Read Online Thornfield Hall by Emma Tennant - Free Book Online

and white drawing room, where he sat with a mournful expression, listening to Blanche at her interminable airs on the piano. But the rest of the party did: within one minute, or so it seemed, a whole herd of young men and silly girls in dresses with the puffed sleeves we have so long ago discarded in Paris are chasing me up the narrow servants’ staircase to the top of the house. And I am too breathless—too excited and even afraid—to stop and look back and arrest them as they rush upward. For I, too, am ignorant of what lies here, in the domain guarded by Grace and never referred to by Madame Fairfax, as if a whole story of Thornfield Hall simply, and just because she had decided thus, had ceased to exist. If I am to hide, what and whom is it they must seek? For I hear the screams of excitement, that I lead them to the ghost—“Oh, it’s Edward’s grandmother, the housekeeper told me so”—as I mount, and emerge at last ontoa landing that even I, in all my explorations of the Hall, have never seen.
    It is dark up here, the ceilings are low, and it is some time before I see the landing, which, unlike the rooms in this fine house, is carpeted in something hard—like matting put down for beasts, I cannot stop myself from thinking; this tough straw is not for the likes of Mademoiselle Ingram and her friends. Light comes in from mansard windows—such as Nadar worked by, poor Nadar who lived for the good strong light of day. Pictures, some so tall they must have been sent up here when they were no longer à la mode—some of ladies and gentlemen, all sad and somber as this house lost in the dark moors would make them—hang unobserved on the sloping walls; and even as I run past, I see the features of Monsieur de Rochester (as I secretly know him, for Papa is as noble as Maman’s vicomte) there, though not my own, for all I try to grimace into the frames.
    Why has it become so silent? The footsteps of the young men and the scurrying girls are muffled now, and I realize they have run off in the opposite direction, drawn, I suppose, by the fact that the passage opens out there, promising further rooms and antique furniture to exclaim over: it is possible to hear, in the distance, one of Mademoiselle Blanche’s chosen confidantes cry out in delight over a sewing basket set in a marquetry table, a rubbishy thing poor Irène at home would have discarded long ago. Then the troupe meets someone—Grace perhaps, on her way back up the stairs with her jug of porter—and a silence falls, this time broken only by murmurs of apology: Madame Fairfax, maybe, coming into the terrain she will never mention, to throw out those who have no right to go in search of the Thornfield Hall ghost. I stop and find that my head touches the ceiling above me, and the passage has narrowed before turning to yet another flight of steps,these smaller still than those I have climbed to the landing behind me. Shall I return and explain to the good housekeeper that we play cache-cache, the game I tried to describe to her, when we sit by the fire in the evenings and Madame Fairfax says the governess will be here soon and I shall have more to occupy me than the recounting of my past life to an old woman who falls asleep? Am I to go in search of those English who hunt and cry “Tally ho!” when they are out in the field but look on me as invisible as a mouse? I am free now; I have no need to hide when no one comes to seek. And so it is that I fit my foot—small even for my age and height, as Jenny has informed me with one of her rare smiles—I place my foot on the stair and see that it covers the tread entirely, as if this way upward could be taken by none other than Adèle Varens, by une petite fille, by the child for whom it was fashioned—for so, as I climb on and on, this strange staircase seem to me to be.
    After several twists and turns—and with any sound of Madame