Jane Steele by Lyndsay Faye

I’ve been paid already, ye daft child,” Nick said, frowning.
    “This is payment for something else.”
    “What, then?”
    “The world is a hard place, and I live in it alone.” I swallowed back my tears. “If you don’t remember the others, remember me.”
    Nick studied me; in the end, he merely accepted my basket and shook my hand. Turning, he strode towards the dingy coach and Chestnut, who stood stamping and generally articulating his desire to be rewarded with a bag of hot oats. I could sympathise.
    “Straight down the path,” he ordered. “Best o’ luck to ye, though brains’ll be of better use—and mind the headmaster.”
    “I mean to.”
    “Good,” Nick grunted, clicking his tongue at his weary horse. “Ye’ll live longer.”
    I walked with a palpitating heart, dragging my trunk, up the lane under the brightening glare of midafternoon. The sun had sliced through the cloud bank, leaving an unmendable gash of blue across the sky’s face, starkly lighting the battlements before me. Reaching the front entrance, I hesitated and then knocked; the door was of thick wood strapped with iron as if bound in a strait waistcoat. A uniformed servant girl with a pockmarked face answered and beckoned me inside with the instruction, “Mind you wipe your boots. This way.”
    We marched through corridors lined with carpets of forbidding black and blue, lit with wall-mounted dips rather than gas, featuring art suggesting that a great love of our Lord would be rewarded by the righteous being pelted with rocks. Half having expected a mean hovel lined with manure-seasoned straw, my childish jaw dropped; wherever my aunt had sent me, she had paid a pretty penny to do so, for this was no barnyard masquerading as a school, but rather the castle of a malevolent monarch. Had a dragon inhabited the dungeons, I should not have been in the least surprised. When we reached a smaller side room with books dimly lining the shelves, the servant said merely, “I’ll fetch someone,” and I was left with my trunk at my feet and mind in turmoil.
    About ten minutes later, the door swung open. The woman standing there was quietly dressed in grey, her blond hair parted in the middle and her slender hand lifting a rushlight towards the darkened interior. She had a classically lovely face, features calling to mind a songbird or a sonnet, with a sweet afterthought of a nose andpale blue eyes. I thought her around twenty-five, which seemed a most distinguished achievement and one I felt unlikely to duplicate.
    “Are you Jane Steele?”
    I nodded.
    “Welcome. I am Miss Amy Lilyvale, and I teach music here. If you apply yourself at Lowan Bridge, you will be a valuable addition to any great household in the world. If you are feckless and idle, you will find life hard.”
    She said these words as if required to deliver them; then she smiled. “You must be weary—you can have a wash before supper, and lie down if you like. Come.”
    Lifting my little trunk, I followed her light step back into the corridor and up a stately central staircase. We had not halfway climbed it when a bell clanged loudly enough to summon the dead, and the sound of pattering feet from all directions met our ears.
    Girls poured into the murky corridors, books clutched to flat bosoms and full ones, for they seemed to range in age from as young as I was to as old as eighteen. They were all dressed in navy blue stuff frocks—coarse material which must have chafed—with quaint white aprons, and a queer cloth cap fastened over their hair. I must have glanced down at my trunk, for Miss Lilyvale touched my elbow gently.
    “Your own clothes will still serve you for holidays when you return to see your family.”
    “I have no family,” I answered without thinking.
    “Surely you must have a provider, or you could not afford to attend Lowan Bridge School.”
    “Yes, I am very grateful to my aunt,” I replied, recovering my wits, “but she is not fond of me. She means to