Jane frowned. “I thought you were writing about the school.”
This was true. Before all of this business with Mr. Brocklehurst, Charlotte had begun writing (drum roll, please) her Very-First-Ever-Attempt-at-a-Novel. Charlotte had always heard that it was best to write what you know . . . and all Charlotte really knew, at this point in her life, was Lowood, so the First Novel had been about life at a school for impoverished girls. If you’d flipped through Charlotte’s notebook, you would have found page after page of her observations of the buildings, the grounds, notes on the history of the school, detailed renderings of the individual teachers and their mannerisms, the girls’ struggles with cold, the Graveyard Disease, and, above all, the abominable porridge.
Consider the following passage from page twenty-seven:
Ravenous, and now very faint, I devoured a spoonful or two of my portion without thinking of its taste; but the first edge of hunger blunted, I perceived I had got in hand a nauseous mess: burnt porridge is almost as bad as rotten potatoes; famine itself soon sickens over it. The spoons were moved most slowly: I saw each girl taste her food and try to swallow it; but in most cases the effort was soon relinquished. Breakfast was over, and none had breakfasted.
That had all been fine, Charlotte thought, especially that bit about the porridge. But this was supposed to be a NOVEL. There had to be more than just simple observation. There had to be a story. A plot. A level of intrigue.
She was on the right track, she was fairly certain. The main subject of Charlotte’s novel was a peculiar girl named Jane . . . Frere, a plain, penniless orphan who must struggle to survive in the harsh environment of the unforgiving school. And Jane was smart. Resourceful. A bit odd, truth be told, but compelling. Likeable. Charlotte had always felt that Jane was the perfect protagonist for a novel (although she hadn’t told Jane that she had the honor of being immortalized in fiction. She was waiting, she supposed, for the right time for that conversation). So the character was good. The setting was interesting. But the novel itself had been somewhat lacking in excitement.
Until the death of Mr. Brocklehurst, that is. It had been a most fortuitous turn of events.
“The girls are beginning to theorize that it was Miss Scatcherd. What do you think?” Charlotte lifted her glasses to her eyes again to watch Jane’s face for any telltale reaction, but Jane’s expression remained completely blank.
“It wasn’t Miss Scatcherd,” Jane said matter-of-factly.
“You sound so certain,” Charlotte prodded. “How do you know?”
Jane cleared her throat delicately. “Can we talk about something else, perhaps? I’m so weary of Mr. Brocklehurst.”
How doubly suspicious that now Jane wanted to change the subject, but Charlotte obliged. “Well, I did hear a good bit of news today. Apparently the Society is coming here.”
Jane’s brow rumpled. “The Society?”
“You know, the Society. For the Relocation of Wayward Spirits. There was a ‘Royal’ in there somewhere, too, at one time, but they had to drop it on account of their falling out with the king. Which I think must be a terribly interesting story.”
Jane’s brow was still rumpled. “Well, of course I’ve heard of them. But I never—”
“Do you not believe in ghosts?” Charlotte chattered on. “I believe in ghosts. I think I may have seen one myself once, back in the cemetery at Haworth a few years ago. At least I thought I did.”
“What I’d like to know is, what do they do with them?” Jane said gravely.
“What do you mean?”
“The Society. What do they do with the ghosts they capture?”
Charlotte tilted her head to one side, thinking. “Do you know, I’ve no idea. I’ve only heard that if you’re having a problem with a ghost, you send for the Society, and they apparently all wear black masks that are quite striking, and then they come and . . .” She gestured vaguely into the air. “Poof. No more ghost. No more trouble.”
“Poof,” Jane repeated softly.
“Poof!” Charlotte clapped her hands together. “Isn’t it exciting that they’re coming?”
“They’re coming here.” Jane pressed a hand to her forehead as if she was suddenly feeling faint. Which didn’t alarm Charlotte, as young women of this time period felt faint regularly. Because corsets.
“Well, they’re not coming to Lowood, specifically,” Charlotte amended. “Apparently the Society has been hired to do some kind of exorcism on Tuesday night at the Tully Pub in Oxenhope—you know the one they say has the shrieking lady over the bar? That’s what I heard this morning from Miss Smith. But perhaps they should come to Lowood. Just think of how many girls have died here of the Graveyard Disease.” Two of those girls had been her older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth. Charlotte cleared her throat. “The school must be bustling with ghosts.”
Jane began to pace.
“We should request that they visit Lowood,” decided Charlotte. Then she had a thunderous idea. “We should ask them to solve Mr. Brocklehurst’s murder!” She paused and peered through her spectacles. “Unless there’s some reason you can think of that we wouldn’t want to solve Mr. Brocklehurst’s murder.”
Jane put a hand to her chest, as if she was now having true difficulty breathing. “How could they solve Mr. Brocklehurst’s murder?”
“They can speak to the dead, apparently. I imagine they could simply ask him.”
“I have to go.” Jane started to gather up her painting supplies, in such a hurry that she smeared paint on her dress. Then she was practically bounding up the hill in the direction of the school. Charlotte watched her go. She opened her notebook.
It’s the quiet ones who you have to watch out for, she read.
Jane Eyre had the opportunity and the motive to kill Mr. Brocklehurst, but could she have actually done it? Was she capable of cold-blooded murder for the good of the school? And if not, then why was she so agitated about the news of the Society? If not a murder, what else could Jane be hiding?
It was a mystery.
One that Charlotte Brontë intended to solve.
TWO
Jane
Jane stood across the road from the Tully Pub, her gaze fixed upon the door. The scent of pork scratchings and pickled eggs wafting from the building made her stomach cramp painfully. Her supper of a spoonful of porridge and a half glass of water were hardly adequate sustenance for a girl of eighteen. (But at least the single spoonful of porridge tasted better now that Mr. Brocklehurst was dead, she thought, which was a small comfort.)
A man came down the road. Jane checked for a mask, but he was a regular man, wearing regular clothing and walking in a regular manner. He glanced in her direction but did not notice her, and then he swung the door to the pub wide open—inside was warm firelight and more men and a burst of raucous laughter and music—and disappeared into the room, the door slamming shut behind him.
She sighed. Before she’d arrived, she had expected to see a sign across the door of the pub reading “Keep out! Exorcism of Screaming Ghost Lady, and other Regular Maintenance.” Surely a “relocation,” or whatever it was called, would be a big to-do. But she’d been standing there for nearly half an hour, and in that time men had been freely coming and going out of the pub as they would any other night. Young women like Jane didn’t belong in pubs, but she had to know if there was a ghost, and she really had to know what the Society would do to said ghost.