Thornfield Hall (30 page)

The pain diminished and her body relaxed. I took my hand away and whispered to her that something had gone wrong with the wedding, that Mr Rochester and Miss Eyre were here on the third floor and that we risked being discovered.

‘Miss Eyre is she still? Not Mrs Rochester?'

I nodded and she gave a hoarse laugh that was interrupted by another pang. Again I clamped my hand across her mouth. As the pain receded she looked slyly at me. ‘Was she wearing her veil?'

‘No. How did you know?'

‘That'd be telling.' She smirked at me. Martha loved to feel superior to others, to know something they did not. Her smugness even protected her from her pains for a moment. Then the pains returned and she made so much noise I feared discovery and covered her mouth. In between screams I struggled with her for possession of the towel. I would hold it over her mouth and she would try to tear it from my hands.

From Bertha's room along the corridor came muffled wails and much female shouting. The baritone voices of the men blended together to provide a background to the shrill screams that I recognized as Bertha's on a bad day. Whoever had alerted
Mr Wood to her existence had done her a bad turn. The arrival of both Mr Rochester and her hated brother had proved too much for her frail mind.

Distracted by this gloomy thought my attention slipped from the task at hand. Martha with a sudden lunge pulled the towel from my grasp and as I tried to suppress her scream she bit my hand, sinking her teeth into the flesh at the root of my left thumb. Blood spurted out. My rage was such that I could not help myself. My right arm found it had a mind of its own. It swung backwards and then forwards to land a stinging slap on Martha's cheek. Her jaw snapped open and I retrieved my other hand.

I was immediately ashamed of myself. Slapping her while in the pangs of labour must count as the very worst crime in my list of offences against Martha. I could not help noticing that her piercing shrieks were now more subdued; groans rather than screams. I held the towel ready but did not feel the need to use it. Her complaints did not seem loud enough to penetrate through Grace's bedroom next door and along the corridor to Bertha's room where bedlam still reigned.

My imprisonment in that room seemed to last for hours before the door opened and Grace appeared. Never have I been so pleased to see her. Her strong face and her calm manner reassured me before she even spoke a word. She held a bowl of gruel out to Martha and suggested she try to eat something. The girl struggled to sit up and for a brief time seemed to forget her pains as Grace spooned the unappetizing stuff into her mouth. I surreptitiously inspected Martha's left cheek for my handprint but failed to find evidence of my crime. The whole of the girl's face was swollen and livid.

‘Bertha is getting dressed,' Grace told me. ‘She was quite wonderful in our bit of play acting. This was part of the charade
as well.' Grace waved the sticky spoon of white gruel at me. ‘I pretended I was cooking it for our lunatic. You might as well have it, Martha.'

If Grace thought to quell my anxiety she was not doing a very good job of it. Bertha crept quietly into the room. She was dressed and her hair was smoothed back under her cap. She took up the seat next to Martha and returned to bathing her face and hands with cool water as if there had been no interruption to her self-imposed task. She began to sing one of her strange melodic songs whose words we could not understand.

‘Explain,' I commanded Grace.

‘Like the battle of Waterloo it was a close-run thing. I was keeping lookout while Bertha kept an eye on Martha. We both wanted to see the new Mrs Rochester return from church. When I saw the way Mr Rochester sped up the path and the three men chasing behind him I realized something was wrong. Bertha recognized her brother; she hates him worse than poison. She did not want him to know of the new life we have planned.

‘We realized the brother must have stopped the wedding. He brought a lawyer with him, a Mr Biggs or something. Rochester wanted to show Jane – and the parson and Mr Biggs – that his wife is wildly deranged. His justification for attempting to marry Jane is that his wife is mad. Quick as a flash Bertha works it out. “He needs mad wife. I act mad.” She pulls her hair out of its plait and shreds her fingers through it. She's still in her white nightgown, not properly dressed, so it is easy to look wild. She throws the remains of the tea over it. Makes a nice brown stain. I fling some old medicine on the fire to make a bad smell and pretend to be cooking gruel. We can just hear Martha screaming so Bertha shrieks and gibbers to cover the sounds.'

Bertha stopped singing. ‘I have to keep them away from here. No baby safe near my brother. Not Mr Rochester either.'
Her voice was icy. She turned back to Martha and took up her sweet song again. It was as if a curtain had come down in her mind.

Grace looked at her charge with a fond eye. ‘She has convinced them all that she is still raving mad. She went for Mr Rochester's throat and provoked him into tying her up. Miss Eyre was horrified. The brother was terrified. It was fiendishly clever. Miss Eyre may feel so sorry for Mr Rochester that she will agree to something less than marriage. He will look like a man more to be pitied than condemned. The brother will go away never to return now that he has done such damage. Better to be pitied for being tied to a madwoman than despised for being a common or garden bigamist.'

A sudden shriek from the bed startled us. Bertha stopped singing. Grace pulled back the bedclothes. ‘Go for more towels,' she ordered Bertha, ‘and some hot water. Here. Take this.' She handed her the key that opened all the doors. ‘Make sure the door is unlocked so the midwife can get here. Where is that dratted woman?'

Bertha looked down at the key in the palm of her hand. Never before had she been entrusted with it. Then she set about the task she had been given.

There followed several minutes that I never want to live through again. All I can say is that my best black silk dress that I put on especially for the wedding was ruined. There was much noise and a great deal of confusion. None of us really knew what we were doing. The end result was that a very small bloodstained baby boy lay in the bed between Martha's legs with a grisly purple tube sprouting from his navel.

‘That's what I like. All the dirty work done before I arrive.' The midwife breezed in followed by Bertha. The midwife took a quick look at the situation and produced a pair of scissors to
cut the cord. When the baby was free she handed him to me. ‘Put him over there.' She waved a casual hand at the washstand in the corner and turned her attention to Martha, who was no longer purple but pale and unusually quiet.

I turned away with the little body in my bare hands and found Bertha holding out a towel to wrap the poor creature in. He was a strange blue colour and his folded limbs reminded me of nothing so much as a skinned rabbit. Between us Bertha and I wrapped him in the towel but I could not bear to set him on the cold and unforgiving marble top of the washstand. I held him in my arms and Bertha stretched out one of her gentle giant's fingers to smooth his wrinkled face. The midwife bent over Martha and spoke quietly to her. Her voice was reassuring but her words were not – though Martha may have found them so. They made my blood run cold. With a casual, ‘I don't think he will last very long,' the midwife condemned the tiny scrap of life in my hands.

A huge sob burst up through my chest and forced itself out of my mouth. I had lost my beautiful little girl; now we were to lose this poor wizened little boy. Tears streamed down my face as I passed the child to Bertha. She held him in one of her strong and capable hands. With the first two fingers of her other hand she massaged him firmly but gently along his tiny spine. I watched, helpless. He was small but perfectly formed, yet the midwife had condemned him without a second glance. There must be something very wrong with this baby. It dawned on me then what was wrong. It was the silence. A new person had arrived in the room without making a sound. The baby had not cried.

I am a parson's widow and I was raised as a churchgoer. We cannot escape the habits of a lifetime. I looked round for some clean, warm water. I dipped my fingers in and sprinkled the tiny
head with its thin strands of dark hair plastered to its skull. I spoke the words of baptism or as near as I could get them from memory. ‘I baptize you in the name of the Lord.' I could not remember any more; I hoped that would be enough.

‘A name. He must have a name.'

‘You are right, Bertha. He must have a name.' I floundered, unable to think of a single boy's name.

‘James. Call him James.'

At the sound of his name a thin wail rose from the little body that lay in Bertha's hands and our tears flowed even more strongly.

I suppose I should not blame the midwife. In her trade she must grow hardened to the misfortunes of others. When she came to claim her fee, which she did remarkably quickly, I did not think she deserved it; she had done very little work and had caused me much distress. I took her down to my room and handed over the money and wished her good riddance. It was tea time so I went to the servants' hall to check that the routine of mealtimes was carried out as normally as possible under the strange circumstances that ruled that day.

Leah was my most reliable informant and I found her sewing baby clothes for her own baby. She was pleased to hear that Martha was delivered of a boy. I played down the perilous nature of the birth. I did not like to think of Leah enduring the pain that I had just witnessed tear through Martha. Leah would not make such a performance of it, I was sure. She would bite her lip and perhaps groan softly. There would be none of the high-pitched screams, the self-pitying wails of anguish and the
dreadful curses that Martha produced. But then Leah wanted her baby. Martha did not want hers.

The great news of the day was of course the abandoned wedding and the revelation of the existence of Mr Rochester's first wife. The new servants were agog. The handsome new footman was cooling his heels in the kitchen instead of riding behind the carriage to the continent. The two horses were back in the stable and Old John was whistling as he went about his business. Leah had made sure that food was set out in the dining room at lunch time but no one had touched it. Miss Eyre had shut herself in her room and Mr Rochester was sitting outside her door like a faithful hound.

The clerk, John Green, had called in the afternoon to set the record straight on certain matters. Leah had taken the liberty of offering Mr Green tea in my room. Did I mind? I assured her she had done the right thing. He had completed her marriage certificate and it had formed a bond between them. The result was that he confided to Leah more than he might otherwise. He had been present in the church in the morning and revealed all that had happened.

It had been very dramatic. A solicitor, a Mr Briggs, had stepped forward just after Mr Wood had asked if there were any impediment to the marriage. The clergyman did not anticipate any objections and had started on the words of the wedding vows when the solicitor stopped the proceedings. Mr Wood was always keen to curry favour with the gentry but even he could not ignore the objection. Mr Mason had then reluctantly and in apparent fear of Mr Rochester borne witness to the effect that his sister had married Mr Rochester fifteen years ago and he had seen her alive and living at Thornfield Hall three months ago.

The unwitting cause of these revelations was Miss Eyre herself. John Green had wormed the full story out of Mr Wood.
It appeared that Miss Eyre had written to an uncle in Madeira and by some evil fortune Mr Mason had been on the island and with that same uncle at the very moment the news arrived. An ill wind had blown him back to England in time to prevent the match. It was agreed by all that Miss Eyre was a completely innocent party. John Green was most anxious that we should be made aware of this.

As if I was not most painfully aware of Miss Eyre's innocence. She was the only one of us with clean hands. We had all colluded and connived, balancing our bible oaths against the legality of a marriage and the happiness of others. Poor girl! My heart went out to her, alone in her room while the man she loved sat outside separated from her by something more substantial than a wooden door. The great powers of church and state divided them irrevocably.

I resolved to go to Jane and offer what I could in the way of assistance though I feared she would blame me for keeping her in ignorance. When I arrived the chair was outside her door in the corridor but Mr Rochester had gone. I tapped at the door but there was no answer. I tried the door, which opened at my touch. The room was empty. I tiptoed to the library and peeped in.

Miss Eyre and Mr Rochester sat at the far end deep in heartfelt conversation. Mr Rochester was passionate and energetic in his speech and Jane was tearful and shaking with emotion. There was no point in my blundering into this intimate dialogue. I left them in their agony and made my way up to the third floor. I might be of use there.