Thornfield Hall (8 page)

“Grace, where is your mistress?” said Mr. R. I had to stop myself from laughing at the way his voice trembled.

“I don't know, sir,” I said. And honestly, as I turned to face him, I believed myself. It couldn't be true that the bride he had brought to the Hall with such lovely dresses, with combs and diamonds piled in her hair, could be locked in a foul-smelling barn along with rotting bales of hay and a couple of cows Jack had brought in there last night, breaking his word that my prisoner would be alone. Not that I'm surprised at what he did. If he was getting paid for the hay—as I'd told him he would be—why not make good use of it for the cow and her calf? We're all the same under the skin, and there's not so much difference between the stable lad and the master of Thornfield Hall when you come down to it.

Just looking at Mr. R's face as it dawned on him that his wife was out there again, roaming and a danger to the prospects of his new marriage, was worth a sovereign or two. But I waited—and here is where I showed myself as a chump who deserves all the bad luck that's coming, and more—before bringing up the reward I had in mind. Later, I figured, when Miss Blanche and her mother were shown to their rooms and Mr. R was hopping with nerves that poor Bertha would come walking in at any moment of the night or day—that was when I'd make my offer to Mr. R to stay quiet on the subject of the first Mrs. Rochester. More fool me.

Well, there wasn't much time to spare for this “eligible bache
lor”—those being the words I'd heard Mrs. F use about her cousin and employer, as if she had to go on pretending she'd never guessed what really lay beyond “Grace's Room” upstairs. The master of Thornfield had to get himself ready for the visitors and appear in charge of the ceremonies when he greeted them on this all-important visit.

“Very well, Grace,” came the snapped reply to my protest that I'd no idea where his dearly beloved could be. “You were hired to guard over Miss Antoinette”—he can't bring himself to say “my wife”; I don't praise him for his cowardice in that—“to guard her and care for her,” Mr. R went on, and I heard the beginnings of the storm of his famous temper building far off on the shores of what he calls his “patience and forbearing.” Soon the cyclone would hit—and even Mrs. F would run from her room, scurrying down to the Hall to avoid a good lashing from her master's tongue. “How
dare
you?” shouted Master Edward, as he was called before the sad death of his elder brother, good Master Rowland. “How were you so careless? Drunk, I suppose?”

The pitch of his voice was awful. But then it dropped again. We stood there, in the room with the high windows where he's made me lose my own youth, unable to look out at the world unless I stand on the chair by the attic window, incapable of love or entertainment, and with only gin or a porter mug for company.

We looked each other in the eye. Whether he knew I knew the whereabouts of his wife, I cannot say. But he was quiet as a mouse all of a sudden, and then he turned on his heel and left the room. If anyone was all churned up, you could say it was I, Grace Poole. I'd expected him to rant and rave. But he went down the stairs like a gentleman. The visit of Miss Blanche wouldn't be spoiled for him, not yet.

And an hour or so later, when I'd worked at carrying the ewers and jugs of water to the rooms and piled coals on the fires in the
library and the Hall as if nothing had happened (and indeed, as the existence of my charge was a secret, nothing had), I was there at the back by the servants' staircase to watch the gentry arriving. I had to hear from Miss Eyre, the governess, that the visit of Blanche Ingram and her mother had been canceled—surely for the last time, I thought when I saw Mr. Rochester's face, black as thunder. She was in his confidence, certainly. Now if he'd just given me the chance to speak to him—very well, to blackmail him, if you like—things would have gone swimmingly for both of us.

 

When things didn't go as I planned, I put it down to the bad
luck the little French girl had brought to Thornfield, with her talk of an old witch fortune-teller she visits in the “pretty, clean town” she left, to come and be with her Papa.

Mind, she didn't call him that at first. The poor child didn't know what to expect at Thornfield Hall; and I will own that the lies I told to that affected little piece of Paris frippery made everything worse in the end. But she made me think she
could
look into the future—that the old woman in Paris she told me about with the toad and the black cat really had picked her as some kind of special seer into the future. And I badly wanted to know when the best moment would be, for going to the master and saying I'd reveal the existence and whereabouts of his wife if he didn't pay up. For, even with the engagement to Miss Ingram no longer a possibility, I reckoned it would still be worth something to Mr. Rochester to get rid of the anxiety over his mad wife's movements. Although of course I didn't put it like that to little Miss Adela—I made it sound like a romantic tie and the need to approach a man of the world for advice when all had gone sour on us.

“Oh, I do not know, Grace,” Adela said. She pronounced my name like “ass,” and it made me laugh. I could see that Mrs. F was
irritated by the child, the “ward” of Mr. R—and she wouldn't take my remarks on the subject, either. Mrs. F had to be proper at all times. But, for all the housekeeper's dislike of the foolish creature, I came to enjoy the company of Adela. I had the feeling I could use her one way or another, if not in the spirit world then simply as one who was close to the master. The fact that he seemed bored with his “little bastard,” as I heard him describe her to the governess out in the garden under the big tree, didn't put me off for long. Blood will out, with the gentry—even if this sprig looked as unlike her father as it was possible to be.

“I believe you must find a good time in your heart,” said the child, who likes to spout such nonsense when she comes to my room high in the house and sits on the poorly made wooden chair that is the sole furniture apart from my table and my own hard perch. “La Cibot tells me you must find the tarot card that is your sign, and you must learn from that.” Adela shrugs. Again it amuses me to see a child as much like a miniature woman as this one. But I don't have these cards she talks of—and I soon dozed off when she ran on about the arcades she loves in Paris, and the man called Félix who takes her to his studio and lets her watch him making men's faces on paper, growing them, she says, in a great tank with a strange-smelling liquid inside. I wonder at the life she's led already, with her mother dancing, she says, over the heads of the crowd in the circus ring. A
danseuse de corde
—Adela makes me repeat the name of her mother's profession—trapeze acrobat, I daresay, though when the fair came to Millcote, I was the one left behind here at Thornfield. They said the master didn't want me to go. Only I knew the reason: poor mad Bertha might have escaped while I gasped at the high-wire dancers and laughed at the clowns.

I like to picture little Adela's mother as she swings high above the crowd. The child takes my mind off my worries, but I can't get
away from thinking that everything is not turning out as it should. The worst feeling I have, which of course Adela can never guess, is that the master knows exactly what I have done and the blackmail I still intend to practice on him, whether he makes it up with Miss Blanche or not. I should have demanded ransom money earlier, when the visit of Miss Blanche was just about to happen. And now that the master has lost his nerve and canceled it, what am I to do with my prisoner who is in the barn, beyond the stable buildings? How can I speak to Mr. Rochester? For he never mounts to the third story now, or sees me when I walk past. Grace Poole has become the ghost of Thornfield Hall.

The worst of it is that Antoinette is weak and, I fear, dying in the hayloft. I had to move her to the uppermost bales when Jack walked in and brought another cow with him, pointing out that the money for renting the broken-down old barn was running out. And there is worse still: the child Adela has heard—from Leah doubtless, but she will have been told not to say—that there is a “strange woman” living somewhere in a barn just beyond the park fence. And that I, Grace Poole, will show her to the curious child. So the net tightens, and the fear begins to mount inside me. Grace Poole will end up dangling from a rope if the luck don't change soon—that I know.

Adèle

T
here was a house in Paris at the time of
the
douceur de vivre
Maman would tell me about—a time she said she despised, before we in France were set free—where the rich old aristocrat owner kept a byre (as Jack the stable lad calls it) right in the elegant first story of his mansion. “There was hay, and a couple of cows munching peacefully, and the old man had his rustic dream fulfilled,” Maman said; and she laughed at the
folies
and extravagances of the nobility in our country in those days before Madame Guillotine was invented for the purpose of cutting off their heads. “The marquis,” Maman continued with a faraway look in her eyes (so I thought for a moment that Céline had in fact been contented with the ancien régime, as it is known to the republicans liberated by Monsieur Robespierre and his kind) “the marquis had a boy to milk the animals, and he lay
reading in bed in the midst of this farmyard scene. Can you imagine it?”

Maman and Jenny used to laugh at this point, as they remembered the eccentricities of the old days. And it is their laughter I think of now, after climbing into the hayloft where I paid Leah to take me, with the louis d'or Jenny sent me for a time when I might need to run away from Thornfield or otherwise save my life. In my opinion it is as important as my own life to rescue my friend Antoinette—for when Leah giggled and told me there was a strange woman found high on the bales in the barn at the far end of the park, I knew this stranger was the
bonne amie
I had on the roof at Thornfield, the kind woman with long black hair who sang me songs of her far-off island.

Leah knew about my little store of gold (for Nadar had given me a sovereign, payment for a photograph of a rich
anglais,
he said), and I knew that Leah wanted the money in order to help her to marry Jack, for she is
enceinte
with his child, so she says.

I had formed my plan to slip out of the house yesterday—the day when the good thing happened: Papa's planned marriage to Mademoiselle Blanche was called off; and then the bad thing came after, when Miss Eyre called me into the schoolroom and told me she had news for me that will affect all of our lives very much.

At first Jane paced the schoolroom in silence, and, as a fine evening lay outside, I had promised Leah to meet her—with the louis d'or in my pinafore pocket,
naturellement
—at the gate to the park from the garden; from there we would have only a short walk to the hayloft, where I thought of my friend, like the Parisian aristocrat, reclining on pillows and sipping creamy milk. Why Jane walked back and forth with so agitated an air, I did not like to wonder. But later, as I reflect, this was the first time the eyes of the little governess shone so bright that one was made to think of their color as green and not the dull “hazel” she has told me they are,
when I have asked her what the word is in English for such an uninteresting
regard.
“Adèle,” said Jane, coming over to me at last and taking me in her arms (and this I have learned not to refuse, for there is a scent of fresh lime I shall forever associate with my little governess: it is as if she is half tree, half woman, like the drawings of the mythological creatures I find sometimes in the big books in Papa's library), “my dear Adèle,” Jane said as she stooped low over me and I breathed in the green leaves that waft from her. “I shall be married tomorrow. We would invite you to attend the ceremony, but it is for us alone—and then we will be away a time, leaving Thornfield immediately afterward. You will be a good girl—you will do all Mrs. Fairfax says. Promise me now, my dear!”

I promised, as my mentor was extremely eager for me to do so; and then, as I was suddenly overcome by shyness, I found I could not ask the name of the bridegroom. I stood as tongue-tied as Little Jack Horner in his corner—while the minutes ticked away, and Leah must have scuffed her feet with impatience on the stableyard cobbles, waiting for me to appear. “I marry Mr. Rochester,” Jane said quietly as I remained rooted to the spot for what seemed an age. “I could not tell you before, Adèle, as he did not wish it. But I may assure you that I intend to be very happy indeed!” And with that, the girl who was no longer the mousy Miss Eyre bounded across the schoolroom to the window and looked out at the forecourt of Thornfield Hall, as if certain her betrothed would now come riding up there.

As for me, I fled from the room and down the back stairs to the door that leads out to the stable buildings, as fast as I could go. Cross, and in the act of stomping off, Leah needed a sight of the louis d'or—which she fished for in the pocket of my overalls as if I were no more than a common thief handing over stolen booty in return for a reward. She pulled my hair, too, did Leah, so I snuffled and sobbed all the way across the shortcut in the park, the overgrown path that leads to the barn where Jack keeps his two cows.

Grace

S
o there is to be a wedding at Thornfield
Hall after all! Leah came to tell me at dawn; and I own I went straight down to the cellar and took hold of a bottle of the master's port, for Grace is in worse trouble now, and no mistaking it.

But there were other matters here to be solved: how did my mistress—another way of describing the poor woman kept at my pleasure in the hayloft until I take my courage in my hands and make the owner of the Hall pay up—guess the existence of this new light in the eye of the master? How did she know that the man she married and set up for life, with her money from Jamaica, now had designs on a penniless orphan? The answer is simple: she saw them together in the garden from her lookout on the roof of the Hall—and my own wits are deserting me if I didn't see it earlier. But now, what with my concerns over the health of the wretched Creole and my fear she'd be discovered in the barn, I
never thought to look under my own nose for the latest object of the master's affections. He can't be without a woman, and the chance his wife might turn up out of the blue one day has scared him off proposing to Miss Blanche. I was right there, and I should have understood he'd stick as near as possible to home when looking for the next one. But Miss Eyre! Eighteen years old! My only wonder is what the little governess will think when Adela, who has never kept her secrets for more than a day, explains to her dear Jane that love for the master, who is already a married man, is strictly forbidden by the church. Once Adela learns the secret, that is.

Of course, the lawfully wedded wife of Mr. Rochester simply saw it all for herself. Just as I thought the poor, drugged woman had been too weak to stir from her bed to the window; I found she'd been looking down and spying on them—something in the new song the master sings to the governess must have given strength to a failing woman. But Antoinette has always had powers that are disconcerting, and I have proof now that the cunning of the woman is just as the master describes. I would say she can make herself invisible, with those black arts she practiced in the islands across the sea—and on occasion she's been as impossible to pin down as the light that flickers out on the moor sometimes, when it's a hot summer night. One minute she's like a dead woman walking—the next minute she's gone. She'll climb out onto the roof and try to pull you down with her, I said to myself. But it turned out I needn't have worried that Miss Adela would go running to the lord and master with stories of the madwoman on the roof. She's easily distracted, and I can't say she knows the difference between what's there and what's not.

The little Parreesienne clambers on my knee and begins to tell me again about her beautiful Maman, the woman who left her own daughter just like that with only the street to look forward to as a home and went off to Italy. Sometimes we get even more of the famous Céline Varens: “Maman and Papa were in the white villa
by the sea!” says Adèle, as she wants us to call her, French as you like with her long brown curls and her pale face. You can see she's bred of a woman who never did a real day's work in her life. “Villa, what villa?” I say, for I own I don't know the word. We don't have villas in this part of the world. “In the sun,” Adela says, and she sighs. “Papa and Maman are in the
grande chambre à coucher
—”

“Oh,” say I, “I'll tell you one thing, my child. It's better to watch out for the traps in life as they come for you day by day than to go on dwelling on the past.”

“And Maman is saying to Papa why she will not marry him,” the child goes on. “She will change her mind now, I am sure of it. I have asked Madame Fairfax to write to Maman, to tell her Papa loves her still and she must return here to be with her family.”

Poor child! If I didn't have such a deal of anxieties on my mind, I'd feel sorry for her. Whatever is going to befall Adèle Varens when the master marries Jane Eyre? But it's refreshing to hear of a woman who wouldn't marry Mr. Rochester, rather than the other way around. “Why wouldn't she accept the offer?” says I, as Adela wanted me to do. The whole story was very likely invented anyway, as Adela makes up with her lying for all the lessons she misses with the governess. “Maman told Papa she does not believe he understands the new French thinking,” replied Adela in her important way. It'll surprise no one to hear I didn't inquire what this new French thinking might be. But Adela went on without caring if I wanted the answer or not.
“Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité,”
says the little wretch, and leaps from my knee. “
Liberté, Egalité
—”

“That's enough, child,” I said, and I swiped at her as she ran past like the gnat she is, a nuisance to all of us here at Thornfield Hall. All the same, the idea of the master being refused on account of not understanding liberty or equality—why, even poor Grace Poole can fathom the meaning of those words. And—though I didn't own it to the child, I took my hat off to her mother, Céline Varens. Mr. R
can go after his governess, with her yes, sirs and no, sirs, but he can't get a true equal like the Frenchwoman to agree to live by his side.

All of this took up my thoughts, and I hardly listened as Adela prattled on—though suddenly I had the need to ask very forcefully that she repeat what she said, slowly and without all those words in French.

“Antoinette
doit mourir,
” Adela said slowly in a loud voice, disobedient as usual. “She must die, so Papa can be free.”

“What do you mean?” I cried. “This ain't a game, you know. You shouldn't speak of anyone in that way, child. Who have you been talking to? Now you must tell the truth.”

“But yes,
la vérité,
” the child said, serious now that she heard my tone and saw the expression on my face. I put my hands over my ears in the rush of horror that came after hearing her like this. Then I thought to myself that if anyone did murder the wretched Bertha, it was likely to be this little minx, with all her false affection and airs.

“Leah has told me,” Adela sobbed, trying to climb onto my knee. But I wouldn't have it, I was rigid, and I must have appeared a ghost to her myself, for she began to cry in earnest, calling on “Maman” to help her from this horrible place.

“Well, Adela,” I said. “First, how do you know who this woman is? And where have you seen her? Then I will see what you fabricate and what is true.” And I lifted my hand, to show I'd give her a great slap if she lied, which only sent her into screams and hysterics worse than before.

At the end of it all, my very worst fears were confirmed. Leah in her idiot way had gone to romp in the hay bales with the stable lad Jack, and she'd seen poor Bertha there, moaning no doubt and begging to be allowed back to Thornfield Hall. The stories had come out—the Lord knows I'm sick enough of them—the hibiscus and the nutmegs on the island with the black sand where she went after she married and was for a short time happy. Her long
years in the attics of the Hall. Her escape from the hayloft a day or two back and how she had seen “her Edward” and the little governess in the garden together. And so it had been Leah and Jack, part from spite against the wardress who had looked after the crazy woman so long—myself, Grace Poole—and part out of pity for me, who had set up little Adela to bring her back into the Hall.

Leah told Adela; of course she would and did. You never can gauge the amount of love a child will have for its mother or father—or both in this case, as it appears Adela still thinks she can bring them together at last at Thornfield Hall. “Now Papa will understand the French thinking,” said the child, when she saw I wouldn't take her in my arms and pet her, as I had been known to do before. “And he can marry Maman when he is—as you say—
veuf,
” Adela went on. “A widower,” I said, and saw all my future fall out the window if the Creole woman died while under my care—and a jail sentence, too, unless I ran fast from Thornfield and found work elsewhere. I confess my mind was going as fast as the merry-go-round at Whitcross Fair, trying to see a way out of the deadly dangerous corner I was now in.

“And Maman will come very soon,” cried Adela just as I had decided to get as fast as my legs would carry me to the old teacher in Millcote who'll write letters for those who can't read or write—like your poor Grace Poole. A letter needed to go—and I see it fly across the ocean and come down like a racing pigeon on the island with nutmegs I always put Antoinette on, in my mind. Her brother, Richard Mason, needed to come here quick—to stop the wedding of the master and the little governess. Mason it was who held proof of that first ceremony in Jamaica: who would listen to Grace Poole? And it was known here that Mr. Rochester and his new bride were going on a long wedding journey once the service is over—with Antoinette as miserably weak as she was when I last saw her in the barn, she'd be dead by the time they returned, and
Grace would swing for her pains. Yes, Mr. Mason must come before the lecher Mr. R had got himself to church with that self-satisfied little piece Jane Eyre. Do you know of an impediment? Yes, Grace knows the word. Richard knows of an impediment, most certainly he does. “And what shall I wear when Maman is
épousée
with Papa?” the child keeps saying again and again, until I think I'm going to take leave of my senses. “The new rose satin Papa brought me from Paris? Or the gauze which is
transparent,
like a fairy's wings, the wings I had when I was in the Funambules Theater…?

I suppose something snapped in me. I don't see myself as cruel, in the ordinary run of business at any rate. Yes, I'd punish Bertha when she grew too Antoinette for my tastes—cloying and full of contradictory demands, acting like the forgotten queen. But I've never spoken just to bring hurt—something I did then, and it's too late to feel regret. “Your Maman isn't coming here, to Thornfield Hall,” I said. That bit was true at least, there was no question so far as I could see, of an actress who's happy with a new lover—and probably another of the same sex as well, for all I know, this Jenny the child keeps talking of—settling down here with Edward Fairfax Rochester. She wouldn't find the equality and liberty she talks of in this country—no, she would not. And it's clear she said good-bye to her daughter when she ran off to Italy. There are enough women moiling and toiling around this place, each with her own wants and needs—from the governess Jane Eyre to Blanche Ingram still keeping hope alive to Bertha Mason herself, who'll be back here soon, you can mark my words. The money I gave Jack is running out, and he'll do no favors for me, that's certain.
No
French trapeze dancers here, please! I turned to Adela, who was practicing dance steps under the high window in my room. “Your Maman won't be coming to Thornfield, my child,” I said. “Your Papa is marrying Miss Eyre, and it's time you came to terms with it, my child.”

“Papa will marry Maman,” Adela said.