My Mr. Rochester 1(34)

“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.