Reader, I Married Him. Tracy Chevalier

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СКАЧАТЬ was brought here to dig the frippery out of the little girl, so that the child might take her proper station in life.

      Less noise there, Grace.

      I can make a noise if I want. They know that. I have not yet lost my voice. If I spoke out I’d tell the pale one a story she wouldn’t soon forget.

      Long ago he married my lady and they were Mr and Mrs R. Amativeness is what the doctor called it. This was long before the snowdrop raised its head, but the creature with the porter was already here. Me. Fifteen was I? As old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth. I was a lovely flashing bit of a girl then. I could stop men of thirty dead in their tracks as they ploughed. I made the air so thick around me they seemed to wade or drown in it. I was Grace Poole.

      I stopped him dead in his tracks. I did not care for my lady then or know her. She did not come downstairs. They said she was nervous. To me she was a foreign land where I never wished to go.

      Grace Poole, he said to me, and I saw him tremble. Is that your name?

      I tilted the water I was carrying so that the jug rested on my hip. I said nothing. Let him look, I thought, and I shall look back at him.

      I had an attic then. A slip of a room all white with sunlight and almost bare, but there was a bed in it. He was older than me but not by so much. He had married young and they said he was unhappy. I thought of nothing then except having him.

      I dare say he had never lain down on such a bed in his life. We had to put our hands over each other’s mouths so as not to cry out.

      Grace Poole, he said when I released him. Grace Poole. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard: my own name. No one heard and no one came.

      No man likes a big belly. I carried mine to a place he procured for me. He told me that he would provide for the child and give it a station in life, and I would come back to Thornfield. It was more than I expected. He was a fox because it was his nature, but he kept his word about the child. I did not resist when it was born and taken by a wet nurse, to go far away to a better place.

      I took a fever when it was gone and the room stank so that even the nurse who tended me held up a handkerchief over her face, but I did not die. I pitted and spotted and what got up from the bed was no longer the old Grace Poole but the beginning of the creature you see presently. I grew as strong as you like. I came back to Thornfield and took a taste for nursing, as perhaps he had foreseen.

      I did not want anyone to look at me. And there she is, the pale one, bursting with it, every inch of her chill little flesh shouting: Look at me.

      She will never stand before him as I did and look back at him, and make him come to her. She hunts in another fashion.

      So I came to nurse my lady here. She would not eat so I fed her from a spoon. She would not speak so I learned her gestures and what they meant. I brushed her hair, which was thick and soft and long enough to touch the ground when she sat. It took an hour sometimes to brush her hair, to plait it and coil it into the knot she liked. When it was finished she would put up her hands to touch it and she would be satisfied. She liked her laudanum flavoured with cinnamon and not with saffron, which was what they gave her at first. Another thing she liked was a bit of red satin ribbon which she would wrap around her fingers and rub against her cheek as she rocked herself, and at those times although she never spoke she would hum and I would think: Perhaps she is content.

      Each morning: porridge with cream and syrup, so that even a little of it will fatten her. Sometimes she will take a dish of tea; other times she will dash it from my hand. But no matter how fiercely she smashes china, she never touches me. There has been long discussion over whether or not she should take meat. It is heating. It inflames the passions. She is allowed only a very little beef. I make broth for her myself, out of bones she likes to crack with her teeth when they are cooked so that the marrow is ready to drip out of them. She will eat toast sometimes, as long as it is cut so fine it splinters to pieces if the butter is hard. On the days when she puts her lips together and will not swallow, I know better now than to persuade her. I take out my two packs of cards and make them flicker down into heaps over and over. It soothes her.

      But now here we are: the old lady, the snowdrop, the little girl, Mr R, my lady and the creature with the porter. Me. The little girl has come back from France and she does not know me. She peeps and cheeps about the house with her high French voice and her dancing slippers. In the kitchen they say that she is the child of a French opera dancer that Mr R has kept in France. Some say that the opera dancer is dead, others that he has tired of her. They are used to me going in and out without partaking of the conversation, as I fetch and carry my lady’s food and drink. They call me Mrs Poole and none of them will cross me. Richard the footman visited London when he was a boy and he says he would rather have charge of the entire menagerie at Exeter ’Change than be left alone with Mrs R as I am. All I will ever own is that my lady has her ways.

      If the pale one had not come to this house we should all have kept on safe. The little girl did not know me. I was content with that. I liked to see her flutter about the house in her lace and silk, and dance in front of the mirror. I was no more the Grace Poole who laid herself down on the narrow bed in the sunlit attic than I was Mr R himself. I rose up from childbed another woman and I am that woman now. I have no child but I have Mrs R. Let the little girl skip where she wants and peep out her French phrases and grow up to a suitable station. But this pale one has come here, loitering in our lanes and uncannily stealing what does not belong to her. And now here is my lady disturbed night after night, murmuring and rocking. No one knows what senses she has. Sometimes I see thoughts whisk in her eyes that I would never dare to see the bottom of, and I know that Mr R will not come here again and face her.

      Mr R knows that I will never leave her. We should have been safe, if that one had never come here. Of course she wants my lady gone. She spins out words in her head like a spider. She will have us all wrapped tight. I see him walking in the garden, and her walking after him, so sly and small and neat that you would never think twice of it. She calls my lady a madwoman and a danger, and he listens. She says these words and he listens, in spite of all the years I have kept my lady safe and she has never troubled him. She wants my lady gone.

      She may marry Mr R. She may take him for all that there is left in him. She will never stop him dead and make him tremble all over, as I did, before he ever touched me. She can do no harm to the little girl. With her bright black eyes and her dancing feet the child will go where she chooses, and by the time she is fifteen she will turn the air around her thick with longing. We will all be what we are again.

      But you could put your hand through Miss Eyre and never grasp her. I know what she is. There she sits in the window seat, folded into the shadows, watching us. She has come here hunting. I have seen how she devours red meat when she thinks herself alone. She wants my lady gone. She will have my lady put away like a madwoman. Her hair cut again, her ribbon taken and nothing to comfort her. The doctors will measure her skull with callipers.

      The pale one may hunt but she must not touch my lady. I read in my Bible with my good candles burning late. St Paul says that it is better to marry than to burn, but there is marriage and there is marriage. Sometimes it may be better to burn.

      I will make my lady a custard, which I can do better than any cook in England. I will sit on my stool beside her and hold the spoon to her lips. Sometimes I chirrup as if she were a bird, to make her open her lips. She holds her red ribbon in her lap and her eyes meet mine and then she does open, she does take the spoon of custard into her mouth and she does swallow.

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