Mrs Rochester

by Hilary Bailey

  ‘Jane,’ he said soberly, ‘you have been my eyes. You saved me from solitude and misery like to have ended in my death. Now my good eye improves, and my strength and spirit return. You, my heart, would not help me by hovering over me and pressing on me attentions I do not desire, or, if I think I desire them, I do not truly need. The Rochesters have ever been a sturdy, stubborn race. Ask yourself, is it likely that I, their last representative, would be any less so? No, Jane. It was not for a nurse that I married you. Do all you wish. I am recovering. I need you still and will always need you, but I would not have you a slave to me.’

  I wept, understanding again the man I had married. Perhaps I had partly feared him in the old days. Now, refined by his suffering, he was that truly great thing, a man strong as a rock and because of that very strength able to be gentle as a woman. He was peering at me through the mist which I knew was always before his eyes. ‘I think you weep,’ he said. ‘You believe you can hide it from a blind old man.’

  ‘You are wicked, Edward,’ I told him. ‘And what shall I do with you when you recover so fast?’

  And he did, indeed, recover quickly, aided by his own strong will. The sight in his eye improved until it became as keen as ever before. He learned, with patient, manly effort, to use his left hand as well as he had once used his right. And gradually the memories of the past faded – their obliteration, I believe, came when the self-styled ‘last representative of the Rochesters’ discovered that he was no longer entitled to make that claim – when he became himself father of a son.

  I ask myself now whether, lapped in happiness and contentment, we should not have spoken more of the past we had both in our separate ways endured. In the pleasantness of day-to-day life, in our constant communication, our shared interests, our delight in each other, it was easy to forget. Yet perhaps there is a price to be paid for turning one’s back on those parts of life one would rather ignore. Perhaps when trouble came upon us we were less well equipped to face it than we would have been had we not, for the best of reasons, so firmly put the past behind us.

  Were we right in choosing to forget what it would have spoiled our happiness to summon up? Did we purchase a decade of unalloyed happiness by turning away from that which we would have done better to have confronted?

  Chapter II

  There have been Rochesters at Thornfield for five hundred years. The family had lived in the same house for more than two hundred years before it burned down.

  After the fire it lay derelict during the ten happy years of our marriage until, one summer day, Edward said to me gravely at breakfast, ‘Jane – will you help me?’

  He never said, ‘Will you help me?’ Often and often I had chided him for this; often and often he had told me he was nothing if he must keep on calling out for help to his wife. Therefore, on hearing his words I smiled, knowing that in reality he did not want me to help him. But – ‘No, I am in earnest when I say I desire your help, or, at any rate, your company. I plan to go back to Thornfield and wish you to come with me.’

  Even then a little chill ran over me, I knew not why, except that the very word Thornfield brought back a flood of memories, countless recollections which, like a river in spate, brought all, twigs, branches, leaves, portions of the river bank, along with it, roaring and tumbling.

  I said, ‘Is that all the help you need? Too little. Of course I will come. When should you like to go?’

  ‘Now,’ he said. ‘I have a fancy to go now.’

  I rose. ‘I will tell Jeremy to harness the horses.’

  He smiled up at me, that sweet smile always so surprising in that dark and gypsy face. ‘Bless you, Jane. Get some food put up. We will picnic in the old garden.’

  That was where, by moonlight, he had vowed his love for me.

  And so it happened. Half an hour later we were setting out for Thornfield. Just after midday we were there.

  We stood in the tangled, overgrown grass of what had been the stretch of lawn before the house, gazing up at the roofless mansion. How dreary it all was, its destruction and dereliction seeming, perhaps, even sadder under bright sunshine. The back wall only was intact, and a corner and part of another wall. Grass and weeds grew from cracks in the smoke-blackened bricks.

  The interior of the house was heaped with bricks, beams and other masonry, in piles as high as a man. These were the rooms, galleries and passageways where once we had trod. Grass grew from the piles of rubble. Through the clumps one could see, here, the charred end of a beam, there, a black rag of cloth which might once have a curtain or a hanging, elsewhere a fused and charred mass of brick, a heap of broken roof-tiles, blackened by smoke.

  The last time I had seen Thornfield I had been too concerned for Edward to comprehend, truly, the sight of this destruction. The last time I had seen it, too, the damage had been fresh. Now the ruins of almost a decade seemed even sadder and more pitiful. I had not always been happy at Thornfield, but the sight of its present state filled me with melancholy.

  Through these rooms little Adèle had run, curls flying. Through those often overpowering rooms I had paced, a girl trying to achieve womanly dignity at that time when the girl must surrender to the woman she is to be. In that house my dearest Edward had grown up. I turned from the ruin with a tear in my eye gazing, in an attempt not to weep openly, down over the lawn and across to the walled garden. That wall had broken down over the years, or perhaps been plundered for bricks. Through it I saw the overgrown beds, barely recognisable now as such. I noted the little statue of Cupid which stood by the pond, streaked and dirty now. Yet the trees in the orchard, visible over the unbroken portion of the wall, were green and vital and there were ripening apples, plums and pears on their branches. It was here, at dawn, that Edward and I had walked, and he had declared, to my joy and incredulity, his fatal, impossible love.

  ‘Ah, Edward,’ I said. ‘Look, the apples are ripening in the garden.’

  He smiled down at me. ‘I saw your tear,’ he said, ‘the tear you tried to hide from me. Yes – the trees thrive in spite of neglect in that garden where you told me you loved me and I confessed my love for you. You were happy, were you not?’

  ‘Oh yes, yes, Edward,’ said I, remembering only his warm gaze upon me, his tender kiss, and not the later hurt.

  He embraced me. ‘You weep for Thornfield. Yet you need not. You have only to say the word,’ he murmured into my hair.

  So close to him, his arm about me, my face turned up to his, I realised his intention. Of course he wished to rebuild Thornfield, his family’s ancestral home. To do so would be not just the indulgence of a personal desire but an act of family duty, of piety towards the dead, a promise to the living. Yet I knew, clearly and absolutely at that moment, that I did not want to return to Thornfield. I knew, too, that so great was my husband’s love for me, I might succeed in influencing him not to rebuild the house.

  ‘You would like to come back here?’ he asked. ‘Back to Thornfield?’

  I replied, ‘Of course, Edward. If you wish it.’

  ‘No, my dearest. Not because I wish it. You must wish it too, or the pleasure will be gone.’

  I knew that what he said was true, that his happiness depended much on mine. If I opposed his plan, for reasons I would hardly be able, candidly, to state – for how could I tell him how sad and frightened I had been at Thornfield, without reviving that past we had silently agreed to forget? – he would do as I asked. He would leave the house as it was, or cause the ruin to be demolished. But he would be disappointed, would see my opposition as a whim, not worthy of me. He might judge me not only as a wife failing to assist in the revival of the family grandeur, but as a mother depriving her son of his part in it.

  In one moment, I saw all this. And knew that, above all, I did not want to disappoint my husband. Against my will I must support the plan to rebuild Thornfield. Yet even then I could not lie to him. I tightened my arms about him and gazed into his black eyes. ‘Wherever you are, my darling, is my home.’<
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  He put me away, to arm’s length. ‘Modest Jane,’ he laughed. ‘Will you ever demand anything for yourself – for yourself alone?’

  ‘Only your love,’ I pronounced boldly.

  And there outside the ruined shell of the house Edward Rochester of Thornfield kissed me.

  And it was done. Plans were drawn up, master craftsmen found and instructed. In a little over a year after the work began, the house was almost ready. My husband had caused it to be rebuilt, stone by stone, brick by brick, beam by heavy beam, an exact replica of the house as it had been before.

  Before the year ended we would be living in that grand house, ready to entertain more widely, to cut a figure in the county, become, in very truth, the Rochesters of Thornfield.

  Yet, I confess it, throughout that perfect late summer and early autumn at Ferndean, while they brought in first the hay and then the corn, while we culled our fruit and rejoiced in our late-blooming roses, my heart sank lower and lower in my breast. It was not the thought of entering into a grandeur I had never sought or wanted, nor of the entertainments which would be expected of us as owners of one of the great houses of the county. No, what afflicted me was a dread of returning to Thornfield.

  What was Thornfield to me? It was the house where I had experienced terror, despair, loneliness, hopeless longing, then great hope, which alas had been followed brutally by equally great despair. I had entered that house a young and inexperienced girl. At my first sight of it I felt a chill, awed by its great size and sensing it contained something to fear. I had put these feelings aside as a fantasy, but alas too soon learned that Thornfield contained mysteries, the worst of them being that upstairs, behind a hidden door, was kept in concealment that dangerous woman, Bertha Mason. I seldom call her Edward’s wife, give her the name I proudly bear, that of Mrs. Edward Rochester. Yet, it must be told – as a young man he had in the Caribbean married this inheritor of a family madness, not knowing enough of her or her family.

  Poor Edward – lonely sufferer of an unbearable marriage. The fault was not his, but that of the law, which will not allow a man or woman to rid themselves of a partner hopelessly insane and with no possible hope of recovery. A man may be shackled to a wife as they chain convicts together. She may be insane, no true wife, her very presence abominable to him, yet he cannot get free, must live alone, without the consolations of marriage, until death releases one or the other of them.

  If he loves, the only fulfilment open to him is to turn the woman who should have been his bride into his mistress, and the children who should have been his pride and borne his name into creatures of shame. And all this in the name of indissoluble vows taken before God. We may ask, what kind of a God it is who will permit one spouse to live all his life in wretchedness because the other is afflicted?

  And yet – how often in the long lonely days after I fled the house did I not find myself secretly, regretting, that that marriage service, mockery as it would have been had not taken place without interruption. For then, wrong though it would have been, we should have been together, come what may. But once I knew we were not permitted to marry the hard choice was mine. Was I to become a creature little better than the depraved Céline Varens, mother of Adèle, and sustain perhaps in the end a fate like hers, a slow slide down from depravity to depravity, ending in the gutter? Or was I to preserve that female integrity which is more valuable than life itself? If so, I must go into the wilderness, the dark, the cold, which was all life without Edward Rochester could offer me. And I forced myself to go.

  Such were my memories of Thornfield. I could not look back on those days with pleasure and contentment. True, they had brought me, ultimately, my happy marriage, the ideal life I led. But oh, the agonies of the past!

  Though all storms were over and calm happiness prevailed, I could not rid myself of my superstitious fear of the return to Thornfield though I made every effort to conceal my doubts and fears from my husband and I truly believe he did not detect them.

  As the house went up I continually reasoned with myself; the old days were over and could not return; in any event, this Thornfield was not the old one. Though it was a replica of the original building in every respect, it was brick, stone and beam, entirely new from its roof to its cellars. The walls of that little room at the back of the house in which I had slept alone at Thornfield no longer contained their stony memories of the secret intrusion of the madwoman on the very night of my wedding – the wedding that was not to be – and of her rending my veil as I lay, half waking, half sleeping. The upper storey where she had been kept prisoner, the very battlements from which she had thrown herself during the fire were not the same. The fabric was new, all new. The furnishings would be different – chosen by me to suit my taste; even the books on the library shelves would be different. The old poisons had gone when the house burned – so I told myself.

  I reminded myself of the many compensations the move to Thornfield would bring – the chance to select new furnishings, hangings, paints and papers for the house, the old garden to restore, for it had grown wild over the years the house had stood abandoned. Yet, all the same, my heart failed me. Might we, I had timidly suggested to Edward, at least rid the thorn field beyond the garden of some of those gnarled and twisted hawthorns, some forty of them, which crowded it?

  Beyond the house and its pleasant garden, aromatic in summer with scents of flowers and ripening fruit, there lay a four-acre field, stony and rising. There grew the trees I have described, stunted and wind-bent, their grey trunks patched with brown. It was, of course, the prevalence of these harsh trees in the locality, and their age-old colonisation of the field adjacent to the house, that gave the house its name. In spring the branches were frothy with blossom, in spite of their age, in summer they were a dense green, but in winter, their stark and twisted forms were bare, the scoured trunks and branches under moonlight, seeming almost malign, the bony branches coming out at accusing angles, like pointing fingers. That field was ever a sore sight to me, though it was visible from the house only from a few windows at one side. Still I knew it was there, stark and angry, mocking joy and hope.

  I even submitted to my lord, like some aspiring manager of the estate, a plan to clear the thorn field and lay it out with broad-leafed trees, to divert the stream to make a pool. But, ‘No, Jane,’ said Edward when I suggested my plan. His voice was tender, but firm. ‘Plain, nay, ugly as they seem, those trees are the very spirit and essence of Thornfield Hall. It is from that field the house gets its name. In the old days they were used to say that if the trees were ever to die or be destroyed, it would mark the end of the family at Thornfield. Those trees are the symbol of our origins in older, harsher times which we must not forget. Long ago, they say, one hard winter after a succession of bad harvests the family only sustained itself by collecting from the branches of the thorns wool the sheep had left behind, and by cutting some of the trees and burning them as fuel.

  ‘You see, Jane, a great family has the habit of remembering its noble deeds – this lord killed in the Crusades, another a prized servant of old Queen Elizabeth, another a general under Wellington. Such recollections are right and natural. But it behoves such a family to remember its poorer, harder times and therefore, my love, I must keep my thorny field as it is so as to retain my humility and ever remember the blessings heaped upon me – not the least of which is you, Jane, my little Jane.’

  And with that he embraced me so warmly, and I was so struck by the reasons he gave for not doing as I wished, that I put aside my desire to see the stony field emptied of those twisted trees. I acquiesced, thinking, well, at least I will cover those windows which overlook the field with heavy net and damask. I will make sure little of it can be seen from the windows of the house.

  However, as I have said, I allowed, none of my thoughts concerning the thorn field or of the house itself to escape me, seeing only my husband’s great desire to reside again where his family had lived for generations and to pass it in turn t
o his son, my Jonathan. For his sake, I knew, I must become the contented mistress of Thornfield and do the position honour. A small price, I reflected, during that last happy time at dear old Ferndean, to pay for all my other contents.

  Let us in imagination leave me there, at Ferndean in that long, low, warm-bricked house, on the lawn below the mulberry with my dear Edward – leave me at that moment when I was happy (and I had then, in early autumn, even more reason, or so I was beginning to believe, for happiness). Leave me in sunshine, with the birds going to roost, and Edward’s hand straying across the gap between us to join with mine; leave the lengthening shadows across the lawn. Let me now take you to people I did not then know and to scenes where I was not. Over the last months I have painfully reconstructed this story for myself, until now I feel as if I had indeed been there to witness the arrival in England of two persons, two women, whose coming was to have such a strange and dreadful effect on our lives.

  Chapter III

  There were two ladies alone in the private cabin of the ship making its crossing from France to England on that September night.

  The crossing had been rough. One of the passengers lay, very pale, on the red plush couch as the ship pitched, her white hand, which bore a large ruby ring, pressed to her brow. This ring was the only colour about her. On the heavy coils of jet-black hair was a small lace cap. She wore a dress of black silk, of very good cut. Her face was oval, her nose long, her eyes, gazing now into those of the other woman, very black, fringed with long dark lashes.

  The second lady sponged the brow of the first and murmured to her consolingly in French, ‘Not long now, Justine, before we shall be in port.’ This woman’s hair was loose over her shoulders and russet in colour. In comparison with her companion, she seemed like some exotic bird in her long, loose gown of dark red brocade.

  The sea voyage which had so badly affected her companion appeared to have given her vigour – there was a flush of colour in her cheeks and her almond eyes, set in a charming, oval face, were very bright. She gently raised her friend’s head from the pillow and gave her a sip of water.