by Luccia Gray
***
My schoolroom was a little room with whitewashed walls, and a stone floor containing twelve painted chairs around a square table. There was a small un-curtained window opposite the door and a wooden clock on the wall. It was very cold most of the year, so often the children couldn’t remove their coats or hats. It was just after five and the children had all gone, except Betty, a little orphan who worked as handmaid to Mr. Wood and who had not yet finished copying from the slate. Most of them, except two new children, could read. Although, only five of them could read sufficiently to recite the Bible; three could write, and the same number could cipher. All the girls could knit and a few could sew a little. They spoke with many incorrect expressions, the broadest accent of the district, and all of them were poorly clad. A few of them were unmannered, but most were docile with warm hearts and a desire to learn. I was mostly content in the schoolroom, because I could see their progress. I was guiding the children on their path away from ignorant coarseness towards godliness.
It had been unusual to have Nell and Thomas at Sunday school that morning, and it was even more surprising to see Jenny collect them in a fine looking carriage, accompanied by a hideous looking, middle-aged gentleman I had never seen before. They both ran out to greet their mother, but instead of walking away, she walked them back towards the schoolroom.
“Susan, I need to speak to you. I have a problem, and if you could find it in your heart to help me, I would be most grateful on my behalf and my children’s.”
“What is the matter?”
“My work at the inn is not enough for us to live. I fear for my children’s wellbeing. I am easy prey to the travellers at the inn, whom I will have to please or lose my job. I don’t want that kind of life for me or for my children. If I could have a proper job, for example at Eyre Hall, and if the children could stay there with me, it would solve our problems, and I could lead a more Christian life, as I would wish. I know Mrs. Rochester speaks kindly of you, she would listen to you, if you would recommend my services. Would you do that for me, Susan? I have experience cooking and cleaning at the inn, and I am prepared to work hard to improve my children’s lives, as well as my own. Would you help me lead a more Christian life?”
I promised to speak to Mrs. Rochester as soon as possible, but I told Jenny I did not know if her services would be needed or when. As she left, I watched her get into the carriage with her children and the sinister looking gentleman. He looked out of the window and smiled at me. I smiled back out of politeness, but I would not have liked to see his large, creased face or his wicked eyes smiling at me again.
I was not sure whether it was a good idea to recommend Jenny as a maid at Eyre Hall. It would be an improvement for the children, because Mrs. Rochester would make sure they were well looked after. She would find them a suitable trade, but I was surprised at Jenny’s sudden interest in working at Eyre Hall. She did not seem the type to enjoy working as a maid, and she was not the kind of person Mrs. Rochester employed. She had never employed adult women since I had been there. She preferred orphaned children, like me and Michael. I wondered if her mysterious friend had anything to do with her desire to work at Eyre Hall.
***
That night, huddled in bed with Nell and Thomas, I wondered how our lives would change from that moment on. It might be advantageous for them, or it might be disastrous for all of us if the secret was ever discovered, but of course it never would be. I was the only person who knew what had happened, and I would never reveal it.
I never thought I would live in the same house as Mrs. Rochester. It is the last place I wanted to take my children. My parents had been honest country folk, the same as their parents. My parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents had worked on a farm on the Ingram’s estate as far back as any of them could remember. I should have done the same, except I married Stan, a blacksmith by trade, who lived in Millcote, on the Rochester’s Estate. He was a good, honest, hardworking man, or so I thought, and we soon had a son. I would never have imagined he would have sold me, his wife, but he did. If my father had found out, he would have killed him, but no one ever told him.
Life in the workshop in the overcrowded town was very different from the life I was used to on the farm. I had helped my mother with the chickens, cows, and in the kitchen making cheese, cream, butter, and buttermilk, which we sold to the cheesemongers. Stan’s hours were spent heating iron with coal furnaces until it was soft enough to be bashed with hammers, then he’d bend and cut the metal with anvils and chisels to make gates, grilles, railings, horseshoes and farming tools or parts for carriage wheels. Sometimes he would fix cooking utensils and furniture, too.
It was a noisy, dirty and dangerous job. Stan’s hands and arms were always grubby, gritty and black. No wonder they were called blacksmiths. Black was the colour that oozed from his pores and covered the walls of his workshop. The devilish glow from the blacksmith's forge reminded me of Hell. I hated the shop, and I hated the persistent smell of burnt metal and smoke. I wondered how I hadn’t noticed the smell when we courted, but I hadn’t or I wouldn’t have married him. The smell impregnated the rooms we lived in above the shop, which had belonged to his father. Stan told me he had died after an accident, when a hot steel railing had cut off his feet. But Stan’s arms were large, strong, clean and loving. They had made me feel safe and loved when we met.
When we married he worked all day and sometimes he even continued on during the night. His skin was always sooty and his brow sweaty, while his heavy black boots covered vile-smelling feet. His touch was rough and his hands coarse. I soon learnt to comply with his demands and pretend I loved him. That is what I have been doing ever since with all the men I have known.
Then I met Grace Pool and Leah. They came to Millcote looking for a wet nurse and I was breastfeeding at the time. I have often wondered how different my life would have been if I had refused to accept the job, but I didn’t. I was alone all day anyway, because Stan was always working. I was allowed to bring my baby with me, and, quite frankly, I was glad to get away from the pounding, deafening noise of the shop and the stink and filth in our rooms.
I remember being terrified the first day I arrived at Thornfield. It was such a gloomy, ghostly, frozen shell of a place. I was asked to dress in a maid’s uniform and taken up to the top floor into a windowless room hidden behind an ugly, hellish, tapestried door. It made my Stan’s workshop seem cheerful. There was a hairy, unkempt madwoman tied to the bed. They said she was the mother, but they didn’t want her to feed the baby. Her cries were worse than the pounding in the shop. When they told me she was Mrs. Rochester, I could hardly believe it. The best thing was that when I finished, I was allowed to eat as much as I wanted; there was always roast meat and cake. Mrs. Fairfax was kind enough to even give me food to take home for Stan. They paid me well and made me promise not to tell anyone. I never did.
I was brought in every morning and taken back home in the evening, until one day Leah came with a middle-aged gentleman I had never seen before. He told me he was Mr. Rochester’s brother-in-law, and he wanted to speak to my husband regarding an urgent matter. That evening my husband sold me to Mr. Mason. Richard told him he needed to take me to Jamaica with him as wet nurse for his niece. He paid Stan a very generous sum and promised to send me back in a few months, as soon as he found another wet nurse in Jamaica.
Peter, my son, was to stay behind with his father. Stan’s sister agreed to look after my baby while I was away. I stayed with Richard for eighteen months, and when I returned, my husband and my son had died of cholera. My sister-in-law and her husband were living in our rooms above the shop. The shop had been taken over by Stan’s apprentice, his cousin Stephen, and I had nowhere to go.
I suppose I could have gone back to the farm with my parents, but how was I to explain what had happened? How could I tell them I had abandoned my son and my husband and left England? Or worse still, how could I admit that I had been sold as wet nurse and mistress to Ri
chard Mason? In any case, I was too restless and depressed to go back to the quiet farm. Richard had given me some money, which was enough to live on for some months while I found a means of making a living.
I had been Richard's child-minder and mistress in Jamaica. When he decided to take Annette to the convent, he asked me if I wanted to return to England or stay with him. Sometimes I think I should have stayed there. It is a beautiful country with a heavenly climate, but I missed my son, and, strangely, my husband, who had been a kind, tender lover. Had I known they were dead, I would have stayed with Richard in spite of his humiliations. He would offer me to please his friends, or trade my services to cover his debts, and when he was irksome, he would strike me. In compensation, he made me feel like the lady of the house. I had pretty dresses, a lovely colonial residence with native servants, and plenty of food and drink. I was never formally introduced to any other members of the English community, and he always referred to me as the baby’s nurse.
When I returned to Millcote, I stayed at the George Inn while I decided what to do. I became friendly with the couple who ran it, the Earnshaws, and they offered me a job cleaning and sewing. The railway had recently been built, so many occasional travellers stayed there and I drifted into various casual relationships with some of the guests.
One of the travellers was Mr. Rosset, who called himself a poet. He offered to marry me and I accepted. I moved to these rooms, which he still pays for, and imagined I would soon become Mrs. Rosset. When I became pregnant, we married so people would think I was an honest woman, but he soon told me he was already married to his cousin in London. Shortly after Thomas was born, he left and never returned, but I am grateful because everyone knows my husband left me, and that makes me more respectable. Three years later, Nell was born. I cannot know for sure who her father is, so I always tell her that he’s dead.
I had fed and clothed my children on my own since they were born. Cleaning and sewing at the inn, helping in the kitchen and occasionally exchanging favours for money. I wanted something better for my children. I didn’t want them to have to feel humiliated, cheap or worthless. I wanted them to learn a useful trade and earn an honest living. That was why I asked Susan, the schoolteacher, to teach them on her free afternoon. Then I met her brother Michael, such a quiet, sweet, boy with sturdy muscles and ambitious objectives. I would have fallen in love with him, if I had not realised he was obsessed with another woman with whom I could never compete.
Now Richard wanted me to be his informant and mistress at Eyre Hall. I was terrified of meeting Mrs. Rochester face to face. I had seen her once at Thornfield, walking in the orchard with Mr. Rochester and Adele. I asked Leah who she was, and she told me she was the governess. I saw how Mr. Rochester looked at her while the child played, and I realised why he kept his mad wife a secret, but they all found out in the end, when Richard told them the truth on their wedding day. I was sure Richard had returned one more time to uncover another of his brother-in-law’s embarrassing secrets. I had never met Mr. Rochester, although I had breastfed both his daughters. I had lost my son by attending to his daughter, although he had inadvertently repaid the debt, and now she was returning home.
***
Chapter VIII Annette’s Story
My mother wrote a diary. She started writing when she was a young girl in the Coulibri Estate and stopped writing when she left Saint Mary’s Convent School in Spanish Town, Jamaica, before meeting and marrying my father. Thirty-one years later when I finished my studies at the same school, Sister Angela gave it to me and advised me to read it carefully, in order to forgive my mother for her madness and blasphemous death, understand her tormented life, and lead a more pious one myself.
The diary was unfinished, covering only her childhood and early youth, before she met and married Mr. Rochester, my father. It included no mention of her married life or her years in England at Thornfield Hall. Neither did she mention Jane Eyre, the second Mrs. Rochester, the woman who poisoned my father against my mother. The detestable woman I was about to meet and who would be my unwilling benefactress in my new life in England.
Three weeks ago, Uncle Richard came to see me at the convent and told me I could not remain there because my benefactor, Mr. Rochester, had cancelled the payments. I did not understand the problem at first, because I had been working at the school as a teacher for over two years without any financial compensation. So I believed my work there was enough to cover my living costs, but my uncle insisted that it was a serious offence, and that I should seek what was rightfully mine.
I was shocked to discover that my benefactor was in reality my father. Until that moment, I had believed that I had been born to Henry Mason, my Uncle Richard’s brother, who had died in an accident with my mother shortly after I was born. My uncle told me the time had come to tell me the truth. Henry and Sybil had never existed. My uncle’s only sister, Bertha Antoinette Mason, was my mother, and her husband, Mr. Edward Rochester, was my father. Miss Jane Eyre, his second wife, had refused to accept my presence in England after my mother’s death, and my father was unable to oppose her wishes, so I was brought to Jamaica by my only uncle.
Now that my father was dying, she was trying to deny me all my filial rights. Unfortunately, I was not in a position to claim my inheritance, because there was no proof of my birth at Thornfield Hall twenty-three years ago. My father convinced my uncle to bribe the local government officials and register my birth in Spanish Town, Jamaica, as daughter of Henry Mason and Sybil Hyde, both recorded as deceased.
Before these events had been disclosed to me, I was perfectly happy to live a quiet and secluded life at the Convent of Saint Mary. When I first had news of my parents’ real identity, I was devastated. After the initial shock, I was furious. I told my uncle I did not care for any inheritance, and I certainly did not want to travel to England to meet my father, who had rejected me for a young concubine. I even suggested I would be prepared to take Holy Orders if necessary, in order to remain within the convent walls. But Mother Superior and Uncle Richard convinced me that my father wished to die in peace, repair his sins by meeting me, endowing me with a generous dowry and maintenance in England; therefore, I should humbly accept his apologies and my rightful inheritance.
My uncle reminded me that he had saved my life, and told me the time had come to repay him for his kindness by following his advice. I was to accompany him to England and recover what was rightfully mine: a respectable allowance, a suitable English husband, and a generous dowry. I told him I was not interested in marriage or a dowry. I did not want to make the same errors my mother had made by succumbing to a frivolous life of luxury and pleasure, or being forced into a loveless marriage in a faraway land. My uncle assured me that I would not marry anyone I did not love, and he insisted that I owed it to him.
He promised me if I didn’t like England he would let me return to the convent, but I suspected that he would not keep his word. Mother Superior had told me I must obey him, because he was my only living relative (she had not been told that my father was alive), and she was convinced it would be most advantageous for me. She thought England a wonderful place to live, even though she had never been there herself, so I did not believe her, but I had to obey. Once more, I was as helpless as the baby who was torn away from her mother!
The days passed, and the more I read the diary and thought about my mother and my father, the more I wanted to travel to England, meet him, and find out more about her. I wanted to see the places she saw and feel the emotions she felt. A great empty space I had been ignoring was growing in my heart and needed to be filled. I had to return to England, the unknown land where I had been born.
So here I was at last, sitting on a woollen bed, in an ancient inn, which leaked and smelt of stagnant water and squalor. The sky had been steel grey since we arrived two days ago, and the sun was trapped behind the heavy cloud curtain spitting unceasingly onto the bogged land. The small wooden windows were stiff with dirt, and there were no ver
andahs to walk out onto. The people dressed in compliance with the weather, in drab colours, their faces lacking expression, and their voices lacking cadence, except when they were drunk, and they shouted and sung dull monotonous tunes. I would die if I had to live here. Perhaps that was what happened to my mother. I turned the pages of her diary once more while I waited for my uncle to return from his errands in Millcote. I had read it so many times I could almost recite it by heart.
I was named Annette, after my grandmother, renowned as the most beautiful woman in Jamaica, according to my Uncle Richard. Annette, originally from Martinique, married a prosperous English plantation owner, who lived in Jamaica, called Mr. Alexander Cosway, at a very early age. My mother, Bertha Antoinette Cosway, and her brother Pierre, were unlucky enough to have been born at a time of financial decline and severe political and social changes, which were most detrimental to their interests. All the other estate owners, except my mother’s family, had abandoned the area after the emancipation of slaves.
My grandfather, Alexander Cosway, was an English plantation owner, who drank himself to death when my mother and her brother, Pierre, were still babies, shortly before the big problems started. He left my grandmother unproductive grounds, which they could not abandon. Soon the estate was isolated at a short but then unreachable distance from Spanish Town, especially when the roads could not be repaired, and most horses either died of starvation or at the hands of desperate owners. They were completely stranded when my grandmother’s horse was poisoned by the resentful former slaves.
My grandmother, who had left behind a Creole background of poverty in Martinique, had experienced the privilege of colonial splendour through marriage, and was naturally devastated at the thought of experiencing poverty and rejection once more. She became melancholic and withdrawn, ignoring both my mother and her ailing brother.
