The Madwoman Upstairs (6 page)

Near the end of dinner, Hans said: “I notice that you keep looking at him.”

“Who?”

“James Orville.”

I gave a start. “What? Where? He’s here?”

“No.” He pointed up toward the wall. “Dr. Orville.”

“What?” I squinted to make out the portrait above us. “I thought that was Richard III.”

Hans laughed. “Close.”

I stared up at the half-eaten chicken leg caught between the man’s hands. “Orville’s a little young to have his own portrait, don’t you think?” I asked.

“He won the International Arts and Literature Prize at twenty.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“It’s a big fucking deal.”

“As big as being a king of England?”

He shrugged. “A matter of opinion.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Orville gets a spot on the wall, but not at the dinner table?”

He hesitated. “Something like that.”

Pudding arrived but I couldn’t seem to eat. I was much too aware that Richard III—Orville?—was watching me. His gaze was steady. He looked like he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to be a good ruler, or Caligula. I’m sure that to a more experienced observer, the answer would have been obvious. For now, I wished he would wipe that cheeky grin off his face.

It happened several nights later.

I was returning to my tower from the library when I discovered a small package leaning against my door, like a sultry actress from the 1940s. It was wrapped in an old copy of the
Hornbeam
. As I approached, it seemed to breathe,
Where have you been, baby?

I thought it must be a belated birthday gift from my mother, but then again, she had already bought me something, hadn’t she? Fluffy slippers—the impractical kind. I picked up the delivery. No scotch tape. Someone must have wrapped it in a hurry. There was a message scrawled in thick black marker across the top.

Here.

I took the package inside, to the refrigerated air inside my room. I set it down on the desk.
Here.
Was that
Here you go, dear
, or was that
Here, fool, it’s yours
? No address. No return address. The sender must have lived within Old College walls. I ripped through newspaper wrapping, then let out a small shriek.

It was a book—one I recognized immediately. Not because of the title,
Agnes Grey
, but because of the ink stain above the
Anne
in
Anne Brontë
, which appeared just below the faded portrait of the young woman on the cover. This book—this ugly, jam-stained book—was an emblem of my childhood. It was Turkish coffee and burned pancakes. It was Shelley in the paddling pool, and the shadows of friends I once knew, conjured out of a dank, dusty literary graveyard. This book had belonged to my father.

My mind drew a breathless blank.
Agnes Grey.
Here, in my lap. What? No. There was no single creature who could have delivered this to my doorstep. My father’s library had burned down many years ago. This was an elaborate, twisted trick. No one could have known what this book meant to me, or how my father and I had read it together, long ago. I sat down. All I could see was the Governess, whose eyes seemed suddenly bright.

I did the only thing I could do. I grabbed my phone, dialed, and let it ring once, twice, seven times.

“Claude, c’est toi?”

My mother’s voice was smooth and light. It belonged bottled up and stored inside her wine cabinet. There was a party bustling in the background. I heard dishes and laughter and friendly epithets. I imagined all of France was gathered around my mother to eat cheese in a city that was sparkling like a thousand opals.

“Hi,” I said.

“Alice?”

“Samantha.”

Another pause. I knew she was surprised. She was the one who usually called me, on the first of every month, like an invoice.

Someone let out a loud laugh in the background; then Mom said, “
Sammy! Bonsoir!
”

“Yes,
hola
,” I said. “Did you send me something in the mail?”

“Say it again?”

“Mail. Did you send something?”

“I hope they fit!”

“I mean a book.”

“A book?”

“You didn’t ever steal anything out of Dad’s library, did you?”

There was a long pause. “I’m going to have to change phones, will you hold?”

I held. I held for a long time.

“I’m back,” came the voice on the other line.

I took a breath. “Did you ever steal anything out of Dad’s library, before it burned down?”

“What kind of a question is that?”

“Please,” I said. “I have to know.”

“No, I did not.” She sounded wounded, and I felt a strange, detached triumph, as though
Agnes Grey
arriving had been a fortuitous way of enacting punishment for her lengthy and inexcusable absences. There was a distant clatter of dishes in the background.

“Tell me what’s going on,” she said. When I didn’t answer, she prodded, “Sammy?”

“Please don’t call me that. It makes me feel like a sheep.”

“A what?”

“A sheep.”

“Listen, darling—”

“Baaaaa.”

There was a pause, and I knew she was pressing her lips together, like she always used to. “Tell me what’s wrong. Are you all right?”

I glanced back at
Agnes Grey
. “I’m hallucinating.”

“I’m switching rooms again so I can hear you.”

“You don’t have to do that. I should go.”

“Samantha?”

“It’s fine.”

“I—”

“Talk soon.”

I hung up.

I flipped open
Agnes Grey
, the brilliant little devil. I might have been looking at a perfectly preserved corpse. Yes, it was my father’s copy. Instead of underlining key sentences, or elegant phrases, Dad wrote things like
Here!
and
There!
and
Bah!
I read the opening paragraph:

All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity that the dry, shrivelled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut.

God, I had forgotten how much I hated this novel. I made a desperate glance back at
The Governess
, which was hanging on my wall, watching me like a spy.
Help me,
I thought. But she was preoccupied with sinking. Once a governess, always a governess. She was holding a book in her hand too—was
Agnes Grey
drowning her, also? I looked at the book in my palm and wondered if this could possibly be my inheritance. Was my father’s much-debated estate really just a 1997 Penguin edition of a novel that had been sitting on bookshelves for a century?

My breathing grew quick and shallow. I felt like an amnesia patient whose memory has suddenly been restored, to her great displeasure. All the facts I once knew about the Brontës were coming back to me in a lethal avalanche. The Brontës’ ghosts were rising out of the unquiet earth; I could almost hear them demanding why I had left them alone for so long. I stared at
Agnes Grey
and I began to remember things I wished I could forget: the madwoman in the attic, Grace Poole, the parsonage fire, Thorp Green. Yes, yes, Thorp Green. Hell, I hadn’t thought of that place in years.

I pulled out my phone for the second time that evening. Blanche Howard had warned me that discussing my inheritance was a matter of great urgency, but I hadn’t anticipated that a book would appear at my doorstep if I didn’t act fast enough. I had no other choice: it was time to arrange a meeting with the British National Bank.

CHAPTER 4

A
gnes Grey
is, without question, the most boring book ever written. It tells the story of an impossibly meek nineteenth-century governess (Agnes) who describes what it is like being an impossibly meek nineteenth-century governess for over two hundred pages. The plot is famously dull—a badly disguised autobiography of Anne Brontë’s own less-than-riveting early twenties. Agnes, the daughter of respectable yet poor parents, becomes a governess at a manor suspiciously similar to the one where Anne Brontë herself worked. There, Agnes meets a slew of well-dressed villains: materialistic, frivolous, and rife with satirical potential. But Agnes—and by association, Anne—never offers the sort of biting social commentary that would have upgraded
Agnes Grey
to
Pride and Prejudice
. Reading the book leaves only a sense of gasping emptiness, and the disappointing feeling that Anne Brontë missed her opportunity to be truly great. The novel is about a woman who isn’t allowed to speak her mind, and was written by a woman who also wasn’t allowed to speak her mind. It was handcuffed right from the get-go.

Critics at the time found little fault with it. Agnes was everything a young lady ought to be: moral, weak, waify. Unlike the other Brontë novels,
Agnes Grey
met with relatively little contempt. “It is infinitely more agreeable” than Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights
, read one review, leaving “no painful impression on the mind—some may think no impression at all.” Poor Anne. I used to fancy myself as something of her reincarnation, caught in the similarly oppressive shadow of older, illustrious writers. “A queer little thing” was what Charlotte called her youngest sister. George Smith, the Brontës’ publisher, called Anne a “gentle, quiet, rather subdued person.” Her manner, he said, was “curiously expressive of a wish for protection and encouragement, a kind of constant appeal which invited sympathy.”

I was eight or nine when my father first sat me down with
Agnes Grey.
Dad viewed the Brontë books as private diaries the rest of the world didn’t understand. We started with
Agnes Grey
because it was the most “coded” of the Brontë novels, as he put it. Then we moved onto
Wuthering Heights
because it was the most “literal,” and after that came
Jane Eyre
because it was the most “unfair.” Then, and only then, my father said, would we take a look at
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
because understanding it required first reading the other three.
Are you ready?
he used to ask me.
Are you ready for them?
My father wasn’t a certified teacher and he didn’t have much of a syllabus. He himself never received a college degree, which I assumed was out of genuine disinterest—Dad loathed modern education and its feel-good teaching methods. In his mind, all teachers should use a combination of the Socratic method and basic training. He did try to create some semblance of a classroom, however. We used the rectangular kitchen table as our desk, a baguette as our pointer. If I received less than eighty-five percent on any of his oral examinations, he made me go outside and play soccer.

Under Dad’s philosophy, books were not shape-shifting constructions of a reader’s imagination. Novels, he said, offered the specific clues, maps, and guidelines necessary for their own evaluation. By
clues
, he did not mean metaphors and he did not mean symbolism. He meant actual clues. To him, every book was its own treasure map. A good novel, he said, left the close reader with a useful souvenir. All you needed to do was learn to see what was right under your nose. (This, I remember, was a refrain he enjoyed repeating.)

I remember our lessons on
Agnes Grey
. My father explained that the only parts of the book worth reading were the chapter headings.

“Recite them to me,” he said.

I asked, “Why?”

“Read them out loud. You’ll see.”

We were at our kitchen table. I flipped open the book to the table of contents. Someone (likely me) had spilled something red and sticky on the opposite page. Ketchup? I read the chapter titles out loud. “ ‘Chapter One: The Parsonage. Chapter Two: First Lesson in the Art of Instruction. Chapter Three: A Few More Lessons.’ ”

“You get the idea,” Dad interrupted.

“No, I don’t,” I said.

“Lessons. Do you understand?”

“Sorry, what?”

“They’re lessons.”

“What are?”

“Exactly. Are we on the same page?”

“Metaphorically?”

“Literally.”

“What?”

“Excellent.”

The discussion went on like this for the rest of the day. “
A few more lessons.” Get it, Sam, get it? Why would she write that?

Now, years later, I thought I understood. What appeared to be meekness and agreeableness on Anne’s part was deliberate subversion. Her protagonist held the post of governess, one of the least powerful positions a woman could occupy in the nineteenth century. And yet, Anne’s novel immortalizes Agnes, giving a loud, persistent, and permanent voice to one of the most inconsequential figures in history. Almost one hundred and seventy years later, Agnes is one of the only governesses left who is barking orders—and, by extension, so is Anne.
“First Lessons,” “A Few More Lessons.”
She is the ageless teacher, and we, the readers, are her eternal students. Here is her first lesson, on page one: