Thornfield Hall (9 page)

Adèle

I
t was all like a dream, from the hour I went
into the hayloft with Leah and she turned the pocket of my gingham pinafore inside out, so the gold coin rolled onto the barn floor and came to rest where Jack was standing, Jack who does not smile at Leah anymore, but keeps raking the hay and forking it to the cows in their stall.

Antoinette was like someone in a dream also, when I clambered up to find her, low in the bales of hay. She looked at me as if she knew me and didn't know me, like dream people do; and, as she acted strangely, I was frightened and understood I also knew nothing of this woman Leah calls a
folle
—and that she might put her hands, which are a yellowish color and very large, with dark fingernails such as I have never seen, around my neck and throttle me to death. So I crept back a little in the sweet-smelling hay and pretended that I was in Paris in the old
douce
days before the Terror of which Jenny speaks with such triumph in her voice. I thought of Maman's story, and of the rich old man with his private dairy in the middle of the city, and I wished Antoinette would laugh and cry “
mon doudou
” as she used to do. But, as I say, she gazed at me most suspiciously and it was as if we had never been friends at all.

“Now, take the crazy woman back to the Hall with you,” Jack shouts from a long distance down at the foot of the hay mountain in the barn. “And no squealing to the master, or you'll get a taste of this,” he calls, brandishing his rake, while Leah tries to hush him—afraid, I suppose, that I will go to Madame F and tell her of all the goings-on at her employer's farm. “And be quick about it,” Jack goes on yelling. He has the louis d'or in his breeches pocket now, and I know from all those fights at the
cirque d'hiver,
when Maman walked the wire, that money will make people feel as powerful as a king, even if they gamble or drink it all away that same night.

So I had to pull the madwoman down from the hay, and neither Leah nor Jack looked at us as we hobbled out into the yard, and then beyond into the darkening park. It was horrible, going under trees that were tall and strange, like the figure, so thin by now you could see the bones stick out under her soiled dress as she walks. Antoinette had become a witch, her arms as long as the branches that waved in the mounting wind. When a leaf from the great beech tree in the park fell on her head, the crazy woman did not attempt to brush it off. She went on, her eyes staring as if the grass and the palisade and the few deer grazing by the sunk fence, held a horror for her, one that nobody else could see. And—for the first time—I wished Jane were here, she who sees the world as it really is, and who plays chess and checkers with me until it is long after my bedtime.

Jane…as we opened the wicket gate I knew also for the first time that I should miss her when she was gone away with Papa,
and that it was also true that she loved him and he loved her in return. They could not marry, though—they could not marry, and Maman was on her way to Thornfield, as Jenny wrote just a few days ago in the letter Madame Fairfax read aloud to me. It was right that I tell Jane—for she had begged me to stay with her all night tonight, the night before her
mariage
—that Maman would come and would not expect to find her
mari
with the young woman employed at Thornfield as a governess. I should inform Jane as kindly as I could; and she would put away the fine veil she took suddenly from a drawer in the schoolroom, before I ran out to meet Leah and make my visit to the barn.

As it happened, everything that took place after my return to the Hall was as strange as the woman I brought with me, she who was “my Antoinette” and who became, once she reached the Hall—as if the magic they practice on her island had taken away her real self—simply Bertha, a zombie who walked quietly to her cell and sat there waiting, apparently, for the key to turn in the lock once more. Nothing that I had imagined would happen took place; and what I had thought was no more than a nightmare that caused Jane to wake suddenly in the night, as we lay entwined in the narrow bed she believed would be exchanged for a four-poster, once she and Papa were back from their long honeymoon in Europe, turned out to be a prefiguration of the truth.

I went to the wedding, whether I was wanted there or not, as Jane only laughed away my attempts to inform her of the imminent arrival of the great Céline Varens at Thornfield Hall and insisted on donning her bridal attire and setting off down the drive with Monsieur Rochester, to celebrate their nuptials. I it was, therefore, who saw the two strangers as they lingered in the little churchyard before going into the church; and I alone, creeping in behind them and well concealed by the tall, carved pew at the back of the aisle, was able to witness the preparations of the more
sallow-faced of the two men who had come so quietly into the building. Holding up his hand at the point in the service when the clergyman, looking around and asking if there was any reason Papa and Jane should not wed, this man who looked familiar (I felt I had seen him with Grace perhaps, on the third story of the house at one time), this stranger announced in a loud voice that there was indeed a reason this
mariage
could not take place. Papa had a “wife living,” at Thornfield Hall. The stranger did not speak of Maman at all, and of the fact that a child born to parents constitutes a
mariage
already between them. And Monsieur Rochester turned and began to shout, as if he knew that the small congregation would be deaf to what he had to say.

Now I understand that the strange woman who was my Antoinette has altered beyond recognition because she realized that Papa was in love with another, and she would no longer be Papa's wife. And now I am back from the church and the fiasco of the wedding that never took place, and I have turned the key in the lock of my room, so I have made myself a prisoner, like the woman Papa married in the unimaginable years before I was born.

 

The sky grew dark, and the night that followed the day that
was to have been the great occasion for Miss Eyre was hard to tell apart from the preceding hours of afternoon and evening. I stayed in my room, imagining poor Bertha/Antoinette in her cell once more—yet I could feel no pity for her, only revulsion. Was this woman, who had walked across the park with me as if we had never once met in our lives, the bride Papa had brought from the West Indies, as big and clumsy and brightly colored as the moth that flies on summer nights into the candles at Thornfield? Did he love her, as once he had loved Maman? It was impossible to believe.

Jane stayed in her room also, and for her I felt as little compas
sion as I did for the madwoman on the upper floor of Thornfield Hall. She must weep, I knew, but the disastrous consequences of her attempt to take Papa from Maman and myself filled me merely with a cool pleasure. That I must act soon and execute the plan I had formed became clear to me on the evening of the second day, when, trying to keep up a pretense of life going on as normal in the house, Madame Fairfax informed me we should have tea in the library, this as always a precinct of Monsieur Rochester and guarded fiercely by Pilot, the only member of the household to appear unaltered by the dramatic turn of events at the church the previous day. I was told to put on my plaid dress—there was no mention of Papa's change of direction and his decision to stay at Thornfield rather than go off across Europe on his
lune de miel
with a bride who could not be his—and Madame F herself brushed my hair and fixed my ringlets, as Leah, along with some other members of the staff, had mysteriously disappeared.

Jane Eyre left the house just after midnight. Outside my door she paused, and I heard her catch her breath and sigh. That she had had affection for me, I cannot gainsay; but I had been for her a conduit to the greater profit of her master's love, and little more. I could fancy her delight at hearing, had she and Monsieur Rochester wed unlawfully and gone to the white villa (Maman's house, as I well know), of the fruitless journey of Céline Varens to Thornfield Hall, to find her bridegroom flown and the house she had thought to share with him empty and deserted. If Miss Eyre had met Maman, I have no doubt she would have shown respect for her, though she considers herself a moral being far above one who acts and dances for a living. But, Miss Eyre, you are returned to a miserable governess in urgent need of employment now!

However, by the time remorse at my uncharitable thoughts had led me to unlock my bedroom door and peer out into the dark corridor, Jane Eyre had gone.

Adèle

I
t was not difficult to gain access to the attic,
as Grace Poole was not only drunk but actually insensible on the floor. I had to wake her, and I tried to persuade Grace, bribing her with the last of the money Jenny had given me, to tell me more of her wretched charge's whereabouts. For the cell door was swinging open—and the strange woman was nowhere to be seen.

It was just as I thought: those who wish to fly away have only one idea, at Thornfield; and Grace, who has no head for heights, refused to accompany me to the small staircase with the window that opens out onto the roof. Only Mrs. Fairfax—I had been into the housekeeper's room barely half an hour earlier; she had brushed out my hair and given me a mug of the sweet pink tea as a reward for putting up with the pain of the fifty brushstrokes and ensuing agony of ringlets—was bustling along the top passage of the
house with a pile of starched pillowcases and the like, saw me, and said sharply that there'd be trouble in store if I started mucking about on the roof again. But I dodged past her and went ahead all the same. Once there, I gazed once more with pride at the cannon up there on the highest roof, trained on any enemy of our master, Papa! And I reflected that I was still so proud of him, so desirous to end the impediment to happiness in his life and from which he, like the foolish Creole he had married, had no notion how to escape. Maman would come and marry Papa as soon as it was known that
la pauvre
Antoinette was dead. Of this I was certain, as I stood by the highest turret, gazing down on all Yorkshire laid out before me.

It was some time before I saw her. She did not move—but she was not a dead body yet. A living woman, very weak and frightened, she clung to a stone balustrade just below me and almost sobbed with relief at the sight of me as I stepped out of the window onto the only flat portion of the roof.

“Why are you so long coming to me, child?” the crazy woman gasped. Her face was very shrunken and thin, and I saw that the
folle
must have wandered away again from her drunken warder as soon as we were back at Thornfield. By the look of her, she could have been two days out on the roof without food or water. She was trapped—no doubt she had been trying, as only a madwoman would, to climb down the front of the house and reach the ground—and I saw that her hands were bloodstained from clinging to the parapet and that her strength was nearly gone. Ah, if only I could return to this moment, if I could replay this scene, as I found it to be, for I had no feeling in my heart for Antoinette any longer, and my sensations belonged more to the theater than to real life. As I stood there, on the narrow sill that divided the
pauvre folle
from a return to her past existence at Thornfield Hall and a certain death on the cobbles of the courtyard below, I struggled, I
know, to recover those human affections I had once had for my French captive, the mother who called me
doudou
even if she came from an island far away. But, as I tried to show a human concern, the colors and shapes of the passage, the window, and the roof outside all changed; the distance between myself and Antoinette turned into an unbridgeable gulf; and a cloud as long and black as a whale settled ominously in the sky outside. “Come to me, child!” I hear still her piteous wails as I stepped back inside the window, brought it down behind me, and stepped from the sill onto the narrow stair. By a stroke of ill fortune, Madame F came pounding along again, this time with a pair of curtains washed and ready for hanging. So I hid, on the ledge by the boxroom with the square door where Antoinette and I had played when we were friends.

And I could hear La Fairfax as she poked about on the turret stair, looking for me. Then, tut-tutting with impatience, she walked on.

It was not long before I knew there were other, pressing reasons Maman must come, and quickly, if Papa was to be saved from the possibility of a life of insufferable boredom with the governess, Miss Eyre. For I feared that Jane would return, drawn by his promises of the white villa and by the certainty of Papa's love for her. I shuddered when I remembered Madame Fairfax's words: “She will be like a sister to you,” the housekeeper had said, and I pray each moment this “sister” will not come.

On the day this gray mouse came into the house that is Papa's and mine, everything changed in the story, like the pantomime of
Cinderella
when Cinders arrives at the ball and the handsome prince falls in love with her. Sometimes in those days at Thornfield Hall I felt as if I were watching a pantomime from
le paradis,
my seat up in the gods, the highest place in the theater, where my lovely Pierrot kept me smiling through all those dark afternoons when Maman was too preoccupied with her new role to take me in
her arms. Jane Eyre and Papa! This was a masquerade that I could only be dreaming. And I heard the voice of Félix, as he tried to comfort me.

“Adèle, this dull little person will go away soon,” he said when he came to me in my dreams, on the days Jane would insist I finish my lessons instead of going into town where Madame Potts the milliner lived, who said she could make me a new bonnet in time for Easter day. I remembered Félix taking me to the fair of the
pain d'épice
—I could taste the spiced bread when I woke—so as to think as little as possible of our schoolroom meals of boiled mutton and cabbage and tapioca pudding that Madame F will not permit me to refuse. Félix would tell me to run away from Thornfield and return to him in his studio. But then Jenny—Jenny holding the whip Maman inherited from her circus days—would come and lock me in a dreadful little room in her
appartement,
and my heart began to beat fast before I woke up. There was no escape here, from Madame F and Jane Eyre day after day.

I soon discovered that Papa had fallen for the lures of the little gray mouse, my governess, Jane. If he was bad-tempered, she learned to stand up to him—that was her trick, and from the first it went very well with a
grand seigneur
like Monsieur Rochester, who is accustomed to being obeyed whatever he may ask of people. The very first time she and I were summoned to the library, I was dismissed without even trying on the
robe
of organdy with the beautiful flowers embroidered along the hem—a dress Papa could have found only in Paris, so my eyes filled with tears of hope that he had gone there in search of Maman. “Run upstairs, Adèle,” said Miss Eyre, as if she were the one accustomed to giving orders here, not Papa. And I saw him look at her admiringly—oh, he liked the voice of command. I remember, when I used to hide myself on the top step of the grand staircase from the hall in rue Vaugirard, that I would hear Maman speak to him like that—when he was still
the milord stranger. Then there would come the crack of the whip. But this would cause Jenny, if she came in just then, to bundle me off to bed as furious as I ever saw her, when she was looking after Maman.

I cannot think of these things without sorrow, but I hear the voices and I know I am an actress, and one day I will walk on the stage and speak in a voice no one can fail to respect. For now I have to try to forget scenes such as this one: Papa is down in the grand salon, explaining to the little governess that it is he who gives the orders here at Thornfield. “Go in there, do that,” and so on. And he laughs. He asks Miss Eyre if she can play the piano, and she says, “A little,” and he teases her. “The expected answer,” says Papa—and from where I sit, in the highest seat here on the stairs at Thornfield, I see him as he comes half out into the hall as if to check that I am really gone. Then he closes the dark mahogany double doors. One thing is also true, however: Papa's face is quite different now from the picture on the plate Félix made that day in Paris before putting it onto paper and placing it in my hand. The face I carried that day of the fair of the
pain d'épice
—the hard rectangle of card that chafed my skin through the pocket of my pantalettes—had an expression Papa no longer wears since Jane Eyre came to Thornfield Hall.

So this was how I knew before anyone that Jane—no sister of mine, however she might try to win the affection of her “dear Adèle”—would win the love of the man I knew must love no one but Maman and me.

Maman will come to Thornfield Hall; I cannot believe the words of the drunken woman who kept Papa's first wife under lock and key. Maman will never forget her love for Papa or for her darling daughter, little Adèle.

As I wait behind the locked door of my room to learn my fate—now that Jane has gone, am I banished from Thornfield?
where will Papa go?—I hear in memory his voice and Jane's together. And I go to the window, to look out as the summer evening draws in and shadows lengthen on the walls.

“Jane.” I am already dressed and running through the Hall to find Madame Fairfax for tea when I hear the voice of Monsieur Rochester in the inner drawing room, the room where the governess used to play her abysmal nocturnes and waltzes and Papa sat there with a foolish smile on his face as he listened to her. Now there is no music: only the sound of sobbing, sometimes hers and even, I believe, also his. Then, “I only ask you to endure one more night under this roof, Jane, and then farewell to its miseries and terrors forever! I have a place to repair to, which will be a secure sanctuary from hateful reminiscences, from unwelcome intrusion—even from falsehood and slander.”

“And take Adèle with you, sir,” comes Jane's voice out to me by the chest in the hall. “She will be a companion for you.”

“What do you mean, Jane? I told you I would send Adèle to school. And what do I want with a child for a companion, and not my own child—a French dancer's bastard? Why do you assign Adèle to me for a companion?”

I did not move from my place on the Hall floor, half hidden by the old Chinese chest John walks around each day, to beat the gong at mealtimes. Yet I must have shifted against it, for a muffled note came from the great brass circle in its ornate frame. I could not move; it was the voices that moved, up and down the scale of passion and sorrow, such as I had never heard from a woman and a man before. Always, it seemed, the governess held out in the face of all Papa's offers and pleas for her to stay with him. If I could hate her for it, then I would: so I thought as I knelt on that hard floor, turned to stone. But there was too much to admire in her intransigence—until I could feel only praise in my heart for her
after all. I could only admire her, even though Papa would deny that I am his child. “You shall be Mrs. Rochester,” he is saying to Jane, “both virtually and nominally I shall keep only to you as long as you and I live. You shall go to a place I have in the South of France: a whitewashed villa on the shores of the Mediterranean. There you shall live a happy, and guarded, and most innocent life….”

I waited only long enough to hear the refusal on Jane's part. I knew that she would flee Thornfield; I heard the anger and sadness in my father's voice as she turned down even the white villa by the sea.

There was no sensation in me, neither love nor hate. I returned to my room and awaited the day when I would be banished from my rightful home. Yet I refused at the same time to believe my fate. How could I be put to school when Maman would appear any moment now, as in a bold new pantomime, and claim Papa for her own?

 

One week after Jane Eyre left Thornfield Hall, John the
footman accompanied me in the coach that took me away to school, and only Madame Fairfax waved good-bye to me on the step. Papa sat morosely in his study. All the servants, with the exception of John and Mary—and Grace Poole, who stayed on the upper floor with her gin and porter—were gone. My father has not written to me, nor has it occurred to him that I am truly an orphan here, without father or mother to give me a place in the world. I think with an affection I never knew I had of Jane Eyre from time to time, although,
naturellement,
it was a great mistake on her part to think she could marry Papa. Madame F has come to visit me a few times, the last occasion being a week
or so ago. “You're thin and pale, Adèle,” said the kind old lady, and she brought sweetmeats and other trifles from her bag, as well as her famous rose hips, to make an infusion, which I have done. Leah, who works in the milliner's at Millcote, sent a note to me at school—this written for her—saying there is no sign of Miss Eyre's returning to Thornfield. The governess hasn't been seen since the day she walked up the aisle of Thornfield Church and came down it again as much a spinster as the day she was born.

If I act now, I shall have Papa at last. We shall wait for Maman together.

 

It is summer again, the month I began my perilous journey
from Paris, exactly a year ago. It is July in this dark place with the gray wooden floors that are wet each morning from water and carbolic soap, this place that smells of cabbage and sadness and from which the inmates never can escape. The place where Papa sent me so I could learn I must not trust in his love, is Hatherleigh School, and I have waited only for the first rays of the summer sun to make my way back to him. This time, however he may try to deceive me, I shall show Papa that I know he loves me. I shall care for him for the rest of his days. And I shall also let him know his secret is safe with me: I have visited the chamber, and I hold the key.

I had not been long at Thornfield Hall when I found that Leah, the maid, would encourage me in my attempts to fasten my circus wings and fly, dangerous though this undoubtedly was. Perhaps already the servants at Thornfield knew I was of little value to their master and did not figure in his plans.

I left the school quite easily by way of going high on the roof
and sailing down on my circus wings. These, gifts from a long-gone life, from Pierrot, who always saw when I was sad or lonesome at Maman's lengthy absences from me on the boards, have saved me often enough before—they led me to the battlements of Thornfield, after all, and to the discovery of poor mad Antoinette—and if I had not lost all the love for her that had once been in me, on the day she fell to her death, Papa would be burdened with her still.