Free Becoming Jane Eyre by Sheila Kohler Page A

old, decaying body, the bedpan.
    “A few days will suffice,” he says firmly, his hand touching her face, her neck. “An unnecessary extravagance we cannot afford. We can manage alone. Just leave the pan near me. I can do it myself.”
    “If you wish, Papa,” she whispers hesitantly.
    “I do wish,” he says.

    Her girl-child grows up fast and searches for independence. She will advertise, find work elsewhere, leave the school, Lowood, where her memories are of cruelty and neglect mingled with kindness and learning. The good Miss Temple gives Jane a brooch. A response arrives in the form of a letter from a Mrs. Fairfax of Thornfield Hall. A position as governess is offered. She has the chance of moving on.

    “We will not require your services any longer,” she says to the nurse when she enters the room. The woman just stares at her. “The doctor said—,” she starts to say.
    “We will manage on our own,” her father says from his bed with his old voice of authority. “We will pay you until the end of the week, of course,” he adds.
    “As you wish,” the nurse replies, and drops a brief curtsy. Charlotte thinks she looks rather relieved, as she turns to gather up her things. Now that the woman is leaving, she thinks she might miss this Humber.
    “I hope you will find your little girls well,” she adds as the woman comes to say good-bye, and Humber smiles at her and takes her hand.
    “Good luck,” she says. “Good luck to you with your writing, Miss. It must almost be a book by now. Perhaps I will read it one day.”
    “Indeed, I hope you will,” Charlotte dares to say, but in truth she cannot imagine her words in print reaching even this woman.

    While she was working as a teacher at Roe Head, where she had once been a pupil, she dared to send off a packet of her poems with an ardent letter expressing her desire to write to Southey, the poet she admired so much. His response arrived more than three months later. When she read it, she wrote on the envelope, “To be kept forever. My twenty-first birthday.”

    The poet laureate’s response had arrived at the end of a long day of toil, a day of listening to the stultifying recitations of her thick, dull pupils. How she hated them! The Misses Lister, Marriot, Walker, and Cook seemed unable to comprehend the difference between an article and a noun. She had felt obliged to exhaust herself with a long walk after tea, coming back and slipping silently upstairs to the dormitory for a moment of blessed solitude, drawing the dark curtains around her bed.
    She lay there deliciously lost in an erotic fantasy of Zamorna, her young duke and demon, coming to her, plumed and sabred, bare chest heaving, hair disheveled, fiery eye kindling her desire, when Sister Margaret, the eldest of the family of five sisters who ran the school, poked her head through the curtains, shaking her ringlets with enthusiasm and waving the letter in the air. “A letter for you, my dear,” she crooned, smiling kindly, believing, no doubt, she was lightening her favorite teacher’s load.
    She rose fast from the bed and took it eagerly, her heart already knocking. Letters were what kept her alive then. Seeing the name of the sender, the walls of the dormitory, even the evening view of the soft valley outside, seemed to swing around her so that she feared she might fall and had to clutch onto the end of the iron bedstead before her.
    But with the door closed behind Sister Margaret, she sat with the letter, unable to open it. She huddled in the silence of the bare, narrow dormitory. She clutched the letter to her thudding heart, too fearful to tear it open, preferring now not to know, to keep the hope of a favorable response alive.
    Too soon, Sister Margaret’s voice called her forth to attend to her evening duties. She had missed her opportunity. Now there remained Miss Lister’s clothes to be mended, a dumb geographical problem to be solved for some dolt, some ass’s nightcap to be