of her brother’s poems included? Several of his poems were perhaps even superior to Charlotte’s, yet she had never allowed any of his work to be included in the volume.

  Since she has come back from Manchester, Charlotte has seemed more cheerful. She has read them some of her new book. This Jane Eyre is the best thing she has written. Emily waits impatiently for the next chapter. Yet this evening, waiting for their brother, Charlotte seems so dispirited, disapproving, and sad. Does she see in her brother’s mad desire a dreadful mirror image of her own incoherent pleas to her Master?

  Charlotte has criticized her own Wuthering Heights as being too extreme, too melodramatic, yet surely Charlotte, too, has gone to the extreme. Mr. Rochester’s mad wife, who lurks on the top floor at Thornfield, setting fire to the bed hangings, ripping the wedding veil, quick with the knife and her teeth, contains some of their brother himself, as well as Charlotte’s own wild desires. As for Mr. Rochester, does he not come from Byron and Charlotte’s early heroes like Zamorna, but also from her Belgian professor? Certainly he looks like him, has some of his impatience and willfulness, and is trailed by the scent of his cigar. By transforming her professor into a character, a country squire, Charlotte may overcome her longing. Does writing ever cure heartache and sorrow? Will this lively book, full of incident and event, enable her to get over the sufferings of the past years? Will she finish it? Will it earn enough money for her to remain at home?

  Anne looks up from her book and says, of Branwell, “I’m the one who should wait up for him. I’m the most implicated in all of this. If only I had never suggested him for the position at Thorp Green!”

  “How can you reproach yourself? Who else would have taken him on? He had failed at everything. Too small for a soldier and too irreligious for a curate. Without your reference, no one would have had him. On the contrary, it was most generous of you! Those awful people even lowered your salary, and I know how much you disliked it there,” Charlotte says.

  “I had really become, indeed I remain, quite fond of the girls. If they had given me any real authority to counsel them, they would have learned to live proper Christian lives. And I never imagined the mother could have behaved as she did.” Anne sighs. “It did take that naughty boy off my hands, at least.” She doesn’t speak of her own secret sorrow. God, she had hoped, would surely give her some small joy in her life, but death had blighted her hopes of love. God help me to accept my fate, to continue with courage and dignity.

  Charlotte says, “It seemed the best to all of us at the time, you must remember. We were all so hopeful then. I wanted foolishly to go back to Brussels, and Emily was quite happy to stay at home on her own with her animals and Papa. You took Branwell off our hands, after all. What else would he have done but stay here idle, drinking and causing trouble?”

  “I did try to give him a fair picture of the family,” Anne adds, “but I’m afraid anything I might have said had the opposite effect. Certainly he
has never listened to me.”

  Charlotte looks at her sisters, sitting side by side with the elderly woman who has looked after them for so many years. She realizes who must rescue Jane when she leaves Mr. Rochester: sisters, of course, two sisters like her own, or two women like her two best friends, Ellen and Mary, from her school days. They have given her courage in their different ways with their example and their love. They have rescued her from despair again and again. It is women, she thinks, looking at her brave and beautiful sisters and her old and faithful servant, who have enabled her to survive. She will invent two ladies of distinction and learning, two studious sisters who study German and are obliged to go out as governesses, two sisters like those before her, two loving, intelligent women in whose conversation Jane will delight, who will shelter her in a moment of need like those two sisters who died so young, who still haunt Charlotte’s dreams. She will conjure up a faithful servant with a harsh manner but a good heart and two sisters and a brother, unlike her own, one more like Ellen’s, cool, clearheaded, hard, and handsome, who believes in reason, someone who is looking for a helpmate, a fellow missionary to share his load. It is they who will rescue her heroine, they and their old servant, Hannah, as she will call her, who knits away so industriously. The four of them will shelter Jane when she leaves the bigamous Mr. Rochester. She sees Jane as she staggers on across the heath and falls faint with hunger at the door of their house, which she will call—what else?—“Moor House.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Retrieval

  Emily rises now and puts on her shawl and bonnet. She refuses her sisters’ offers to accompany her. “I can always manage him better alone, and if I don’t go now, I’ll never get him home,” she says. “I’ll take Keeper with me.” She bends down to touch the dog’s head lightly. She is not at all sure she is as safe alone as she maintains. Her brother walks the streets with a knife up his sleeve, believing that Satan is stalking him. He is capable of sudden violence.

  She feels exhausted, shaky-legged. She has slept badly, dreamed strange dreams. She has risen at dawn, stumbling barefooted down the steps into the kitchen, opening the door for the dog, the sky a faint orange-pink, the autumn air already cold. Sipping her coffee, she has studied the newspapers, which are lent to them, looking for information on their railway stocks, which are doing quite well. Charlotte would like to sell them, but Emily has refused. As in all things, she relies on her own convictions. Very early in life, she learned to think for herself. She considers she has no choice but to go after her brother now. She feels they are linked in an almost supernatural way.

  It hardly seemed a coincidence to her that on the same day, the 26th of May, their poems had been published, thanks to thirty-one pounds from Aunt’s bequest, and her brother had left the house. She can see him vividly, dressed with such care in his green suit, his red curls carefully brushed and clustered about his high forehead, his fine Roman nose and long patrician upper lip turned upward as he danced down the street. He expected to be summoned to his wealthy and adulterous beloved, who was now free, free! Mr. R., who had banished him from the side of the lady he loved so extravagantly, had finally died.

  Then he had instead received the command, conveyed ignominiously by her coachman or groom, not to contact her in any way. Mrs. R., apparently, had more ambitious plans. A practical woman, aware of her social position, she had no intention of spending the rest of her days with the impoverished little tutor she had dallied with briefly. Since then, Emily’s beloved brother has been a broken man. From time to time he receives money from a mysterious source, most probably Mrs. R., who has paid him off, money that he immediately squanders on squibs of gin or sixpenny packets of opium acquired freely at the chemist’s. Like her character Hindley Earnshaw, he is deliberately drinking himself into a stupor.

  She has been compelled to write about it. She has written in her poems about separation, abandonment, and union, but it is in her novel that she has exposed her brother’s folly, using his apocalyptic language, his excesses of behavior. Her book has come to her fast. It is what she wants the world to see.

  Putting on her gloves, she steps out into the damp street with her dog, an umbrella over her head. She relishes the life-giving wind, the cloak of darkness, the solitude and silence. She bends down and strokes the back of the dog’s head. The autumn chill and damp restore her strength and endow her with a kind of impatience. She strides onward, trying not to shiver, to give in to everything without name or shape that causes her nervous apprehension.

  Since the incident of the fire, her father sleeps in the narrow bed with her brother to watch over him as he sleeps. Is he afraid he might take his own life and theirs too, like the mad wife in Charlotte’s new book? Why does her father not remove the weaponry bristling on the wall of his room? She has suggested it, but he will not part from his guns. What a strange, fierce, contradictory old man he is. Yet she loves him and prefers to remain home with him and her brother, whom she loves more than her life.

  She knows her brother is seriously in debt. He cadges off friends and strangers alike, even off the woman who has spurned his love. He is in danger of going to prison because of his debts to the landlord of the inn he frequents nightly. Does she not hear stories from the families around her of violent acts by usurpers who have taken over ancestral homes and fortunes, as her Heathcliff does? She has been home for four years now, a witness to every one of her brother’s mad moods.

  Much of her Heathcliff and Hindley comes from the man she watches now through the pub window. She stands there with her shoes sinking into the mud, her umbrella over her head, the strong smell of alcohol and urine in the air.

  Her brother sits talking to a group of men gathered around him, laughing. He appears to be telling them some amusing tale. He can be a fascinating raconteur, above all, in his cups. Unlike his sisters, he is a better talker than writer. All his life he has been encouraged to talk, to entertain, to be the center of attention. The only boy, he is expected to speak of his exploits, to tell of his triumphs.

  One of his companions rocks on his chair, throws his head back, opens his mouth wide in a raucous guffaw. Another is filling her brother’s glass. Surely they must see what effect it is having on her brother? She can hear the loud laughter, a snatch of song, see someone turning to the barman and calling for more wine. Her brother is standing up now unsteadily, his shoulders stooped, his hand on the back of his chair, singing for the crowd. The bartender behind the bar in his apron is drying a glass, the mirror behind him. He, too, is joining in the song. Then her brother sinks back down onto his chair, dropping his glass, which someone scrambles to recover and refill for him.

  It infuriates her to see how her brother’s companions encourage him. Can they not see how ill he is? She raps on the pane angrily with her knuckles, but no one heeds her. Instead, her brother flings the glass away and seizes the brandy bottle by the neck. He tilts it back and swallows greedily. She raps harder, pressing her face to the glass, calling his name. For a moment, he looks up and even stares at her with a vacant stare, his eyes bloodshot in his bloated, red face. She knows that look all too well. She recognizes the droop of the trembling lips. He has probably taken opium. He often mixes these things recklessly to the permanent detriment of his mind and health. He leans over to cough. It is this mixing of drugs that is killing him, surely, this and the weak lungs from which they all suffer. Can his companions not see his weakened condition? Does he not even recognize her? She raps again harder and shouts his name loudly. The men around him glance toward the window and back at her brother, their faces suddenly grave, embarrassed. One of them leans down and says something to him. He glances toward the window. His face darkens as he puts his hand up his sleeve. Is he armed? Will he take her for Satan?

  Passion of this kind is surely better eschewed in life. Animals, with all their passionate feelings, their blind devotions, are safer to love than human beings. She leans down to pat her darling Keeper, who stands at her side.<
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  She will not linger out here in the rain any longer. She goes around to the front of the pub, closes her umbrella, and throws open the door. She strides into the room, her hand on her dog’s collar, letting the cold air enter the smoke-filled room. A hush falls over the crowd of men, and all the eyes are on her as she goes forward toward the fire, where her brother sits with his cronies in a half circle. No one moves for a moment, no sound is heard, as everyone watches her and her big dog. Then a low murmur begins. Someone says something about women and dogs not being welcome. She goes directly over to her brother and leans down to whisper in his ear. He glances up at her, his eyes small, his gaze blank. She grasps him by the arm and tries to get him to rise. “Help me,” she says to the man beside him. Together they get him onto his feet and his cape onto his shoulders. She puts her hand around his waist and tries to move toward the door. For a moment he resists, glaring at her, then he lets his head fall on her shoulder and slumps against her body. They move toward the door together through the crowd of staring onlookers, the dog following.

  She cannot help pitying him; she suffers with her mournful boy. She understands his wish to escape into another world. She finds his sufferings as hard to bear as her own: she hears him sigh with anguish, unable to console him. She sees in this wretched life all the destructive power of excessive love. She knows he is dishonest, that he will say and do anything to obtain the drugs he craves. She knows he is spineless, without willpower of any kind at this point, and yet she cannot help but love him and will minister unto him as long as she is able, though she no longer believes he will ever recover.