Thornfield Hall (36 page)

When I had dressed her in a clean white gown Mr Merryman came to help me put the body in the coffin. I used the time we were together to feed him some snippets of information about the fire, details he could weave into the story he was making to entertain his customers for years to come. Mr Rochester was far from perfect but he had many good qualities. I did not want him to go down in history as a drunken sot who burned his own house down.

‘You remember the third-floor rooms at the front, don't you Mr Merryman?' Indeed he did. ‘That was where the fire started. The lady lived up there. We had some nice hangings up there. She must have set fire to them. And the bed in the governess's room next to me. That was set on fire too. I expect she did that for sheer wickedness. I'd have burnt in my own bed if Mr Rochester had not been so prompt to save me.' Between us we lifted the body of Martha. ‘Gently now. There. Poor girl. She is at peace now.'

Girl! I called her a girl! I should have said ‘lady'. Mr Merryman appeared not to have noticed the slip of my tongue. My fingers trembled as I arranged her hands. I was in a panic that he would notice there was no wedding ring on her finger. He was peering closely into the coffin. I felt his breath on my neck as he leant over to examine her face. Would he see beneath the scars and the crust of grime the features of Martha, the Martha he had known briefly all those years ago when he was butler to my first Mr Rochester?

I need not have worried; he saw what he wanted to see.

‘She is very dark is she not? You can see the wickedness in her face even in death. Mr Rochester is more to be pitied than blamed.'

I breathed a sigh of relief. Like a lamb to slaughter he had obligingly come to the right conclusion from the evidence I had placed before his eyes. I hoped the rest of the neighbourhood would follow his example. ‘Fasten down the lid, Mr Merryman. There is no one else who will come to pay their respects to this poor creature.'

With every turn of the screws I felt a weight fall from my shoulders. My last and greatest fear still remained like a ball of ice where my heart should be. I feared that as the ruins of Thornfield Hall cooled a search party would find among the debris a tiny blackened corpse, a little life cruelly destroyed. If baby James really had perished in the fire, by the laws of nature I should place him in this very coffin so he could rest on his mother's heart.

The next day the coffin was loaded onto Mr Merryman's cart, the same one that had carried us away from the fire. As I sat on the board next to Mr Merryman I used the time to rehearse the story of the great fire at Thornfield Hall until he was word perfect. How he had arrived first, long before the fire engines, how he had seen the madwoman on the roof. Indeed he had seen Mr Rochester climb to the roof and struggle with the huge dark woman with the great mane of hair. He had seen her fall and smash upon the paving stones.

He startled me by asking about Mrs Poole, the madwoman's keeper; he had learned his lesson too well. I had no role prepared for Grace in the story. I could not let her be trapped in the building to be consumed by the flames. The search of the ruins would reveal no body. I racked my brains for a
plausible answer. I was sure I was the only one to see both Grace and Bertha depart. The new servants were too busy with each other and their complaints about their treatment to concern themselves with the comings and goings of the residents of the top floor. They had not noticed the absence of Grace or Bertha when we counted heads before we fled the burning Thornfield Hall. How could I remove Grace from the scene without setting off a hue and cry in search for her? Inspiration came.

‘Gin,' I explained promptly. ‘She had a weakness for gin. I expect she over-indulged and fell asleep. Woke to find the house in flames. Knew she should have watched the madwoman better. Fled in shame at the dereliction of her duty.' I crossed my fingers as I spoke and asked for Grace to forgive me for the calumny.

Mr Merryman nodded wisely and a great smile of satisfaction spread across his face. He had the perfect story for his customers now. It had drama, a hero – himself – death and fire engines. Best of all, the whole catastrophe was the fault of some women, one mad and one drunk. How they would enjoy that in the snug bar! The men would puff on their pipes, nod knowingly and order another pint of the landlord's best. After a happy evening basking in masculine superiority they would go home and regale their wives with the story. The wives, isolated in their cottages and farmhouses, would lap up this dramatic tale of fire, death and bigamy. This authorized version would soon spread round the whole neighbourhood.

It was a motley group of servants who collected in the church for the funeral service. The poor souls were dressed in the clothes
they had scrambled into on the night of the fire, supplemented by a few garments borrowed from the villagers' scant wardrobes. I cannot say that my well-worn and shabby clothing was what I would have chosen for the occasion. It was bitter cold in the church and we shivered in our raggedy outfits. Many of the servants wore black armbands to show respect for the mad mistress they had not met but thought they were burying.

Considering the circumstances we made a respectable show of mourning. Sometimes appearances are more important than motive. It did not matter that it was the promise of their wages and compensation for their losses that had brought them to the funeral service. Or that I had misled them as to the identity of the body. A Rochester, even such an unsatisfactory one, was entitled to a certain amount of pomp.

We all stood with bowed heads as the coffin was carried in. Mr Wood set a cracking pace as he strode down the aisle in front of it. It was clear that he wanted this service to be over as quickly as possible. I was surprised to see Mr Carter walking behind the coffin in the position usually taken by the chief mourner. He carried his black top hat pressed against his chest and for once he was wearing dark trousers, not his riding breeches. As he reached the front pew where I sat he did a swift left turn and came to join me.

Under cover of all the rustling and coughing as we took our seats I asked him if he had come to represent Mr Rochester.

‘You could say that,' he told me out of the side of his mouth.

‘I will say exactly that,' I told him. ‘It is what the world wants to hear. Mr Rochester was too ill to attend his wife's funeral so he sent his friend to take his place.' The conventions would be satisfied.

‘Course, you could say he wants to be very sure that she is securely boxed up and buried very deep.'

‘You could say that, but we won't.'

Meanwhile Mr Wood gabbled his way through the beautiful prose of the funeral service. Was he taking his revenge on Mr Rochester by deliberately mangling the words? I wondered if it was any consolation to poor, silly, dead Martha that at last she was joining the gentry. Her body was to be interred in the Rochesters' tomb and would decay in the company of the bones of the local aristocracy. She had nursed an ambition to move up in the world and in death she had at last achieved it.

When the service was over Mr Carter said farewell to me and hurried after Mr Wood, who was speeding out of church with his surplice flapping about him. Before the cleric reached the church door I heard Carter's great voice braying out how pleased he was that the vicar had seen reason and that he could give a good report on him to Mr Rochester. He made sure that none of us was left in doubt that the vicar took his orders from Mr Rochester rather than God.

Afterwards at the back of the chilly church I used a pew to spread out my calculations and the coins and notes that the staff were due. Most were grateful for the generosity of their payments. A surprising number already had offers of work or were happy to return to their parents' home until they had replaced their uniforms. The handsome footman was on his way to work for the mighty Clifford family. He was an exact match in height for one of their existing footmen. The not-so-handsome footman received a generous bonus for saving Mr Rochester from the flames. It seemed only fair. He was certainly not going to get any credit for his bravery in Mr Merryman's version of the story; that heroic action was sure to be undertaken by the landlord himself.

John Green came after I had finished handing out the money. I was glad Mr Wood had left the clerk to deal with the
paperwork; he had been so kind to Leah and behaved so well after the notoriously interrupted wedding.

‘Strange to see business done in a church. A little like the money changers in the temple,' he remarked.

‘Yes. You have no objection to my paying these people what is their due? They have lost all their clothes and belongings.'

He shook his head. ‘There is no better place than a church for such a deed.' When I had finished saying farewell to the servants it was time to deal with the paperwork of death. Mr Green had his pen and his book ready. ‘I must fill in the details of the lady's death in the Parish Register. Can you give me her full name?'

That was a nasty moment. I could not avoid giving Bertha's name. What a storm it would cause if I suddenly decided to say it was Martha in the coffin! There was no going back. I took a breath. ‘She is Bertha Antoinette Rochester. She was born in Spanish Town, Jamaica.'

The pen scratched as he wrote the words. ‘She was the wife of Edward Fairfax Rochester?'

If only she had not been! What a deal of misery would have been saved. I nodded and he wrote in the date of the fire as the date of her death. I had to do some calculations to work out a year for her birth. I guessed she was between thirty five and forty. I knew she was a little older than Mr Rochester. In the end we settled on 1794. I could not give a month. Bertha did not concern herself with birthdays.

I checked that the clerk knew the exact wording to be inscribed on the vault. He allowed himself a brief smile. ‘Just wife. No beloveds or dearly missed. And the date of her death. We do not want there to be a repeat of the unfortunate events in this church when Mr Rochester tried to marry Miss Eyre.'

I pictured Mr Rochester if he found his beloved Jane. He would bring her to inspect the vault and point to the inscription.
There engraved in stone for all to see would be the incontestable record of the demise of Bertha Rochester. I asked the efficient clerk if he would make a copy of the entry in the register of deaths, so I could send one to Mr Rochester. He made one so quickly and so easily I was emboldened to ask, ‘Will you make one for me? I will keep it safe in case the other one is lost. Mr Rochester has lost his sight and is very ill at the moment. He may not appreciate the importance of the document.' How glibly the small untruths slipped from my tongue once that first great falsehood had passed my lips!

Mr Green obliged me, as people so often do if asked politely. I folded the piece of paper and slotted it between the pages of my bible. It made a fitting companion to the flimsy first letter I received from Mr Rochester where he announced he was bringing a mad lady to live at Thornfield Hall. For some reason I had kept that letter. The two documents lay side by side, the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega of Mr Rochester's mad wife.

Mr Merryman drove me back to the Rochester Arms. I fed him a further detail to add to his story. Terribly injured though he was, Mr Rochester had sent the surgeon to represent him at the funeral of his poor mad wife. I was anxious that Mr Merryman include this fact in his account. The rehabilitation of my former employer's reputation in the neighbourhood was the final service I could undertake for him. By the time we reached The Rochester Arms Mr Merryman had his lines by heart.

I may have led Mr Merryman by the nose over the events of the fire but when it came to travelling by stagecoach he had the advantage of me; he was an expert on the subject. The coaches regularly stopped at The Rochester Arms to water the horses. Passengers could be picked up or dropped off there. ‘You must pay four pounds for an inside ticket if you possibly can,' the
landlord urged me. ‘It's only two pounds for an outside ticket, but it is fearsome cold up there on the top. And they put the livestock up there once they've filled the boot.'