Thornfield Hall (10 page)

To reach Thornfield I took the coach, which set me down at Whitcross; and I ran up the long lime drive to the house. Mrs. Fairfax was there to admit me; she had written to me of the day she intended to return to Thornfield to collect her belongings (for, as it transpired, Papa had emptied the house of most of the staff after Jane left and I was sent away to school), and I tricked the good housekeeper into believing I wished only to find my favorite toy, Punchinello, and so would go straight to my room. But I went around to the French window in the west wing, and I ran still, this time up and up, higher and higher, to the attic where Grace would sit, head in hand, by her bottle of gin. But there's no sign of her here now.

The sun comes in the small window in the eaves. I take the magnifying glass from its bag on my arm, and hold it under the strong rays of the July sun, training it directly on a paper fan—a pretty thing, it must have belonged to the crazy woman once—that lies on Grace's table.

The flames start small, like Félix's miniature fireworks, set off to keep me happy in the long hours while he develops his pictures in his studio. Then they grow; and to save my life I run: down and down, for there is no time to take out and attach my wings. How can fire make walls, as this one does? The voice of La Cibot sounds in my ears: “Fire loves you, Adèle.” And I know
I must take with me the picture of Papa in my room and rush in there through the flames and pull out a stool to fetch it from the top of the chest of drawers…and then, as the fire closes around me on the crashing stairs, I leap from the turret window…and fly….

Edward

I
t is five years since Thornfield Hall was
rebuilt, after a fire that started up in the attics succeeded in burning a great part of the house to the ground. In the ensuing chaos I, Edward Rochester, was blinded and maimed, and little Adèle, who had been unexpectedly visiting Thornfield on that day, was found unconscious in the parterre where she had fallen from a high story. God gives me guidance to thank Him for her recovery from the effects of this tragic disaster, in which it was reported that Bertha Mason leaped to her death in an attempt to evade the conflagration.

They were alike, the wretched Creole and the
fillette
who demanded of me that I love her as a father: they craved a man to lead them, and they had no spirit of their own, neither pride nor independence in a world they saw as belonging precisely to the paternal figures they have been denied. And so they were vengeful! Had they understood my Jane, so resolute,
proud, and fine, they would have seen a life without misery and madness; as it is, poor Antoinette lost her life without coming to understand the qualities of the woman who is now my loving wife.

There are other reasons for my sad, reflective state of mind at present. Adèle leaves school today to come to us, to be greeted by Jane, the guiding spirit of her young years. Adèle never to my knowledge obeyed her governess, preferring to mock and jeer and make up to me with all the skills of her own mother, a
courtisane.
Could she not see that Jane had merely a desire to assist a child reared without morality? That the rules of Paris are not played here in England, and certainly not here in the north—where once I knew misery and feared for my own mind—before Jane returned to me, bringing happiness and calm.

This state of marital harmony must continue, and Jane must never learn of my suspicion that her “little Adèle” escaped on the day of the fire from the school to which she had been sent, and came here to try to claim a paternal affection from me. Jane, mother of my son and heavy now with our second child, will give as much as she is able to the daughter I cannot publicly accept as mine, for all the “proof” that has come from France in these past years (not from Céline; she has too much cunning for direct communication) from Jenny Colon, a woman whose tone—self-justifying, masculine, intolerable—I abhor. My cherished young wife trusts me to instill in Adèle, after five years of the new boarding school I instructed should be as strict as possible, a belief in Christian values along with a love of this country, which is in all probability still as appealing to the child as the bowl of cold porridge they have required her to eat daily in the seminary. She must learn, as I have, to like the days that pass here. As my sight returns to me, I recognize and salute the sky of steel, the sternness and stillness of this landscape, winter and summer both. I like Thornfield: its old crow
trees and thorn trees; its gray façade and lines of dark windows. All that Adèle—and the poor insane Antoinette before her—loathed to the very core of her being, feeling the prison of my refusal to love her—but how could I? how could I?—the child must now learn to give grateful thanks for. I welcome back each day with the blessed growing sharpness of my eyes.

I admit that the curbing of my natural instincts is proving harder than poor Jane had hoped. I hate still; I act with speed against my enemy; I suffer, most of all, from the sin of despair. (But who can reproach me, victim first of an avaricious father and then of a mad wife?) My house has been burned, I have been blinded and maimed: surely, as the good Lord revives in me the greatest of his gifts, that of vision, I must lose my vices and dedicate myself in true humility to a lease of life I had long thought could never be mine. Have I not done penance enough, for committing the mortal sin of murder, when I took the life of Céline's lover? Am I not fully aware of the suffering inflicted on the women who loved me? Now I am saved—by the elfin creature who first startled me on horseback here at the gates to Thornfield—she who could have followed God and wed the missionary of whom she still speaks some nights in her sleep—rescued from the pit of eternal misery by my darling Jane. Surely I can find peace of mind at last?

But I confess it comes slowly, this calm and contentment of which philosophers and God-fearing men speak. On some days, it's true, I sense the wind as it blows on the moor, and all the living, hidden creatures that breathe beneath the ling and gorse: my heart is filled with the glory of Creation.

On other days I could wish myself a supplicant in the Romish church, so deep is the abyss created by my misdeeds, my cruelties, the pain my power here and abroad has led me to commit. I would kneel by a curtained box—like my father and his before him I dis
dain the papists and their idolatry, but now I am led to wonder if they are not the true followers of Jesus Christ—and I would pour my heart out to a man I cannot see.

Is this what it has come to? Can I never make amends? Jane will not support my black moods, as she calls them in that light, quiet voice of hers, which would blow them out onto the moor as surely as the northeasterly that comes today to chase my horrors away. “Edward, none of us is without sin,” she says, looking at me profoundly, but with a smile half etched on the small mouth whose dictates I followed so long when quite blind. “Take little Edward and walk up to the kitchen garden with him. Show him what grows there, even in the hardest winter: how the snowdrop and the willow are pushing through.”

I take the child on these occasions, and the miracle of life restores me, as the infant stares in wonder at the snowdrop, first herald of the spring. In summer I take the child to the hothouse, and peach juice dribbles down his chin as he cries out in delight. And I can see him more clearly, day by day! My wife, by bearing another child, demonstrates her belief in me, in Thornfield, in a future without pain or strife.

But on some days I am no sooner in my study, in the house I have built up again from the ashes of the past, than I am plunged into darkness once more. I see Antoinette, in the hammock on the veranda of the accursed place where the birds that were like tropical crows, with their insistent, metallic call, mocked her mad eyes and my own breaking heart. I see the journey back to England: her bafflement at the cold, lightless sky; the good days when she danced and pirouetted on the lawn here—and the gradual, ghastly descent as she lost her mind. And then I wander further, retracing the steps that led the “milord” to France and Germany and Italy, in search of recompense for a bargain struck in the infernal regions. How they loved my gold, these women I picked and left,
discarded as soon as outworn. How gold, which formed the basis of my father's hellish pact, was what attracted them!—this is the thought I have. And then, too frequently and with knowledge of a burden of remorse and shame, I think of Céline Varens. Even to Jane I have painted her as a mercenary pest, a woman who lived solely to scratch the fortunes from her lovers' adoration, their disillusion growing as she emptied their purses and ran away.

But it was not so. Céline lived for the high wire, she walked across the highest span of the Funambules without support or fear. She knew herself a great actress—but who would give a circus high-wire dancer the chance to play Racine or Corneille? She was marooned in her acrobat's costume, chained to the horse she rode standing bareback in her tinsel pantaloons cut off high above the knee. I offered her the path—with my gold, it is true—to study with the great, to turn from entertainer to tragedienne. And just as she began to train her voice and learn the lineaments of true passion, I threw her from her house and home for the venial sin of spending a day at the races with a young fop whom I knew in my heart she took to seeing when I was away—and in whom she had no true interest.

Céline, where are you now? Wandering in Italy still with a vagrant musician who has neither understanding nor appreciation of your talents? Accept my appeal for pardon—even if I did not love you with sufficient selflessness, I should not have treated you in this way. If you come here—and one day you will perhaps seek your daughter and mine in this bare moorland country—you will witness my remorse for my past treatment of you. You will see the meaning of true love, when you witness my Jane and the man you once placed on a pinnacle, for respecting your wish to become a true actress. “You are not like most men,” Céline said; it was a cool day, and we rested indoors, in our white villa where mimosa trees grow, by the sea. “You care for my soul, and you know I aim high,” she said, and I hear her words now and shudder at my vile
indifference to her, on the occasion I decided to punish her infidelity to me.

It is time for me to find Jane; and on days such as this I find her one hundred times in a single morning—a result, possibly, of the dependence I had on her for three long years after we first wed. There are other reasons, also, for my need of dear Jane. She will banish my thoughts—of Antoinette, of Céline, of the other women I tortured with false promises of love and enduring happiness. We shall walk together—she slowly, mindful of the child she brings to the eighth month—to the lake, to the new staircase of water constructed at the far end by the chestnut tree, which will fulfill her dreams as it descends in rivulets of music all night long. Jane will turn to me and say she hopes for a daughter, for we already have a son—

There. As I go out onto the terrace from my study and walk down the stone steps to the parterre, I see a figure by the wicket gate that leads out onto the moor.

She is beautiful—even more beautiful than I remember her. A face that is a heart lit by pools of dancing brown water under straight brows. Ringlets, black as night, gathered at the nape of a neck I can taste and smell, so strongly does it come back to me.

Céline—but it is not she. This young woman, who looks back at me with the frank, fearless gaze of Céline Varens, tosses her head as her lost mother once had done, and she smiles, the child I once knew as Adèle. Now this apparition will come in. A slender hand at the latch to open the gate and bring her here….

And as I call Adèle's name, Jane appears from the study's French window, her gaze following my trajectory of a mere few seconds before, running down the flight of steps to my side.

Jane sees no one there, at the side of the lichen-covered gate under the dark-laden branches of an Irish yew. She gazes at me
anxiously—for she fears for my eyesight, and any mistaken vision bodes ill for the coming days.

I look again, and there is indeed no one there. With my dear wife I walk down to inspect the improvements in the gardens of Thornfield Hall.

Mrs. Fairfax

I
t was something in the region of two months
after the little governess packed her bags and left Thornfield Hall, her hopes and happiness destroyed, that Mr. Edward Fairfax Rochester came up to inform me I must go, too, to cousins in the remote north of Scotland, an island, to be precise, and not a spot I would have chosen for myself in the circumstances. For, as I had expected, it grows dark at noon on the bare outcrop of rock that is the home of Lord and Lady Doune, and however much I put in in the mornings, in the way of patching linens and cleaning silver sadly left to rust in the damp Atlantic air, night invariably descends before I complete my task, and the remainder of the day must be spent knitting garments too simple to require a pattern.

It was at Inchalan Island, therefore, that I heard news of the burning of Thornfield Hall; and Lord Doune's demeanor was very grave when he summoned
me out from the downstairs housekeeper's sitting room of the ancient keep that is his ancestral home and requested me to take a seat in the old arbor, protected from the gales that blow in night and day there. “Cousin Fairfax,” says His Lordship, “I have shocking news for you.” And he proceeded to recount the story I have heard so many times since, after returning to Thornfield at Mr. Rochester's sudden instruction. The accounts do not vary over-much. Fire broke out as it was growing dark, and flames spread throughout the house before engines could arrive from Millcote. A great proportion of the valuable antique furniture was destroyed inside the house, and the fire took hold so rapidly on the ground and first floors that Mr. Rochester was hard-pressed to run to the attics—but this he had done. “And what did Cousin Edward hope to find there?” I asked Lord Doune, for I have learned in life that to assume innocence of even the most basic facts brings greater reward than the demonstration of a knowledge of events.

“It was said that Edward Rochester had a lunatic wife living up there,” replied Lord Doune when a brief silence between us had passed. “We had—along with everyone else—assumed him to be unmarried. And yet despite the existence of a wife living, our kinsman had wished to marry a young woman, a Miss—”

“Eyre,” I said.

“Yes, you must have had more than a superficial acquaintance with her,” said my host and employer, refraining, however, from meeting my eye and gazing instead out at the limitless gray sea that stretches, so he has informed me, all the way to America. “No doubt Edward was wrong to contemplate bigamy, as he did, though his situation must, even to elders of the church in these islands, be demanding of sympathy. The tragic part, so I believe, is that Rochester came too late to the battlements, and his wife threw herself off.”

“And how did you hear that, sir?” I asked. Something in Lord
Doune's words and manner of expressing himself had me wondering at the identity of the bearer of the tale. For I knew better than anyone else that poor Mr. Rochester's insane wife had been disposed of in quite a different way, and a good time before the fire of which I had just been told.

“I could not expect Edward to write to me directly,” came the prompt and truthful answer. “He has lost his true home, and I am informed that he is cared for at Ferndean Manor, somewhere on the estate.” Lord Doune must have seen me shudder, for he paused again; and as we both stood quietly looking out to sea, I thought of the conversations on the subject of an impending influx of visitors I had had with my master, these being the sole occasions when the possibility would arise of his admitting to the existence of a person living but hidden in the uppermost extremities of the Hall. “Mrs. Fairfax, I may require you to ready Ferndean Manor for a new occupant,” Mr. Rochester had said to me two or three times (this before the arrival of Miss Eyre, it must be stated: the requests would usually coincide with the imminent visit of Miss Ingram and her mother, Lady Ingram). And, as I recall so well, my reply was invariably the same, to wit that the manor was famously damp and would need months and not days of fires and airing to prepare it for human habitation. I never, in the course of these exchanges, showed the slightest curiosity as to why Mr. Rochester made these demands; and indeed, before long, they were referred to between us as emergency measures, in the event Lady Ingram brought a greater retinue than had been expected. I always knew that my employer was aware he could count on my discretion in this, as in all else concerning his private arrangements.

Lord Doune was silent a while longer; then His Lordship went on to tell me—and deeply saddened I was to hear it—that my master had, either permanently or temporarily, been blinded by the fire at Thornfield and had been maimed also, whether in his
right or left arm had not been made clear. The landlord of the inn not far from Millcote—a mere two miles across fields from the Hall—was, it transpired, an Archie Campbell, who had previously served Lord and Lady Doune at Inchalan—and it was from his pen that these pieces of information flowed. He had some of the facts right, I supposed, but I was wary of believing the entire account. To test my host, and without his knowing I was doing so, I proceeded to inquire as to the manner of the “madwoman's” conduct, once Mr. Rochester had arrived too late on the battlements to save her. Had she turned, as lunatics will, on her husband, despite the grave danger in which they found themselves? How, in short, had the ghastly scene begun and ended?

“Cousin Edward went back to get his mad wife out of her cell,” said the master of Inchalan somberly. “And then they—the servants, that is, and Archie Campbell himself, who had seen the blaze from the inn and rushed across the fields—called out to him that she was on the roof, where she was standing, waving her arms above the battlements, and shouting out till they could hear her a mile off. Campbell saw her and heard her with his own eyes. Several onlookers witnessed Mr. Rochester ascend through the skylight onto the roof; they heard him call ‘Bertha!' They saw him approach her; and then, madam, she yelled, and gave a spring, and the next minute she lay smashed on the pavement So badly smashed, they say, there was nothing left of her face—so there was no knowing what manner of woman she was.”

“Dead?” I said, and Lord Doune nodded before the word was out of my mouth. “I see,” I said, with as much an air of grief as the sad tale demanded. “This is a dreadful happening, my lord, and I know you will respect my greater sense of duty to Mr. Rochester, should he be in need of my services in his new and drastically altered situation. I am as well aware of the drawbacks attached to living at Ferndean Manor, especially in winter, as anyone; and if
the master has John and Mary caring for him there, I shall be glad to direct them.”

Lord Doune replied that he understood perfectly and that he would forward any command from Mr. Rochester to me without delay. This, however, took some time to come, as I have already explained, and in the meanwhile various thoughts and memories came to me that I kept to myself, despite the curiosity shown by Janet, the maid at Inchalan, a sister and therefore confidante of the landlord of the inn at Millcote, Archie Campbell. I needed time, I knew, to examine the evidence sent north by the host of the Rochester Arms, before coming to my own conclusions. But the account I was given, as I know, is not accurate. And it soon became clear to me that my hosts and employers wished keenly to learn the facts of the tragedy at Thornfield Hall.

 

“
Come in, Mrs. Fairfax, and sit down.” Thus was I sum
moned by Lady Doune to give an account of the time I had passed at Thornfield before coming north to the islands of the Hebrides, to act as housekeeper to the noble kinsfolk of my relative, Edward Rochester. That I had been asked nothing—or very little, at least—on the subject of the setup at the Hall since my arrival at the castle, I had put down to the reasonable assumption by my employers that I would have little to tell. Mr. Rochester, a bachelor with a known appetite for traveling abroad, had been rumored long enough to be about to become engaged to Miss Blanche Ingram to have stopped being an item of interest, to kin or acquaintance alike. He was an unmarried man; tales of the extent of his fortune varied considerably (this I knew from the inadvertent overhearing of conversations in the drawing room, before the ladies went up to change); and the general opinion of my excellent master was of a man who was the prototype of a bachelor: inter
ested in the running of his estate, keen to marry when the time came and raise a family, and not hurried in any of his ways. Now there came a story of fire, followed by madness and possible murder or suicide. Lady Doune placed me very tenderly in a low, needlework-covered chair in her boudoir and proceeded to demand I “fill in the gaps,” as she very succinctly termed it.

“So, my dear Mrs. Fairfax, tell me about the governess our cousin wished to make his wife. Unlawfully, we hear. Is this correct? Did Mr. Rochester, up until the time of the fire at his house, have a wife living there, unknown to everybody?”

“Lady Doune,” I replied, “there is nought, as we both know well, that servants and keepers of hostelries like better than to invent and fabricate the most lurid of tales when misfortune strikes at their betters. Edward Rochester did not have a wife living at Thornfield Hall, to my knowledge; but he was a man of tested loyalties and never dismissed anyone from his service, even if they fell fatally ill or went so far as to lose their reason.”

As I spoke these words, I knew them to be the gospel truth, so help me God. Not once in all the long years I passed at Thornfield Hall did I gain a glimpse of the “ghost,” as Leah and some of the foolish maids called the vision they claimed would pass sometimes down the stone spiral staircase and emerge on the second-story landing of Thornfield Hall. Rumors and hearsay are one thing, evidence of one's own eyes another. “There is neither ghost nor wife at Thornfield,” said I as Lady Doune sat staring at me in much the same way her husband had done.

“How do you explain the fact the wedding between Mr. Rochester and Miss Eyre was stopped?” persisted Lady Doune. “If there had not been an impediment to the marriage, would not the ceremony have taken place?”

I confess I have thought long on the subject of my master's mat
rimonial intentions—with Miss Blanche Ingram, with Miss Eyre, and even with the mother of the little French girl, who lived under the impression, poor child, that her “Céline Varens” would arrive any day to wed the man she called Papa, whether he be such or not. So great was the child's ability to deceive herself on the subject of her mother's coming that she addressed letters to herself from the absent mother, these discovered by Leah in the fork of a tree and brought to me. I attempted to explain to Her Ladyship that our mutual cousin, for all his excellent qualities, was congenitally unable to decide on a bride, a future chatelaine of the Hall. “He would announce his engagement and then call it off,” I said. “He rigged it up, very probably, that two strangers would appear and show ‘proof' of Mr. Rochester's previous tie. It worked well: the service was called off, and the intended wife of Mr. Rochester left the house the very next day.”

“Odd indeed,” mused Lady Doune. “Why did he not marry Blanche Ingram, then?” she went on with a sharper tone.

“My lady, we all expected it,” said I. “The family diamonds were sent up by the bank from London—and these I saw with my own eyes. The engagement dinner was on two occasions planned and then called off. John the butler can give you more details—there are so many, regarding the postponed or canceled betrothals of Edward Rochester.”

“So who was it who put it about that Edward Rochester had a wife already living at the time of the fire, by those who did not know the facts?” asked Lady Doune, her voice and expression showing extreme uncertainty as to what or whom she might next believe. My answer, however, convinced the good countess, I am reasonably sure, of the truth of my words.

“Why, the woman who spread this calumny was an old house-maid, my lady, who had long ago succumbed to the temptations of
alcohol; and while indulging herself in her master's cellar, had lost her sanity along with any sobriety or good judgment she might once have possessed.”

“Good heavens!” exclaimed Lady Doune.

“I warned Miss Eyre,” I continued, “the new governess come to the Hall to teach the French ward—or daughter—of Mr. Rochester, to pay scant attention to the laughter and menacing sounds she heard soon after her arrival there. They emanated from Grace Poole—that was the woman's name.”

“The child was—is—Edward's daughter?” gasped the noble-woman. “I was informed the child was adopted, when Archie Campbell wrote to us from the inn at Millcote.”

“Indeed, she is both,” I replied. “Little Adela was convinced that the promises made by her ‘Papa' to the dancer in Paris who is the child's mother would be honored, and shortly. These were promises of marriage, most certainly.”

“I am astonished,” Lady Doune confessed in a faint voice.

Lady Doune was able, when I had done, to inform me that she now understood fully the illusion all those at Thornfield labor under, who believed that a “madwoman” perished in the flames at Thornfield. Her cousin Edward Rochester would certainly have run up to the roof, to try to ascertain the extent of damage already caused by the fire. The drunken servant—Grace Poole—it must have been who leaped to her death and was disfigured beyond recognition. I agreed heartily with this and, when pressed, replied that of any other victim of the blaze at Thornfield I know nought. But I kept for myself one certain resolution: should the governess or the French child, now safely locked away at school, come to the Hall again when I am there (and surely I will be), then they must suffer for their innocence. For I fear for my master's life, if the truth should finally come out one day.