Thornfield Hall (16 page)

Now the pain, worse than homesickness, seized me once again. And with it came the pictures of the frightening times in Papa's house: the finding of the starving, terrified Antoinette out on the roof and the bustling figure of Madame Fairfax as she hustled me along the passage, her footsteps loud on the wooden floor after fas
tening the window; the dream I had had, when Jane was far from home and Papa sat disconsolate and often drunk by the fire in the library, building up the flames whatever the season; the dream of fire, caused by myself in the attic where Antoinette had for a long fifteen years been locked away; the waking to find my glass, the precious glass given me by the old witch La Cibot, missing from the box where I had stowed it. And the suspicion, from all at Thornfield Hall—housekeeper, undermaid, John and Mary—everyone except Jane. I blamed myself for the burning of Papa's house, of course I did. “Your old witch in Paris,” Madame F's words would come to me when I woke, covered in sweat and shivering. “She taught you all these tricks, Miss Adèle.”

As these scenes flashed through my mind, Nadar lifted up to me the picture hidden at the base of the ring. A boy and a girl were shown, painted in oils against a red velvet background. The girl, as I recognized immediately, was myself—Adèle at five years old, ringleted and pouting, the child Papa had sent for three years later, to save her from the degradation of the street. The other head was also shown in profile and was unforgettable—I, at least, had not forgotten that face, both like my own and yet nobler, with an aquiline nose and eyelashes that were long and black. I turned to Nadar; he replaced the ivory head of Céline, snapped shut the concealed locket, and slid the ring onto my finger.

“Yes,” Nadar said when the loud music had died down and we could think and speak in the dusk of a fine Paris evening. “It is true, Adèle. And just as what you have told me of the pictures that came into your mind with the playing of the barrel organ have pointed the way to the truth of what happened in your English castle, so these portraits will show you who you are.”

“But who am I?” I said, and as I spoke the words, I dreaded Nadar's reply. For surely—if Céline had wished me to see this ring, if she had entrusted it to Nadar with instructions I should
have it after her death, then it must contain the very quality I began to see had been as concealed from me all my young life as were the tiny portraits in the cameo: namely, the truth.

“You will always be Adèle,” Nadar said. “But you have a brother, who was born some hours before you, and it is he, I believe, whom you have seen today.”

W
e sat silent for a long while, Nadar and I,
on our bench where the cries of the old charlatan in front of his half-empty booth were broken up by the voices of skipping, chanting children and the sound of the river steamers as they came in and went out, disgorging passengers, seemed as far off as traffic from another world. The families I saw, as they passed us, unseeing and concerned only with themselves, were also distant ghosts, and those who turned their gaze, if only for a second, in our direction, appeared to expose the hidden picture of my own childhood, as just divulged by Nadar; for in each case they consisted of a mother, a father, a boy, and a girl. They had no direction, these families, save that of strolling on the banks of the Seine and showing themselves off to those less perfect than they knew themselves to be. A man and his wife, a miniature couple following in their wake, promising a future as happy and well provided for as their parents were—what else on earth could compare with this flaunted
wholeness? And I, remembering myself in the days as I walked after Maman in the Luxembourg Gardens, understood at last the incompleteness we had shared; for there had been neither husband, son, nor brother in our brave procession.

Nadar showed no sign of wishing to answer the questions I had to ask. “Why did I not see my brother when I was a child? Where did he live? If Papa decided to send for me, to the dark north of England, why was the boy not included in the invitation?” Why, most mysteriously of all, did Céline not tell me of the existence of
mon semblable, mon frère,
the brother I had had to see for the first time all by myself when hanging upside down on a trapeze swing in the Funambules? Was she afraid of the consequences? And if so, why?

“You will discover when the time is right,” Nadar said, and for an instant I saw the truth as Nadar fashioned it in the dark place behind the curtain in his studio, as the features of a real man or woman formed on the photographic plate. There was no room in Nadar's portraits for fantasy or speculation, he had often told me, as the lined, unblinking faces grew stronger, their identity more unmistakable as the developing fluid brought them out. Here, what you see is what they are.

Yet still I asked my questions, and the silent giant at my side shook his head at me. How did Nadar know of my “lost brother,” as I saw the youth walking with Monsieur Rochester to be? Why had Céline given Nadar the ring with the locket and the cameos of her children buried deep inside? Was—was it possible even that it was Nadar who was the father of us both? That he had given his word to Céline to keep the subject to himself forever? After all, I had passed more time with the kind Nadar than I had with any other man. Was paternity the reason for the patience he had shown me over the years? And if so, why was the boy not accorded the same affection and understanding as I had been? “Adèle,”
Nadar spoke at last, hesitantly, as we both rose together in an unspoken decision to leave the bench, an island in the midst of the bustling world of hawkers, acrobats, and quacks selling fake medicines to the easily deceived. “The reason for my silence is…indelicate. I cannot speak of it to a girl, a young woman.” And, as I saw, he turned away from me and bit his lip. “Go home, Adèle,” he added in a low voice that was almost a whisper, as we stood together a moment outside a curtained booth where a small crowd of men had already gathered. “Go home and think no more of a past none of us can reclaim. You have the ring—I was honor bound to hand it over to you if ever we should meet again.”

The fact that Nadar had not expected this to come about made my heart sink even more, and I must have looked up at him imploringly, for he went on with a brusqueness I had never heard in him: “My child, it seems to me that you are blind to the truth in this new life of yours. You spit in the face of good fortune. Go back!”

But I had heard those words, declaimed with the same urgency, many years before. Céline's voice, descending like a thunderbolt from the pink and white bedroom in…in the whitewashed villa by the sea, while I sat, waiting and waiting, for the time when we could all go into the sea together, Maman, Papa, and me. “Go back!” And then came the voice of the man she and Jenny said was my father—lazy, laughing, and protesting that Mademoiselle Céline Varens would last barely a month in the harsh climate of Thornfield Hall. “I'll stay here for the rest of my life if that is what it takes,” came the words of the man who shared Maman's bed—when she allowed him, that is, and Jenny was always the first to point out to me that the milord stranger had been sent packing more than once and hadn't gone into Céline's bed at all. So…“Where should I go back to?” I shouted like the angry child I still knew myself to be. “Where is my home?”

Nadar shook his head, and I suffered the leaden realization that I might never hear the whole story from him. “Let's go and eat at Flicoteaux, and we'll see if they have those tasty dishes you used to like,” Nadar went on. “You remember how we went there….” And, as if I were a new visitor to the capital of my birth, he started to describe the route to the place de la Sorbonne. “It won't take us more than twenty minutes,” Nadar continued excitedly, as if the only subject of conversation between us had been routes through Paris, restaurants, and other amusements. “Come on, Adèle.”

As Nadar finished talking and I stood as stubborn and mute as the eight-year-old I had now returned to being, the curtain of the booth was drawn back and a roar from the crowd rang out. More people—all these men on their own, as I was quick to see: none of the perfect families I had observed earlier, did anything but hurry past, eyes averted—pushed in among them. But Nadar frowned when he saw the spectacle that was about to begin and tugged at my arm again.

It didn't take long to understand why my old friend and protector tried to lead me away and entertain me at the students' eating house, Flicoteaux—hoping, I suppose, to distract me from the subject of family mysteries, lost brothers, absent mothers, and all the rest. In the company of young people, each looking forward to a new life, the past and its consequences would have seemed less important to me—or so poor Nadar must have hoped. Now, as I stood transfixed to the spot, I saw it was a brutal scene I was witnessing, amid the bustle of the fair. The smell of frying, which is the incense of these occasions and evokes also the domestic scent of poverty and marital desperation, grew stronger as an iron cage was revealed behind the curtain and the protagonists appeared behind the bars, to show themselves to the mob. “Very well, let me explain to you, Adèle,” Nadar's voice sounded in my ears, and he
spoke now with the cynicism and worldliness I had heard him use when with Gérard or Charles, his friends the black-spirited poets who came to visit him at his studio. “That monster,” Nadar continued, indicating the creature—at first it seemed hardly human—who ran into the cage, a short, stout man running behind her, “is one of those animals generally called ‘my angel,' that's to say a woman. The other monster”—and I saw Nadar referred to the short, stout man who came after her—“the one screaming at the top of his voice, is a husband. He has chained up his legitimate wife as if she were a beast, and he puts her on show in the suburbs, whenever there's a fair, with the permission of the magistrates, I need hardly add.

“Pay close attention,” Nadar went on, just as I shrank back from the vision I had two seconds before been so determined to stay and see. “That hairy monster has a form that possesses a faint resemblance to your own, dear Adèle. See how greedily—and perhaps she's not pretending!—she rends asunder the live rabbits and those cheeping little chickens thrown her by her keeper. And see how he beats her, this husband of hers, and snatches the prey cruelly away from her, so that the trailing entrails cling for a moment to the teeth of the ferocious beast. Such are the marital customs of those two descendants of Adam and Eve,
ma petite.
Are you certain that you wish to learn the secrets of human happiness this way?”

I turned, as sickened by this fairground display of bestiality as I had ever been by anything I'd known or half understood in my short life. I wanted only to take Nadar's arm and walk away with him to the place de la Sorbonne. I wanted the company of the laughing students; I could bear no more of the wild woman and her husband. Nadar had been right: I should have left before the dreadful cage and its occupants were shown to me.

Yet somehow I knew, as the scene on the highest floor of Thornfield unrolled before my eyes and I saw the wild, hairy crea
ture who was in her bad times the monster who was Bertha, and not my friend Antoinette—her cruel keeper neither Papa nor Grace Poole but another, a figure so familiar I cried out, in the midst of the curious, guffawing crowd—I knew that my own curiosity had been punished by a return to the misery and solitude I had known before Nadar tapped me on the shoulder on the embankment above the Seine. For just as my horrified memory provided me with a sequence of scenes concerning the wretched first wife of Monsieur Rochester—the taunting with food among them (and later, when I was thought to have been long asleep, the cudgel blows, the whimpering, and the pleas for mercy), I saw that the hand I now sought for and grasped in the crowd was not Nadar's hand at all. A dwarf stood grinning up at me and squeezed my hand hard in return. I pulled away from him in horror and ran—but there was no sign of Nadar in all the fair, and this time I knew for certain that my obstinacy and childishness had taken my old guardian from me for good.

Now I had nowhere left to go. Jenny must be on the river with young Albert and all the others she had tried so patiently to make my friends; and I would be alone if I returned to the Faubourg Poissonière, more alone than I had ever been.

Yet a cool, quiet voice guided me as I walked, at first in any direction, and it was not my own. It told me not to panic, and even though it spoke distantly, I knew I was well advised to return to Jenny's and then to consider what I must next do. So I made my way through the boulevards to the room where a bed in the corner was—sometimes at least—home to me. But for how long I would stay there, I could not know.

 

Jenny was standing by the window when I arrived in the
room under the sloping rafters, where today, as if in honor of the
public holiday that had brought the crowds into the streets, the strong odor of frying food had accumulated and sunshine showed up the cracks in the walls, the cobwebs, and the dust. She must have been looking out for me—this I realized with a pang of guilt, an emotion I had never known in the presence of Jenny, high priestess of self-containment and doing as she pleased, regardless of the reactions of others. She had clearly sacrificed her evening of pleasure—in her case, talking with other women on the subject of freedom and revolution—on board a steamer on the river, in order to console me for the death of Céline. She had witnessed my grief and had brought her own under control. For the first time since I was a child, I felt love for the squat, aging actress as she turned from the window and came toward me: after all, she had given everything she had to Céline; and, like me, she had been abandoned for a newer, more exciting passion.

“Ah,” Jenny said without any preamble, as if I had left the room only a moment before and all the confusing events of the day had not taken place. “Nadar has given you the ring, I see.” And she lifted my hand and slid the signet ring from my finger. With a quick twist, she opened the locket and—as I saw in growing agitation that none of the mysteries of Céline's hidden portraits were unknown to her—she flipped up the delicate panel of gold, to reveal the tiny pictures. “And he has shown you these today?” Jenny went on in her gruff way, as if asking me if I had put powder on my hands before going to swing on the high bar of the trapeze. “You have been informed of the identity of your brother, I assume?”

“The identity?” Suddenly I was overcome by a wave of fatigue such as I had never known, even after two performances dancing across the wire at the theater. “Surely,” I said, and I could hear the weakness in me as I spoke, “it is enough that I have a brother? I saw him, you know—in the audience with Papa,” and some of my
strength returned, at the thought that I had a true family after all, a family like those at the fair, and that my father and my brother had come to see me, dancing high above the stage.

“Yes, I followed you to the Funambules,” Jenny said shortly, and I felt another pang, that her day plotting politics with Jeanne had been subsumed by her concern for me. “I…I was afraid you might fall”—and she pushed me away as I stepped closer, to give thanks for her unselfishness. “I saw them there—the milord stranger and your twin, young Lucien. But Lucien is not your father's son.”

“But,” I protested, “you have just said he is my twin. Lucien—” and I saw I didn't even know the name of my brother, the new member of this wonderful family Nadar and Jenny had produced for me, to make up for the loss of Céline perhaps. “Lucien,” I added, and I liked the sound of the name, could imagine Maman choosing it. “Is he Lucien Varens?”

“Listen to me, child,” Jenny said, and some of the anxiety and fear she must have felt for me all day was visible in her face as she came up close, the miniatures lying no bigger than jeweled insects in the palm of her hand. “Take the portrait of yourself and turn it over. Now look on the back.”

It was a strange feeling, to handle the infinitesimally small portrait of the child with brown ringlets and a smiling face, who had all those long years before been “la petite Adèle,” the loved daughter of the great vaudeville actress Céline. “Now what do you see?” Jenny insisted as the picture, no more than the size of my little fingernail, showed on the back an intricate pattern inscribed in the fragile gold carapace. “Look carefully—and you will find what you want there.”