Chapter 4 #2
At Thornfield, as the time drew near for Molly to depart, I sensed a kind of regret in her.
I wondered how she would fare on her own back on her island.
She had been Bertha’s body servant from childhood, but she would return a free woman—yet freedom does not guarantee a living.
When the time came for her to leave, I pressed two hundred pounds into Molly’s hand and wished her well and thanked her for her devotion to her “missus.” I could not trust myself to say more.
She stood silently before me for a long time, and I perceived she was struggling inwardly, and I waited.
“Sir, I think you do not know—of the baby,” she said, gazing past my shoulder.
“What baby?” I wondered suddenly if Molly had been mistreated by someone at Thornfield, if she were fleeing England in shame. “Yours?”
She frowned, and she must at first have thought I meant Tiso. “No, no. If missus, if she cry for her baby, her little boy, tell her he is fine—sleeping.”
I was dumbfounded. “Bertha had a baby? She was…she was married before?”
“Not marry. She a child. Tiso age.”
“What happened to the baby?” I asked, my heart pounding in my ears.
“He gone.”
“Where? Where did he go?”
“People came. They took him.”
I stared at her, my mouth dry. “Who was the father?”
Still looking beyond me, she shrugged, as if there was no more to tell.
* * *
As the days passed after Molly’s departure, I tried to establish for myself a routine of riding out in the morning, overseeing my fields and cattle, enjoying the peace of my holdings, without worry for Bertha.
I was no longer concerned for her immediate safety, but I could not rid my mind of Molly’s parting news: Bertha had a child, a son.
And he would be grown now, nearing twenty years of age, if he were still living.
Ought I to try to find him? I wondered. Did he know who his mother was—what she was?
Would he want to know? The thought of his birth, and loss, tormented me.
If only I had known sooner. She had spoken of lost babies, but I thought it was only one of her delusions.
The anguish she must have felt—a child herself, weeping for her lost baby.
Surely this was part of what had driven her to madness; I could not help but wonder if a reunion with the child might once have stopped her decline.
I began sitting with her again, as often as I could, hoping to speak with her about the boy and offer some sort of comfort.
But she was already too far gone. Sometimes in her garbled rants, I still heard that word—baby—but her tirades had become so nonsensical that I could never be sure. Perhaps I only imagined it.
I wrote to Richard—to the last address I had for him in Madeira—asking about Bertha’s child, but a reply never came, only the letter itself, returned to me.
And I wrote to Mr. Arthur Foster, my solicitor in Spanish Town, who still kept an eye on business related to Valley View, and though he responded promptly, he, as well, knew nothing.
It was what I had half suspected, for in a case like that, would they not have done it all clandestinely, given the infant to someone who was leaving the island, for—for where?
Madeira? Saint Thomas? England? The Americas?
Or could he have remained in Jamaica somehow, hidden safely away from the family?
What if the child had died? It was a mystery I had no idea how to unravel.
As I hit wall after wall in my attempts to trace the baby, I grew increasingly frustrated and tried to put it out of my mind. To what end, after all, was I searching now for this motherless boy, to reveal to him the monster his lost mother had become? Why torment myself this way?
Yet, often I couldn’t sleep, and I paced the floor, roaming around the rooms. Above me, my wife roamed as well, watched over by Grace Poole, trapped inside her head and trapping me there with her, neither of us free.
Thornfield-Hall had been my dream since I had left it as a child, but in these months it had transformed into a kind of nightmare.
And a prison, for the both of us. I began to realize that there was nothing for me at Thornfield, none of the joy or peace it had once promised, as long as Bertha—poor Bertha—weighed on my soul.
That thought, and the future it promised, pressed upon me those dark nights until I felt that it would pull me under.
Have I not a right to a life? I asked myself.
Have I not as much a right as the next man?
Time and again I had tried to do the moral thing, had I not?
And how had that worked out for me? No, I told myself, this stops here.
I was done with it, done with Bertha, or as much as I could be.
I would start over, and find love on my own terms.
The next morning, I sent for Ames and gave him instructions, and I sent letters of explanation to Everson and Carter, and then I packed a bag and took a coach toward Southampton, leaving Thornfield in my wake.