Becoming Jane Eyre by Sheila Kohler

looks up, as if she senses this thought, and even in the dim light the nurse sees a momentary flash, a spark of smoldering fire in the large, luminous eyes behind the glasses, which surprises her. Perhaps not as mild and meek as one might think at first glance.
    The daughter turns from her immediately and plunges her nose back into her writing book. Who do you think you are, dearie? She is accustomed to a bit of a bustle, a friendly word now and then, an appraising glance, even from the most aristocratic of her patients.
    When she worked for Lady Sedick last summer at Thornton, there were the housekeeper who chatted with her at length in her cozy sitting room in the evenings and the groom, who had his eye on her. She can still see him as he was early that spring morning when she took a turn in the dew-wet garden: a big, sandy-haired, strapping young fellow, standing astraddle in the sunlight in his mire-flecked boots, offering her a big bowl of wild strawberries he had picked from the garden, swimming in cream. Irresistible.
    Even Lady Sedick, herself, whose husband was absent most of the time, liked to converse about her ailments at some length, particularly in the middle of the night when she could not sleep. She would call her at moments like that, plaintively, and ask her to bring her a tisane and perhaps a little biscuit. She would dip the biscuit into her cup and wet her lips, the dark hair on the upper lip damp. Sometimes she would even hold her hand or have her brush out her thin hair. “My dear, my dear, if you knew how I suffer,” she would say, and press her hand to her heart. Sometimes, when she had asked her to massage her shoulders and back, and if the nurse would allow the tips of her trembling fingers just to touch her décolleté with delicacy, she would make a little moaning sound and say, “What healing hands you have, my dear.”

    She wakes in the night, unable to sleep. “Forgive me, God. Just to let me sleep,” she whispers, and places her hand between her thighs, strokes gently, crosses her legs on her hand. She groans with relief. Still, she does not fall asleep. She needs something more solid in her stomach than the watery fish they had again for dinner. She would like a piece of cheese, a little of the lamb left over from the day before.
    She climbs out of her bed, pulls a shawl over her shoulders, and barefooted, candle in hand, creeps quietly down the stairs. She goes into the basement kitchen and takes the lamb bone from its dish in a cupboard, pours herself a pint of porter, and sits down at the table. She takes the bone in both hands and gnaws at it, ravenously. Nothing quite as delicious as the flesh near the bone. She is grinding on a delicious piece of gristle with her good back teeth when the kitchen door swings open and someone stands staring at her, a flash of surprise in her eyes. It is the daughter in her white nightgown, her hair around her shoulders.
    “What are you doing here?” she asks, though it is perfectly obvious.
    “I couldn’t sleep,” she says, embarrassed, dropping the bone, springing to her feet, wishing she had put on shoes. She wipes the grease from her chin with the back of her hand and lowers her gaze like a guilty child.
    The daughter looks at her for a moment and then smiles. “Neither could I,” she says, not unkindly.
    “Would you like something to eat—drink?” the nurse asks, gathering her wits about her.
    The daughter hesitates, eyeing the lamb bone and the porter. There is a flash of greed in her eye.
    The nurse pours her a generous glass of porter, and the daughter makes a gesture to her to sit down. They sit facing each other across the kitchen table in the night silence, sipping. She can see the traces of the porter in the fine hairs on the daughter’s upper lip. What a small, dainty woman!
    “Such long, lonely nights,” the daughter says, and in the soft light, her pretty hair down, her eyes bright, the nurse finds herself thinking she