“As you indirectly suggested!” I fairly shrieked.
“Plan to steal food from the mouths of your fellow students—”
“You’re killing Clarke.” Outrage transformed effortlessly to begging. “Please, even you cannot justify death by starvation.”
Mr. Munt walked round his desk, the smug uptilt to his lips intact; I have never seen a man enjoy himself so much. “Heavens! Where on earth would you have stored these items, and how would you have cooked them?”
“I would have found a way,” I spat, but the bitterness lay in the fact that he was correct.
This had been a fool’s errand, and Miss Lilyvale and I the fools.
Mr. Munt sat before his ledger. He was dressed for Sunday, wearing a grey waistcoat which made his pale eyes gleam, and a high collar; his garb ever hinted at the parsonical whilst still accentuating his Byronic appearance. Running a hand through his black curls, he emitted a sigh.
“You will have to be severely punished for this.”
“Do what you like,” I snarled, confidence bolstered by loathing. “I’ll fight back. Only please,” I added as his sad look shifted into annoyance, “don’t deprive Clarke anymore. I was the one who read the letters first, not she. You know Clarke is half mad, and anyway she’s learnt her lesson.”
“Half mad,” Mr. Munt reflected, pulling his index finger and thumb along his lower lip. “Do you know, Steele, I don’t think the half-mad one is Clarke.”
A poisonous silence fell, one which burnt my skin.
“Do not pretend that this is about my mother.”
“It is not about your mother. It is about whether you are capable of rational behaviour, or whether the devil works his will through you.”
“I’m only here to save one of your own students!”
He laughed, showing straight white teeth. “So you will fight me, you say, and in the next breath you plead the case for the daughter of smut purveyors?” Standing, Mr. Munt strode past me to the opposite wall. “Ah, here we are. The Garden of Forbidden Delights, author anonymous, published in serial by Whittleby and Clarke. Borrow it, and then tell me whether you think Clarke’s judgement of sincere affections is sound.”
A small red volume, unmarked on its cover but bearing the frontispiece The Garden of Forbidden Delights, was in my hands an instant later. Mr. Munt raised an eyebrow, stony resolve in his granite eyes, and I queasily slid the object into my dress pocket. I saw many more books like them—I saw an entire shelf, as a matter of fact, enough to be termed a collection.
“Do show that to Clarke when you’ve finished,” he added with a cold smirk.
He’s actually insane. His power had flooded his brain, eroding it piecemeal. I recalled the phrases I had studied in such repulsed confusion, the thought of your mouth against my cock-stand, and I would lick my way down your spine and lower until—
“Miss Lilyvale has seemed most upset since you touched her private things,” Vesalius Munt chastised, returning to his desk. “She carelessly left a letter lying out, I take it?”
I drew a quick breath. “I was in the teachers’ wing looking for food, and one of your letters caught my eye. I told Clarke about the contents. She never . . . It was all my doing, Mr. Munt.”
“Perhaps so—I blame myself, you realise. It’s clear as day that Anne-Laure Steele’s unchecked rebellion, her cunning, her willingness to spit in the face of God Himself, all have been passed down to her only child. Pity. Do you long for death too, Steele? Do you think of the Reaper as you would a suitor, turning away from God’s myriad blessings?”
Hours of conversation with Mr. Munt, I thought, was indeed too hard a bargain when set against a single hot meal.
“That is why I am contemplating committing you,” Mr. Munt concluded, examining his shirt cuffs.
The words hung before me like a corpse displayed for public view.
“It would sadden me beyond words should one of your classmates fall prey to your wild moods.” Mr. Munt’s eyes gleamed, a powerful king protecting his realm from embodied disaster—disaster by the name of Jane Steele. “You could hurt someone, Steele; you could destroy someone, I believe.”
Vesalius Munt could not possibly have known my secret, but my knees turned to water anyhow; he had seen something in me—a sparking flint where there ought to have been a soul, perhaps. Asylums by all accounts, meanwhile, were handy places to be chained to a bed covered in your own filth, subjected to ice baths and mercury doses and leeches on shorn scalps, and fed rather less than was customary at Lowan Bridge School.
“Don’t expel me,” I breathed. “I’m, I’m not mad—you know that I am not. I’ll behave. Only feed Clarke and I shall do just as you say.”