The Madwoman Upstairs (23 page)

I wished I could have been in the room when Anne showed Charlotte her first wild and unseemly manuscript, the one that documented all the gory details from Thorp Green. Had it been easy for Charlotte to convince God-fearing Anne that such vehement writing should be reserved for the home, not shared with the public?
Do you think it wise to expose such things?
Charlotte would have said.
Is it entirely proper for a Christian woman? Is it fair to your father? To us? To your dying brother? Think of our mother. What of our late mother?

Anne would balk. She was a changed woman, but not as changed as one would have hoped. She would falter under her sister’s moralistic outpouring, and become Annie again. Charlotte would win. As Anne abandoned her manuscript for the watered-down second draft—
Agnes Grey—
Charlotte would be quietly updating
The Professor
. This new draft, called
Jane Eyre
, would be filled with all the salacious details of Anne’s own original and untold story. The central relationship between professor and student would remain the same, only now there was a new, sensational backdrop: Thorp Green, with its Gothic grandeur, its crusty staff, its pink-cheeked ward, and its mysterious servant, Ann Marshall. It was Anne’s life, and Charlotte stole it. She sensationalized it, colonized it, chopped it up and sold it for parts.

Then, of course, came the Parsonage Fire. It was a veritable inferno, engulfing Branwell’s bed, the curtains, the nightstand, and half of the wall. It took nearly an hour to extinguish and required the collective effort of all four siblings and the hastily awakened Patrick Brontë. Elizabeth Gaskell later reported that the fire began when Branwell drunkenly set fire to the curtains around his bed, and nearly killed himself. It was plausible, certainly, but I didn’t believe it, not least because Gaskell had a habit of sugar-coating the truth. Branwell never seemed bothered by the fire afterward. He never wrote about it, nor did he seem to reference it at all. The only sibling who seemed traumatized was Charlotte. She experienced something akin to post-traumatic stress disorder, and eventually banned all curtains from the Brontë household for fear that the incident would repeat itself. It was she, not Branwell, who decided to incorporate a blazing bed into her first novel.

The fire in
Jane Eyre
occurs in a similar setting, past midnight on an otherwise calm and noiseless evening. Jane wakes up to a cruel laugh echoing through the hallway. Grace Poole, she assumes. The servant. She creeps out of bed to inspect, and finds Edward Rochester alone in his room, in a bed half-consumed by flames. She manages to extinguish the fire and save Rochester, but it is months before she knows the true culprit: Bertha, the madwoman. It was a woman she did not even know existed, but who had been lurking in the attic of her home for years.

Exactly how much of
Jane Eyre
’s fire scene was fact and how much was fiction was difficult to ascertain. This much I knew: the fire at the parsonage had most certainly
not
started in Branwell’s room. Fire victims didn’t generally walk away without emotional baggage, as Branwell had. (This I knew from personal experience.) No—the fire had occurred in Charlotte’s room, and the only possible culprit was Anne Brontë.

Without a doubt, it was Anne. I could feel it in my bones, the way dogs sense earthquakes. I knew Anne Brontë like I knew myself. I could feel her burning rage inside of me—the horrible, wretched anger of a woman whose one story had been cruelly usurped by a jealous older sister. What else was there left for her? Few people would attribute attempted murder to a woman who made tea and wore a frock, but those, I knew, were the ones to look out for. I could almost feel Anne’s bitterness welling up inside of her, taking her down the hall late in the night and into her sister’s room.

I wished I knew the exact date the fire had happened. All anyone knew was that it occurred around the time
Jane Eyre
was written—either soon before it was published, or soon afterward. Each option presented a radically different version of the truth. Had Charlotte Brontë experienced a terrifying fire and decided to replicate the story in her novel? Or had someone read
Jane Eyre
after it was written, and tried to enact revenge upon the author in the most fitting way possible? Either Anne Brontë had been the inspiration for Bertha Mason, or Bertha Mason had inspired Anne Brontë. In one scenario, the madwoman inspires the book; in the other, the book inspires the madwoman.

In either case, I had an inkling that the madwoman in the attic was not quite as fictional as the world might have hoped.

January was a black and silent month, dark and cold in ways I didn’t know were possible. Orville saddled me with so much reading that I started taking meals alone in my tower. Over the next three weeks, we studied Edith Wharton, Samuel Baker, Ovid, John Davies, Dante, Rumi, Cicero, Henry James, and Confucius. Our syllabus was like a literary graveyard that had exploded. There was no chronology or thematic cohesion and it made me wish I had instead chosen to study engineering.

Near the end of the month, I descended upon the dining hall in search of lunch and signs of life. A freckled man served me cafeteria lettuce and a clump of something with Pommery mustard, and I entered the dining room with my tray. The former kings of England looked down from their portraits with characteristic disdain. Across the room, I spotted Hans, whose golden locks were shining in a way that defied science. When he saw me, he hailed me to come sit. I was surprised. I had not seen or spoken to him since the night
Jane Eyre
arrived, and I remembered the evening as one of the most awkward I’d ever spent.

“Samantha!” he said when I walked over to him. I had forgotten how clean and boyish his face was. He was classically attractive in a way that made Orville look like an oaf.

“It’s been a while,” he said, not introducing me to anyone.

I said, “Where have you been?”

“Fighting for truth, justice, and the American way.”

I paused. “Benjamin Franklin?”

He said, “Superman.”

“Ah,” I said, feeling my cheeks growing red. “I think I had a dream about him last night.”

“Who, Superman?”

“Benjamin Franklin.”

Hans grinned. “Was I in the dream?”

I paused. “It took place at Oxford, so you were probably there, too, somewhere.”

We started eating. Hans’s friends all smelled of sweat. One was a beefy-necked rugby player with glassy eyes who was talking about vehicle repair. The friend next to him was French, and had a stricken look about him, as if he was secretly thinking:
A vehicle? Bah, she is a woman.

Hans asked me what I was doing this weekend. I told him that I had decided to go to Paris.

He raised a brow. “What’s in Paris?”

“My mother.”

“Are you two close?”

“No, she’s my mother.”

“Sure.”

I reached for the pepper even though I never used pepper. I needed something to do with my hands. I noticed that there were
Hornbeam
s fanned out all over the table.

“I really hate this paper,” I said.

Hans didn’t respond, only glanced at Beef-Neck and back at me.

“Why are there so many of them?” I snapped. “They look like multiplying bacteria.”

“Noon is normally distribution time,” said Hans.

I reached for one and took a cursory look at the new headlines, awaiting the usual burst of defamatory lies and slander. To my relief, I found nothing by Pierpont. The only thing on the front page was an allegation made by a student against her teaching assistant, who had supposedly propositioned her outside a sandwich shop. I flipped to page four, then page five. Nowhere was I mentioned. Page six, however, caught my attention. I squinted. On the lower right of the page was a very small article with a very small portrait of a very small woman. I let out a small gasp. No. Yes? No.

OLD COLLEGE FELLOW REBECCA DEFOE RECEIVES AWARD FROM NATIONAL ACADEMY

I dropped my fork.

“What is it?” Hans asked.

“Rebecca,” I said.

“Rebecca who?”

I blinked. I stared at the paper, struck by a confusion that verged on comical. The head shot next to the article was one of those blurry pictures from the eighties. The woman had beehive hair and the bleary look of someone who has just been kissed on the eyes. I knew this Rebecca. She was
my
Rebecca.

I looked between Hans and his friends as though we were back in middle school and someone had just played an insensitive practical joke. But Hans’s face contorted in genuine confusion.

“Do you know who Rebecca Defoe is?” I asked.

Hans nodded. “The matriarch of the math department.”

“Is she British? Did she write a textbook when she was twenty-five and does she wear multiple gold rings?”

“You know her?”

I blanched. My sanity was flapping wildly out of control. I held the limp newspaper in my hand. How could such small, two-dimensional words have the power to change entire worlds? Rebecca had died.
Died
, as in was no longer capable of accepting awards. And who was Rebecca Defoe? The woman pictured—the woman staring back at me from 1982—was Rebecca Smith.

Hans looked at me with his pair of peacock-blue eyes.

“Nothing,” I said, answering a question he hadn’t asked. “I just didn’t know she was a professor here.”

“She’s quite well known.”

“Is she? How convenient.”

“Pardon?”

My cheeks were flushed. I racked my brain, trying to remember how my father had introduced us. He had called her a math teacher. Teacher. Not Oxford professor. A material omission, no? Regardless, the entire article was impossible—Rebecca had drowned. It was only a few months after my father had died. Her boat had crashed in the early hours of the morning, and she had sunk, along with her Greek lover, down to the bottom of the ocean. They found her days later, lying facedown on the floor of the cabin, like she had just popped down for a nap. I wasn’t crazy—it had happened. And yet, according to this paper, she was alive and well and giving speeches at national conferences.

Hans said: “You don’t look very good.”

“I think it was the mustard stew.”

“It was fish.”

“Maybe that’s it, then.”

I looked back at his sun-streaked hair. How I wished the two of us could interact just once without another bit of my past resurrecting itself between us. We were doomed, he and I. I could never live a normal life, not when my life was overrun by ghosts.

Hans said: “I’ll walk you back to your place, yeah? We can talk about it.”

I didn’t respond, and turned to look at the faculty table instead. For a moment, I thought I’d find Rebecca sitting in the front, grinning at me like a wolf.

“Where is she?” I asked. “Is she here?”

“She’s not allowed to eat in hall.”

“I thought you said she was the matriarch of the math department.”

“That doesn’t mean she hasn’t been on probation.”

“What did she do?” I asked. “Fake her own death?”

Hans said something but I wasn’t listening. A small sound escaped my mouth that didn’t seem to be coming from me. It was coming from the teenager who had awakened inside me, the one who had once been forced to learn trigonometry with an English woman’s scented-toothpick collection.
What’s twelve times seven, Sam, twelve times seven?
I pressed my palms into the cool wood of the table. It didn’t seem right that cold, real objects existed in a world where Rebecca Smith might still be alive.

I stood and told Hans to stay where he was. I smiled at no one in particular and left the table. As I walked out, I had the feeling that someone in this room—a painting, a person, even a spirit—was watching me.

When I returned to my tower, I threw open the computer. I remember the exact morning when I had learned of Rebecca’s death. I had been a fifteen-year-old in a robe, standing on our doormat with curlers in my hair.
Mystery at Sea
, shouted the headlines, over and over again. I remember feeling the strange, unconscionable excitement that only sudden tragedy can produce. The victim was London native Rebecca Smith. Age fifty-five. Teacher. Unmarried.