A Fair Hand

by Charlotte Brontë, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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The strap was of soft grey kid lined with flannel, with a buckle at the wrist and a long tongue that passed behind the chair-back and was buckled again there, so that the hand it held lay quiet against the child's side like a bird in a pocket. Mrs. Prestwich had it made by a glover in Bold Street. She showed it me on my first evening at Fairfield, lifting it out of its tissue paper as another woman might lift out a bracelet, and said, "Louisa is to wear this during lessons, Miss Hird. Every lesson. I am told it is the kindest way, and the quickest."

I said that I had seen such things before.

I did not say where. I had seen one of plain buff leather, cut by my grandfather from an old saddle-girth, buckled every morning for two years round my own left wrist in the kitchen at Ovenden, while I sat at the deal table with a slate and wept onto it, and he sat across from me with his pipe out and waited. I had worn it until I could write, with my right hand, a copperplate fit to show a bishop. It was that hand which had got me my place. Mrs. Prestwich had written to Mrs. Ogden, at whose school in Halifax I taught the little ones, for "a person of steady habits and a really superior hand"; and Mrs. Ogden had sent her a page of my writing, as a draper sends a pattern of cloth. So I took the strap from her and turned it over, and thought it a great deal better made than mine had been; and I thought, God forgive me, that the child was fortunate.

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Fairfield stood on the high ground above Everton, among the merchants' houses, each in its own laurels behind its own wall. From the schoolroom at the top of the house one looked down over the slates of the whole town to the Mersey, and the river was so thick with masts that on a still morning it was like looking at a wood after a fire: the trunks all standing, black and bare, and the smoke lying among them. I had never seen a ship before that autumn, the autumn of 1843. I used to stand at the window before Louisa was brought up, and count them, and give it up.

Mr. Prestwich was a cotton broker. He had gone out to New Orleans in September on the business of his house and was not looked for before May; I never saw him. He had married his second wife eighteen months before. She was a handsome, well-made, fair woman of thirty, who had been a Miss Gore of Toxteth Park and had a great deal of money of her own, and she managed Fairfield as she would have managed a ship: from the top, by bells. I believe she was not unkind to the child. I believe she did not know what to do with her, and had resolved, in the absence of knowing, to do everything correctly.

Louisa was eight. She was small for it, and sallow, with straight black hair that would not curl in papers, and a habit of standing very still when she was spoken to, with her eyes on the speaker's mouth, as though the words were coming at her one by one across a distance and she must catch each separately. She did not chatter. She did not cry. In the first week I thought her stupid, and I thought so for perhaps three days; and then one afternoon I came back into the schoolroom from fetching a book and found her at the window with her back to me and a stub of chalk in her left hand, and on the board, in five or six lines, a ship. It was not a child's ship. It had its yards and its stays and its furled sails, and its reflection under it, shaken, in the water. She heard me and dropped the chalk, and put the hand behind her, and stood still.

"Who taught you to draw, Louisa?"

"Nobody, Miss Hird."

I rubbed it out. I did it with my right hand, slowly, so that she should see I was not angry, and I said that drawing was a very pleasant accomplishment and that she should learn it properly with the right hand, as young ladies did, when her writing was good enough. Then I buckled the strap, and set her copy.

I was a good teacher that autumn. It is only just to myself to say so, in view of what follows. I was patient; I was never once harsh with her; I did not let her see me tired. I knew to the hour how the right hand would ache and shake at the end of a page, because mine had, and I stopped her five minutes before it began, and made her rest it on the desk, palm down, and look out at the ships, and then begin again. I knew the trick the left hand has of creeping round under the strap to steady the paper, and I knew the cure for it, which is to put a book under the paper so that it needs no steadying. I knew everything. I had been both sides of that table. Her pothooks went from a spider's walk to something like a row of hooks; by Advent she could make a round O, and by Christmas she wrote out the collect for the day, the whole of it, in a hand I let Mrs. Prestwich see; and Mrs. Prestwich held it to the drawing-room lamp and said, "Very creditable, Miss Hird," and rang for tea. I went up the stairs that night with my face hot, and I was glad, and proud, and I lay a long time awake hearing the ships' bells come up out of the fog, and thinking that I was earning my bread honestly at last, and that the child would thank me.

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The strap was worn in lessons only. After tea, until Nurse took her down, Louisa had an hour to herself at the schoolroom fire, with her doll and her slate, and in that hour her hand was her own. That was Mrs. Prestwich's order and not mine. I would have kept the strap on longer. I thought it a soft order, and said so to myself, and let it stand.

In the second week of January the fog came up the river and stayed. It was such a fog as I had not known a fog could be: not the white wet mist of our moor, that lies in the hollows and lifts by noon, but a brown, cold, standing thing that came in at the sashes and tasted of coal and the river, and did not lift at all. For four days we did not see the masts. The lamps were lit in the schoolroom at two o'clock. The house seemed to have drawn its walls in close, and the sounds of the town came up through the brown dark at us, muffled and enormous: a cart, a dog, a hammer on the docks, the ships' bells, and once, very long, a ship's horn, like an animal lost.

On the third of those evenings, after Nurse had taken Louisa down, I went to make up the schoolroom fire for the morning and found her slate where she had left it, face down on the window seat. I turned it over to wipe it. It was covered from edge to edge in small close writing, and I could not read one word.

I held it to the lamp. They were letters, and they were joined, and they were in lines; and they ran the wrong way. Every letter was turned upon itself, and every line began at the right and travelled to the left, and the whole of it leaned backward like corn in a wind. My first thought was that it was a cipher, some game of Nurse's. My second thought I do not like to set down, but it was there: that it was the hand of somebody other than a child. Then I remembered the left hand, and the ship on the board, and I understood what I was looking at; and I carried the slate to the glass over the chimneypiece and held it up.

In the glass it came right.

Dear Mamma, I have been good today. I wrote the Collect with the other hand and Miss Hird said it was nearly fair. I do not think it is. The fog is come and I cannot see the ships but I heard one cry in the afternoon. I do not like the strap but I do not mind Miss Hird. She had a strap too when she was little only she does not say. I think she still minds it. Are you warm. Your loving daughter Louisa.

Under that, and older, half rubbed away: Dear Mamma, I have drawn you the ship Nurse says Papa went in. And there was the ship, drawn small at the slate's foot; and in the glass the ship sailed the other way.

I stood a long while with it, I do not know how long. I looked at the line about myself. I had told no creature in that house of Ovenden, nor of my grandfather, nor of the girth-strap. I had told no creature anywhere for twenty years. I went over it in my mind, every word I had said to her since October, and found nothing. And then I remembered the afternoon in December when she had knocked the inkstand off the desk with her elbow, and I had caught it before it touched the floor; and I remembered, as one remembers a thing seen by somebody else, that I had caught it with my left hand.

That was very likely all. A child who watches mouths will watch hands too. I tell myself so still. But I asked her, the next evening, when I gave her back the slate wiped clean; I asked her very lightly, as if it did not signify, who had told her that Miss Hird had once worn a strap.

She looked at my mouth in her still way, as if waiting for the rest of the question to come across.

"Mamma did," she said.

Then I asked her why she wrote backwards. She was not frightened of that question. She explained it to me as one explains a thing that is perfectly obvious to a grown person who is being slow. When her Mamma died, the year she was five, Nurse had gone round the house and hung a cloth over every glass, the long glass on the stairs and the glass in the drawing-room and the little one on Mamma's own table; and Louisa had asked her why, and Nurse had said it was so that Mamma should not be caught in them, going. And afterwards, after the funeral, the cloths had been taken down. "So she was caught," said Louisa. "In one of them. Nobody knows which. And everything is the other way round in a glass, so I write it the other way, and then she can read it."

"And does she answer you?"

Louisa considered this. "Not on the slate," she said.

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I did not tell Mrs. Prestwich. I have asked myself since whether I ought to have done, and whether what came after would have been gentler if she had heard it from me, sitting down, in the morning. I think it would not. But I did not tell her; I put the strap on in lessons and took it off at tea, and in the evenings I went down to my own supper and left the child at the fire with her slate; and for nine days I wiped the slate each night without reading it, which was the hardest discipline I have ever kept.

On the tenth evening Mrs. Prestwich came up to the schoolroom after dinner, which she had never done. She had a letter from New Orleans in her hand and meant to read Louisa the part about the steamboats. Nurse had not yet come. And I was not there to stand between, for I had gone down for more coals; and when I came up the stair with the scuttle I heard nothing through the door at all, and that silence told me before I opened it.

She was standing at the chimneypiece with the slate held up to the glass. Louisa stood by her chair with both hands behind her. Mrs. Prestwich did not turn when I came in. She stood and read it through to the end; I saw her lips move once. Then she lowered the slate, and for a moment, before she turned, she looked at her own face in the glass where the writing had been: a fair, handsome, well-kept face, very pale, looking back at her out of a room that ran the other way.

"Take her down, Miss Hird," she said. "Then come to me."

I took her down. I came back. Mrs. Prestwich had not sat. She had the slate in one hand and the grey kid strap, which had been lying on the desk, in the other.

"Her mother had this failing," she said. "Did you know? Mr. Prestwich has told me. She never troubled to correct it. She wrote her letters with her left hand, and her invitations, and her accounts; she held her fork in it at dinner, in company. It was thought very charming." She laid the slate on the desk, face down. "From tomorrow Louisa will wear this from the time she is dressed until she is put to bed. At meals. At play. If she will not keep still in her sleep, at night. The slate is to be taken from her. The glass is to come down from this room. And you are to make her understand, Miss Hird, kindly but so that it is understood once and for all, that her mother is dead, and is in heaven, and is not in any glass in this house, and cannot read anything she writes, backwards or forwards, now or ever." Her voice did not rise. It was a very level voice, and a little hoarse. "I will not have this house haunted by a child's left hand. I will not."

She held out the strap to me.

I did not take it. I stood and looked at it in her hand: so soft, so well made, with its little gilt buckle, and the flannel inside worn smooth already in the shape of a wrist. And something went round in me that I have no name for. There was a vane on the barn at Ovenden that stood rusted fast to the east for a twelvemonth together, so that we gave up looking at it for the weather; and one March night a wind none of us felt in the house swung it clean about, and in the morning it pointed west, and it never went back. It was like that.

"No, ma'am," I said.

She did not understand me. I saw her not understand.

"I have buckled that strap on her every morning for three months," I said, "and I did it well. Better than you know. I did it because I believed in it, and I believed in it because it was done to me. My grandfather tied my left hand to a chair for two years, in a kitchen at Ovenden, and I cried onto the slate every morning of the first winter, and he waited till I had done and then made me begin again. He was a good man. He meant me to earn my bread, and I have earned it; it was my right hand you sent for, ma'am. You held it to the lamp and said it was creditable. So it is. It has written copies for children, and accounts for Mrs. Ogden, and letters asking for places, and letters thanking ladies for them, for twenty years; and it writes a fair hand, and it has never written one thing that was mine. Not one. I did not know that until I read Louisa's slate. I had to hold it to the glass to find it out."

My voice was shaking now, and I let it. I had not been taught to let it, but I let it.

"She has one hand left that belongs to her," I said, "and she uses it to tell her mother she has been good. That is all she uses it for. She is not haunting your house. She is the only creature in it, I think, who is not afraid of anything in it; and that is because she is talking to somebody. You may take away her slate. You may take down the glass. You may tell her what you please about heaven, and so may I, and she will listen to us both with her eyes on our mouths, and believe her own heart, as I did, as every child does that is any good. But I will not tie that hand for you at her dinner and in her bed. I would as soon tie her tongue. And I will not tie it in lessons any more either, for I have found out tonight what I was doing when I did."

I put my two hands together before me, right and left, because they were trembling and I would not have her see it.

Mrs. Prestwich was quite white. She laid the strap down upon the desk beside the slate, very exactly, parallel with its edge, as she might have laid a knife beside a fork.

"You will go in the morning," she said. "I will pay your quarter. I will not give you a character."

"No, ma'am."

She went to the door. At the door she stopped with her hand on the knob and stood with her back to me, and the knob did not turn for so long that I heard the coals I had brought up settle in the scuttle. Then she went out and down; and I heard her go along the landing below and stop, a long time, at the head of the stairs, where the long glass hung.

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I left Fairfield at eight the next morning in a hackney coach for Lime Street. The fog had lifted in the night. It lay now only along the river, low and brown, with the tops of the masts standing up out of it in the sunshine, a thousand of them, like reeds out of a flood; and the slates of the whole town shone wet below me as we went down the hill.

I had not been let see Louisa. I had not asked; I knew what the answer would be, and I would not make the asking a thing for the servants to repeat. But as the coach came round the sweep, under the laurels, I looked up, because I could not help it, at the schoolroom window at the top of the house.

She was there. She stood quite still behind the glass, as she stood when she was spoken to, in her grey frock, with her black hair hanging straight; and when she saw me look up she put her left hand flat against the pane, and kept it there.

I let down the coach window. The air came in cold and sharp off the river, smelling of tar and salt. I put out my own left hand, which had not been held up to anybody in twenty years, and I held it up to her, open, until the laurels came between.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (17 October 2026), ā Carolā Brontë per mystērium cōnscientiae renātā.

Charlotte Brontë, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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