by Luccia Gray
Their house was old and leaky, so my mother took refuge walking around the roofed terrace with an unrestrained sea view. She would look out for hours, talking aloud, as if she were imploring the sea gods for better fortune. Her father had died, her mother was neglectful, and there was no possibility of going to school, so my mother was able to run as wild as a bird in paradise.
She could not go to school or leave the estate, because the freed slaves who had left the plantation hated the whites, cursing and abusing my mother and grandmother whenever they saw them. Having no other children to play with, except her sick, bedridden brother, she took refuge in Christophine, their Negro cook, who had been one of her mother’s wedding presents, and had chosen to stay on after emancipation.
For a time my mother made friends with Tia, a black girl, who was her own age. They would go to a pool in the nearby river, where they would swim and summersault in search of the brightly coloured pebbles which covered the riverbed. Then they would eat boiled green bananas and sleep under the shady trees. Years later, Tia would throw a jagged stone full of hatred at my mother’s incredulous face, almost killing her, and teaching her that no one was to be trusted in their shifting world.
Other times my mother would wander around their garden, which was more beautiful and mysterious than the Garden of Eden. It was wildly overgrown from neglect. The vegetation flourished freely with a mixture of bright purples, mauves and greens, oozing sweet, intense perfume. In the evenings she would roam around the old derelict sugar works and disused water wheel, imagining what it would have been like when the machinery was working and the plantation was bustling with life. She dreamed she was the queen of a forest, thick with emerald reeds and leafy ferns, smelling of river water, sweet seaweed and diving fish. She imagined the lizards and snakes were evil sorcerers, who retained her in captivity with the help of the insects, who were their obedient armies. She fancied that knights in armour, who came from England in large boats, would save her by transporting her to a castle she had once seen in a drawing in one of the old books, which Christophine used in the kitchen as a slab to cut the bread. Other times she would stack the books and jump from one stack to another, until the top book slipped and fell open on a page with a black and white drawing of houses and people she had never seen, so they too were included in her daydreaming world of magic.
This idle and undomesticated life persisted for five years until my grandmother, thanks to her beauty and elegant dancing, remarried a wealthy English gentleman called Mr. Jonas Mason, and their lives took a fortunate turn. Mr. Mason had brought up various properties in the West Indies. Estates were going cheaply as a result of the slump in the sugar market and the emancipation, so he ventured to the islands in search of a profitable investment.
Mr. Mason had a son by his first marriage, my Uncle Richard, who was living in Barbados and managing his father’s estates in Trinidad and Antigua. He often travelled to England on business, so they did not see him often at that time. The marriage transformed my mother’s life. The house was repaired, new servants were employed, they ate beef and mutton and puddings, and they were happy for a time.
My mother did not like her stepfather at first, but she took a liking to him when she realised he had saved them from their misery. He was a generous, kind man, with good intentions, but he did not understand our way of life in Jamaica. Mr. Mason said the natives did not want to work, so he imported workers from the East Indies as other English landowners were doing. My grandmother knew this would rekindle the hatred and resentment towards the whites, but Mr. Mason did not understand his actions would create more conflict with the local population. Within a year my grandmother wanted to leave, due to increasing hostility towards the white landowners. She sensed wicked deeds were brewing.
My mother also realised they were in danger, since the moment their horse had been poisoned years earlier, so she slept with a long narrow piece of wood with two nails sticking out at the end, like a shingle, by her bed in case she needed protection. Christophine took the nails out, but let her keep the shingle, and, after the West Indian workers came, she slept with the shingle in her arms. It was the only way she felt safe. Eventually, the night she would need her shingle arrived, although it was of no use, because there were so many of them. The Negroes stood outside their house, armed with torches, machetes, and sticks, rhythmically repeating foreboding chants. They set fire to her bedroom and Pierre’s crib, and then the whole house was an amber blaze against the indigo sky. The only home she had ever known was burned to a cinder before her very eyes. Part of my mother died that day, the rest died in smaller parts, some in Spanish Town and others in England. So she was almost all dead by the time she finally fell off the battlements at Thornfield, the year after I was born.
After escaping from the shock of Pierre’s death and the loss of her home, my grandmother fell ill and was cared for by her widowed Aunt Cora, who nursed her back to health in Spanish Town. My mother went to see her at the institution where she was convalescing, but my grandmother pretended not to recognise her, or perhaps she really had lost her memory. My mother wrote that there were always two deaths, ‘the real one and the one people know about.’ She said her mother had died her real death the night they burnt Coulibri, although they buried her some years later.
Shortly after visiting her mother for the last time, when my mother was fifteen, Mr. Mason decided she should go to a Catholic Convent School to learn some manners and discipline, or she would never be able to marry a suitable Englishman. The first day she thought she would die of suffocation. The classrooms were hot and stuffy because the windows were too small and too high up, in order to avoid distractions. The pine benches burned her skin. The stone floor, white walls and pine desks confined her oppressively. She longed to return to the freedom of Coulibri, but there was nowhere to return to. She must have felt very lonely and alienated at the school. Her father was dead, her mother was inattentive, her Aunt Cora had returned to England for a year, her stepfather visited very rarely, her brother had died, Christophine was living with her son and never visited, and her beloved Coulibri no longer existed.
However, as the days passed, the convent became her refuge and she grew to enjoy the activities. She learnt to cross-stitch colourful flowers on a pale oblong background while Mother Justine read the lives of Saints and Holy Martyrs. They bathed regularly, using scented soap under long cotton chemises, and ate buttered rolls and drank coffee for breakfast. She learnt to forget about happiness and pray five times a day, and praise at the wooden crucifixes hanging limply from the nun’s waists. Christ taught her to distinguish Heaven from Hell and to pray for happiness to come to her one day. During the following eighteen months, her stepfather visited more often and brought presents, such as a locket and a bracelet. I wondered what had happened to her personal belongings. I never saw anything that belonged to her, except her diary, which was a great deal, but not enough, not now that I knew her so well.
The diary ended one day shortly before her seventeenth birthday. Mr. Mason came to visit her and told her she was a grown woman and it was time for her to leave the convent and return to the real word, to a world full of laughter, dancing and young people. She was to stay with her Aunt Cora, who had returned from England, and meet his son, Richard, who had some friends who wanted to meet her. He promised her life would change for the better, but she remembered how he had said the same when he married her mother, and although things had improved in some ways, they had got much worse in other ways.
She had many nightmares and was apprehensive about leaving the convent, which had become a safe place for her. The world outside would be unpredictable. Her mother had gone and Coulibri no longer existed. The diary ended with the desperate fears of a young and insecure orphan. Every time I read the final pages I shivered. I felt as if my mother were speaking to me, warning me about marriage and England. I didn’t know what she looked like. I watched my reflection in the rusty mirror, over the rickety chest of drawers,
and wondered if I looked like her, if my life would be like hers, or if my death would be like hers.
My uncle had informed me of what happened after she left the convent. However, I was aware that his knowledge was incomplete. Jonas Mason and Edward Rochester’s father were old acquaintances, who connived to solve a common problem. The former wanted to marry his beautiful stepdaughter to a well-bred Englishman, and Raymond Rochester wanted to marry his son to a rich heiress, so they wrote up the marriage contract. Edward was to receive thirty thousand pounds and Bertha Antoinette would be married to an English gentleman of good race. My mother was seventeen years old and one of the most beautiful women in Spanish Town.
When Mr. Rochester first arrived in Jamaica, he was very pleased with the arrangement. Although, he was not so pleased when he learned she was Mr. Mason’s stepdaughter. He was informed that my mother was Jonas’s second wife’s daughter by her previous marriage to a certain Mr. Cosway, a drunken former slave owner whose reputation was far from respectable. He began to hear rumours about my grandmother and how she lost her property, her son and her mind, just two years after marrying Mr. Mason. He also found out her mother was a Creole from the island of Martinique. In addition, Mr. Rochester was a very jealous man and my mother was dazzlingly beautiful and gay. Her mother had taught her to dance, and she had an innate sense of colour and style, so she became one of the most strikingly dressed women in Spanish Town. All the men who admired her could not fail to envy him.
My mother’s life changed radically in months. She was introduced to Jamaican society by her stepbrother Richard, who proudly accompanied her to parties and dances. Bertha Antoinette was able to wear beautiful clothes, dance, have fun and enjoy herself. She revelled in her newly found freedom and enjoyed the attention no one had ever given her before. She imagined she was back in colourful Coulibri, the belle of the plantation. In fact, when Mr. Rochester finally arrived, she wanted to postpone the marriage claiming she was too young. However, she was duly convinced that her time had come to be an English gentleman’s wife. At first their marriage was happy; she was compliant and he was satisfied. He promised to take her to England and she promised to be a faithful wife, but the problems started too soon.
According to my uncle, Mr. Rochester was greedy, selfish, moody, choleric and possessive. He hated the natives, the food, the insects and the tropical climate and was far too attracted to the fiery and submissive native women. I suppose my parents were too young, impulsive and inexperienced. Whatever the reason, my father soon lost interest in my mother, finding the local women more submissive and soliciting. My mother was enraged with jealousy and lost her mind. On the other hand, Mr. Rochester’s life took a turn for the better; he was a fortunate man. He already possessed my mother’s bountiful dowry, and months later, due to the sudden deaths of his brother and his father, he inherited his family’s estate in England, to where he decided they should return at once.
Unfortunately, my mother could not get used to the climate, the people, or the way of life in England, and her health worsened after I was born. When my father met Miss Jane Eyre, he locked my mother away so nobody would know of her existence. I was transported by my uncle to Spanish Town, where I was brought up by the same nuns at the same convent as my mother.
The convent school had not changed much since my mother’s days. We ate plentiful and nutritious food four times a day and washed regularly, because we had been taught that cleanliness is next to godliness. I learned to sew, embroider, paint, and play the piano. We were also taught how to cook and cleaned our rooms daily. We prayed five times a day and read the Bible in the evenings, mainly the word of Christ through the Gospels. I had been teaching the younger girls for two years. Most of them were pious and well behaved, and I enjoyed teaching them music, sewing, and embroidery.
I can understand how my mother felt when she left the convent. I also felt terrified of life outside the safe walls, which had been my shelter. I had never lived anywhere else or known other people. My uncle had visited me regularly, but infrequently. On occasions, he had taken me to his estates in Jamaica. I knew, because Mother Superior had informed me, that for some time his finances had diminished, so it was my duty to accompany him to England and repay him for saving my life.
Although he had refused to acknowledge me as his daughter, I was thankful to Mr. Rochester for having provided for me, and I was looking forward to meeting him before his death. Uncle Richard had told me I must be polite to Mrs. Rochester, because she would administer Mr. Rochester’s legacy. I was terrified of meeting her. Uncle Richard had told me how wicked she was, and how she had captivated Mr. Rochester while he was married to my mother, so that he locked her in the attic, which led to her lunacy and death. I did not want to meet or be polite to the person responsible for my mother’s captivity and destruction. My uncle had told me not to worry, because he would look after me, but he never had, why should he do so now? The sisters at the convent had looked after me, but they were so far away, in another lost world, like Coulibri.
Before we left Spanish Town three weeks ago, my uncle took me to the shops and bought me suitable clothes for the occasion: colourful dresses, bonnets, capes, boots, gloves, and some pieces of jewellery. I told him not to spend so much money on me, but he reminded me it was only a loan, because I would have to pay him back once I received my inheritance. He said I had to look rich and beautiful.
He insisted I learn to dance before coming. I could not dance. I had never danced. I complied, although, I feared he wanted to advertise me in search of a wealthy husband, an idea which I abhorred. I begged Mother Superior to let me stay, but to no avail. I was truly terrified of being face to face with Jane Eyre, and I dreaded the day I would have to marry a wealthy, English gentleman I had never even met. Since I had arrived, I had dreamt of walls caving in and burying me, and flying monsters carrying me away with their claws across a rough sea and dropping me in the ocean, where I drown. I had drowned many nights in the wide Sargasso Sea, since I learned I was to come to England.
Incredible and terrifying things had happened to me in the last three weeks. I felt as if I were riding on a runaway horse. The last troubling event happened yesterday. We had arrived at the Rochester Arms the previous evening, after a ten hour coach drive from London. Yesterday morning, my uncle went to Eyre Hall to visit Mrs. Rochester. He wished to procure an invitation to visit Mr. Rochester.
Yesterday afternoon, my uncle left on another errand. I was alone at the inn when the rain halted, or at least seemed to lessen, so I ventured out for a walk. The inn was on the outskirts of Hay, a small village with few shops and houses on dusty unpaved roads, much like the abandoned paths that led to the sea in Spanish Town, where I would sometimes walk, except at home it was warm, and the air smelt fresh and crisp like the sea breeze, and the horizon was deep blue like the sea. Here the horizon was grey, the air smelt of damp weeds, and the wind was cold and furious. I walked towards the moors, away from the dwellings, for a while.
The ground was hard and the road lonely. In the distance I could hear a church bell, although I could not see the belfry, which I guessed was over the hill ahead of me. My uncle had told me Eyre Hall was just a short walk away from the church. I imagined my father and Mrs. Rochester were hearing the same sound, and I wondered if they were as concerned about meeting me as I was about meeting them. Curiously, the sun, which had not appeared all day, was suddenly visible, pale and low on the distant horizon. Seconds later there was absolute silence and solitude; even the wind decided to hold its breath. The day darkened, and the white outline of the moon, which was less than full, was growing more intense. I should have returned to the inn at that moment, when the bushes and the trees were turning from green to grey, and the first stars were starting to shine. But I stayed.
I sat on a stile by the path, looking towards the place where I was born, wondering what my life would have been like if I had stayed here, when I heard the ground rumbling, as if it was going to snap. The
sound became louder and louder, and in the distance I saw a great dark shadow approaching me, which seemed to have the huge head of a wild unicorn and the body of a dragon. I jumped off the stile in terror and ran back towards the safety of the inn, slipping on a sheet of ice on the causeway and sliding down to the path, hitting my head on a stone. I closed my eyes and covered my head, expecting to be either trampled on or swallowed by a monstrous beast. The rumbling stopped and I heard an animal rear up by my side and halt seconds later.
“Who are you, and what on earth are you doing walking at night in the middle of the causeway? You could have got yourself killed! I didn’t even see you!” shouted the rider.
I felt a terrible throbbing in my head and warm fluid trickle down my brow. I wiped it away with the back of my hand, but as I brought it back down, I realised my glove was covered in blood and screamed. The rider jumped off his horse and bent down to help me.
“Are you all right? Let me help you.”
He tried to lift me up, but I screamed with pain.
“Does it hurt?” I nodded. “Where is the pain?”
“My ankle hurts, and so do my arm and my head.”
“Excuse me, but may I see if it is broken?”
I nodded and shivered as his hands pressed my foot, feeling for broken bones. No man had ever touched me, except when I had embraced my uncle, but it was not a moment for shyness. I was injured and needed his help.
“No bones are broken, although it is already swollen and will probably swell even more tomorrow.
“Now let me look at your head,” he said, as he took out a kerchief and wiped my forehead. “Don’t worry, it is not a deep cut. It is no longer bleeding. May I take off your glove? It is full of blood, and you will spoil your cape.” I nodded and gasped, as he slid it off and wrapped my hand in both of his.
