These might have been idyllic circumstances, but they were not.
Mr. Hugh Grizzlehurst’s behaviour when drunk owned peculiarities which it failed to evince when he was sober; furthermore, these whimsical quirks tended to be visited upon the person of Mrs. Bertha Grizzlehurst. In fairness, Mr. Grizzlehurst only imbibed when he had been unsuccessful, and—as my help and his experience rendered us jointly successful—this was seldom. When every other month, however, the British Empire had been distressingly peaceable, Mr. Grizzlehurst would arrive home with a jug of gin which could either have been imbibed or employed to strip the paint from the chipped green rocking chair.
When Clarke and I had retreated upstairs, ducking to avoid the low slant of the ceiling beams, we would hear shouting. At times, the shouting would prove the climax, and we should find at dawn Mr. Grizzlehurst snoring upon the knotted rug. At other times, shouting would prove insufficient to Mr. Grizzlehurst’s purposes, and the sharp crack of a slap or two would follow, and Clarke’s entire body would flinch alongside mine as I set my teeth hard against each other.
“What can we do?” Clarke whispered the third time this happened, shifting up on one elbow to stare at me with her nightgown slipping over her shoulder.
I did not know. Bertha Grizzlehurst was silent for days on end, ugly as her husband, and relentlessly calm; and now that I knew the reason for her insistence upon our lodging there, I suspected we were already doing the task she had planned for whatever tenant occupied the garret: we were witnesses, which went a long ways towards stopping a real crime from ever occurring.
“Nothing,” said I. “We are here to prevent things going too far. It isn’t our business.”
Clarke settled her head between my neck and collarbone, smelling of starlight and lavender as she always did, and murmured, “Then whose business is it?”
Pondering, I sifted her hair through my fingers. I was not, even at age sixteen, foolish enough to suppose that love and marriage always kept company; my mother had loved my father to distraction, but I had never seen it, and as for the union our former music teacher might have enjoyed, the topic was best left unexplored. Theoretically, however, some form of affection was meant to be involved—and though I could only love hungrily, I could not imagine ever striking Clarke if I had been a man and she a woman, no matter what she may have done.
No, it is not my business, I concluded.
But it could be, I thought next, shifting and afterwards falling into a troubled slumber.
TWELVE
“Dread remorse when you are tempted to err, Miss Eyre: remorse is the poison of life.”
If early reading of the Newgate Calendar carved a mark upon my girlish character, I was for two years grateful for the scar.
We were housed thanks to me, kept in ribbons and pub fare thanks to Clarke, and when our presence leashed the mongrel inside Hugh Grizzlehurst, so much the better. Mrs. Grizzlehurst never failed to greet us with buttered porridge or Sunday eggs and herring, so I supposed that her scheme was working, despite occasions when the lilac circle beneath one eye looked darker than the other. Clarke and I hemmed loudly at the occasional nocturnal scuffle, stomping to fetch a glass of water, returning to bed in the widening pool of quiet.
There are households which would have considered this arrangement paradise—and in retrospect, at times, I did myself.
In the frigid January of the year 1845, Mrs. Grizzlehurst grew thicker about the middle and began to whistle when she was not speaking (which was nearly all the time). Jane Eyre insists, Human beings never enjoy complete happiness in this world, and I agree with her—but as Mrs. Grizzlehurst slowly swelled with child, I thought what a lucky chance it was that humans do not often suffer complete unhappiness either.
Mr. Grizzlehurst produced clownish smiles as he bent to kiss her cheek in the morning, his expressions tinged a helpless shade of ash when he went through his account books in the evening. He began to toss me worried glares, meaningless winks and clucks, a pleading slackness hanging heavy in his chops before he whispered:
Miss Steele, hadvantitious as this ’ere week has been, is there nary another penny we might’a misplaced somewhereabouts?
This verse is downright halliterative, Miss Steele, and I happlaud you. . . . Can we not keep it to a single page? Paper is that dear these days, and we don’t want to look ’eathenish.
Just before everything fell apart, he handed me this gem:
MOST BRUTAL STABBING RIPS HOLES IN NUBILOUS YOUNG VICTIM—.
Sighing, I dipped my pen; I sat at the rickety table in our garret in the coral glow of a February afternoon, preparing myself to rescue our native tongue from worse than death once more. The chipped yellow vase which I generally filled with weeds—Queen Anne’s lace and wild flowering parsley—sat empty in February save for some whimsical thistles Clarke had brought me to cheer my spirits when English had been dealt cruel blows.