Thornfield Hall by Emma Tennant Read Free Book Online Page A

devices. In the street, in the mire and filth of Paris, you will find little Adèle, she who walked in rosy pink and blue behind her mother in the Luxembourg Gardens while Céline’s companions, the painters and poets of Paris, spoke of their brilliant dreams of Utopia.
    â€œI shall not write to your father,” Jenny says as we set off for the place du Carrousel, where Nerval and his friends have a vast studio. “Better that we surprise him.” Jenny, the blond chanteuse of Piquillo, will sing for them there, at the end of the Bal des Truands, the magnificent evening of bohemia for which they have long planned. “But you must leave tonight, before the feast is over. Courage, Adèle—your father will be delighted to welcome you to Thornfield Hall.” But we both know, as we follow the sound of the cabaret orchestra smuggled through a hole in the fence in the Doyenné, that Jenny’s decision to send me away from Paris in the wake of Maman’s scandalous desertion is tantamount to a sentence of death. The man I must love with filial devotion is a Bluebeard, and his castle, I have little doubt, has locked and forbidden rooms where poor Maman, in the eyes of Jenny at least, would have languished if she had accepted his proposal to return with him to Thornfield as a bride.
    For all that, I know that this monster of male selfishness and arrogance is not a murderer. Nor did he hold my mother prisoner in our house, as Jenny claims. He went to the Bois to fight a duel in defense of his honor (I, as I say, concealed in the basket with the fresh shirt and cravat and all the necessities for a wounded, bleeding duelist), and he returned to our house having killed a man. The vicomte it was who turned again, when Papa had winged him (he said the words quite lightly, I confess, like a hunter out shooting birds) when Maman took me there to meet her new, noble lover. He spoke like the huntsman who brings down a young partridge, and thinks nothing of it. But the vicomte it was who went against the rules of the duel. So the stern overseer in black said, who arranged the contest at first light in the Bois de Boulogne. The vicomte went against the rules of the game when he fired again, and Papa, a better shot by far, moved quickly and silently on that stretch of grass in the clearing in the wood, and on the grass still silver with the morning dew, he shot his rival dead.
    As for Maman held hostage until Papa came back to her—why,he had no choice but to keep her in her bedroom under lock and key while he organized his escape from the gendarmes the vicomte’s friends and supporters sent around (and there were many of them). Pauvre Papa—this is how I must think of him, now. Pauvre Papa: who loved me far better than Maman did, all along.
    I speak of flying, for this summer, the summer of my exile from Paris and from all I loved best, was also the summer Jenny took me up in the circus, on wings fitted to my back with invisible wires, and I fluttered and dived high above the smiling crowd. How happy I was! She felt sorry for me, I suppose, for Maman had gone without a word of when or how I would ever see her again. And, in the same spirit, while Jenny taught me the divine gift of staying aloft—and instructed me, too, in the acting skills she said I would one day need—Félix made a point of taking me up in a hot-air balloon, the novelty of the season. We flew miles above all Paris and saw the Seine like a great green caterpillar as it crawled below, and Notre Dame so small I could have leaned down and taken it in my hand. “They have hot-air balloons at your Papa’s,” Félix said, trying to cheer me when we came down in a field farther out from the city than he had intended. But I knew, on the long journey back to Jenny’s severe apartment where I stayed, that this was unlikely to be true.
    La Cibot, the old witch, was right: it was the month of the crab, the dry, hot