Thornfield Hall (6 page)

I will never know how it took so long for Grace Poole to discover us in our hideaway on the roof. Because it was raining, perhaps, and we had stepped across the sill (this was the first time for my new friend; she had as great a dislike for the indoors at Thornfield Hall as I had for the gray, sodden walks Madame F made me take “for my health”—and many more to come, she promises me, when this governess arrives: how I hate “Mademoiselle” already, with her brown brogues and her stick that pokes into the foliage of the hedges we go past and then pass again on our dreary excursions. Adèle will find plenty of headaches to keep her away from the schoolroom; then I'll hide and run back to the turret house of
ma chère
Antoinette, that's for certain).

But Antoinette hated one thing more than any other, and that was the very notion of being locked in somewhere, as I was to learn. For I had found a low door, several twisting stairs down from the big window that leads out onto the roof. The door was square, and even for me it was necessary to bend almost in two to push it open and go in; also there was a shelf that must be mounted before crawling through the aperture into the hidden room.

Antoinette refused at first to step from the freedom of the roof back into the house. But when I told her what I saw in this boxroom—for this, I suppose, is what it was: a repository of all the old, unwanted, and unremembered childhoods of the girls and women of the
famille
Rochester—my new friend was no longer able to resist coming to join me. She was tall, and it was hard at first for her to double up (she let out a laugh when she came to kneel on the
shelf by the low door that would have made me afraid of her if I had not known her to be gentle and loving at all times), but once she was through and down with me on the wooden planks, I knew I had never seen her so happy or so taken with what lay before her.

The room was higher than the door, but not by much. I could walk upright; Antoinette could not. Yet the fact of having to stoop in this way drew her attention to the floor of glass in the farthest part of the room, and, skirting a colony of drowsy bees on the way there (I had stopped to pull their wax houses apart in the search of honey), I followed her as she stood goggling at the room that lay beneath us in the highest attic of Thornfield Hall.

A bathroom was visible through the grime of the glass tiles, these clearly unwashed since their incorporation into this house built by Mr. Rochester's grandfather—or so Madame Fairfax had attempted to instruct me, with the idea that I should show proper reverence for the château to which I had been brought as a destitute orphan. A bath, long and greenish in color; a commode of wood with a cane back to the seat, giving the contraption an air of an African throne—as I thought, at least, remembering the plates in the books of native tribes Nadar had shown me, in the room where he invented faces, both sad and humorous. A basin, a wash-stand, two pictures (but the light was too dim to make these out; they seemed to portray lakes and moors and be colored with the false purples bad painters use to portray the landscape of this district). And in the bath, motionless and pale, naked as the day he was born, none other than Monsieur Rochester, the milord and proprietor of all he surveys at Thornfield. Antoinette, seeing him first, gave out a great yell. Monsieur Rochester looked up, frowning, and then sat upright in the bath. Antoinette, falling backward on a painted rocking horse, grasped its mane, made of a molting wire wool, and proceeded to mutter strange words into the black and white wooden ear, complete with jingle bells, which her pow
erful arms pulled toward her. I in turn ran to my new friend's side and buried my head in her skirts. I had no idea then, of any connection between the man Jenny says I must know as Papa and the woman from the spice islands who sings to me as a Creole maid of Maman's once did, songs my new playmate says come from an old woman who loved her, Christophine. I shut my eyes and feel the heaving, sobbing sound Antoinette makes when her laughter turns to wild grief. The rocking horse shakes its head, and the little silver bells ring out. We are away from the glass part of the boxroom floor by now, and as we stumble away we fall against two basketwork saddles, these fashioned for children no more than four years old, and I see perched in them two tiny figures, the dead twin sisters Madame F had told me of, the aunts of Monsieur Rochester. I scream…and I scream again. And as the low door from the stairs opens and Grace scrambles in with Madame F close behind her, I leave poor Antoinette lying like a corpse on the floor as I rush into the housekeeper's arms.

Edward

I
am in danger of losing my marriage, my
hopes for the future, everything. If there is a spirit haunting this house, it belongs to the child sent by the devil to put me in my mind of my past errors and sins; it is the spirit of chaos and destruction, learned at its mother's knee, the spirit of revolution and subversion, the end of the order established here since time immemorial, commemorated and celebrated on the tablets in the ancient church of Thornfield, revered and respected throughout the countryside.

God (and he is banished also, by the fire of disobedience and rebellion that sweeps through the once-orderly corridors of this great house)—God alone knows whether the child is mine (though I do observe, I freely confess, some of the traits in my own nature that I have prayed to the deity to assist in erasing: namely, pride, arrogance, and a desire to keep
what is closest to the heart concealed). The child's wickedness may be the natural and inevitable consequences of an upbringing that can barely be described as such: a mother more absent than lovingly present; a camaraderie of acrobats and atheists with no more wish to reach the gates of heaven than the highest wire in the circus tent can provide; and, to underline the importance of a guiding spirit in matters of the affections, a sapphic blackmailer such as the woman who signs herself “Jenny” in her impertinence, when she writes to demand further money from me. No, to add these characteristics to those of the child's own dear mother—namely cunning, deceit, and a huge measure of vanity and self-regard—there is little surprise in the discovery that Adèle Varens, at eight years old, is already wedded to the devil and beyond conversion or repair. Whether she is my child or not, her home is not here among these gentle hills and moors, but in the infernal regions. She shall leave Thornfield at the earliest opportunity: already my marriage to Miss Ingram is compromised, my fortune halved by my reluctance to propose a settlement in the course of their last visit. Nor was it ever possible to find a time to make the proposal of matrimony I had fully intended. The brat flew in, a malign sprite, on the very day my estates were due to grow in revenue and magnificence. My mother's diamonds lie untouched in their chest here in my library—and it grieves me to add that I shall now need to lock them away, while this thieving Jacobin guttersnipe is about. Miss Ingram has gone off discontented, and Lady Ingram spoke of insult as I bade her farewell at the door of the Hall. To cap it all, one of the young blades of the party hinted that he had had designs on the lovely Blanche for some years now and that he had held off in deference to the master of Thornfield. Another, smirking insufferably, muttered something to the effect that “Mr. Rochester's fortune is but a third of what it is said to be,” and I discovered, only this morning, that papers of mine
are vanished from the strongbox here—the very same box where the jewels intended for my bride languish unoffered to her. Blanche saw to it that I must lay all this misfortune at the door of the devil's daughter. Adèle must go; in the grime of Paris streets I have no doubt she will have the wits to survive; and should she fall by the wayside, let her do so before the future of this great estate is further threatened by the actions of one whom the French libertarians would proclaim as heir, for all she is female and born illegitimate, of Thornfield and its outlying lands. Adèle shall never prove me to be her father: if I lose all I have in doing so, I shall contest the accusation of paternity of Céline's offspring to the end of my days.

I pick up my handbell; the dog, Pilot, stirs by the fire at the familiar ring, but no one comes. I rise, my impatience and wrath mounting as they do daily at these evidences of indifference to my wishes on the part of the staff of Thornfield Hall. I am answered nowhere now, when I call. I am further subjected to the indignity of finding myself goggled at in the bath from the attic above, by the little brat. Worse, I could swear that the bloated features of my wife, Bertha—on that day caught and returned to her cell—stared down at me, she kneeling beside the child. However many the tricks the little fiend decides to play on me, nothing shall take Edward Fairfax Rochester from his rightful occupancy of the house constructed by his ancestors.

I pick up the bell again, but as its chime rings out, the door opens and a small figure comes quietly in. It stands there, this elf in a gray, modest costume, its eyes lowered as befits one in the presence of the master of the greatest estate in Yorkshire. “Well, Jane,” say I—for I have come to find a soothing quality in this young woman, the newly arrived governess of Céline's diabolical daughter. “Is there no servant to answer my command? Did you come from kindness, to minister to my needs?”

“No, sir.” Miss Eyre looks up at me, but I see she is shy and does not wish to meet my gaze.

“What then?” I glance down at the antique rings and pendants in the box at my feet. They are still mine; they do not yet adorn the snowy bosom of Miss Ingram. And for a moment—but I am mad indeed; my fancies and illusions of past days are all the fault of the malevolent spirit unleashed on this house by the unbaptized child—for a moment I am inclined to walk over to “Miss Aire,” as the little goblin addresses her, and fasten them at her slender neck. “How do you like diamonds, Jane?” I cannot prevent myself from blurting out nonetheless, and I hold up a strand of the magic stones in their old silver settings, a ray of sun coming in the window and turning them to a cascade of sparkling stones.

“I have not given thought as to whether I have a liking for them or not,” replies Miss Eyre—as she is rightly called, a name as plain as she herself. “I came to say, sir, that Adèle needs shoes for country walking. She has brought only dancing shoes or satin slippers, and these are, naturally, unsuitable for the lanes here.”

Suitable for walking away from Thornfield forever, I thought, but for one reason or another I did not voice my opinion of the governess's request. “Very well,” I said, and I heard myself growl most uncharitably as I replied. Yet I had confided in this young woman, this Jane from nowhere, only last evening in the garden, when I had told her of Adèle's origins—and then of my past passion and my jealousy for the child's mother, the actress Céline Varens. “You don't hold it against me, do you, Jane?” said I as she came up to my proffered hand and took the note I had scribbled for Cousin Fairfax, that she instruct the cobbler at Whitfield to fashion a pair of stout shoes for the governess's young charge. “You don't think the less of me, for describing to you last night the feelings of the human heart?”

“You said yourself, sir,” responded Jane Eyre, retreating as fast
as her natural dignity and modesty would permit her, and addressing me only when she had reached the door, “you said I should know such passions when I was older, sir, and you have been kind in warning me.”

With this ambiguous statement the small figure left the room. I stood on awhile, still holding a strand of diamonds and looking all the more foolish for it, I daresay. And I reminded myself that Bertha, my wife, must never be permitted to escape again, from the cell I had constructed for her. I must be safe in the knowledge that the wretch is under lock and key, before Blanche Ingram comes here again. Before the hunting season is out, I will fasten these stones under the heiress's great mane of dark hair. And by then Adèle Varens will have left Yorkshire—and England—forever.

Then it occurs to me that without the child here there will be no need for a governess at Thornfield Hall. “A good economy,” I say aloud; but I know, if only as faintly as a cloud that passes over the moon and then wanders on into the night sky, that this economy would not do good for me after all. I need the quiet presence of Miss Eyre at Thornfield Hall—why, damn it, I must admit I do.

Adèle

I
detest the creature Papa has ordered from
a seminary to come here as my
gouvernamte.
This “Miss Aire” governs nobody, with her independent views, however: she appears instead to love the authority Maman and Jenny showed me how to hate. “Yes, sir. No, sir,” says the disagreeable little thing, when Monsieur Rochester invites us for such a brief minute to sit with him in the library. And he smiles at her in return! “Yes, sir,” when he orders her to take me off to bed. Yet this man I first knew as Bluebeard has been kinder to me, of late—when he is not in one of his rages,
c'est à dire
—than in the days after the visit of Mademoiselle Blanche, when I was the
raison
for everything that went wrong in the running of the house. Perhaps he compares Miss Eyre, as I must learn to call her name, with the child he does on occasion accept as his daughter with the great Céline Varens. Little wonder he smiles fondly at me, as I run
with the battledore and shuttlecock Leah is permitted to play with me on the long lawn at Thornfield Hall. Papa sees the results of his noblesse and Maman's talents, combined in me. In Jane he sees only the persistent banality of her mind and an adherence to rules and regulations doubtless instilled at the seminary. Jane can never become a grande dame—whereas I have a future without bounds that lies for me just over the horizon. I have only the lack of
ma chère mère
to trouble me; but as I become the famous actress she always predicted I would be, we shall all be one happy family together: Papa, Maman, and Adèle. And definitely no Jane Eyre!

For the time, I contain my rage and misery as best I can. As I sit in the schoolroom and go through the English verbs and the sums the young woman with the pale, closed-in face makes me do, I nurse my secret in silence. I smile to myself, that the meek governess who has nevertheless a fine picture of her own way of doing things, a self-satisfaction that would have had Jenny Colon reaching for the whip, has no idea of the existence of my new friend high in the attic of this house. Yes,
ma pauvre amie
was captured by Madame F and Grace Poole and placed in her cell, behind a door that could never be stormed, even stronger than the Bastille. I can time my visits to within one minute by now. When Grace is down at the cellars or the kitchen, to fill up her tankard of porter, she leaves the inner door unlocked, and I can go in to embrace my friend and chatter in the language that comes from the rain forests where Gérard, Maman's friend, found and captured our parrot, Monsieur Punch.

Once, it is true, I very nearly gave away my secret—and it was indeed when the vexed subject of the revolution in France had to be raised, for Miss Eyre guided me through the kings and queens of England and France and arrived at our last king with, so I considered, a smile of sympathy for the
monstre
on her face. “Louis?”
said she. “You have remembered the Bourbon and the Orléans families, Adèle. But you have not given me the names of the guillotined monarch and his consort.”

“Citizen Capet,” I replied crossly.

“And his queen, who knew such unhappiness and lost her son the dauphin in the prison to which they were both confined for many months,” pressed the dull little Puritan, Miss Eyre. (But she is at heart a monarchist; of this I am quite sure.)

“Antoinette,” I said; and as I spoke the name of my friend, I cried aloud at the injustice of those at Thornfield Hall: namely Grace Poole and Papa, who want no one to know of the woman they keep shut up there, without sunlight or chance of escape.
Why
she is there I have never asked—and I began to speak violently and eagerly of my friend before I remembered that Miss Eyre will go straight to Papa if I reveal my secret, and he will be angry with me again. “
Ce n'est rien,
” I said when I had recovered myself and Miss Eyre had announced our lesson over, thus giving me an extra ten minutes in which to play with poor Antoinette. “I wept for the queen of France, the massacred innocent,” I said. For I had seen a miniature, very sentimentally executed, of the late Marie Antoinette, thus labeled and displayed on a table at the house of a woman who paid Jenny to take her riding on horseback in the Bois de Boulogne. “My heart bleeds for her,” I went on, deceiving my interlocutor, as I knew I should. “You are tired today,” said Miss Eyre—and when she is kind, I must harden my heart against her, for Maman is the only one I love. “Go and run in the garden awhile. The rain is holding off.”

I said I would do the bidding of Miss Eyre. But I ran up the stairs and then through the door behind the tapestry where visitors to the Hall say they sometimes see a ghost—although,
naturellement,
I know the identity of this “ghost”—and up again to the low rafters of the third story. I have a treat for my Antoinette in store:
I have found the chest with all the dresses Grace hid from her, the red dress especially, of which the sad
prisonnière
speaks so often and with such passion. “We'll play weddings,
doudou
—you shall be my husband and I your Antoinette.”

But when I arrive at the bare room that Grace should, by all rights, have left at this hour in order to replenish her jug with ale or porter, I find that the steel door to the inner cell is locked. I knock on it as hard as I dare, but no answer comes.

Perhaps because I have been at my lessons with Jane, I think when I stand by the door of a steel blade descending, slicing through the neck of a woman who is not the queen of France but who is instead my Antoinette. Then I see what appears at first to be a scrap of waste paper on the floor, near the door that separates
la folle
from those who have the good fortune to run free at Thornfield Hall. I go to pick it up. A wedding bouquet…even in its faded and derelict state I can see that it consisted once of flowers and had a satin ribbon tied around the dried and emaciated stalks. But the flowers are not rosebuds or
muguets,
lilies of the valley, as would befit a bridal banquet in France. These are tropical blooms—tall, spiked—like dying moths they droop in extinct oranges and indigo blues. And I remember Antoinette as she told me of the great shoots of color that blossom all year long, the hibiscus and frangipani and orchids that grew on the island where she once was happy. This was her wedding bouquet, all those years ago. What happened to her after this?

 

Autumn has come. The days pass, and the hedges that mark
out the lanes to Millcote and Whitcross begin to turn from green to copper, while the tall trees that line the avenue—the trees I first saw when I came to Thornfield and thought them weeping, so endless were the raindrops that pattered from them onto the
road—shed their leaves in the strong autumn winds blowing in from the moors.

The days pass, but there is still neither sign nor sound anywhere in the house of the strange woman I made my friend. Grace I cannot ask directions on the whereabouts of her secret prisoner—for Antoinette was indeed a secret for both of us, but one we could not share. Leah—who has fallen in love with Jack the stable lad and places little
cadeaux,
or notes that contain no more than a heart pierced by an arrow, on scraps purloined from the library wastebasket and placed in a hole in a tree in the garden—looks mysterious if I hint that the upper house is quieter now than it used to be, or even if I demand outright to know why Grace Poole stays in that room of hers when it appears she now has no one to converse with or take her orders. “No,” Leah says as we walk down the lime walk and stand a moment by the clump of trees known as the Four Ashes, just beyond the stable walls. “No, there is nothing changed here at the Hall.” And she puts her hand deep into a cleft in the tree and pulls out a packet, small and bulging with Jack's latest gift: today a pebble, fished from the stream up by Whitfield Height, where the pools lie deep and clear, the rough brown stone containing a glint of river gold that runs in a vein across the surface. The stone has been pierced—with a chisel, very probably—for the hole is barely wide enough to contain a slender chain, this of the cheapest materials—or so my Parisian eyes, trained in all manner of jewelry from scrutinizing Maman's
bijouterie,
immediately tell me. Leah is pleased with today's offering, however, and slips the stone around her neck; and I reflect, as some of the other servants emerge from the back door of the house—John the footman going into the stables with a purposeful air (Monsieur Rochester has sent him with instructions to have his horse ready, perhaps; he always issues his commands at the very last minute and then is impatient when things do not hap
pen all at once)—I reflect that my time for grilling Leah on the subject of the disappeared Antoinette has slipped away again.

But thinking of Maman's jewels and then of the last trace of my poor friend, she who lived on the roof happy as a bird, snug at night in her little pepperpot house, has led me to think with even greater concentration of the future here at Thornfield Hall. And as I try to envisage this future, I also find myself wondering at the changes that have overtaken me in the past months, some so alarming, I confess, that I wish for Jenny, stern though she may be, as a guide to my new, different state. For how can I explain the dreaminess that seizes me, even on the clearest day Yorkshire can provide, and the sense that I see what is not there, as if this old house, to which I have become so accustomed, has given birth to a new family of ghosts? I feel myself, quite literally, without balance or ballast on the days when this affliction descends—the very trees in the avenue at Thornfield change color, as if precipitated into a false autumn, and the clouds, packed with the usual rain, dance in the strangest shapes across the sky. Is all this due to my fears for the future—the future, that is to say, when Papa and Maman are married at last and we are all happy together, happy, as the fairy tales have it, as the day is long? How can I arrange it, that what is right shall take place—after all the crimes people say Papa committed, and some of them a result, as I so well know, of my mother's own wrongdoing, her luring of the man she truly loves into killing the vicomte. As a result of the terrible jealousy she produced in
mon pauvre
Papa, the vicomte is dead and Monsieur Rochester can no longer return to France. How, then, can I bring them together? And yet now, as I stand thinking under the Four Ashes, with their leaves yellow and brown in the approach to the long, cold winter, I see the answer and wonder that I had not found it before.

Of course! Like Leah, I must write my message of love and
send it to Maman. I shall obtain the name of the street where Jenny now lives and from which she writes to Papa. Did I not hear him growl the other day that “the wretched Colon” was after him again, for money (why I do not know, but it will concern the killing of Papa's rival, I am sure). So I may at last beg Maman to come to Thornfield and marry Papa, as she should have done long ago. My letter will be written today. There is a need for haste: I heard the conversation that took place in the garden last night, the confidences given by Papa, who now makes a habit of sharing all his thoughts with the governess I detest, little Miss Eyre.

Papa informed Miss Eyre that soon he will marry Mademoiselle Blanche. He wishes Jane to sit up with him all the night before his
mariage
—until the dawn comes into the sky—and this I cannot understand at all, for it was not in Papa's voice that he wishes to marry Mademoiselle Blanche.

I shall attempt to describe my own deceiving of Madame Fairfax, and perhaps some will think I have inherited my capacity for lies and cunning from the great Monsieur Rochester. For I am his daughter indeed, though he will on occasion deny it, for whichever reason comes into his head.

I waited until Leah had gone into the room Grace Poole calls the
boodwah
of Madame F—she carried towels or the like—and then I put my head around the door and smiled my very best smile at the old housekeeper. “Papa has asked me to provide a bouquet from my own hand for the chamber of Mademoiselle Ingram,” said I (for the visit begins tomorrow: John and Mary, who make ready Ferndean Manor down in the damp woods for the servants of Mademoiselle Blanche and her mother, have said this is the “very last chance” of a betrothal between Papa and the haughty Miss Ingram, but I do not know what they mean). “I must gather the last roses from the walled garden while there is dew on them,” I went on, clever as a monkey; and I could see that Madame F was
convinced of the truth of what I said. “I will place them in the blue opaline vase Monsieur Rochester had as a
cadeau
from you,” I finished off, and the custodian of Thornfield beamed, even if Leah winked at me, as she went out carrying in her arms a pile of newly laundered linen for the guests. “Don't be long,” Madame F said, and I scampered away, blessed by the one person who had reason to tell me to mind my own business and get down to my bed. For Miss Eyre, as Madame F must know, is not indoors this evening: indeed, she is often called by the master (as John and Mary and Leah and Grace call him) to join him in the lime walk, or down by the ornamental pond. Sometimes he will take her to the rose garden, where I have said I will go tonight, to gather the last pink blooms with their frilly petals like the hem of the
robe
Papa brought me back from Paris, the beautiful dress chosen by Maman, as I know it must have been. Why Papa wishes to confide in Miss Eyre so frequently, I do not know. And last night, when it was growing dark and Jane was still not back in the schoolroom tidying the essays she makes me write and constructing the sums I cannot do, I decided to discover the reason for Papa's determination to tell his thoughts to the little governess.

“Then you are going to be married, sir?” These are the first words I heard, from Miss Eyre, for it had taken me some time to discover Papa and the young woman he employed to make a lady of the
fillette
sent over to him from Paris. I had found the pair in the laurel walk, at the very end by the sunken fence and the horse chestnut. I crept into a clump of bamboo—where Papa says a panther lives, and he gives a great breathing sound as I walk past with him, so I cry out in fear. But last night I found the courage to go into the bamboo myself, to hear what Papa has to say to the mousy governess.