Death of a Schoolgirl: The Jane Eyre Chronicles (30 page)

Waverly shook his head and sighed. A deep frown creased
his forehead as his whole face closed down. Behind his spectacles, his eyes grew narrow and flinty.

“You are excused, Mrs. Rochester. Or Miss Eyre. As you prefer. We are done here. For now.”

I slipped out of the superintendent’s office and ran up the stairs, stopping briefly at the first landing, trying not to call attention to myself. Waverly had come out of Mrs. Thurston’s office to introduce himself to the Biltmores.

“Mr. and Mrs. Biltmore, may I tender my deepest condolences? I am here at your service,” he said before bowing deeply. “I am sorry to bother you, but we have much to discuss.”

“This has ruined everything! He will be furious!” yelled Mr. Biltmore. “And you, you are complicit as well. Bringing her here was your idea.”

This last salvo was directed at his wife, who continued to cry only harder.

“Really, sir,” Mrs. Thurston said.

“Do you have any idea what has happened here? Tell her, Waverly!”

“This matter demands privacy,” said Waverly. “Come. We can talk behind closed doors.”

Waverly escorted Mr. and Mrs. Biltmore into Mrs. Thurston’s office. The superintendent brought up the rear, sniveling loudly into a soiled handkerchief.

“Where is Caje? Where is he?” Mr. Biltmore asked. “I shall tear him apart with my bare hands! He was supposed to watch after her!”

Then the door closed with a bang.

The exchange struck me as exceedingly odd, but this was not the time to stop and ponder it.

“
Laboro, laboras, laborat
.” Miss Jones droned her way through the forms of the Latin verb.

The students’ heads cocked with attentiveness as they tried
to make sense of the shouts from the ground floor. But they turned as one when they heard my footsteps, and their faces cheered at the sight of me, although they wore a sense of confusion like a heavy blanket tossed over their small frames.

Miss Jones continued her recitation in a voice as steady and measured as a clock hand. Evidently she had powers of concentration that exceeded mine, because she continued on about Latin verb formations as if nothing amiss or unusual had happened in the hallway one story below.

But she must have heard the commotion! Or the upset it caused!

A wet trail of tears streaked Nettie’s face. Rufina was digging at a spot on her knee. Rose twirled a strand of hair as fast as the spinning of a dragonfly’s wings. And Adèle’s pale skin took on the unwholesome pallor of chalk.

“Come with me, Seniors.” I gestured toward the secondary classroom. “Thank you, Miss Jones, for attending to my young ladies while I was detained.”

“But of course.” She nodded.

My students seemed rooted to the spot and stood there looking dazed and confused. Instead of chastising them, I reached out and took Adèle by the hand. In return, she took Nettie’s hand, who took Rose’s, who in turn grabbed Rufina by the fingers. Thus our human chain moved to the far end of the second classroom. They waited as I slid the divider in place and latched the partition closed. “Sit down, girls. Let us chat for a moment.” Any notion we could get to work right away was absurd. Instead, I chose to address the commotion they had heard.

“Come, sit close to me,” I said, directing my charges to bunch up while I took a spot in the middle. “I am here. Do not be frightened.”

“That man who was yelling,” Rose said, “he must be Selina’s papa.”

“And her mama is here, too. I remember the day they
brought her. She came in a big black coach pulled by twin bays.” Rufina sighed. “The horses were lovely. I wanted to pat them.”

“It is natural for her parents to grieve, girls. They have lost a child they love.”

Nettie’s lower lip quivered. “Lucky Selina.”

“Pardon?” Nettie didn’t seem the kind of child who would either employ or understand sarcasm.

“Her papa loves her. He is awful broken up about her being gone. I wish my papa cared as much for me. He does not want me around. Mama does not, either. Not since my little brother came. They only care for him because he’s got hair.”

I believe she meant that her parents were pleased because the boy was an “heir,” but this was definitely the wrong time to discuss homophones.

I pulled Nettie close to me. “It might seem that way, but I am sure they love you very much. And you have a Father in heaven who loves you. All of you. Remember that, won’t you? Now, would you show me your drawings, please?”

Their work ranged from accomplished (Rufina) to disastrous (Adèle). After a quick glance at the sketches, I said, “I want each of you to write a paragraph for me in German. The topic is Selina. I find it helpful, sometimes, to put my thoughts and feelings on paper. I think you will, too. Please get started.”

The girls bent over their projects, letting the noise of pencils rubbing against paper fill the quiet spaces between us. As they worked, I roughed out a sketch of my assailant at the coaching inn. Thus our faculties were occupied until the commotion of voices and footsteps told us the Biltmores and Mr. Waverly were leaving.

My students barely registered the departure. They kept at their work until the bell rang for dinner. The girls fell into line behind Rufina, who led us downstairs.

What did Mr. Biltmore mean when he said, “This has ruined everything”? And when he singled out Caje? I vowed
to press Miss Miller for answers about this and about the marks on Nettie’s back.

However, when we arrived in the dining room, Nan Miller’s chair again sat empty, as did Mrs. Thurston’s. Miss Jones led us in saying our prayers over the food.

After our meal, the girls worked on their needle arts. Once they seemed occupied, I took a seat very close to Miss Jones and whispered, “May I speak to you in private?”

We moved to a corner of the room. “Is harsh punishment allowed here?”

She almost laughed. “Good heavens! Only if you think copying Bible verses is harsh. Why do you ask? Does one of the students vex you?”

“No. This morning when they were dressing I noticed scars on one of the girls’ backs. I have no experience to judge these things, but they looked to me like caning marks.”

“Indeed!” Her eyebrows shot straight up. “Then she must have been disciplined at home, because neither Mrs. Webster nor Mrs. Thurston would ever allow such a thing here. I believe the worst punishment ever meted out has been sending Adèle to bed without her supper.”

I nodded, wondering if that were truly the case. Miss Jones leaned over and said, “One of the girls showed me the assignment you gave them, sketching the robin. I long to improve my artistic abilities. Would you critique some of my work?”

“With pleasure,” I said. For the rest of the session, we viewed her portfolio. She had a good eye for color, but her technique needed refinement. I made a few suggestions, which she seemed to take to heart.

I admit, however, that it was difficult to focus. My eyes strayed to the door, expecting to see Miss Miller return at any moment. I rehearsed the suspicions I harbored, recalling that she had not elaborated on her life during that time when we lost contact.

“Circumstances changed,” she had said. A neat sidestep.

Was there a portion of her history that bore relevance to the situation at hand?

Was my old friend a murderer?

Mrs. Thurston escorted a careworn spindle of a woman into our midst. “This is Mrs. Grover. She’s here to measure for the mourning clothes.” The shabby twig of a guest silently measured up each of us, first with a pair of red, swollen, and crusty eyes.

As head girl, Rufina took the lead, standing on a footstool and submitting herself to Mrs. Grover’s quick ministrations with a tape measure, waiting patiently as the fast-moving woman stopped to scribble notes on a dirty scrap of paper. Children no older than these students would sit up all night sewing the mourning clothes by candlelight. The garments would be ready for wearing tomorrow.

This industry gave me pause. The many reversals of fortune in my own life led me to question what determined our fates. What unseen hand decreed that one child would stitch all night in a rookery and pay tuppence to sleep in a bed with a half dozen others, only to be turned out on the street in the morning, while the girls of Alderton House yawned and stretched, splashed in basins of clear water, and broke their
fast with a table full of food? Where was the justice? Why the vast inequity? What loving God so neglected the majority of his children to spoil and pander to the rest?

The door flew open and Mrs. Thurston again waddled her way to the center of the room, pushing aside poor Mrs. Grover and causing the seamstress to lose a mouthful of pins.

“Attention!”

Miss Miller shuffled along in Mrs. Thurston’s wake, but my old friend did not look at me. She kept her eyes on the floor.

“Selina Biltmore’s earthly remains will come back to Alderton House,” said the superintendent. “Since the family is from Brighton, this will allow friends in London to pay their respects before Selina makes her final journey home. She will be displayed in the front parlor. None of you have any reason to gawk, and I shall give strict instructions to the midwife in attendance that anyone lingering there will be reported to me.”

Seeing the confusion on my face, Miss Jones leaned over and whispered, “The midwife safeguards the body, to keep it from being snatched by resurrectionists. Not a problem outside the city, is it?”

No, it certainly wasn’t. The superintendent concluded that “there will be no reason for any of you to use the front parlor except to pay your condolences.”

When Mrs. Thurston speared the Amazonian teacher with an angry look, admonishing Miss Jones for whispering to me, my colleague spoke up. “I was only telling Miss Eyre that I would be happy to make a funerary brooch from Selina’s hair. Rather time-consuming, but a lovely remembrance. I made one last year when my brother died.”

“Do so,” said Mrs. Thurston. With that, she turned on her heel and left us.

“Please accept my condolences regarding your brother. That must have been horrid.” I could only draw on my deep feelings for my Rivers cousins, though I had to assume those between siblings were many times stronger.

Miss Jones dabbed her eyes. “I come from a family of scholars. My brother Adonis was a historian, who traveled to France to do research. Sadly, he fell in love with a disreputable woman and was killed by one of her jealous lovers. We had hoped to open our own village school. Ministering to poor children was our dream, you see.”

That explained her harsh words about the French people. “Words prove inadequate; however, again, I am sorry for your loss. He sounds like he was a wonderful person.”

“The brightest mind I have ever known. A gentle soul who never stood up for himself or struck back. We often argued over whether a Christian should always turn the other cheek or whether ‘an eye for an eye’ was the more valid philosophy. He was the most forgiving and accepting of any person I’ve ever known.”

I understood the conundrum. “What did you decide?”

Her smile stopped short of her eyes. “I firmly believe we have a duty to strike back at those who harm us and their minions. Elsewise they escape to do evil again and again. The least among us lacks a champion, unless each of us takes a stand against wrongdoing.”

The evening dragged on, and a minor squabble broke out among two of the Junior girls. The prospect of Selina’s body “coming home” preyed on all our minds, making concentration difficult.

Trying to redirect my own thoughts, I returned to my sketch of the thief who had stolen my reticule. His eyes captured the bulk of my efforts, as I made them large and protruding. As the image grew under my pencil, I shook off a strange sensation that I knew this person.

Of course he looks familiar; he robbed you,
said a voice in my head. But even so, a certain bulging of the eyes prickled at my memory. Did I know someone with similar features? As I finished the sketch to my satisfaction, I reminded myself that
my entire life had been turned topsy-turvy. Perhaps I was seeing resemblances where none existed.