Wild Island (6 page)

During the next seven years I had three miscarriages and bore two infants. Both lived only a few weeks. I recovered easily in body, and
yet the doctor said I could never, now, bear children. People remarked on how well I looked, and I strove to be cheerful for Tom's sake, but I felt always veiled in a kind of dark trance, half absent from myself and the world. Work was a solace, but it was a time of mourning; my father was drowned in the Mediterranean in the year '27. During all these years I struggled to be calm. Steady observation and detachment being habits drawing promotes in any case, I schooled myself to be like my father: measured, cool; since Tom, I now saw, was like Nina: hot-blooded, impatient, vigorous. These lessons of self-restraint and patience stood me in good stead in the later years of my marriage and during Nina's last illness.

But it was never easy to subdue my eagerness of spirit, and now, at ‘Thornfield', in the days when Jane and Rochester's passion filled the house like a contagious summer fever, and England was preparing to celebrate a new young queen, the life in me that had been damped down and wintry for years, felt ready, suddenly, to burst out of containment.

I thought of my beloved London, of the parties there would be in the streets, illuminations along the river, music, dancing; of warm busy life going forward varied and glorious. Not standing still, frozen day after day, as it seemed to be in ‘Thornfield's' attic. I could not help crying a little and thinking of the past. Then I reminded myself that if I had stayed in London I would probably be dead in a pauper's grave. I resolved to be thankful for ‘Thornfield', and even for my cantankerous patient, and I fell to considering what changes might follow.

Jane and Rochester were to marry four weeks after his midsummer proposal, allowing just enough time to call the banns and prepare for the wedding journey. When the morning came they walked together from ‘Thornfield' to the Church across the park. By then they were so hungry for each other the air between them fairly crackled.

I was watching from my upstairs window as they set out. I did not go to the Church but I know what happened. At the moment
when the vicar asked if anyone knew just cause why this man and woman should not be joined in holy matrimony, a man rose at the back of the Church. He said, ‘Yes. Rochester cannot marry because he is married already. Fourteen years ago at Spanish Town in the West Indies, he was married to Bertha Antoinette Cosway-Mason who is at this moment a prisoner in the attic of “Thornfield Hall”.'

The silence was instant, Jane told me later. She thought she had gone suddenly deaf, or that Time itself had come to a stop, like the cogs of a great clock between one second and the next. Then Rochester burst into accusations against the stranger, seized Jane by the hand, and strode out of the Church and back to ‘Thornfield' with that dumbfounded little group stumbling behind. (There was the stranger, and Mr Gray, the lawyer, and Mr Wood, the clergyman, and the two elderly Miss Pattons from Hay village, who had been putting flowers on their mother's grave and were swept, wide-eyed, into the drama.) When they reached the Hall, Rochester pushed aside Mrs Fairfax, Adèle, and the huddle of servants waiting on the steps to give their good wishes, and strode on up to the attic and unlocked the door.

And there was I, Grace Poole, or so I was called sometimes, because it had been the name of Bertha's former keeper, a vicious old woman, by all accounts. I had been trying to keep Bertha quiet all morning, because she knew about the wedding, I'm sure. They seem to know things, mad people, without ever being told. They pick it up from the air around them as dogs do, I think. Or was she ever quite so mad as we all believed? Although Bertha never spoke properly and it was difficult to tell how much she understood, I am sure I could feel what she knew sometimes, as you can with an animal you know well.

Bertha herself had an animal's sensitivity to Rochester, as though she could smell him across long distances. When he was away she was docile. She would often sit quietly with her dark hair hanging down over the back of a chair while I sat behind her, brushing slowly until the hair shone like the feathers of a blackbird. But she seemed to sense her husband's return long before he arrived, and to become restless, prone to growling and fits of rebellion.

In the months while Jane Eyre and Rochester had been in the house together, Bertha had become agitated and unpredictable. I could not leave her for more than a few minutes. It was this that put an end to my teas with Mrs Fairfax. Bertha's imprisonment was mine too, you could say. I was drinking when I could, and praying a good deal. Praying and drinking. A more common combination than I knew then.

We had taken a drink or two the night before the wedding, Bertha and I. Or perhaps three or four. A drop or two of ‘shrub' to start with—gin and lemon with a little hot water and sugar. Not ladylike, but then so much of my life has not been ladylike. And when the gin ran out, most of a bottle of claret. To keep out the cold, to warm the cockles. It was July but the nights were chilly. The fire in the grate wouldn't seem to draw properly and Bertha couldn't bear to be cold. She had been in the attic ten years by then, and I had been with her the last three.

She did not want to sleep, although commonly she slept a great deal, like the huge, drowsy, shabby bear I used to see on a chain in Glasshouse Yard. This night she was on the move all the time, up and down, in a way that made me uneasy. I brought the old red dress out of the chest for her to hold. She wound the fabric round her hand and put her thumb in her mouth the way little children hold a favourite piece of rag. The rest of the scarlet fabric trailed from her hands, and in the yellow candlelight it looked like flames, or blood. She dropped to the ground and crouched in the corner, holding the dress and crooning to it.

On that wedding morning when the noise came up the stairs and the door was thrown open, Bertha was crouched against the wall in the back corner. Rochester was raving and pointing, ‘There you see her! Behold, gentlemen, my wife!' His face was twisted with rage hatred fury scorn. He looked more the maniac than Bertha.

Jane was white-faced, holding herself rigid; her elfish face a mask in which only the eyes moved.
His wife
! I had not known that. Mrs Fairfax and the servants believed Bertha was some mad bastard child or discarded mistress of old Mr Rochester. But, Edward Rochester's
wife! I was so profoundly struck by this revelation that my attention was distracted from Bertha, who leapt from the wall and hurled herself at Rochester with a rising screech. Her hands snatched at his throat, tiger-violent. He seized her arms and battled with her as though glad of the excuse.

There was a cry from one of the men who had followed him up the stairs. It was Richard Mason, Bertha's stepbrother, the man who had come from the West Indies to stop the wedding, and now she had bitten him. In trying to get clear of the fray he knocked me aside, so I could not quiet her. Mason lurched into Rochester, who lost his balance and struck his head on the coal hod as he went down. Blood everywhere, suddenly. I pulled Bertha away to a chair. She sank down rocking, moaning, like a great lumpy old doll, and would not have made any more trouble; the fight had gone out of her but Rochester insisted on tying her arms with the straps I had never had to use.

Irrational, I know, but it's one of the things I find hardest to forgive him, and one of the reasons why I do not think I can ever be completely fair to his side of this story. I tell myself he had cause to be savage that day—his bride snatched away at the wedding hour, ‘Thornfield's' secret torn open to the parish. But it was only ever a secret from the gentry, surely he knew that? And not all of them. Mr Woods, the clergyman, might cry out that he'd lived there twenty years and never heard of it, but servants and sharp-eyed children know everything that goes on in a great house.

You can't drag heavy buckets of coal, water, food and chamberpots up and down to the attics without servants talking. They did not know who the madwoman was, but you can be sure there had been plenty of guessing. About six months after I had arrived at ‘Thornfield' I overheard Dawlish, the cook, and a young maidservant, Leah, talking about it. Leah had not been long in the house herself and was curious:

‘That Grace Poole, or Mrs Adair, or whatever she calls herself, is no more nurse than I. She knows but one remedy—gin, or summat as strong, and as many doses a day as she can get.'

‘Well, if it keeps t'other one quiet . . .' Dawlish said, kneading dough vigorously. ‘There's noises in that attic come from no Christian soul. I'd not be shut up day and night with such a creetur—not fer all the hundert n' fifty guineas a year.'

‘Hundert n' fifty! But that's ten times a wage!'

‘And everything in food and keep with it.'

‘But what can she do with all that?'

‘Sits there countin' it in piles.' Dawlish was enjoying herself, warming to the sight in her imagination. ‘Great heaps o' gold sov'rins,' she added. Then sharply, ‘But it's nowt to me what she does with it, nor what she does to get it, neither. And you'd best make sure it's nowt to you, or you won't stop long in this house.'

I missed the rest: John the butler had come into the kitchen and he and Dawlish were both talking at once. They were husband and wife; had been at ‘Thornfield' forty years. Like me, they knew almost everything about the madwoman except who she was. It was they who told me the story of old Grace Poole, a woman Rochester had hired to look after Bertha when he brought his wife back to ‘Thornfield' ten years previously. Mrs Poole had been formerly a wardress at the Grimsby Retreat for the Insane, Dawlish said, a villainous old hag who fed Bertha gin and ‘black drop', the strongest laudanum, for seven years. It kept the patient quiet most of the time, but there were terrible eruptions. The female servants whose bedrooms were near the attic often heard screams, which might have been Mrs Poole or Bertha or both. They had orders to keep away on pain of instant dismissal without a character. If the prisoner was cruelly used at times, what could they do?

No one was eager to interfere, therefore, when Dawlish noticed one winter's evening that Mrs Poole had not been in the kitchen all day. This was during one of Rochester's absences, and only he and Grace Poole had keys for the attic. John and Dawlish went up and listened outside the door. Nothing. Was Mrs Poole ill? Or had the madwoman murdered her? They agreed uneasily that she was probably sleeping off a prolonged bout of gin.

In the afternoon of the second day, John ordered Matthew, the groom, to fetch Dr Carter. When he arrived they broke in and found Grace Poole dead of an apoplexy behind the door. The madwoman was cowering in a back corner in a stench of her own excretions, apparently too terrified to come near the corpse.

Well, said Dawlish, if the poor creature had not been mad before, she would be now. Dawlish knew stories of people accidentally shut up with corpses, or even in a room where corpses had recently been, and none had come out with their full wits.

Rochester was still away when Grace Poole died and Dr Carter was desperate to find someone to care for Bertha. This was when I came to ‘Thornfield' and discovered I was to be a madwoman's keeper, the second Mrs Poole. In the first days I regarded my charge with a mixture of disgust and wariness. Her hair was matted and filthy and she stank to a degree almost suffocating, but I was not afraid, being at that time too weary of my own life to care much whether I died or not. I did, however, take steps to make sure she should have no opportunity to attack me.

This was not difficult. The attic was divided into two parts; Bertha's cell was the cold, dark section at the back, divided by bars from my end of the room, which was large enough to contain a fireplace, a comfortable chair, a cot, and a small table under a skylight. I soon discovered a low door in the panelling behind my cot. It was fastened with rusted bolts, but I persisted until I could open it, and found a tiny outdoor space among the roof leads, where the steep angles of the gabled roof came down on three sides, and a high parapet closed off the fourth. When the sunshine from this doorway entered the attic, I heard the first nearly human sound from Bertha. A groan so filled with longing and anguish that tears came to my eyes, and I began to think of her as a woman rather than a wild beast, and wondered what misfortune had brought her to this.

My pity was greatly increased by finding a hideous garment in a chest in the corner, a thick white cotton jacket evidently made for pinioning the arms. The sight of it made Bertha scream and beat her
head against the wall. She stopped when I threw it on the fire. I was about to add to the flames an old red dress also in the chest, but she gave a cry and put her arm through the bars. When I handed it to her she sank to the ground, pressing it against her face.

To show her I meant no harm, I began to tame her by means of food, as I had trained dogs and squirrels in my childhood. From the first I made sure that her meals each day were at regular times, and appetising. She was a greedy eater, which helped my cause, but it was like taming a lioness. I spoke to her frequently, though the only reply might be silence or growling. I spread a clean new dress on a chair outside her bars, and told her she might wear it if she would only wash herself. She hurled her tin jug and basin at the walls for days, but one day plunged her face into the water and tipped the rest over her head, which I took to be an attempt of sorts. I rewarded her with strawberries and cream and a hand mirror. She stared into this with apparent horror before she flung it, too, at the wall. Her next several meals were bread and water, and so it went. Any return to bad behaviour—this was frequent at first—was punished by bread and water (and greeted with howls and moans).