Page 39 of John Eyre

He forced a grim smile. There was no reason to prevaricate. “I suppose it was the death of Lady Helen. Not but that my faith wasn’t already waning.”

“The wife of your former employer? She appeared young in that portrait of yours.”

“She was the same age as you and I.”

Her brows lifted. “You presume to know my age, sir? I don’t recall having shared it with you.”

“Forgive me. Another assumption of mine. But it seems to me that you can’t be much older than I am. Despite your—” He broke off, his eyes closing briefly on a private grimace.

Dash it all! Was he doomed to always be saying the wrong thing when he spoke to her?

“Despite what?” she asked.

He exhaled slowly. There was nothing for it but to answer her honestly. Indeed, he was certain she already knew of what he spoke. “The white in your hair. It might lead one to think you older than you are.”

Her hand emerged from her muff. She brought it to her temple, gloved fingers briefly touching the aforementioned streak. “A nuisance. I sometimes forget it’s there.”

John didn’t reply. He could scarcely tell her that he found the streak strangely attractive. That it caught the eye—as singular and mysterious as all the rest of her.

She tucked her hand back into her muff. “We’ve established that Lady Helen was young. And your portrait tells me that she was beautiful. But you haven’t yet mentioned how it was she died.”

He hesitated before answering. “She took her own life.”

Understanding registered in Mrs. Rochester’s gaze. “I see.” She slowed her step. “How did she do it?”

“She hanged herself.”

His words were met with a long silence.

John wished he were content to let it lie. To allow the silence to subsume the gruesome reality of Helen’s death—her imagined final moments as she struggled for air. But he couldn’t leave it at that. The guilt was too much a part of him. Guilt and—he was ashamed to admit—anger.

“There were more seemly ways she could have done it,” he said abruptly. “A pond on the grounds of her estate she might have drowned herself in. An overdose of the sleeping draught she took each evening. But either of those methods might have conjured doubt or uncertainty.”

“She wanted her intention to be clear?”

“I believe so.” John had long suspected it to be Helen’s parting blow at her husband. An action that would result in Sir William having to live with the unambiguous shame of her suicide. But lately John had begun to wonder if it hadn’t also been meant for him. The man whom she’d begged to take her away. To save her. The man who had ultimately let her down.

“I suppose you loved her,” Mrs. Rochester said.

His throat tightened. He turned his head, looking across the lawn at the boys playing. “Not in the way she wanted.”

He’d loved her as a friend. Had admired her greatly. Indeed, for a time, her grace and gentle femininity had been a pattern card by which every other lady was measured and fell short. But there had been nothing of romance about his admiration. Nothing of heat or passion.

Mrs. Rochester was quiet for several minutes, the crunch of their footsteps on the frozen path the only sound as they continued down past the thorn trees. “Is that why you left your position in Lowton? Because your employer’s wife fancied you?”

“What else could I have done?”

“You might have run away with her.”

“On a schoolmaster’s pay? But I wouldn’t have been a schoolmaster any longer. I would have had no employment. And Sir William wasn’t likely to grant his wife a divorce. Where could Helen and I have gone? We’d have been outcasts.” John gave voice to thoughts he’d never before shared with anyone. “No. There was no future for us. The best thing that I could think to do was to leave.”

“And yet…if you had loved her…”

“I didn’t,” he said. “Not that kind of love. Not the kind that moves mountains—that overcomes all odds.”

At that moment the boys ran up out of the mist to join them, rackets hanging loose in their hands. Their cheeks were flushed from the cold.

Games of battledore and shuttlecock were a new addition to their time out of doors. John had had to initiate play himself, demonstrating how to toss the shuttlecock back and forth, and how to strike it with one of the light rackets. Stephen and Peter had initially been reluctant, but in the past month they’d come to enjoy batting the shuttlecock about.