Mr. Rochester

by Sarah Shoemaker

  From then on, my life at Cambridge changed. Studies and lectures for six hours a day seemed beside the point, and I began following my own pursuits: sometimes reading at random, but just as often taking countryside walks. I played truant once with a group excursion to Newmarket to watch the races and to gamble. But Newmarket felt riddled with Carrot—and I could not watch the races or turn a corner in the town without sensing his presence—as the last place on this earth he had been. I felt even more bereft than ever, and I could not wait to leave. I never went again.

  I was, in those years, rudderless, with no one to push me in one direction or another. My tutor was a brilliant man but no teacher, and he often left me to my own devices. I became one of those faceless men in a crowd, always willing to go wherever the others dictated, willing to do whatever was at hand. I learned to play a role, to be whatever kind of man was needed at the moment. I don’t remember much in particular about my college life, and I imagine that none of my classmates remember anything in particular of me. If a person can be a cipher, rolling along with the crowd, having fun, hoisting a mug, causing neither admiration nor dismay, I was that cipher.

  I did manage to join the Cambridge Union Society, and although I was told I had a good voice and a quick wit, I no longer had the patience for the study that was required for a killing argument. And I joined a theatrical group, finding it soothing somehow to dress up as another, to play a role, to forget for a time that I was Edward Rochester, alone in the world. As well, I took up riding, my one pleasure above all else in those years. I loved feeling the power of a horse beneath me, the wind in my hair, the sun on my back, as if I were in another world entirely, as if I were totally free of all care or burden.

  After years of drifting, of late parties and groggy mornings; of simple romances with town girls that never led to anything, of mad rides over the downs, and, finally, five days of eight-hour exams, I did manage to pass my tripos—if just barely—and come down from Cambridge with exactly what I had been sent there for. There was much I could have learned that I did not, but I did learn two things: that one can hide oneself behind a mask, and that, more than anything else, I longed for a real home of the sort that I had had for such a short time at Maysbeck, and for companionship that I had not known since Black Hill.

  Chapter 17

  My father came for my graduation, and although he frowned at my apparent lack of zeal as a student, he said nothing, which I took to mean either that that meant little to him or that I had not done any worse than Rowland. Over dinner that evening, he informed me that I was ticketed on the Badger Guinea in two weeks’ time, bound for Jamaica. After all that had passed in the preceding years, the lure of Jamaica had faded for me, but as it became clear that he was not to accompany me, my perspective changed. I would be on my own; I would, for the first time, be free.

  Perhaps sensing the direction of my thoughts, he cautioned me: “This is a serious business, and I presume that you are up to it.”

  “Yes, sir, I am, sir,” I said, hoping to hide my excitement.

  “You must know what Jamaica is: it’s a gold mine, but the gold is white—‘white gold,’ they call it in fact, whole fields of it, growing higher than a man’s head. I have a plantation there—a small one, and without an estate house at the moment, but you will have the opportunity to vastly expand that holding if you are wise enough to do so. And a shipping business in addition, as you already know. For”—he leaned across the table—“the ‘gold’ must be brought to market, must it not? You will take over these interests; they will become yours. Any profit will be yours, any loss yours as well. It is your future, son, to do with as you choose. As you know, my interests in England are Rowland’s, but those in Jamaica are entirely yours. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” I responded.

  “I am aware that you spent too much of your time at university in pursuits other than studies, but that is past now. Now you are a man who will sink or swim on his own merits. If you end up having to rent yourself out as a book-keeper, or, worse, if you return to England in rags and penniless, that is your own account. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir, it is.”

  “Fine,” he said, tucking into his roast, “we understand each other. Two weeks from today you depart. Whatever must be done must be completed by then.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He looked up at me suddenly. “You haven’t made any promises to any young ladies, I presume.”

  “No, I have not.” Miss Phillips had been married to David Wilson for nearly two years, and I had no idea what had happened to Miss Kent.

  “Good,” he said, taking another bite. “Because there is a young lady you must meet when you get to Spanish Town. A beautiful and charming person, really, and her father and I have had several business dealings together. He is interested in seeing her married, as his health is not the best, and his wife is…gone. The girl has a brother, but he has not the head for business that you have already shown, and the father—Mr. Jonas Mason by name—is quite interested in you as a possible successor. Mason is thrilled that you have finished with Cambridge and made a good accounting of yourself there. A beautiful wife and an extremely generous arrangement: I cannot recommend this situation highly enough.” This last was accompanied by a shake of his fork to emphasize each word. “You will find,” he went on, “once you get to Jamaica, that a young man who arrives there with nothing but his good name and a willingness to work will find no position of value open to him. The best he can hope for is to be hired as a book-keeper at a plantation—the basest position for a white man, for he works directly with the slaves. If, on the other hand, he arrives with letters of recommendation to individuals of substance on the island, he will find a welcome. And if, as you are positioned to do, he comes with connections and with a plantation and a town house in Spanish Town, and shipping interests already in hand, nothing can stop him from making the very best of himself, unless he does not take advantage of all that is waiting for him.” His eyebrows rose at the end of that last phrase, but I had caught his meaning well enough.

  I nodded, as it seemed there was not much more to be said on the subject, and he dove again into his plate, while I fiddled with my food, my heart already pounding with enthusiasm and anxiety at the opportunities before me.

  My father said nothing else until he had finished eating. As he placed his fork down, he said, “I shall be leaving on the coach for London in the morning. I have business there, but I shall return to Liverpool in less than a week. I trust you will have arrived by then.”

  “Yes, indeed, I will.”

  “Fine. You have sufficient funds, I presume.”

  “I believe so,” I said, wondering in fact if I did.

  He rose and started away, but turned suddenly back, pulling out his purse as he did so. “Young men never have sufficient funds, I have come to learn,” he said. He laid a couple of banknotes on the table for me. “This should take care of whatever debts you may have around town and get you back to Liverpool. You will give me an accounting when you return. Take care you are not delayed.” And with that he left.

  * * *

  I had not known my father to be a generous man, but he was a businessman and he knew the value of a good name. I did have a few debts, and what he gave me would more than cover them, and I was grateful for that. I had nearly gotten used to my father’s abruptness, but I felt sure that underneath his manner, he truly did care about me and my future, or else he would not have taken such pains—and expense—to prepare me for it. I left the inn nearly as soon as he did, but I saw no sign of him, and by the end of the day I had indeed paid off my debts and was packed and ready to leave.

  The next morning I rose early to see my father off and to arrange to have my belongings shipped to my father’s town house in Liverpool. I kept out only what I needed to carry me through the next few days, and these items I placed in a small knapsack of the sort soldiers use. It was perhaps an inappropriate choice of luggage, but I wa
s determined to travel by horseback and therefore to carry as little as possible. I did not expect to see anyone I knew or needed to impress; I was traveling only to visit old friends who had seen me in much worse states and had loved me anyway.

  The weather was fine: a lovely day in mid-June, and as I urged my hired horse a bit faster, the meadow grasses, daisies and cowslips among them, nodded in the breeze. I had come to love riding, and I came to understand how Carrot could have died in such a way, atop a racehorse at full speed, pushing the both of them to the edge of danger. Young men tend to be fools in that respect.

  My ride took the better part of a week, and my first stop was Mapleton, where I found the little church where the Reverend Gholson had been the vicar. He had departed years before, and I had no knowledge of his destination, but it was not he I had come to see. I wandered in the graveyard at the side of the church until I found the grave: William Andrew Gholson—Beloved son of the Reverend Richard and Ann Gholson—“Into God’s hands we commend him”—and I knelt and placed my hands on it, filling my mind with thoughts of that small, gentle boy beneath the ground. We three, I thought, and kneeling there in the grass I wept.

  But I had more to do, and I mounted my horse again, riding for two days, reaching the little church at the edge of the park at Lanham-Hall just as the bell was tolling the evensong. I did not have difficulty finding the grave in that small churchyard, and the carving on the stone still seemed fresh: Thomas George Alfred Fitzcharles. I wept for him as well, and for the time we had not spent together, the letters he had sent, urging me to come, and how I had put him off, and the times he had told me that I was like a little brother to him and I had not responded that he was a better brother to me than the one I had. I told him that now, too late, standing over his grave.

  I gazed down the long drive, bowered by lime trees, toward the Hall itself, wondering who would live in it now. It looked empty, forsaken—perhaps there was no one at all there, which seemed fitting to me. Who, after all, could ever take Carrot’s place? I turned away and walked back to the grave once more, caressed the stone, and then returned to my mount and hastened off toward Cambridge to return the horse, and to find a coach toward Liverpool and, ultimately, start my journey to Jamaica.

  I might have made a detour to ride past Thornfield-Hall one last time, but I could not bring myself to do so. There was no way in the world that I could have managed to face a final farewell to Thornfield-Hall.

  Chapter 18

  I preceded my father to his town house by only a few hours, but a few hours was enough time for me to settle in and to pace the floor in anticipation. He had said, Take care you are not delayed, and I understood that to mean that he had plans for me before my departure, as indeed he did. First thing the next morning he took me to his tailor and ordered a complete outfitting of clothing suitable to the life of a Jamaican planter. I had thought that after Cambridge I was finished with tutorials, but I could not have been more mistaken. Even before the tailor’s, over breakfast, he started me on the last set of lectures I would ever receive, and they kept on for much of the next week or so, preparing me for the life I was henceforth to lead.

  “You are used to our social order here in England,” he said, “the upper classes who wield influence and power—and below them the merchant classes and the other educated people and lastly the working people and the cottage folk, and at the bottom, the poorhouse dwellers. Do you know where you fit in this scheme?”

  “Yes, sir, I do,” I said.

  He chuckled dismissively. “Do you? Do you really?”

  “We are of the merchant class, surely.”

  “Surely. Surely? What of Thornfield?”

  “But…you are—”

  “I am what? And what of Rowland, what is he?”

  What of Rowland? “He is…You are…”

  “Ah, yes, there it is. Rowland is landed gentry: Thornfield is his. He has no need to work and he chooses not to, which is indeed his choice. For generations the Rochesters have held Thornfield and its lands, but living in a manor house and the life it entails has never suited me. By choice I am also a merchant—in trade, as is said; I am not ashamed, and, indeed, I like the challenge of it. It will suit you as well. The day will come when members of the gentry are only too happy to marry their sons and daughters to members of the merchant class. Times change, boy, and men must change with them.”

  I nodded uncertainly. Was he telling me that I was to wind up more fortunate than Rowland?

  “You have no experience with slaves yet, of course.”

  “No, sir, I haven’t,” I said.

  He looked straight at me, his eyes holding mine. “It is different now from what it was when the slave trade was legal. You were but a child when that was ended—so let me clarify: Parliament made illegal the importation of slaves, but the institution of slavery survives, and it is the only way that the economy of the West Indies is able to survive. I suppose you find that difficult to comprehend, but you will see soon enough the truth of what I say.”

  He went on to describe more fully the slave system, and I listened carefully, for I thought he was trying to smooth my way. But now I know differently; now I realize it was simply his way of ensuring that I would understand the world just as he did.

  “At this point,” he said in conclusion, “you may assume that your purpose will be to act as a plantation manager or even an overseer, as you are surely equipped to do, but that would be lowering yourself. However, many a landowner discovers that he has entrusted too much power to his manager, and as a result that he has been cheated of his due. With your training and experience, you will prevent such a likelihood happening to you, and your neighbors will learn to take advantage of your expertise, which will be to your own benefit.

  “That, son, is what you have been educated for. You will move in the highest of society; you will learn quickly the operation of a plantation and thus become an adviser to many. There will be no dearth of opportunity for you. There will be nothing you cannot accomplish, and with a beautiful and charming wife at your side, you will have a life in the West Indies that you have never imagined possible for yourself.”

  I hardly knew what to say. He had planned and provided for my entire future, it seemed, and, after wishing my whole life for my father’s care and attention, I felt one part of me wanting to rebel and refuse and make my own way. But another, larger part told me I would be a fool to turn my back on all that he offered.

  I was a fool. That day I smiled at my father and thanked him and promised I would make the most of the opportunity that had been laid out for me. I regret now to say how much I gushed my gratitude and how I praised him for all he had done for me. I would like to think that, knowing what he did, he was embarrassed at my effusiveness. Embarrassed and ashamed.

  But most likely not. Most likely he smiled to himself to think how well he had arranged things. But I wonder, even today, did he know? Could he have, even in his darkest self, known what might come of it? Or was he simply pleased to have this younger son—the one who looked so much like him—out of the way, taken care of? And the older son delivered to safety.

  I still struggle to think of it, and I cannot say that it is possible now to harbor good thoughts of him. But then I remind myself that if I had turned my back on my father’s plans, my journey would have been entirely different, and while I might have found a satisfactory sort of life much sooner, I would never have found Jane.

  Book Two

  Chapter 1

  The ship—the Badger Guinea, a barquentine—sailed more or less on time, rather a rarity as maritime schedules go. With my father, I had gotten used to wandering down to the docks and seeing the ships moored with their myriads of lines fastened to the stone walls of the quay, green with sea growth. The Badger Guinea’s masts stretched mightily toward the sky, her sails furled on her yards, her crew either busily loading or else off somewhere getting drunk. My father and I had stepped aboard a few times since it had come into port,
and he strode about at will, as was his right as the ship’s owner. He called the captain by his last name in private, but within hearing of the crew used “Captain.” In return, the captain called him “sir.”

  The vessel had a large hold for cargo but few cabins, and there were only a dozen or so passengers. Despite my father’s ownership, he had not instructed that I be given any special treatment, for which I was grateful; I did not care much to be the center of attention, and I was sure I would be most comfortable as it was. I shared a cabin with two other young men—Daniel Stafford and Geoffrey Osmon—who were both about my age, warm and outgoing fellows, all of us traveling to Jamaica for the first time. I fell in easily with them. Osmon was bearing letters of introduction, which I already knew would be a great advantage to him. Stafford did not have such a benefit, but he was pleasant and intelligent and would be quick to make friends. He talked of becoming a book-keeper on some plantation, which made me wonder if he knew what that entailed. Remembering my father’s description of a book-keeper’s work, I urged him to think of finding something in the city instead. Because I was fortunate enough to come with connections and my path already set, I naïvely imagined myself by far the luckiest of the three of us, for my father had provided me with my own trading company, with three sailing ships, a sugar plantation, and, as well, the education to make the best of all that. I was determined to take advantage of my opportunities, to show that I was ready to take on whatever came my way. In my musings everything seemed golden. I never once doubted that my father had planned it all with my own best interests in mind.

  There was only one other young male passenger, Walter Whitledge, a Creole who made such a point of his recent graduation from Oxford—in an accent that dripped with pretension—that we did our best to avoid him, though on a ship of that size it is well-nigh impossible to evade any particular person. A ship is a world in miniature, sufficient unto itself: if one is to eat, one eats what is provided; if one is to be entertained, one must make one’s own diversion; if one is to have society, one is confined to those on board. Indeed, all the passengers developed at least a nodding acquaintance with one another, but Stafford, Osmon, and I noted with childish glee that we were not the only ones on board who studiously ignored Whitledge.