Becoming Jane Eyre (14 page)

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

E
mily 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

E
mily 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.