John Eyre - Mimi Matthews

For my mother, Vickie.

This story was written entirely for you.

Lowton, England

October 1843

John Eyre stood over the freshly turned heap of earth, his head bent and his gloved hands clasped behind his back. The sun was breaking over the bleak Surrey Hills, a slowly rising rim of molten gold. It burned at the edges of the morning fog that blanketed the valley, pushing back the darkness, but doing nothing at all to alleviate the bone-numbing chill that had settled into his limbs.

Lady Helen Burns’s newly dug grave was located behind the church in a section reserved for those poor souls who had died outside of the grace of God. Unconsecrated ground. The final resting place of the village’s suicides and unbaptized infants. None had been blessed with so much as a simple marker. No cross, headstone, or marble angel to commemorate their passing.

Until now.

Helen’s humble plot was adorned with a tablet of gray marble. John had commissioned it himself. It didn’t state her name, or the date of her untimely death. Had it done so, Sir William would have no doubt demanded it be removed. Helen was still his wife, and therefore his property, even in death.

In lieu of Helen’s name, the stonemason had recommended a quote from the Bible. Something dire, from the book of Lamentations. “The crown is fallen from our head: woe unto us, that we have sinned!”

John would have none of it.

Instead, he’d ordered the stone to be chiseled with a solitary word of Latin: Resurgam. It was the promise of resurrection. Eternal life in the hereafter, free of earthly woe—whether the church believed she merited it or not.

It had been an act of defiance. Yet how pathetic it looked in the early morning light, that small stone with its single word, propped over a hastily dug grave.

She had deserved better.

“I thought you would come.” The Reverend Mr. Brocklehurst approached, the tread of his footsteps nearly silent on the frost-covered grass.

John’s muscles stiffened. The beginnings of another headache throbbed at his temples. Megrims, the village doctor called them. Symptoms of a highly strung individual with far too much on his mind—and on his conscience.

Whatever they were, they were coming with more frequency of late. Even during those hours when the pain was at an ebb, the shadow of it still lurked behind John’s eyes.

“A sad end for an unhappy soul.” Mr. Brocklehurst came to stand beside him. He looked down at Helen’s grave with an expression of pious regret. “Though I cannot but think it mightn’t have come to this had you never offered her your…sympathies.”

John failed to conceal a flinch at the thinly veiled accusation. “I was kind to her, and she to me. There was nothing more to it than that.”

There hadn’t been. Not on John’s part.

But Helen had come to view their friendship in a different light. She’d seen him as a savior. A man who might help her to escape the prison of her life.

He hadn’t helped her in the end. He’d been too concerned about his own future. Too respectful of the bonds of matrimony.

“In these cases,” Mr. Brocklehurst said, “kindness can often be a cruelty.”

John gritted his teeth. He had no patience for the man’s homilies. Even less for his insinuations that John’s friendship with Helen had hastened her demise. He had enough to reproach himself with on that score without being lectured to by a clergyman.

“You’re young yet,” Mr. Brocklehurst went on. “You’ll soon learn.”

Young? At seven and twenty? John felt as old as creation. Weary in body and soul. After Helen’s death, he’d been quite ready to lie down and die himself. But that was all over now. It had to be. Guilt was a bog—a mire. He wouldn’t permit it to suck him under.

“Where will you go?” Mr. Brocklehurst asked.

“Far away from here.” John inwardly winced to hear the lingering bitterness in his words. In the preceding weeks, he’d thought the last ounces of emotion had been leached from his soul. Nothing remained, save a firm resolve to start again somewhere else. To move forward, safe in the knowledge that he would never make the same mistakes again.

And yet that trace of bitterness remained.

It was a result of being here. Of seeing her small, ignominious grave.

“To another school?” Mr. Brocklehurst coughed. “I think that unwise.”

John’s fingers curled into an unconscious fist. He had the sudden urge to strike Mr. Brocklehurst right in his smugly sanctimonious face.

An uncivilized impulse.

It was restrained by the same shackles of propriety that had prevented