Thornfield Hall (3 page)

T
he eighteenth card illustrates the dark
realm of Hecate, the night hag. The sign of the Crab, seventh sign of the zodiac, emblem of the primitive forces of the unconscious. Here are the stone pillars of Hades, gateway of life and death; reigning over all is the moon. This is the critical stage of the journey, where existence hangs in the balance….”

The speaker, an old woman Maman and Jenny call simply La Cibot, looks at me as she pronounces, and I can see that Maman isn't pleased by this at all. It's the first time the
fillette
of the actress and opera singer Céline Varens and her devoted friend Jenny Colon (everyone always behaved as if I were somehow their daughter, and I had long accepted it) has been allowed to come into the shabby street deep in the Marais where the fortune-teller plies her trade. So how can it be that someone so young, so clearly without an interesting future for several years yet, can command the attentions of the crone?

Maman coughs as Jenny, taking a morning away from the theater and preparations of
Piquillo,
lights up a cheroot and leans back in her chair, placing her legs in a ringmaster's pair of tan leather boots right up on the table where La Cibot lays out her tarot pack. A black hen named Cleopatra nibbles at seeds under the table, and a toad with a long biblical name no one can pronounce sits up close to the cards, with their crudely colored pictures of towers, hanged men, and malevolent moons.

I am not afraid of La Cibot—she's come to the rue Vaugirard too often to occasion alarm—and I've heard Maman and Jenny joke about her unsuccessful predictions as I drop off to sleep, comfortable in the knowledge that one thing is fixed in my life and that is the happiness of living forever with my adored mother. I've only been allowed to come along because I begged to—the Italian lessons Maman has suddenly decided I need are boring me, and the woman with the loud, theatrical voice, the sister of the new musician-director at the Funambules who comes to teach me this language Maman says I will be grateful one day to know, has developed a bad Parisian cold. “I'll be quiet,” I told Maman as we set off from the house, Monsieur Punch shouting an imprecation in the new tongue in which I'm supposed to become fluent. “I won't say a word, Maman. You won't know I'm there!” And now it happens that, as far as the old witch is concerned, no one but me is in the fetid little room, with the black hen strutting and pecking under a seldom-cleaned, tasseled cloth and the shutters tightly closed against an early-summer sun. Maman and Jenny might be women without any prospects of romance, fortune, or whatever soothsayers are visited in order to provide; I am, unwittingly and quite undeservingly, the star of the show.

“The tower,” intones La Cibot, who has gone into one of her trances (on no account, Jenny has told me, must she be woken until it is time: her heart might stop with the shock of reentering
the world we all inhabit). “The tower and the crab together. The journey under the moon.” And she fixes on me, from the depths of her hallucinatory state, a gaze so wild and full of foreboding that, for the first time, I feel a real fear on confronting La Cibot. Maman, too, is looking at me anxiously. Why must I go? And where is this dreadful tower? Without warning, the tears come: like a baby I sniffle and gulp, watching a trail of liquid run from my nose down onto my freshly starched pinafore. La Cibot is condemning me to exile; I sense she is sending me away from Maman. It doesn't occur to me at this stage that the ancient fortune-teller may be in on Maman's new plans and has either been told or genuinely picked up from the tarot the fact of our coming separation. How could I imagine such a thing? But in the light of successive events it seems probable La Cibot knew a portion at least of the trouble Maman now finds herself in; and if I had been old enough to think clearly about what the repercussions of the night before were likely to be, I would have been less surprised by the old witch's pronouncements.

This morning, as we walked along the boulevard Saint-Germain, there had been an atmosphere of joy and plenty.
Flâneurs
—those who simply stroll and observe—went past, enjoying pavement scenes in pausing at cafés where every subject under the sun was aired (and every pocket eyed for the picking) and women in striped jackets and gathered skirts and pretty shoes showing slender ankles in stockings of dyed cotton all gossiped happily. I had seen that Maman alone had been preoccupied and even grumpy. My calls to her to look up and admire the chestnut trees with their magnificent candles to grace a poor man's ball, chandeliers lit by a May morning, had gone unheard. Even Jenny, striding along at her side, made no effort to cheer Maman, something she invariably did when her spirits were low. It was as if this capital of the world, this magical city, had lost its allure for one of
its greatest gems, the beautiful and celebrated Céline Varens. Yet we were going to La Cibot as if to a doctor, to hear a highly unwelcome diagnosis. Despite the fact, as I reminded myself in our progress through the crowd, that the man Céline had once asked me to call Papa had once more vanished from our lives. What more could Maman possibly want?

What had happened was this. The stranger, as I continued to think of the dark, ill-favored man who had come to our house in rue Vaugirard every two or three days between Easter and this month of early summer, appeared to consider himself owner of all he set eyes on. His possessions included my poor Maman and myself. Just as the “milord anglais”—so Jenny referred to him with a short, sneering laugh—brought on each visit an additional item of furniture or valuable piece of glass or painting for the conservatory (for which he had certainly paid)—so I could see my mother's sense of obligation and feelings of oppression and even hatred toward him grow. Myself, counted as a minor adornment to the ménage, the milord stranger would sometimes throw up in the air, exclaiming I was his little
article de Paris.
By this he meant that I signified to him all the frivolities of the city in which he was so ill suited to live. Even at my tender age, I knew an
article de Paris
to mean a feather, or an artificial flower such as Tante Irène stitched on a hat or corsage for the courtesans the milord and others of his kind frequented when the fancy took them. My reaction to these attentions on the part of this arrogant man may well be imagined.

It was therefore a pleasant relief when one day, just as the good weather was setting in, Maman announced to me that we were going to the races at Longchamps together, and the vicomte, thrust into the background by the arrival of the milord, would be our escort for the day. I liked the vicomte: he was ineffectual but polite and never failed to buy me pastries, including the
fraise de bois
tartlets that Jenny considered too expensive to bring into our little household. “I smell the blood of an Englishman,” Jenny called after us when we set off in the vicomte's smart crested phaeton for the first important race meeting of the year; and as we looked behind us, we did indeed see the man who called himself my father disembark from an expensive hired vehicle outside our house and look very disgruntled at being told by Bettina that Madame was not at home. To my delight, Maman thought the joke as good as I did and made no attempt to hide the vicomte's head when the good-natured young man twisted half out of his coach to see what we were laughing at. Unfortunately, as I am bound to think in retrospect, it was a mistake on our part not to restrain the vicomte, and things would be very different today if we had.

The day at the races, during which the vicomte made sure I won several louis d'or (these coins he made appear down my nose or out of his sleeve and were referred to as my “winnings”), was as much enjoyed by my mother as myself. She agreed, so great was her renewed fondness for the vicomte, to accompany him to the opera that evening; I was to be dropped at home, where Jenny and Bettina between them would make my supper, read me stories, and put me to bed. This kind of arrangement had happened dozens of times before, and I thought nothing of it. I was secure in the knowledge that Maman would be home before midnight; she might sit in the conservatory awhile if the evening was fine, and then, pausing in the boudoir on her way to her room, she would stoop low and kiss me good night.

Nothing was as I expected when the vicomte's phaeton dropped me back at the rue Vaugirard. A sulky kitchen maid let me in and then disappeared: the house was empty; and after all the excitement of the racecourse, I felt unable to settle down with a drawing pad or a book. I even went out into the street and looked
vainly up and down, in the hope that Jenny or even Bettina might be coming back. Of course there was no sign of them. Then I looked up. A man sat on the balcony of the first-floor suite of rooms, these generally kept locked and reserved for the occasional use of Monsieur Graff.

The man was the milord stranger. He had taken possession of the balcony, just as he had over past weeks commandeered each room in the house, not to mention the conservatory. He saw me at once: “Adèle!” he called out as I ran indoors and went up the stairs as fast as I could, to reach the safety of my room. “Come here, you little monkey. Where's that flirt your Maman, eh? Tell me that!”

I have seen enough of drunkards to know it's best to keep out of their way, and I ducked down the stairs again at the sound of his voice, the dreadful thought having also come to me that the house was indeed empty except for a mad stranger milord, and that he might chase me right up the stairs and kill me like Bluebeard before locking me in a secret room. But the ogre was faster than I, and he pulled me into the room and then out on to the balcony, where he had been sitting eating chocolate-covered almonds. “Here, you're as bad as your mother. You'll do anything for money,” this man, the man my mother could no longer bear to refer to as my father, said in a thick voice. “If you won't eat it, let's throw it.” And, to my horror, he started to toss the bonbons, these almonds as hard as stones, onto the roof of the greenhouse below. Soon came crashing sounds as the glass broke into a million fragments and then, try as I might to conceal them, my own cries and sobs in the ensuing silence.

There is worse to come. The only way the stranger could be persuaded to stop from throwing more of these costly chocolate missiles down below was if I climbed onto his knee—something
he often tried to make me do when he came to call and was always refused. He was sobbing, too; I hardly dare admit it, but, despite the strong, sweet smell on his breath, I pitied him. Perhaps I was intoxicated by the scent he gave off: partly cognac (with which I was familiar from others of Maman's admirers) and partly something else—I smelled it once on Monsieur de Nerval when he came to woo Jenny, if that is the word for his strange mode of behavior. As I say, I felt the first twinge of sympathy for the sad, drunken stranger. Up close he was no more frightening than the Beast in “Beauty and the Beast,” a tale that used to terrify me when I was younger. Now I was adult enough to see that he was unhappy, that he missed Maman as I did. But I had no intention, once it grew dark and the milord was sober enough to be guided down the stairs and out into the street, of allowing him to stay. This shocking display of emotion—smashed conservatory and all—must warn my mother finally of the unsuitability of allowing an Englishman into her home.

Alas, things did not turn out as I had planned. Long after it was dark, the carriage I recognized as belonging to the vicomte drew up outside. The stranger, who had been taking long pulls of brandy from a bottle at his side, set me down roughly and leaned over the edge of the balcony. He called to Maman; then his tone changed, and he turned to run down the stairs and—just where I had wished him three hours earlier, but now too late—out into the street. I heard nothing more after a brief, low exchange between two men: the vicomte, as I can only suppose, and the Englishman.

And here we are—Maman, Jenny, and I—returned from the foolish visit to La Cibot and standing in the ruins of Maman's pretty house in rue Vaugirard. For it's not only the conservatory now that is broken up and destroyed. The house itself has been
emptied—of everything. The beds have gone, and all the furniture, and the rosy curtains and the Sèvres plates and all the kitchen spoons and forks and knives.

Even Tante Irène has gone, and with her the pins and the bags of soaps and the bunches of artificial Parma violets.

“What shall we do?” Maman asks Jenny in a dull, sad voice. For once Jenny is at a loss for a reply.

Edward

I
am a murderer. Under French law, at
least. In defense of my honor I have killed. I will never hear her again, or hold in my arms the daughter of freedom who taught me to love slavery. She will turn from me and curl her lip in contempt. “Go back to your cold country—go back, go back!” And, like the cry of the bird that flies over the moor and awaits our guns when August comes, her voice sounds in my ears as I walk about the house, preparing myself for an influx of visitors. Your house and your land are all you Englishmen care for, so the voice goes on, the voice that can take on a hundred shades, become the voice of tragic queen and simple
comédienne
, of
femme savante
or revolutionary heroine. Your castle, your estates…Go back…

Now I have little to do but wait for death. My life is laid out before me, like the great tessellated marble floor in the Hall of this mansion I never expected to
inherit: the banquets, the long spells of solitude, the hunting parties, and the rest. Twice a year I will travel to my more distant farms, then up to Scotland to visit the Duke of This and the Earl of That, listening in long, dark nights to the sound of their wailing bagpipe music against the tumble of brown waterfalls. All my visits will be to foreign places, places foreign to my heart. And on my arm will be a wife more foreign to me than my grande passion, my belle Céline, could ever prove to be.

For I must marry, or I will go mad.

As luck will have it, there will be two arrivals today at Thornfield Hall. One, my intended bride, comes before noon. We shall walk together in the long hazel avenue where the leaves are green and the bleakness of the surrounding countryside concealed. “How I hate the bareness of the place you describe to me!” Céline would cry as we lay together in the white villa by the sea, the mimosa beyond the window a veil of yellow, the bright blossoms dancing with their feathery leaves as if the grim north of my country were no more than a dream. “I will never come and live there with you. Why don't you sell everything and come permanently to France?”

I forget, in my remembering, the young woman who comes today. I place us together in my imagination on a rugged hill, on the acres Céline rightly accuses me of owning, while the people in my poorly farmed heather country are fortunate if they can find enough to eat. (Yet she doesn't mind the diamonds and cashmeres I buy her with the rents from this accursed land, or the railway stock from the great steel tracks that will cross the perimeter of the estate. Nor the lands in Trinidad that supply the fortune squandered on the conservatory in Paris before I destroyed it. Like so many others, this is a subject on which I cannot dwell.)

Where was I—if not with Céline Varens, in the abolished king
dom that once was ours? I am more truly there than here, so why did I not sell all, as she insisted? Why am I in this godforsaken place, as she would doubtless find it? Why, when I saw the old woman on the heath like the witches who appeared to Macbeth at Forres, did I take no heed of her warning—that my lands would claim me in the end and the ghost of my bride would bring me great unhappiness? I was young and strong then: I should have gone. But I stayed, triumphant at my father's and brother's sudden deaths. I had never anticipated riches, yet I could buy any woman I wanted, and all the luxuries she called for. It was heady stuff for a younger son, and I availed myself of the advantages of my new position. For a milord abroad, as I was to find in Italy with Giacinta and in Germany with Clara, is treated as a little king. He is offered all the treasures of Europe. And if the slave trade in which my late father dealt so profitably has now been ruled unlawful, then the women of Europe are well prepared to make up the deficit. They'd sell their souls—with the exception of Céline, of course, with the exception of Céline—to become mistress of Thornfield Hall. Yet I turned them all down, these willing slaves. I returned here alone, a murderer.

It does not fall to many men to dispose of one wife in order to marry another. “You'd better come upstairs, sir,” said Grace Poole at dawn on the day I heard my new bride would come. And I woke before her hand touched my shoulder, so great had been my dread at the knowledge of my impending nuptials spreading through the house. Grace would never tell her charge, naturally—but Leah and the other servants: who can say? I had envisaged it often: the chapel, the old Dowager Ingram in her pew, the stately bride I could almost mistake, as I turned impatient from my place by the altar, for the tall, dark woman I had first married.

Then the sudden silence, as strong as the wind on bright October days that sweeps the moor and scatters leaves along the valleys,
crisp, unready to die. The silence—then the murmur, the shuffle of feet drawn in, the rush of skirts along the aisle. The red dress, my God, the red dress. It runs like flames, its wearer a line of fire that makes straight for the table where the holy sacrament is laid out. How can I stop her, this woman who haunts the place as the old witch once said she would? But there is no time to lose. “Come up, sir,” Grace Poole says. “We must do something before the ladies are here.” And I follow Grace, for she is right. We must do something, and do it now.

What can I say, what can I do in expiation for the sins committed first in my name and then by myself, for the thirty pieces of silver, the thirty thousand pounds with which my poor Antoinette bought me? For the money has bought her only a cage, and like a tropical bird she is frozen to her perch, high above the hum of the household she should by rights have organized and controlled. How can I make reparation to a woman who has lost her mind, who suffers and then forgets, grows violent and then despairs, all in a cloud of oblivion—only on occasion shot through with lucid thought? I cannot love her, nor she me. But she will possess me to the end, if I do not marry and lead a life as other men. The Ingram lands adjoin Thornfield Hall. I'll march with you, dear Blanche; we'll grow rich together.

Already, as I climb to the third story of the house where I saw early on in our honeymoon that the poor Creole would have no choice but to spend her days, I am forced once again to recognize the reality of my life—Grace Poole will see to it! There can be neither passion nor light for you, her solemn tread says, as she mounts the last, twisting step; take your dreams of the Frenchwoman and burn them. You need to marry and produce an heir.

It is too late now for me to return to that state of innocence—ignorance, Céline would say—in which I dwelled when my father and brother lived and I had little to look forward to but church or
army, refuge or barracks for a younger son. I was reared by beating and neglect; my mother, who died before I grew, was temperamentally incapable of love. My elder brother, Rowland, secure in his inheritance, bullied me pitilessly. I passed my days on the moor, shooting and hunting. “You were reared to kill,” Céline said as we sat one day in the garden of the house I built for her, the house where the scents from the mountains of the Alpes-Maritimes lingered until late among the flowers she grew there. “The birds and beasts you slaughtered were born to die a violent death, and you were from birth their executioner.” And Céline, seeing me roll my eyes in astonishment at her strange ideas, laughed and rose from the table where we sat over peaches and wine. “One day,” she said, “you will understand. When you come to this country to live, and meet those who see the truth and continue the fight for liberty and justice.” But these words meant nothing to me then; and now that I understand them, it is too late. I am a murderer and never can return to France. I have no choice but to reflect, as I follow the grim figure of Grace Poole ever upward, that the heiress I betrayed enjoys a brilliant revenge. For even Céline could not have heard the secret of my West Indian marriage. And if she had discovered it, what would she have thought of me then? It is a secret I must carry to the grave—and now the only question is, as I know too well, whether the grave will prove to be Antoinette's or mine.

I cannot give details of my visits to my wife. As ever before, the sheer inhumanity of her treatment appalls me. But money handed over to Grace Poole finds its way to drink and a threatening scowl if I complain. Grace holds my future, as well as my insufferable present, in her hands. No hint of the presence of Bertha, as once I called my wife, can become known. Mrs. F, my housekeeper, is obliging enough to tell visitors a ghost haunts Thornfield Hall; and so indeed it does.

I said I would not describe a visit to my wife, and the reason is simple, though I cannot dare to breathe it, for fear that the contrary of what I found on the third story of my accursed inheritance yet proves the case.

I opened the steel door, the door to which only I possess a key, as Grace stood back, her foul body stink almost overcoming me in the low-ceilinged, narrow passage of the attic. I smelled gin, and the sourness that comes from a diet of cabbage, bread, and little else. It is long since I insisted my Antoinette should eat well, as once we had together, on that island in the Windwards where the breeze blows soft, laden with spices and hibiscus, a feast to stomach, ear, and eye. But Grace disobeys me—she knows she can—and I have suspicions that my poor mad wife goes hungry if she refuses the same dreary diet as her wardress. She is thin enough, God knows. And it was the sight of her I had come to dread more than any other part of my ordeal of a life here at Thornfield Hall. Thin, spectral—she is indeed the ghost of our first days of love. Her floating mind, so desperately seeking for a stable meaning in the world, is the opposite exactly of Céline's—for Céline, whose perfect balance could be savored as she rode bareback or danced across the wire stretched high above the ring, has reason and clarity as her guides, and this starveling, stumbling creature has none. Oh, if I could only have met Céline Varens when I was still young and unmarried! All the plans made by my gold-hungry father would have come to nothing. I would have lived out under the stars, traveling with the little provincial circus Céline loved to work with through the summer months. I would have swept and carried for her, poor as a stable lad.

This is not to the point—nor, as I suspect when the wild longings for my brave actress seize me, would they be believed by such as Grace Poole, who stares suspiciously at me as I walk past her antechamber and into the room with beams as low and dark as the
Thornfield forest in which Antoinette always refused to walk. Here I'm as greedy, as determined to take the best for myself as my own father was, in the eyes of the servants, I've no doubt; why else, otherwise, would I wed Blanche Ingram, as everyone knows I mean to do? She is majestic certainly, but there are prettier and pleasanter about. I must be after her dowry, and the estate that marches with mine—and to Grace (and to my cousin, Mrs. Fairfax, though we never speak of what she must surely be aware of) I must seem a powerfully avaricious man, to take money from two brides in a row. So much for your dream of living as a stable lad, I can feel Grace Poole thinking, as if the drunken, illiterate woman could read my mind.

The table where my wife's keeper sits day and night is as it always is, that is, quite bare except for a bottle of porter and a glass. There is no other furniture, for Antoinette has in the past attempted to overthrow the press, where her old fine clothes, her red dress among them, hung; and Grace with my consent had this removed, along with the garments and their memories. There is one chair only, where Grace sits at the table, sleeping when she must, with her head on her hands. It takes me several seconds to recognize—in this mean, raftered room where straw is the sole floor covering and the view, as the attic windows are small and high, is of the narrow room behind, containing a single trundle bed—that the chair has been overturned and the bed (though I thought at first I must be mistaken, as there is no natural light to speak of in this cell) is without an occupant. I stare as stupidly at Grace Poole as she stares at me. It is impossible—yet it is what we have both most feared at Thornfield Hall. Antoinette—Bertha—my wife, has escaped, has disappeared into the house and is at large. Blanche Ingram, her mother, and her friends appear within the hour. And yet, as this foolish, evil-smelling woman and I both know, this was bound one day to occur, for all the pains we take to
keep the door locked and the room padded to subdue the sound. The poor, demented creature dreamed only of escape. I cannot record my feelings on this here.

I descend the main staircase into the great hall with a heavy heart. (Grace, on coming to the first-floor landing, where are the master bedroom and the suites that will be Blanche and Lady Ingram's, has taken the back stairs, down to the servants' quarters. She fears for her job. I pay her double to keep quiet; now I shall have to triple her pay.) What would Céline do now? I ask myself; how would her philosophy have advised her in circumstances as unutterable as mine? “All men are born equal,” said she as we lay in the quaint little house in Montparnasse I bought and furnished for her with such care—she telling all that she paid rent to a Monsieur Graff: she was ever the independent woman, Céline, and she liked to have her bread buttered on both sides. “Women have rights just as men do.” And I think, what rights are these, then? Are not my chains, for all my lands and wealth, more oppressive than any poor man's? And I reach the Hall fuming at Céline, as I so often did when we were lovers. She would have insisted, very probably, that poor mad Bertha had the right to roam over my house as she would, disturbing the servants and the guests.

But Céline is not with me now, and she never will be again. Damn her, that even now my precious time is taken up in dreaming of a lost past, when a past more pernicious, more imminently damaging to my interests, walks murderously here. Curse the woman who preached freedom and brought me only servitude. For the last time—as I see Leah, guided by Grace Poole, scamper with a frightened face from the stone stairs to the lower floor into a corner of the Hall (what has Grace told her? forced finally to admit there is a lunatic about?)—for the last time I make the great effort of will to expunge La Varens forever from my mind. She is dead to me—dead, dead.