Into the Moors

I did not go to him that night to be comforted. I went because something in me would not be silenced until it had spoken. I found him in his chair in the blue room, wretched and unguarded, and when I told him what I knew, he did not deny it. He gave me instead his whole life laid open like a wound: a father who sold him, a brother who deceived him, a wife who was mad before he took her hand and madder still after. He spoke of passion, of despair, of years spent with a creature who was not a wife in any sense a woman could bear. He begged me to stay. He offered me everything a woman is taught to want — his house, his name, his bed, his constant adoration. And he asked only that I should agree to be called nothing, to be owed nothing, to be received in secret and sent away by dawn. He said God must forgive him because he could not do without me. I understood him. God knows I understood him. My whole body leaned toward him as he spoke. The old hunger in me, the hunger that has never had a proper home, rose up like a creature scenting food, and I could feel every argument for yes pressing against my chest. He was offering me warmth after a lifetime of cold. He was offering me a place. And I knew — with the same clear, cold certainty that has guided me through every hard choice of my life — that if I said yes, I should buy those comforts with the one thing I have never been permitted to lose: my own respect for myself. A kept woman, however loved, is a woman who has agreed to be a shadow. I have been a shadow nearly all my days. I will not be one in his arms. I told him I would go. I told him I would leave Thornfield before the house woke. He begged, he threatened, he wept. I held. I held the way a tree holds in a wind that wants to snap it — not by strength, but by choosing where to set its roots.

I did not sleep. I sat in my room in the dark and waited for the smallest pale edge of light to creep under the curtains. When it came, I rose. I took my plain dress, my shawl, my one change of linen, a little purse with almost nothing in it, and the small keepsake I had been given long ago by someone who loved me without condition. I did not look behind me as I came down the stairs. I did not go past his door. I let myself out into a yard still wet with night, found the postilion, paid what I had, and climbed onto the coach. The horses set off before I had time to weep, and that was a mercy, for weeping would have been a delay and I could not afford delay. The coach carried me on through towns whose names I did not trouble to learn. I sat upright. I did not speak to my fellow passengers. I watched the hedgerows and the fields go by as though I were watching my own life pass under a window — close enough to see, too far to touch. When the coach stopped at the end of its run, I stepped down onto a piece of moorland that seemed to belong to no one. The driver looked at me as if I were a fool. Perhaps I was. He turned the horses and went back the way we had come, and I stood alone under a wide indifferent sky with almost no money and no plan.

I have no relative but the universal mother, Nature: I will seek her breast and ask repose.