I was a precocious actress in her eyes: she sincerely looked on me as a compound of virulent passions, mean spirit, and dangerous duplicity.
Invitations to the main house were rebuffed in the rudest manner I could think of: silence. Even adults who are frightened of children come to their senses sooner or later, however, and in early June, I opened a missive demanding I appear before Mrs. Patience Barbary at five o’clock for tea. When I entered the drawing room, I discovered that three people awaited me instead of two.
Aunt Patience presided over the ivory-and-green-striped settee, an expression of foregone success staining her froggish mouth. The fact that her full widow’s weeds looked no different after my mother’s death (how could they have?) made me long to slit wounds in the taffeta. Edwin, lips already faintly dusted with sugar from the lemon cakes, offered me a polite smile.
In that instant, I knew—as I think I had suspected—that Edwin had been the one spying upon me.
“Jane, this is Mr. Vesalius Munt of Lowan Bridge School. Mr. Munt, this is my niece, Jane.”
Doubtless the reader has heard cautionary reports of granite-eyed patriarchs who run schools for profit and, shall we say, misrepresent their amenities? You are partly prepared for what is to come, then. Mr. Munt was clad head to toe in black; his forehead was high, his sable boots neatly polished, and his mien sober. Here Mr. Munt’s superficial resemblance to fiction ended.
First, he seemed highly intelligent. He watched those around him closely; this was not a man who ignored the way I settled as far as I could from my aunt, nor who would remark upon it until the observation suited his interests.
Second, Mr. Vesalius Munt was handsome. He was aged somewhere between forty and fifty, but the map of his face—from thoughtful wrinkles to clear grey eyes to slender chin—suggested naturally benevolent inclinations and announced his regret at his self-imposed sternness of character.
Third, he was a tyrant, which returns us to the more familiar literary archetypes. He was a great whopping unrepentant tyrant, and he enjoyed the vocation, its artistry—I could see it in his perfectly disarranged black hair and his humbly clasped hands. I thought, with a squirming stomach, that here was a man who would set a snake over hot coals simply to watch it writhe.
“Miss Jane Steele,” he greeted me. “You have been orphaned within the month, I am sorry to hear. God’s ways are inscrutable, but trust in Him nevertheless brings light to the darkest of valleys.”
My aunt primly tucked her chin within her neck. “She is a clever enough girl, only mannerless and stubborn, Mr. Munt. Her intelligence needs moulding into humility and her character into an orderly Christian one.”
“Then I won’t remind you of my mother any longer?” I hissed.
Aunt Patience whipped out a glint of lacquered wood and began fanning herself with black lace. She wanted something between us, even if a scrap of cobwebby cloth.
Mr. Munt’s gaze flickered between us like stage swords, all shine and speed and subtle games. “Your aunt has informed me that your mother was . . . troubled,” he said with tremendous care. “It is not unusual for the children of lunatics to—”
“Mamma was not a lunatic!” I cried, aghast.
“No indeed,” seconded Edwin in a fawning manner which sickened me.
“Her constitution was delicate.” My aunt sounded like the teeth were being pried from her head. “Artists are often highly strung.”
“Art is a curse,” Vesalius Munt agreed, shifting on the hard cane chair. “An infection eating away at godly reserves of abnegation, chastity, and meekness. Show me a contented artist, Mrs. Barbary, and I will show you a dabbler—a pretender, a drudge. True artists belong to a miserable race. Jane, they tell me that your passions are strange ones, and your upbringing . . . eccentric. I run a school, you see, and your aunt thinks you would make an excellent pupil there.”
The word school provoked the first sensation other than dull misery I had felt since before I could recall. Mamma had been at boarding school as a girl, in the south of France. On holidays they walked to the glimmering seashore, where pebbles clattered under their slippers and the sea spray chased them shrieking with laughter back to the dunes. She learnt both dancing and painting there.
Going to school already seemed adventurous, but my fingers tingled when I realised it would also be imitative of my