Thornfield Hall (5 page)

But now I have no more impatience for the coming of the governess. For, in the most unlikely of places, I have found a friend. It happened in this way. A day of blustery autumn squalls had kept the house filled and the park and gardens empty at Thornfield: Mademoiselle Blanche, in all her finery, had no desire to step into puddles or subject her coiffure to the high winds that raced across the moor and stripped leaves from the trees in Papa's proud avenue; and her mother, Lady Ingram, along with the other guests, had settled in the red and white drawing room, a room I was not allowed on pain of death to enter. “Do remove the brat from here,” I heard Miss Blanche cry out on those occasions when I persuaded Leah to dress me up in the rose organdy Papa had brought me back from Paris, a sure tribute to his undying love for Maman and for their darling,
petite
Adèle. “The child gets on my nerves”—these were the words she invariably used; but when I said to La Fairfax that I had no wish for this monster as my step
maman,
the housekeeper would smooth her apron and look away, muttering that there would be no step
maman
in sight, the way
things were at Thornfield Hall; and as I had no intimation of the good woman's meaning, the subject of the approaching nuptials of Monsieur Rochester would be abandoned yet again. So I felt myself neither welcomed nor dismissed when I entered the red and white drawing room in my party frock; for, after all, Mademoiselle Ingram had less right than I to be there, for all her languid occupation of the big sofa right under the window. Was I not the daughter of the house? And did it not seem increasingly unlikely that Blanche would reign as chatelaine? Yet, as so often in this puzzling
maison de campagne,
which is neither castle nor manor house, I saw Monsieur Rochester obey Miss Blanche as if she were indeed his chosen bride; and he would pick me up and forcibly throw me into the hall, as if I were no more than an unwanted puppy. It is true to say that until I made my new friend here, I had as little notion of my place as the weathervane high on Papa's battlements, turning and turning in the wind.

On this particular day, as I say, the house was filled to over-flowing with people who had as little capacity for amusing themselves as sheep shut up in a pen. When I considered the
jeux de cartes,
the charades, and the operettas Maman and Jenny would stage on rainy Sundays as the dull gentlemen and their wives knelt at prayer in the church of Saint-Germain en Laye, or as the great chimes of Notre-Dame sounded out across the city, bidding clowns and actors, gamblers and dancers to abandon their frivolity and invest in the life after death—when I thought of all the amusements we contrived, I felt true pity for these
anglais
and their inability to do more than stuff down
le rosbif
at luncheon and yawn all day as the rain came down outside. I had learned to occupy, even to fascinate, myself by exploring the ancestral home of
mon cher
Papa, at those times when Yorkshire threatened to engulf us with its gloom and downpours. For me, the great hall with its oak staircase was as full of excitement and promise as a
child's toy theater (such as Papa had bought me, from a rare visit to London, red cardboard, gold paper proscenium, and all). Which door would I enter, from that square hall that was so forbidding to enter from outside that Madame Fairfax said she could swear the ghost of old
Grandmère
Rochester lingered there, beneath her portrait in the rope of cold pearls? (For I was not afraid: if this is my home, I shall occupy it as my ancestors have done.) Which dark, somber day will have me try the door that leads upward, to the servants' staircase I have seen a strange woman come down—followed by Grace, she who fills her tankard on the half hour while Madame Fairfax clucks her tongue and who comes to pull the stranger back up again, with as little courtesy as Papa and Mademoiselle Ingram practice on me? It was that day, just less than a week ago and at the time of the Ingram stay here at Thornfield Hall, that I showed those who suffered from ennui how to find novelty and pleasure, at even the saddest and drabbest of times.

Mademoiselle—she who dreams she will be the fiancée of the squire—is in one of her moods today. La Fairfax teaches me that “squire” is the word that describes Papa, but I do not like it: Papa is a milord, as Maman and Jenny both knew, for all their impatience with his rude and rough ways. A squire is a countryman, a man who lives with his pigs and cows, or so it sounds to me, and Papa travels the world. The grand tour has opened before him, and he has returned with marble statues and pictures as wide and long as colonnaded streets and mountain ranges: Europe has offered its treasures to Papa. Mademoiselle, as I say, is in a bad mood and has just had the temerity and ill breeding to eject me once more from the drawing room, so I find myself, on this cold and overcast day, alone and forgotten in the square hall. Blanche will never be Madame Rochester, that is certain; and just as I stand shivering in the white silk mousseline with the cherries and rosebuds appliquéd on the hem and attempt to imagine a good prank
to play on the haughty beauty, the door that leads to the servants' staircase opens, and a flash of a dirty petticoat shows, before its owner stumps out into the hall, empty tankard in hand. Grace—for it is she—ignores me as she makes for the kitchen, though why she hasn't gone straight down to take her supply from the cellars I don't know. At the same time the door from the billiard room bursts open and the rest of the Ingram party comes out, bloated and yawning as usual, Grace disappearing from sight as they emerge.

This is my chance to bring some life and laughter to the wretched
anglais
. Doesn't Papa remember, when we used to play
cache-cache
at the house where Maman lived and she would sometimes allow him to climb right up into her bedroom, when we all played the game? Won't Papa follow, when he hears me cry, as La Fairfax had told me were the words, “Hide and seek! Catch me if you can!”

Papa did not come from the red and white drawing room, where he sat with a mournful expression, listening to Blanche at her interminable airs on the piano. But the rest of the party did: within one minute, or so it seemed, a whole herd of young men and silly girls in dresses with the puffed sleeves we have so long ago discarded in Paris are chasing me up the narrow servants' staircase to the top of the house. And I am too breathless—too excited and even afraid—to stop and look back and arrest them as they rush upward. For I, too, am ignorant of what lies here, in the domain guarded by Grace and never referred to by Madame Fairfax, as if a whole story of Thornfield Hall simply, and just because she had decided thus, had ceased to exist. If I am to hide, what and whom is it they must seek? For I hear the screams of excitement, that I lead them to the ghost—“Oh, it's Edward's grandmother, the housekeeper told me so”—as I mount, and emerge at last onto
a landing that even I, in all my explorations of the Hall, have never seen.

It is dark up here, the ceilings are low, and it is some time before I see the landing, which, unlike the rooms in this fine house, is carpeted in something hard—like matting put down for beasts, I cannot stop myself from thinking; this tough straw is not for the likes of Mademoiselle Ingram and her friends. Light comes in from mansard windows—such as Nadar worked by, poor Nadar who lived for the good strong light of day. Pictures, some so tall they must have been sent up here when they were no longer à la mode—some of ladies and gentlemen, all sad and somber as this house lost in the dark moors would make them—hang unobserved on the sloping walls; and even as I run past, I see the features of Monsieur de Rochester (as I secretly know him, for Papa is as noble as Maman's vicomte) there, though not my own, for all I try to grimace into the frames.

Why has it become so silent? The footsteps of the young men and the scurrying girls are muffled now, and I realize they have run off in the opposite direction, drawn, I suppose, by the fact that the passage opens out there, promising further rooms and antique furniture to exclaim over: it is possible to hear, in the distance, one of Mademoiselle Blanche's chosen confidantes cry out in delight over a sewing basket set in a marquetry table, a rubbishy thing poor Irène at home would have discarded long ago. Then the troupe meets someone—Grace perhaps, on her way back up the stairs with her jug of porter—and a silence falls, this time broken only by murmurs of apology: Madame Fairfax, maybe, coming into the terrain she will never mention, to throw out those who have no right to go in search of the Thornfield Hall ghost. I stop and find that my head touches the ceiling above me, and the passage has narrowed before turning to yet another flight of steps,
these smaller still than those I have climbed to the landing behind me. Shall I return and explain to the good housekeeper that we play
cache-cache,
the game I tried to describe to her, when we sit by the fire in the evenings and Madame Fairfax says the governess will be here soon and I shall have more to occupy me than the recounting of my past life to an old woman who falls asleep? Am I to go in search of those English who hunt and cry “Tally ho!” when they are out in the field but look on me as invisible as a mouse? I am free now; I have no need to hide when no one comes to seek. And so it is that I fit my foot—small even for my age and height, as Jenny has informed me with one of her rare smiles—I place my foot on the stair and see that it covers the tread entirely, as if this way upward could be taken by none other than Adèle Varens, by
une petite fille,
by the child for whom it was fashioned—for so, as I climb on and on, this strange staircase seem to me to be.

After several twists and turns—and with any sound of Madame Fairfax or the retreating party entirely subdued and gone—I see a light ahead of me on the stairs and, as I turn the last, almost impossibly squeezed corner, a large window can be seen to shed its light on wall and staircase. The window is ajar, and the sill is easy—or easier—to step onto than the next, vertiginous step. Accordingly, as if I had known all along I must walk out onto the forbidden roof of Papa's house, I do so. The leads feel soft, as if melted by a sun seldom known to Thornfield; and they are bound, or confined, by lengths of piping, where I take care to walk, for fear of stumbling on the uneven flat surface. At first, anxious to preserve my balance, I do not look up. I know that a magnificent view will be my reward when I do, but the mock cannons, roughly hewn from gray stone, are all I permit myself in the early stages of my illicit visit to the roof. What if I were to fall? I can't help thinking of the trouble that would come to Madame Fairfax, of whom I
have become fond, in the absence of anyone else with whom to exchange affectionate gestures. I must take great care not to go tumbling down to the ground.

When at last I do look up, I see her. The purplish haze of heather on the moors, fading in the fast-encroaching winter but strong enough in color still to lend the air of an ocean painted by one who dreamed of foreign seas, stretches out behind her in the clear air. The thorn trees, parterres, fine vegetable gardens, and outbuildings of Thornfield Hall lie as neat as a child's toy on the land claimed from the wildness of the moors. The ornamental lake glitters like a teardrop put there by one of Maman's
amis
in Paris, on the waxen cheek of my favorite
poupée,
Christine. All is artificial, removed, minute—with the exception of the woman who stands facing me now, not six inches from the parapet. She is haggard, her black hair tumbles down her back, and she holds her arms out to me. She alone, on these battlements of Papa's where the guns cannot fire and the turrets, with their pepperpot hats, could sustain neither siege nor attack, is real. Behind her, like a backdrop in the Funambules, hangs the likeness of the landscape surrounding and enclosing Thornfield Hall. The woman, with faltering steps, approaches me.
“Mon doudou,”
she says, and her voice is thick, thicker than the voice of Grace when she has been at her porter and I'm hurried away from her, on the stairs. “
Viens,”
the strange woman says. Her accent places her somewhere in my memory, but I cannot for now think just where. She is French—that is all I know now—she is French, and she is my new friend, brought to me here on the roof of Thornfield Hall.

 

I soon learned how to keep the secret of the lady who lives out
on the parapet and battlements of the house Jenny says I must
think of as my home—but I cannot, I cannot. The
étrangère
(for I can see that poor Antoinette, as she tells me I can call her, is as much a stranger in this place as I am) has found a little
maison
all her own, in the turret, and here she has placed a quilt that is the color of the exotic flowers Maman preserved and brought back with her from the time she went to dance in Martinique, far, far away across the sea. My friend sleeps when the sun goes down, and I bring her food, smuggled up from the plain, horrible meals Leah takes up twice a day to the schoolroom. Leah is accustomed to seeing my plate go back still piled with the stews and overboiled legumes of this sad country, and I have had to pretend to an appetite I never had before. But it is worth the stories I must make up. Madame Fairfax also must believe I wish for time to study my English verbs, in preparation for the new governess, though she has come to see me, I know, as I really am, a child in need of company, a budding actress who desires an audience for the canzonets and lovesick ballads she was taught to sing at her mother's knee.

All this is worth the trouble. Antoinette is not like the English ladies: Blanche with her hauteur that chills me to the bone, even Madame F who looks right through me sometimes when I prattle on. Antoinette understands the colors, the muslins, silks, and satins I bring in, scraps from dresses now outgrown but kept—kept like the memories of Maman they bring each time I lift them from the drawer, in the tissue paper the maid Sophie provides for them. Antoinette, who speaks on occasion in a tongue I cannot understand—but then she laughs and returns to French or English; she says her patois is from an island where she will take me one day, a Windward island, as she calls it, where she was happy once—Antoinette will play with me and hold me close as if we had known each other in a time before either of us was brought here to the cold of Thornfield Hall. “
Chérie, doudou,
” she whispers to me, and I smell the firewater on her breath. And—when she thinks we
are about to be disturbed at our games high on the roof—“
Qui est là? Qui est là?
” she calls out, which reminds me so strongly of our parrot in the rue Vaugirard, Monsieur Punch, that I place them in my mind in the same landscape, where the hot-colored flowers Antoinette loves bloom all year long and the moths are as large as Papa's silk handkerchiefs.