Free Becoming Jane Eyre by Sheila Kohler

sister’s sufferings, she is aware, would be unbelievable on the page.
    She cannot describe the moment when her ill sister, suffering from the blister on her side, raised by the doctor to relieve her lungs, was thrown from her bed onto the dormitory floor by the teacher, who screamed, “Get up, you lazy girl, get out of bed immediately!”
    She leaves out how she watched the scene and listened in silence, too afraid of punishment to come to her sister’s aid in the dormitory that freezing morning, the water for washing frozen in the basins by the beds. She remembers watching her dying sister struggling to dress herself properly, and how the ten-year-old Maria remained silent with Christlike patience and fortitude, hearing herself called “slovenly and untidy” without retort, and was ordered to go about the ordinary business of her day.
    Death was presented to the little girls as the great protector from sin, as the goal, the recompense toward which all children should hurry forward to claim with joy—all children, that is, except for Carus Wilson’s own pampered ones. She will unmask the dreadful director of the institution. She will net him and pierce him. She will immortalize his wickedness and his hypocrisy with a dart of venom.
    On the page, too, she will make Jane lie in the arms of her dying friend, as Charlotte would have liked to do in her sister’s, whom their father finally took home to die. She would have wanted to hold her hand, to soothe her pain, as her older sister had done so often for her, for all of them, as their mother lay dying. She would have liked to kiss her on her smooth, pale cheek before she departed forever. Why had she not been able to keep her safe?

CHAPTER TWELVE
    Progress
    S ince she was sent away to school as a young child, she has often been homesick. It comes to her now, alone with her father in the dark, that old feeling of abandonment, the longing for home, for a mother she has never really known, for her dead older sisters, for her brother as he was as a boy, for the closeness of her family as she once knew it. She remembers how she went out into the world to earn her bread for her brilliant brother, so that he could go up to London to become a painter. It was all so much harder than she could have imagined.

    Her tooth aches and when she bends her head lower to her page, it is worse. Yet she realizes that she wants only these calm, autumn days in this strange city, days of uninterrupted work in these small, shuttered rooms. She does not want her past, not even her closeness with her brother, nor the brief affection of her black swan.
    Sometimes, in the cool of the September night, she takes a blanket from her bed. She collects her pencil and her notebook and wraps the blanket round her bare legs and feet. She sits in the moonlight by her father’s bed and writes. He seems aware of her presence, whether he wakes or sleeps. He seems to talk more to the dead, her mother, her sisters who are gone, or her absent brother. He lies very still, as the doctor has requested, even though his eyes are no longer bandaged. Gone is his old impatience with her. Her name now comes frequently to his lips. “Charlotte! Charlotte! Are you there, child?”
    She has her small, square notebooks, where she writes, hardly seeing the words. Her toothache is better, and since she has been writing her bowels, so often obstructed, have moved regularly, as though they were directly connected to the flow of words from her mind onto the page.
    “Charlotte, come closer,” he calls her to bend over him.
    “What is it, Papa?”
    He gropes, finds her arm, draws her nearer still. “Get rid of her,” he says.
    “What? What did you say?”
    “Tell that woman we don’t require her services any longer. We can manage alone. An unnecessary expense,” he whispers, drawing her closer to him, her arm like a bird’s wing in his hand.
    “Soon, soon, Papa,” she whispers close to his ear, thinking of bathing his