Thornfield Hall by Emma Tennant Page A

wouldn’t be too much, and then I could boil or roast in the room the master calls “Grace’s room,” though God knows it’s not mine to dispose of or even leave. “We don’t want fire up there,” Mr. R says. And he looks away in that end-of-the-world way he has, as if being master of all isn’t enough to keep him cheerful most of the time.
    So today I had to wait, till Leah had come up with the gruel and set it down, bad-tempered in all her ways as ever, on the table in “Grace’s room,” the room with windows so high up in the eaves you can’t look out at Thornfield land or see whether it’s snow or rain today.
    â€œWhat is it, Grace?” my mistress—if that’s what you’d call her, the wretched Creole the master brought back here from the sugar estates his father had (“It’s all tobacco now, Cousin Fairfax,” I heard him say some years back, but if you ask me, they’re still slaves just like we are here at Thornfield Hall)—the poor white woman calls out to me as she always does. “What is it, Grace? Are they my fruits, pineapple and mango and lime? Is there a hibiscus blossom on the tray? Am I home at last?”
    You can’t help feeling sorry for this wife the master has made a prisoner of, but on a cold, dark morning it just grates on my nerves to have the woman he calls his “Antoinette” crying for all those exotic things she’ll never taste again. And now she’s locked up in her cell every hour of the night and day, after the fright we had with her lately. Yet it’s true, her escaping like that did give me the idea of making my fortune at last, from the crazy creature I’ve watched over so long. “No, Bertha,” says I, “it’s the gruel. Andthere’s an apple here. From the orchard where you used to like to go walking when you first came to Thornfield—remember?”
    Then she falls silent, and this is very probably the last exchange we’ll have—unless Mrs. F comes up and I tell the madwoman to stop her babbling. If it gets so bad the master has to be called for, he’ll “recommend a cold bath.” Oh, that makes Mrs. R holler, all right, and cruel it is, too, with the prisoner bundled down to the yard where they hose the horses and given a fair beating with a spray of icy water at full throttle. I’ve seen Mr. R leave the house when this punishment is going on, and I don’t blame him. I’d leave myself, if I could. “It’s not because of you I stay here,” I say to the poor lunatic when she clings to me and cries for a hug or some other proof of affection. “There’s nowhere for me to go,” and I ram the point home. And then I know she knows I see Thornfield Hall as just as much of a prison as she does. We belong to a master who’d happily see us dead—that I tell her sometimes, too. And then she cries as if her heart would burst open.
    Today it was all going to be different. Mr. R’s “fiancée,” as they call her in the servants’ hall (where John and Mary are too stuck up to let me eat with them), was expected today. Her second visit in just a matter of weeks. She was due to be the new mistress of the Hall, the queen of his heart, so they say.
    And the only one who knows an impediment to the marriage of Miss Blanche Ingram and Mr. Edward Fairfax Rochester (“impediment” is a fine word, and it was Bertha’s brother, Mr. Mason, who first taught it to me) is Grace Poole.
    We were in the room with the high windows, Mr. Richard Mason and I, on the occasion of his last visit to Thornfield. I know he comes here to get money from the master, and I soon set myself to learn his tricks. “You and I, we’re the only ones who know the secret,” the gentleman from the West Indies says tome, after pouring me a glass of Tokay he’s brought up from the cellars, cool as