Thornfield Hall by Emma Tennant Page B

cucumber. “You’ll like this better than that evil porter you tope, Grace,” says Mr. Mason, and he gives a high-pitched laugh that almost wakes Bertha—though I’d given her enough laudanum to keep her still at least a day or two. “Mrs. F would never tell the world the shame of my sister’s confined state,” Bertha’s brother goes on, “and the decline of her mental powers; dear Mrs. Fairfax would not care to be kin to a man like Edward, who could reduce his lawfully wedded wife to little more than an animal.”
    As Mr. Mason said the words “lawfully wedded wife,” I saw his meaning. If the master so much as began to believe he could remarry, then the blackmail would begin in earnest. Mr. Mason would end up a rich man. Why he imagines I wouldn’t go in for this game, too, I cannot say. I didn’t count, I suppose: I was just Grace Poole.
    Well, the week of the confirmation of Miss Blanche Ingram as official fiancée to Mr. Edward Fairfax Rochester came, and it saw a great upheaval and bustling at Thornfield. This time, as we all knew at the Hall, the master had to declare his intentions; he’d put those diamonds back in the safe too often, as Cook and Leah agree. Mary, Mr. R’s devoted servant, was at sixes and sevens over the bed linen and the hip baths, and with John shouting at the lads down in the lower regions to stoke the boiler up high and Mrs. F speaking coldly to that sharp-eyed little minx Leah, it was a busy scene at Thornfield and no mistaking.
    But Mr. Richard Mason, as I noticed and I was all the happier for it, had missed the cue entirely. No sign of a telegram, no figure just off the coach at Whitcross walking up the drive with gold written all over his face. No voice at the bottom of the stairs to the attic, soft and cooing like the wood pigeons that fly about the woods on the far hill of the Ingram estates. “Grace, are you there?”I’d think I heard it sometimes—but as the days passed, I began to see that the road was open to me alone. And I began to form my plan.
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    Bertha was in one of her heavy sleeps when I took her from the trundle bed. She sometimes wakes and thinks she’s in her marital couch, on honeymoon in those accursed spice islands she paid the master to take her away from. Then, when she sees the narrow iron bedstead and the high, sloping walls without so much as a chink of light, she groans and rolls over. On this occasion I made sure she rolled right into the net—or hammock, if you like: I came across it in the attic where the playthings of Master Edward and his late, lamented brother were stored once they grew too old to have a use for them.
    She looked like something from that exotic place I thought I’d never see—Bequia, sounded like its name. “Grace, you’d love the Windward Islands”—so poor Bertha would croon sometimes, and tell me of the nutmegs and breadfruit a Captain Cook had planted there, on an island I like the sound of, along with plants with fronds and spiky leaves such as Mr. R’s new bride would give her eyes for, in the new greenhouses down by the water garden at Thornfield. “Let me tell you about the trade winds, Grace.”
    Today, lying in that bright hammock on the floor of the attic room she’s been in more years than anyone could care to count, the wife of Mr. Rochester looked like something that’s turned from a butterfly back to a caterpillar, and I couldn’t help wishing I didn’t have to do this to her—though she knew nothing, thanks to Quincey’s drops, of her destination or her future life. I muttered a few words to her, as if it would give her some comfort, as I dragged her down the stone spiral stairs (I knew that Mrs. F had gone all the way to Sheffield, visiting her niece, and this I considered was the best part of my good luck today).
    While I was muttering on—and thinking who was the