Thornfield Hall (4 page)

Then as I see Grace and Leah in fact go to the wide door, the door that stands between Thornfield Hall and the outside world, and a loud banging sounds against the studded nails and planks of old oak, I consign Céline forever to a well-merited oblivion. For this must be the Ingram party, come early, due to Blanche's eagerness to see the man she knows will propose before the week is out. Her mother, decked in pearls and diamonds, will shamelessly forecast the splendid gifts I shall promise to my bride. And they will bring with them a retinue—of young men as brainless as Céline (here I repeat, I will not think of her) assumes the rich, sporting Englishmen to be. “A
rosbif,
like you, Edouard!” her teasing voice sings in my ears. Her greatest contempt would be reserved for the young women, friends of my intended wife, and for their acceptance of their narrow lives. All these parasites will now descend on me, demanding hospitality, in one case devotion, even love. Céline, your spirit walks this house as my wife, my true wife. I cannot live without you. Go back, you said—but I will leave Thornfield Hall and come secretly to France, to live alone with memories of you, if these are all I am permitted to call my own. Let them arrest me and throw me into jail, may they send me to the guillotine for my crime. But I know, as Blanche Ingram approaches the heart of Thornfield Hall—my soul, the citadel of my youth, my future, and my past—that I cannot marry her and live an honest life.

The great door into the Hall swings open. John the footman appears, and Leah shrinks away into the shadows once more, while Grace, still seeking her quarry, I suppose, has vanished in the direction of the upper stories. Ah, I find myself thinking in the new, wild freedom my acceptance of the truth has at last brought to me, let the wretched specter of Antoinette appear now, just as the great families of Yorkshire come here for their hunting and cards and theatrical shows. Let them see the Creole from the islands where their fathers, like mine, traded in human cargo and
paid with the evil profits for their snuffboxes, lace handkerchiefs, and the rest. Antoinette may be white—but she bears the marks of the slavery I imposed on her, and of my own cruel repudiation of her, too. Lords and ladies, do you wish to see your Blanche reduced to this?

The wide door, when it opens fully at last, does not reveal the neighboring gentry. A child stands on the threshold, dazed. She looks around her, then sees me and runs into my arms.

At first, I confess, I saw Céline there, a tiny woman, shrunk by magic to a fairy's size. The face—the smiling, dimpled face—the beauty, all miniature; and I thought I saw her fly to me, as she did in the circus in those far-off summer months. “This is a big house, monsieur,” the child-woman cries out, as the household crowds around to stare at the apparition. And, as if to confirm my first fanciful idea, the little creature then asks if she would be allowed to fly, in a
salle
as
grande
as this. “I have the wings, Papa. Do you like to see?”

Adèle

I
t was hotter, this past month, in Paris than
had ever been recorded, so Félix said; Félix the copier of faces, complete with frowns and wrinkles. And in this weather, when faces ran and dripped with the heat, some fair monsters came up from the deeps of the chemical bath in his studio. But none with a physiognomy as vile, as clear a transcription of evil as Papa. Jenny Colon says I must now think of the man wanted by the French police, the man who never can return to the city where she claims poor Maman was held captive in her house in rue Vaugirard, by this name alone. “He is your father, Adèle. You must make your life with him, now Maman has gone. Be brave. He's not as bad as he looks.”

I couldn't tell Jenny I knew more about the hideous stranger than she imagined. Her worship of Maman would falter, surely, if I described the evening, not so many months ago, when the milord wept
on the balcony of the hotel he had furnished with such comfort for the woman he loved. She would find it hard to believe if I recounted the number of times Céline had led the lovers she swore she did not have past the chaise where I lay, feigning sleep, outside her bedroom door. And she would exorcise me forever from her life, I know, if I described to her that last, fateful morning: the mist that coiled along the banks of the Seine as the sun rose, the birds just rousing from night as we entered the Bois de Boulogne, the milord and his second, a valet named Edward, like his master, and—hidden from view in a pannier of bandages, fresh linen, and the rest—myself, Adèle Varens.

Jenny wouldn't believe me because everything has to be in black and white for her. Like Félix's studies of the famous and debauched—dear Gérard with his pet lobster, Gautier with his face like a map, all the arrondissements etched on his great fore-head—Jenny is almost too “real” to be true. There is no mystery in her, and she expects none in her dealings with the world. In her eyes Maman is still perfect—and, most important, always at the mercy of men. Despite the fact that this victim, martyr to passion, deceived mistress of a murderer, has run off to Italy with the musician composer of the new opera at the Funambules, leaving her daughter an orphan, dependent on the generosity of Félix and the silent Pierrot. They have more to occupy them than an abandoned child—soon, as I know Jenny fears (for she cannot keep me; her tastes are not for domesticity and children), soon I shall be left to my own devices. In the street, in the mire and filth of Paris, you will find little Adèle, she who walked in rosy pink and blue behind her mother in the Luxembourg Gardens while Céline's companions, the painters and poets of Paris, spoke of their brilliant dreams of Utopia.

“I shall not write to your father,” Jenny says as we set off for the place du Carrousel, where Nerval and his friends have a vast stu
dio. “Better that we surprise him.” Jenny, the blond chanteuse of
Piquillo,
will sing for them there, at the end of the Bal des Truands, the magnificent evening of bohemia for which they have long planned. “But you must leave tonight, before the feast is over. Courage, Adèle—your father will be delighted to welcome you to Thornfield Hall.” But we both know, as we follow the sound of the cabaret orchestra smuggled through a hole in the fence in the Doyenné, that Jenny's decision to send me away from Paris in the wake of Maman's scandalous desertion is tantamount to a sentence of death. The man I must love with filial devotion is a Bluebeard, and his castle, I have little doubt, has locked and forbidden rooms where poor Maman, in the eyes of Jenny at least, would have languished if she had accepted his proposal to return with him to Thornfield as a bride.

For all that, I know that this monster of male selfishness and arrogance is not a murderer. Nor did he hold my mother prisoner in our house, as Jenny claims. He went to the Bois to fight a duel in defense of his honor (I, as I say, concealed in the basket with the fresh shirt and cravat and all the necessities for a wounded, bleeding duelist), and he returned to our house having killed a man. The vicomte it was who turned again, when Papa had winged him (he said the words quite lightly, I confess, like a hunter out shooting birds) when Maman took me there to meet her new, noble lover. He spoke like the huntsman who brings down a young partridge, and thinks nothing of it. But the vicomte it was who went against the rules of the duel. So the stern overseer in black said, who arranged the contest at first light in the Bois de Boulogne. The vicomte went against the rules of the game when he fired again, and Papa, a better shot by far, moved quickly and silently on that stretch of grass in the clearing in the wood, and on the grass still silver with the morning dew, he shot his rival dead.

As for Maman held hostage until Papa came back to her—why,
he had no choice but to keep her in her bedroom under lock and key while he organized his escape from the gendarmes the vicomte's friends and supporters sent around (and there were many of them).
Pauvre
Papa—this is how I must think of him, now.
Pauvre
Papa: who loved me far better than Maman did, all along.

I speak of flying, for this summer, the summer of my exile from Paris and from all I loved best, was also the summer Jenny took me up in the circus, on wings fitted to my back with invisible wires, and I fluttered and dived high above the smiling crowd. How happy I was! She felt sorry for me, I suppose, for Maman had gone without a word of when or how I would ever see her again. And, in the same spirit, while Jenny taught me the divine gift of staying aloft—and instructed me, too, in the acting skills she said I would one day need—Félix made a point of taking me up in a hot-air balloon, the novelty of the season. We flew miles above all Paris and saw the Seine like a great green caterpillar as it crawled below, and Notre Dame so small I could have leaned down and taken it in my hand. “They have hot-air balloons at your Papa's,” Félix said, trying to cheer me when we came down in a field farther out from the city than he had intended. But I knew, on the long journey back to Jenny's severe apartment where I stayed, that this was unlikely to be true.

La Cibot, the old witch, was right: it was the month of the crab, the dry, hot month of July that saw me going from Paris and through the dull fields of France, before crossing the gray sea. All this with a girl Jenny had appointed as my protector; but the girl stared out the window as I wept, and I had neither comforter nor friend. Only Maman's cashmere came with me. “He'll remember that even if he's forgotten you,” said Jenny with one of her barking laughs as we set off. “He spent enough on it, God knows.”

Yet I had something else with me also, a memento as the crone
La Cibot termed it when pressing the great eye of glass into my hand after my last visit there. (I'd insisted, to Jenny: there might be a way of finding Maman, provided by the spirits with whom the hag was in communication. Maman, somewhere in Italy: but where?)

“You may need this, my child.” La Cibot looked across at me, the table with its grubby cloth between us and Cleopatra the black hen asleep this time in a corner of the room, as if my presence without my mother and only with the unbelieving Jenny in tow was hardly worth waking for. “Look, do this—hold it up to the sun.” And the fortune-teller went to the window to pull back the worn velvet curtain usually drawn against daylight and reason. “No, bring it down now, to that paper on the table—yes, that's right.
Ma petite
Adèle has quite a genius for the pyrotechnics, I can see.” And La Cibot, for the first time, stood back and stared at me in admiration.

The fire began at first like the mark of a snail, a brownish smear across the lined paper where La Cibot jotted her expenses for the week. Then, as the trail began to bite, the words, the figures, and the penciled columns began to disappear. Flames half an inch high danced like the miniature
feux d'artifice
Félix liked to play with, a snake forming from a cigar, a clumsily built mouse, all on a plate in his studio. But this time I was the one who controlled the reality of fire, not the manufacturers of a childish toy. The flames began to grow higher, and then, as a rare gust of wind came in from the baking-hot day, they climbed higher still. The hen woke, I remember, as La Cibot, cursing, threw a basin of water over her own tabletop. “The fire likes you, Adèle,” she said when she was done. “Respect it and it will be your servant forever. Use it with contempt and many will die.”

I was afraid suddenly, in the room where the old witch summoned the dead and brought their messages to the unconsoled. I
looked around for Jenny—but, just as I had feared, she was laughing at my fire-producing efforts and was as unimpressed as I had expected her to be. “Yes, give the child the magnifying glass by all means,” said Maman's friend, pulling on her coat. “But I'm not paying extra, that's for sure. Besides, it won't be of much use where she's going”—and Jenny nodded at me sadly now. “There is no sun,” she said with a horrible air of finality, “in
Angleterre.
”

Now, with the disaffected girl snoring at my side, I can see how right Jenny was on that hot day that seems now to be no more than a distant dream. The fields are dead-looking, drenched under the recent rain bursts, and the sky is heavily wrapped in cloud. With each mile the air grows darker, making me believe that the English live in a permanent night. The horses standing by the clogged streams look dispiritedly up at us. This cannot be half of me, I think; I do not belong in this landscape. But there is no one to whom I can confide the thought. Silence as oppressive as the gloom comes down on me, as we turn up a long drive with a line of dripping trees on either side. “I refuse to live here”—this I say aloud, as the driver turns and points out a tall house, gray as an executioner's block, with battlements like sharp blades rearing into the sky. “This is the place I must run from—to Italy, to the blue sea and Maman, to love.”

But if I arrive at Thornfield Hall knowing myself a stranger here, the man I must call Papa clearly thinks otherwise. As he comes to catch me in his arms, I make a show of little-girl affection and fly to him, babbling of the circus wings I have brought along with me, a performer to the last. As I do so, another batch of visitors arrives at the great house. I do not know yet how rare the arrival of company is here at Thornfield. “Ah, Blanche,” says Papa to a tall, dark young woman as she comes into the Hall. She looks around, I see, as if she owns it. Papa sets me down on a marble floor that is checkered like a chessboard and says to the visitors,
with a sarcastic growl I recognize too well, “You have chosen the hour of your coming most carefully.”

“Why? Who is this?” demands the tall, stately lady as she strides over the cold marble and tries to avoid me in her greeting of the host.

“Oh, it's no one,” Papa says, laughing, while a woman with breath that stinks of an alcohol we do not have in France comes forward to lead me away to the nursery and an early bed. “It's my little French bastard, if you want to know. Adèle Varens.”

 

It is cold here, as cold as Jenny said it would be.
La vieille dame
, Madame Fairfax, tells me there is a Jack Frost who comes each night to write on the windowpane of my room—and it is true his scribbles are there when I wake, as hard to decipher as the smiles and frowns of the man I am told by Jenny to call Papa, but who wishes none of that word from me. I am closer to Monsieur Frost, I think sometimes, as I sit alone in the room where one darkness succeeds another—the brown twilight hour, then the blackness of night, followed only by a gray that lies like the pelt of a dead animal over field and meadow and lea—I am closer to this invisible writer of cold than I am to the man who has told his friends from the great world outside of his rescue of a pitiful bastard from the Paris gutter.

Seven weeks have passed—I count them on the tassel from the
robe de chambre
that was once my mother's, the only memento I have of the days in rue Vaugirard. The rosy cotton, padded Turkish style to keep Maman snug in her long mornings sipping coffee or rehearsing her lines carries still the faint musk or jasmine of her scent—but I must not think of her, so Jenny says; and Madame Fairfax cannot think of her at all, for she has no knowledge of the most beautiful woman, the most celebrated actress in all Paris. “I
shall be with you soon,
ma cherie,
” Maman says to me in my daydreams by the dark window where Jack's white pen lingers until late on the casement. “Don't forget how much I love you.” And although I have no memory of my mother's saying those words to me, I feel the love that Nadar says I hide too much, feel it come to my cheeks and turn them pink and glowing. I shall show everyone here what I am capable of…this child with her French airs no one likes or understands. I shall earn the love of Papa and I must try—however hard this may prove to be—to unlearn the way the mimes and actors show themselves to the world, for it is not popular here.

“My dear, I have visited the theater once, in Bradford,” says the old lady when I press her for some reminiscence that lies outside the fortress where I am imprisoned, Thornfield Hall. “But I recall little other than a sad love scene: lovers who were not permitted to meet—something of the kind. There wasn't a dry eye in the house, if I look back on it.” And then the housekeeper, usually so bustling and occupied, so quick to reprimand Leah or send me shooting to my room for slippers to keep my toes from turning to pillars of ice, falls silent, and I feel guilt at her sadness, though she will never tell me why I should. Sometimes, I admit, I misbehave simply to gain the attention of this cousin of Papa (so is she my cousin also? I hardly think she desires me as kin), and I run all over this house where each story, in the frightful gloom, appears to belong below-stairs. “The great Thornfield Hall,” I wrote to Jenny in my first week here—but six more weeks have passed, and she still has not replied to me—“is no more than three basements, one on top of the other.” Little did I know then that one further subterranean level existed, high above the sad, tenebrous room I have been allotted, as neither gentry nor servant class. How unaware I was, of a hell plucked from the nether regions and set up under the battlements in the unrelenting whiteness of the winter sky. For me, at
first, the sense of a vertigo, almost an indifference as to which way to go when meeting stairs that soar or plummet to floors nearer or farther from the man I must woo, must love—my Papa who does not yet understand me—reflected merely my own uncertainty of my status in this odd, frozen household. Are maids to look up or down at me? Does Madame Fairfax's occasional gentleness reveal a secret knowledge of all the treats Papa has in store for me, once his grand guests have departed, once—even though I do not like to think of it—his engagement to Mademoiselle Ingram is announced? Will the governess I am told will come any day now to instruct me in the manners of a young English lady demonstrate to Mademoiselle Blanche the superior nature and breeding of her charge? Or shall I be ignored forever? I had no direction; I could be led or left to my own devices, as people chose.