Becoming Jane Eyre (16 page)

“Who will fight?” she asks, doubtfully.

“Two black giants, two princes, two outcast brothers, two fallen angels. They are in a grand palace, with jewels and a golden throne. No, it’s four giants, four monsters. All brothers from the same royal house, Ashantee dukes or princes. Eight feet tall with flashing dark eyes, dark skins, dark hair, mustachios, and scars. They cut the duke’s neck. They cut off his hands. The blood spurts. He falls down into the pool, down, down, down!”

She shudders, makes a face, appalled. “No, no, too awful,” she says.

“We can always make him come alive again,” he says with a grin. She protests, “No one would believe that. What sort of a palace is it? What time of year? What’s the weather? And why are they fighting now?”

“For the throne, for power, that’s all,” he says. They are both snobs. They like details of grandeur, the appointing of governors, the adventures of the aristocrats: dukes and duchesses, Wellington and his sons, but she likes to dwell upon the small details that will conjure up something larger: the swing of a walk, a black neckerchief casually adjusted, lightning splitting a tree.

“That’s the way it’s going to happen!” he says in a sudden passion, his cheeks flushed. Which is when he grasps a lock of her brown hair and twists it round his finger, almost lifting her small, light body up into the air. He finishes this by giving a sharp rap on her fingers with the ruler. She lets him. She would let him do anything. Her mouth tastes salty and her head aches and she is aware of the danger of such passion. Though she already suspects he possesses a quality that is dangerous to him and to her, a quicksilver quality, a wild temper, an inability to accept the unwelcome reality of the world around them, she now thinks of him as a changeling brought in to replace the real baby who once lay quiet in his cradle. He is someone who does not belong to this dutiful circle of quiet, obedient girls. The outcast, the interloper, he comes from a different world.

At the same time he is what she would be if she dared: her secret double. Her admiration and adoration will now coexist with her lucidity, her knowledge of the dark side of his nature and hers.

The father, too, hears his boy come up the stairs. Dimly he sees him stand slumped at his door. Such a brilliant, beautiful boy, his heart’s darling. How could this have happened to him?

After the death of his wife and of his eldest two girls, he has withdrawn from his remaining daughters. How could he not? He could not help thinking that his favorite girl, the most brilliant and saintly, had been taken from him, that he could have spared one of the others more easily. But the boy was different, strange and almost holy.

He remembers him perched on the arm of his chair, leaning over the page from
Blackwood’s
. Branwell’s red hair hangs in his pointed face, glasses misted on the tip of his nose in his excitement, and the two eldest girls sitting on the dark sofa with the three little ones huddled together on the mat, their faces lifted up with joy. The boy takes the paper from him in his haste to hear the end and exultantly reads out a passage. They all lift up their hands to applaud the success of the Tories, the aristocrats, the landed power, the Great Duke, their favorite, Wellington!

Naturally, he had not expected much to come of all that scribbling for his poor girls, though they would keep scribbling, but he had had such high hopes for his darling boy. Perhaps they all had.

He wonders if it should have been the boy he sent away to school and not the girls. There were too many of them to handle: five small girls tucked away in that cramped nursery space above the door. Still, some had suggested they send the boy away. But neither he nor his sister-in-law thought he could stand it. He had not lasted long in the local grammar school. So they had kept him close, watched over him, sheltered him, adored him. Everyone adored him, particularly Charlotte. Perhaps they all spoiled him. They feared so for him: his fits, his excitability, the great swings of joy and despair, the great sensitivity, and all the gifts.

Nothing has turned out as he expected. He had considered his son someone of such strange mental and physical energy. Such a curious boy. Nothing he ever did was predictable or without contradiction.

He remembers coming into his church early one morning to speak to the sexton and hearing someone playing the organ, sweet sounds filling the air. When he looked toward where the sounds came, he thought it was an angel with flaming hair, bent over the keys, pulling out all the stops, his little legs straining to pump the pedals. The boy was hardly twelve years old and small for his age, barely able to reach the pedals, but he was playing the organ, filling his church with heavenly music. He could play the organ, write, draw, paint. The father has taught the son and not the daughters all he knows about the classics. All that Latin and Greek. He remembers the art teacher, hired at considerable expense—at least they all took advantage of that—the studio rented, board provided, not to speak of all the letters of introduction, all unused, the precious pennies they had all scraped up for him for the journey to London, all squandered. Left to his own devices, he was incapable of rising to the occasion. The boy—he continues to think of him as a boy, though he is only a year younger than Charlotte—was crushed with despair, remorse, surely. Perhaps the best loved always suffers most.

What is to become of him? That wicked woman! That sorcerer! She had bewitched him.

CHAPTER TWENTY

C
harlotte sleeps uneasily through the many cold winter nights. All spring and summer she continues to send their three books out again and again, only to see them return. The poetry book does not sell, and they decide to send complimentary copies to the poets and writers they most admire, so that at least someone will read their work. She continues to work on her new book, writing the chapters that take place in Moor House, where Jane spends time with the two sisters and their brother, St. John. Emily writes her poems, irons, bakes bread, feeds her animals, walks out across the moors, and goes to church. Their father’s sight, though he occasionally complains of spots before his eyes, has been much improved by his operation. He resumes his pastoral work, preaches his sermons on Sundays, and visits his parishioners.

It is a rare warm day. The three sisters sit together in the dining room after breakfast, the white bowls still on the table, the summer sun glimmering for a moment on the stone floor. Their father is already out. The summer landscape has a luminescence that he has always loved and is delighted to see again. Branwell still lies in his bed sleeping, sketching, or writing pathetic complaints to his friends about his depression, asking them for money for opium.

A letter arrives. Anne hands Charlotte the familiar brown paper packet, addressed to the three Bells, and asks her to open it. She reaches across the table, across the empty bowls of oatmeal and the milk jug with its familiar illustrations of
Pilgrim’s Progress
, and takes the packet gingerly with the tips of her fingers, as though it might burn them. She places it beside her empty plate and looks at her sisters. She can see that they, too, have the same cowardly urge to let the packet lie beside the bowl unopened, to hold on to the moment, to preserve hope, as she did nine years ago with the response to her work from Southey.

“What do they say?” Emily finally asks, her mouth set.

Charlotte recalls that it is almost a year since their three volumes were first sent out together. This one comes from a little-known publisher, Newby, whom they have tried as a last resort.

She slips a knife slowly under the fold. Her sisters watch closely, sitting side by side opposite her. She notes that the letter is several pages long and takes hope. She reads the first few lines to herself and looks up at her sisters’ alert faces.

“Read this. It’s good news,” she manages to say, feeling herself grow old. Emily snatches up the pages and they peer at them together, reading attentively, their heads close. T. C. Newby writes from his offices on Mortimer Street that he will publish two of the volumes:
Wuthering Heights
and
Agnes Grey
, but not Charlotte’s
The Professor
. Nor are his terms particularly favorable. The authors are required to advance fifty pounds, which he will refund when two hundred and fifty copies have been sold. Also, he asks for changes in
Wuthering Heights
, which is to be expanded into two volumes.

Her sisters look at each other in silence, their gaze deep and searching. Charlotte sees them as though she has never seen them before: such beautiful faces. Two graceful young women, long-necked and slender—ladies, she feels, in every sense of the word, Emily with her dog’s big, ugly head, like a lion’s, on her knee. There is sunlight in their hair and on their pale faces. Their eyes seem bright. A fly buzzes against a windowpane. The brindled cat jumps from Anne’s lap.

“What are we to do?” the youngest asks, looking from one sister to the next.

“You must not hesitate for a moment. It’s not a good offer, I admit, but it’s the best we have had,” Charlotte says firmly, though she is convinced they will, they must, refuse this offer. Surely they will not leave her out?

“But what will you do?” Anne asks.

“I will send mine out once again.” She can hear the tremble in her voice. She draws herself up, rises from the table, puts the sugar bowl on the sideboard, fusses with the lid. She glances over her shoulder at her sisters, who are sitting in their dark dresses looking at each other. She turns toward them. They stare up at her for a moment, speechless, lips slightly open, the letter before them. Surely, she thinks, they will not spend their legacy to publish their faulty books without her?

Besides, she knows how stubborn and retiring Emily is, how much she is against changing a word in her text. She has not listened to Charlotte’s advice on her book at all. She has never cared as much as Charlotte about presenting her work to the public. She remembers the great fuss Emily made over publishing her excellent poems.

But she goes on dutifully, attempting to be sensible and, above all, fair. “You cannot give up an opportunity of this kind. Your book could be expanded, and might even be improved, as the publishers suggest.”
Dear God, don’t let them leave me out!

Emily replies without hesitating, in her matter-of-fact manner, her voice sounding loud, suddenly reminding Charlotte of the nurse, Humber, “You are quite right, my dear. We must consider this offer seriously. It’s the only one we have had.” Charlotte is so surprised that she bumps her toe against the leg of the table. She is obliged to sit down again, her hands in her lap, the hurt so hard. She wants to cry out in protest. Whoever would have thought of Emily calling her “my dear” in that detached and rather superior tone of voice? She adds to the hurt, “There’s always the possibility, if you send your book out again, you might find something better than this.”

There is a new assurance in Emily’s voice. She is now the one in charge. She rises and pours the rest of the milk into a saucer for the cat and then resumes her seat, pushing her chair back slightly and looking at them. It is clear that it is her book, with all its exaggerations and melodrama, its scenes that disturb mental peace by day and banish sleep at night, that the publisher really wants.

A new kind of silence fills the room. Her beloved sisters seem far off. Charlotte gazes at them, as from the shore of a desert island, as their ship draws away. They have abandoned her so easily. They stare at her with unbearable pity in their eyes. The alliances have shifted once again, as they did when she left for Roe Head.

How could they do this? Without her they would never have seen their poems published or received the encouraging reviews. Did the reviewers not speak of Ellis Bell’s “power of wing”? Did this not spur her on to finish her novel? Why have her sisters succeeded and not she? Are their books any better than hers? Their faces now appear altered, less fine, less distinguished, less distinct.

Why is Emily eager to rush in so readily on such unfavorable terms? Is she willing to expand her book, to let it swell to fill the place of her own? Original though it may be, as Newby says, it has its faults. She considers Emily’s mind unripe and insufficiently cultured. The characters, with their relentless implacability, lack depth, complexity, and substance. Who would believe that a man who could hang his wife’s beloved dog from a tree could also be capable of passionate love for his childhood sweetheart, his Cathy?

She turns toward Anne. Surely, with her strict Christian morality, her integrity, she will put her sister’s good above her own. But Anne, too, nods her blonde head and agrees with Emily: “I suppose we have little choice.”

“We do need the money, after all, if we are to pay Branwell’s debts,” Emily adds, quite illogically, for they will have to pay a considerable sum for the publication, and there is no guarantee they will ever see any of the money back. Emily rises and paces in the restricted space. Already she seems to glow with energy, to have gained color in her cheeks and light in her gray-green eyes.