The next morning, she came to me, contrite, and leaned over the back of my chair as I sat at breakfast, kissing my neck and nuzzling against my ear. “Did we make a baby last night, do you think?” she murmured.
I turned toward her. “Bertha—”
“Antoinetta!” she demanded, rising.
I rose as well, pushing back my chair and facing her. “We can only hope God blesses us—”
“God.” She spat the word. “God has nothing to do with it.” She began weeping, silently. “It’s all wrong,” she said as she wept. “Everything is all wrong.”
I thought I loved her. I will make it right, I told myself. But I had no idea.
There were other balls and gatherings after that, but they were all the same. We arrived separately and danced a few times together before she went on to dance with one man and then another, and afterwards we returned, she sullen, or I, or both of us. She spent her days with Molly, playing strange African games. Perhaps they were meant to help her conceive a child, but I ignored them as foolishness. And we came together in acts of passion, if not always love.
Everything to do with my marriage to Bertha had happened so quickly that I had not, fortuitously perhaps, found time to write to my father to tell him the news, that I had indeed married Jonas Mason’s daughter. However, by the time I got to the task, I had already begun to wonder what kind of future our marriage held for us—Bertha’s mother and brother in an insane asylum, and Bertha herself clearly disturbed—so I wrote to him in simple and civil terms, saying as little as necessary and imploring him not to make my marriage known among his friends and acquaintances.
It was not the marriage I had thought we would have, but it was perhaps no worse than many others. Richard had warned me about Creole marriages, though at the time I paid little attention. One always thinks one is the exception, I suppose.
I saw less of Richard since Valley View became my chief residence, but I did pin him down once on the question of his mother, though he seemed not to understand my concern. “Of course she is mad,” he said. “Did you want us to shout it from the treetops?”
“I should have been told,” I responded tartly.
“What good would it have done? And anyway,” he added as he walked away, “half the women on the island are mad.”
But that far from satisfied me, and I confronted Jonas Mason as well. “I ought to have been made aware of Bertha’s mother,” I blurted out to him one evening as we sat on the veranda. It was not how I should have done it, but perhaps it was as good as I could have managed in my distress.
“You ought,” he agreed. “I had imagined…I thought you could help her keep from becoming like her mother.” He glanced away from me, as if searching for the right words. “I thought new blood…And—”
“She will get worse,” I said.
He nodded. “She will.”
“And she is afraid of being put where her mother is.”
“Please,” he said. “We cannot let that happen.”
That stopped me for a moment. What could I say? There had been a time when I had thought my presence would always calm her, my words or actions could somehow make her well again, but I no longer thought that, and I could not imagine what my life would become, saddled forever—forever—to a woman like Bertha. “I will do my best,” I responded, though in truth I did not know how I could manage such a thing for the rest of my life.
But there was one more thing: “Did my father know—did he always know of Bertha’s inheritance?”
“He knew of my wife, Rochester,” he said gently, “but in those days I hoped neither Bertha nor Richard would follow their mother’s course. And I still hold out hope that Bertha…will…not…”
He did not complete his thought, but I knew it was a false hope.
After that, from time to time, I tried writing to my father, demanding to know why he had not warned me about Bertha’s inheritance. I wished him to blush with shame at having had any part in sending me to Jonas Mason, for I was certain now that he had known far more than I did from the very beginning, and I could not imagine why he would do such a thing to his own son—bring me up, educate me, for this…this hell. But every time I wrote, I balled up the letter without sending it, for I could never think of how to adequately express my anger and my loss of respect for him. As for Jonas, while of course I wished he had been more honest with me, my sense of betrayal was less acute: I understood his desire to ensure his daughter’s care, which was what any father would do. It was my own father who seemed to have sacrificed his son—me—for Bertha’s sake.
To escape the disappointment of our marriage, I buried myself in my work. True, Bertha was as beautiful as ever, and true, I could not complain of the way she graced my bed. But beyond that, there was nearly nothing. We did not share meals, nor did we speak of everyday things, or our hopes and dreams. She did not care to read or to share her thoughts on any subject, small or large. I did complete the purchase of the Sea Nymph, though the ship had become nearly a burden for me, a reminder of the mistake my marriage seemed to have been.
There were other tensions as well in our world, especially between the Creoles and the field slaves in the West Indies. Negroes on the island of Jamaica outnumbered whites by ten or more to one, and there was—always—the fear of a slave uprising. Such revolts happened on all the sugar islands from time to time—uprisings that saw a great deal of violence and destruction on both sides. At those times slave owners were rarely killed, but often they were shamed by their negroes by being put into the stocks, or shackled—as negroes sometimes were—to iron posts set into the ground, a humiliation beyond bearing. And, of course, the great fear was the burning of the cane fields.
Daniels, the estate manager at Valley View, had informed me early on that it was never allowed for all the whites to be absent from the estate at the same time. He did not say outright that it was to deter insurrection, but I understood. The one weapon the whites had against the negroes was fear. A negro late to the field received ten lashes; a negro who tried to escape was beheaded and his head placed on a pole at the side of the road as a warning.