Wild Island Page 4

  When I was seven, my father paid me a penny for a sketch of our dog, Rom. A whole penny for doing what I loved, what my deepest nature cried out to do. I was too young to think of it in such terms, but the tremendous satisfaction of the bargain was a lesson in itself, the dawning of a thought about how to live one’s life. Father took the sketch of Rom away to sea with him. He was a Post Captain in Nelson’s fleet, away at the war with Boney for most of my childhood. My poor mother had died soon after I was born. I was her fourth child, the only one to survive; and as she was without family, I grew up with my father’s mother.

  Grandmama was the daughter of a clergyman and the widow of one too, and pale watercolours had been among her own accomplishments as a girl, but even so, she found my continual sketching excessive (and paper was precious during the war). While not exactly immoral, it amounted to a passion, and therefore could not be entirely blameless. It was ‘inordinate’, a word she kept returning to; too much concerned with outward appearances, and it occupied hours better employed in other ways: sewing, good deeds, prayer. She encouraged my reading and playing the pianoforte in the hope that these would in time replace the drawing (both of these could at least be used in the service of the Lord) but they did not.

  I was ten when Grandmama died and I was sent to my new stepmother, Nina, in London. This violent translation from a Hampshire village to the city was at first desperately unwelcome to me. My father was at sea; the sprawling paradise of garden and wooded lanes I was accustomed to had become dirty crowded streets; the windows in Nina’s large, cluttered second-storey rooms revealed only dark roofs and chimneys. Later I thought them beautiful, but not at first. The only animals here seemed to be cats, mice, sooty pigeons and bony street horses. All these I liked well enough, especially the cats, but they could not compare with the village menagerie of dogs, hens, rabbits, cows, sheep, and more, now lost to me.

  Nina had been the widow of an actor before she married my father, and an actress herself in her youth. Looking back I can only imagine they were one of those odd pairings war tends to bring about. My father was coolly rational, energetic, meticulously neat and self-disciplined. Nina was sentimental, warm and famously untidy: her brown hair was always escaping from the bright turbans she wound carelessly about it. Her face reminded me of a gentle pony’s. My father needed her gaiety as she needed his steadiness. Even so, their mutual happiness was no doubt aided by the war and his naval position, which kept them frequently apart. But they were happy, I believe.

  Nowadays I think it could not have been easy for her to have a strange child thrust into her life. She managed by enlisting the help of her many friends—artists, actors, writers, musicians, both male and female: the demi-monde. At first I was shy of them, but soon became fascinated by their talk, their colourful ways. Under their good-natured, irregular care, I discovered a way of life entirely to my liking, which unfortunately lasted not much more than a year. Boney was captured and sent to Elba, and my father came home and noticed that the education I was deriving from this rackety company was rather too broad. He had earned a thousand pounds in prize money when his ship the Resolute captured the Belle Isle; it would pay for my schooling in Dublin.

  ‘Dublin!’ cried Nina. ‘Are there no such establishments in London?’ She was a Londoner through and through, and by then she had taught me to love the city. She had once toured the provinces playing Lady Wishfort in The Way of the World, and shuddered at the memory. Yet she could not dissuade my father. The widow of his best friend, a fellow Post Captain, was struggling to keep body and soul together by running a ladies’ academy in Dublin, and there I must go.

  The long journeys that followed four times a year for me, across England and the Irish Sea, seem in memory to have taken place mostly at night and in winter. But all through the rattling cold, the boredom and fear, I always felt a current of humming excitement: the promise of new sights and places.

  Waterloo came when I was twelve, and the following years were lean ones. My father, like so many naval men, was stranded ashore on half-pay because the fleet was in tatters after the decades of fighting. By the time I was fifteen he could no longer afford the school, and assuming I was sufficiently educated in any case, he called me back to London.

  But I had fallen in love—like half the girls and teachers at the Academy—with Thomas Adair, our drawing master. An older girl nudged me and nodded at him in Church a few days before our lessons began. He was lean, wolfishly handsome, with Byronically hollowed cheeks, dark hair and a pointed chin. I believed at once the rumours she told me: he was half Irish, half Russian; he had escaped from the burning of Moscow by the skin of his teeth, and later fled a splendid career in London on account of a scandal involving the wife of some eminent person.

  At our first lesson he loped into the room carrying a basket, set a white linen cloth in casual folds on a small table in the centre of the room while we watched and giggled, and laid out upon it lemons and grapes. It was January, in Dublin. They must have come from a hothouse. He half-peeled an orange so that the peel, still attached, curled out across white linen, dark wood. He carried the plaster cast of a beautiful veiled woman from a collection of such things on shelves in another corner, set this lady among the fruit, and bade us draw.

  As he paced about the room, watching us begin, he intoned, ‘“She walks in beauty like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies.” Do you know what that means, young ladies? It means she is dark and warm as the scented air of a summer evening in Italy. Put that into your drawing, mesdemoiselles—all the promise of summer, although we are in chilly Dublin, your young fingers are purple with chilblains, and she only a cold plaster bust.’

  Later, when he came to look over my shoulder, he asked, ‘A new girl?’

  ‘Harriet Pym, sir.’

  He used the pencil he was carrying to lift a long lock of my hair, and said, ‘Harriet the Red.’ An exaggeration: my hair was reddish brown. ‘Are you fiery, Harriet? Aflame with the desire to draw?’

  I looked at him. ‘Yes, I am,’ I said.

  There are many opportunities to lean close together to study drawings, many times when the eyes of student and teacher meet, when the hot cheek of one feels the warm breath of the other. I was twelve at that first meeting; Tom was thirty-three, though he could have passed for ten years younger. He taught me chiaroscuro, perspective, and to measure faces—and many things besides. He kissed me behind a tree in St Stephen’s Green on a sketching expedition when I was fifteen, and I knew I would die if I had to live without him. I wrote to him for a year after we were separated, letters of misery and burning passion. We eloped when I was seventeen.

  There followed great troubles, but my father was brought to accept the marriage at last, and Tom and I went to the continent on a six-month wedding journey. It was 1820 and I was young and full of joy. Nothing could touch me: no crowded stifling carriages, no bleak wet days in flea-ridden inns, no greasy dinners of horse meat and black bread. Tom knew the poetry of each place, the paintings to see, the churches, palaces, the hill towns and fêtes. He was my teacher and sage, lover and friend, and I was blissfully happy. I discovered Paris, Florence and Geneva with lean wolfish Tom, all my very own, on days when the sky was blue as heaven and the nights were warm and full of promise. We were in Aix-en-Provence when he told me, greatly amused, that he had not a particle of Russian in him. He was the son of an Irish woman and a Liverpool Army man, both long dead. He had been brought up among cousins in a carpenter’s yard in Putney. I did not care; I was happy.

  Portraits were Tom’s forte in those days, and the first shadow came when we returned to London and discovered the demand for these greatly diminished. With the war over, Captains and Admirals no longer needed to leave their likenesses at home for their loved ones—and money was short. Tom began then to paint grand Biblical scenes, gradually becoming possessed by them, spending less and less time on portraits.

  During the next seven years I had three miscarriages and bore t
wo infants. Both lived only a few weeks. I recovered easily in body, and yet the doctor said I could never, now, bear children. People remarked on how well I looked, and I strove to be cheerful for Tom’s sake, but I felt always veiled in a kind of dark trance, half absent from myself and the world. Work was a solace, but it was a time of mourning; my father was drowned in the Mediterranean in the year ’27. During all these years I struggled to be calm. Steady observation and detachment being habits drawing promotes in any case, I schooled myself to be like my father: measured, cool; since Tom, I now saw, was like Nina: hot-blooded, impatient, vigorous. These lessons of self-restraint and patience stood me in good stead in the later years of my marriage and during Nina’s last illness.

  But it was never easy to subdue my eagerness of spirit, and now, at ‘Thornfield’, in the days when Jane and Rochester’s passion filled the house like a contagious summer fever, and England was preparing to celebrate a new young queen, the life in me that had been damped down and wintry for years, felt ready, suddenly, to burst out of containment.

  I thought of my beloved London, of the parties there would be in the streets, illuminations along the river, music, dancing; of warm busy life going forward varied and glorious. Not standing still, frozen day after day, as it seemed to be in ‘Thornfield’s’ attic. I could not help crying a little and thinking of the past. Then I reminded myself that if I had stayed in London I would probably be dead in a pauper’s grave. I resolved to be thankful for ‘Thornfield’, and even for my cantankerous patient, and I fell to considering what changes might follow.

  Jane and Rochester were to marry four weeks after his midsummer proposal, allowing just enough time to call the banns and prepare for the wedding journey. When the morning came they walked together from ‘Thornfield’ to the Church across the park. By then they were so hungry for each other the air between them fairly crackled.

  I was watching from my upstairs window as they set out. I did not go to the Church but I know what happened. At the moment when the vicar asked if anyone knew just cause why this man and woman should not be joined in holy matrimony, a man rose at the back of the Church. He said, ‘Yes. Rochester cannot marry because he is married already. Fourteen years ago at Spanish Town in the West Indies, he was married to Bertha Antoinette Cosway-Mason who is at this moment a prisoner in the attic of “Thornfield Hall”.’

  The silence was instant, Jane told me later. She thought she had gone suddenly deaf, or that Time itself had come to a stop, like the cogs of a great clock between one second and the next. Then Rochester burst into accusations against the stranger, seized Jane by the hand, and strode out of the Church and back to ‘Thornfield’ with that dumbfounded little group stumbling behind. (There was the stranger, and Mr Gray, the lawyer, and Mr Wood, the clergyman, and the two elderly Miss Pattons from Hay village, who had been putting flowers on their mother’s grave and were swept, wide-eyed, into the drama.) When they reached the Hall, Rochester pushed aside Mrs Fairfax, Adèle, and the huddle of servants waiting on the steps to give their good wishes, and strode on up to the attic and unlocked the door.

  And there was I, Grace Poole, or so I was called sometimes, because it had been the name of Bertha’s former keeper, a vicious old woman, by all accounts. I had been trying to keep Bertha quiet all morning, because she knew about the wedding, I’m sure. They seem to know things, mad people, without ever being told. They pick it up from the air around them as dogs do, I think. Or was she ever quite so mad as we all believed? Although Bertha never spoke properly and it was difficult to tell how much she understood, I am sure I could feel what she knew sometimes, as you can with an animal you know well.

  Bertha herself had an animal’s sensitivity to Rochester, as though she could smell him across long distances. When he was away she was docile. She would often sit quietly with her dark hair hanging down over the back of a chair while I sat behind her, brushing slowly until the hair shone like the feathers of a blackbird. But she seemed to sense her husband’s return long before he arrived, and to become restless, prone to growling and fits of rebellion.

  In the months while Jane Eyre and Rochester had been in the house together, Bertha had become agitated and unpredictable. I could not leave her for more than a few minutes. It was this that put an end to my teas with Mrs Fairfax. Bertha’s imprisonment was mine too, you could say. I was drinking when I could, and praying a good deal. Praying and drinking. A more common combination than I knew then.

  We had taken a drink or two the night before the wedding, Bertha and I. Or perhaps three or four. A drop or two of ‘shrub’ to start with—gin and lemon with a little hot water and sugar. Not ladylike, but then so much of my life has not been ladylike. And when the gin ran out, most of a bottle of claret. To keep out the cold, to warm the cockles. It was July but the nights were chilly. The fire in the grate wouldn’t seem to draw properly and Bertha couldn’t bear to be cold. She had been in the attic ten years by then, and I had been with her the last three.

  She did not want to sleep, although commonly she slept a great deal, like the huge, drowsy, shabby bear I used to see on a chain in Glasshouse Yard. This night she was on the move all the time, up and down, in a way that made me uneasy. I brought the old red dress out of the chest for her to hold. She wound the fabric round her hand and put her thumb in her mouth the way little children hold a favourite piece of rag. The rest of the scarlet fabric trailed from her hands, and in the yellow candlelight it looked like flames, or blood. She dropped to the ground and crouched in the corner, holding the dress and crooning to it.

  On that wedding morning when the noise came up the stairs and the door was thrown open, Bertha was crouched against the wall in the back corner. Rochester was raving and pointing, ‘There you see her! Behold, gentlemen, my wife!’ His face was twisted with rage hatred fury scorn. He looked more the maniac than Bertha.

  Jane was white-faced, holding herself rigid; her elfish face a mask in which only the eyes moved. His wife! I had not known that. Mrs Fairfax and the servants believed Bertha was some mad bastard child or discarded mistress of old Mr Rochester. But, Edward Rochester’s wife! I was so profoundly struck by this revelation that my attention was distracted from Bertha, who leapt from the wall and hurled herself at Rochester with a rising screech. Her hands snatched at his throat, tiger-violent. He seized her arms and battled with her as though glad of the excuse.

  There was a cry from one of the men who had followed him up the stairs. It was Richard Mason, Bertha’s stepbrother, the man who had come from the West Indies to stop the wedding, and now she had bitten him. In trying to get clear of the fray he knocked me aside, so I could not quiet her. Mason lurched into Rochester, who lost his balance and struck his head on the coal hod as he went down. Blood everywhere, suddenly. I pulled Bertha away to a chair. She sank down rocking, moaning, like a great lumpy old doll, and would not have made any more trouble; the fight had gone out of her but Rochester insisted on tying her arms with the straps I had never had to use.

  Irrational, I know, but it’s one of the things I find hardest to forgive him, and one of the reasons why I do not think I can ever be completely fair to his side of this story. I tell myself he had cause to be savage that day—his bride snatched away at the wedding hour, ‘Thornfield’s’ secret torn open to the parish. But it was only ever a secret from the gentry, surely he knew that? And not all of them. Mr Woods, the clergyman, might cry out that he’d lived there twenty years and never heard of it, but servants and sharp-eyed children know everything that goes on in a great house.

  You can’t drag heavy buckets of coal, water, food and chamberpots up and down to the attics without servants talking. They did not know who the madwoman was, but you can be sure there had been plenty of guessing. About six months after I had arrived at ‘Thornfield’ I overheard Dawlish, the cook, and a young maidservant, Leah, talking about it. Leah had not been long in the house herself and was curious:

  ‘That Grace Poole, or Mrs Adair, or whatever she cal
ls herself, is no more nurse than I. She knows but one remedy—gin, or summat as strong, and as many doses a day as she can get.’

  ‘Well, if it keeps t’other one quiet . . .’ Dawlish said, kneading dough vigorously. ‘There’s noises in that attic come from no Christian soul. I’d not be shut up day and night with such a creetur—not fer all the hundert n’ fifty guineas a year.’

  ‘Hundert n’ fifty! But that’s ten times a wage!’

  ‘And everything in food and keep with it.’

  ‘But what can she do with all that?’

  ‘Sits there countin’ it in piles.’ Dawlish was enjoying herself, warming to the sight in her imagination. ‘Great heaps o’ gold sov’rins,’ she added. Then sharply, ‘But it’s nowt to me what she does with it, nor what she does to get it, neither. And you’d best make sure it’s nowt to you, or you won’t stop long in this house.’

  I missed the rest: John the butler had come into the kitchen and he and Dawlish were both talking at once. They were husband and wife; had been at ‘Thornfield’ forty years. Like me, they knew almost everything about the madwoman except who she was. It was they who told me the story of old Grace Poole, a woman Rochester had hired to look after Bertha when he brought his wife back to ‘Thornfield’ ten years previously. Mrs Poole had been formerly a wardress at the Grimsby Retreat for the Insane, Dawlish said, a villainous old hag who fed Bertha gin and ‘black drop’, the strongest laudanum, for seven years. It kept the patient quiet most of the time, but there were terrible eruptions. The female servants whose bedrooms were near the attic often heard screams, which might have been Mrs Poole or Bertha or both. They had orders to keep away on pain of instant dismissal without a character. If the prisoner was cruelly used at times, what could they do?