“Of course,” I responded.
The deal was done by noon the next day. Mesrour, the most magnificent horse I have still ever seen, was mine. Foolish purchase, perhaps, but I seldom give in to frivolity, and this was a horse I had to have. Mounted on him, with Pilot trotting along beside us, I felt a new man. Suddenly all thingswerepossible once more.
***
It had been ten years since Osmon and I had seen each other, and we had both aged, I probably more than he. Yet even so, we greeted each other as brothers when we met at the inn. I insisted on taking him first thing to admire Mesrour at the stable where I was keeping him. Osmon knew horses better than I, and I was pleased that he thought I’d made a good purchase, though he asked me what I intended to do with such an animal.
“Ride him!” I replied, and he laughed.
Back at the inn, mugs of rum before us, Osmon reported in great detail about Valley View, lamenting that now that laborers must be paid some kind of wage, the estate was not nearly as profitable as it once had been, though he was making do as best he could. As I had suspected, however, he had grown restless with his position and was ready to move on, but there was the difficult issue of what to do with Valley View. Because it was entailed, it could not simply be sold.
As we talked over possible solutions and the difficulties of the Mason inheritance, Osmon suddenly paused in our conversation and gazed into his mug. I wondered, too late, if he had arranged this meeting with something else on his mind. “Osmon?” I prompted.
“A young man came,” he said. “From America.” His eyes flicked up to mine and then dropped again to his mug, until, with what seemed like a force of will, they rose again to meet mine. “He says he is your wife’s son.”
My hand froze with my upraised mug—for a moment, it seemed, nothing, and no one, moved. So therewasa child. And the boy had lived. The shock of Molly’s story, the horror of Bertha’s madness, the rage and frustration of that fruitless search years earlier—all of it rushed back at me in a moment, and I felt the room spin. “From America?” I asked.
“South Carolina, I believe.”
“He has a name, I presume.”
“He calls himself Gerald Rochester.”
A fresh wave of emotion hit me. He shared my name—or had taken it—born of my wife, and yet I was not the father. Who, then? Another suitor of Bertha’s? No, she had been too young, still a child herself, Molly had said. A slave? Unthinkable. Some criminal act, kept secret from the neighborhood? But no, the child would then have had no cause to use the Rochester name. Surely, it had not been my own father. No, but perhaps Rowland: the unwelcome product of Bertha’s childhood crush on my brother?
And further, how did the infant get to America? Who had raised him there and what did they know of his parentage? What didheknow, beyond the name of his mother? Would he find me at Thornfield? I stared across the table at my old friend, my mind stuck in a jumble of thoughts. Osmon’s sympathetic eyes were on me. “How old is he?” I asked him. “What does he look like?”
He toyed with his mug before responding. “In his late twenties, I suppose; tall, slim, good-looking, I imagine one would say. Dark—but not as dark as you. Curly hair. He has a kind of arrogance about him. To be frank with you, I didn’t care for him.”
Rowland,I thought.Rowland and Bertha.God have mercy, this isRowland’s bastard son. Unless…“Where is he now?”
“I sent him to your solicitor—and the late Mr. Mason’s—in Spanish Town: Mr. Foster. I would not be surprised to see him turn up here in England. He seemed a determined young man.”
“I don’t suppose he has proof of a marriage.”
Osmon gave a quick shake of his head. “Not that I saw.”
If he had it, I knew, he would be Rowland’s heir—and Bertha’s. He would inherit Thornfield and half of Valley View. If he didn’t, he would have no claim to anything. He would be legal son of no one, heir of no one.
If Molly were to be believed, it was unlikely there had been a marriage, else the infant would not have been sent away. No, it was clear that pains had been taken to hide Bertha’s pregnancy—because she had given birth to a bastard? I allowed myself to be satisfied that that was the whole of it. It did not yet occur to me that there was more.
Osmon had no additional information to offer, and seeing my distress he kindly tried to steer the conversation in other directions. After a few more rounds of rum, we relaxed once more and talked late into the night. He had married a widow who had brought a little property into the marriage, as well as two children; he had an exporting firm in Kingston in mind and was hoping to accumulate enough savings to purchase it. He asked, gently, after Bertha, and, grateful for his openness in this difficult situation, I told him as much of the truth as I had told anyone, and he nodded and laid a consoling hand on my arm. I praised him for the way he had handled my affairs all those years, and I asked how much more he needed to purchase the exporting firm. With great hesitation he told me a sum that must have seemed huge to him but seemed quite reasonable to me, and in return I shared with him an idea that had been forming in my mind as we spoke. While Valley View could not be sold, it could be rented. “Rent the land to whomever you trust to be good stewards,” I told him. “I will pay you to oversee the arrangements and to be my land agent. In exchange, I will lend you enough to buy your new business, and instead of paying you a salary, I will put it to your account.” Neither he nor I mentioned that such a business deal could be voided by Gerald Rochester’s proof of legal birth.
In addition, Osmon told me he still saw Whitledge from time to time, and that Whitledge had sent his greetings and that he now had a daughter and three handsome sons. I envied that: those two married, with wives and families, with children. I looked down at Pilot, curled at my feet, and reached down to pat him.
Although it had grown quite late, when we parted I walked for some time afterwards, Pilot at my heel. I was pleased that Osmon seemed to have done so well for himself, and was glad to have played a part in that. On the other hand, what was my life? I had just purchased a stunning horse, and I should have been in good spirits. I had all the trappings: ownership of Thornfield-Hall, the interest of the beautiful Miss Ingram, freedom to travel when I wanted or stay home when I chose. Yet still, my life seemed empty, except for the burden of Bertha. And Adèle. And now, for the question of Gerald Rochester.
Chapter 10
It was January and bitter cold. Most of the gentry—the Ingrams and the others—would be in Bath by now, if not farther afield in Europe somewhere, and eager as I was to show off Mesrour, I had no mind to join them. It had been months since I had been in residence at Thornfield, and despite the burdens I had there, I felt it was time to make an appearance, to assure myself that Bertha was still in good care and that Adèle was in good hands as well, that her new governess was not ruining her. And, perhaps most important, I needed to assure myself that this so-called Gerald Rochester had not somehow materialized at my home in my absence. Osmon’s revelation had bothered me, I realized, much more than I cared to admit.
The journey to Yorkshire took almost two weeks, for there was snow on the roadway and, despite my hurry, I had no intention of ruining Mesrour in the first days that I owned him. Yet, as we neared Thornfield, coming down the causeway from Millcote in the late afternoon, I was deep in my own head, where my emotions were at war with themselves. Even as I dreaded what I might find at the Hall—Bertha’s further disintegration or the presence of this mysterious, unwanted stranger—nonetheless I still felt that old familiar longing to see the distant outlines of Thornfield-Hall against the darkening sky, to be home again. In my distraction, I was not paying the attention I should have to Mesrour’s footing, to the telltale slips of the hoof that foretell disaster. We came around a curve in the pathway, where moisture from a recent rain had frozen into a thin sheet of ice. Suddenly, Mesrour’s hooves lost their purchase, and before I could react, we were both of us falling onto the frozen causeway with the kind of crash that shatters bones.
I was dazed for a moment, as was the horse, but when I came to myself I discovered I was entangled with him, and he groaned as if he were near death, a sound that frightened the deuce out of me. I struggled mightily to remove myself from my entanglement, swearing to myself as if it would help the effort, as Pilot snuffled around us both. I thought I heard a voice and peered about into the gloom, but seeing no one, I was put in mind of childhood tales of woodland sprites haunting this vicinity. Then the voice came again, more clearly: “Can I do anything?”
I looked toward the sound and saw a little thing, barely half my size: not a sprite after all, but a child. I ordered it to one side, afraid it might get hurt, and managed to scramble to my feet, a sudden pain flashing through my ankle. As I helped Mesrour stand and checked him for injuries, Pilot leaped and barked around us in either joy or concern. I had just limped my way to a convenient nearby stile when I was surprised to hear the voice again, for I had forgotten that I was not alone on the path.
“If you are hurt, and want help, sir, I can fetch someone, either from Thornfield-Hall or from Hay.”
