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.
It’s the quiet ones who you have to watch out for. That was quite a good line. She’d have to work it into something later.
Miss Temple and Miss Scatcherd were both reasonable suspects, but Charlotte believed that the murderer was somebody that no one else would ever think to consider. Another teacher, who had until recently been a student at Lowood herself. Charlotte’s best friend.
Jane Eyre.
Charlotte climbed down into the dell and spotted Jane near the brook. Painting, as usual.
Talking to herself, as usual.
“It’s not that I don’t like Lowood. It’s that I’ve hardly been anywhere else,” she was saying to the empty air as she made a series of quick, short strokes onto her canvas. “But it’s a school. It’s not real life, is it? And there are no . . . boys.”
Jane was a peculiar girl. Which is part of why Charlotte and Jane got along so well.
Jane let out a sigh. “It is true that things are so much better here, now that Mr. Brocklehurst is dead.”
A thrill shivered down Charlotte’s spine. Never mind that this was (as we have previously reported) what every girl at Lowood had been saying regarding Brocklehurst’s untimely death. There was just something so satisfied about the tone in Jane’s voice when she said it. It seemed practically a confession.
It had been no secret that Jane had detested Mr. Brocklehurst. There’d been a particular incident the week that Jane had first come to the school, when Mr. Brocklehurst had forced her to stand on a stool in front of her entire class, called her a liar—worse than a heathen, he’d said—and ordered the other girls to avoid Jane’s company. (Mr. Brocklehurst had really been the worst.) And Charlotte remembered another time, after Mr. Brocklehurst had refused their request for more blankets, when the girls were waking up with chilblains (we looked this up, and a chilblain is a red, itchy, painful swelling on the fingers and toes, caused by exposure to cold—gosh, wasn’t Mr. Brocklehurst the worst?), when Jane had quietly muttered, “Something should be done about him.”
And now something had decisively been done about Mr. Brocklehurst. Coincidence? Charlotte thought not.
Jane looked up from her painting and smiled. “Oh, hello, Charlotte. Lovely day, isn’t it?”
“It is.” Charlotte smiled back. Yes, she suspected that Jane had murdered Mr. Brocklehurst, but Jane was still her best friend. She and Jane Eyre were kindred spirits. They were both poor as church mice: Jane a penniless orphan, Charlotte a parson’s daughter. They were both plain—they even somewhat resembled each other—both exceedingly thin (at a time when the standard of beauty called for ladies to have a pleasant roundness to them), with similarly sallow complexions, and unremarkable brown hair and eyes. They were the most obscure type of person—the kind people’s gazes would pass over without notice. This was also partially on account of the fact that they were both little—that is, short of stature, diminutive, petite, Charlotte preferred.
Still, there was beauty inside of them, if anyone cared to look. Charlotte had always known Jane to be a kind, thoughtful sort of person. Even when she was committing murder, she was thinking of others.
“What’s the subject today?” Charlotte stepped up beside Jane’s easel and lifted her spectacles to her eyes to examine Jane’s unfinished painting. It was a perfect facsimile of the view from where they were standing—the dell dappled with sunshine, the leafy boughs of the trees, the swaying grass—except that in the foreground of Jane’s painting, just across the brook, there was a golden-haired girl wearing a white dress. This figure had been featured in many of Jane’s paintings.
“That’s quite good,” Charlotte commented. “And you’ve captured a sort of intelligence in her expression.”
“She thinks she’s intelligent, anyway.” Jane smirked.
Charlotte lowered her glasses. “I thought you said she wasn’t anyone in particular.”
“Oh, she’s not,” Jane said quickly. “You know how it is. When I paint people they sometimes come to life in my mind.”
Charlotte nodded. “The person who possesses the creative gift owns something of which she is not always master—something that at times strangely wills and works for itself.”
Jane didn’t reply. Charlotte lifted her glasses to look at her. Jane was staring off at nothing. Again.
“You’re not leaving Lowood, are you?” Charlotte asked. “Are you going to be a governess?” (That was really the only viable career choice for girls at Lowood: teaching. You could become a village schoolmistress, or an instructor at some institution like Lowood, which is what Jane had done, or a governess in some wealthy household. Being a governess was really the best any of them could hope for.)
Jane glanced at her feet. “Oh, no, nothing like that. I was just . . . imagining another life.”
“I imagine leaving Lowood all the time,” Charlotte said. “I’d leave tomorrow if the opportunity presented itself.”
But now Jane was shaking her head. “I don’t wish to leave Lowood. That’s why I stayed on, after I graduated. I can’t leave.”
“Why ever not?”
“This place is my home, and my . . . friends are here.”
Charlotte was beyond flattered. She’d had no idea that Jane had stayed at Lowood simply because she hadn’t wished the two of them to be separated. Charlotte was, as far as she could tell, Jane’s only friend, thanks to Mr. Brocklehurst. (Charlotte had never given a fig to what Mr. Brocklehurst had dictated concerning Jane.) Friendship was indeed the most valuable of possessions, especially for a girl like Jane, who lacked any family to speak of. (Charlotte was the middle child of six—which she counted as both a blessing and a curse.)
“Well, I think you should go, if you can,” Charlotte said gallantly. “I would miss you, of course, but you’re a painter. Who knows what beautiful things there are to behold outside of this dreary location? New landscapes. New people.” She smiled mischievously. “And . . . boys.”
Jane’s cheeks colored. “Boys,” she murmured to herself. “Yes.”
Both girls were quiet, imagining the boys of the world. Then they sighed a very yearning type of sigh.
This preoccupation with boys might seem a little silly to you, dear reader, but remember that this is England in 1834 (think before Charles Dickens, after Jane Austen). Women at this time were taught that the best thing that could ever possibly happen to a girl was to be married. To a wealthy man, preferably. And it was really good luck if you could snag someone attractive, or with some kind of amusing talent, or who owned a nice dog. But all that truly mattered was landing a man—really, any man would do. Charlotte and Jane had few prospects in this department (see the above description of them being poor, plain, obscure, and little), but they could still imagine themselves swept off their feet by handsome strangers who would look past their poverty and their plainness and see something worthy of love.
It was Jane who broke the spell first. She turned back to her painting. “So. What marvelous story will you write today?”
Charlotte shook the idea of boys out of her brain and took a seat on the fallen log she always perched on. “Today . . . a murder mystery.”
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.