Prologue
You may think you know the story.
Oh, heard that one, have you? Well, we say again: you may think you know the story. By all accounts it’s a good one: a penniless, orphaned young woman becomes a governess in a wealthy household, catches the eye of the rich and stern master, and (sigh) falls deeply in love. It’s all very passionate and swoonworthy, but before they can be married, a—gasp!—terrible treachery is revealed. Then there’s fire and despair, some aimless wandering, starvation, a little bit of gaslighting, but in the end, the romance works out. The girl (Miss Eyre) gets the guy (Mr. Rochester). They live happily ever after. Which means everybody’s happy, right?
Um . . . no. We have a different tale to tell. (Don’t we always?) And what we’re about to reveal is more than a simple reimagining of one of literature’s most beloved novels. This version, dear reader, is true. There really was a girl. (Two girls, actually.) There was, indeed, a terrible treachery and a great fire. But throw out pretty much everything else you know about the story. This isn’t going to be like any classic romance you’ve ever read.
It all started, if we’re going to go way, way back, in 1788 with King George III. The king had always been able to see ghosts. No big deal, really. He didn’t find them frightening in the least. Sometimes he even had amusing conversations with long-deceased courtiers and unfairly beheaded queens who were floating about the palace grounds.
But one day, disaster struck. The king was walking in the garden when a mischievous ghost rattled the branches of a nearby tree.
“Who’s there?” called the king, because, as it happened, he was without his spectacles.
“Look at me,” answered the troublesome ghost in its most stately voice. “I’m the King of Prussia!”
The king immediately dropped into a bow. Quite coincidentally, he had been expecting a visit from the King of Prussia. “I am most pleased to meet you, Your Highness!” he exclaimed.
Then he tried to shake the tree’s hand.
This, again, would have been no big deal, but for the dozen or so lords and ladies who had accompanied the king on his walk in the garden, who didn’t see the ghost, of course, only the king mistaking a tree for royalty. From that moment on, poor George was referred to as “Mad King George,” a title he greatly resented.
So George assembled a team made up of every kind of person he thought could help him be rid of these irksome ghosts: priests who specialized in exorcisms, doctors with some knowledge of the occult, philosophers, scientists, fortune-tellers, and anybody, in general, who dabbled in the supernatural.
And that’s how the Royal Society for the Relocation of Wayward Spirits was established.
In the years that followed, the Society, as it came to be called, functioned as a prominent and well-respected part of English life. If there was something strange in your neighborhood, you could, um, write the Society a letter, and they would promptly send an agent to take care of it.
Fast-forward right past the reign of George IV, to William IV ascending England’s throne. William was practical. He didn’t believe in ghosts. He considered the Society to be nothing more than a collection of odious charlatans who had been pulling the wool over the eyes of his poor disturbed predecessors for many years. Plus it was a terrible drain on the taxpayers’ dime (er, shilling). So almost as soon as he was officially crowned king, William cut the Society out of the royal budget. This led to his infamous falling-out and subsequent feud with Sir Arthur Wellesley, aka the Duke of Wellington, aka the leader and Lord President of the RWS Society, which was now underfunded and under-respected.
This brings us to the real start of our story: northern England, 1834, and the aforementioned penniless, orphaned girl. And a writer. And a boy with a vendetta.
Let’s start with the girl.
Her name was Jane.
ONE
Charlotte
There was no possibility of taking a walk through the grounds of Lowood school without hearing the dreadful and yet utterly exciting news: Mr. Brocklehurst had been—gasp!—murdered. The facts were these: Mr. Brocklehurst had come for one of his monthly “inspections.” He’d started right off by complaining about the difficulty of running a school for impoverished children, the way said children were always, for whatever reason, annoyingly asking for more food—more, sir, please may I have some more? Then he’d settled down by the fire in the parlor, devoured the heaping plate of cookies that Miss Temple had so kindly offered him, and promptly keeled over in the middle of afternoon tea. Poisoned. The tea, evidently, not the cookies. Although if he’d been poisoned by the cookies the girls at Lowood school felt it would have served him right.
The girls didn’t shed so much as a tear over Mr. Brocklehurst. While he’d been in charge they’d been very cold and very hungry, and a great many of them had died of the Graveyard Disease. (There are many terms for this particular illness over the course of history: the Affliction, consumption, tuberculous, etc., but during this period the malady was most often referred to as “the Graveyard Disease,” because if you were unlucky enough to catch it, that’s where you were headed. Anyway, back to Mr. Brocklehurst.) Mr. Brocklehurst had believed that it was good for the soul to have only burnt porridge to eat. (He meant the poverty-stricken, destitute soul, that is; the dignified, upper-class soul thrived, he found, on roast beef and plum pudding. And cookies, evidently.) Since Mr. Brocklehurst’s untimely demise, conditions at the school had already improved tremendously. The girls unanimously agreed: whoever had killed Mr. Brocklehurst had done them a great service.
But who had killed Mr. Brocklehurst?
On this subject, the girls could only speculate. So far nobody—not the local authorities nor Scotland Yard—had been able to uncover the culprit.
“It was Miss Temple,” Charlotte heard a girl say as she crossed the gardens. Katelyn was her name. “She served the tea, didn’t she?”
“No, it was Miss Scatcherd,” argued Victoria, her friend. “I heard she had a husband once, Miss Scatcherd did, who died suspiciously.”
“That’s just a rumor,” said Katelyn. “Who’d marry Miss Scatcherd with a face like hers? I still say it was Miss Temple.”
Victoria shook her head. “Miss Temple wouldn’t hurt a fly. She’s so sweet-natured and quiet.”
“Oh, tosh,” Katelyn said. “Everyone knows it’s the quiet ones who you have to watch out for.”
Charlotte smiled. She collected rumors the way some girls liked to accumulate dolls, recording the juicier details into a small notebook she kept. (Rumors were the one commodity that Lowood had in spades.) If the rumor were good enough, perhaps she’d compose a story about it later, to tell to her sisters at bedtime. But the death of Mr. Brocklehurst was much better than mere gossip passed around by a gaggle of teenage girls. It was a genuine, bona fide mystery.
The very best kind of story.
Once outside the walled gardens of Lowood, Charlotte pulled her notebook from her pocket and set off into the woods beyond the school at a brisk pace. It was difficult to walk and write at the same time, but she had long ago mastered this skill. Nothing so insignificant as getting from one destination to another should impede her writing, of course, and she knew the way by heart.