My Mr. Rochester 1(15)

I was the little princess who’d lost everything—except I’d had no father, no protector, to begin with.

Bishop Brocklehurst added my lovely hat and scarf to his plunder. When he’d gone for good, Miss Temple called for Miss Miller and instructed her to show me to my bed in a dormitory in one of the large buildings.

I don’t remember if the wind howled through the trees that night or the rain raged against the dormitory’s window pane. I don’t remember if I was awakened several times by girls crying softly in their beds. I don’t remember if my teeth chattered with cold because my blanket was so thin. All those details are part of the memory mosaic contained in my brain, labeled Lowood. None set the first night apart from any night I spent there.

But I will never forget Bishop Brocklehurst’s assault on me, an experience distinct and fixed. He had risen to the top of my list. I hated him then more than I hated Mrs. Reed and more even than John Reed. I believed it was impossible to hate him more.

I was wrong.





« Chapter 7 »

Helen


Lowood was electrified in ways that made me loathe the invention. When the Great Secession restored a slower, simpler life more suited to human dignity, someone forgot to tell Lowood’s administrators. If electricity was used like this in the heathen old country, it’s no wonder the old country cracked up.

A caustic unceasing bell drove me from sleep, and the dormitory glared with unnatural fluorescent light. Other girls were out of bed, putting on uniforms like the one given me the night before. The nightmarish bell stopped when I was halfway through tying on my pinafore, but it echoed on in my brain.

It was bitter cold. I washed at the end of a line of six girls and held out my hands for inspection. The bell rang us down to the dining hall where we sat, ranked according to age, on long hardwood benches at tables arranged in two rows with a wide aisle between the rows.

Breakfast came out in two big pots which the servers placed on a high bench before the head table. The teachers there immediately wrinkled their noses, and their hands flew to faces.

“Disgusting!”

“The porridge is burnt again!”

“Shhh!”

We said grace, a variation of the prayer said at Gateshead:

Bless, O Lord, this food to our bodies,

And make us grateful to thy bounty.

Keep us ever fit for your service,

And mindful of the needs of others.

The stench of the burnt porridge reached my nostrils and wiped out all thought of the needs of others. At the end of the prayer, one of the older girls stood and recited the eleventh psalm.

I suppressed a smile and looked down at my hands. I told Bishop Brocklehurst I didn’t like the psalms, but it didn’t mean I didn’t know them. Psalm 11 was my nemesis. It had made me bitter and turned me away from God. I still loved Jesus, but in my book God could suck eggs.

The girl finished:

“Upon the wicked he shall rain snares, fire, and brimstone,

and an horrible tempest:

This shall be the portion of their cup.

For the righteous Lord loveth righteousness;

His countenance doth behold the upright.”

Right. Not at Gateshead. There the Lord rewarded wicked John Reed on a daily basis, and not with snares and brimstone.

A young girl from another table stood to recite Psalm 12.

“We hear ten psalms every morning,” the girl beside me whispered in a serious, no-nonsense manner. Like all of us, her hair was hidden behind a white scarf tied in a knot at the nape of her neck, but a few red curls had escaped. “They’ll give you one to learn.”

“Burns!” A teacher charged through the tables toward us. She was about the age of Miss Miller, thin and hard-looking, with round wire-rimmed glasses and a furrow between her eyes.

The girl stood up and bent her head forward. She clasped her hands behind her back, as if she was used to some solemn ritual about to be carried out.

The teacher wore the same uniform as the other teachers, a plain black Jersey dress, calf-length, with three-quarter-length sleeves. A white lace collar draped over her shoulders came down in two points over her breasts. She raised an instrument above her head that looked like John Reed’s riding crop and brought it down over the girl’s shoulders.

Outrageous! I started to protest, but the girl’s sharp look stopped me.

“Return to your seat, Burns,” the teacher said.

“Thank you, Miss Scatcherd,” the girl said.

“And maintain silence.”

Miss Scatcherd returned to her place at the head of the teachers’ table, and Burns—if that was her name—returned silently to her seat beside me. The sting of the injustice was maddening. She’d only meant to be nice.

After eight more girls recited a psalm, we lined up in two rows holding our bowls. My stomach alternated between growls of hunger and revolt against the smell. I sat down again amidst stifled moans of complaint from every table.