Lowood

An ImaRead production · text & illustration by the production line

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Wide horizontal illustration of a small thin girl standing alone at the iron gate of a tall, narrow, grim schoolhouse against a pale winter sky, a coach just departed down a frost-rutted road. — The coach was gone before she could count her own breaths. The building stood against the sky as if it had grown there out of stone and refusal.

Mid illustration of a thoughtful young girl with a slate-blue shawl sitting at a wooden desk reading, in a cold grey schoolroom with frost on the window and a small amber hearth-glow in the distance. — In that cold place she found a girl whose face was too thoughtful for her years, who spoke to her as if she were a creature worth reasoning with.

Intimate charcoal-and-wash illustration of two girls in a dim dormitory at night. One lies still against a thin pillow; the other sits on the bed's edge, cradling her small hand. A single guttering tallow candle on a stool casts a small amber pool of light onto their joined hands and faces, while the rest of the room dissolves into slate-grey wash and bare paper shadow. — She folded her small hand over mine, and told me, in her steady way, that she was going to her Father.

I was carried into the cold like a parcel no one had agreed to receive. The coach left before I had counted my own breaths, and the road unwound through a country that paid no attention to the small, sick creature it was splitting in two. When the carriage stopped at last, a building stood against the sky as though it had grown there out of stone and refusal: tall, narrow, grim, its many windows staring like the eyes of people who have decided not to love you. A lady in lilac met me at the gate; another, gentler, took me inside and washed me and fed me and laid me down in a long room where other girls lay shivering in the dark. I learned quickly what Lowood was. It was a place where the porridge was burnt because patience was thought a better lesson than breakfast, where the water in the basins froze overnight, where fires were rationed like bread and the bread itself was rationed like fire. I learned what Mr. Brocklehurst was the same week. He came clothed in funereal respectability, with a stiff cravat and an eye like a nail, and he asked the teacher whether I were the new pupil. He made me stand on a stool before the whole school and pronounced me a liar. My hair, which I had been vain of, was cut to the root by one of his followers, and I was told that if I had been comely I had been given a plain face on purpose to mortify me. I have not forgotten it. I have never entirely forgiven it. The man spoke of heaven and meant humiliation; he spoke of humility and meant starvation; he spoke of God and meant himself. I would learn later that the world holds more such men than I would like to count, but Lowood gave me my first specimen, pinned and labelled.

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Yet Lowood was not only Brocklehurst. In that cold place I found Helen Burns. She was a girl with a face too thoughtful for her years, who was bullied and read Plato and spoke to me as if I were a creature worth reasoning with, not a troublesome foundling to be slapped back into shape. She taught me to bear an unjust blow without striking back; she taught me that forgiveness and contempt are not the same thing; she taught me, though she did not use the words, that there is a difference between meekness and surrender, and that no one, not even God, asks a reasonable soul to be spat upon. Miss Temple, the superintendent, taught me the rest. She taught me to draw, a little, and to play, badly, and to speak French with an accent I would carry all my life. She gave me books and quiet, and she never once struck me or made me a spectacle. I could not have said it then, but I felt it: she was the first adult I had met who treated me as though I had a soul and not merely a use. There were other winters at Lowood that I would not wish on any child. I stood at my desk in thin shoes and watched my feet go white. I ate the burnt porridge and pretended it did not taste of ashes. I watched the older girls go thin and then go away, and I learned not to ask where.

Then came the sickness. It came on a winter cold as iron, and the school fell to it like a field of wheat. The dining room smelled of sickness before we even crossed the threshold. The schoolroom emptied; the dormitories filled. Miss Temple nursed. The village doctor came. And Helen, who had been coughing longer than anyone admitted, who had carried her tuberculosis as patiently as she had carried every insult, grew quieter and then grew still. I sat with her one evening in her dormitory; we said nothing in particular; she folded her small hand over mine, and she told me, in her steady way, that she was going to her Father. I stayed with her until the candles burned low and her breath slowed and stopped. I held her after. I held her because there was no one else to hold her, and because I could not bear that so much tenderness should leave the world unattended. She died, and with her died the first version of myself, the one that had believed love and cruelty could live in the same house. Spring came late that year. When the doctors came to inspect the school they found what Brocklehurst had starved into the children's bones, and he was humbled in front of his own committee, which gave me a small, savage satisfaction I will not pretend to renounce. Miss Temple, before she left to be married, invited me to tea and spoke to me as though I were a guest, not a charge, and gave me back a little of what the school had taken. I walked in the garden that afternoon and understood, for the first time, that I had begun to be a person who would, one day, choose her own ground.