I felt suddenly cold, unable to fully comprehend what had just passed. Everson nodded and began refolding the letters, and Ramsdell reached for them, but suddenly I stopped them both. “Wait,” I said. “Let me see them once more.”
The letters were laid out again on Everson’s desk and I examined them more carefully. Suddenly, I, who had been a copier of letters in my childhood, realized two things simultaneously: one, that these letters of Gerald’s were falsified. My father’s letters never included the full date, and the dates here were in a subtly different pen, a different hand. Gerald, or someone looking out for his interests, must have added the dates to make these letters a clearer proof.
But my attention was drawn even more strikingly to the second realization: the promises referred to between my father and Jonas. If the dates had been falsified—and I now was convinced that they had been—then there could be only one meaning to the words: there had been an agreement between Jonas and my father, a long-term arrangement that played out only when I arrived in Jamaica, one that culminated in my blind marriage to the young woman with whom my brother had, earlier, fathered a bastard child.
My arrival in Jamaica had apparently been planned as an arrangement to clean up my brother’s indiscretion, my own life a payment into the account of my brother’s irresponsibility. God, my whole life…?
I could not comprehend it, but there was no other explanation I could see. All I had believed, all I had understood, about my father and his care of my future: it was all lies; he was protecting Rowland, and I was the coin he chose to spend. And Jonas Mason as well, who had in his last years been like a father to me—he had taken me as payment for my brother’s sins. At least…at least Jonas had had a reason: love for his own child. And my father? My father’s reason? I could barely even think it: to uphold his business dealings, whatever they might have been with Jonas, while at the same time saving Rowland from marrying a girl with Bertha’s inheritance. To save his holdings and Rowland at my expense. My whole life, for that.
I gazed around at the others, and they were all staring at me, wondering what I was seeing. It was clear that I was the only one to have noticed the fraud, and the fate of my life—and of Thornfield—lay in my hands. I could speak and save my claim to Thornfield, hold on to the Rochester heritage that had once been Rowland’s but had now become mine—or I could stay silent, let my father’s lands go to this Jamaican bastard, and be free to claim Jane as my own.
I could have wept. I could have bellowed. Instead I swallowed and spoke. “Yes, all right. This is finished.”
“You’re certain?” Everson asked, frowning somewhat, for he could see that there was more going on in my head.
“Yes.”
“Then we are done here,” Ramsdell said, gathering up the letters. “Good day, gentlemen.”
“I will see my mother now,” Gerald said.
But I was in no hurry to give his mother to him. “I will contact you when it will be convenient,” I said.
“Today.”
“No, not today.”
He insisted, but I stood my ground, he becoming angry, far angrier in fact than the circumstances would bear, but Mr. Ramsdell reached out and touched his arm and quieted him. “Within three days,” Ramsdell said to me.
“Within three days,” I agreed.
Gerald nodded at Everson and led the way out the door.
“Rochester,” Everson asked me when they had left, “are you really satisfied? Have you no quibbles at all with this?”
“I have not. It seems clear to me; there was a marriage. There is no point in dragging this out.”
“But you will lose everything—Thornfield-Hall, your other properties, your income, everything.”
“I will lose them indeed.” But I will keep Jane. “How long will it take to receive an annulment?”
He sighed. “Four weeks, I would assume.”
“Four weeks,” I repeated.
Chapter 19
Gerald came to see Bertha two days later. I had ensured Jane’s absence from Thornfield by suggesting she take Adèle on a trip for the day in the pony cart. It was a mistake on my part, in retrospect, to let him come, but at the time I was trying to do the right thing. I reminded myself that it was not Gerald who was to blame for what my father and brother had done to me, and I warned him again of her condition, but he seemed incapable of understanding.
He left his mount in the stable yard and followed me through the side entrance door and all the way up to the curtained door to Bertha’s chambers. “She’s like to be sleeping,” I warned him. “She is more somnolent in the daytime, more violent and unpredictable at night. She will not know who you are, even if you tell her, but she dislikes strangers. Take care, she may, even in daytime, try to attack you.”
He nodded carelessly, as if to say he was no stranger. I imagine he thought he could beguile Bertha into recognizing him.
I unlocked the door and led him into the outer chamber. Grace Poole was startled, for I rarely came at this time of day, and she made a quick move to hide the mug at her side. “Grace”—I nodded to her—“my companion has come to visit Bertha.”
At the door to the inner chamber I stood for a moment on the threshold, Gerald looking over my shoulder. Bertha lay asleep, her hair matted and awry, but her face as calm as it ever was. I could still see how I had once thought her beautiful.
I stepped to the edge of the bed, but Gerald immediately knelt at the bedside and put a hand on her arm. I marveled at his lack of hesitation; it occurred to me he might be playing out a scene he had imagined countless times in his head over the years. At his touch, Bertha stirred, then fell back into sleep. “Mother,” Gerald said softly.
Her eyelids fluttered. “Mother, I’m your son,” Gerald said, trying to coax her awake.
“’Ware,” Grace warned, her voice swelling from the doorway behind us.
Suddenly Bertha opened her eyes, seeing me first, frowning as if unable to decide if she knew me. Then her eyes swept to Gerald, and she flinched sharply at the unfamiliar face, batting his hand away from her arm.
“Mother, it’s me,” he said more forcefully.
“Took my baby, where’s my baby, where’s my baby, where’s my baby,” she muttered almost incoherently. Should I have warned him that she would not understand? Yes, undoubtedly. But I did not. I was curious as to how this would play out.
“I am he,” Gerald insisted, his eyes searching his mother’s face, which was growing more feral by the minute. “I am your son and I have—”
His words were swallowed by her scream. Again he persisted, his voice rising to match hers, as if her understanding were only a matter of hearing him. “I am here, Mother. I have finally found you!”
“Gaaaa, gaaaa!” She let out a wail that could be heard throughout the house, and she clawed at him as he stood, frozen in horror. It was only Grace’s quick reflexes that saved him. She leaped across the room and pulled a snarling and growling Bertha away.