“Are you afraid now, in daylight?”
“No. But night will come again. And besides, I’m unhappy. Very unhappy, for other things.”
“What other things? Can you tell me some of them?”
I was afraid to go on—for I might never stop. No one had ever asked me what I thought, how I felt. To be sure, I’d given out my thoughts and feelings freely, but none had ever cared about them or wanted them. Oh, how my heart ached!
“For one thing, I have no father or mother, no brothers or sisters.”
“You have a kind aunt and cousins.”
“But John Reed knocked me down, and my aunt shut me up in the Red Room.” At this point, I withdrew my arms from under the covers and thrust my wrists out together.
“Hm.” Dr. Lloyd looked at the red marks. Then he looked at my nightgown, and I felt he considered it too thin and my blankets too few. He looked back to the door and at the cold grate in my fireplace. After another minute he said, “Don’t you think Gateshead a very beautiful house?” he said. “Aren’t you grateful to live in such a fine place?”
“It isn’t my house. Abbot says I have less right to be here than a servant.”
“Pooh! Are you silly enough to wish to leave then?”
“If I had anywhere else to go, I’d be glad to. But I’ll never get away until I am a woman. A grown woman.”
“Have you any relations besides Mrs. Reed?”
“I think not, sir.”
“None belonging to your father?”
“I asked Mrs. Reed once. She said I might have some low relations called Eyre, but she knew nothing of them.”
“If you did, would you like to go to them?”
I had to think about that. I’d called the workhouse preferable to Gateshead, but that was theatrics. I didn’t want to be poor. Who does? I’d seen the magazines at church with pictures of heathen cities and calls for missionaries. Poverty was ugly and cruel. Perhaps crueler even than John Reed.
“No,” I said. “I don’t want to belong to poor people.”
“Not even if they were kind to you?”
I shook my head. “Mrs. Reed says if they exist they’re beggars or criminals. That would be worse than…” I began to see. My only hope was to live on as I was until I did reach adulthood. Marriage would offer no escape—no one would want to marry me—but there were other ways.
As if he read my mind Dr. Lloyd said, “Would you like to go to school?” Like lighting a candle in the midst of my dark thoughts.
“That was Georgiana’s idea!” I told him. “She wrote only yesterday that I should become a teacher.” I had cast the idea aside. No. I hadn’t even picked it up, thinking it impossible.
“Perhaps Miss Georgiana’s Harvard education is good for something after all.” Dr. Lloyd collected his bag, and at the door he said, “Now let go of fanciful thoughts of ghosts and red rooms and imagined unkindness. Rest, Jane. Doctor’s orders. I’ll come see you tomorrow.”
The next day at noon I was up and dressed and deposited on Mrs. Reed’s sofa in the morning room with a microfiber blanket around my legs and a cashmere shawl around my shoulders. Though I was alone, a good fire burned on the grate. There was tea with toast and raspberry jam, for when Dr. Lloyd had come in the morning to see the Reeds he left orders I was to have tea with toast and jam, and I was not to be allowed to take a chill.
I was somewhat bewildered by the treatment. At times I thought I might be dreaming, like the little princess.
I had never forgotten it. On Georgiana’s thirteenth birthday, Mrs. Reed had the Movie Man in for the party. He set up a screen in the garden and showed a movie about a little princess who’d lost her father. She was poor and hungry, but her dreams were so powerful that one night she dreamed of good food and a warm shawl and slippers, and when she woke up the next morning they were there!
Mrs. Reed did not enjoy the movie. (No surprise there; the horrid Miss Minchin in the story was rather like her.) The Movie Man never came again.
But I loved the story—not for dreams of food and clothes. It was unthinkable then that I could ever be without those things. I loved the story for the affection the little princess’s father had for her and because she found happiness in the end.
Until yesterday that was my great hope, the thing I lived on, what I expected from a just world: happiness in the end.
A tear rolled down my cheek, and the raspberry jam turned sour in my mouth. Happiness in the end no longer existed in my world. A great sob poured out of me, just as the door to the morning room opened.
“What’s all this?” Dr. Lloyd entered behind Bessie. He put his doctor bag on the table, shrugged his shoulders helplessly, and winked at her. “I’m losing my self-confidence as a doctor.”