Free Thornfield Hall by Emma Tennant Page B

cannot prevent myself from blurting out nonetheless, and I hold up a strand of the magic stones in their old silver settings, a ray of sun coming in the window and turning them to a cascade of sparkling stones.
    â€œI have not given thought as to whether I have a liking for them or not,” replies Miss Eyre—as she is rightly called, a name as plain as she herself. “I came to say, sir, that Adèle needs shoes for country walking. She has brought only dancing shoes or satin slippers, and these are, naturally, unsuitable for the lanes here.”
    Suitable for walking away from Thornfield forever, I thought, but for one reason or another I did not voice my opinion of the governess’s request. “Very well,” I said, and I heard myself growl most uncharitably as I replied. Yet I had confided in this young woman, this Jane from nowhere, only last evening in the garden, when I had told her of Adèle’s origins—and then of my past passion and my jealousy for the child’s mother, the actress Céline Varens. “You don’t hold it against me, do you, Jane?” said I as she came up to my proffered hand and took the note I had scribbled for Cousin Fairfax, that she instruct the cobbler at Whitfield to fashion a pair of stout shoes for the governess’s young charge. “You don’t think the less of me, for describing to you last night the feelings of the human heart?”
    â€œYou said yourself, sir,” responded Jane Eyre, retreating as fastas her natural dignity and modesty would permit her, and addressing me only when she had reached the door, “you said I should know such passions when I was older, sir, and you have been kind in warning me.”
    With this ambiguous statement the small figure left the room. I stood on awhile, still holding a strand of diamonds and looking all the more foolish for it, I daresay. And I reminded myself that Bertha, my wife, must never be permitted to escape again, from the cell I had constructed for her. I must be safe in the knowledge that the wretch is under lock and key, before Blanche Ingram comes here again. Before the hunting season is out, I will fasten these stones under the heiress’s great mane of dark hair. And by then Adèle Varens will have left Yorkshire—and England—forever.
    Then it occurs to me that without the child here there will be no need for a governess at Thornfield Hall. “A good economy,” I say aloud; but I know, if only as faintly as a cloud that passes over the moon and then wanders on into the night sky, that this economy would not do good for me after all. I need the quiet presence of Miss Eyre at Thornfield Hall—why, damn it, I must admit I do.

six
    Adèle
    I detest the creature Papa has ordered from a seminary to come here as my gouvernamte. This “Miss Aire” governs nobody, with her independent views, however: she appears instead to love the authority Maman and Jenny showed me how to hate. “Yes, sir. No, sir,” says the disagreeable little thing, when Monsieur Rochester invites us for such a brief minute to sit with him in the library. And he smiles at her in return! “Yes, sir,” when he orders her to take me off to bed. Yet this man I first knew as Bluebeard has been kinder to me, of late—when he is not in one of his rages, c’est à dire —than in the days after the visit of Mademoiselle Blanche, when I was the raison for everything that went wrong in the running of the house. Perhaps he compares Miss Eyre, as I must learn to call her name, with the child he does on occasion accept as his daughter with the great Céline Varens. Little wonder he smiles fondly at me, as I runwith the battledore and shuttlecock Leah is permitted to play with me on the long lawn at Thornfield Hall. Papa sees the results of his noblesse and Maman’s talents, combined in me. In Jane he sees only the persistent banality of her mind and an