My Mr. Rochester (13 page)

Indeed it felt different than any place I’d lived. Thornfield Hall seemed a living thing with its own personality, kept in a state of suspended animation.

“Is Mr. Rochester an Anointed Elder then?” I said.

“No, he isn’t married. The Righteous designation came when his grandfather built Thornfield just after the Great Secession. Mr. Rochester’s older brother inherited, but that poor man and his wife died in a measles outbreak.”

“Horrible disease,” I muttered. “Were you here then?”

“Not yet. My husband was living then, but the measles took him too. Our Mr. Rochester heard of my loss not long after he inherited and asked me to come run Thornfield for him. It will be ten years next spring, and I believe he still grieves for his brother and sister-in-law. You’ll understand how relieved I was to read in your qualifications that you’ve been vaccinated. Mr. Rochester insists on it for everyone on the estate. No, Mr. Rochester may appear peculiar, but allowances must be made for his sorrows. He’s a good master, for all that we so rarely see him.”

We’d reached the wing where she and I had our rooms. My door was the first we came to on the left. “I’m here,” Mrs. Fairfax said at a second door on the left. We started back, and she pointed out the only door across the corridor, an equal distance between her room and mine. “Mr. Rochester sleeps here when he’s at Thornfield.”

We’d passed my room again and were near the end of the corridor when Mrs. Fairfax looked at me sideways. She hesitated, and with an impish smile pushed against the wood-panels on Mr. Rochester’s side of the wall.

A door popped open. Mrs. Fairfax opened it further, a twinkle in her eye. For an instant I saw the playful child she once must have been. “I’ll show you my favorite view.”

I followed her into the dark small space and up a narrow stairway.

“Mrs. Fairfax, this is wonderful!” I stood at the parapet at the edge of the roof. I could see Millcote in the distance to the east, the gryphon gates at the end of the drive, and the road that led away from Thornfield up the hill to the west.

Mrs. Fairfax said, “I always think if there were a ghost at Thornfield Hall, this would be its haunt.”

“Then you have no ghost,” I said. “How sad is that?” My words recalled Georgiana’s.
You might encounter no man at Thornfield—how sad would that be?

“None that I know of.” Mrs. Fairfax chuckled.

“Is that Thornfield’s church?” Near the top of the hill, the hour tolled from the white-washed belfry of a small church.

“It is. Mr. Wood gives very nice, very short sermons.”

I was going to like Mrs. Fairfax.

A servant must have closed the secret door at the bottom of the stairs, for coming down again there was no light. We descended the stairway carefully with only the feel of the wall for a guide. A few treads down, I caught my breath. The woman’s wail from my dream sounded from somewhere in the house.

The sound of Mrs. Fairfax’s footsteps continued unaltered, as if she’d heard nothing. When she opened the door to the corridor, the cry changed to loud and coarse laughter. The light of day streamed in, and I easily found my way down to her.

“Didn’t you hear that?” I asked.

“What is it?” she said. “What did you hear?”

“Someone crying. Or laughing, I think.” Now I felt foolish, and I was grateful Mrs. Fairfax didn’t ridicule me.

“Oh, I’m a little hard of hearing, my dear,” she said. “I suppose it’s a blessing in this old house. I’m sure it makes plenty of noises. You heard one of the servants,” she answered. “Most likely Grace Poole.”

“You didn’t hear her at all?”

“No, but I’m sure you did. She’s a special hire, another of Mr. Rochester’s projects.”

I felt sure she wanted to add
like Adele
but thought better of it.

“Grace Poole was here when I first came to Thornfield. She does odd work for Leah, sewing and such. She doesn’t mix with the others. Leah usually brings up her meals, and sometimes they’re noisy about it.”

The laugh repeated, louder this time, preternatural and tragic. I still couldn’t tell where it came from. Then all was silent again, and I wondered if Mrs. Fairfax had been mistaken. That Thornfield did indeed have a ghost.

“Grace!” Mrs. Fairfax said, speaking to the secret door.

The door opened, and a servant came out, a woman between thirty and forty, robust-looking, with a hard, plain face. Surely no one less romantic or ghostly ever lived—or died. But where had she come from? There must be another room in there, hidden in the dark, perhaps behind the stairs.

“Too much noise, Grace,” said Mrs. Fairfax. “Remember your orders!”

Grace curtsied, with a tinge of insolence, and went back in.

“Now, Miss Eyre,” Mrs. Fairfax returned to me pleasantly, as if nothing odd had just happened. “Adele is with her nurse in the library. There must be no lessons on your first day, but would you like to meet your pupil?”

Adele Varens was ten years old, not at all clever, and she’d been taught badly. Her education before Thornfield seemed to have consisted of mimicking her errant flirtatious mother, now deceased. Communicating in French, I learned she was an orphan. On that account, she won my affection straightaway.

“See what you can find out about her,” Mrs. Fairfax said. “Mr. Rochester told me nothing of her origins.”

I asked the girl how she knew the master.

“Adele says only that Mr. Rochester is the best man in the world who always brought her a
cadeau
—a gift when he came to visit her
maman
. I don’t believe she understands anything more than that.”

Mrs. Fairfax and I established a satisfying routine. She rightly held herself above the household staff in rank, but she treated me as her equal and often joined me during Adele’s lessons then stayed for coffee and conversation when they were over.

My days were idyllic, though I’d never associated that state with winter. All was peaceful and congenial. I worked with Adele. I conversed with Mrs. Fairfax. I had time to draw and to read what books I liked from the unlocked shelves in the library which served as Adele’s schoolroom.

My
new epoch
was well underway, and I was happy.

« Chapter 13 »
Dusk

Anno Domini 2086

When I first came to Thornfield, a carpet of pink and yellow roses covered the fence outside Mr. Wood’s little church on the hill. The season was turning then from autumn to winter, and a closer look showed blooms fading and the last of the fat lush blackberries running underneath the roses.

Now four months later, winter refuses to give way to spring. Halfway to Hayton, I stop a moment in the lane. The wood fence stands lonely, as naked as the winding sticks of wisteria crawling over the rectory door. The dirt shoulders of the lane are as hard with cold as the cobblestones. Clouds hang low and darken the sky, but there’s no rain.

The bell in the whitewashed belfry tolls the hour: four o’clock. A chilly gust of wind rushes up the lane and through the bare branches of the willow at the edge of the church graveyard. I pull my cloak closer and watch the dissipating mist of my breath.

Past the church there’s a stile accessing the field I like to cut through. I sit down to rest and look back the mile I’ve walked. In the vale below I can see Thornfield Hall, like a citadel at the center of its working farm. Sometimes when Adele plays with her nurse and Mrs. Fairfax busies herself with household matters, I climb the secret staircase—which does have a locked door behind it. The view is more expansive from Thornfield’s roof than from the top of this hill, but from both places the view is as serene as my current days. Peaceful, at times dull.

Not the nights.

I have the train dream several times a week. Sometimes it drives me from sleep. I think I hear a woman’s cries in waking life, but they never repeat once my head is clear. I once followed the noise into the corridor, but all was still.

Mrs. Fairfax promised to again admonish Grace Poole to be quieter in her work, but I wonder why she has to work at all so late in the night.

From my place here in the stile I see Millcote. Millcote fancies itself a village, I’ve learned, but the imagined metropolis contains only five buildings: the local mill and the miller’s cottage, the Jefferson Inn with ten rooms to let, and attached to the inn a public garage and stables.

It’s more hamlet than village.
My Hamlet 1-3-78,
I think fondly.

My goal today is Hayton, an actual village yet another mile on the other side of this hill. Mrs. Fairfax missed the morning post, and I agreed to carry the letter to the post office, not merely for the exercise but for the solitude.

Today I long for something different. I’m impossible. Only four months into my entirely satisfactory new life, I’m restless with it. I leapt at the chance to get away.

Something inside me will not be quiet, still, tranquil. I can’t be happy with my most outrageous good fortune. Would I go back to the sterile austerity of Lowood or the cruel luxury of Gateshead?

Never.

I have so much. I want something more—but what it is, I don’t know. Fire where there is a chill? Feeling where there is composure? I feel I’m going crazy with ingratitude, but I don’t know how to stop myself.

What would I alter? I’ve exchanged discomfort for comfort, tolerance for appreciation, endless chatter for a mix of quiet and conversation. Mrs. Fairfax treats me as her equal, and teaching fills my need for creative occupation.

In truth these months at Thornfield have been the most tranquil and secure epoch of my nineteen years. And yet I jinx it. Today I’m antsy for a temporary escape. I’ve grown complacent in my comfort. I long for something out of the ordinary, something different—
something interesting
—to happen.

I don’t know if the clouds sank into the earth during my reverie on the stile, but they’re gone. A freakish mist swarms at my feet. Above the hilltop the flat disk of the moon rises, full and eerily brightening against the late afternoon sky, while the wispy mist snakes like a living thing about the hedges and rocks and trees.

A wind gust agitates fallen leaves, pushing and pulling them up into a swirling dust devil on the lane. The gust folds and rolls over, multiplies, and repeats its dance on and on through every vale and over every hill beyond my sight.

I’m pierced by an unexpected feeling of eternal well-being, a profound connection with all life.

But a rude noise breaks through my bliss. A
tramp,
tramp, tramp
, and metallic clatter. My heart races a little. A horse is coming, I can’t tell where from. The bend of the lane yet hides it. On it comes. I leave the stile but keep to the shoulder, prepared to let the beast go by.

I am an educated adult of nineteen, but childhood’s magical thinking still influences my mind. Fairy tales and Sunday school fables still dance in my brain with other rubbish. I’m still forming my life’s journey, still sorting real and true from claptrap fed to me by unloving tricksters or controlling piety freaks.

Onward the horse comes. I watch for it through the low mist, thinking of Gytrash, the gigantic ghost dog of the Canadian tundra.

Gytrash is said to haunt solitary byways and seize on lone travelers. At the time of the Great Secession, so my cousin John Reed said, Gytrash was seen as far south as Utah and Colorado and as far west as here in Jefferson State where Thornfield Hall lays.

I laughed at John Reed for believing such stuff and received a thwack across the back of my legs in return. I still have the scar to show for my impudence.

Now mixed in with the
tramp, tramp, tramp
of horse’s hooves, a rushing
thump-a, thump-a
sounds behind the hedges. The traveler isn’t on the road but somewhere among the trees. All at once a great black dog bursts through—exactly in the form of the Gytrash! A lion-like creature with long hair, a white blaze on its huge forehead, and glittering black eyes.

It thunders past me. I am nothing to it.

The anticipated horse follows. The substantial blue-black steed bears a rider on its back. The man—the human being—at once breaks the spell that’s captured me. Nothing ever rides with the Gytrash. It’s always alone. This is no supernatural beast, only a man. A traveler taking the shortcut from Millcote.

As with the great dog, I’m nothing to man or horse. They pass, and I resume my errand.

But the eerie sound of animal despair stops me. The man calls out, “What the devil?” I turn to see horse and rider fall in a terrible crash to the ground, slipping on thin ice which has glazed the cobblestones.

The dog comes bounding back, frantic over its master’s predicament. It barks until the hills echo the sound. Then it runs again to me, the only help at hand. My heart races, but I can see the poor animal is no danger to me. It’s only worried about its master. The man struggles vigorously to right himself. He can’t be hurt much.

Still I ask, “Are you injured, sir?”

He swears at earth and sky and keeps at it for a few sentences.