Thornfield Hall (17 page)

At first it was impossible to make out what the swirling characters, small as they were, could signify. It was as if, I thought in my bewilderment, a child had doodled with an engraving pen on the
smooth surface of the back of the portrait, in order to make an impression of a forest—or of entwining snakes—there. The letters, as I slowly saw them to be, writhed so—and were rubbed, too, with age and maybe with their frequent removal and replacement (and this, I found, I wished to believe: that Céline, for all the happiness that came to her in Italy, had not been able to bear her separation from me and so had taken my portrait constantly from the locket inside the ring)—that I could make out no more than the letter
F,
or so it seemed to be, standing tall and flanked by other shapes, all rearing and falling on either side of it.

“Yes, yes,” Jenny said, and she was no longer able to suppress her impatience. “And this?” She pointed down to the minute object, and I saw at last as she did an
E,
a Greek
E
as Jane had taught me to practice writing in the schoolroom at Thornfield; then the
F,
as ornate as a peacock's feather and upright before the great
R
that followed it, turned back on itself, and swallowed the rest in the grandiosity of its flourish. “
EFR,
” Jenny spelled out for me, as if I were a small child again. “Edward Fairfax Rochester. Your Papa has given his signature of endorsement to you, Adèle. Now look at the back of Lucien's miniature. What do you see there?”

Memory is famously unreliable, and on that day, in the still-stifling heat of Jenny's room under the roof of the house in the Faubourg Poissonière, I could not have sworn that I really did remember so rapidly the coach that took us, Maman and I, to the races at Longchamps that day. I saw in my mind's eye the obsequious steward of the course and noted his haughty greeting of Céline, whom I knew at once and even at such a young age he scorned for not being a member of the aristocracy. I saw the horses lined up and heard my own screams of pleasure when the vicomte's horse romped ahead and came in as the winner.

Yes, the vicomte. Of course! I saw the coach again, on the way
home, and I saw the door of the coach as it was held open by the attendant, the coat of arms resplendent in the late-afternoon sun. The vicomte's coat of arms, as gracious and arrogant as Papa's initials on the rear of my portrait, adorned that of the boy I had been told was my twin.

“Your mother was convinced,” Jenny said quietly when I had gone to the window and looked out at the real world—so much simpler in its ways, as I then thought, than the tangle of the family in which I now found myself—“your mother was certain that Lucien was the child of the vicomte and you were the daughter of the Englishman who came to Paris and broke her heart, or so she would often describe him. Think back, Adèle, and you will understand why Nadar, who loved Céline too, you know, could not bring himself to tell you.”

I closed my eyes, still at the low mansard window in Jenny's humble room, and I see the day at the races with the vicomte all over again, this time with the long absence of Maman and her lover, the half hour at least in which they had promised me they were finding bonbons for my delectation on the long coach ride home. I run after them, without their knowledge, and go into a covered box on the royal stand…and then I see them, Maman rosy-cheeked and blushing, and the vicomte with the sleek look I had come to understand in him as meaning something as good as the little sugar sweets given him by his adored Céline.

“The day they didn't take you with them to Longchamps,” Jenny prompts me. “My God, Adèle, the day of the milord's terrible rage: a day you will surely never forget.”

Again, though I am ashamed to admit it, it is the memory of the chocolate nuts that comes to mind: how I had wished for one and, while I was afraid of the mood the man they told me to call Papa was in, how I had had the audacity to come right up to him on the balcony of the house in rue Vaugirard and demand a bon
bon from him straightaway. I hear his angry laugh as he tosses the hard almonds onto the roof of the conservatory Maman had asked him to give her, and his snort of satisfaction as the glass shatters and falls in splinters to the ground.

Then I see the coach—before Monsieur Rochester does, probably—though he must see, as I do, the expressions the vicomte and Céline wear as they disembark. Expressions that translate immediately for the milord stranger: he must know the look of satisfied desire on both their faces. But for me, I struggle to think back to the day I was permitted to join Céline and her French lover, and the picture of the box on the royal stand comes back to me, the door behind a velvet curtain, the stockings and petticoats and lace I had seen Maman donning so carefully earlier in the day, spread out over the couch at the back of the box.

Now I force myself to remember what took place at Maman's house before he threw her onto the street and wrecked the rooms as we fled weeping, to find Jenny. The vicomte was summoned to a duel—yes, that I remember very well. But Maman—how could she have let herself be seized by the Englishman and carried up to her boudoir, already half destroyed in his jealous rage? Hadn't I covered my ears, praying the ogre would not kill her as her cries echoed around a house the servants had abandoned at the first sign of coming trouble? And hadn't those cries, as I had refused to accept then, turned to moans of joy?

I remembered then how Maman had told me with lowered eyes of the first occasion of Monsieur Rochester's seeing her with her lover—as today, they came in the coach right up to the door, thinking Céline's protector safely in Yorkshire. “Edward took the whip from the glass cabinet,” Maman had said, and I remember I recoiled from her, for the first time in my life. “That was the day,
ma petite,
that you were conceived. A child of the circus, certainly.”

But she hadn't told me about the other result of that first visit to
Longchamps. Within the space of an afternoon, both Lucien and Adèle had been conceived. Jenny came across the room, on the unsteady boards, and stroked my cheek with her hand. “Your mother was convinced.” And I hung my head, in a final acceptance of the truth. “So your brother was raised by the vicomte,” Jenny went on softly, “and Monsieur Rochester took care of you. Why did you not stay there, Adèle, where you were provided for? I have not been able to understand what you are looking for, here in Paris?”

“My mother,” I said, and the scalding tears came for the second time that day, to run down my dusty cheeks as Pierrot's did at the end of the evening show. “She is dead, Jenny—but where is she? I need to know.”

“You could have gone to see the old witch, La Cibot,” Jenny replied, back to her old self, her tone tart and dismissive. “But evidently you did not.”

I agreed that I hadn't thought La Cibot important—that I had left for the theater as I had no wish to be late.

“And look what you found there,” said Jenny, who was laughing at last. “The witch could have warned you of things you didn't have to see while hanging upside down on the trapeze!”

“So we'll go there now,” I said.

 

There are some faces that seem to belong so completely to the
room or house they inhabit that they are barely recognizable if found elsewhere. The round table with the drooping, tasseled cloth; the lamp with the leaning shade; the curtains that would never shut out the sun even if tugged until the cheap cotton, already twenty years old, protested with an earsplitting rending sound were as much a part of La Cibot, as I remembered her, as the gray hair that was sparse on top and the bulging eyes set in a horny brow. Without mentioning the toad, the cockerel, and the
crystal ball that lived under a green baize cloth on a side table also shrouded in a musty material. La Cibot, I decided as Jenny and I walked at a brisk pace into the poor district beyond Montmartre, was a fixture in my life—as well as the one responsible for handing over to me the magnifying glass with which I had conjured flames, dangerous and all-consuming, and had brought about my own banishment from Thornfield Hall. So it came as a relief to me to find that, after all the surprises of the day, there was no change in the apartment of the old witch and that she seemed to know me as well, after all these years, as she had done when Maman, Jenny, and I first visited her, in urgent need of advice on the subject of their lives—and on the future for
la petite
Adèle.

“There are deaths and near-deaths in the cards, my child,” La Cibot pronounced as the tarot pack came out and the bright, terrifying images spilled out over the tasseled cloth. “
Ton père
—he is here in Paris, no?”

Jenny and I nodded together, both of us, I was aware, impatient to be told where Monsieur Rochester could be found, now that I knew myself to have been accepted by him when I was born. And Maman—I had a strange feeling La Cibot would know where she was, too, whether in Italy or here in the solemn graveyard of Père Lachaise, where Gérard had taken me once, his pet lobster tottering behind him on its string, to wander among the imposing tombstones.

“I need to know if my brother hates me,” I said, and as I spoke, I felt myself blushing to the roots of my hair. For I had the right to know, surely, whether the boy with the face I saw half as my own and half as the face of the vicomte when I had known him in those far-off days in the rue Vaugirard raged in his heart against me, daughter of his father's murderer. I relived the duel as I looked into the eyes of the old witch across the table from me, and I knew she saw it also: the dawn light, the dew on the tall, stiff grass, and the two men with their seconds as they paced out the ground.

“Adèle.” La Cibot reached out a hand to me, and I saw it was as brown and speckled as the toad that sat, head cocked, by a bowl of water in the darkest part of the room. “Your father did not kill his adversary. I saw it then, in the ball—the nobleman fell, and he lost consciousness, and he was taken for dead. But I saw him rise again—his eyes opened as he lay in the morgue, and he was saved.” She turned to Jenny, who sat quietly on the low chair without arms, tapestry drooping from its sides and one leg missing a claw foot, so Jenny appeared to sit lopsidedly as she considered the old witch's visions. “Is the man alive, who was shot and wounded by the milord you have spoken of to me?”

“He is,” Jenny assented, still in her quietest voice. “When Adèle came to Paris, I feared that her father would follow her—as indeed he has—and would find himself arrested for the murder of the vicomte.”

I must have cried out then, for Jenny rose from the broken chair and went up to La Cibot, her face ablaze with triumph and joy. “You are right, Cibot! I walked right down to the rue Jacob, to the house with its long garden and the Temple de l'Amour, where my adored Céline would sit with the vicomte on a summer evening.”

“Yes.” I heard my own voice now, stronger that I had known it before. “And what did you see there, Jenny?”

“I looked over the wall,” Jenny said, quiet as I was loud and clear. She wiped her eyes before going on. “And I saw the vicomte, and at first took him for a ghost. For you know,” she said, now addressing me with a new urgency, “once Monsieur Rochester had gone from Paris—and Céline of course had run away to the south—there was no way of discovering whether the other participant in that duel had lived or died. Only when the police came in search of your father did we assume the worst.”

“The nobleman had gone to recover on his country estates,”
said La Cibot, and she gave a cackle of laughter. “But you, Adèle—you, too, must go home if you wish to retrieve your soul and recover your true identity. First, however, you must find and bid farewell to your mother. This is what you came here to ask me, is it not?”

“Where is she?” I said, and now for the third time that day I burst into tears and sobbed as if there would never be an end to it. “Maman is all I want, and I don't know where my home is, so how can I find her, and where should I go?”

“Wait,” said La Cibot crossly as she played out the long cards on the tabletop. “It is time for you to move on—and your
pauvre mére
comes to me here to inform you that you must love a new friend now, a friend who will not take your memory of her away from you. And I am seeing now, as the cards build up their pictures of water, moon, and crossing the sea, that you will find Céline in your home here, before leaving for your home over the water.”

“Home here?” I said, and I knew I sounded foolish.

“You remember where your home is, Adèle,” Jenny said, and her voice was not gruff but tender. “Go there now. Go home.”

 

I left Jenny hunched over the tarot cards with old Cibot and
made my way out into the street. Dusk was falling, like the curtain at the Funambules when the clowns and jugglers, knowing that it will come down behind them, step up their acts: colored balls go higher in the air, men with red noses tumble and somersault right up to the edge of the stage, and Pierrot, walking dreamily on, receives a kick that sends him spinning into the wings.

Paris had just that air of frivolous abandon on the May evening I went in search of my father and my home. Young lovers walked with their arms about each other, under chestnut trees that
snowed white blossoms on their heads. Stalls selling oysters and
oursins,
sea urchins that are balls of black prickle and succulent pink flesh, were set out on the corners of busy streets, along with flowers by the million, so the scents of roses and lilies of the valley mingled with the sharp smell of the sea. Shop windows, lit by gas from the lamps along the boulevards, promised transformation, love, and ruin with their assortment of striped silk bodices and ballooning skirts. By the river on the quai des Grands Augustins, the stalls bearing books formed an open-air library, and the cafés that spilled their chairs and tables right up to the embankment wall served wine chilled to precisely the right degree.