Read Wild Island for Free Online

Jane was called away to the deathbed of her aunt, a Mrs Reed, in a distant county. Jane, who had believed Mrs Reed was her only relative, now discovered the existence of her uncle, her father’s brother, a bachelor living in Funchal, Madeira. Jane wrote to him and a correspondence began. All this came to me from letters Jane sent Mrs Fairfax. Rochester evidently heard it too, and perhaps he wondered whether Jane might go to Madeira—at any rate, as soon as she returned, he proposed to her.
    This was nine months after she came to ‘Thornfield’, Midsummer’s Eve of 1837. That magic night when the world pauses and turns. Earlierin the day, Leah, the housemaid, had brought the midsummer cushion into the kitchen—a square of meadow-turf set on a meat platter, with wildflowers stuck thickly into it. Unmarried women and girls would put a bloom from it under their pillow, in hope of seeing their future husband in a dream that night.
    ‘No, thank you, Leah,’ said Jane, passing through, ‘If I ever come to want a husband, I’ll trust in the Lord and look about for myself.’
    Later, when Adèle was in bed, Jane went into the garden. It had been a day of heat and the air was balmy. Rochester joined her and they wandered in the scented twilight and on into the dark. There were accusations and tears, misunderstanding, explanations. As they embraced, the wind suddenly rose and the moon turned blood red. Rain began to pour down, and thunder and lightning rent the air, all heaven in a rage. As the lovers ran into the great hall the clock struck midnight and Rochester took Jane into his arms and pressed her wet face with kisses, murmuring, ‘Jane, my Jane.’
    ‘Let me go, sir,’ she said smiling, struggling to escape. She had seen Mrs Fairfax holding her candle at the other end of the hall, astonished at the sight of the Master of ‘Thornfield’ dripping wet, clasping the orphan governess in his possessive embrace.

    On that same midsummer night in 1837, the King died at last in London: William the Fourth; the Sailor King; or Silly Billy, depending on your point of view. The Princess Victoria was eighteen, the same age as Jane Eyre, and just as intelligent, as uncompromising, as plain. And both were as eager for love—as I had been, at the same age. Many women are Jane Eyres at eighteen, ready to brave anything for the beloved, who is like no other; but we are sometimes forced to change as the years go by. The heart’s hot beating continues invisibly, but we learn to disguise our feelings, to present a more cautious aspect to the world.
    When I was seven, my father paid me a penny for a sketch of our dog, Rom. A whole penny for doing what I loved, what my deepestnature cried out to do. I was too young to think of it in such terms, but the tremendous satisfaction of the bargain was a lesson in itself, the dawning of a thought about how to live one’s life. Father took the sketch of Rom away to sea with him. He was a Post Captain in Nelson’s fleet, away at the war with Boney for most of my childhood. My poor mother had died soon after I was born. I was her fourth child, the only one to survive; and as she was without family, I grew up with my father’s mother.
    Grandmama was the daughter of a clergyman and the widow of one too, and pale watercolours had been among her own accomplishments as a girl, but even so, she found my continual sketching excessive (and paper was precious during the war). While not exactly immoral, it amounted to a passion, and therefore could not be entirely blameless. It was ‘inordinate’, a word she kept returning to; too much concerned with outward appearances, and it occupied hours better employed in other ways: sewing, good deeds, prayer. She encouraged my reading and playing the pianoforte in the hope that these would in time replace the drawing (both of these could at least be used in the service of the Lord) but they did not.
    I was ten when Grandmama died and I was sent to my new