Thornfield Hall (12 page)

And now I go to see her again, I thought grimly. I shall be arrested, I have no doubt, for the murder of my first wife if I remain in England; while in France I am wanted for the killing in a duel of the vicomte. But I have no choice—to Paris I must go. God, and my new resolution to repair past ills, must guide me there. I reached the low gate and fumbled with a latch seldom in use, other than by myself and John when we go out on a fishing trip, the rough road that lies beside the gate leading, as it does, to a fine lake filled with roach and carp. There will be no gentle sport in coming weeks, I remind myself as I set out on this back road across my estate, a private road even the constabulary of Yorkshire would not find. I angled for other prey now; for while Jane wished me to bring back her pupil to join our circle (and hoped, surely, that the matter of the dead woman's body would be cleared up while I was fortunately absent: no awkward questions asked at the inquest, no tawdry secrets of the upper story at Thornfield Hall brought to light), I must confess that my own desire to find the daughter of Céline Varens was different. For I must discover from the child—as still I thought her to be—what she knew of the last days and death of Antoinette.

Adèle

T
he sun shines, the crowd spreads out,
sprawls, enjoys itself. I walk alone, among all the people, and I feel myself at home at last. For wherever there are people, wherever a crowd gathers, as is possible only in Paris, there I may find my mother.

I think of Céline most painfully on a day such as this when the workers forget everything in the pleasure of a holiday. And while they forget, I remember: those days when Maman would take me to the fair on the banks of the Seine, and those blue twilit evenings when she would go into the hotel on the quai Voltaire and tell me to wait patiently until a handkerchief appeared at a window on the second floor, when I could go in and be with her, and not before. For Maman had business to conduct, and her red velvet purse with yellow drawstrings would be clanking with gold coins when we went back up the long boulevard to our home.

I am alone, as Nadar is too busy with his caricatures to spend time with me. “Go and inspect the booths at the parade, Adèle,” he said to me—and it seemed to me, not for the first time, that this giant with red hair, if he had exhibited himself, would have made enough to keep both of us for a month. “Go and find Gérard; he has been suffering a bout of melancholy recently, it will do him good to see you.” And Nadar gave me a look I am beginning to understand, now that I have arrived in the city I despaired of ever seeing again. The look shows regret at having to postpone excitement, maybe an evening on the river, a restaurant, a bottle of wine. But even Gérard, though he greets me with a sad kind of fondness, is too deep in his occult studies and his histories of the
princesse lointaine
to spare me much of his time. He gives me the look, as all Frenchmen must—but then he turns away and returns to his obsessions, just like Nadar with his cartoons and his photographs. They are not young anymore, these friends of Maman; and I hate to think she may have aged as they have done. They had time for Adèle once; they played like children, and now they send me on my own to the fair.

Twice already, I have been certain I have seen Céline. She appears and then vanishes again, in this medley of hawkers' cries, thundering brass, and exploding rockets. I walk in the crowd, alone and possessed; and as I stare at the acrobats and the Simple Simons, their faces contorted, burned, and shriveled by wind and rain and sun, I stop to hear their witticisms and jokes, which return me to the days of my childhood, days when Maman laughed and said the comedy was as good as Molière.

Where is she now? Yesterday at midday I disembarked off the coach from Le Havre at the staging post at rue Coq-Heron and made my way across the city to Montmartre: surely Jenny Colon and the friends Maman had made in all her years in Paris would know where their
chère collègue,
the actress who could also walk
the high wire and ride bareback on the circus horses, had gone in her endless search for happiness. If it occurred to me that I copied my mother, in my flight from the home I had been promised in that grim northern country where I was reared from eight years old, it did not concern me unduly. I knew that Nadar and the rest would always have a place for me, to sleep and eat and talk of the old days, which seem now so near and also far away. Are these the horse chestnut trees I walked under, with Maman and Jenny, on our way along the boulevard Saint-Germain to the stuffy flat where the old witch Cibot plied her trade? Can these pink candles, mocking my misery and loneliness, have been those that danced high in a coronet of sunbeams, above Maman's head, all those long years ago? Yet La Cibot was right, that fire loves Adèle; and as I think of her predictions, it seems that time has not moved on at all. The new distance of Nadar and Gérard will be forgotten if I go to visit old Cibot, and the truth of Maman's hiding place will be revealed. So it is, by arming myself with false hopes and promises, that I put the life that was planned for me well out of mind and—like Maman, you could say—concentrate on an impossible future.

I had known, somewhere inside myself, that the order to the nuns at Hatherleigh to release me from the seminary had come as a surprise to them. I was considered an orphan there, I must confess; only “Miss Eyre” showed interest in the progress of my studies; and the nuns wrote back to her, with reports, I have no doubt, of the continuing rebelliousness of my nature. I had convinced myself—this, too, when I was no more than the child who badgered her poor parent for a
cadeau
or a new dress whenever he appeared—that it was really Papa who wished to get in touch with me and that somebody or something—usually the nuns were to blame—stood in the way of our reunion. That the man I came increasingly to know as “Monsieur Rochester” gave less thought to the little French girl he had impulsively ordered from Paris to his
battlemented house on the Yorkshire moors than to his prize dairy herd or his dog, Pilot, was a part of that grown-up truth that I, as my mother, Céline, has undoubtedly done, will spend a lifetime avoiding. How could it be that a growing woman so lovely, so clear-skinned and shapely as Adèle Varens, could be ignored, shut away in a prison such as Hatherleigh, and then left there indefinitely, forgotten? Whenever these thoughts came to me, I persuaded myself that it was Papa who wished for me at Thornfield Hall. As a father, he could not shut out his daughter from his life. Something deeper in me than anything I have confessed to before led me to believe this; and it aided me, too, in my absolute refusal of the knowledge that there was only one person in the world who would show a human heart at work, when it came to caring for the bastard of a French opera dancer.

Only Jane Eyre could have had the patience and insistence to demand my return to Thornfield Hall, these being the qualities with which she had won over the surly, arrogant man who was Monsieur Rochester when she came first to take up her post as governess. Only Jane could have transformed Papa; and it was solely to her that the lord of Thornfield and its environs would have listened, as she built up her case and pressed home her reasons for including “little Adèle” in the family.

Yet, even after the nuns had bidden me good-bye and I had traveled across the country, to alight from the coach at Millcote, I still had no idea that I would find my former governess at Thornfield. I had no evidence, it must be said in my favor, that “Miss Eyre,” whose letters I was not shown—only their inquiries and comments on my scholastic progress being read out to me—was in the house of which I so often dreamed, whether as a ruin or as a home where I, a child again, would be made welcome. Jane wrote, so I thought, from her next post—indeed, I had heard Papa informing her, late on the night of the thunderstorm that split the
tree by the sunken fence, that he had discovered a position for Miss Eyre in Ireland. So, ever willing to deceive myself, I saw her in my mind's eye in the green fields around Bitternutt Lodge, where Papa had sent her, exiled—as I was—for eternity.

I took the small road from Millcote, the rough stones piercing the soles of my feet through my slippers. I wished to see the Hall at its most romantic and beguiling: the wicket gate, which opened on a grassy path leading into the garden, was my chosen point of entry, and the latch worked smoothly, as I knew in my memories of it was not the case when winter gales had stiffened hinges and latch alike. I stood, my hand fumbling with the gate, and looked straight ahead, along the green path mown in long grass and wildflowers.

Papa came down the wide stone steps from the balcony beside the library door. He also looked up—as if my presence, half hidden by the low branches of the shrubs by the gate, had alerted him without volition either on his part or on mine—and he stared directly at me, as if he had seen a ghost.

I stood also quite still, and it seemed a very long time we both remained thus. Then the French window in the library opened, and a voice cried, “Edward!” Jane Eyre stepped out. She stood a moment on the terrace, with its long balustrade overlooking the garden. But by the time she looked across at the gate in the lane, I had disappeared from sight.

J
enny Colon had a flat on the fourth floor in
the boulevard Poissonière, a cheap district on the way to Montmartre, and it was to this temporary haven that I made my way, exhausted by the crowds, the booths in the arcades at the fair on the river's banks, where the stench of frying food overcame the delicate scents of May, and by the old men at their miserable untended stalls who sold medicines and elixirs that could bring little but nausea and fever.

I walked there, knowing I was as unwanted at Jenny's apartment—with its knickknacks from her old boudoir at rue Vaugirard, the pink pouffes and secondhand carpet, the awning I remembered sitting under on the terrace when the man they first insisted I should and then said I should not know as Papa came to visit Maman—as I had been welcome at Thornfield, thanks to the efforts made by Jane. Why, I asked myself as I climbed the stairs—these inhabited by that same Parisian smell, of dust and fried food, that I had known as a young child when visiting
the children of the acrobats at the Funambules—why am I here, and why have I refused the comfort and security offered to me at Thornfield? Do I hate the poor little governess so much, who has tried from the very beginning to instill modesty, education, and decency into the
fillette
to whom Monsieur Rochester was more inclined to deny paternity than to love? Am I not mature enough now to accept the future that dear “Miss Eyre” certainly has in mind for me: as carer for her children with her husband, Monsieur Rochester, somewhere between a nursemaid and a companion; and, if I persist in my studies, eventually a governess to the daughter for whom Jane inevitably pines? Jane, as she reads the letter I left for her—it was not hard, when I arrived in Millcote, to find Leah in her milliner's shop, borrow a pen from a goggling clerk, and write a missive for the curious girl to take up to the Hall—will realize there is no way of stopping my flight to France. She will see me selecting spotted muslins for a dress, dancing at outdoor balls, and flirting with the revolutionary youths of Paris. Is this why I have come here? If only she could understand that this is not so, that already, at an age that they who knew me at Thornfield must consider dangerous (for they heard my demands when I was small for the frivolities with which my city and my mother are forever associated), I wish only for purity and happiness. To go and seek the company of Jenny Colon, they might say, is hardly the way, then, to achieve these admirable goals. But it would have been useless, as I have known for so many years, to try to persuade Miss Eyre—or Madame Fairfax, the respectable housekeeper, or, most certainly Papa—that I come here to Paris for one last chance to find Céline. They would turn from me. The unspoken part of the arrangement, which has me contented and submissive at Thornfield as they would have had me at the wretched seminary, is the total obliteration of any trace or memory of Céline Varens. Then I may live
and die in the nursery and schoolroom at Thornfield Hall, a semirelative, truly an orphan, a half ignored recipient of generosity at the hands of the master, Edward Rochester. And this, while there is still some hope of being reunited with Maman, I refuse absolutely. Even if it is now impossible for Papa to marry Céline, her daughter will be with her always, as devoted and self-sacrificing as only a fast-maturing woman such as Adèle Varens can show herself to be.

Jenny Colon stumps to the door of the flat to let me in when I make my tentative knock at the door. She does not permit me a key, and I know I must leave soon, perhaps to sleep on a pile of Turkish cushions on the floor of Nadar's studio, in my nostrils the foul stink of the fluid in which he dumps the faces of the famous; or at Gérard's, where the scuttling of his pet lobster around the floors at night will cause the hackles on my neck to rise in horror. Without a mother to turn to—without any money other than the accumulations of the frugal allowance Jane made sure was sent me from the offices of Thornfield Hall (though I did not know until the day I left the school at Hatherleigh that it was she who had made sure the money came to me, for I had no knowledge of her marriage to Papa)—without the wherewithal to survive in this cruel city, what chance have I to become other than the woman of easy virtue Monsieur Rochester foresaw? All those years ago he saved the poor child that was Adèle from the Paris gutters and had her dispatched, alone and trembling, to his castle, his home in Yorkshire. Was this in vain? Did Adèle learn nothing of the truth of life: that those who are born with nothing will remain penniless unless they do as they are told? Maybe that is the case—the lesson is not yet understood—but even as Jenny lets me in with a grunt and settles herself back on the divan littered with copies of the
Revue des Deux Mondes
and pamphlets from the women's clubs to which she undoubtedly belongs, I swear to myself one last time
that I will not give up hope, when it comes to seeking out Maman. For hints have been dropped that Céline is no longer in Italy—she has disappeared, certainly, but no one knows where.

“Maybe La Cibot has news for you.” Jenny, sulky but keen to find a way of ridding herself of an unexpected guest, waggles her cheroot as she leans forward on the divan, framed in a burst of spring sunshine. I have to confess I find Jenny's own attitude to the disappearance of Céline confusing, even sad: for were not the music-hall actress Jenny Colon and the
danseuse de corde,
the high-wire dancer who wanted to become a serious actress, a tragedienne with the Comédie Française, the very closest of friends for many years? Didn't Jenny coach Céline as she poured forth her speeches from
Phèdre
? “The old witch informed me she had your cards ready for reading,” Jenny goes on. “I paid her for an hour of her time a couple of weeks ago. You'll find what you're looking for with her, very likely.” If Jenny didn't look me in the eye as she spoke, I no longer noticed. And that is how, without so much as a café au lait or a wave good-bye, I find myself walking through crowds—more crowds—to see the fortune-teller, the old woman who reads tarot.

 

Life has a way of placing both obstacles and advantages in
the path of those who lose their way; maybe because the eye is sharper then and the memory more honed to long-buried events and images, the most trivial of occurrences can appear laden with significance, even with the promise of finding a new direction.

This morning in Paris when the candles on the trees began to shed their rosy petals on a crowd intent on all the pleasures of the city—a morning when I walked invisible and unanswered among the poor women with rough faces, the aristocratic women with looks of subdued anguish, and the young men in their silk cravats
and gleaming waistcoats—it was clearly intended by the Fates (or, as the nuns at Hatherleigh School would have it, by our good Lord Himself) that I should not proceed immediately to the dark, stuffy rooms inhabited by La Cibot. There were other things in store for Adèle—for the child who boasts of being already a woman, but who seeks her mother and meets only the averted gaze of her friends. For it came to me that, while Nadar and Gérard and Jenny found themselves speechless when asked a simple question on the whereabouts of Céline Varens, then those who do not rely for expression on human speech may turn out to be the sole purveyors of the truth. In the case of the dogs of the boulevard Saint-Germain, the effect of their snarling, barking dance was to make me turn on my heels and walk off in the direction opposite to La Cibot's flat, to the popular revolutionary quarter of Paris, the ancient boulevard du Temple.

It hadn't been clear to me, the reason for avoiding the circus where Maman—and I, naturally, I was a child of the Funambules, petted and ignored alternately by the stars of the Arlequinade, the tumblers and clowns and bareback riders—had spent so many winters and summers all those years ago. Maman had been the most daring of the trapeze dancers; and even high up myself in the
paradis,
with the youths who were the rowdiest in Paris as they cheered and booed the exploits of the actors and dancers, silent all in their
pantomime noir,
I had to gaze higher to see Céline swinging there, a scarlet and gold comet above the crowd of spectators.

Why was it that I had come to Paris and had not called on the Funambules? Was it a dread of the mime, the crude gestures that set the cheap seats aroar? Had the love of slapstick been bred out of me by the Yorkshire seminary? It seemed unlikely: possibly I had no wish to return to scenes of my childhood, when I had so painfully just grown out of it. The kicks and assaults administered by Cassandra to the poor White Clown and the mournful expres
sions of Pierrot, the eternal thwarted lover, would have been, perhaps, too sharp a reminder of my own past tears and tantrums. Pierrot, in any case, would have shown me sympathy at the loss of my mother, and he would have brought another attack of self-pity to poor, lonely Adèle. The sad clown of the Funambules had always made out he nursed an unrequited passion for Maman; and he had cared for me when I was tiny, so his agonized grimaces showed, in order to gain the attentions of the beautiful Céline. The great Dubureau, already the most famous mime in Paris by the time I was sent to England, made a gesture of holding her child up to Céline every night, as she swung high in the rafters of the Funambules.

The dogs in the middle of the boulevard Saint-Germain, as they fought and leapt, took me instantly to the days in rue Vaugirard, when Jenny and Maman talked of the circus of performing dogs, Les Chiens Savants, which had preceded the new theater of the Funambules. Set between the market of Les Halles and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, the circus contained not only dogs trained to waltz and pirouette, to jump and catch balls, and to swing on the wire in ballerina attire, but was famed for its audience, too, made up of the
canaille,
the ruffians and lowlife of Paris. Gérard would say that to use a lorgnette in their presence was to incite a riot. All this returned to me, as the crowd where I walked cheered on the rushing, swerving dogs. And when I turned and made my way to the theater where I had passed so much of my infancy and early childhood, it was the sound of the crowd, avid for the next act in the Funambules repertoire, that filled my ears and propelled me along the pavement.

“Adèle—it can't be true!” The old actor Placide was the first to see me when I pushed my way in through the doors Maman had left and returned to so often, handing her child to whichever member of the troupe happened to be standing on the step. “My
God,
une belle femme!
”—and the ancient comedian chuckled up at me, for I was now taller than the character I had once revered and imitated when I was safely home, with Jenny smoking her cigar in the downstairs parlor and Monsieur Punch shouting on his perch in the ornamental cage. “For one moment—
tiens!
—I thought I was seeing not Adèle but her mother, Céline.”

“Placide,” I said, and as I seized him by the lapels of his ill-fitting suit, I saw him flinch and remembered that each night the character of Cassandra, played by old Placide, received a mighty cudgeling about the shoulders from Pierrot. “Where is Maman, Placide, please? This is why I've come here—to find Céline.”

But Cassandra merely nodded at me. With a theatrical gesture he wiped away a tear, or a false tear (for when I was very young, the sight of weeping clowns would set me off bawling myself, and large white handkerchiefs would be produced, puddles of mock tears being mopped up, for the fun of seeing me teased and then reassured). “
Ma petite,
you must ask Dubureau.” The gnarled face of the simpleton Cassandra loomed into mine, so close you could see the pores thickened by years of heavy makeup. “Oh, Pierrot will be happy to see his little Adèle,” Placide repeated; but now, as I saw, the shambling figure moved at surprising speed into the dark depths of the theater. “I'll tell him you're here,” his voice echoed back.

I was prepared for Pierrot—my own darling Pierrot, the perpetual buffoon, unhappy lover, witless recipient of life's blows, the tender, flour-faced Pierrot—to have changed since last I saw him onstage at the Funambules, but I had not been ready for the man who stepped down from the stage in the darkened auditorium and came toward me. For a moment I held back, as the white sleeves of the famous Pierrot costume came to envelop me; then I hugged and kissed the gaunt figure as hard as I could. Pierrot did not think of me as Céline; Pierrot knew where Maman was hiding
out; perhaps, a possibility I had not allowed myself to consider, Maman had in the last week or so returned to Paris, had not thought of searching for me as I did for her, and was about to perform for the great Dubureau at this evening's show. The very idea made me gasp with excitement and hope.

But Pierrot, although he offered his embraces and kisses, had none of the gaiety I remembered of the
enfariné,
the fool whose kohl-rimmed eyes looked out from a sheet-white face. Pierrot, the new Pierrot, had a grim air—and I remembered the long letter Jenny had written to me, shortly after I left Paris for Thornfield Hall. Pierrot, she said, had murdered a man—or Dubureau had; no one in this city of make-believe and cruel ribaldry could tell the difference between the actor-manager of the Funambules and the clown he played to such wide acclaim. Pierrot, in any case, had been out walking with his wife (I had trembled, as this was read out to me by the kind Madame Fairfax: had the poor wounded Pierrot, the sufferer of life's injustices, actually married Maman?), and on a summer evening, in the Paris suburb of Bagnolet, a seventeen-year-old apprentice had called out insults to him and had been struck dead by the strolling actor's cane as a punishment for his rudeness. “Walking with
ta putain, ta margot,
” your whore, your slut, Jenny's letter had repeated the nature of the vile remarks; and, not understanding them, the good housekeeper had stumbled over the words as she read them out, while I shuddered at the thought that my mother, if she had indeed married poor Pierrot, had been the subject of such scurrilous attacks.