Reborn as 8yo Regency Girl, OP All the Way

Chapter 8 A New Friend·Jane

Elara penned a long letter to Mr. and Mrs. Harrington, detailing every corner of Lowood and her days at the school, painting a calm and steady picture to ease their worries.

In the letter, she spoke at length of her new friend, Jane Eyre—lingering on the status of Jane’s late uncle, careful to note Jane’s respectable lineage: a father who had been a reverend, a mother born to minor nobility.

Elara knew well that in this era, status was everything. A friendship between those of differing stations would draw scorn and mockery from all sides. She was certain the Harringtons would approve of Jane once they knew her birth—not for Jane’s sake alone, but to justify their daughter’s choice of companion in the eyes of Longbourn’s society.

At Lowood, the girls divided themselves into cliques long before any teacher spoke a word of class. Orphans from the villages kept to their own, while those with even a hint of a respectable family stood apart, the divide sharp and unspoken.

Elara’s station made her one of the highest-born girls in the school. With living parents and the title of Lord Harrington’s daughter, she was a figure of quiet prestige. Her presence even began to draw new students—children of small merchants, families with enough coin for food and roof but not for a private governess. If a lord’s daughter deemed Lowood worthy, they reasoned, it could not tarnish their own modest respectability.

Soon, Lowood’s halls hummed with more girls than ever before. Two new classes were formed, and the school hired two more teachers to keep pace with the growing numbers.

Elara threw herself into her lessons, mastering each skill with steady resolve—and slowly, she let glimmers of her talent for weaving and dressmaking show through. Before long, she and Jane became Miss Temple’s special pupils, granted the rare privilege of using the teacher’s small private kitchen. There, Elara let her skill for cooking peek out, too.

She had never been a master chef in her past life, only able to make simple home-cooked meals and small pastries. But in a place as barren of fine food as Lowood, even those simple treats were a luxury. This was a land where a dish of boiled fish and potatoes could pass for a feast, after all—no one expected delicacies.

Her repertoire was small: soft egg custards, warm little bread rolls, nothing more. The school had no fancy ingredients to spare, and Miss Temple dared not let her near the open hearth for fear of fire. Still, the weekly chance to cook and share a little something sweet with Jane was more than enough to make Elara content.

Mr. Harrington had given her ten pounds before she left Longbourn—a small fortune in these parts. Elara left the sum untouched, locked away in her trunk. She spent only her small pocket money, buying bolts of plain cloth and skeins of thread, saving them for the right moment.

She planned to wait until formal embroidery lessons began to reveal her skill with a needle. She would turn that skill into coin, eventually—but she could not let her talents spring forth from nowhere. In this superstitious age, an unexplained gift for craft might label her a witch, and a witch’s fate was the gallows.

Patience was her best strategy. For now, learning was her only priority.

Becoming a lady, Elara discovered, meant learning a dizzying array of skills—an unorganized jumble of lessons, with no system to bind them together. The teachers taught whatever came to mind, with no regard for order or foundation.

Embroidery was the worst of it. The girls were taught French raised embroidery: beadwork, satin stitch, lacework, a dozen different techniques, each with its own set of stitches. But there was no rhyme or reason to the lessons.

One day, it was beadwork, the girls left struggling to master the basic loop before the teacher moved on to satin stitch the next. Stitches were taught haphazardly, beadwork one moment, lacework the next, no time to practice, no chance to perfect.

And the teachers only ever taught the simplest patterns. The intricate, elaborate designs were left for the girls to puzzle out on their own— the clever ones might figure them out, the rest would learn nothing at all.

It did not take Elara long to see the truth: the teachers held back their best skills, hoarding them for the students they favored— the obedient ones, the quick ones, the ones they could use. Jane told her as much, her voice quiet but clear. She had been called to the embroidery teacher’s office more than once, taught private stitches, given extra thread and cloth to make work that was then handed back to the teacher.

The teacher sold those pieces, Jane said, adding the coin to her own purse. The kinder teachers split a little of the profit with their students. The greedier ones gave nothing, demanding endless work for no reward.

Elara leaned in, her voice low. “Does Miss Temple not stop this?”

Jane shook her head, her eyes heavy with understanding. “She has tried. But if the teachers cannot earn extra from the girls’ work, they will teach nothing but the very basics. This way, at least a few of us learn the real craft.”

Elara’s heart sank as she understood. A skill with embroidery was a lifeline for these girls. For a common woman in England, the options were few and cruel: maid, or worse, a street walker. The government urged young women into service, but maids worked thirteen, fourteen, fifteen hours a day for a pittance, their bodies worn thin by toil. Too many chose the streets instead, selling their bodies to feed themselves and their families.

The rising textile mills had opened a new door—factory work—but the mills were death traps. Long hours, choking dust, lungs seared by the fumes, a slow death by consumption.

A woman’s place in this world was small, her survival dependent on men. A skill with a needle, the ability to make fine embroidery or well-fitted dresses, was a rare chance at independence. It was no wonder the teachers hoarded their knowledge like gold.

It was the oldest truth in the world: teach a student too well, and the master starves.

Only the nobility could afford fine embroidery, and they would only buy from the most skilled hands. Even then, they coveted the exotic stitches of the far East, seeing them as the height of fashion—native French embroidery was only for the middle class, who bought sparingly, only from those they trusted.

To make a living at this craft was to walk a narrow path: master the skill, yes, but also build connections—connections the teachers guarded fiercely, never letting the girls meet the buyers, never letting their students steal their livelihood.

Elara let out a soft sigh, staring at her half-stitched sampler on the desk. “It seems influence and connections matter everywhere, no matter the world.”

Her plan to earn money with her needle would have to wait. A little longer, she told herself. Just a little longer.