Wild Island (9 page)

Adèle came mournfully to show me a list of clothes to be taken to the Misses Bartons' Academy. Two plain black frocks, one plain black silk dress, four plain white pinafores, one plain merino . . . She was only just out of mourning for her mother and now the beloved colours must be laid aside or go into the dye bath and come out black again.

Dr Carter, who came regularly to see Bertha, one day stood panting in the doorway. ‘Too much for me nowadays, three flights of stairs,' he said. ‘And the weather so warm. I've asked Rochester to move you both to the ground floor. There's no need for secrecy now the whole shire knows the story.'

Adèle, staring at Bertha, asked him, ‘When will she wake,
monsieur
?'

‘I don't know, child,' he said. ‘Perhaps tomorrow. Or it may take a hundred years as it does in fairy stories!'

Then Adèle wanted to hear the old stories about sleepers. She and I spent the long afternoons of that glorious St Martin's summer in the garden, walking, sitting on the swing, playing with a ball or hoop. I grew fond of Adèle. She corrected my French politely and chattered about her life in Paris with her mother and the other ‘ladies'. She did not want to go to school. With a world-weary sigh she said, ‘They will want me to be like an English girl,
et ça serait impossible, je crois
.'

The servants had instructions from Rochester that if Jane Eyre returned while he was out they were to keep her in the house at all costs. He told Mrs Fairfax it would be best to take Jane up to her old bedroom and lock her in until he returned. Mrs Fairfax was shocked. She fidgeted with her housekeeping keys until Rochester said, ‘Leave them alone, madam, for God's sake.'

‘It is all so wicked and wrong,' she stammered. ‘I don't know what to do for the best. Miss Eyre—and that poor mad creature. I don't know what to say . . .'

Two weeks later she departed for Brighton to live with a distant cousin. Rochester had settled an allowance on her. He was always generous with money. An envelope also came to me that week. It contained a ten pound note and Rochester's scrawl on thick cream paper: ‘Item: lessons for Adèle in addition to nursing duties.' It was far too much, and my first thought was to return it, but in the end I kept it. Bertha might die any day and my future must then be in doubt again.

What came next was the fire, no doubt fed by the oak-panelled rooms full of furniture polished with years of beeswax, and the paintings along the gallery, dark portraits of former Rochesters which would burn fiercely. Afterwards it was blamed on Bertha, for no other reason except that she was there and mad, but it almost certainly began in the cluster of chimneys damaged by that lightning strike months before, on midsummer's eve. It had been a hot, dry summer, most of the fireplaces had been unused for months, but now it was late September and they were lit again. One must have caught on fire, sending sparks into the drifts of dry pine needles lodged in the roof.

Earlier that afternoon, we had moved Bertha down to Mrs Fairfax's rooms on the ground floor where she and I were now to live, so that when the cry of ‘Fire!' arose, she was easily carried out onto the furthest part of the sunken lawn below the terrace. By that time a crowd of servants and tenant cottagers were milling there. Tongues
of red and orange flame licked into the sky. We called out names through the smoke and din. Dawlish counted us over and over and waited for her husband, who had gone back in to find Rochester. In the end John came stumbling out, his head wrapped in soaked, blackened cloths. Rochester was not with him.

At that moment a section of roof fell away and we saw two figures up high, a man and a woman. The woman fell, her skirts lifting and billowing before she disappeared into the hottest part of the fire. The man hesitated. We saw now, with terrible certainty, that it was Rochester. He retreated along a parapet, stumbled, slid down onto a lower gable, and fell again into a patch of darkness. He was alive when they picked him up. The water engines arrived from Millcot and Hay but little could be done before morning. The dead woman proved to be Leah, the housemaid, who must have been upstairs and fled to the attic when the fire broke out.

A kind of silence came down on us after the fire: a dullness of exhaustion and mourning. We were lodged at the George Inn at Hay, where Rochester gradually began to recover. His injuries were not so dreadful as had been feared, being chiefly damage to one eye, one arm and a hand. He decided that ‘Ferndean', a neglected house I had always admired on a far corner of the estate, would become his home as soon as it could be made liveable. Bertha slept on.

I went walking each day to get out of the closeness of the inn, often drawn in the direction of ‘Thornfield'. The sight of the remains held an eerie fascination even in daylight. Broken chimneystacks, blackened ruins, and a rubble-strewn, unrecognisable space. Loose ends of cloth and paper rippled in the wind, caught among the devastation of brick and stone. On a blowy autumn day, rags of white cloud tearing across a blue sky, I stood gazing at the scene until a movement on the far side of the grounds caught my eye. A small woman in black. She had been as still as I, staring at the ruin, but now she turned away and set off walking. I could not see the face inside the bonnet, but
the figure was unmistakable: Jane Eyre. I set off in pursuit, unable to walk directly across the rubble, making my way round the perimeter and losing sight of her where ruined walls interrupted my view. By the time I reached the other side she had vanished.

That evening as I sat reading in the room I shared with Bertha at the George, there was a knock and it was her: Jane. We hesitated, embraced. I said I was pleased and relieved to see her well. She came smiling into the room, but the smile faded when she saw Bertha in the bed. She gazed for a minute and then asked me if I would go with her to Mr Rochester's room. There were matters they wished to discuss with me.

The George is one of those rabbit-warren inns, centuries old. The curved oak beams were once part of Tudor ships; now they supported crooked corridors, low doorways, unexpected steps. Not a straight wall in the place. Rochester's room was the largest, but even here there was only space for a curtained bed with a chest at the end, a night table, a chair each side of the fire, and a low stool. Rochester was seated in one of the chairs with a dark crimson counterpane tucked around him. His right forearm was bandaged and he had a patch over one eye. He looked like a domesticated pirate, slightly ridiculous, sadly tamed. Dawlish was nodding in the opposite chair, but at our coming she pulled herself awake, bobbed a curtsey and went out. Jane motioned me to the empty chair, and placed herself on the stool close to Rochester. He took her hand in his good one and they sat for a moment beaming at each other as though they'd lost a farthing and found a shilling, as my father used to say. In the conversation that followed it was clear they were a mutual pair, a joint self. There would be no more talk of her leaving, marriage or not.

‘Mrs . . . Adair,' said Rochester. ‘You see that Miss Eyre has appeared again, like the little witch she is. We have been making plans, deciding on a course of action in which we hope you will join us.'

I responded with a polite murmur but I was thinking about Jane, the subtle difference in her. She was as straight and determined as ever, but now with an easier, less defensive confidence.

‘We intend to make a sea voyage,' Rochester was saying, ‘taking my . . . Bertha Mason with us. We hope you will accompany us as the invalid's nurse and Miss Eyre's companion.'

The West Indies, I thought with a lifting heart, Spanish Town. It would be like Italy and the South of France: olive trees, white houses, sunshine and grateful warmth. Bertha would be placed in some kindly mission convent, we would make a leisurely tour back to England through the Mediterranean . . .

‘I would be glad to,' I replied. ‘I would be curious to see the West Indies.'

They looked at each other, smiling.

‘We do not go to the West Indies. Van Diemen's Land is our destination.'

My astonishment amused them. Rochester explained that he had never been wholly satisfied with his father's account of Rowland's death and had set his lawyers to look into the matter. After much correspondence, they had discovered that when Rowland arrived in Spanish Town, he had fallen in love with Bertha and written to his father announcing his intention to give up his engagement to Lady Mary Faringdon and marry the heiress himself. It was this letter that made old Mr Rochester set off for the Indies so hurriedly. When he arrived, there had been a great quarrel and a scuffle between the two men, after which Bertha had been sent to a convent and Rowland had gone to Demerara. But it now seemed Rowland might have married Bertha before his father arrived.

‘Can you imagine my feelings when I heard this?' said Rochester. ‘If it was true, then my own tie to Bertha was bigamous and invalid! My years of suffering were at an end. I was free! I wanted to believe but dared not hope. Everything hinged on whether my brother had married Bertha, and whether he was still alive when my marriage to her took place, or whether he had died in Demerara beforehand. When I came to know Jane, I told her I was enquiring into the death of my brother, but I could not explain why it was of such vital importance to me!'

Through Army records, his solicitors had discovered references to a Lieutenant Charles O'Hara Booth of the 21st Regiment, who had found Rowland mortally ill at Demerara. They hoped Booth might know more of the matter—might even know whether Rowland was alive now, and where he could be found. But the 21st was now in Van Diemen's Land. Letters had been despatched months ago but no reply had come.

‘When Miss Eyre disappeared,' Rochester glanced sideways to where she sat smiling at him, ‘I became sunk again in Stygian gloom.' Jane took up the story. When she ran away from ‘Thornfield', she had intended to visit her uncle in Madeira, as he had been urging in his letters. She had therefore gone to her uncle's lawyer in London, only to discover that her uncle had died, leaving the largest part of his estate to her, and the residue to her cousins in England, whom she now heard of for the first time. She decided to visit them in the north, but could not forbear calling at Millcot on her way, to hear news of Rochester. In this way she had come to know of the fire.

Now Jane and Rochester had devised a new plan. ‘Thornfield' was in ashes; there was no home for him until ‘Ferndean' was refurbished, which would take many months. They would therefore travel to Van Diemen's Land and enquire personally about Rowland. This would be far better than the exchange of letters over months, years. There was nothing to prevent such a journey, everything to recommend it.

At first I thought they were mad, but gradually I understood. In England they could not live in the same house until they learned the truth about the marriage. After the
débâcle
of their wedding, convention would frown on it. But on a ship, or in a distant country, who could object? They would not be the first people to take refuge in the colonies from an awkward situation at home. I was wondering why they did not leave Bertha Mason in England, but Rochester answered my thought.

‘I will not have it said that I abandoned my wife to die of neglect,' he scowled. ‘For I must consider her to be my wife until the alternative is proved . . . And if she were to die while we were away, even of
natural causes, there would be gossip. I will not have any vicious slur cast a shadow across my future with Miss Eyre.'

A transfigured smile from Jane.

‘When we discover the truth and can marry at last,' Rochester continued (a leap of faith, I noted), ‘it will be in all bright honesty with no doubtful stain. Dr Carter assures me the sea voyage will do the invalid no harm. It may even be beneficial.'

They glowed by the fire like a pair of children planning a great adventure, brimming with mutual tenderness and passionate hope. A quest for the truth: that was how they saw it. Jane would be Rochester's nurse, companion, faithful servant and protector. Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote, Sam Weller to his Pickwick, pageboy to Good King Wenceslas, gender notwithstanding. They would be together, that was the chief thing.