Free Thornfield Hall by Emma Tennant

Madame Fairfax had attempted to instruct me, with the idea that I should show proper reverence for the château to which I had been brought as a destitute orphan. A bath, long and greenish in color; a commode of wood with a cane back to the seat, giving the contraption an air of an African throne—as I thought, at least, remembering the plates in the books of native tribes Nadar had shown me, in the room where he invented faces, both sad and humorous. A basin, a wash-stand, two pictures (but the light was too dim to make these out; they seemed to portray lakes and moors and be colored with the false purples bad painters use to portray the landscape of this district). And in the bath, motionless and pale, naked as the day he was born, none other than Monsieur Rochester, the milord and proprietor of all he surveys at Thornfield. Antoinette, seeing him first, gave out a great yell. Monsieur Rochester looked up, frowning, and then sat upright in the bath. Antoinette, falling backward on a painted rocking horse, grasped its mane, made of a molting wire wool, and proceeded to mutter strange words into the black and white wooden ear, complete with jingle bells, which her powerful arms pulled toward her. I in turn ran to my new friend’s side and buried my head in her skirts. I had no idea then, of any connection between the man Jenny says I must know as Papa and the woman from the spice islands who sings to me as a Creole maid of Maman’s once did, songs my new playmate says come from an old woman who loved her, Christophine. I shut my eyes and feel the heaving, sobbing sound Antoinette makes when her laughter turns to wild grief. The rocking horse shakes its head, and the little silver bells ring out. We are away from the glass part of the boxroom floor by now, and as we stumble away we fall against two basketwork saddles, these fashioned for children no more than four years old, and I see perched in them two tiny figures, the dead twin sisters Madame F had told me of, the aunts of Monsieur Rochester. I scream…and I scream again. And as the low door from the stairs opens and Grace scrambles in with Madame F close behind her, I leave poor Antoinette lying like a corpse on the floor as I rush into the housekeeper’s arms.

five
    Edward
    I am in danger of losing my marriage, my hopes for the future, everything. If there is a spirit haunting this house, it belongs to the child sent by the devil to put me in my mind of my past errors and sins; it is the spirit of chaos and destruction, learned at its mother’s knee, the spirit of revolution and subversion, the end of the order established here since time immemorial, commemorated and celebrated on the tablets in the ancient church of Thornfield, revered and respected throughout the countryside.
    God (and he is banished also, by the fire of disobedience and rebellion that sweeps through the once-orderly corridors of this great house)—God alone knows whether the child is mine (though I do observe, I freely confess, some of the traits in my own nature that I have prayed to the deity to assist in erasing: namely, pride, arrogance, and a desire to keepwhat is closest to the heart concealed). The child’s wickedness may be the natural and inevitable consequences of an upbringing that can barely be described as such: a mother more absent than lovingly present; a camaraderie of acrobats and atheists with no more wish to reach the gates of heaven than the highest wire in the circus tent can provide; and, to underline the importance of a guiding spirit in matters of the affections, a sapphic blackmailer such as the woman who signs herself “Jenny” in her impertinence, when she writes to demand further money from me. No, to add these characteristics to those of the child’s own dear mother—namely cunning, deceit, and a huge measure of vanity and self-regard—there is little surprise in the discovery that Adèle Varens, at eight years old,