‘Not quite,’ he agreed, ‘but Thornfield will have to be let if it can be restored without too much cost. Shall you mind that, Jane?’
I shook my head. ‘I mind nothing, so long as we are together.’
Edward’s head dropped to his breast. ‘Oh, Jane – oh, Jane – what should I do without you, so brave, so loyal?’
In the course of one short week Edward had found himself ruined, seen his house in flames – and on the following day he would bury Adèle. Such events, coming so quickly, one upon the other, can crush the strongest spirit. I feared my husband would break under the strain – and suspected, too, he carried a further burden, which he would not let me know. With the intention of confronting what might have been one of his nightmares, I said, ‘Edward – I think we must go to Thornfield to estimate the damage. Shall we visit the house together, soon?’
There was defeat in his tone as he said, ‘Let me first bury my daughter.’
‘Of course, Edward,’ I said. I stood, bent to kiss him and quietly left the room, knowing he needed solitude.
As did I. I found myself outside the house, then walking towards the church. I entered and sat alone in a pew near the back and did not pray but allowed the peace to flow over me. I had been shocked when Edward named Adèle ‘daughter’ for though she was dead it roused in me all my old doubts and fears concerning Edward’s meetings with Adèle and Céline – and with Céline alone in London. Perhaps it was wrong to sit in that holy place thinking anxious, jealous thoughts but I could not help myself. Adèle was dead; Adèle had been Edward’s daughter by the beautiful Frenchwoman; Céline was in England still – that I knew. What if their shared grief for their unfortunate child brought them closer together?
I told myself I was wrong to think such thoughts in that place at that time, before poor Adèle had even been laid to rest. But a jealous heart cares not for time and place. I knew Edward loved me but a man may love two women at once – I feared Céline.
And then – like a miracle – I calmed. Peace came to me and some kind of knowledge the source of which I did not recognise. It was as if a voice said to me, ‘The secret lies with Adèle. Ask Edward about Adèle.’ And I resolved to do this, even though I did not understand.
Next day we laid Adèle to rest, near the grave of Bertha Mason, and on the following day Edward said, ‘Well, Jane – will you come with me to Thornfield?’ We walked there through the fields. The day was bright and sunny and warm for the time of year. We stood on the lawn gazing up at the house, which was streaked with black. The windows were holed and cracked.
Inside all smelled of smoke. I stayed below in the hall, surveying the dirtied walls and pillars; beneath my feet the marble floor was still puddled with water. Edward, meanwhile, went as far up the staircase as was safe and peered upwards at the gallery, then, sighing, descended. Arm in arm we entered the drawing-room – the walls were blackened, and one of the long windows had been broken to admit the men carrying water. The curtains hung at the windows like dirty rags; my cherished pale carpet with the pattern of roses was sooty and footmarked.
‘Do not grieve for your pretty room, Jane,’ he said.
‘I do not,’ I said. ‘What damage there is can be repaired.’
‘From what I have seen there will be a good deal to be done upstairs. But, nevertheless, it can be managed,’ he told me. His tone was spiritless and I looked at him and saw desolation in his face – but the cause, I knew, was not the wretched condition of his house.
‘The fire began upstairs, it seems,’ I said quietly. ‘Shall we go outside?’
We walked down the lawn a little and then, without discussing it, turned into the walled garden. There I said to him, ‘Edward – I beg you – there is a mystery here. You are like a man carrying a heavy burden – share it with me. I am your wife; I am not made of sugar or of glass. Do not hurt me by considering me unfit to confide in.’
‘I would rather not—’ he began, but I interrupted him: ‘I would rather not live with a husband trying to bear an awful secret – for that is what I think it is – alone.’
‘It is too sad,’ he told me. ‘What of your health and the child you carry?’
‘What of my mind, Edward?’ I asked. ‘Can you imagine what anxiety I shall suffer knowing only that you are unhappy and uneasy, but not the reason?’ I remembered that voice I seemed to have heard alone in the church only two days before – ‘The secret lies with Adèle.’ ‘You think of Adèle, do you not?’ I asked. ‘Tell me, why was she upstairs when the fire began?’ – for this question had puzzled me for some time.
He gazed at me, as if stricken, then smiled, unhappily. ‘You were ever a mind-reader where I am concerned,’ he told me. And a great chill came over me as I said, ‘Edward – Adèle started the fire, did she not? That is why she went upstairs, why the worst damage was there, where she was.’ And then, as if a fresh pattern of events came suddenly into my mind, I asked him, ‘Edward – did she start the earlier fire also? Edward – please tell me – how did Bertha die?’
His voice was very low as he spoke. ‘I see you have found me out. Very well, I will explain, God help me, though I fear the consequences for you and the child. Yet you have gone so far now that we reach the point where silence may do more harm than speech. It is a dreadful tale I have to tell, that of a secret I have kept for more than ten years.
The beginning of these sorry events was when Adèle was but eight years old, shortly before you came to us, Jane. You must imagine our situation – she and I alone at Thornfield, but for a nursemaid – a local girl who proved to have been neglectful of her charge. And that was when this little girl, whose pretty tricks, as you know, had such power to disarm me, spoke to me one evening.
‘We were by the fire and as she sat caressing the great body of Pilot, who lay beside her on the rug, she gazed up at me charmingly from under lowered lids, the very model of a little coquette, and asked me, “Papa – could it be that one day you will marry my Mama, and bring her here, as your wife, so that we may all live together?”
‘I replied, “Alas no, Adèle, for as you know, you Mama is dead.”
‘To which she returned, all innocence, “But if she were not dead, Papa?” For she knew even then, Jane – how, I cannot tell – that Céline was alive. When I say “knew” perhaps that is wrong. She may have had a fantasy, as children do, that what she most dearly wished – that she had a living mother to love her – was true. And as it happened, it was indeed true, though I myself did not know it then.
‘I told her, with as little attention as one gives to the innocent and ill-informed questions of children, “No, child. Even if your Mama were alive it would still not be possible for me to marry her.”
‘And that remark,’ Edward said sombrely, ‘of which I took so little account, began the whole obsession in Adèle which was to lead to the fire at Thornfield and Bertha’s death. How could I know, how could I have guess that this child, at large in the house and improperly supervised by her nurse, had discovered the presence of my wife in the upper rooms? Who could have imagined that by eavesdropping on the servants, and listening to the mutterings of Grace Poole when she had taken drink, that she would discover that the prisoner was my wife?
‘It was a short step for this careful, intelligent child, whose nature was nevertheless twisted and distorted beyond any imagination, to conceive that if Bertha were dead I would be at liberty to marry her mother and thus she would gain what she so violently desired.
‘And so, by studying the habits of the household and discovering my wife’s capacity to release herself from her place of confinement and roam the house, Adèle made her plans. One evening she watched Bertha release herself from her room and begin her roaming and crying out from room to room. But when Bertha re-mounted the stairs to re-enter her prison, lock the door and pretend to Grace Poole, when she awoke, that she had not escaped from the room, Adèle, who had followed her upstairs, snatched the key from Bertha as she re-entered the room –
and locked her in. And then she, Adèle, crept downstairs, lit her fire and waited for it to burn the house down – and kill my wife.
‘After the blaze had taken full hold I found her outside the house with the others gazing up at the house, which was in flames. And she said, “When Bertha is dead, Papa, you can marry Mama” – and Jane,’ he said in a tone of horror, ‘she held out to me the key to Bertha’s door! Held it out, as if presenting me with a trophy. I snatched it from her and ran inside. She had not calculated in her warped, but still childish mind that I would go to the rescue of Bertha, whom she knew to be my bane. Standing outside with the others, she became hysterical and tried, they said, to run in after me, into the fire.’ And Edward gave a great shudder.
After a pause, he continued, ‘Very well – I will finish. After those long months of illness I sustained after the fire, she came to me. She was quite unrepentant. She felt no remorse for what she had done.’ Edward’s voice dropped low. ‘In the ruins she had found a key, half melted by the heat. She chose to believe it was the key to the upper storey where Bertha had been kept. She showed it to me as if she treasured it, as if it were a symbol of success – our success! She confessed all, speaking of her deed quite calmly, as if it were nothing and asked me, “Will you now marry my Mama?” What could I have done? Could I reveal to anyone the truth about this child so young, my own flesh and blood, tell anyone of the monster I knew her to be? I decided to protect her and in so doing I have caused great distress and destruction to you, in particular, my darling whom I love more than anything else in the world; you have suffered more than anyone for my foolish protection of Adèle.’
I put my hand in his. ‘You did what you thought best. Perhaps you thought she would change. It cannot have been an easy burden to bear alone.’
Edward sighed. ‘I am happy it is over, that you know all at last. For it has been a sore burden to bear alone over the years. Only I knew this story; only I watched and patiently hoped Adèle would begin to improve. Only I mourned when she did not. Behind the peace and contentment at Ferndean there was always something else – that deadly knowledge I could not share, even with you.’
‘Poor Adèle,’ I said.
He kissed me there, in the wintry garden. ‘You are an angel, I think.’
I did not reply, knowing that I was far from an angel but that all this pain and woe had changed me, perhaps, into something a little better than I was.
‘It grows cold,’ he said. ‘Shall we walk back to Todd’s?’
As we went he said, ‘When she came back to Thornfield I continued to hope she would change but it took little time to detect that she would not – she had merely become a more polished version of the evil little creature she had been. I continued, though, to hope – foolishly, as I now see. I treated her indulgently, hoping that kindness and, perhaps above all, daily contact with you, my Jane, would moderate the ferocity and all-consuming selfishness I saw in her, hidden behind the mask of sweetness. That was why I forgave her for taking the carriage that day – but my anxiety over her, combined with my business worries, was too much for me, alas. I punished Jeremy instead.’
We stood beneath a great, bare horse chestnut which grew close to the path. He drew me to him and kissed my brow. ‘Jane,’ he said tenderly, ‘I know you feared I had sought out Céline and had renewed my love for her. I knew – I grieved – but what could I tell you? That I went to her to discover if Adèle was indeed my child? And if she was not – was there some taint in her blood, some family madness which might explain what she was? That I went to my old mistress and besought her to tell me aught that might have created Adèle Rochester? I had kept the secret of Adèle for years. Was I to reveal it in all its horror to you when you were ill and expecting our child? I did not know, of course, that she had tried to kill you – that I could not believe, even of her – until the second time in the thorn field.
‘So,’ he continued, and bitter humour entered his tone. ‘I went to Madame Varens and asked her, was Adèle indeed my child? She told me yes – she told me no – she told me yes again. When I became impatient, she tapped me with her fan and murmured something about life having been very complicated at that time. “More complicated than I ever supposed,” said I to myself.’ He sobered. ‘But there – she has now lost the only child she had or is ever likely to have, poor woman.
‘Having earlier kept my very great fears and doubts about Adèle’s nature from her, I was forced to reveal them, to appeal to Céline. Was there aught in Adèle’s parentage, or in her earlier life, which gave any clue as to her perverse disposition? But,’ he sighed, ‘Céline is a star in our firmament Jane, no longer a creature of flesh and blood. She could not help, she had no help to give – she began to babble of Greek drama. The Greeks, Jane!’ he exclaimed. ‘At such a moment! It angered me – but I calmed myself, thinking, Rochester – you were foolish – how could you have imagined Céline Varens would help you? And meanwhile,’ he said regretfully, ‘I had left my poor little wife in bad health in a great, lonely house in the country. And she responded gallantly.’
‘Not so gallantly,’ I murmured, recalling the long hours spent mourning my husband’s absences and brooding on the beauty and charm of Céline Varens. But of this I said nothing.
We had reached the churchyard and went to Adèle’s grave, a poor heap of earth, for no headstone had yet been raised, and on it were only such scanty blooms as winter could provide.
As we stood there he told me, ‘Grace Poole knew all, of course.’
‘I see,’ said I. ‘And that was why you employed her?’
He nodded. ‘When I came on Mrs. Poole in Manchester, in the sad condition of which I told you, she told me she knew Adèle had caused the fire in which Bertha perished. Her employment was the price of her silence.
‘You see, at first, after the fire, Grace Poole believed herself solely responsible for Bertha’s escape and the destruction of the house, not to mention my own injuries. She fled. It was only later, when she gave up drink and got her life in order, that she recognised the complete impossibility of Bertha’s having caused the fire. If neither she nor Bertha had the key to their place of confinement, some other person had it, and that person had locked them in. She ruled out the servants, and concluded, logically enough, that I was the person with most to gain by my wife’s death – and yet did me the justice of not believing me responsible.
‘But she knew Adèle, and her ways, hit on her as culprit by instinct as well as reason, and when she spoke to me had the cunning to put it to me that she positively knew the child to have been guilty of all. And I, off guard and foolish, very shocked by the notion that another person knew this horrible secret, did not realise that she only guessed at facts of which she was not certain, confirmed her suspicions – and then, of course, she had me in her power.
‘Ah, Jane,’ he said, his hand still in mine, ‘how could I imagine the girl would grow up and became not better but worse, infinitely worse? That her obsession would grow, that, having disposed of one wife to make, as she supposed, room for her mother, she would not scruple to attempt the life of the other? She saddled the horse for you, with the intention you should fall and be killed, though I could not, would not, believe at first that was what had happened. Then she attacked you that night in the thorn field. When you told me that, my darling, I felt as if a knife had been plunged into my own breast. To you, I swore I would never again leave you alone. To myself I vowed that now I must deal with Adèle, once and for all.
‘I could not tell you all this, on the night of the ball. My guilt was extreme, for had I not tried to protect her all those years ago, she would not have grown up to believe she could commit any atrocity and go unpunished.’
There was ever a kind of madness in her,’ I murmured. ‘She was one of those whom nature creates perfectly egotistical. They are rare, very rare, those who are born with no sense of the value of the existence of others, and therefore no sense of right conduct towards them. I do not think
there was anything you could have done to change her, Edward. You must not reproach yourself.’
‘Only that in protecting Adèle I allowed suspicions to rise among the Masons as to the true facts of Bertha’s death, and thereby began a whole chain of dreadful events. I did not respond to Mason’s importunities. There was no agreement between us as to the dowry – never had been – yet, in my desire to rid myself of Madame Roland I resolved to repay what they alleged I owed – and thus matters grew worse – and worse.’
‘It is over now,’ I said. ‘And perhaps if there is any consolation at all, it is that through these awful trials we have become, I hope, wiser?’
‘And closer and closer,’ Edward said. ‘Shall we go in?’ And hand in hand we returned to Mr. Todd’s.
‘I believe there might be a place for Mrs. Poole at the Nortons’,’ I said. ‘I know their housekeeper is retiring.’
‘We certainly shall not need her at Ferndean,’ he said. Then he laughed. ‘I should enjoy the thought of Blanche babbling on thoughtlessly, as she does, under the steely gaze of Mrs. Poole.’
There was, however, to be one last, unpleasant event before we recovered our former peace. This came some two days later. Edward had risen early to go out with Mr. Sugden, for the land had to be attended to as usual, though we were to leave Thornfield. Mr. Todd was away on some parish business, so that I was alone in the house when Madame Roland called.
I had heard she was leaving the neighbourhood but I had no wish to bid her farewell. Yet I could not refuse to see her, since it was at her house that Adèle had been cared for before her death.
She came, dressed for travelling, into the parlour where I was sitting. When I invited her to sit down she refused.
‘I would not come to you, Mrs. Rochester, for I know you dislike me, but I leave England today and wished to speak to you before I go.’
‘And I owe you a great debt for your care of Adèle,’ I told her.
‘I did that for Céline, not for you or Rochester’ was her uncompromising reply.
Mrs Rochester Page 22
