Thornfield Hall by Emma Tennant Read Free Book Online Page B

month of July that saw me going from Paris and through the dull fields of France, before crossing the gray sea. All this with a girl Jenny had appointed as my protector; but the girl stared out the window as I wept, and I had neither comforter nor friend. Only Maman’s cashmere came with me. “He’ll remember that even if he’s forgotten you,” said Jenny with one of her barking laughs as we set off. “He spent enough on it, God knows.”
    Yet I had something else with me also, a memento as the croneLa Cibot termed it when pressing the great eye of glass into my hand after my last visit there. (I’d insisted, to Jenny: there might be a way of finding Maman, provided by the spirits with whom the hag was in communication. Maman, somewhere in Italy: but where?)
    â€œYou may need this, my child.” La Cibot looked across at me, the table with its grubby cloth between us and Cleopatra the black hen asleep this time in a corner of the room, as if my presence without my mother and only with the unbelieving Jenny in tow was hardly worth waking for. “Look, do this—hold it up to the sun.” And the fortune-teller went to the window to pull back the worn velvet curtain usually drawn against daylight and reason. “No, bring it down now, to that paper on the table—yes, that’s right. Ma petite Adèle has quite a genius for the pyrotechnics, I can see.” And La Cibot, for the first time, stood back and stared at me in admiration.
    The fire began at first like the mark of a snail, a brownish smear across the lined paper where La Cibot jotted her expenses for the week. Then, as the trail began to bite, the words, the figures, and the penciled columns began to disappear. Flames half an inch high danced like the miniature feux d’artifice Félix liked to play with, a snake forming from a cigar, a clumsily built mouse, all on a plate in his studio. But this time I was the one who controlled the reality of fire, not the manufacturers of a childish toy. The flames began to grow higher, and then, as a rare gust of wind came in from the baking-hot day, they climbed higher still. The hen woke, I remember, as La Cibot, cursing, threw a basin of water over her own tabletop. “The fire likes you, Adèle,” she said when she was done. “Respect it and it will be your servant forever. Use it with contempt and many will die.”
    I was afraid suddenly, in the room where the old witch summoned the dead and brought their messages to the unconsoled. Ilooked around for Jenny—but, just as I had feared, she was laughing at my fire-producing efforts and was as unimpressed as I had expected her to be. “Yes, give the child the magnifying glass by all means,” said Maman’s friend, pulling on her coat. “But I’m not paying extra, that’s for sure. Besides, it won’t be of much use where she’s going”—and Jenny nodded at me sadly now. “There is no sun,” she said with a horrible air of finality, “in Angleterre. ”
    Now, with the disaffected girl snoring at my side, I can see how right Jenny was on that hot day that seems now to be no more than a distant dream. The fields are dead-looking, drenched under the recent rain bursts, and the sky is heavily wrapped in cloud. With each mile the air grows darker, making me believe that the English live in a permanent night. The horses standing by the clogged streams look dispiritedly up at us. This cannot be half of me, I think; I do not belong in this landscape. But there is no one to whom I can confide the thought. Silence as oppressive as the gloom comes down on me, as we turn up a long drive with a line of dripping trees on either side. “I refuse to live here”—this I say aloud, as the driver turns and points out a tall house, gray as an executioner’s block, with battlements like sharp blades rearing into the sky. “This is the place I must run