Yours faithfully,
George Howell Rochester, Esq.
And the second, dated 12 February 1810:
My dear Jonas,
I have now received a letter from my son, reporting that the wedding has taken place, and the two of them have made a home for themselves at Valley View. I cannot tell you of the pleasure I feel that this marriage has been achieved as we hoped and planned, and I feel now that I have upheld my end of the arrangement.
Yours faithfully,
George Howell Rochester
They were short letters—shorter than I would have expected—but clearly the two of them indicated a marriage between my father’s son (and by the dates, it could only have been Rowland) and Jonas Mason’s only daughter.
I turned to Everson, and he was already staring at me. “What do you think?” he asked. “Might they be genuine?”
I pulled out three letters that I possessed in my father’s own hand and laid them down beside the others. There was no doubt of it: the same kind of vellum my father always used, and the handwriting an exact match.
“It seems so,” I said, hardly able to believe it. Why had no one objected to my marriage at the time, if Bertha and Rowland were already wed? Why would Jonas and my father have both blessed it—indeed, encouraged it?
“So you consider this proof?” Gerald asked.
“That’s for the court to decide,” Everson responded, “but…”
“But?” I asked.
“One never knows,” he said.
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 therecouldbe 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 anarrangementto clean up my brother’s indiscretion, my own life a payment into the account of my brother’s irresponsibility. God, my wholelife…?
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.
