Those last words came to me from behind; I was already running. Up the steps from the kitchen, across the hall, up the grand stairs, turning to Jane’s room, and stopping abruptly. Dare I risk waking her? I hardly gave it a second thought. I did knock, but immediately opened the door, envisioning her in bed, turning sleepily in surprise at the intrusion.
The bed was neatly made, the room in order, and Jane was not in sight. I opened the cupboard: Jane had so few clothes, and they all seemed to be there. No—her black silk dress was missing. I searched the meager rest of her things: she had taken nothing I had given her, and her trunks remained packed and locked, just where John and a stableboy had brought them back upstairs the day before. Perhaps she had just gone out for a morning stroll to clear her head? But even as I thought it, I knew it couldn’t be true, for why else the unlocked kitchen door, the missing bread? No, Jane had removed herself from temptation. From me.
I ran from the room, my mind at once full and blank, if such a thing is possible, and down the stairs and to the back entry, where I exchanged my ordinary boots for riding boots and threw on a jacket and made for the stable. A few moments later Mesrour and I were clattering out of the stable yard, with Pilot bounding beside us. But where to go? Where? I hesitated a moment, asking myself where Jane would go but finding no answer. Jane was, in some ways, still a mystery to me.
Not to a city, I thought. Not even to Millcote. Where? Where?
“Find Jane!” I ordered Pilot, knowing it was useless. He looked back at me, tongue flapping, joyous at the chance for a romp across the moors, but insensible to my pain. No, I would have to find her myself. Would she take the road or would she set off across the moors? Surely she was too smart to cross the moors, where she could so easily twist an ankle and fall, where the bogs could devour her. And so I spurred Mesrour into a gallop down the estate road; at the gate I turned instinctively not toward Millcote, but the opposite way. How far would she get? She had little enough money, I knew, since her salary would not yet come due for two more months. She must have had in hand only a pittance—not enough to survive on, not even for my resourceful Jane. God, we allow our people little enough; what do we expect them to live on? Damn it all!
I galloped ten miles at least on the road but saw no sign of her, and I knew it was impossible for her to have gone farther on foot, even if she had started out well before light. Did she go toward Millcote? Could she, in her desperation, have set out across the moor? Was she lying now in a gulley, having turned her ankle, unable to walk? Had she been accosted by someone living rough and been taken away against her will? I reined in Mesrour and looked about me. All was silent, save the cries of a pair of larks and the wind in the heath and the pant of Pilot at my foot.
“Jane!” I shouted, rising in the stirrups. “Jane!” But there was only silence to carry her name across the moor.
Witlessly, I spurred Mesrour onward, aimlessly, down into one dale and up onto another fell, until slowly it occurred to me that she might not be on foot at all. She might have taken a ride on a passing coach, or a farmer’s wagon bound for market. She might, by now, be past Millcote or on her way to Harrogate; she could be halfway to Doncaster or nearly to Leeds. She could be anywhere.
She could be lost to me.
She could be lost. How could I give up the search?
I could not. I rode this way and that. I stopped a coach-and-four with an irascible passenger but a more kindly coachman to ask if they had seen her; I queried a passing tinker; I spoke to a couple of ruffians who were more drunk than alive; I asked at the George Inn in Millcote and at the Royal Oak at the crossroads. No one had seen her. It was as if she had vanished from the face of the earth.
I returned home well after dark, tired and hungry. I told myself I would find her there: perhaps she had had second thoughts. Perhaps it was all a misunderstanding, and she had only gone for a long walk after all.
But, of course, she had not returned, and no word had come from her. She had forsaken me; my love for her had not been enough. She did not love me as I loved her. She had been within my grasp and now was torn from me—forever. And it was Bertha who had caused this, my manic wife, the woman I was stuck with for eternity. In a frenzy I stormed up the stairs and burst into her chamber. I ignored Grace and charged straight into Bertha’s bedroom. She had been sleeping, but my angry shouts wakened her, and she cowered in her bed as I screamed at her that all this was her fault, that her dalliance with my brother had ruined my life, her madness had cost me my one chance at happiness, that I was sorry that I had ever laid eyes on her, that I wished I had never come to her blasted Jamaica, that she and her greedy, selfish son had destroyed me.