You have no ghost, then?

Jane settles into her new life, but she begins to realize that the job at Thornfield might be more than she bargained for…

But first, she arrives at Millcote, and is disappointed (and slightly confused) to find no one from Thornfield ready to meet her.

It is a very strange sensation to inexperienced youth to feel itself quite alone in the world, cut adrift from every connection, uncertain whether the port to which it is bound can be reached, and prevented by many impediments from returning to that it has quitted. The charm of adventure sweetens that sensation, the glow of pride warms it; but then the throb of fear disturbs it; and fear with me became predominant, when half an hour elapsed and still I was alone.

I’ve never had this exact feeling, since I’ve always had family (or at the very least friends) there to help me settle into a new environment. The closest I’ve had was maybe when I took a bus across five states to get home from college once, but that only lasted a day, and I had people at both ends of the journey. But it’s not hard to imagine it.

Anyhow, Jane finally gets to Thornfield after an uncomfortable delay, arriving late at night, and greeted by Mrs. Fairfax.

“She treats me like a visitor,” thought I. “I little expected such a reception; I anticipated only coldness and stiffness: this is not like what I have heard of the treatment of governesses; but I must not exult too soon.”
[…]
“Shall I have the pleasure of seeing Miss Fairfax to-night?” I asked, when I had partaken of what she offered me.
“What did you say, my dear? I am a little deaf,” returned the good lady, approaching her ear to my mouth.
I repeated the question more distinctly.
“Miss Fairfax? Oh, you mean Miss Varens! Varens is the name of your future pupil.”
“Indeed! Then she is not your daughter?”
“No, – I have no family.”
I should have followed up my first inquiry by asking in what way Miss Varens was connected to her; but recollected it was not polite to ask too many questions: besides, I was sure to hear in time.
“I am so glad,” she continued, as she sat down opposite to me, and took the cat on her knee; “I am so glad you are come; it will be quite pleasant living here now with a companion. To be sure it is pleasant at any time; for Thornfield is a fine old hall, rather neglected of late years perhaps, but still a respectable place; yet you know in winter time one feels dreary quite alone, in the best quarters. I say alone – Leah is a nice girl to be sure, and John and his wife are very decent people; but then you see they are only servants, and one can’t converse with them on terms of equality: one must keep them at due distance, for fear of losing one’s authority. I’m sure last winter (it was a very severe one, if you recollect, and when it did not snow, it rained and blew) not a creature but the butcher and postman came to the house from November till February; and I really got quite melancholy with sitting night after night alone. I had Leah read to me sometimes; but I don’t think the poor girl liked the task much: she felt it confining. In spring and summer one got on better: sunshine and long days make such a difference; and then, just at the commencement of this autumn, little Adela Varens came and her nurse: a child makes a house alive all at once; and now you are here I shall be quite gay.”
My heart really warmed to the worthy lady as I heard her talk: and I drew my chair a little nearer to her, and expressed my sincere wish that she might find my company as agreeable as she anticipated.

It seems apparent that this isn’t quite the situation Jane expected of a widow and her granddaughter, but as she arrived so late, she leaves such pondering to the next morning.

The steps and banisters were of oak; the staircase window was high and latticed; both it and the long gallery into which the bedroom doors opened looked as if they belonged to a church rather than a house. A very chill and vaultlike air pervaded the stairs and gallery, suggesting cheerless ideas of space and solitude; and I was glad when finally ushered into my chamber to find it of small dimensions, and furnished in ordinary modern style.
When Mrs. Fairfax had bidden me a kind good-night, and I had fastened my door, gazed leisurely round, and in some measure effaced the eerie impression made by that wide hall, that dark and spacious staircase, and that long, cold gallery, by the livelier aspect of my little room, I remembered that after a day of bodily fatigue and mental anxiety I was now at last in safe haven. The impulse of gratitude swelled my heart, and I knelt down at the bedside, and offered up thanks where thanks were due; not forgetting, ere I rose, to implore aid on my further path, and the power of meriting the kindness which seemed so frankly offered me before it was earned.

Mrs. Fairfax continues to treat Jane cordially, which is even more perplexing given her allusion to keeping a “proper” distance between her and the servants, but the next morning she finally clears it all up.

“How do you like Thornfield?” [Mrs. Fairfax] asked. I told her I liked it very much.
“Yes,” she said, “it is a pretty place: but I fear it will be getting out of order, unless Mr. Rochester should take it into his head to come and reside here permanently; or, at least, visit it rather oftener: great houses and fine grounds require the presence of the proprietor.”
“Mr. Rochester!” I exclaimed. “Who is he?”
“The owner of Thornfield,” she responded quietly. “Did you not know he was called Rochester?”
Of course I did not – I had never heard of him before; but the old lady seemed to regard his existence as a universally understood fact, with which everybody must be acquainted by instinct.
“I thought,” I continued, “Thornfield belonged to you.”
“To me? Bless you, child; what an idea! To me? I am only the housekeeper – the manager. To be sure, I am distantly related to the Rochesters by the mother’s side; or, at least, my husband was: he was a clergyman, incumbent of Hay – the little village yonder on the hill – and that church near the gates was his. The present Mr. Rochester’s mother was a Fairfax, and second cousin to my husband; but I never presume on the connection – in fact it is nothing to me; I consider myself quite in the light of an ordinary housekeeper: my employer is always civil, and I expect nothing more.”
“And the little girl – my pupil?”
“She is Mr. Rochester’s ward; he commissioned me to find a governess for her. He intends to have her brought up in –shire, I believe. Here she comes with her ‘bonne,’ as she calls her nurse.” The enigma was then explained: this affable and kind little widow was no great dame, but a dependent like myself. I did not like her the worse for that; on the contrary, I felt better pleased than ever. The equality between her and me was real; not the mere result of condescension on her part: so much the better – my position was all the freer.

Apparently, “bonne” means “good” in French, but when used as a noun, it can also refer to a housemaid. And another riddle is resolved when Jane’s student greets her.

I looked at my pupil, who did not at first appear to notice me: she was quite a child, perhaps seven or eight years old, slightly built, with a pale, small-featured face, and a redundancy of hair falling in curls to her waist.
“Good morning, Miss Adela,” said Mrs. Fairfax. “Come and speak to the lady who is to teach you, and make you a clever woman some day.” She approached.
“C’est la ma gouvernante [is this my governess]?” said she, pointing to me, and addressing her nurse; who answered: “Mais oui, certainement [yes, certainly].”
“Are they foreigners?” I inquired, amazed at hearing the French language.
“The nurse is a foreigner, and Adela was born on the continent, and, I believe, never left it till six months ago. When she first came she could speak no English; now she can make shift to talk it a little: I don’t understand her, she mixes it so with French; but you will make out her meaning very well, I daresay.”

Fortunately, Jane was taught French by a native French speaker, so she has no trouble following Adèle’s chattering.

“Ah!” cried she, in French, “you speak my language as well as Mr. Rochester does: I can talk to you as I can to him, and so can Sophie. She will be glad: nobody here understands her: Madame Fairfax is all English. Sophie is my nurse; she came with me over the sea in a great ship with a chimney that smoked – how it did smoke – and I was sick, and so was Sophie, so was Mr. Rochester. Mr. Rochester lay down on a sofa in a pretty room called the salon, and Sophie and I had little beds in another place. I nearly fell out of mine; it was like a shelf.”

Once Mrs. Fairfax sees how wall Jane understands her, she requests that Jane ask about Adèle’s parents, as she clearly doesn’t know her situation that well given the language barrier.

Adèle tells her that she lived with her mother in Paris until she died, and her mother taught her to sing and dance and generally entertain visitors. The songs she taught her were seemingly angsty, but not bawdy. After she died, Adèle moved in with another lady before Mr. Rochester asked her to live with him.

“[…] Mr. Rochester asked me if I would like to go and live with him in England, and I said yes; for I knew Mr. Rochester before I knew Madame Frédéric, and he was always kind to me and gave me pretty dresses and toys. But you see he has not kept his word, for he has brought me to England, and now he is gone back again himself, and I never see him.”

This is the first hint we get about Mr. Rochester’s character: He sometimes makes promises he doesn’t keep…

Jane starts teaching Adèle, and finds her lacking focus, but that’s understandable for a kid her age. After their lesson, Jane finds Mrs. Fairfax tidying up some stately rooms, and comments about how she keeps all those clean without covering the furniture.

“Why, Miss Eyre, though Mr. Rochester’s visits here are rare, they are always sudden and unexpected; and as I observed that it put him out to find everything swathed up, and to have a bustle of arrangement on his arrival, I thought it best to keep the rooms in readiness.”
“Is Mr. Rochester an exacting, fastidious sort of man?”

“Not particularly so; but he has a gentleman’s tastes and habits, and he expects to have things managed in conformity to them.”
“Do you like him? Is he generally liked?”
“Oh, yes; the family have always been respected here. Almost all the land in this neighbourhood, as far as you can see, has belonged to the Rochesters time out of mind.”
“Well, leaving the land out of the question, do you like him? Is he liked for himself?”
“I have no cause to do otherwise than like him; and I believe he is considered a just and liberal landlord by his tenants: but he has never lived much amongst them.”
“But has he no peculiarities? What, in short, is his character?”
“Oh! his character is unimpeachable, I suppose. He is rather peculiar, perhaps: he has travelled a great deal, and seen a great deal of the world, I should think. I daresay he is clever: but I never had much conversation with him.”
“In what way is he peculiar?”
“I don’t know – it is not easy to describe – nothing striking but you feel it when he speaks to you: you cannot be always sure whether he is in jest or earnest, whether he is pleased or the contrary; you don’t thoroughly understand him, in short – at least, I don’t: but it is of no consequence, he is a very good master.”

And that’s all Jane’s able to get out of her. Mrs. Fairfax offers to show her around the rest of the house, and as the manor is centuries old, it’s a fascinating tour, and she eventually leads her to the third storey.

“Do the servants sleep in there rooms?” I asked.
“No; they occupy a range of smaller apartments to the back; no one ever sleeps here: one would almost say that, if there were a ghost in Thornfield Hall, this would be its haunt.”
“So I think: you have no ghost, then?”
“None that I ever heard of,” returned Mrs. Fairfax, smiling.

While Mrs. Fairfax doesn’t seem to take the question seriously, Jane is seemingly at least a little earnest about it, because she believed her childhood home to be haunted. And the subject of ghosts makes the following events seem uncanny…

I lingered in the long passage to which this led, separating the front and back rooms of the third story: narrow, low, and dim, with only one little window at the far end, and looking with its two rows of small black doors all shut, like a corridor in some Bluebeard’s castle.
While I paced softly on the last sound I expected to hear in so still a region, a laugh, struck my ear. It was a curious laugh; distinct, formal, mirthless. I stopped: the sound ceased, only for an instant; it began again louder: for at first, though distinct, it was very low. It passed off in a clamorous peal that seemed to wake an echo in every lonely chamber; though it originated but in one, and I could have pointed out the door whence the accents had issued.

The allusion to Bluebeard seems to indicate that Jane’s suspicious of Mr. Rochester at this point, as Bluebeard is a largely forgotten fairy tale about a young woman who marries a wealthy man, only to discover that he murdered six previous wives, and she only escapes herself by her wits.

But Mrs. Fairfax insists this mysterious laugh has a perfectly mundane explanation.

“Did you hear it?” I again inquired.
“Yes, plainly: I often hear her; she sews in one of these rooms. Sometimes Leah is with her: they are frequently noisy together.”
The laugh was repeated in its low, syllabic tone, and terminated in an odd murmur.
“Grace!” exclaimed Mrs. Fairfax.
I really did not expect any Grace to answer; for the laugh was as tragic, as preternatural a laugh as any I ever heard; and but that it was high noon, and that no circumstance of ghostliness accompanied the curious cachinnation, but that neither scene nor season favored fear, I should have been superstitiously afraid. However, the event showed me I was a fool for entertaining a sense even of surprise.
The door nearest me opened, and a servant came out, – a woman between thirty and forty; a set, square-made figure, red-haired, and with a hard, plain face: any apparition less romantic could scarcely be conceived.
“Too much noise, Grace,” said Mrs. Fairfax. “Remember directions!” Grace curtseyed silently and went in.
“She is a person we have to sew and assist Leah in her housemaid’s work,” continued the widow; “not altogether unobjectionable in some points, but she does well enough. […]”

Until next time…