Free Wild Island by Jennifer Livett Page B

‘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. Tonguesof 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, butthe 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