My most heartfelt condolences upon behalf of the firm. Mr. S—— was a highly valued patron of Sneeves, Swansea, and Turner. I await your arrival and assure you that the documents have already been drawn up to the late lamented Mr. S——’s satisfaction.
Humbly,
Cyrus Sneeves, Esq.
I could only understand that these documents referred to my eventual ownership of Highgate House; puzzled, I passed them to Agatha, who carefully folded both letters together again and returned them to the trunk.
“Well, that weren’t what I’d been expecting.” Agatha’s squinting eyes narrowed further.
“My mother wrote that when my father died?”
“A wise hen always sees her chicks are looked after. Now, there’s pickled ’erring and toast to be had. Your mother’s things seem to ’earten you, and this trunk will be ’ere tomorrow, and the day after that.”
Agatha was again strictly correct, but mistaken in her accidental assumption that I would be present.
“Did you ever meet my father, Agatha?” I questioned as she shut the trunk and heaved herself upright.
“Why, bless your ’eart, Miss Steele, what a question.” Agatha tsked fondly and trudged downstairs.
Infants own memories, perhaps, but by the time I was nine, hazy visions of Jonathan Steele were locked away like mementoes in a safe to which I knew not the combination. The bread crumbs I had gathered into his portrait scarce made a crust, let alone a meal.
Your father was un homme magnifique, and his eyes were the brown of sweet chocolate just as yours are, and he never stopped thinking of ways to make us safe, from my mother.
’E was as good a man as any, and no worse than some, from Agatha.
Don’t speak of him, for God’s sake, from Aunt Patience.
Now I knew he was a banker in Paris with an English solicitor friend my mother trusted; I imagined Jonathan Steele a positive hero of finance with sweeping moustaches, who had rescued my mother from penury with a flourish of his fancifully enormous pen.
“How did he meet Mamma?” I called from the top of the creaking garret stairs.
“You’ll use up all your chatter and be clean out o’ words, and then ’owever shall we pass the time, Miss Jane?” Agatha chided, beckoning.
I wondered over the unsettling notion of words running dry. My footsteps as I followed her made no more sound than the virtuous dead, fast asleep beneath their coverlets of stone.
• • •
Slowly, I recovered my appetite—and concurrently, my keen interest in rebellion.
My aunt Patience thought girls ought to be decorative. Indeed, Jane Eyre tucks herself away in a curtained alcove at the beginning of her saga, and thus at least attempts docility.
I was not a fictional orphan but a real one, however. Waking in the full blaze of the May afternoons, I would eat nothing save brown bread and butter for lunch, and the steaming milk soup Agatha made with sweet almonds, eggs, and cinnamon for my tea. My ugly—dare I say French—opinion of Aunt Patience kept her away temporarily, and the rest of the time I spoke low nonsense to the horses or slunk through the woods where the marsh grasses swooned into the embrace of the pond. In the stables, I could allow the stink of manure and clean sweat to calm me as I brushed my last remaining confidants; but in the forest, my musings turned darkly fantastical.
I will set fire to the main house, and then they will be sorry they made Mamma unhappy.
I will run away to Paris, where I will be awake only when the stars shine through the window and the boulevards are empty.
I will find my mother’s grave and live there off of dew and nectar.
True peace did not visit me; but at times, an edgy calm like falling asleep after a nightmare descended when I lost myself in melancholy.
At times, I suspected I was not alone.
As the days passed, my sense of being watched increased. Agatha gave me free rein apart from unlocking Mamma’s trunk every evening and packing satchels of apples for me to carry to the stables; she would never spy on me, I felt certain. The gardener was a wizened old thing, and the grooms paid me as little mind as did the servants at the main house. Patience Barbary thought the out-of-doors a treacherous bridge meant to convey her from one civilised structure to another.
Still I caught glimpses of another creature there in the trees, one with round eyes and a predator’s hungry stare; but by the time I understood that