Read Online Thornfield Hall by Emma Tennant - Free Book Online Page A

Fairfax or the retreating party entirely subdued and gone—I see a light ahead of me on the stairs and, as I turn the last, almost impossibly squeezed corner, a large window can be seen to shed its light on wall and staircase. The window is ajar, and the sill is easy—or easier—to step onto than the next, vertiginous step. Accordingly, as if I had known all along I must walk out onto the forbidden roof of Papa’s house, I do so. The leads feel soft, as if melted by a sun seldom known to Thornfield; and they are bound, or confined, by lengths of piping, where I take care to walk, for fear of stumbling on the uneven flat surface. At first, anxious to preserve my balance, I do not look up. I know that a magnificent view will be my reward when I do, but the mock cannons, roughly hewn from gray stone, are all I permit myself in the early stages of my illicit visit to the roof. What if I were to fall? I can’t help thinking of the trouble that would come to Madame Fairfax, of whom Ihave become fond, in the absence of anyone else with whom to exchange affectionate gestures. I must take great care not to go tumbling down to the ground.
    When at last I do look up, I see her. The purplish haze of heather on the moors, fading in the fast-encroaching winter but strong enough in color still to lend the air of an ocean painted by one who dreamed of foreign seas, stretches out behind her in the clear air. The thorn trees, parterres, fine vegetable gardens, and outbuildings of Thornfield Hall lie as neat as a child’s toy on the land claimed from the wildness of the moors. The ornamental lake glitters like a teardrop put there by one of Maman’s amis in Paris, on the waxen cheek of my favorite poupée, Christine. All is artificial, removed, minute—with the exception of the woman who stands facing me now, not six inches from the parapet. She is haggard, her black hair tumbles down her back, and she holds her arms out to me. She alone, on these battlements of Papa’s where the guns cannot fire and the turrets, with their pepperpot hats, could sustain neither siege nor attack, is real. Behind her, like a backdrop in the Funambules, hangs the likeness of the landscape surrounding and enclosing Thornfield Hall. The woman, with faltering steps, approaches me. “Mon doudou,” she says, and her voice is thick, thicker than the voice of Grace when she has been at her porter and I’m hurried away from her, on the stairs. “ Viens,” the strange woman says. Her accent places her somewhere in my memory, but I cannot for now think just where. She is French—that is all I know now—she is French, and she is my new friend, brought to me here on the roof of Thornfield Hall.
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    I soon learned how to keep the secret of the lady who lives out on the parapet and battlements of the house Jenny says I mustthink of as my home—but I cannot, I cannot. The étrangère (for I can see that poor Antoinette, as she tells me I can call her, is as much a stranger in this place as I am) has found a little maison all her own, in the turret, and here she has placed a quilt that is the color of the exotic flowers Maman preserved and brought back with her from the time she went to dance in Martinique, far, far away across the sea. My friend sleeps when the sun goes down, and I bring her food, smuggled up from the plain, horrible meals Leah takes up twice a day to the schoolroom. Leah is accustomed to seeing my plate go back still piled with the stews and overboiled legumes of this sad country, and I have had to pretend to an appetite I never had before. But it is worth the stories I must make up. Madame Fairfax also must believe I wish for time to study my English verbs, in preparation for the new governess, though she has come to see me, I know, as I really am, a child in need of company, a budding actress who desires an audience for the canzonets and lovesick ballads she was taught to sing at her