My Plain Jane Read online

  Dedication

  For everyone who’s ever fallen for the wrong person, even though we agree that Mr. Darcy looks good on paper . . . and in a wet shirt.

  And for England (again). We’re really sorry for what we’re about to do to your literature.

  Epigraph

  “He made me love him without even looking at me.”

  —Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë

  “I am just going to write, because I cannot help it.”

  —Charlotte Brontë

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Praise

  Books by the Authors

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  You may think you know the story.

  Oh, heard that one, have you? Well, we say again: you may think you know the story. By all accounts it’s a good one: a penniless, orphaned young woman becomes a governess in a wealthy household, catches the eye of the rich and stern master, and (sigh) falls deeply in love. It’s all very passionate and swoonworthy, but before they can be married, a—gasp!—terrible treachery is revealed. Then there’s fire and despair, some aimless wandering, starvation, a little bit of gaslighting, but in the end, the romance works out. The girl (Miss Eyre) gets the guy (Mr. Rochester). They live happily ever after. Which means everybody’s happy, right?

  Um . . . no. We have a different tale to tell. (Don’t we always?) And what we’re about to reveal is more than a simple reimagining of one of literature’s most beloved novels. This version, dear reader, is true. There really was a girl. (Two girls, actually.) There was, indeed, a terrible treachery and a great fire. But throw out pretty much everything else you know about the story. This isn’t going to be like any classic romance you’ve ever read.

  It all started, if we’re going to go way, way back, in 1788 with King George III. The king had always been able to see ghosts. No big deal, really. He didn’t find them frightening in the least. Sometimes he even had amusing conversations with long-deceased courtiers and unfairly beheaded queens who were floating about the palace grounds.

  But one day, disaster struck. The king was walking in the garden when a mischievous ghost rattled the branches of a nearby tree.

  “Who’s there?” called the king, because, as it happened, he was without his spectacles.

  “Look at me,” answered the troublesome ghost in its most stately voice. “I’m the King of Prussia!”

  The king immediately dropped into a bow. Quite coincidentally, he had been expecting a visit from the King of Prussia. “I am most pleased to meet you, Your Highness!” he exclaimed.

  Then he tried to shake the tree’s hand.

  This, again, would have been no big deal, but for the dozen or so lords and ladies who had accompanied the king on his walk in the garden, who didn’t see the ghost, of course, only the king mistaking a tree for royalty. From that moment on, poor George was referred to as “Mad King George,” a title he greatly resented.

  So George assembled a team made up of every kind of person he thought could help him be rid of these irksome ghosts: priests who specialized in exorcisms, doctors with some knowledge of the occult, philosophers, scientists, fortune-tellers, and anybody, in general, who dabbled in the supernatural.

  And that’s how the Royal Society for the Relocation of Wayward Spirits was established.

  In the years that followed, the Society, as it came to be called, functioned as a prominent and well-respected part of English life. If there was something strange in your neighborhood, you could, um, write the Society a letter, and they would promptly send an agent to take care of it.

  Fast-forward right past the reign of George IV, to William IV ascending England’s throne. William was practical. He didn’t believe in ghosts. He considered the Society to be nothing more than a collection of odious charlatans who had been pulling the wool over the eyes of his poor disturbed predecessors for many years. Plus it was a terrible drain on the taxpayers’ dime (er, shilling). So almost as soon as he was officially crowned king, William cut the Society out of the royal budget. This led to his infamous falling-out and subsequent feud with Sir Arthur Wellesley, aka the Duke of Wellington, aka the leader and Lord President of the RWS Society, which was now underfunded and under-respected.

  This brings us to the real start of our story: northern England, 1834, and the aforementioned penniless, orphaned girl. And a writer. And a boy with a vendetta.

  Let’s start with the girl.

  Her name was Jane.

  ONE

  Charlotte

  There was no possibility of taking a walk through the grounds of Lowood school without hearing the dreadful and yet utterly exciting news: Mr. Brocklehurst had been—gasp!—murdered. The facts were these: Mr. Brocklehurst had come for one of his monthly “inspections.” He’d started right off by complaining about the difficulty of running a school for impoverished children, the way said children were always, for whatever reason, annoyingly asking for more food—more, sir, please may I have some more? Then he’d settled down by the fire in the parlor, devoured the heaping plate of cookies that Miss Temple had so kindly offered him, and promptly keeled over in the middle of afternoon tea. Poisoned. The tea, evidently, not the cookies. Although if he’d been poisoned by the cookies the girls at Lowood school felt it would have served him right.

  The girls didn’t shed so much as a tear over Mr. Brocklehurst. While he’d been in charge they’d been very cold and very hungry, and a great many of them had died of the Graveyard Disease. (There are many terms for this particular illness over the course of history: the Affliction, consumption, tuberculous, etc., but during this period the malady was most often referred to as “the Graveyard Disease,” because if you were unlucky enough to catch it, that’s where you were headed. Anyway, back to Mr. Brocklehurst.) Mr. Brocklehurst had believed that it was good for the soul to have only burnt porridge to eat. (He meant the poverty-stricken, destitute soul, that is; the dignified, upper-class soul thrived, he found, on roast beef and plum pudding. And cookies, evidently.) Since Mr. Brocklehurst’s untimely demise, conditions at the school had already improved tremendously. The girls unanimously agreed: whoever had killed Mr. Brocklehurst had done them a great service.

  But who had killed Mr. Brocklehurst?

  On this subject, the girls could only speculate. So far nobody—not the local authorities nor Scotland Yard—had been able to uncover the culprit.

  “It was Miss Temple,” Charlotte heard a girl say as she crossed the gardens. Katelyn was her name. “She served the tea, didn’t she?”

  “No, it was Miss Scatcherd,” argued Victoria, her friend. “I heard she
had a husband once, Miss Scatcherd did, who died suspiciously.”

  “That’s just a rumor,” said Katelyn. “Who’d marry Miss Scatcherd with a face like hers? I still say it was Miss Temple.”

  Victoria shook her head. “Miss Temple wouldn’t hurt a fly. She’s so sweet-natured and quiet.”

  “Oh, tosh,” Katelyn said. “Everyone knows it’s the quiet ones who you have to watch out for.”

  Charlotte smiled. She collected rumors the way some girls liked to accumulate dolls, recording the juicier details into a small notebook she kept. (Rumors were the one commodity that Lowood had in spades.) If the rumor were good enough, perhaps she’d compose a story about it later, to tell to her sisters at bedtime. But the death of Mr. Brocklehurst was much better than mere gossip passed around by a gaggle of teenage girls. It was a genuine, bona fide mystery.

  The very best kind of story.

  Once outside the walled gardens of Lowood, Charlotte pulled her notebook from her pocket and set off into the woods beyond the school at a brisk pace. It was difficult to walk and write at the same time, but she had long ago mastered this skill. Nothing so insignificant as getting from one destination to another should impede her writing, of course, and she knew the way by heart.

  It’s the quiet ones who you have to watch out for. That was quite a good line. She’d have to work it into something later.

  Miss Temple and Miss Scatcherd were both reasonable suspects, but Charlotte believed that the murderer was somebody that no one else would ever think to consider. Another teacher, who had until recently been a student at Lowood herself. Charlotte’s best friend.

  Jane Eyre.

  Charlotte climbed down into the dell and spotted Jane near the brook. Painting, as usual.

  Talking to herself, as usual.

  “It’s not that I don’t like Lowood. It’s that I’ve hardly been anywhere else,” she was saying to the empty air as she made a series of quick, short strokes onto her canvas. “But it’s a school. It’s not real life, is it? And there are no . . . boys.”

  Jane was a peculiar girl. Which is part of why Charlotte and Jane got along so well.

  Jane let out a sigh. “It is true that things are so much better here, now that Mr. Brocklehurst is dead.”

  A thrill shivered down Charlotte’s spine. Never mind that this was (as we have previously reported) what every girl at Lowood had been saying regarding Brocklehurst’s untimely death. There was just something so satisfied about the tone in Jane’s voice when she said it. It seemed practically a confession.

  It had been no secret that Jane had detested Mr. Brocklehurst. There’d been a particular incident the week that Jane had first come to the school, when Mr. Brocklehurst had forced her to stand on a stool in front of her entire class, called her a liar—worse than a heathen, he’d said—and ordered the other girls to avoid Jane’s company. (Mr. Brocklehurst had really been the worst.) And Charlotte remembered another time, after Mr. Brocklehurst had refused their request for more blankets, when the girls were waking up with chilblains (we looked this up, and a chilblain is a red, itchy, painful swelling on the fingers and toes, caused by exposure to cold—gosh, wasn’t Mr. Brocklehurst the worst?), when Jane had quietly muttered, “Something should be done about him.”

  And now something had decisively been done about Mr. Brocklehurst. Coincidence? Charlotte thought not.

  Jane looked up from her painting and smiled. “Oh, hello, Charlotte. Lovely day, isn’t it?”

  “It is.” Charlotte smiled back. Yes, she suspected that Jane had murdered Mr. Brocklehurst, but Jane was still her best friend. She and Jane Eyre were kindred spirits. They were both poor as church mice: Jane a penniless orphan, Charlotte a parson’s daughter. They were both plain—they even somewhat resembled each other—both exceedingly thin (at a time when the standard of beauty called for ladies to have a pleasant roundness to them), with similarly sallow complexions, and unremarkable brown hair and eyes. They were the most obscure type of person—the kind people’s gazes would pass over without notice. This was also partially on account of the fact that they were both little—that is, short of stature, diminutive, petite, Charlotte preferred.

  Still, there was beauty inside of them, if anyone cared to look. Charlotte had always known Jane to be a kind, thoughtful sort of person. Even when she was committing murder, she was thinking of others.

  “What’s the subject today?” Charlotte stepped up beside Jane’s easel and lifted her spectacles to her eyes to examine Jane’s unfinished painting. It was a perfect facsimile of the view from where they were standing—the dell dappled with sunshine, the leafy boughs of the trees, the swaying grass—except that in the foreground of Jane’s painting, just across the brook, there was a golden-haired girl wearing a white dress. This figure had been featured in many of Jane’s paintings.

  “That’s quite good,” Charlotte commented. “And you’ve captured a sort of intelligence in her expression.”

  “She thinks she’s intelligent, anyway.” Jane smirked.

  Charlotte lowered her glasses. “I thought you said she wasn’t anyone in particular.”

  “Oh, she’s not,” Jane said quickly. “You know how it is. When I paint people they sometimes come to life in my mind.”

  Charlotte nodded. “The person who possesses the creative gift owns something of which she is not always master—something that at times strangely wills and works for itself.”

  Jane didn’t reply. Charlotte lifted her glasses to look at her. Jane was staring off at nothing. Again.

  “You’re not leaving Lowood, are you?” Charlotte asked. “Are you going to be a governess?” (That was really the only viable career choice for girls at Lowood: teaching. You could become a village schoolmistress, or an instructor at some institution like Lowood, which is what Jane had done, or a governess in some wealthy household. Being a governess was really the best any of them could hope for.)

  Jane glanced at her feet. “Oh, no, nothing like that. I was just . . . imagining another life.”

  “I imagine leaving Lowood all the time,” Charlotte said. “I’d leave tomorrow if the opportunity presented itself.”

  But now Jane was shaking her head. “I don’t wish to leave Lowood. That’s why I stayed on, after I graduated. I can’t leave.”

  “Why ever not?”

  “This place is my home, and my . . . friends are here.”

  Charlotte was beyond flattered. She’d had no idea that Jane had stayed at Lowood simply because she hadn’t wished the two of them to be separated. Charlotte was, as far as she could tell, Jane’s only friend, thanks to Mr. Brocklehurst. (Charlotte had never given a fig to what Mr. Brocklehurst had dictated concerning Jane.) Friendship was indeed the most valuable of possessions, especially for a girl like Jane, who lacked any family to speak of. (Charlotte was the middle child of six—which she counted as both a blessing and a curse.)

  “Well, I think you should go, if you can,” Charlotte said gallantly. “I would miss you, of course, but you’re a painter. Who knows what beautiful things there are to behold outside of this dreary location? New landscapes. New people.” She smiled mischievously. “And . . . boys.”

  Jane’s cheeks colored. “Boys,” she murmured to herself. “Yes.”

  Both girls were quiet, imagining the boys of the world. Then they sighed a very yearning type of sigh.

  This preoccupation with boys might seem a little silly to you, dear reader, but remember that this is England in 1834 (think before Charles Dickens, after Jane Austen). Women at this time were taught that the best thing that could ever possibly happen to a girl was to be married. To a wealthy man, preferably. And it was really good luck if you could snag someone attractive, or with some kind of amusing talent, or who owned a nice dog. But all that truly mattered was landing a man—really, any man would do. Charlotte and Jane had few prospects in this department (see the above description of them being poor, plain, obscure, and little), but they could still imagine themselves
swept off their feet by handsome strangers who would look past their poverty and their plainness and see something worthy of love.

  It was Jane who broke the spell first. She turned back to her painting. “So. What marvelous story will you write today?”

  Charlotte shook the idea of boys out of her brain and took a seat on the fallen log she always perched on. “Today . . . a murder mystery.”

  Jane frowned. “I thought you were writing about the school.”

  This was true. Before all of this business with Mr. Brocklehurst, Charlotte had begun writing (drum roll, please) her Very-First-Ever-Attempt-at-a-Novel. Charlotte had always heard that it was best to write what you know . . . and all Charlotte really knew, at this point in her life, was Lowood, so the First Novel had been about life at a school for impoverished girls. If you’d flipped through Charlotte’s notebook, you would have found page after page of her observations of the buildings, the grounds, notes on the history of the school, detailed renderings of the individual teachers and their mannerisms, the girls’ struggles with cold, the Graveyard Disease, and, above all, the abominable porridge.

  Consider the following passage from page twenty-seven:

  Ravenous, and now very faint, I devoured a spoonful or two of my portion without thinking of its taste; but the first edge of hunger blunted, I perceived I had got in hand a nauseous mess: burnt porridge is almost as bad as rotten potatoes; famine itself soon sickens over it. The spoons were moved most slowly: I saw each girl taste her food and try to swallow it; but in most cases the effort was soon relinquished. Breakfast was over, and none had breakfasted.

  That had all been fine, Charlotte thought, especially that bit about the porridge. But this was supposed to be a NOVEL. There had to be more than just simple observation. There had to be a story. A plot. A level of intrigue.

  She was on the right track, she was fairly certain. The main subject of Charlotte’s novel was a peculiar girl named Jane . . . Frere, a plain, penniless orphan who must struggle to survive in the harsh environment of the unforgiving school. And Jane was smart. Resourceful. A bit odd, truth be told, but compelling. Likeable. Charlotte had always felt that Jane was the perfect protagonist for a novel (although she hadn’t told Jane that she had the honor of being immortalized in fiction. She was waiting, she supposed, for the right time for that conversation). So the character was good. The setting was interesting. But the novel itself had been somewhat lacking in excitement.