Thornfield Hall (15 page)

I
t was growing dark by the time I had lost
my quarry three times and then finally found—so I thought—the face I had glimpsed in the audience of the Funambules Theater.

First, I walked in the direction of the river. The broad back of a man in a long black overcoat, his companion a boy of about my age, had kindled the spark of recognition for which I yearned: surely, I thought as I increased my pace on the banks of the Seine, this is the answer to my long, frightening, and confusing day. This is Papa, my father come to Paris to find the child he turned away from when he married Jane. This is Monsieur Rochester—and when he sees who runs along the wide escarpment by the river, he will turn and stop, then smile down at me.

But the strange man, when at last I overtook him, bore less resemblance to the man I had come to love and hate than did the crumpled, blackened face Nadar had fished up from his tank in the old days of the wet-collodion plate. He was tall, certainly, my
Monsieur Rochester, and he wore a sardonic expression that had more cruelty and also less of a reflective quality than Papa's; and that he wasn't even English was soon demonstrated by his barking demand of me, in a Belgian accent, to give an account of what I desired from him, and immediately. Then, still with his young companion, he walked on.

Why I had imagined the master of Thornfield Hall with a lad of about fourteen years old, I don't know; but I was compelled, after accepting that I had blundered and followed the wrong suspect, to cast my mind back to my last moments on the high wire and to try, with all the concentration I could muster, to remember whether the dear and dreaded individual I had seen looking up at me had indeed been accompanied by a youth of my own age.

At first, the terror of the bar as it swung me high and then low across the stage of the Funambules came to me so vividly that I saw nothing but my own figure, small and determined, as it climbed from pole to strip of metal and then dropped, with a plunging movement that brought a knot to my stomach, to hang upside down over a sea of equally reversed faces.

How could I—this is how I thought on that Paris morning as I stood gripping the stone balustrade by the Seine, hanging on in my memory as I had learned to do on the trapeze—how could I possibly recall who had been a spectator among so many today? Hadn't my grief and nervous reaction to the devastating news of Céline's death—broken by Nadar, not unkindly but with a candor that was typical of the man—unhinged me, so, my having learned of the loss of my mother, that I hallucinated my father there before me in the audience? After all, why should a man such as Monsieur Rochester, with all his estates and land, stretching far east of Millcote and west of Whitcross (and to think of those names and places filled my eyes with tears)—why should so important and preoccupied a man take the time and trouble to come to Paris to look for
an orphan who had been five years incarcerated in a boarding school?

By the time I decided it was highly unlikely that Monsieur Rochester could have been in the audience at the Funambules, the Seine had lost its morning glitter and a warmth from the late spring sun had descended on the embankment and on the strolling crowds, growing in number, who had left work for a picnic or a breath of air by the river. How lucky they were, I couldn't help thinking, not to find, as I did, that they had neither mother nor father to count on—for wherever I looked, I saw contentment in the family groups walking slowly under plane trees, grandmothers and grandfathers, young parents and small children all together. How fortunate, these inhabitants of the wide boulevards and narrow, poky streets of Paris, who are not torn, as I have been, between one country and another—half of me a little
article de Paris,
a piece of frivolity and froth from this great capital, and the other a part of the dour, haunted landscape to which I was dispatched at the request of Monsieur Rochester. I belonged nowhere; and as I looked down into the gray and swirling waters of the Seine—illuminated here and there by strands of gold, as the sun dazzled through the trees—I wondered that “little Adèle,” who had the courage to dance across the wire twice a day at the Funambules, now lacked the spirit to jump into the deep river.

It was the vision of the wire that in the end supplied my memory. I am walking, pert little nose upturned, as Dubureau has taught me, arms like wings that flutter at my sides, lending a false assurance of my safety. I am walking, each step a miracle of judgment and precision, in my satin ballet slippers, across the highest
corde
in Paris—and I have the audacity and folly to stare out into the faces that lie beneath and beyond my fragile form. Something—so my memory insists to me—something I don't know or understand has caused me to look out like this, gawking like a
flâneur
in the boulevard just when I should be most devoted to the accuracy of my progress on the wire.

Yet this something or someone was so powerful that a message was transmitted to me, and it was a message I desperately needed, in order not to lose my way, fall, and ruin my chances of survival.

I see in my mind's eye Papa in his seat in the middle rows of the packed theater, and I know it is no illusion. He neither smiles nor scowls: in a flash I see him in the library at Thornfield Hall, looking inward as he sits over a book or his accounts. And beside him, indubitably, is a boy. A boy who looks, I realize with a jolt of fear, like me.

Who can he be, this child who is almost a man, who smiles apprehensively up at Papa as my trembling passage across the wire begins? He is not from Papa's country—of that I am sure. But maybe it's because he dresses in the French style, a dandy already, with waistcoat and finely cut jacket: the opposite of poor Pierrot's attempts to impress the audience with his appearance.

When the thought comes to me that the youth who seems to have taken up the affections of Monsieur Rochester may in fact be another of his children—his lost or forgotten son, abandoned as I was to a life fending for himself in the streets of Paris (and he hasn't done badly, as his costume and sophisticated manner show)—I am halfway across the
corde,
in my memory. Little wonder I had shut the idea from my mind, of Papa's real reason for coming to Paris: I would have tumbled, there and then, and broken my neck on the stage floor, if I had continued to think it one second longer. How amusing to arrive in France and take one's now-discovered son to the Funambules, to see the “little French bastard” of whom my father had spoken with such contempt to Mademoiselle Ingram! And how utterly destroying for me.

I remembered, as I held the balustrade and peered out at the river, murky now with the passing of a cloud over the sun, the
effort it had taken me to expunge from my mind the possibility of the boy's birth earlier today; and how hard, too, it had been to forget my uncharitable conclusion that Monsieur Rochester, dissatisfied with the son Jane had borne him, has been happy to make contact with his French heir.

As I stood, helpless recipient of yet another dreadful possibility, a hand taps my shoulder lightly, and I wheeled around. But before I saw him, I knew the long, stained fingers to belong to my old friend Nadar; the wide-palmed hand, so patient with the plates and images it draws from the depths, in the dark-curtained area of his studio, has helped hoist me high to go piggyback down the boulevards; the cameo ring this giant's hand wears is as familiar as the face of my dear mother, Céline. “Adèle!” Nadar stoops to kiss me, and as he does so, a river steamer goes by, music blaring out across the river. The party! It occurs to me: the party Jenny and Jeanne urged me to attend, all those centuries ago, before I very nearly lost my life, stumbling and falling from the high wire. “What are you doing all alone here,
ma petite?
” Nadar demands, and I feel hot tears start up behind my eyes. I mustn't cry—so I think of Pierrot's contrived, single tear and the laughter of the spectators at the grief of a clown defeated by his life. People love to see you cry—and so, I think as I smile back at Nadar, I simply won't! Not even, as the busy voice in my head reminds me, if I have this new possibility to consider seriously—the dreadful, life-crushing possibility that the youth with Papa had been as much a child of Céline Varens as I.

Nadar took me to the fair, as he had done over all those years when Maman was too occupied with her work onstage to come walking in the Jardin des Plantes or strolling among the peasants in from the country with their wares. He understood, without saying a word, that I needed the comfort of his presence but couldn't hear or speak, in case the sorrow flooded out and left us both
unable to continue with the expedition. From time to time I tried to pass on some piece of information: that the policeman we passed with his red sash and smart uniform was one of a corps containing a young man, Albert, who waited for me on the steamer that plied its way, horns and trumpets and fiddles sounding out cheerfully; and that Nadar was missing the supper banquet of his life by preferring to take me to the fair, when he could have joined the fun. I even recited Jeanne's menu for the evening—but as I did so, my voice sank to a whisper and the real river, the river of tears I had been fighting all day, came bursting from me.

“Adèle, let's sit down and talk about all this.” We were in the heart of the fair by now, and booths, filled with the brightly colored toys and curiosities of jugglers, artisans who picked a wooden puppet from the basket on the stall and brought an instant, mocking life to its jerking limbs, stood in a row like huts on a seaside pier. Some children and a lady with worn, aristocratic features stood laughing at the dancing replica of the now-deposed king, Louis-Philippe, a doll with an umbrella and a head shaped like a pear; yet Nadar, who had the kindness not to laugh, forgot his famous caricatures of the exiled monarch and hung his head in sympathy with me. “Tell me,” Nadar said, “what you have not been able to speak of before, Adèle. Many times you came to the studio and waited for me to explain to you about Céline. I couldn't bring myself to tell you she was dead. But I felt, also, that a new bond had grown in you, and that you did not wish to admit it. I waited for you to come out with the truth—”

“What truth?” I cried, for Nadar now hurt me just when I least expected it. “I wanted—I want—my father—”

“No, not your father,” Nadar said, and his voice was so low I could barely hear him against the shouts and hurdy-gurdy of the fair down on the banks of the Seine. “The best way is for you to tell
your poor old Nadar what happened in this ogre's castle Jenny sent you to, with a strong feeling of anxiety, I have to say.”

So I began, and so I told everything to Nadar, as it came to me. His eyes widened when I spoke of my discovery of Antoinette and my immediate friendship with her, and they closed in disbelief when I described the manner of death of Papa's sad wife, how I had closed the window onto the roof and left her out there. How she had desperately tried to reach the ground by way of the drain-pipe down the side of the battlemented house, and how she must have fallen and died—for there was never any sign of her again, at Thornfield Hall.

“Adèle, I do not believe, even when you were eight years old, that you would do this,” Nadar said, and he spoke so gravely that I realized he was earnest this time: that he did have something to tell me and that he wanted to be sure I knew the difference between truth and lies before he confided it to me. “Wasn't there anyone there, in the passage at the top of the monster's castle?” Nadar pressed me. “You know, my child, you would do better to go to La Cibot and look into her crystal ball if you want fairy stories than depend on Nadar believing your tall tales of falling mad wives and the rest.”

“No, no!” I cried, stung by the assumption on Nadar's part that I lived still in the world of Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, and the locked chamber of Bluebeard. “This was before I came back from school—before I ran away—and set fire to Thornfield Hall with my magnifying glass. The glass La Cibot herself gave me—I swear it is true! It was before the fire that
la pauvre
Antoinette fell to her death. But then everyone said she had perished in the fire. And she had not, she had not!”

Nadar burst out laughing despite himself and put out his hand to me, as he used to do when I was small and we were crossing a
busy street together. “Adèle,” he said softly, and as he spoke, he drew off the dark cameo ring he had worn since I knew him and touched a tiny hinge at the side, so the carnelian stone embedded in gold that lay at the top flicked back to show a portrait, equally minute, of a head engraved on ivory there. I flinched: here was Céline, as beautiful in this lifeless replica as I had known her when she was young and first flourishing in her stage career at the Funambules. Had Nadar always loved my mother? Why did he wear her ring, which never left his finger? What could it mean?

“Here,” Nadar said, and with the care he lavished on the portraits of his bohemians, poets, writers, and painters of Paris, he lifted out the bas-relief of Maman, to reveal a second, even more infinitesimal picture below.

I leaned across Nadar on the dirty old bench that stood on the graveled ground of the fair, and as I did so, a barrel organ started up. The music, sad and merry at the same time, returned me to the drawing room at Thornfield Hall, where Mademoiselle Blanche had liked to play on the old pianola Papa had brought back, so the story went, from an early visit to Paris. When he was in a good mood, he'd pick me up to sit astride the brightly painted contraption and call me his “little monkey.” At other times, if Blanche was selecting her tunes and smiling up at him with her velvety black eyes, he'd tell me to get out of the room as fast as my legs could carry me. Either way, the loud, indifferent music as it echoed through an empty afternoon at Thornfield Hall would bring me the acutest sense of the misery of missing Céline I thought I could ever know.