All was quiet in Jane’s room; no one had been there since I had left it the night before, her trunks still standing as they had been. I searched her belongings again, hunting for any indication of how I might find her. I opened her trunks once more and scoured her dressing table. I even went to the schoolroom and looked there. I found her painting supplies and leafed slowly through her images, seeing there a portrait of almost preternatural perfection: a dark-ringletted goddess that it took me several moments to recognize as Blanche Ingram. Jane’s artistry had rendered her far more beautiful than in life, with a sweet, delicate expression that had never graced that actual face. Did Jane imagine this was how I saw her rival? What had I done to her with my cruel, useless games?
A few sheets later came an even greater shock: a portrait of myself that was both honest and loving—she had placed a gleam in my eye that was surely meant for her, and, as always, my hair falling over my forehead. I touched my finger to it; she had seen into my soul and drawn this. She knew me. I was hers. She did love me, and had spoken the truth; there could be no doubt of it now. And yet the man on the page was far better, more beautiful, inside and out, than the man holding it. How could I have treated her so? I held that drawing in a shaking hand and wept.
Before I left the room, I paged through the rest and was arrested by another image. It was a representation of Jane herself. Yet she was almost as unrecognizable as Miss Ingram had been, but for an opposite reason—instead of the sprightly, intelligent passion that illuminated Jane’s face and cried out daily to my heart, here was a visage of dullness and despair. This was not my Jane. I wondered if this was how she felt: deceived, taken in, her loyalty mistreated. Oh God, I thought, what have I done to her? It is I, not Bertha or Gerald, who have driven her away. I am a monster.
My limbs felt heavy, for I had not slept. All was quiet in the corridor, and I crept back to Jane’s room and lay down on her bed, where the pillow still held the faint scent of her, and I fell, at last, into sleep.
*
I rode out the next day and the day after and the day after that. I rode east and west and north and south. I asked discreetly where I could, and searched carefully wherever I went. I toured the moors and the fields and the meadows and the lanes. I tracked down the horrid Reed children once more—the vain absurd one was being courted in London by a man of fashion, the other one in a remote convent—but received no fruitful reply. I wrote to Lowood School, where she had spent her childhood, but they had no news of her, either.
My last hope was that she would write, that she would at least settle my mind that she was alive and well. But a letter never came. Only once did Mrs. Fairfax give me a moment of hope, but the letter was about Jane, rather than a response to my inquiries—a message from that accursed solicitor Briggs, who had been responsible for driving us apart. Even if she were found, I would not allow him to have anything to do with her. I told Mrs. Fairfax I would hear nothing more about it.
“Where is Miss Eyre?” Adèle asked day after day. I had no response for her, and I could bear it no longer. I arranged, at the beginning of the school year, for her to be sent away to school, and Sophie back to France. Adèle did not want to leave, but I was unwilling to hire another governess and I could not care for her myself.
“You will destroy yourself,” Mrs. Fairfax said more than once through that time.
I wished I could. I wished I could drive myself down to the bone and then float away like ash in the wind. I had driven Jane away, made her miserable, and I did not deserve space on this earth.
How could God do this to me?
Chapter 25
But I went on living, and the only thing I could think to do was to keep on searching. When the folly of that had become obvious even to me, I buried myself in work. I made the rounds of all my cottagers, I helped in the harvest—to the amusement and dismay of the harvesters—and I invented reasons to see Everson. Around that time, odd things began to happen: noises on the grounds late at night, locks broken, the gardens trampled, even once a dead stoat hanging from a tree in the orchard. Ames believed someone was trying to break in, but John and Sam could catch no one. The servants became nervous, afraid to go out at night, and Mrs. Fairfax especially was deeply anxious. I was sure it was Gerald, his madness perhaps growing worse, trying to force his way back to his mother, into the house he considered his own, but there was nothing to prove since we were all unable to catch him. Eventually, Mrs. Fairfax could bear it no more and asked to be released from her duties. I was almost relieved when she did, for I had become uncomfortable in her presence: she had turned almost too kind, more mothering than I could bear at a time when I hated myself and who I had become—a liar and a bigamist. I settled a goodly sum on her and wished her well. She was all graciousness at the gift, and no little embarrassed, I imagine, but she deserved it, if for no other reason than she was my only living relative.
The same day she left, I removed the portrait of my mother from the drawing room and placed it and Jane’s drawings in a closet on the second floor, for I could not bear to see these reminders of all I had done, the misery I had caused and fallen into myself.
I went out with the harvesters as often as I could, hoping to work myself to the marrow, to drop into bed at night too weary to think, to rise in the morning and take to the fields again, to allow the pain of my blistered hands and my weary back to at least in part replace my other, worse, pain, and the sun on my face to burn off a small portion of my regret.
*
It was one of those nights late in that harvest season, two months or so after Jane had disappeared, and I had fallen into bed and into a weary and miserable sleep, with dreams that assaulted my mind with unease. I dreamed that Jane had died in some lonely, forsaken place; I dreamed that I was perishing on some faraway island, bereft of all I had ever known; I dreamed that the sea had overtaken me and I was drowning; that I had died but instead of peace I was greeted by the fires of hell, which were consuming me, and I could barely breathe.