Becoming Jane Eyre (19 page)

At first she had deferred but, when pressed, she had added that Mr. R. was an arrogant man, a landowner of considerable wealth who had in his library many books of sermons, including those of Carus Wilson, the director of Cowan Bridge, with their fiery Calvinist view of hellfire and damnation that Charlotte describes in her new book. Mr. R. was of the Evangelical persuasion. “He’s obviously convinced his wealth and prosperity are signs of God’s grace,” she had said with a smile and added, “He’s often engaged in an attempt to convert the heathen,” with a sideways glance at her brother. He had laughed.

She had added, “He spends more time shut up in his study with his sermons than with his own boy, poor little Edmund.” What ideas must have already sprung to her brother’s fertile mind?

She told him Mrs. R. was somewhat proud and arrogant herself. She was a woman who, for her age, was too showy in her attire. Still, she was a handsome woman and no fool. “She’s a good businesswoman and runs her domain efficiently,” Anne told her brother. In Anne’s opinion she was more intelligent than her short-tempered spouse. She liked to lie on a daybed and be read to—though she had a taste for light literature. Above all a sentimental woman, she fancied herself in the role of a victim. As was often the case, she was not particularly sensitive to the feelings of others, but unfortunately Anne had thought it wiser to keep that to herself.

She did tell him how the mother doted on her honey-headed Edmund, whom she, Anne, had been unable to teach anything, let alone the Latin he should have acquired by eleven. He was supposed to have been sent away to school, but his departure had been deferred repeatedly. Unfortunately, none of the children seemed to have acquired even the mother’s taste for light reading. The girls were more interested in boys or horses. The boy could hardly read a line without help. She wasn’t even certain he knew his alphabet. “A wild colt,” she remembers saying.

None of this information seemed to distress her brother. He smiled at her with that old belief in his genius. “Chief Genii Branii to the rescue,” he had laughed, using the name from their childhood games and waving an arm in the air, as though calling up his troops. He said he would know how to take a boy of that kind in hand. And, indeed, he had, he had, for a while.

She could see how he was already transforming this information into some Gothic romance. Only she had not realized to what point he might be capable of losing touch with reality. She had watched him looking out the train window dreaming, as it continued onward, taking him to his doom.

Perhaps it would have made no difference what she had said. Certainly, he soon told her she was mistaken about the boy, who took to him with something like passion. The growing boy hovered beside him, not much shorter than he, his arm draped around his waist, his blond head turned up to smile at him mischievously. Her brother taught him songs, naughty rhymes, and allowed him to drink wine mixed with less and less water. He hardly kept him in the schoolroom—“he’ll learn more outdoors,” he would say when she remonstrated. He left the boy free, as her brother had been, to shout, to sing, to slam the door, to roam the land, sleeping wine-drunk, his mouth stained with berries through the summer afternoons in some shady spot, while her brother spouted his bad poetry to the bright air. One summer afternoon she had found them together, half-naked by a brook, the boy asleep, his damp curls like sunlight on the brother’s pale chest.

Once she had watched them wrestling, grappling with each other, half in wrath, half in jest, until the boy fell to the earth, where he kicked him in the back viciously and then, when she was about to intervene, rubbed at the bruises lovingly.

From their first meeting, it was clear that Mrs. R. would treat the tutor quite differently from the governess. He received no lengthy lectures on making himself likable or on how to win over his charge. Indeed, he had no need. He gave in to all the boy’s whims. Perhaps, at first, the mother’s aim was simply to make sure her darling was treated with appropriate kindness. Very soon this may have turned into a real attraction. Her brother could be very attractive, capable of uttering the wittiest things, speaking gravely at times, his sentences taking fresh and unexpected turns. Anne, who so often felt unable to speak up, could not help being proud of her brother. Above all, he was capable of giving his interlocutor the impression that he or she was fascinating. Indeed, he found Mrs. R. fascinating.

Anne, sitting upstairs in Emily’s sitting room, sewing while her sister writes, can still see Mrs. R.’s broad face suddenly lit up and laughing without restraint. Ah! Why had she not intervened? And how much was real and how much a figment of her brother’s imagination?

Anne realizes now that she, too, vicariously, caught some of her brother’s bright glow. She was permitted to grow closer to the girls, whom the mother increasingly ignored. She was even allowed to grow closer to their mother.

“I’m so glad you suggested your brother for the position,” Mrs. R. said to Anne one morning, rustling into the schoolroom in a low-cut, pastel silk, bestrewn with ribands, a nosegay at her full bosom. Smelling of strong, sweet perfume, her cheeks flushed, she looked youthful, happy. She put her beringed hand on Anne’s shoulder, leaned a little. “He’s the first tutor who has known how to take Edmund in hand. We are so happy to have him here.” She paused and added, “Indeed, we are happy to have both of you here,” and she bent down and brushed Anne’s cheek with her lips. What could Anne say? She wrote to her father, knowing the letter would be read aloud with pleasure to the whole family, that they were both much appreciated in their positions.

“You cannot imagine how kind she is to me,” Anne remembers her brother telling her one morning early as he rushed by her in the hall, his hair curled, blue eyes lit up, a bunch of wild, dew-wet bluebells in his hand, going into Mrs. R.’s room. She had put her hand on his arm, leaned toward him, and whispered: “Be careful, Brani,” but had he even heard? He had never listened to her, to anyone. He was being Northangerland, his invented character, inspired by Byron, and Byron’s was the only voice he seems to have heard.

“How little she receives when so much should be accorded to her,” he whispered darkly to Anne, his eyes flashing with anger, as they both stood in the drawing room one evening before dinner and Mr. R. paced back and forth in his black attire, looking aggravated and somber at his lady’s side, pontificating. It was increasingly clear that her brother was taking on the role of knight errant. But even then she had not realized that it would be Mrs. R. who would seduce him.

For she had seen them together that morning early on the beach at Scarborough where the family summered. She loved to go there at dawn to walk in the freedom of the sand, the rocks, and the sea. There was never anyone there at that hour except for a few grooms airing their masters’ horses, five or six riders, and a few elderly gentlemen walking for their health.

That morning, lifting her eyes in the dazzle of early light, she saw the gulls wheeling above and a man and a woman accompanied by a small black dog. At first she had not recognized them, but had only thought they were standing too close for people in a public place. Then she had noticed that the woman’s hand was on the man’s face, in an unmistakable gesture of tenderness, a caress, and she had seen the red of the young man’s hair.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

T
hrough the changing seasons of the year, Anne continues to watch her brother drift further into his own world. She works on her second novel, one about a woman tied to an increasingly degraded man, a woman who finally escapes her husband and comes with her child to inhabit a new place, a mysterious tenant with an unknown past, like Charlotte’s Mr. Rochester. She writes
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
all through the winter and spring while extraordinary events occur in Charlotte’s life.

Jane Eyre
comes out before her own and Emily’s books. Newby has asked for more work on
Wuthering Heights
, so that their books will not come out until December.
Jane Eyre
is published by George Smith to instant success, whereas their books are either ignored or compared unfavorably to their sister’s. Anne tries not to read the reviews, not to think about them. She struggles to take pleasure in Charlotte’s great success. She turns with determination to the writing and publishing of her second book for solace, hoping to do better this time, to write something with a wider canvas, something that will not be forgotten.

Now Charlotte holds another letter in her trembling hand. She looks flushed and cross. Recently, Charlotte has seemed so happy, delighted with one good review after another arriving in the post. Has her
Jane Eyre
not been called a “book of decided power,” “one of the most powerful domestic romances,” “full of youthful vigor and imagination”? Her book has even had a great run in America.

Yet today Charlotte’s hair, usually so neat, and the skirt of her gray muslin dress are in disarray. Her cheeks, often so pale, are flushed. She waves her new letter in the air at her sisters and announces in an irate tone, “Your publisher, that shuffling scamp, is up to his old tricks! We have to put a stop to this! I don’t know how you can continue to deal with this unscrupulous man! Why did you let him publish your new book, Anne?”

Anne puts down her sewing and looks across the room at Emily, who takes her feet from the fender and looks back at her. In this the two sisters have remained united. Newby, though he has delayed the process and though there were many errors in the text, has published both
Agnes Grey
and
Wuthering Heights
, as he has promised. He had taken a chance with their first books.
Wuthering Heights
has been called tasteless and shocking: “Readers would be disgusted, almost sickened, by details of cruelty, inhumanity, and the most diabolical hate and vengeance.” Even when praised, it was mistakenly regarded as an early and artless book by the writer of
Jane Eyre
.

Despite, or perhaps even because of these reviews, the books have not sold badly. Newby, unscrupulous though he may be in the use of Charlotte’s name and in publishing only two hundred and fifty instead of the promised three hundred and fifty books initially, has managed to promote the sales. So how could they not remain with him, who has even brought out a second edition of their books and has promised to publish both their second novels, despite all this storm of opprobrium? Of course Anne turned to him for her second book.

Emily comes forcefully to her younger sister’s rescue. She draws herself up, puts one hand on her hip, and says, “What do you mean? Newby gave Anne decent terms this time. She has already had fifty pounds from him. Her book is doing quite well, almost as well as your own, despite your recommendation not to bring it out.”

Charlotte stares at Emily with something like furor in her eyes. Anne presses her hands together and says a silent prayer:
God give us peace.
She looks around the small room and feels the lack of space. A close summer evening. She can hardly breathe. Often, these days, she is overcome with breathlessness, particularly at moments like this. She gets up and opens a window, breathes in the air. She can hear the church bells chiming the hour.

These days there has been increasing dissent among the sisters over the smallest of things. Anne and Emily are sometimes aligned stubbornly, bitterly, against Charlotte, clinging to their publisher; sometimes Emily, deeply hurt by the scathing criticism and incomprehension of her “disagreeable” book, faces off against the others.

Anne notices Emily’s pale face and belabored breathing. She, too, breathes with difficulty and suffers perhaps even more from this constant and unfavorable comparison with her sister’s book. Anne has seen the reviews Emily keeps in her desk, those that compare her book unfavorably to Charlotte’s. The critics have not understood her.

Emily has told Anne she longs to escape this world, which she calls “this shattered prison.” Anne cannot follow her there. Indeed, she has worked constantly to finish her second novel, refusing even to go out walking with her sisters. She has taken a certain satisfaction in being the first of the three to publish a second book, and with some success, albeit a scandalous one.

Now, as Emily lifts her head, she sits down beside her and gives her a grateful look, puts her hand on her arm.

Charlotte has told her youngest sister that her new book is just too close to the naked truth. “You need to varnish, to soften, to conceal,” she counseled her, speaking of their brother’s rapid descent almost to madness. But the public has perused with great interest the story of the drunken husband and his unfortunate wife, much of which came from her observation of her brother and her own experience at Thorp Green.

Charlotte says, “If I can’t say what I think to you two, to whom can I speak? I’m sorry to have to say this, but I still think the publication of that book a mistake. In any case, this is going too far. I have thought this over all day and I just feel I cannot stand by and do nothing with my publishers accusing me of dishonesty!”

“What has Mr. Newby done now that displeases you so?” Anne asks. Charlotte comes to her, thrusts her letter from George Smith into her hands, and stands over her while she reads.

“Newby has told the American publishers your novel is the second written by the author of
Jane Eyre
. He maintains all our books have been written by the same person,” Charlotte tells them. She pulls out a chair and sits down at the dining room table beside Anne and turns to her. She puts a clenched fist on the table. Her nose looks large and red and her eyes flash as she adds, “We have to do something about this. It’s not fair to George Smith, who has been so correct in all his dealings with me. He had promised them my second book! I don’t care if the public confuses our identities, but I can’t have my publisher suffer.”