‘But sure there’s little chance of the poor girl stopping long on the throne,’ added Pilkington.
Many would frown on having a woman head of the kingdom. When she married, England would virtually pass into her husband’s hands. Especially if she died in childbed and her child survived; her husband would have the Regency. Look at King George’s daughter, the poor Princess Charlotte: she would have been queen this very moment if she’d survived her first lying-in. At any rate, the Queen would appoint a new Secretary of State for the Colonies, which would stir things up here.
Former comfortable relations were re-established during the evening. Lizzie’s younger sister came in with two friends and conscripted them all to play ‘Anagrams’ at the dining-room table. When Lizzie won by swiftly changing Booth’s ‘L-E-O-P-A-R-D’ into ‘P-A-R-O-L-E-D ’, smiling archly at him, he pleased her by saying, ‘Bravo! I certainly know one young lady clever enough to rule the world.’ Then she gave him a present, supposed to have been for his birthday in August: it was a china dog, a brown terrier which looked a little bit like Fran.
8
WE WERE TWO WEEKS PAST THE ISLAND, AS SAILORS CALL Madeira, when Rochester began to be ill. The weather was warm now, and the rest of us, even Mr Chesney, moulted our woollens and emerged as thinner, summery creatures. Most of our time was spent on deck under awnings, like some straggling, ill-assorted family at a picnic.
Rochester generally stayed below in spite of the humid closeness of the cabins and saloons. When he did emerge he wore a dark frock coat and waistcoat, a black hat, which he was often forced to remove on account of the wind, and gloves. It was as though, with a perverse disregard for the present real conditions, he was dressing as if he were still in an English autumn. At ‘Thornfield’ he had always been scrupulously well attired, but with a degree of studied carelessness which seemed like a show of patrician disdain for mere clothes. Now, when there was excuse for laxity, he was too correct, making an odd contrast with Jane, who looked like a child beside him in lilac muslin—half-mourning for her uncle—and a calico sunbonnet. More than once I saw her look at him anxiously, but she knew that any fussing would irritate him.
Jane and I took turns in giving Adèle and Polly a lesson each day. Apart from the lessons, Jane stayed below with Rochester in their stifling seclusion. Liddy and Mrs Chesney were occupied with Natty, preventing him from tottering determinedly towards the side and trying to climb the rigging. The gentlemen occupied themselves with books and sports. They had the shark chains out and hauled in a great saw-toothed fish which was hacked into bloody portions for dinner, making surprisingly good eating. They practised target shooting at barrels tossed into the sea and read the sextant with Captain Quigley at the noon sightings. In the afternoons we played cards, at which Mrs Chesney excelled, or chess, at which Louisa and I were evenly matched. Seymour was better than either of us. We dozed, and lapsed in and out of straggling conversations as the hours passed. Rochester and Jane took no part in any of this. When they were on deck for brief airings, Rochester observed our activities sardonically; like a corpse at a feast, as my grandmother used to say.
On Sundays, Jane and Rochester made an exception to their usual withdrawal. They attended St John Wallace’s morning service on the deck and afterwards dined with us. Our hymns rose thinly into sails, and on up into the vaporous blue. St John prayed for us all, for our safe arrival in the colony, and for the sick woman in our care, that she might be restored to health, as Our Lord Jesus had restored so many, even those lame, blind and afflicted for many years. Rochester seemed amused by this. He leaned towards Jane and murmured something that made her look at him reprovingly.
Louisa told me Lord Caldicott had so much admired St John’s sermons as to offer him a living, but the congregation was small and wealthy, and St John considered his talents more needed among the less fortunate. A mixture of pride and resentment seemed to govern Louisa’s attitude to this. Her sister was married to a clergyman who held a living in a pretty village near Bury St Edmunds.
We began our dinner that day with soup as usual, and by the time we had finished were hotter than ever in consequence. We were fanning ourselves, waiting for the next course in perspiring patience, when Rochester suddenly leapt to his feet without warning. While we looked on in astonishment he tore off his jacket, then his waistcoat and cravat, as though freeing himself from shackles. Using his one good hand and scrabbling with the maimed one, he flung each garment down, stood panting like someone escaped from a furious pursuit, and suddenly sat again without a word, his shirt open to the waist. In any man it would have been strange: in Rochester it was shocking.
Dr Seymour asked him if he was well. Was he overheated? Rochester did not appear to hear. The steward had served him beef, which he began to eat with a kind of weary persistence. Nothing further occurred, but later, when Rochester went below with Jane, the doctor followed. On his return a short time later, he was met with general enquiry.
‘Mr Rochester is well,’ Seymour said smiling, ‘or at least well enough to consign me—and all medical men—to perdition. He declares himself sound as a bell and refuses to hear any other opinion.’
‘That’s reassuring, at least,’ I said. ‘It would be more alarming if he had lost the will to abuse you.’
Seymour smiled, nodded. ‘Miss Eyre says much the same.’
Several days later, while Jane and Rochester were taking a turn around the deck, they paused near where Mrs Chesney and I were sitting. Jane murmured something to Rochester and moved to the companionway, evidently returning below to fetch something. He went to the side and stood motionless, a strange fixity in his attitude. After a moment he pointed out to sea and began muttering. Raising his chin, he snuffed the air like a dog finding a scent. A cold wave passed through me at the strangeness of it.
‘Glittering, glittering,’ he said loudly, pointing at the water, which sparkled with sharp tremulous points of light. ‘Long grey hair and glittering eye. “Wherefore stopp’st thou me?” It is my father’s eye. I’d know it anywhere. He was a devil in this life and left a devil’s mischief behind him.’
Mrs Chesney gaped. I put down my book and went to his side.
‘Mr Rochester, sir, will you come and sit in the shade?’
‘There is no shade,’ he said. ‘I smell sun and rottenness. Fee, fi, fo, fum. D’you know that song, madam? I smell the blood of an Englishman. Too bright, too hot, too red.’ His tone began to falter. ‘Pray excuse me, Mrs Poole . . . Ah! No, not Mrs Poole. Another woman who keeps changing! If they would only stay as they are! Pray excuse me, madam, I am not myself.’
He seemed to collect himself, seized my arm and pointed into the distance.
‘Look!’ he said. ‘It comes again. The bird . . . red feathers. So steadily it approaches. Feathers. Help me, for God’s sake, I am suffocating! Ugh! Ugh!’
He washed his hands vigorously across his face as though to clear an obstruction, staggering until he fell to the deck and lay in a glaze of sweat, muttering. At that moment Jane returned from below and Mrs Chesney arrived with the doctor and McLeod.
Between us we helped the stricken man down to his bunk. Jane went into the cabin with Rochester and the doctor, and I started to return to the deck, but as I passed the cabin I shared with Bertha, I heard the low sound of a woman singing. When I opened the door I saw it was Bertha, and again there passed through me that shudder engendered by the sight of something inexplicably strange. She was still asleep, lying flat with her eyes closed, her condition apparently unchanged—except that she was singing. Or not so much singing as humming; a wordless melody like that of a woman lulling a baby to sleep. Bertha, who for years had not spoken more than a few cracked words. Rochester’s cabin door was wide open and the rise and fall of his delirious monologue made a counterpoint to Bertha’s wandering tune, a weird duet. Rochester stopped first. She sang on, softer and softer until she ceased altogether.
Rochester’s condition did not improve that night. The do
ctor administered paregoric, bled and cupped him, and at last he fell into a restless sleep.
I woke next morning to the sound of someone moving in the cabin. Bertha was sitting up in her bunk, shaking as though with palsy, breathing hard.
‘Bertha!’ I said foolishly. ‘Bertha?’ she said slowly. ‘No, I am Anna. Anna Cosway-Mason.’
She paused, looking at me. ‘I remember you . . . Not Grace Poole . . .Who was Grace Poole?’
I was in such confusion that I could find no words to answer her. She had pulled her hair out of its plaits and it hung in black abundance around her face, which, ravaged though it was, still possessed a swarthy beauty. At last I gathered enough presence of mind to say, ‘Grace Poole was your first nurse, and I . . . My name is Harriet.’
‘Christophine is my nurse,’ she said. ‘But she would not come. We are such a long time sailing to England. Are we near arriving?’
‘We . . .’ I began, but she did not wait.
‘Christophine did not believe in England,’ she went on slowly, breathing heavily. ‘“No such place,” she said. “Come,” I begged her, but she would not.’
Every movement was clearly exhausting to her. She tried to swing round to sit on the side of the bed but fell back on the pillow, closing her eyes.
‘J’ai faim,’ she said. ‘Coffee. Chicken, bread, melon?’
I wanted to shout for someone, run in all directions. I hurried in search of the doctor. I found him still in Rochester’s cabin—in his shirtsleeves, leaning over the sick man, who was waxy, deathly pale. Jane was beside him. They had evidently been there all night. She had a bowl of blood and rags on her lap and looked nearly as ill as Rochester.
When James Seymour saw Bertha his astonishment was extreme—I think he had not quite believed me—but it quickly turned to professional interest. Water she must have at once, he said, only sip by sip, and later, weak beef tea. Her constitution must not be shocked by too much sudden nourishment. Bertha made faces at the water and accepted a spoonful of beef tea before her eyelids began to droop. I thought she was relapsing into her former state, but Seymour pointed out that this was a different kind of sleep. She lay curled on her side, her brown face suffused by a flush. I could not help wondering how she would manage the world this time when it had driven her mad before.
Our fellow passengers greeted the news with varying degrees of wonder, except St John, who said calmly, ‘We pray for miracles and yet do not truly expect them. The proper response is not to wonder, but to rejoice and give thanks to the Lord.’
A few days later, after attending early to Bertha, I left her dozing and went along to Rochester’s cabin, where the doctor was generally to be found at any hour these days. Jane was there too. I began to say that Bertha—Anna—seemed stronger this morning, but as I spoke I saw their eyes leave me and fasten on something behind. It was Bertha, dragging herself slowly along the short passageway like a wounded creature. She pushed me away when I went to help, and sagged against the door of Rochester’s cabin, gripping the frame and staring inside.
‘Jane Eyre,’ she said.
Jane clasped the jar of leeches as though she might need to throw it at the madwoman, but Anna had turned to the doctor.
‘I do not know you,’ she said. And then, to the sick man, ‘but I know you, Edward Rochester.’ Tears rolled down her face. ‘Where is Rowland?’
She began to shake in great palsied shudders and sank to the floor. I knelt beside her and said we were sailing to another country to find him. Mrs Tench came with hot water just then, and together we helped Anna back to our cabin.
I will not recount every small degree by which she came to the eating of broth and egg (she tightened her lips against gruel like a child) nor how the doctor insisted she build up her strength in short periods of exercise, but the result was that after ten days, Seymour declared she might dress and come in to dinner for an hour.
Clothes were a problem we had not considered when we brought her aboard. It had seemed so certain she would die. Although she had lost a good deal of flesh during the months of her strange state, she was still a large woman. Mrs Chesney, Polly, and Liddy went off to forage and returned with Louisa Wallace and arms full of clothing.
Anna sat on the side of the bed turning over the offerings, making little noises of astonishment and disapproval and muttering in French. I began to understand that she expected to see the high-waisted fashions of fourteen years before: the style of her old red dress, too low-cut for these newly prudish days. In the year ’37 the correct shape for a woman was that of an hourglass: a yard across the shoulders and hips, a handspan at the waist. Skirts were not yet as long as they later became, did not yet conceal the shoes. The expanse from neck to ankle was covered during the day. For evening, the shoulders and upper bosom might be bared if they were alabaster white and wreathed in silk flowers or lace. The gigot, or leg o’ mutton, sleeve was still present, but waning.
At first it was just Anna we draped and pinned, while Adèle, Polly and Liddy knelt on the bunks dressing up Natty and each other, giggling, sorting through the clothes. Then Mrs Chesney tried on a dark green walking costume belonging to Louisa’s mother, which Louisa meant to have remade. Bess Chesney believed she might squeeze into it if we laced her stays a little tighter, and what a surprise for Chesney if she went in to dinner like that!
Polly draped herself as a bride in Mrs Chesney’s vast lace petticoat and was overtaken by hysteria. Liddy, wearing Mrs Chesney’s striped poplin with a pillow underneath, showed an unexpected talent for comedy—and suddenly we were all helpless with laughter, gasping and wiping the tears from our eyes. Bertha alone did not laugh. She gazed from one to the other of us with an expression of mild puzzlement, but soon returned her attention to the clothing.
At the time I thought this wild mirth came from the monotony of the voyage, but looking back I think it was more. Seeing Anna lying still all those weeks, we had known in our hearts that any woman might come to this fate: madwoman, invalid, sleeping princess. Now it appeared that if Anna could escape the prison of Bertha, then anything was possible. We might each be more than we had imagined. We were seized with jubilant excitement.
No amount of thought could solve the problem of shoes. Her feet were a size larger than mine and three sizes larger than Mrs Chesney’s. She was forced to go barefoot until a crewman cobbled her a pair of leather sandals. Odd, but serviceable.
Accounts of Anna’s progress had been relayed to the gentlemen, but only the doctor had seen her. For her debut Anna chose a red dress of Mrs Chesney’s. It was too short—Anna was a tall woman—but would pass with a long black petticoat underneath. I looped her hair back into a coronet of braids. With a pair of Louisa’s silver earrings and a dusting of pearl powder, she looked suddenly like a woman of consequence. Not English, something more dusky and exotic. We stared. She viewed herself piece by satisfactory piece in Mrs Chesney’s hand-mirror, then brought it up and stared at her own face.
‘Madame, que vous êtes belle!’ cried Adèle, curtseying.
And now she did seem like a wonderful large doll: our creation. At the dinner hour when we arrived with her, each dressed in borrowed garments, our appearance produced as much astonishment among the gentlemen as we could have wished, and the occasion became a party, a rout. The gentlemen fell in with our mood, even St John. The Captain hoped Mrs Rochester felt more herself, and pressed her to take a little chicken (two non-layers from the hen coop sacrificed to the occasion) while she smiled cautiously, answered little, exclaimed in French from time to time. ‘Vooly-voo?’ cried Mr Chesney, offering turnip. The meal passed in high good humour, subdued only by the knowledge that the doctor’s place was empty because he and Jane were still with Rochester.
Wine was liberally served at dinner on the Adastra, and I suddenly wondered whether Anna might imbibe too freely, but she drank only two glasses. After the meal we went on deck to an afternoon of tropical warmth, with a blue sky, milky at the horizon, and a light wind. We
were under full canvas, which rippled and snapped and sang. Anna clung to us, turned her face up to the air and closed her eyes, breathing deeply as though she smelt a divine perfume, although it was only the sour mixture we were accustomed to, of brine and tar and salt-pork boiling in the galley. She seemed to draw the warmth inside her, and for the rest of the voyage she was like a cat, always curled up in a warm spot, blinking gently, smiling. She preferred to doze randomly through all the twenty-four hours. When I became too tired to stay with her, Mrs Tench, Mrs Farley, or the Captain on his night watch, became her attendants. He treated her with courtly politeness as though she were some beautiful, large, damaged creature from a different order of being—which, in a sense, she was.
I came on deck a week later to find Jane and Anna standing at the rail with their backs towards me, two yards apart and not talking. They had met and murmured brief civilities, but showed no inclination to converse further. Jane, in any case, was generally with Rochester, whose condition had not changed.
As I approached them, I thought how profoundly different they were: Jane small, pale, slim as a child; Anna tall, brown and statuesque. Jane wore dove grey, the curved seams moulding her narrow body tightly from neck to waist, and yet a vital spirit animated that unremarkable exterior. Anna was in a flowing red sacque, bright and loose, but the embers of life burned very low within her, or as the Captain had said to me quietly, ‘Hatches still battened down after great storm, signs of devastation apparent’. Jane wore her calico bonnet, while Anna’s black hair was pulled back severely into a knot high at the back, with a green silk sash around it, the ends floating free. Jane looked utterly English, made of sugar and spice and all things nice, but also of prayer books and duties, tea and sombre warnings. What Anna was made of, we had yet to discover.
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