Wild Island (16 page)

‘
J'ai faim
,' she said. ‘Coffee. Chicken, bread, melon?'

I wanted to shout for someone, run in all directions. I hurried in search of the doctor. I found him still in Rochester's cabin—in his shirtsleeves, leaning over the sick man, who was waxy, deathly pale. Jane was beside him. They had evidently been there all night. She had a bowl of blood and rags on her lap and looked nearly as ill as Rochester.

When James Seymour saw Bertha his astonishment was extreme—I think he had not quite believed me—but it quickly turned to professional interest. Water she must have at once, he said, only sip by sip, and later, weak beef tea. Her constitution must not be shocked by too much sudden nourishment. Bertha made faces at the water and accepted a spoonful of beef tea before her eyelids began to droop. I thought she was relapsing into her former state, but Seymour pointed out that this was a different kind of sleep. She lay curled on her side, her brown face suffused by a flush. I could not help wondering how she would manage the world this time when it had driven her mad before.

Our fellow passengers greeted the news with varying degrees of wonder, except St John, who said calmly, ‘We pray for miracles and yet do not truly expect them. The proper response is not to wonder, but to rejoice and give thanks to the Lord.'

A few days later, after attending early to Bertha, I left her dozing and went along to Rochester's cabin, where the doctor was generally to be found at any hour these days. Jane was there too. I began to say that Bertha—Anna—seemed stronger this morning, but as I spoke I saw their eyes leave me and fasten on something behind. It was Bertha, dragging herself slowly along the short passageway like a wounded creature. She pushed me away when I went to help, and sagged against the door of Rochester's cabin, gripping the frame and staring inside.

‘Jane Eyre,' she said.

Jane clasped the jar of leeches as though she might need to throw it at the madwoman, but Anna had turned to the doctor.

‘I do not know you,' she said. And then, to the sick man, ‘but I know you, Edward Rochester.' Tears rolled down her face. ‘Where is Rowland?'

She began to shake in great palsied shudders and sank to the floor. I knelt beside her and said we were sailing to another country to find him. Mrs Tench came with hot water just then, and together we helped Anna back to our cabin.

I will not recount every small degree by which she came to the eating of broth and egg (she tightened her lips against gruel like a child) nor how the doctor insisted she build up her strength in short periods of exercise, but the result was that after ten days, Seymour declared she might dress and come in to dinner for an hour.

Clothes were a problem we had not considered when we brought her aboard. It had seemed so certain she would die. Although she had lost a good deal of flesh during the months of her strange state, she was still a large woman. Mrs Chesney, Polly, and Liddy went off to forage and returned with Louisa Wallace and arms full of clothing.

Anna sat on the side of the bed turning over the offerings, making little noises of astonishment and disapproval and muttering in French.
I began to understand that she expected to see the high-waisted fashions of fourteen years before: the style of her old red dress, too low-cut for these newly prudish days. In the year '37 the correct shape for a woman was that of an hourglass: a yard across the shoulders and hips, a handspan at the waist. Skirts were not yet as long as they later became, did not yet conceal the shoes. The expanse from neck to ankle was covered during the day. For evening, the shoulders and upper bosom might be bared if they were alabaster white and wreathed in silk flowers or lace. The
gigot
, or leg o' mutton, sleeve was still present, but waning.

At first it was just Anna we draped and pinned, while Adèle, Polly and Liddy knelt on the bunks dressing up Natty and each other, giggling, sorting through the clothes. Then Mrs Chesney tried on a dark green walking costume belonging to Louisa's mother, which Louisa meant to have remade. Bess Chesney believed she might squeeze into it if we laced her stays a little tighter, and what a surprise for Chesney if she went in to dinner like that!

Polly draped herself as a bride in Mrs Chesney's vast lace petticoat and was overtaken by hysteria. Liddy, wearing Mrs Chesney's striped poplin with a pillow underneath, showed an unexpected talent for comedy—and suddenly we were all helpless with laughter, gasping and wiping the tears from our eyes. Bertha alone did not laugh. She gazed from one to the other of us with an expression of mild puzzlement, but soon returned her attention to the clothing.

At the time I thought this wild mirth came from the monotony of the voyage, but looking back I think it was more. Seeing Anna lying still all those weeks, we had known in our hearts that any woman might come to this fate: madwoman, invalid, sleeping princess. Now it appeared that if Anna could escape the prison of Bertha, then anything was possible. We might each be more than we had imagined. We were seized with jubilant excitement.

No amount of thought could solve the problem of shoes. Her feet were a size larger than mine and three sizes larger than Mrs Chesney's.
She was forced to go barefoot until a crewman cobbled her a pair of leather sandals. Odd, but serviceable.

Accounts of Anna's progress had been relayed to the gentlemen, but only the doctor had seen her. For her
debut
Anna chose a red dress of Mrs Chesney's. It was too short—Anna was a tall woman—but would pass with a long black petticoat underneath. I looped her hair back into a coronet of braids. With a pair of Louisa's silver earrings and a dusting of pearl powder, she looked suddenly like a woman of consequence. Not English, something more dusky and exotic. We stared. She viewed herself piece by satisfactory piece in Mrs Chesney's hand-mirror, then brought it up and stared at her own face.

‘
Madame, que vous êtes belle
!' cried Adèle, curtseying.

And now she did seem like a wonderful large doll: our creation. At the dinner hour when we arrived with her, each dressed in borrowed garments, our appearance produced as much astonishment among the gentlemen as we could have wished, and the occasion became a party, a rout. The gentlemen fell in with our mood, even St John. The Captain hoped Mrs Rochester felt more herself, and pressed her to take a little chicken (two non-layers from the hen coop sacrificed to the occasion) while she smiled cautiously, answered little, exclaimed in French from time to time. ‘
Vooly-voo
?' cried Mr Chesney, offering turnip. The meal passed in high good humour, subdued only by the knowledge that the doctor's place was empty because he and Jane were still with Rochester.

Wine was liberally served at dinner on the
Adastra
, and I suddenly wondered whether Anna might imbibe too freely, but she drank only two glasses. After the meal we went on deck to an afternoon of tropical warmth, with a blue sky, milky at the horizon, and a light wind. We were under full canvas, which rippled and snapped and sang. Anna clung to us, turned her face up to the air and closed her eyes, breathing deeply as though she smelt a divine perfume, although it was only the sour mixture we were accustomed to, of brine and tar and salt-pork boiling in the galley. She seemed to draw the warmth inside her, and for the rest of the voyage she was like a cat, always
curled up in a warm spot, blinking gently, smiling. She preferred to doze randomly through all the twenty-four hours. When I became too tired to stay with her, Mrs Tench, Mrs Farley, or the Captain on his night watch, became her attendants. He treated her with courtly politeness as though she were some beautiful, large, damaged creature from a different order of being—which, in a sense, she was.

I came on deck a week later to find Jane and Anna standing at the rail with their backs towards me, two yards apart and not talking. They had met and murmured brief civilities, but showed no inclination to converse further. Jane, in any case, was generally with Rochester, whose condition had not changed.

As I approached them, I thought how profoundly different they were: Jane small, pale, slim as a child; Anna tall, brown and statuesque. Jane wore dove grey, the curved seams moulding her narrow body tightly from neck to waist, and yet a vital spirit animated that unremarkable exterior. Anna was in a flowing red sacque, bright and loose, but the embers of life burned very low within her, or as the Captain had said to me quietly, ‘Hatches still battened down after great storm, signs of devastation apparent'. Jane wore her calico bonnet, while Anna's black hair was pulled back severely into a knot high at the back, with a green silk sash around it, the ends floating free. Jane looked utterly English, made of sugar and spice and all things nice, but also of prayer books and duties, tea and sombre warnings. What Anna was made of, we had yet to discover.

Jane turned as I approached. ‘I came up to get a little air,' she said in a low voice, ‘but I must go down again.'

‘Mr Rochester is a little better, I hope?'

She looked at me and her mouth twisted out of control.

‘No,' she said harshly. ‘Dr Seymour believes he is dying. The fever has passed but he grows weaker. The cabin is dark but he complains of too much sun.'

She gazed bleakly into the distance. The doctor approached along the deck and was about to speak when Anna said unexpectedly in her slow way, ‘You can save him if you want to.'

‘Want to?' Jane was fierce, quick. ‘Can you doubt it?'

Anna said calmly, ‘Take him back to England. Now, quickly.'

For a moment I thought Jane might strike her.

‘To England?' She did not raise her voice but it was bitter. ‘We are in the middle of the ocean. And if I could, what then? Dr Seymour has done everything humanly possible.'

‘England itself will cure him,' Anna said. ‘He has had this sickness before—in Spanish Town and at Granbois. Breath not coming, pain in the chest. Christophine said, “When the fish comes out of water, at first it flaps, struggles, then it dies. Edward Rochester cannot breathe the air too far from England. He is not himself.”'

Jane looked at me. ‘He says this: “I am not myself.”' But that is nonsense, superstition. If it were true, every Englishman who travelled to a foreign place would die.'

Anna shrugged. ‘Englishmen are not all alike. Some carry enough Englishness in them to serve for a lifetime. Some become more English on a foreign shore. Many do die. Who is to say whether it is always a sickness of the body or sometimes of the mind? Is it possible to die of . . .
mal du pays
?'

‘Homesickness,' I said.

Jane turned aside with a disbelieving shake of her head. Anna shrugged as though unwilling to attempt any further persuasion, but after a moment she said, ‘When we were in the Islands, Edward always grew more ill as we journeyed south, better as we went north. Christophine noticed this. Soon we will cross the line of division the Captain says, the Equator.'

‘Why should I believe you?' Jane cried, suddenly desperate. ‘You hate him. You want him to die.' I knew she was recalling those nights at ‘Thornfield' when Anna had escaped over the roof and attacked Rochester and Richard Mason while they were sleeping.

Anna's round brown face was expressionless, her manner unhurried.

‘No,' she said. ‘When Rowland vanished and they married me to Edward, yes, I hated him. Voices came in my head, saying, “Kill him.” Then I hear other voices; the nuns, Christophine. “What I teach you,
bébé, dodo
? Have you learn nothing? Anyone can love a friend, what is hard is to love the enemy. But you must try. Hate is bad magic. Feed on your own self. Eat you up, make you sick.”'

The impression of that Caribbean voice was so powerful I could almost see Christophine.

McLeod had now approached and was listening too.

‘I could not forgive Edward Rochester and his father,' Anna continued, ‘but Christophine sent help. Or perhaps it is God who sends it.' Anna put her arm around my shoulder. ‘This one comes. Reads to me, gives me my red dress. Then I begin to think a little of other things, not just what they have done to me.'

Jane's face was white. She put her hand on Anna's arm, hesitant, vulnerable. ‘I am sorry,' she said. ‘But this is of such great importance to me . . . Were you married to Edward, or Rowland?'

Anna frowned. Not deliberately keeping Jane in suspense, I felt, but the question seemed to give rise to a crowded disorder in her thoughts. She began to speak hesitantly, as though setting it straight in her mind as she spoke.

‘I married Rowland in the little chapel of Our Lady of Mercy. But then his father came and there were great quarrels and I was sent back to the nuns. They told me Rowland was dead. I was to have his child but it was born dead, they told me. A girl, born dead.'

Nobody spoke.

‘Then my stepfather Mr Mason came. He brought Edward Rochester and his father to the convent,' she continued. ‘They said, “Rowland is dead, you must marry his brother Edward now.” I told them no, but always they came back. Sister Marie Augustine said, “You must do as they say.” Later, after we were married, I had a letter.'

McLeod said, ‘A letter from Rowland Rochester? After you were married to his brother Edward?'

‘Yes.'

Sun poured onto the deck, a canvas above rippled and flapped, men were up there working and calling. Adèle and Polly continued
some shrill game further along. The surface of the sea was inscrutable, showing nothing of the strange, teeming life beneath.

‘I was frightened. Christophine brought the letter secretly and I did not know what to do. We had moved to ‘Granbois' and it had taken long to find me, sent first to Spanish Town. Rowland was at Saint Vincent but he said he would come. I wrote to him. Come, I said, take me away. Christophine took the letter. I did not tell Edward because he hated me. He hated the islands, and Christophine most of all because the islands are strong in her.