Reader, I Married Him

An ImaRead production · text & illustration by the production line

ImaReadFolio 02 — 03

Wide night shot: a small woman silhouetted at a tall window, forehead against glass, dark moor beyond under a pale sky — I sat alone by the window with my forehead against the cold glass, and the wind came up off the moor — and then his voice.

Wide daylight exterior of the burned-out Thornfield Hall with black roof timbers jutting against a slate-grey sky; a small woman in a dark plain dress stands at a low gate in the foreground looking up at the ruined mansion. — Thornfield was a tooth. Black timbers stood against the sky like the ribs of something that had died standing up.

The proposal came dressed as a summons. St John Rivers stood in the parlor at Moor House with the light of India in his eyes and asked me for my hand as one might ask for a lamp or a sounding line — useful things on a long voyage. He did not love me; he made that plain, and oddly I respected him for it. He needed a worker, a body that would not break beneath the climate, a mouth that would not complain when the work outstripped the food. I would have been the lever and the rope; he would have been the hand that pulled. He asked for obedience, and in exchange he offered the only thing he had to give: a life of meaning, in service, far from England. I should have been honored. He thought I was honored.

I wavered. That is the truth I cannot smooth over. Twenty miles from anyone who knew my name, wearing borrowed clothes, dependent on the bread of strangers, I was tired enough to mistake surrender for vocation. I almost signed. I almost bent my neck into the yoke and called it holiness. St John had a way of standing very still and letting his silence do the work that arguments cannot, and in that silence I began to feel my own shape thinning, as if I were being unwritten line by line. I would go to India. I would teach. I would bury pieces of myself so deep that no one, including me, would ever find them again. He pressed. I almost said yes. I almost did.

Then came the night that broke every calculation. I sat alone by the window with my forehead against the cold glass, and the wind came up off the moor carrying nothing I could name — and then his voice. Not loud. Not near. Rochester, calling my name as if the moors themselves were a throat and he were asking them to carry it. Three miles away, on a road I could not see, a man I had been trying not to think of spoke into the dark, and I heard him. I do not say I heard him with my ears; I say I heard him, and my whole body answered. I left that house before dawn. I did not wait for permission. I did not even take a proper bag. Some things cannot be packed.

ImaRead2

ImaReadFolio 03 — 03

Intimate interior: a blind man sits on stairs with his head in his bandaged hand, a woman kneels before him reaching up — He came to me down the passage with his hand along the wall, and his face — his poor ruined face — turned toward me like a flower toward a sun he could not see.

Thornfield was a tooth. Black timbers stood against the sky like the ribs of something that had died standing up. The roof was gone. The smell of old smoke still lived in the walls. I learned the story in pieces from a farmer who had come down from the village: a madwoman in the attic, set loose one terrible night by a man too gentle to do what was necessary; the torches; the screams; a rescuer who went up into the burning house and came down again with his eyes burned out and one hand gone. Bertha Mason was dead. Edward Rochester was alive, but only in the way a tree struck by lightning is alive — still rooted, still green in patches, but forever changed. He had gone to Ferndean, a house so deep in the woods that even the keepers of the great estates had forgotten it. He was alone there with two old servants, blind, and waiting for nothing.

I went to him. I will not pretend I went nobly; I went because the path my feet had always known led there, and I had stopped trying to fight it. The door was opened by a woman who looked as though she had not slept in a year. The house smelled of damp wood and old linens and a kind of patient sorrow. He came to me down the passage with his hand along the wall, and his face — his poor ruined face — turned toward me like a flower toward a sun he could not see. He did not know me. He asked who was there. I said my name. He said it again, and again, as if tasting it; and then his knees gave way, and he sat down on the stairs with his head in his one remaining hand, and we both wept in a way I will not describe, because some griefs and some reliefs are not improved by being described.

He asked me to marry him. Not as a master, this time. Not as a gentleman taking a governess to grace his drawing room. He asked as a man with nothing left to offer, asking a woman with everything she needed, to choose him anyway. I chose him. We were wed quietly, in a church with almost no one present, and I took him home as a wife and returned to him as the equal he had finally learned to want. Two years on, sight crept back into one of his eyes — enough to see our son's face, enough to see mine, enough to see, he said, what he had nearly lost twice and would not lose again. I am his eyes, when he needs me to be. He is my shelter, when I will let him. We are, at last, two people standing upright in the same room.

Do you think I am an automaton? — a machine without feelings?