Jane Eyre Read online

  First published in 2020 in Great Britain by

  Barrington Stoke Ltd

  18 Walker Street, Edinburgh, EH3 7LP

  This ebook edition first published in 2020

  www.barringtonstoke.co.uk

  Text © 2019 Tanya Landman

  The moral right of Tanya Landman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in any part in any form without the written permission of the publisher

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library upon request

  ISBN: 978-1-78112-952-4

  To Isaac and Jack, in the hope that they will finally read Jane Eyre

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  I was not loved.

  I was not wanted.

  I did not belong.

  I lived with my aunt and cousins, but I was not welcome in their house. My parents had died when I was a baby, and my uncle took me in. He didn’t live much longer than they had. I don’t remember any of them.

  My strange story starts on a wet winter’s day. There was no chance of taking a walk, and I was glad of it. I never liked being out with my cousins. They had rosy cheeks, golden hair, and brimmed with the kind of confidence only money can buy. They would stride ahead as we walked, and I’d be stomping along in their shadows. I was small, shabby, and the nursemaid nagged me at every step. The chilly air bit deep into my bones, but what bit even deeper was knowing I was disliked. That clamped its teeth right down into my soul.

  The wind blew so hard that wet winter’s day the rain fell sideways. No one dared set foot outdoors. My cousins were in the drawing room, clustered around their dear mama. She lay on the sofa, basking in the fire’s warmth like a well‑fed pig.

  I’d been told to go away. I was banished from their company for some sin or other, I don’t know what. I asked my aunt what I’d done wrong, but that just made things worse. Children were not meant to question their elders, my aunt said. It was unnatural. Odd. Children were meant to be cheerful and charming. And if they could not be cheerful and charming, they should at least be silent.

  Very well, I thought. I walked into the next room and shut the door behind me. I took a book from the shelf, climbed on to the window seat and pulled the curtains across so I was hidden from sight.

  I was all right until my cousin John came looking for me.

  John was fourteen years old. He’d been kept home from school these last few weeks because his mother feared he’d been exhausting himself. My aunt adored her son John: he was an angel fallen to earth in her eyes. A genius with the soul of a poet and the heart of a saint. Never has a mother been so mistaken.

  John was a selfish bully who cared little for his mother and less for his sisters. I was his one passion. He hated me. John attacked me not two or three times a week, or once or twice a day, but continually. I was four years younger and half his size. Every nerve in my body feared him. Every inch of my flesh shrank whenever he came near.

  I heard the door open and I froze. John was not intelligent or observant. He wouldn’t have seen me at all if one of his sisters hadn’t pointed out my hiding place. He came in, ordered me from the window seat and demanded, “What were you doing?”

  “Reading,” I replied.

  “Show me the book.”

  I placed it in his hands.

  “You’ve no right to take our books!” John said. “You’re an orphan, a beggar! You’ve no money. You should be on the streets, not living here at Gateshead, eating our food, wearing clothes my mother has paid for. I’ll teach you your place. Go and stand over there, by the door.”

  I did what I was told. There was no one to turn to for help. The servants could not afford to notice, and my aunt became blind and deaf whenever John raised a hand against me.

  He hurled the book. I dodged but too late. The big heavy volume hit me, and I fell, striking my head on the door. The cut bled, and along with the pain I felt a sudden, overwhelming rage. I’d suffered John for nearly ten years. But now I’d had enough!

  I’ll not say what I called him. It wasn’t polite. For a moment John stood gawping. He couldn’t believe I’d dared to stand up to him. He was so shocked!

  And then he ran at me. His hands grasped my hair, tugging so hard I thought he’d rip my scalp off. Blood ran down my neck, and I truly feared John was going to kill me. I lashed out, grabbing the only part of him I could reach. Digging in my nails I squeezed his soft flesh with all my might.

  I didn’t know what I’d done. I couldn’t even see with my head pulled back. John squealed like a pig, and that brought both my aunt and the maids running.

  John and I were dragged apart. I was called a wildcat. A demon. A fiend. And then my aunt told the maids, “Take her to the red room. Lock her in.”

  The red room.

  It was the largest, most splendid, most comfortably furnished of all the rooms in Gateshead House. And yet it was the room where no fire ever burned and no one ever slept. It was the room I would run past if I was alone in the corridor, because of the strange, unearthly air that seemed to seep under the door. My uncle had died in that room, and he’d lain there in his coffin for the week before his burial. That was nine years ago, but the red room still had the feel of a graveyard. The maids had to drag me every inch of the way, but they were two fully grown women and I was a scrawny scrap of a ten year old. They got me in there fast and then left me.

  A child in a haunted room. My rage turned to terror. The maids had not given me a candle, and the wet winter’s day was fast fading to night. I thought every draught was my uncle’s ghostly breath, every creak his ghostly bones, the wind howling down the chimney his ghostly wails. My fear grew moment by moment until I could bear it no more.

  And then a light flitted across the ceiling. It was probably just someone crossing the lawn outside carrying a storm lantern, but my mind was in no state to be sensible. I was sure that light was my uncle’s spirit coming to carry me down to hell.

  I screamed, and my screams summoned the maids. But they also summoned my aunt. I wept, I begged for mercy and I pleaded to be let out, but there was no heart in my aunt to melt. She pushed me back into the room.

  I must have had some sort of fit. I remember hearing my aunt’s feet going back down along the corridor. But after that? Nothing.

  I don’t know how long I was locked in the red room. Hours? Days? I’ve no idea. All I know is that when I woke I was back in my own bed and I was very poorly.

  My aunt came to see me. If I’d been apologetic, if I’d begged her forgiveness, things might have worked out between us. All she wanted was for me to be magically transformed into somebody different, someone who was meek and mild and above all pretty. But I’d spent ten years trying to be the child she wanted. The harder I’d tried, the worse I’d failed. I’d
had enough of her too.

  I told my aunt that John was a spiteful bully and that what she’d done to me was evil. I said she’d burn in hell for being so cruel.

  In return, she told me I was a liar, a demon child. She said she would not keep me under her roof a moment longer.

  She made arrangements for me to be sent away to school. My heart leaped at the idea. School meant learning to paint and draw and play the piano. It meant learning French and Mathematics and reading poetry. School meant freedom. Didn’t it?

  Maybe to some.

  But not to me.

  My aunt selected Lowood, a charitable school for orphan girls. Miss Temple was the teacher in charge, and she was kind enough. But Mr Brocklehurst, the clergyman who held the purse strings, was a tight‑fisted … I’ll not say the word that comes to mind. He was tall as a stone pillar and as hard as one too, dressed always in black. He spoke of God and quoted the Bible and threatened us with hellfire and damnation. We girls were poor and therefore undeserving, Mr Brocklehurst said. We needed to be kept humble. Grateful. We needed to know our place. So we were dressed in clothes that did not keep out the cold and shoes that did not keep out the wet. We slept two to a bed under a single blanket and were fed food of such poor quality in such small portions that staying alive was a struggle. A struggle that a good many of us lost the first year I was there.

  School taught me many things, but three stand out in my mind.

  The first was that sinners walk amongst us, disguised as respectable clergymen.

  The second was that saints live on earth too – people so good, so pure, with souls that shine so brightly they illuminate everything and everyone around them.

  And the third?

  Saints die.

  I met Helen Burns on my first morning at Lowood. It had been brutally hard. The lessons were bewildering, the rules strict. I did not know the school’s routine, and no one took the trouble to explain it to me. By the time we were allowed outside for a breath of fresh air, I was lonely, afraid and dizzy with hunger.

  Helen was sitting alone with a book open on her lap. It was the book that drew me to her, the book that gave me the courage to speak. She was five years older than me and looked like a goddess. And she was kind and gentle, and I was so sorely in need of that. Is it any wonder I was besotted with her?

  I could fill this book with praise of Helen Burns and I wouldn’t even have begun to describe the beauty of her soul. Let me just say this: I have never met anyone before or since who so truly lived by the words of Jesus Christ. Helen really did love her enemies. She really did bless those that cursed her and she did good to those that hated and despised her. I admired Helen. But she totally baffled me.

  That first winter at Lowood was as harsh as anything I’ve ever known. I raged against Mr Brocklehurst the whole time. The fury burning inside my chest carried me through those dreadful months. Helen survived them without a murmur of complaint because she had Christ‑like powers of endurance.

  Even the longest, hardest winter has to end eventually.

  At last, the warm air of spring breathed life into the woods around the school. Pinpricks of emerald green appeared on the beech trees. The ground was carpeted with bluebells and primroses.

  That same warm air of spring breathed typhus fever into the crowded classrooms and turned our school into a hospital. We were half starved and weakened by months of extreme cold. The disease raged through Lowood’s inmates like a fire. More than half the girls were taken ill.

  But I was not one of them. The typhus meant there were no lessons, so I was allowed to roam freely outside from dawn till dusk. Mr Brocklehurst dared not come near Lowood for fear of catching our disease, so there was no talk of hell or damnation. I was oddly contented. Yet Helen was not beside me. She was ill, but not with the fever. I’d been told she had consumption and, being a child who knew nothing about medical matters, I thought she’d recover soon.

  One day I’d helped myself to bread and cheese from the kitchen and gone out, roaming further even than normal. The day was so bright and clear I suddenly broke down in tears. I was thinking about how sad it must be to be lying ill, to be dying, when life was so lovely and the world so beautiful.

  When I got back to Lowood, it was already dark and I saw the doctor riding away. The maid was still at the door, and I asked, “How is Helen Burns?”

  “Poorly,” the maid replied. “But she’ll not be here much longer.”

  They were sending Helen back to her family, I thought. I knew she had an aunt and uncle somewhere. I wanted to say goodbye, but they wouldn’t let me speak to her, no matter how I pleaded. So in the middle of that night – when everyone slept – I crept along the dark corridors.

  When I found her, she was lying in bed looking as calm and serene as ever.

  “Jane!” Helen said gently. “Your feet are bare. Come here. Cover yourself with my quilt.”

  I nestled in beside her.

  “I’m going home,” Helen whispered.

  “I heard,” I said. “Where do your family live? York?”

  “No! Not to them.” Helen’s breath was warm in my hair. “I’m going home to God.”

  I let out a strangled gasp. I struggled to believe her. How could anyone be close to death and not rage against it?

  But this was not anyone: it was Helen Burns. Heaven wasn’t a matter of hope or faith with her. It was a matter of solid, rational fact. It was as if Helen could see the gates of heaven right there, open wide, ready to receive her. And perhaps she could. She had a soft glow to her, a blissful happiness I could not understand.

  I think Helen thought I envied her, because as she stroked my hair she said, “You will come to heaven too in time, dear Jane. Never doubt it.”

  But I did. Where was it? Did it exist?

  I said nothing.

  Helen was so tired. She pulled me close and we both drifted off to sleep.

  When Miss Temple came in at dawn, she found the two of us, arms around each other. I was still fast asleep.

  Helen was dead.

  The typhus fever that swept through Lowood carried away so many of its inmates that it couldn’t be ignored. So many poor orphans were buried in the churchyard that even the high and mighty noticed. They asked questions. They demanded answers. How had this come about? Who was to blame?

  Mr Brocklehurst was a rich and powerful man. (The “blessed are the poor” line in the Bible had somehow escaped his attention.) He could not be removed from his position at Lowood, but he could be overseen. A committee was set up to manage the school, and life there became bearable.

  I did well. At Gateshead, I’d tried so hard to please my aunt, but every effort had just made things worse. At Lowood the opposite was true. The harder I worked and the more effort I made, the more I was rewarded and respected.

  I stayed there for eight years – six as a pupil and two as a teacher. I was not unhappy. Lowood was the closest thing I had to a home.

  But then Miss Temple got married. She’d been my most excellent teacher, my patient guide and my dear friend. After the wedding ceremony, when the happy couple stepped into a carriage and disappeared over the hill, my contentment went with her.

  I retired to my room and started pacing the floorboards. For eight years I’d tried to follow in the footsteps of my saintly friend, Helen. It all fell away in the space of one afternoon. I was no Helen Burns. I saw this world, not the next. I did not have one foot in heaven – both of mine were rooted to the earth.

  I wanted excitement. I was restless. A hunger awoke in me – it itched under my skin. The world was wide and wonderful and I had seen so little of it. I wanted freedom. I was desperate to stretch my wings, to fly.

  How foolish an ambition was that? Did I not know my place? I wasn’t a lady of fortune who could travel as I wished. I was a nothing, a nobody. I must earn my keep, pay my way. I needed to be reasonable.

  Not freedom then, I told myself. Nothing so large. But perhaps a different kind of imprisonm
ent? Another place, a new position. Yes … that would do.

  And so I set the wheels of change in motion.

  I placed an advert in the newspaper:

  A young lady accustomed to teaching is seeking a situation with a family where the children are under fourteen. She is qualified to teach the usual branches of a good English education, together with French, Drawing and Music.

  A week later, I received a reply. A Mrs Fairfax of Thornfield Hall wanted a governess for one pupil – a girl aged seven.

  Letters were written. References were sent. And not two months after Miss Temple had married I found myself leaving Lowood for the first and last time.

  I left Lowood before dawn. I arrived at Thornfield Hall long after the sun had set, near exhausted from a day of travelling. I had the impression of a large house but could see little of it. A maid named Mary showed me to a snug parlour where a fire burned bright in the grate. An elderly lady sat knitting beside it, a cat curled at her feet.

  “Mrs Fairfax?” I asked.

  “Yes!” she said, and stood, insisting I sit in her chair so I could warm myself. She sent Mary running to the kitchen for food, for she was sure I must be hungry. I was overcome with relief. I’d launched myself into the unknown and it looked like I’d found a safe landing.

  That night I climbed into a warmed bed in a room that I had all to myself. Being alone was the most incredible luxury. For six years at Lowood I’d been in a dormitory with a dozen other girls. For the next two I’d shared a bedroom with a fellow teacher whose grunting and snoring had kept me awake.

  I stretched my limbs, I shut my eyes, and I fell into a sleep so deep it was close to death.

  I’d assumed Thornfield Hall belonged to Mrs Fairfax and that my pupil was her grandchild, but I was wrong on both counts. She was the housekeeper. The owner was a Mr Rochester who was rarely at home, Mrs Fairfax told me the next day. My pupil was his ward, a little French girl called Adèle Varens.