Mr. Rochester

by Sarah Shoemaker

  She tilted her head downward as she often did, coyly, gazing at me through her eyelashes, a smile spreading slowly across her face. “Of course, my darling. When I have arrived.” When she had made her entrance, was what she meant. Marriage had not changed her wish to be seen and admired by all in attendance. Still, I claimed her at the first reel, but after that initial dance, she turned from me and tilted her head at a man I had never seen before. He took her from me, and after that she was with another and then another. I broke in from time to time, but she pouted when I did so, as if I were ruining her evening, and after a time I gave up altogether and stood out on the veranda with a group of planters, smoking cigars and talking about the cockfights.

  She did not leave the ball early that evening, as she had done every other time since I had known her. Instead, she stayed to the very end. A few times, she pulled her partner out onto the veranda, leaning close to him and laughing softly. I was tempted to leave, but I stayed on, for I did not want the others to see my jealousy, or how little control I had over my own wife.

  She left the ball as dawn was nearly breaking. Kissing her final partner on the cheek, and gathering her wrap against the night air, she mounted her carriage. She did not even seem to notice that my horse followed behind, and that I trudged up the steps to the house in her wake.

  Once inside, she turned to me. “I must say, you behaved abominably,” she snapped. “I cannot imagine what people thought.”

  “Abominably? Me?” I countered. “It was you who refused to dance with your own husband.”

  “Refused? I did not refuse! You were never around. It seemed as if you were never to be found. And leaving me half the night with that horrid Jasper Duncombe while you mooned over that stupid wife of his!”

  “You kissed him!”

  “Kissed him? I? Kissed him? That lout! I would rather kiss a tree frog.”

  I stared at her in astonishment.

  She stared back, her eyes locked on mine, her pout slowly breaking into a coy smile, and she stepped closer. “Take me,” she whispered.

  I could not believe it—my head whirling at the speed with which her emotions changed. Yet, was this not the Bertha I preferred, I asked myself—a loving and lusty wife? She stepped closer and put her arms around my neck, kissing me full on the mouth, and I responded, and together we made our way to our room and fell upon the bed.

  When we had finished, spent, I caressed errant locks of hair from her face and kissed her gently until she turned away from me. “You are nothing like your brother,” she murmured.

  “What?” I asked, suddenly chilled.

  “You are nothing like your brother,” she repeated slowly.

  I moved back from her. I was indeed nothing like my brother, I knew, but I could not think of a response to that.

  But she could. “He is tall and slim and fair, and he dances as if he is moving on a cloud, while you—”

  “That’s enough,” I said. I did not need to be told by my own wife how much she might have preferred Rowland. “You were a child when he was here,” I said, throwing on my garments. “And you had a child’s imagination. But now you are a woman, and you know nothing of Rowland.”

  “It is you who knows nothing!” she screamed. “You stupid…graceless…ugly—” I slammed the door on her words.

  * * *

  The next morning, she came to me, contrite, and leaned over the back of my chair as I sat at breakfast, kissing my neck and nuzzling against my ear. “Did we make a baby last night, do you think?” she murmured.

  I turned toward her. “Bertha—”

  “Antoinetta!” she demanded, rising.

  I rose as well, pushing back my chair and facing her. “We can only hope God blesses us—”

  “God.” She spat the word. “God has nothing to do with it.” She began weeping, silently. “It’s all wrong,” she said as she wept. “Everything is all wrong.”

  I thought I loved her. I will make it right, I told myself. But I had no idea.

  There were other balls and gatherings after that, but they were all the same. We arrived separately and danced a few times together before she went on to dance with one man and then another, and afterwards we returned, she sullen, or I, or both of us. She spent her days with Molly, playing strange African games. Perhaps they were meant to help her conceive a child, but I ignored them as foolishness. And we came together in acts of passion, if not always love.

  Everything to do with my marriage to Bertha had happened so quickly that I had not, fortuitously perhaps, found time to write to my father to tell him the news, that I had indeed married Jonas Mason’s daughter. However, by the time I got to the task, I had already begun to wonder what kind of future our marriage held for us—Bertha’s mother and brother in an insane asylum, and Bertha herself clearly disturbed—so I wrote to him in simple and civil terms, saying as little as necessary and imploring him not to make my marriage known among his friends and acquaintances.

  It was not the marriage I had thought we would have, but it was perhaps no worse than many others. Richard had warned me about Creole marriages, though at the time I paid little attention. One always thinks one is the exception, I suppose.

  I saw less of Richard since Valley View became my chief residence, but I did pin him down once on the question of his mother, though he seemed not to understand my concern. “Of course she is mad,” he said. “Did you want us to shout it from the treetops?”

  “I should have been told,” I responded tartly.

  “What good would it have done? And anyway,” he added as he walked away, “half the women on the island are mad.”

  But that far from satisfied me, and I confronted Jonas Mason as well. “I ought to have been made aware of Bertha’s mother,” I blurted out to him one evening as we sat on the veranda. It was not how I should have done it, but perhaps it was as good as I could have managed in my distress.

  “You ought,” he agreed. “I had imagined…I thought you could help her keep from becoming like her mother.” He glanced away from me, as if searching for the right words. “I thought new blood…And—”

  “She will get worse,” I said.

  He nodded. “She will.”

  “And she is afraid of being put where her mother is.”

  “Please,” he said. “We cannot let that happen.”

  That stopped me for a moment. What could I say? There had been a time when I had thought my presence would always calm her, my words or actions could somehow make her well again, but I no longer thought that, and I could not imagine what my life would become, saddled forever—forever—to a woman like Bertha. “I will do my best,” I responded, though in truth I did not know how I could manage such a thing for the rest of my life.

  But there was one more thing: “Did my father know—did he always know of Bertha’s inheritance?”

  “He knew of my wife, Rochester,” he said gently, “but in those days I hoped neither Bertha nor Richard would follow their mother’s course. And I still hold out hope that Bertha…will…not…”

  He did not complete his thought, but I knew it was a false hope.

  After that, from time to time, I tried writing to my father, demanding to know why he had not warned me about Bertha’s inheritance. I wished him to blush with shame at having had any part in sending me to Jonas Mason, for I was certain now that he had known far more than I did from the very beginning, and I could not imagine why he would do such a thing to his own son—bring me up, educate me, for this…this hell. But every time I wrote, I balled up the letter without sending it, for I could never think of how to adequately express my anger and my loss of respect for him. As for Jonas, while of course I wished he had been more honest with me, my sense of betrayal was less acute: I understood his desire to ensure his daughter’s care, which was what any father would do. It was my own father who seemed to have sacrificed his son—me—for Bertha’s sake.

  To escape the disappointment of our marriage, I buried myself in my work
. True, Bertha was as beautiful as ever, and true, I could not complain of the way she graced my bed. But beyond that, there was nearly nothing. We did not share meals, nor did we speak of everyday things, or our hopes and dreams. She did not care to read or to share her thoughts on any subject, small or large. I did complete the purchase of the Sea Nymph, though the ship had become nearly a burden for me, a reminder of the mistake my marriage seemed to have been.

  There were other tensions as well in our world, especially between the Creoles and the field slaves in the West Indies. Negroes on the island of Jamaica outnumbered whites by ten or more to one, and there was—always—the fear of a slave uprising. Such revolts happened on all the sugar islands from time to time—uprisings that saw a great deal of violence and destruction on both sides. At those times slave owners were rarely killed, but often they were shamed by their negroes by being put into the stocks, or shackled—as negroes sometimes were—to iron posts set into the ground, a humiliation beyond bearing. And, of course, the great fear was the burning of the cane fields.

  Daniels, the estate manager at Valley View, had informed me early on that it was never allowed for all the whites to be absent from the estate at the same time. He did not say outright that it was to deter insurrection, but I understood. The one weapon the whites had against the negroes was fear. A negro late to the field received ten lashes; a negro who tried to escape was beheaded and his head placed on a pole at the side of the road as a warning.

  Does not the effect of unlimited power and the frequent witnessing of such severe punishment tend to harden the heart? Yes, I found, it does, although the whites of the West Indies would have said it is an unfortunate truth that must be accepted, for there is no way to grow and harvest sugar without it. But there is also no doubt that such power destroys the souls of those who wield it every bit as much as it destroys the bodies and spirits of those who suffer under it, and I was no exception, for I too easily slid into acceptance of the way of life of a Jamaican planter.

  I followed Daniels around, watching his dealings, learning the routines of a sugar plantation: the planting season, which involves the most difficult work of holing for the new canes; the rainy season, when the canes and the weeds grow most vigorously and the weeds need constant chopping lest they—and the vermin they harbor—get entirely out of control; the autumn and winter months, when the temperature grows cooler and the plantation manager needs to keep an eye on the cane and on the dampness of the soil and when the final repairs to the mill must be completed, so that sometime in the first few months of the year, when the cane is ready to harvest, all is prepared for the long, mad days of harvest and of sugaring.

  At that time I was so intent on all that the plantation involved, I often did not see Bertha from dawn until evening, and when we were together there were frequently sharp words between us. “You care nothing for me!” she would scream. “It’s only the stupid, idiotic, bloody harvest that you care for.”

  “You know that’s not true,” I would respond, forcing my voice into calmness. I had gotten used to her foul language and had come to think that if I ignored it she would stop using it, as if she were some kind of child who was only trying to shock.

  “You’re worthless!” she screamed once. “Ugly! Stupid! You know nothing of women! You can’t even fuck right!”

  That jolted me into silence, and I stormed out of the room.

  * * *

  Crop time was almost a relief. The pressures are heavy on all involved, because sugar is a finicky crop: it must be harvested at just the right stage, for a day or two in one direction or another can ruin the crop and mean the loss of a year’s work and thousands of pounds of income—the difference between the life of a prosperous planter like Jonas and that of the poorest landholder in the county.

  Although the work of a plantation like Valley View is highly regimented, everyone having his or her own responsibilities, at crop time all work is focused on chopping and transporting the canes to the mill, and on boiling and distilling and curing the sugar that will someday grace the tables of the wealthiest and noblest Europeans, and on the production of the rum that warms many a man the world over.

  The harvest lasted about a week, the black smoke rising day and night from the boiling-house chimneys. Book-keepers took twenty-four-hour spells overseeing the work gangs and catching a few moments of sleep wherever and whenever they could. People grew tired and snappish but carried on until the work was finished. I did not see Bertha at all during those crop time days. I was in the fields or the sugar mill or the distillery all day and half the night, and when I did return to the house, I fell into bed, sometimes not even bothering to take off my clothes. Bertha was occasionally absent from the bed, but I assumed she was sitting somewhere in the dark with Molly.

  For me, for that brief time, my mind and body were so occupied with all the fury and activity around me that I could not possibly think of anything else. And that was a blessing.

  Chapter 8

  The end of the harvest—“crop-over time”—was always an occasion for great celebration. The negroes received an allowance of sugar and santa—a mix of fruit juice, sugar, and rum. First there would be a dinner at the buckra house and a black ball and an overabundance of rum punch. Negro fiddlers would play and drummers drum, and all the negroes came dressed in their finest. They danced with the buckras, and when, sated with rum and dancing, they left to sleep it off, the white neighbors arrived for more food and dancing and rum. Crop over could last for days and days.

  I had assumed that Bertha would be in attendance at Valley View’s crop-over celebration, for she always attended the neighborhood balls in her usual fashion. But she did not appear at the black ball, nor did she attend the white one that succeeded it. By that time I had not seen her for two weeks and I had become concerned, but I hardly knew where to turn. None of the servants could answer my questions regarding her, and Molly had disappeared as well. I could not bring myself to admit to Jonas that after only a few months of marriage I had lost my wife. After another day, I took myself to Spanish Town to speak with Richard, but he merely shook his head and said, “Bertha is like that. She’s probably with one of her Obeah women. She’ll be back.”

  Bertha had become obsessed with Obeah, a kind of religion, or mysticism, or magic—I hardly know what to call it—that some of the negroes practiced. It involved attempts to control events or to secure good luck for oneself or bad luck for others, or put curses on others or remove them from oneself, and included the use of the bones and feathers and strange concoctions of blood and herbs that I had seen Bertha with on a few occasions. I did not know how to react to this or what to say, and whenever I mentioned it she laughed at me as if I were a fool to take any of it seriously, and yet I saw how much time she spent on it and how far she would go to meet with an Obeah woman or man. I had asked her father about it once, but he had laughed it off as a childish obsession that she had not yet outgrown. “Give her a child of her own, and she will forget all that nonsense,” he had said, taking another drink of his grog and looking off over his cane fields.

  I stayed over in Spanish Town for a few days, Sukey’s calm presence a comfort, and when I returned I found Bertha in our bedroom, as if she had been there all along. She was playing, I thought, with a doll. I had not seen it before, and I assumed it was some precious thing from her childhood, but on closer examination I saw that it was roughly made from old fabric, patched in the arms and body, and with hair cut from some animal. Bertha glanced up at me when I arrived and grinned. “We shall have a baby!” she announced.

  “Really!” I exclaimed, flooded suddenly with conflicting emotions, for while I was keen to have a family, I worried about Bertha: I was not as convinced as her father that a baby would bring her back to her former self.

  “You will give me a baby,” Bertha said.

  “Oh,” I said. Not yet, then.

  “Now,” she said. “It must happen now.” She rose and kissed my mouth, her teeth bitin
g my lips as they often did when she was strongly aroused.

  I meant to step back, for I had great reservations regarding the act of love with her, for in fact, she was not in her right mind and I had come to understand that she ought never to become a mother. But before I made a move, she suddenly began to weep. “What good does it do to have a baby when they just take it away from you?”

  I stared at her in confusion. She seemed to be talking gibberish.

  Still, I asked, “Who takes babies away?”

  “They do!”

  “Who?”

  “What does it matter who?”

  Her Obeah woman had put hallucinations into her head. Or perhaps, I thought, the worst has happened and she has become her mother. She reached for me then, her face suddenly softening. “You will give me a baby,” she whispered, “and you will not disappear.” Her lips were on my surprised mouth, her tongue inside. I felt the heat of her, but I could not rise to her need. When instead I tried to comfort her, her hands pummeled me and she bit me, screaming my worthlessness at me until I turned from her and left.

  Later, sleepless, I walked out of the house and into the moonless night, cursing myself, and my father, and all that had brought me to that wretched place.

  * * *

  After that night, it seemed that Bertha grew worse by the day. She often had hallucinations—some were garbled and full of fantasy; others were clear. She imagined my brother or my father in the room with her; she imagined a house full of babies; she even imagined she had killed her father and mine. And then she took to cutting herself, and Molly and I had to be ever watchful to keep sharp objects from her reach.

  I needed to get away. Far away. I needed new vistas, other persons surrounding me, other thoughts than those crowding my head in the night. I sent a quick message to Whitledge and packed a small valise and made my excuses to Jonas, barely able to look him in the face as I did so, for I had come to wonder if everyone—all of Jamaican society, except me—had known of Bertha’s proclivities. I had been an egotistical fool: it was not a contest for Bertha’s hand that I had won; it was the contest for her bed, and perhaps I had not won even that.