Becoming Jane Eyre (15 page)

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.

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.

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

W
riting 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.