Mr. Rochester

by Sarah Shoemaker

  I rose early, just at dawn, and even though it was chilly and the early-morning air still damp, I was determined to leave at once. The day promised to be fine, the sky that pure Jamaican blue that one almost never sees in England, and the air full of the raucous birdsongs I had become used to. As I started out, I felt a kind of freedom, a release. In the previous few weeks I had felt tied down to Bertha in a way that I had not felt when we first married. I had not before then seen her darker side, did not know the terrors that haunted her. I had once thought that a child of her own might make a difference, but now I knew I could not wish a mother like her on any innocent being. She frightened me, not only because I wondered how life could go on as it had before, but also because I had begun to wonder what demons lay inside me—inside anyone—only waiting to be awakened.

  I reached Arcadia late in the afternoon. I had expected the great house there to be similar to the one at Valley View, but in fact it was noticeably smaller, set beautifully on a small rise, the road to it lined by a handsome avenue of tamarinds. Whitledge, warned no doubt by some sharp-eyed pickaninny, was on the veranda, waving as I approached.

  “Rochester!” he shouted, as if I were some long-lost cousin, rather than a shipboard acquaintance. After our warm greeting, he offered me a tour of the house—an unusual gesture, since most estate owners kept their homes quite private, except for the public rooms where a dinner or a ball might be held. But I accepted gladly.

  Arcadia was an architectural gem. Valley View, it was clear, had been built by a man with a practical and mathematical bent, reflected in its stolid, square shape, in the symmetry of its windows, and in its expansive rooms. But in Arcadia alcoves and curves abounded, ceiling heights changed from room to room, doors led into unexpected spaces. Bertha would have loved its surprises and mysteries. Had she seen it in the first days of our marriage, she would have flung her arms around my neck and insisted, “Fairfax, we must build a house just like this! Just exactly like this!” I would have done it for her too, back when I was still under her spell.

  Whitledge was rightly proud of it. “My father and I designed it together when I was a child. Its building, I have to say, was a result of a tragedy. There was an uprising of the negroes and the house and most of the fields were burned. None of us was harmed, but my mother never recovered. She refused to set foot in the damaged house, where all her belongings smelled of smoke; she could not bear the memories of those fearful days.

  “So we moved in with my grandparents, and my father had the building totally destroyed, the ground leveled off and put into gardens, and he settled on this new location, where he built a house designed for my mother. She never lived in it, though. She died before it was completed.” He paused then, and said, “Have I told you I’m to be married soon?”

  Of course he had not told me; we had not conversed since we parted in Spanish Town months before. She was a delight, he enthused, a girl he had known from childhood; her parents had been great friends of his own. It had always been assumed that they would marry, and now he and his Elizabeth were to wed in less than a month. He hoped my wife and I would be able to come; he was quite anxious to meet the woman who had captured my heart. I smiled and said it would be a pleasure, while wondering what excuse I could make when the time came, and thanked God that Whitledge had not heard gossip regarding Bertha.

  A couple of days later, at a neighborhood ball, I had an opportunity to meet the bride herself. She was not at all what I had expected, I will confess. Whitledge was a handsome young man and I expected Elizabeth to be a beauty—but while she had an attractive figure, her face was quite plain, with a nose too small for her broad forehead. Still, she had a bright smile and was pleasant indeed to talk with. I danced a reel or two with her and found her to be an engaging conversationalist. I could imagine with envy the quiet, contented nights she and Whitledge might spend together.

  After four days, I took my leave to return to Valley View. Whitledge was eager for me to visit again as soon as possible, and I wished with all my heart that I could return the invitation, but things were far too uncertain at Valley View. As I began my ride home that afternoon, I reflected that I had not had so many days of pure enjoyment and much-needed relaxation since my visit with Carrot so many years before.

  * * *

  After my absence, I had hoped to return to a different Bertha, perhaps even a chastened one. But the moment I put foot to the veranda steps, she ran out of the house, dressed like a harridan, her black curls flying, her mouth spewing the most vile language I had ever heard. She rushed toward me, her face contorted in anger, and when I was within her reach she slapped my face. And then, before I could even react, she accused me, in full earshot of the whole household, of every indecency she could think of: desertion, drunkenness, unfaithfulness, even violence.

  Astonished, I tried to place my hands on her shoulders to calm her, but she screamed and backed away as if I had assaulted her. To my relief, Molly materialized at Bertha’s side, gently touching her arm and speaking in a language I did not know. Bertha soon turned from me and followed Molly as docilely as a child.

  From that day forth I gave up all pretense of a respectful partnership with her. I learned to ignore her demands and her foul words, using only calm language in her presence, and I never had intercourse with her again. She screamed at me and swore and attacked me more than once. But just as she had lost all sense of decency, I had lost all desire for her.

  Jonas caught me by the arm one day shortly after that first public outrage and pulled me into his study. “You are not to be blamed for this,” he said, and his voice was shaking with emotion.

  Still, she was my wife; I had taken her for better or for worse, though none of us imagines beforehand how bad the worse might be. In my despair, I wondered what I might do to free myself of her. But a divorce would have taken an act of Parliament, and how could I drag us both—all of us—through that? No, I could not. When one is young, one imagines all sorts of miracles that might come to pass if one is patient. So I let time pass, still harboring a slim hope that that lovely, vivacious girl I had fallen in love with remained in there, hidden, but alive.

  Now, in retrospect, I know that I should have done at once anything necessary to free each of us from our bonds to the other. But at the time, I thought that would have been an unconscionable act of cruelty. I had no idea of what was yet to come.

  Chapter 9

  I cannot say that my decision was brave or generous or kindhearted, or even humane. It was just that I had nothing behind me in England and nothing ahead of me in Jamaica that I could see except the life I had slipped into in Valley View. I had been linked to Jonas by my father, not only in marriage to his daughter but also in my very way of life: the plantation and the import and export business that we shared. As well, the Sea Nymph was doing so well that Jonas and I had together purchased another ship, the Dragon, which we had outfitted as another passenger ship in the lucrative immigrant trade from Europe to America.

  And, indeed, Jonas had had to deal with a mad wife. I did not ask—nor did I want to know—the circumstances of his marriage, but we shared that situation as well, and, in particular, our concern for Bertha. It might have been easy to blame Jonas for his part in entangling me with Bertha, but his very concern for her taught me that he was simply doing what he thought best for a child he loved. I could not blame him for that. So I simply tried to make the best of my situation.

  But my father was a different case. I could not understand how he could have encouraged a relationship between Bertha and me. If anything, it seemed, he should have warned me against it. His actions went against all I understood about a parent’s duty to his child. I could not forgive him, and therefore I ceased what little communication had occurred between us.

  There would never be anything like a normal marriage between Bertha and me, but, as with many marriages in the world, a person could manage, more or less, with a sham. Sometimes, in Bertha’s calmer moments, I tried to ma
ke something of what we had left. I would sit down beside her in the evening and try to have a conversation with her, but she knew little of the wider world and cared less. The only things she seemed to care about were the worthless incantations and precepts of her current Obeah man or woman, and the strange games that she played with Molly. Now and then she tried to seduce me, but more often she attacked me. Twice she came at me with the sharp edge of a broken china plate, once managing to draw blood before I was able to wrest the weapon from her.

  Sometimes she even turned on her own flesh. Twice she tried stabbing herself with the pin of a brooch I had given her as a wedding gift, and once she shoved a fist through a window in order to cut herself with the glass shards. Molly kept a close watch on her day and night, and for the most part she was successful in keeping Bertha safe.

  But one dark night Bertha managed to escape, making her way out of the house with a lighted candle, and before anyone knew it, she had set the nearest cane field ablaze. When the fire was discovered, ten acres were already burning and Bertha was still nearby, her eyes on the flames as if transfixed. It was too late to save that field, and only with the valiant efforts of everyone on hand were we able to save the other nearby fields. By afternoon the next day we claimed victory, though there were still smoldering pockets. As I stood in the midst of the ashes, covered in dirt and soot and smelling like burned sugar, it occurred to me that in nearly all of Jamaica the whites feared an uprising of the negroes that would burn down the fields, but at Valley View it was a white woman who did it and negroes who put the fire out.

  The morning after the fire Jonas asked me into his study, closing the door behind me. I sat—uncomfortably, for we had difficult things to discuss—in a chair facing his desk. “My daughter is a danger to herself, to us, and now to the plantation itself,” were his first words. “But I refuse to put her into an asylum. It would break her heart. It would kill her.”

  I felt a sudden surge of rage. “I cannot understand why I was not told!” I charged. “I should have been told! You deliberately—”

  “I suppose I did,” he interrupted.

  “You suppose?”

  “I hoped…,” he said. “I thought marriage would keep her from growing worse. I thought perhaps a baby—”

  “A baby! She is the last person who should have a baby! Her mother is like this?”

  He blanched at my question, but he did respond. “Worse. I imagine”—he sighed—“I fear my daughter will someday fully lose her mind, as her mother did. But if there is any hope for her, it will be in keeping her at home. My wife grew much worse when she was put in care, and, between you and me, Rochester, I’ve found it difficult to get over that decision; it’s irreversible now, but I would give anything to have done it differently, to have kept my wife and son near me, despite it all. We must keep my daughter with us, safely under our eye, here, within the radius of our family. Constrain her within the house if you must, but…” He choked back a word or two, then gathered himself again. “We must treat her with gentleness, Rochester, for she is sick, and we must stop it from getting worse.”

  Though it seemed impossible to end Bertha’s decline, I reluctantly agreed with him, for Jonas’ love for his daughter was clear, and I had respect—and envy—for that. But I could not yet completely forgive him for having sacrificed my happiness in his quest to see Bertha cared for—nor, worse, could I understand my own father, who should have warned me of her family history, which he must have known. What reason could have compelled the two of them to use me so?

  Devastated, I retreated to Spanish Town as quickly as I could, for the town house there had become almost a sanctuary for me. As always, Sukey almost seemed to foresee my arrival, for there was pepper pot on the stove to welcome me. She was in the parlor, mending a shirt of mine, when I arrived, but she rose immediately when I came into the room. “No, no, sit,” I said to her.

  As she sat, I said, “It’s Bertha,” for I needed at that moment to unburden myself, though it is never right to bring servants into one’s private life.

  She nodded.

  “You know her inheritance,” I said. “Her mind.”

  Sukey did not even look at me.

  “Why was I not told?” I demanded, as if I expected the poor girl to hold the answers. When she did not speak, I found myself unable to contain my restlessness. “I will be back for dinner.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, and I left.

  I went to my office, where, distracted, I signed the application to the registrar-general for permission to remove the word Guinea from the names of the two ships that had carried slaves. I didn’t care if it was bad luck or not; I had had enough bad luck in my life anyway. What worse could happen?

  The next day I rode to Kingston, though I knew it was a mistake, and asked directions to the asylum—a large, formidable building of gray stone. I paused in front of it for a long time, not sure what I was seeking but knowing I needed to face what lay behind those walls. Finally, I tethered my horse and walked toward the gate, where a squinty-eyed man asked my business. He led me down a dark hallway that smelled of urine and vomit and God knows what else. I could hear, in the distance, shouts and screams and a low, nearly constant moaning. Another man intercepted us and the two had a few words, and then the second man beckoned me forward and I followed him.

  “Why do you want to see her?” he asked.

  “She is my wife’s mother.”

  He shook his head. “Too late for you, then, surely,” he said.

  I did not respond.

  We passed several cells crowded with women, all of them reminding me of Bertha in one way or another, before we stopped at a cell containing a woman alone, her simple dress askew, her hair matted.

  “Here.” My guide indicated her with a nod.

  I watched her for a time, taking in the three-legged stool on which she sat, the mat on the floor on which she no doubt slept, the bucket for her waste. She was raking her fingers through her hair, as if to groom herself, and she seemed not to notice me. At first I pitied her, sitting there alone. “I have come from Valley View,” I said to her. “Your daughter sends her love.” My words seemed to make her suddenly aware of the two of us standing outside the bars, and she started to scream, and she rose and lunged toward us with an ear-shattering howl, her face grotesquely contorted, and I inadvertently jumped back.

  “This one’s right mad,” my guide observed.

  I stood for a moment, rooted to the spot, horrified. Was this what would become of Bertha? And then I fled.

  Bertha there, in that place? It was no wonder her father forbade it and she was terrified of it. I could not blame them. As I rode away, the horror of that place would not leave me, and I, too, became as determined as Jonas to prevent Bertha from ending up there.

  I spent three more days in Spanish Town before I could bring myself to return to Valley View.

  * * *

  Bertha’s rages and her night terrors came and went, and as I grew to understand that they had nothing to do with me, but with her own inner demons, I tried to ignore them. However, her hallucinations grew more frequent and more devastating. She would talk and scream and cry at beings in the room, one moment cowering from them and the next charging around as if to drive them from her. She ate little and bathed less, and sometimes she seemed unsure of who I was.

  There were good days—many of them, in truth—and each time I raised a hope of improvement, but her rages came unannounced, and sometimes only Molly’s voice could calm her; we were deeply in that girl’s debt, all of us. At last, Jonas and I arranged for the plantation carpenter to turn two of the bedrooms into an apartment for Bertha, and that became her private refuge. She rarely left it, and Molly and her daughter waited on her there. Tiso was nearly ten years of age—old enough to be in the fields in the second gang, but Jonas and I agreed her presence in Bertha’s apartment was of more importance. She was a sweet girl, and obedient, and was a great help to Molly.

  Bertha was
immediately calmer, more content, when she could shelter in her rooms, and she didn’t seem to mind being away from the rest of the household activity. I visited from time to time, and she would beg me to make her with child, but I was far beyond accommodating her in that respect. Jonas rarely went to see her—he could not bear to, I think. Richard came even less often, and I suspected he and his father had had a falling-out, but neither of them would speak of it.

  That was what my life became. I buried myself in the business of the plantation and spent considerable time in Spanish Town and Kingston overseeing my shipping business. Being there was balm for me: the silent house, Sukey fixing my favorite meals without my having to ask for them. As for the Sea Nymph and the Dragon, they were making regularly scheduled packet and passenger trips, and Jonas and I were pleased with the results of our purchases. Even my father, far away in Liverpool, having heard from Jonas of my venture, wrote that he was glad I was taking advantage of the education he had provided. I read the letter with distaste and threw it into the fire.

  Once or twice again I rode out to see Whitledge at Arcadia. I did not attend his wedding, giving some poor excuse at the time, but the fact that he never again asked after Bertha—other than a vague How is your wife these days?—led me to assume the gossip had somehow reached him. After a handful of outbursts at balls that shocked half the county and confirmed the suspicions of the other half, no mention of a dinner or a ball was ever made to her again. Even so, she would often dress up in her finest clothes, insisting I dress up as well. She imagined herself going to the governor’s ball, but we plied her with sangaree or with something stronger until she became unaware of the passage of time, and when she awoke we told her of the wonderful evening she had had.