Thornfield Hall by Emma Tennant Read Free Book Online

myself thinking in the new, wild freedom my acceptance of the truth has at last brought to me, let the wretched specter of Antoinette appear now, just as the great families of Yorkshire come here for their hunting and cards and theatrical shows. Let them see the Creole from the islands where their fathers, like mine, traded in human cargo andpaid with the evil profits for their snuffboxes, lace handkerchiefs, and the rest. Antoinette may be white—but she bears the marks of the slavery I imposed on her, and of my own cruel repudiation of her, too. Lords and ladies, do you wish to see your Blanche reduced to this?
    The wide door, when it opens fully at last, does not reveal the neighboring gentry. A child stands on the threshold, dazed. She looks around her, then sees me and runs into my arms.
    At first, I confess, I saw Céline there, a tiny woman, shrunk by magic to a fairy’s size. The face—the smiling, dimpled face—the beauty, all miniature; and I thought I saw her fly to me, as she did in the circus in those far-off summer months. “This is a big house, monsieur,” the child-woman cries out, as the household crowds around to stare at the apparition. And, as if to confirm my first fanciful idea, the little creature then asks if she would be allowed to fly, in a salle as grande as this. “I have the wings, Papa. Do you like to see?”

four
    Adèle
    I t was hotter, this past month, in Paris than had ever been recorded, so Félix said; Félix the copier of faces, complete with frowns and wrinkles. And in this weather, when faces ran and dripped with the heat, some fair monsters came up from the deeps of the chemical bath in his studio. But none with a physiognomy as vile, as clear a transcription of evil as Papa. Jenny Colon says I must now think of the man wanted by the French police, the man who never can return to the city where she claims poor Maman was held captive in her house in rue Vaugirard, by this name alone. “He is your father, Adèle. You must make your life with him, now Maman has gone. Be brave. He’s not as bad as he looks.”
    I couldn’t tell Jenny I knew more about the hideous stranger than she imagined. Her worship of Maman would falter, surely, if I described the evening, not so many months ago, when the milord wepton the balcony of the hotel he had furnished with such comfort for the woman he loved. She would find it hard to believe if I recounted the number of times Céline had led the lovers she swore she did not have past the chaise where I lay, feigning sleep, outside her bedroom door. And she would exorcise me forever from her life, I know, if I described to her that last, fateful morning: the mist that coiled along the banks of the Seine as the sun rose, the birds just rousing from night as we entered the Bois de Boulogne, the milord and his second, a valet named Edward, like his master, and—hidden from view in a pannier of bandages, fresh linen, and the rest—myself, Adèle Varens.
    Jenny wouldn’t believe me because everything has to be in black and white for her. Like Félix’s studies of the famous and debauched—dear Gérard with his pet lobster, Gautier with his face like a map, all the arrondissements etched on his great fore-head—Jenny is almost too “real” to be true. There is no mystery in her, and she expects none in her dealings with the world. In her eyes Maman is still perfect—and, most important, always at the mercy of men. Despite the fact that this victim, martyr to passion, deceived mistress of a murderer, has run off to Italy with the musician composer of the new opera at the Funambules, leaving her daughter an orphan, dependent on the generosity of Félix and the silent Pierrot. They have more to occupy them than an abandoned child—soon, as I know Jenny fears (for she cannot keep me; her tastes are not for domesticity and children), soon I shall be left to my own