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Excerpt from Chapter 1: I Am Sent to School
MISS JANET? MISS JANET!"
My maid's calm country voice called me early one morning as I dawdled in the orchard before breakfast. It was a fine April day, the air fresh and cool after a night of rain. There were crocuses, patches of yellow and purple, visible in the grass and daffodils in bloom under the apple trees, and somewhere a robin sang, proclaiming his territory. As I left the orchard, a kestrel flew up, lofting high in the rain-fresh sky: windhovers, the Yorkshire people call them, a name I have always loved. I watched it float overhead, poised, wings still, eyeing the ground for prey.
"Miss Janet?" The call was louder. I picked a daffodil. I held it between thumb and finger and inhaled its fragrance with enjoyment. Its clean, astringent scent filled my senses. Only then did I turn towards the house.
"Yes, Annie. I am here."
My mother wanted me, she said. I was to join the rest of the family in the library. Quickly she straightened my collar and smoothed my hair, braided and looped at the back of my head.
There could be no dawdling if my mother had expressed a wish. I made my way to the library, where my father sat at his desk and my mother stood behind him with one hand on his shoulder. Oliver lounged in a leather armchair. They had been talking eagerly, but now they stopped and looked towards me.
"Come in, Janet," said my father as I lingered on the threshold. It was sometimes difficult for me to intrude on their close-knit group. He sat me down in a chair opposite his desk. His glance at me was sober and assessing.
"We have something to tell you, Janet, of an important nature. We are making a change in our lives." Cool fingers seemed to play about the nape of my neck. I shivered, shrugged my shoulder blades, and held my tongue.
"Your mother and I are leaving shortly for Jamaica," he said. "Within a month. And we will be gone perhaps two years. Oliver will accompany us. It is a scheme that has been long in the planning." He looked at me kindly. "You are too young, we feel, for such a trying journey. You will stay safely in England and go to school. So, Janet, what do you say?"
I felt as if I had been struck a blow. But I stiffened my spine and returned his gaze. "It is a long way off, sir," I said. And again, "It is a long way."
He winced. My father had travelled considerably during the difficult years of his first marriage to Bertha Mason. He believed he travelled in an attempt to leave behind his unhappiness and despair with his marriage. In fact, I believe he would always have had a wandering bent. He was interested in other ways, other lands. Apart from their yearlong European tour, my mother had not travelled, though when she was young she had yearned for "far horizons." She took up the tale. They had decided, she said, that now, while they were both in good health, was a suitable time to make a journey they had long considered. (This was an oblique reference to my father's age; he was twenty years older than my mother.) It was, they explained, their intention to investigate the affairs of the Masons, the family of my father's long-dead first wife, to see how needy they might be after years of upheaval and revolution in the West Indies and, if they felt it advisable, to make recompense for the money that had come to my father on his marriage to Bertha
Mason. (That was my mother's influence, I thought. My father's conscience was well developed, but I doubt if he would, left to himself, have felt guilt over Bertha Mason's dowry. That a husband assumed a wife's property was a fact of life. It would be my mother who felt that every last reminder of that disastrous marriage should be excised.)
I had read in my mother's journal the story behind that ill-fated marriage. My grandfather had arranged for his younger son to marry Bertha Mason, a Creole, living in Jamaica and the daughter of a wealthy sugar planter, although he knew that both her mother and grandmother were of unsound mind, the mother now confined in a lunatic asylum. Through this marriage, my grandfather planned to make his son's fortune without having to divide his own property and thereby lessen what he could leave to his eldest son, Rowland. Bertha Mason's fatal mental inheritance had been disguised before the marriage, her coarse behaviour glossed over. She was handsome, that was enough. (In the Islands, she was widely known to be unchaste and intemperate, indulging in strong drink - the fiery local rum - smuggled in by her servants and given to extreme bursts of temper and even violence to those serving her; local gentlemen of marriageable inclination knew better than to seek her hand despite her wealth.) To Mr. Rochester senior, her dowry was all that mattered. As it turned out, this venal marriage was unnecessary.
My uncle Rowland was unmarried, and when after some years he was thrown from his horse and broke his neck and then, shortly after, my grandfather died, my father inherited Thornfield and all his father's property. He had grown steadily more prosperous over the years.
My mother took over the explanation once more. "As your father says, you, Janet, are to go to school in London. Your father believes you have lived too long in seclusion here with us. The establishment is a finishing school for young ladies, run by my friend Miss Temple, and there you will not only continue to study art and music and to follow a course of reading but also learn to dance and to comport yourself with ease in the social world." The corners of her mouth turned down a little. "I do not imply I wish you to indulge in the more vapid ways of Society, to become vain and self-centred, concerned only with appearance, dress, gossip, and petty snobberies. Your whole upbringing must protect you from such false indulgence. We have tried to instil in you such standards and true moral principles as will preserve you from frivolity. But to be at ease in society is an asset."
