The Red-Room

An ImaRead production · text & illustration by the production line

ImaReadFolio 02 — 03

Intimate charcoal-and-watercolor scene of a book hurled at a small girl, a thin line of blood on her cheek, aunt gripping her shoulder in a breakfast-room. — The pain was sharp and the blood came warm down my cheek.

Wide charcoal-and-watercolor view of a small girl alone in a crimson bedchamber, carved wardrobe faces staring down, blood-colored light spilling from a painted window. — I sat on the floor and felt the panic rise in me like water filling a well.

Mid-shot charcoal-and-watercolor of a small girl lying on a crimson chamber floor, the door broken open, an apothecary kneeling, pale daylight spilling in from the corridor. — I was a creature of no account, and yet I was a creature still, and I would not be broken.

I was ten years old, and I lived in a house that did not want me. Gateshead Hall was a place of silks and silver trays and drawing rooms where the fire was always lit, and yet to me it felt colder than any field in winter. I was the orphan taken in out of pity, the burden my dead uncle had left behind with his last breath, and every servant and every cousin seemed to know it. My aunt, Mrs. Reed, kept me because her conscience would not let her send me away, but she did not love me. Her eye passed over me the way one looks at a piece of furniture that has been moved into the wrong corner — a thing to be endured, never to be noticed on its own account. I ate at the table but I did not belong to it. I walked the corridors but I had no claim upon a single room. I was tolerated. I was nothing.

John Reed was her son, and he was master of the house in every way that mattered to a child. He was older, larger, and certain that I existed only to be struck. He called me names — a governess, a beggar, a servant girl who dared to sit in his sight — and he beat me when he pleased, and when I complained the servants laughed or looked away, and my aunt told me I had provoked him. That was the law of that house: the rich boy was always right, and the dependent orphan was always wrong. One afternoon in the breakfast-room he took up a book and hurled it at me, and when I tried to turn away, he struck me across the head. The pain was sharp and the blood came warm down my cheek, and I — for the first time, for the only time I ever forgot myself in that house — struck him back. I do not remember the blow. I remember only the hot feeling in my chest and then my aunt's hand on my shoulder, and her face white as paper with anger. She called me a thing, a liar, a bad and ungrateful animal. She said I had struck her darling son. She ordered two of the maids to take me by the arms.

ImaRead2

ImaReadFolio 03 — 03

I was a discord in Gateshead Hall: I was like nobody there; I had nothing in harmony with Mrs. Reed or her children, or her chosen vassalage.

ImaRead3

They carried me up the stairs and into the red-room. It was a spare chamber, hung in crimson and gold, where my uncle Mr. Reed had lain in his coffin nine years before, and the family had shut it up like a tomb ever since. The curtains were heavy and still as if no breath had ever moved them. The light through the painted window was the color of old blood. They pushed me inside, turned the key in the lock, and left me there alone with the ghost they all pretended not to believe in. I sat on the floor and felt the panic rise in me like water filling a well. I screamed. I begged. I beat upon the door until my knuckles were sore. No one came. The room seemed to breathe around me, and the carved faces on the wardrobe stared down from the panels, and somewhere in my mind I understood, with a child's terrible clarity, that this was what my life would always be: a small locked place, and no one answering.

I do not know how long I sat there before the fear grew larger than my body could hold. The light thickened. The walls seemed to lean inward. I heard a sound that might have been my own heart, or might have been footsteps in the empty hall, or might have been something that had no name at all. I felt myself sliding down into a darkness that was not sleep. When I came back to myself I was lying on the floor of the red-room, and Mr. Lloyd the apothecary was kneeling beside me, and Bessie Lee was chafing my hand. They had broken the door at last. I heard them say, in low voices, that I should not have been shut up there. But when my aunt was questioned she only answered that I had been naughty and that I had fainted from nothing but temper. No one, in that house, would speak for me. No one would say the plain word: this was unjust. I learned in the red-room what I was to learn again and again in the years to come — that I was alone, that I was small, that the world did not love me — and that none of it would make me bend. I was a creature of no account, and yet I was a creature still, and I would not be broken.