Jane Slayre

by Sherri Browning Erwin

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  "That is my wife. Such is the sole conjugal embrace I am ever to know. Such are the endearments. And this is what I wished to have." he laid his hand on my shoulder. "This woman, who stands so grave and quiet at the mouth of hell, looking collectedly at the gambols of a demon. Wood and Briggs, look at the difference! Compare these clear eyes with the red balls yonder--this face with that mask--this form with that bulk, and then judge me, priest of the gospel and man of the law, and remember with what judgment ye judge ye shall be judged! Off with you now. I must shut up my prize."

  We all withdrew. Mr. Rochester stayed a moment behind us, to give some further order to Grace Poole. The solicitor addressed me as he descended the stair.

  "You, madam, are cleared from all blame. Your uncle will be glad to hear it--if, indeed, he should be still living--when Mr. Mason returns to Madeira."

  "My uncle! What of him? Do you know him?"

  "Mr. Mason does. Mr. Slayre has been the correspondent of his house for some years in the region. When your uncle received your letter intimating the contemplated union between yourself and Mr. Rochester, Mr. Mason, who was staying at Madeira to recruit his health, on his way back to Jamaica, happened to be with him. Mr. Slayre mentioned the intelligence, for he knew that my client here was acquainted with a gentleman of the name of Rochester. Mr. Mason, astonished and distressed as you may suppose, revealed the real state of matters. Your uncle, I am sorry to say, is now on a sick-bed, from which, considering the nature of his disease, decline, and the stage it has reached, it is unlikely he will ever rise. He would have come if he could have to extricate you from the snare into which you had fallen, but he implored Mr. Mason to lose no time in taking steps to prevent the false marriage. He referred him to me for assistance. Were I not morally certain that your uncle would be dead ere you reach Madeira, I would advise you to accompany Mr. Mason back. As it is, though, I think you had better remain in England until you can hear further from me, or from your uncle himself.

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  Have we anything else to stay for?" the solicitor inquired of Mr. Mason.

  "No, no--let us be gone" was the anxious reply. Without waiting to take leave of Mr. Rochester, they made their exit at the hall door. The clergyman stayed to exchange a few sentences, either of admonition or reproof, with his haughty parishioner. This duty done, he, too, departed.

  I heard him go as I stood at the half-open door of my own room, to which I had withdrawn. The house cleared, I shut myself in, fastened the bolt that none might intrude, and took off the wedding dress to replace it by the stuff gown I had worn yesterday.

  I stretched out on my bed, suddenly weak and tired. I thought over all that had happened. Where was the Jane Slayre of yesterday? Where was her life? Where were her prospects? I looked on my cherished wishes, yesterday so blooming and glowing. Today, they lay stark, chill, livid corpses that could never revive.

  One idea only still throbbed lifelike within me--a remembrance of my uncle Reed entreating me to my Slayre mission. Had I sought others like me, had I trained, would I not have been prepared to slay the vile werebeast as she'd stood over me the other night? If I had, I would be married now. I would have saved Mr. Rochester from his burden and freed the thing that roamed the attic. Was she remorseful? Did she want to be free to go to God? Did it matter?

  I would not even have found Mr. Rochester had I been off seeking others of my kind. I would not have come to Thornfield hall to love him, or to know of that creature, his wife. My life would be very different, but perhaps I would be doing what I was meant to do.

  It was clear to me, when Mr. Rochester would not strike it, that he viewed that thing he married with compassion. I couldn't imagine the particulars that had brought about their union, but I know he regretted it now. Still, he would not kill her. It would have been so easy to find the way to get it done, to have rid himself of such an encumbrance as a werewolf wife, but that was not his way.

  He pitied her. He kept her. He hired a servant to keep her safe

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  from harm, and to keep her from hurting others in turn. He was passionate, caring. I could see that if I'd killed the thing, he would probably not have approved, and where would we be then? The same place we were now, torn asunder.

  I felt the tears begin to come, and once they started, there was no stopping them.

  CHAPTER 30

  SOMETIME IN THE AFTERNOON I raised my head and looked around. The western sun gilded the sign of its decline on the wall. My head swam as I stood. I was weak with grief and, probably, hunger, for I had taken no breakfast. I decided to get some nourishment, and I opened the door and practically fell into Mr. Rochester, who stood on the other side.

  "You come out at last. Well, I have been waiting for you long, and listening."

  "All day? You have been here waiting?"

  He nodded. A chair was placed nearby, so I assumed he hadn't spent the whole time standing, but there he was outside my door. "I started to worry that you were dead. I haven't heard a movement, not an oath, or a whisper, or even a tear, all afternoon. Five more minutes and I planned to break the door down."

  "No need. I had to come out sometime."

  "So you shun me? You shut yourself up and grieve alone. I expected a scene of some kind. Well, Jane? Not a word of reproach? Nothing bitter--nothing poignant? You regard me with a weary, passive look."

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  "What is to be said that can help the situation now?" Kill your wife, sir, or let me have at her. I will find a way! I sensed it was not the right thing to say.

  "Jane, I never meant to wound you thus. Will you ever forgive me?"

  Such deep remorse was in his eye, such true pity in his tone, such manly energy in his manner. Besides, such unchanged love was in his whole look and manner. The only thing to forgive, as far as I could tell, was that he should have trusted in me sooner with the news. I should not have had to hear it as I did. That he was married to that thing upstairs? He may have been married once, but I could not consider him married now. But that a formal union could not exist between us, that the vows we'd been about to speak would have been false? He should have told me. Still, looking at him, knowing what he suffered and how he'd been seeking my happiness as well as his, I could not blame him.

  Reader, I forgave him at the moment and on the spot.

  "You know I am a scoundrel, Jane?" ere long he inquired wistfully--wondering, I suppose, at my continued silence and tameness, the result rather of weakness than of will.

  "Yes, sir."

  "Then tell me so roundly and sharply--don't spare me."

  "Sir." I placed my hand tenderly on his chest. His heart beat fierce under my fingers. "I would love to berate you as you deserve, but I cannot. I am tired and weak with hunger. I need water."

  I wasn't waxing melodramatic. It was true. My knees buckled under me as I spoke and he had to catch me up in his arms. He carried me downstairs and set me down. I felt the reviving warmth of a fire. Summer as it was, I had become icy cold in my chamber. He put wine to my lips. I tasted it and revived. I ate something he offered me and was soon myself. I was in the library, in his favoured chair. He took the one opposite and pulled it close.

  I could not stay in the house with that thing, now that I knew

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  what she was, now that everyone knew she was his wife. What was to be done? Had he never attempted to marry me, had I never written my uncle, things might have stayed as they were.

  "How are you now, Jane?"

  "Much better. I shall be well soon."

  "You must have a strange opinion of me. To think I tried to marry you all the while keeping a wife in the attic upstairs. She's so much more than what she looks."

  "I know, Edward. A werewolf. I don't think this house a suitable environment for a child. I believe Adele needs to go to school." It wasn't the main issue that needed to be settled between us, but I figured I would bring it up as it came to mind.

  "Oh, Adele will go to
school. I have settled that already; nor do I mean to torment you with the hideous associations and recollections of Thornfield Hall. Jane, you shall not stay here, nor will I. I was wrong ever to bring new people to Thornfield Hall, knowing as I did how it was haunted. I charged them to conceal from you, before I ever saw you, all knowledge of the curse of the place, merely because I didn't think Adele yet ready for school and never would have a governess to stay if she knew with what inmate she was housed. My plans would not permit me to remove the fiend elsewhere. Though I possess an old house, Ferndean Manor, even more retired and hidden than this, where I could have lodged her safely enough, it seemed an unhealthy situation. Probably those damp walls would soon have eased me of her charge, but to each villain his own vice. Mine is not a tendency to indirect assassination, even of what I most hate."

  This point, I sensed, would be the separation of us. He had no tendency towards even indirect assassination, while I saw the mercy in killing the afflicted. Did Bertha Mason wish to live as a fiend? Did she not deserve to be set free of such unnatural earthly bonds? Yet, I understood his desire for mercy. Shutting her away to die of illness and neglect would never do. One wanted a sure hand to end her suffering immediately, phut! No drawing it out.

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  "I should shut up Thornfield Hall. I'll nail up the front door and board the lower windows. I'll give Mrs. Poole two hundred a year to live here with my wife. Grace will do much for money, and she shall have her son, the keeper at Grimsby Retreat, to bear her company and be at hand to give her aid in the paroxysms, when my wife senses a full moon and is prompted by her familiar to burn people in their beds at night, to stab them, to bite their flesh from their bones, and so on--"

  "Edward," I interrupted, "you speak of her with hate--with vindictive antipathy. She cannot help what she is."

  "Jane, my little darling, you misjudge me. It is not because she is a werewolf, or even mad, that I hate her. If you were mad or afflicted with such a curse, do you think I should hate you?"

  "I do indeed."

  "Then you are mistaken. Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own. In pain and sickness, it would still be dear. Your mind is my treasure, and if it were broken, it would be my treasure still. If you raved and grew fur and fangs, my arms should confine you, and not a strait waistcoat. Your grasp, even in fury, would have a charm for me. If you flew at me as wildly as that woman did this morning, I should receive you in an embrace, at least as fond as it would be restrictive. I should not shrink from you with disgust as I did from her. In your quiet moments, you should have no watcher and no nurse but me. I could hang over you with untiring tenderness, though you gave me no smile in return, and never weary of gazing into your eyes, though they had no longer a ray of recognition for me. I love you, Jane. I love you as I have never loved before, and I will always love you."

  "Then, you never loved her? And why did you marry her? How did she come to be this way? Please, help me understand."

  He leaned back in his chair, tented his fingers, and exhaled. "Jane, did you ever hear or know that I was not the eldest son of my house, that I had once a brother older than I?"

  "So Mrs. Fairfax told me once."

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  "And did you ever hear that my father was an avaricious, grasping man?"

  "I have understood something to that effect."

  "Well, Jane, being so, it was his resolution to keep the property together. He could not bear the idea of dividing his estate and leaving me a fair portion. All, he resolved, should go to my brother, Rowland. Yet as little could he endure that a son of his should be a poor man. His solution was that I must be provided for by a wealthy marriage, and he sought me a partner. Mr. Mason, a West Indies planter and merchant, was his old acquaintance. He was certain his possessions were real and vast. He made inquiries. Mr. Mason, he found, had a son and daughter; and he learned from him that he could and would give the latter a fortune of thirty thousand pounds. That sufficed."

  "And you were agreeable?"

  "This hardly mattered to my father. When I left college, I was sent out to Jamaica. My father said nothing about her money. He told me Miss Mason was the boast of Spanish Town for her beauty, and this was no lie. At the time, she was a fine woman: tall, dark, and majestic. They showed her to me in parties, splendidly dressed. I seldom saw her alone and had very little private conversation with her. She flattered me and lavishly displayed for my pleasure her charms and accomplishments. Being ignorant, raw, and inexperienced, I thought I loved her. A marriage was achieved almost before I knew where I was. Oh, I have no respect for myself when I think of that act! I never loved, I never esteemed, I did not even know her."

  "But you were young. And you were deceived?"

  He nodded. "I understood that my bride's mother was dead. Once the honeymoon was over, I learned the truth. She was shut up in a lunatic asylum, stark raving mad. The elder brother, whom you have seen, will probably be in the same state one day. My father and my brother, Rowland, knew all this, to the fullest extent, but

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  they thought only of the thirty thousand pounds and joined in the plot against me."

  "I'm so sorry. Your own father and brother!"

  "These were vile discoveries, but except for the treachery of concealment, I should have made them no subject of reproach to my wife, even when I found her nature wholly alien to mine, her tastes obnoxious to me, her cast of mind common, low, narrow, and singularly incapable of being led to anything higher. When I perceived that I should never have a quiet or settled household because no servant would bear the continued outbreaks of her violent and unreasonable temper, or the vexations of her absurd, contradictory, exacting orders--even then I restrained myself. I tried to devour my repentance and disgust in secret. I repressed the deep antipathy I felt."

  "This repression must have been very difficult for one so naturally outspoken as yourself."

  "Jane, I lived with that woman upstairs four years, and before that time she had tried me indeed. Her character ripened and developed with frightful rapidity. Her vices sprang up fast and rank. They were so strong, only cruelty could check them, and I would not use cruelty. Bertha Mason, the true daughter of an infamous mother, dragged me through all the hideous and degrading agonies which must attend a man bound to a wife at once intemperate and unchaste. And worse. One of her lovers had been afflicted with what they called in the West Indies lob hombre. In short, he was a werewolf, and when he bit her in their lovemaking, he infected her with the condition as well. In the next full moon, she revealed her transformation. She tore apart the housekeeper in her bed and devoured a footman and a maid before I managed to restrain her."

  "But, she's never bitten you?"

  "How she's tried! But, no, she's never broken skin. I have made sure to keep up my physical strength and to give myself every advantage of her."

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  "Not so, Mr. Mason," I realised. "She did bite him."

  "Ah, yes, thus the Italian potion. If administered soon enough, it might prevent any effects, or he might end up a mad werewolf himself yet. But, back to my tale. My wife was genetically predis-posed to madness, and in the course of our first four years together, a werewolf as well. My brother in the interval was dead, and at the end of the four years my father died, too. I was rich enough, yet I could not rid myself of it by any legal proceedings, for the doctors now realised that my wife was showing signs of full-blown madness, too. Jane, shall I defer the rest to another day? You look unwell."

  "No, finish it now. What did you do when you found she was mad?"

  "I approached the verge of despair. A remnant of self-respect was all that intervened between the gulf and me. In the eyes of the world, I was associated with her. I remembered I had once been her husband--that recollection was then, and is now, inexpressibly odious to me; moreover, I knew that while she lived, I could never be the husband of another and better wife. Though five years my senior, she was likely to live as long as I, being as robust in
frame as she was infirm in mind. Thus, at the age of twenty-three, I was hopeless."

  "So young."

  "And yet older than you are now. One night I had been awakened by her yells. Since the medical men had pronounced her mad, she had, of course, been shut up. I wouldn't trust her to an institution due to her unique condition. It was indeed a night of a full moon, and a fiery West Indian night besides, one of the sorts that frequently precede the hurricanes of those climates. Being unable to sleep, I got up and opened the window. The air was like sulfur steams--I could find no refreshment anywhere. Mosquitoes buzzed in. The sea rumbled dull like an earthquake, black clouds casting up over it. The moon was setting in the waves, broad and red, like a hot cannonball. I was physically influenced by the atmosphere and scene, and my ears were filled with the howls of my creature-wife

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  as she made her transformation. She momentarily mingled my name with such a tone of demon hate, with such language and wolfish shrieks."

  "And the laugh?"

  "Ah, yes, she was yet perfecting her vocal stylings. At last, I'd had enough, or so I'd thought. 'This life,' said I at last, 'is hell. Let me break away and go home to God!' But a wind fresh from Europe blew over the ocean and rushed through the open casement. The air grew pure. I then framed and fixed a resolution. I would go and live in Europe again. I would have to take the creature with me to England, as I could not trust her with anyone else. I would confine her with due attendance and precautions at Thornfield, then travel and form what new ties I liked. She was not my wife, I reasoned. Not really. She was barely human. No one would know of her relation to me. My father and brother had not made my marriage known to their acquaintance. Far from desiring to publish the connection, they were as anxious to conceal it as myself."