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

mother’s knee.
    All this is worth the trouble. Antoinette is not like the English ladies: Blanche with her hauteur that chills me to the bone, even Madame F who looks right through me sometimes when I prattle on. Antoinette understands the colors, the muslins, silks, and satins I bring in, scraps from dresses now outgrown but kept—kept like the memories of Maman they bring each time I lift them from the drawer, in the tissue paper the maid Sophie provides for them. Antoinette, who speaks on occasion in a tongue I cannot understand—but then she laughs and returns to French or English; she says her patois is from an island where she will take me one day, a Windward island, as she calls it, where she was happy once—Antoinette will play with me and hold me close as if we had known each other in a time before either of us was brought here to the cold of Thornfield Hall. “ Chérie, doudou, ” she whispers to me, and I smell the firewater on her breath. And—when she thinks weare about to be disturbed at our games high on the roof—“ Qui est là? Qui est là? ” she calls out, which reminds me so strongly of our parrot in the rue Vaugirard, Monsieur Punch, that I place them in my mind in the same landscape, where the hot-colored flowers Antoinette loves bloom all year long and the moths are as large as Papa’s silk handkerchiefs.
    I will never know how it took so long for Grace Poole to discover us in our hideaway on the roof. Because it was raining, perhaps, and we had stepped across the sill (this was the first time for my new friend; she had as great a dislike for the indoors at Thornfield Hall as I had for the gray, sodden walks Madame F made me take “for my health”—and many more to come, she promises me, when this governess arrives: how I hate “Mademoiselle” already, with her brown brogues and her stick that pokes into the foliage of the hedges we go past and then pass again on our dreary excursions. Adèle will find plenty of headaches to keep her away from the schoolroom; then I’ll hide and run back to the turret house of ma chère Antoinette, that’s for certain).
    But Antoinette hated one thing more than any other, and that was the very notion of being locked in somewhere, as I was to learn. For I had found a low door, several twisting stairs down from the big window that leads out onto the roof. The door was square, and even for me it was necessary to bend almost in two to push it open and go in; also there was a shelf that must be mounted before crawling through the aperture into the hidden room.
    Antoinette refused at first to step from the freedom of the roof back into the house. But when I told her what I saw in this boxroom—for this, I suppose, is what it was: a repository of all the old, unwanted, and unremembered childhoods of the girls and women of the famille Rochester—my new friend was no longer able to resist coming to join me. She was tall, and it was hard at first for her to double up (she let out a laugh when she came to kneel on theshelf by the low door that would have made me afraid of her if I had not known her to be gentle and loving at all times), but once she was through and down with me on the wooden planks, I knew I had never seen her so happy or so taken with what lay before her.
    The room was higher than the door, but not by much. I could walk upright; Antoinette could not. Yet the fact of having to stoop in this way drew her attention to the floor of glass in the farthest part of the room, and, skirting a colony of drowsy bees on the way there (I had stopped to pull their wax houses apart in the search of honey), I followed her as she stood goggling at the room that lay beneath us in the highest attic of Thornfield Hall.
    A bathroom was visible through the grime of the glass tiles, these clearly unwashed since their incorporation into this house built by Mr. Rochester’s grandfather—or so