Reader, I Married Him. Tracy Chevalier

she chose, with every dish on the table to her appetite.

      She came in meek and mild but I knew her at first glance. There she sat in her low chair at a decent distance from the fire, buttering up Mrs Fairfax as if the old lady were a plate of parsnips. She didn’t see me but I saw her. You don’t live the life I’ve lived without learning to move so quiet that there is never a stir to frighten anyone.

      Jane Eyre. You couldn’t touch her. Nothing could bring a flush of colour to that pale cheek. What kind of pallor was it, you ask? A snowdrop pushing its way out of the bare earth, as green as it was white: that would be a comparison she’d like. But I would say: sheets. Blank sheets. Paper, or else a bed that no one had ever lain in or ever would.

      I am a coarse creature. No one has ever married me and I have not much taste for marrying. I like my porter, and there’s no harm in that. I am quick with the laudanum too. My lady takes it flavoured with cinnamon, and I keep the bottle under lock and key because sometimes she likes it too much. This little pale one won’t touch a drop of anything. Won’t let it sully her lips. Doesn’t want to be babbling out her secrets in that French she’s so proud of, as if anyone cared to listen. The little girl speaks French as pure as a bird.

      I sweat and my stays creak when I move. I have good employment and I am respected by everyone in the household, not least Mr R. He’s a sly one, a fox if ever there was, and my poor lady was no vixen. All she ever had, and I will swear my Bible oath to it, was a weakness.

      Violent? Not she. Not my lady. Mr R brought Dr Gallion here to measure her skull. She was tied firm to a ladder-back chair and she did not resist although her eyes rolled. The doctor undertook the palpation of my lady’s skull prominences. Here, he said, this is the bump of Amativeness. A propensity to Combativeness, do you see here, sir? His hands roved over her head and everything he discovered was to her detriment. He went beyond prodding at her bones to observe the way her hair grew low on her forehead, which he said showed an animal disposition. It vexed me. It was because she would not speak that he called her animal, but she could talk when she liked. She spoke in her dreams, when only I was there to hear her. If she preferred to be called mute I did not blame her. Downstairs, the pale one, chatter chatter in French with the little girl, scribble scribble on whatever piece of paper she could get, as if words were all anybody needed.

      What I hated most was the way she made herself milk and water, a dish of whey for anyone to drink at, sip sop sip sop, when what she truly wanted was to be a blade through the heart of us. I knew it but the rest were dumb and blind. The old lady loved the sip sop. As for the little girl, she was taken by her, like a baby taken for a changeling.

      My poor lady’s skull showed an enlarged Organ of Destructiveness. Dr Gallion passed his fingers over the place and repeated the words. He nodded and Mr R nodded with him, the two gentlemen solemn together now while my lady bent her head and her hair slid over her shoulders. The doctor had loosened it from the knots and coils she wore, the better to get at her.

      In such a case as this, the doctor said, it would be wise to shave the head entire, the more clearly to see how the organs display themselves.

      I rubbed oil into the bristle that sprouted from my lady’s scalp, so that it would grow more quickly. She was bewildered at the loss of her hair. She would raise her hand as if to touch the knot that sat at her nape, and find it gone, and then her hand would waver. I would give her a little laudanum and she would rock herself and seem to find comfort in it.

      The pale one thinks she has the measure of us all. Up and down the garden she goes in the shadows of evening. She ticks us off in her steps. The old lady. Mr R. The little girl. The guests who come and go. She would tick me off too but she only knows my name. She asked it and they told her: Grace Poole.

      I am a strong creature with a pot of porter. I receive excellent wages. I am so turned and turned about that if I saw a snowdrop push its way out of the earth I would stamp on it.

      She was brought here to dig the frippery out of the little girl, so that the child might take her proper station in life.

      Less noise there, Grace.

      I can make a noise if I want. They know that. I have not yet lost my voice. If I spoke out I’d tell the pale one a story she wouldn’t soon forget.

      Long ago he married my lady and they were Mr and Mrs R. Amativeness is what the doctor called it. This was long before the snowdrop raised its head, but the creature with the porter was already here. Me. Fifteen was I? As old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth. I was a lovely flashing bit of a girl then. I could stop men of thirty dead in their tracks as they ploughed. I made the air so thick around me they seemed to wade or drown in it. I was Grace Poole.

      I stopped him dead in his tracks. I did not care for my lady then or know her. She did not come downstairs. They said she was nervous. To me she was a foreign land where I never wished to go.

      Grace Poole, he said to me, and I saw him tremble. Is that your name?

      I tilted the water I was carrying so that the jug rested on my hip. I said nothing. Let him look, I thought, and I shall look back at him.

      I had an attic then. A slip of a room all white with sunlight and almost bare, but there was a bed in it. He was older than me but not by so much. He had married young and they said he was unhappy. I thought of nothing then except having him.

      I dare say he had never lain down on such a bed in his life. We had to put our hands over each other’s mouths so as not to cry out.

      Grace Poole, he said when I released him. Grace Poole. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard: my own name. No one heard and no one came.

      No man likes a big belly. I carried mine to a place he procured for me. He told me that he would provide for the child and give it a station in life, and I would come back to Thornfield. It was more than I expected. He was a fox because it was his nature, but he kept his word about the child. I did not resist when it was born and taken by a wet nurse, to go far away to a better place.

      I took a fever when it was gone and the room stank so that even the nurse who tended me held up a handkerchief over her face, but I did not die. I pitted and spotted and what got up from the bed was no longer the old Grace Poole but the beginning of the creature you see presently. I grew as strong as you like. I came back to Thornfield and took a taste for nursing, as perhaps he had foreseen.

      I did not want anyone to look at me. And there she is, the pale one, bursting with it, every inch of her chill little flesh shouting: Look at me.

      She will never stand before him as I did and look back at him, and make him come to her. She hunts in another fashion.

      So I came to nurse my lady here. She would not eat so I fed her from a spoon. She would not speak so I learned her gestures and what they meant. I brushed her hair, which was thick and soft and long enough to touch the ground when she sat. It took an hour sometimes to brush her hair, to plait it and coil it into the knot she liked. When it was finished she would put up her hands to touch it and she would be satisfied. She liked her laudanum flavoured with cinnamon and not with saffron, which was what they gave her at first. Another thing she liked was a bit of red satin ribbon which she would wrap around her fingers and rub against her cheek as she rocked herself, and at those times although she never spoke she would hum and I would think: Perhaps she is content.

      Each morning: porridge with cream and syrup, so that even a little of it will fatten her. Sometimes she will take a dish of tea; other times she will dash it from my hand. But no matter how fiercely she smashes china, she never touches me. There has been long discussion over whether or not she should take meat. It is heating. It inflames the passions. She is allowed only a very little beef. I make broth for her myself, out of bones she likes to crack with her teeth when they are cooked so that the marrow is ready to drip out of them. She will eat toast sometimes, as long as it is cut so fine it splinters to pieces if the butter is hard. On the days when she puts her lips together and will not swallow, I know better now than to persuade her. I take out my two packs of cards and make them flicker down into heaps over and over. It soothes her.

      But