Reader i murdered him, p.2
Reader, I Murdered Him, page 2
I have a strange, flickering half memory of my parents’ discussion about taking me back to England, about whether I was Papa’s daughter. I think they were still arguing over it when Maman opened the door. She was still speaking to him even while her eyes met mine, full of anger or fear, and she gestured with a firm wave that I should go back to the children’s room and wait. “Come back in an hour, ma fille,” she told me, her voice both soft and hard.
At least I’d seen that she was still alive.
I went.
There were a few books hidden under a loose floorboard in the red room, and now that the sun had risen, I could see to read. There was a one-eyed doll under the boards too—we often left little things there to amuse ourselves with, while our mothers made their money and kept us fed—but I had recently decided that I was too old for dolls. That day, while Maman and Papa finished their talk, I paged through an illustrated book about birds. Half the pictures were torn out, and the ripped ends of the pages looked like wings. I traced their fibrous softness with my fingers, closed my eyes, and imagined myself flying.
Papa opened the door when I returned. Unlike the other men who spent time with Maman, he did not flush at the temples to see me waiting there, and he did not scurry away.
“How would you like to see England, little elf?” he asked.
When he let me back into her room, Maman did indeed look sick. “We have made a pact, ma chère,” she said.
Three days later we were gone, and she was dead.
Maman had told me I must always call him Papa. “He’ll like that,” she’d said, “even if he isn’t your real papa. Especially then.”
I said it the same way I’d heard Maman and the other dancing girls say it to so many men, nestling onto the men’s laps, sliding their strong, soft arms around the men’s necks like snakes. “Ooh, Papa, you’re too good to me,” with a pout in the lips, a sweet little moue in the voice.
I know now that they were grown women mimicking little girls. But then, I thought I was mimicking grown women. I thought Mr. Rochester, perhaps my papa, wanted to have a sophisticated French daughter of whom he could be proud. A little souvenir of Le Moulin.
He had once loved my maman, I thought; he must have if he came back to her a decade after they’d first known each other and if he agreed to her wish for me to go to England.
I thought if I could be enough like her, he’d love me too.
But perhaps I do not remember it so clearly: the corridor, the muffled noises, the red wallpaper. Miss Eyre told me a story later of a red room from her own childhood, a kind of memory mixed with nightmare, and I suppose I might have gotten it jumbled with my own. Papa was always very rigorous with us, the women of his house, that we should keep memories and figments of imagination separate. If we thought we remembered something differently than he did, he was sure to set us straight right away.
So when he asked me what I remembered of meeting him, of our passage to England—he did this whenever he had guests who needed entertainment, trotting me out as a novelty—I parroted his own memories, as docile as one of the caged, bright birds that he ordered all the way from Jamaica, for my first English Christmas.
And maybe, after all, the red-papered room I remember is the same as Jane’s red room. Like the one I remember, hers was secret and dark, a place where she waited for ghosts while her life changed around her.
Perhaps all little girls have the same red room inside them.
Two
I lost my last milk tooth on the passage to England. I’d been tonguing it loose for weeks, but it was stubborn, and there was something about mashing the root back and forth in my tender gum that I nearly liked, despite the pain, the same way I liked breathing the sooty air around the big, smoke-heaving chimney of the ship we rode. I used to bite my lips, as a kind of nervous habit, until Maman chided me out of it—the gnawing left the skin there unattractively scabbed. I started biting the insides of my lips instead, which I was careful to make sure she never knew. I had bands of ridged scarring on the inside of my mouth, but the only hint of it to the outside world was the way it pushed my lips out, plumped them; since that only made me prettier, Maman stopped worrying. She didn’t know my mouth always tasted of blood.
But whenever I lost a tooth, I briefly also lost interest in biting my lips, in favor of tonguing the raw new space inside me, and my mouth had a chance to heal.
I asked her before we left—in truth I begged her—to come with us. She refused. “Your papa’s riches are for you, cherie, not me,” she said. “I bought them for you when we made you all those years ago. He will leave you a good inheritance in your own right and not for any future husband; I have made him promise that. But there is not enough wealth in all of England to persuade me to leave my bones in English soil, and I must choose their place before long. They shall stay in Paris, and I will go to my rest easier knowing in what luxury you’re kept across the sea.”
I cried, holding on to the starboard-side railing and looking down into the cold, white-churning water. Tears slipped into my mouth and stung my healing lips, and they tasted like the salt water we crossed.
I wiped my face and put my fingers in my mouth. I pulled the tooth before I could think of pain, and by the time I flinched, the act was done. The rounded chip lay in my palm, red at one end.
No bones in English soil.
I dropped the tooth into the waves.
I made myself a promise then: however long I lived in England, when I died, I would be buried in Paris, with Maman.
The channel crossing was supposed to take only a day, and Papa told me I’d have the freedom of the deck for all that time, but as night approached, rough seas forced every passenger indoors. Within the sick belly of the ship we tossed back and forth so violently that sometimes my small body was lifted off the bunk, as if I flew.
Papa and I shared a berth. We could not do such a thing without scrutiny in England, he said, but they had trapped the air of France inside the boat when they closed its doors.
“You are the daughter of a whorehouse, Adèle,” he said. “You will not be a respectable girl until I make you one, and I will do so by making you English. You shall have new clothes and English books before you get your English fortune when I die—oh yes, never fear, I will honor my promise to your sly mother, and richly too. I have never broken a promise to a woman, no, not even vows I would have done better to break long ago. I have kept my vows to the letter, damn my soul.” His expression darkened, and though he still looked toward me, his gaze seemed to turn for a moment entirely inward.
“You will learn quiet and gentle habits and to be a quiet and gentle person. If indeed I am your father, you will have too much darkness in you from me; far too much, I fear. As for your mother and your mother country, you have too much of both in you as well.”
My mother’s heart gave a great angry thump in my belly. I clutched it, pretending I felt seasick, though I did not. While Papa’s face was white and slick and I could tell he was resisting the urge to vomit only through his strength of will, the rocking of the sea was a thrill and a comfort to me.
He looked me up and down in my pink dress, the one Maman’s friend Cecile had made, fluttering all over with lace. She could have used that finery herself, but she’d used it on me. She’d said Maman would far rather have seen me in such a dress than in mourning colors. And Papa had not demanded that I formally mourn my mother. We had left, in fact, before her funeral. He had said it would disturb me.
“Yes,” he repeated. “Far too much.”
He turned away to rest on his own narrow bunk.
I let the waves lift and drop me, and I breathed the stale air he had said was French. I twisted Maman’s ring on my thumb and wondered what would ever feel like enough trouble now to make me give it up.
Papa barely looked at me for the rest of the passage over. I did not understand what he was so afraid to see.
Thornfield was a wet, hulking monster of a house. Its windows watched the barren landscape with a cruel and sleepy gaze through heavy curtains and age-pocked panes, and its outer walls shone black with damp even on rare sunny days. Its crenellations bristled. When I saw it from a distance, I always expected Papa’s house to unfurl, to unhunch its stone shoulders and crawl off across the moors. When I first went inside its doors, I felt like I’d been swallowed.
Papa had barely dropped me off there before he left it again.
In fact, he was almost always gone. For the first months, I was mostly alone, with only Papa’s servants to mind me during his frequent trips away, and they did not seem to desire my company. The weather rarely allowed me to stay outdoors as long as I wished. Although I was often confined, I amused myself with the books in Papa’s library; he had quite a few in French. I briefly struggled with a few English texts but found that as much as I could speak and understand the language, reading and writing in it was a challenge. English books with illustrations, however, I adored. These I tried to copy onto the drawing paper that Mrs. Fairfax amply provided; I’m afraid I left half-finished sketches scattered around the house like fallen leaves, which could not have endeared me to her. If I was wild or indecorous to the staff or on Papa’s rare visits back home, you must remember it was because I was a child, a frightfully lonely and bored one. With servants fulfilling my needs but refusing my company and usually no Papa around to discipline me, I began to think of myself as almost the lady of the house.
But there was another lady of Thornfield. A chatelaine of Papa’s heart, or at least his mind. The woman to whom he referred when he told me he’d never broken a word of his vows.
Thornfield’s true mistress was a ghost.
She screamed and laughed from secret places, and she haunted the halls at night.
I woke up several times my first night at Thornfield convinced that I’d been screaming. But Grace Poole, the sad-eyed servant who smelled like gin, told me that she heard nothing.
The next night I woke again, but I thought the screams must be someone else’s. Once more, though, Grace informed me that the night had passed in peaceful silence.
“And you’ll tell the master so when he asks you how you slept,” Grace said, a warning in her eyes and on her juniper breath. “He doesn’t like to hear of anything strange in his house.”
“Even if something strange is happening?” I asked.
Grace Poole looked away. “He doesn’t like to hear of it.”
Whether he liked it or not though, Thornfield’s ghost was always there.
She watched me for a long time, I think. Gradually I started waking up at night and knowing she was there. At first she was a kind of imaginary friend.
One night I dreamt I saw a woman in white hanging from the huge oak tree that grew outside the house.
When I woke up screaming the screams that I’d call silence come morning, I saw a real woman at the foot of my bed, dressed in white with wild hair.
Staring at me.
Even in the shadows, her eyes gleamed in a way that reminded me of Papa’s glistening darkness at the theatre—but while his darkness drew me toward him with that irresistible force that I later learned to compare to gravity, this woman’s blaze repelled me.
“What are you, then?” she asked, her voice low and fast. “What are you—another me? Come to be Daddy’s new doll, then, precious girl?”
She stepped up onto the bed as if it were a low stair; she was tall and strong enough that the stride was nothing to her.
“Papa brought me here from France,” I said, my voice soft but very clear. I still had half an idea that I was dreaming, and though I was frightened, it was only dream fear, and my voice did not shake.
“Oh, yes,” she said, “all his best things he collects from realms abroad. I suspect he’ll put you up next to me on the same shelf once he’s done. Can you guess where he brought me back from, poppet?”
She took one great step across the bed and squatted down by my pillow in her long and dirty nightgown, and she dug my hand out from under the covers and pressed it against her cheek. “They don’t make skin like this in England, girl, nor France. Dear Edward says he should have known from it how dark I was within.”
At the touch of her strong, hot hand and of her burning cheek, I knew I was awake. I opened my mouth to scream—how I wanted to scream—but the sudden knowledge that I wasn’t dreaming had stolen my voice.
Nonetheless this woman clapped her other hand over my lips. My braids had come undone during the night and some of my hair was trapped between her hand and my open mouth. I felt it scratch my tongue and grow damp, and I tried to swallow.
“No screaming, darling, or he’ll put you away before he’s even played with you. Don’t want to get yourself shut up on that shelf, believe me.” She looked up at the shadowy molding on my ceiling. “All kinds of cobwebs and big fat spiders up there, and no one ever dusts. Not even Grace.”
She smiled, and slowly she took her hand away from my mouth. She gently pulled out my damp hair and tucked it behind my ear, where it lay cool and wet like a slug.
“Gracie does take the doll down off the shelf though, now and then,” she said, “when Daddy is gone or deep asleep. He mustn’t know.”
She slid down from the bed, her movements still sinuous and strange enough that I think older children than myself might have believed her a ghost too.
Yet she was living. She was a real woman, with an eeriness to her that was so different from my own lost mother . . . and yet there was something in her that I recognized.
I wonder now if I might have seen in her not my mother but myself. I wonder too how many women of Thornfield saw, or feared to see, themselves in her.
“He mustn’t know,” she said again.
And she was gone.
It was frightening, of course.
She was mad.
Of course.
And yet . . .
I was suddenly not alone in that house, not so alone as I’d thought. Not the only strange thing.
So it was that I met Bertha Antoinetta Mason Rochester.
It was several nights before I saw her again, and weeks or months before I learned that she was truly Papa’s wife. It took many of our secret meetings—in my room at first, and then whispered conversations through her bolted door when I was finally brave enough to climb up to the attic—before Grace Poole would admit that there was a reason she sat in her narrow chair by the attic stairs so often, that I was not the only lady of the house she served, that she let her ladyship out at night sometimes.
It was in that drab corridor, sitting on that narrow chair, that she finally told me so. “I couldn’t bear it, otherwise,” Grace said, quietly, looking down into her gin-dosed cuppa.
I thought about the times I’d seen her carrying food up the stairs, always better food when Papa was gone than when he was home. I’d thought she was taking it for herself, and I’d hardly blamed her.
I settled down on the floor next to her. I had a little sketchbook in the pocket of my pinafore, and I took it out and began to draw—just nothing pictures, little sketches of butterflies and birds to pass the time.
After a long while, she spoke again, softly. “It’d be like I was another . . . I couldn’t bear it.”
She never spoke quite as much to me after she admitted to letting Bertha out. It was as if once she gave me the secret, we both had to swallow it to keep it safe.
It might have seemed to someone watching as if I were lonelier in that big house than ever. But we found there was much that we could bear together.
On the next of his rare visits home, Papa told me that he’d put out an advertisement for a governess.
I had yet to become sufficiently English, he told me. “I had been hoping that the land itself would sink into you, get its cold, fresh fingers inside your hot French soul and turn you into something like itself,” he rumbled over tea. “It was entirely unfair to you for me to expect it, and I am sorry. Nonetheless”—he looked me over with a gaze that seemed to suggest his certainty that whatever he discovered about my body would also be true for my soul—“you cannot be allowed to go on as you are. You are in great danger of turning out just like your mother—or like . . .” His eyes flicked briefly upward, and I wondered if he was thinking of Bertha or of himself.
Bertha had been trapped all alone in her attic since Papa’s return, even at night; I didn’t dare to visit her when he was at Thornfield. When he was home, she was alone, her arms tied in a horrid self-embrace, in the straitjacket Papa believed she always wore.
At least Bertha could hug herself in that jacket. I tried to tell myself that might make her less lonely at least.
Papa tipped back the rest of his tea in a quick swig. When he put down his cup, a few cloudy brown drops stuck indecorously to the stubble on his upper lip. It still baffled me that English people took milk with tea, and I did not think I could ever manage to learn to like it myself. Still, I knew enough to drink milky tea when Papa was there to watch me.
“May I sing for you today, Papa?” I asked as he stood up from the table.
He raised a hand as if deflecting an attack.
“I have no desire to be charmed, Adèle,” he told me sternly. “Especially not by little imps who know more about womanhood than is proper in girls twice their age. You are going to learn to be proper, to restrain yourself and your worse nature. This is something we all must learn. I learned it too late to save myself.” I knew by then that he meant marrying Bertha and, later, meeting Maman and women like her. “Or to save you from the life you’ve had so far . . . to save you even from coming into such a world as the one we live in. But by God, I will save you from it now. By God, I will save us both.”
