The weeks turned into months and I saw little of Jane—on purpose, of course—but kept in contact with the household and Mr. Rochester to make sure that all was going well. And it appeared that all was going well. As usual, Mr. Mason was bitten by his mad sister in the upper room; I was standing outside the locked door when Rochester went for the doctor and Jane tended to Mason’s wounds. When the doctor arrived I kept watch in the arbor outside, where I knew Jane and Rochester would meet. And so it went on until a brief respite when Jane went away to visit her dying aunt in Gateshead. Rochester had decided to marry Blanche Ingram by this time and things had been slightly tense between him and Jane. I felt some relief that she was away; I could relax and talk to Rochester quite easily without Jane suspecting anything.
“You aren’t sleeping,” observed Rochester as we walked together on the front lawn. “Look how your eyes are dark-rimmed and languorous.”
“I don’t sleep well here, not while Hades is barely five miles distant.”
“Your spies, surely, would alert you to any movement of his?”
It was true; the network worked well, although not without some considerable expenditure on Rochester’s part. If Hades set off anywhere I knew about it within two minutes from a rider who stood by for just such an occasion. It was in this manner that I was able to find him when he was out, either walking or reading or beating peasants with his stick. He had never come within a mile of the house, and I was happy to keep it that way.
“My spies afford me peace of mind, but I still can’t believe that Hades could be so passive. It chills and worries me.”
We walked on for a while, Rochester pointing out places of interest to me around the grounds. But I was not listening.
“How did you come to me, that night outside the warehouse, when I was shot?”
Rochester stopped and looked at me.
“It just happened, Miss Next. I can’t explain it anymore than you can explain arriving here when you were a little girl. Apart from Mrs. Nakijima and a traveler named Foyle, I don’t know of anyone else who has done it.”
I was surprised at this.
“You have met Mrs. Nakijima, then?”
“Of course. I usually do tours of Thornfield for her guests when Jane is up at Gateshead. It carries no risk and is extremely lucrative. Country houses are not cheap to run, Miss Next, even in this century.”
I allowed myself a smile. I thought that Mrs. Nakijima must be making a very sizeable profit; it was, after all, the ultimate trip for a Brontë fan, and there were plenty of those in Japan.
“What will you do after this?” asked Rochester, pointing out a rabbit to Pilot, who barked and ran off.
“Back to SpecOps work, I guess,” I replied. “What about you?”
Rochester looked at me broodingly, his eyebrows furrowed and a look of anger rising across his features.
“There is nothing for me after Jane leaves with that slimy and pathetic excuse for a vertebrate, St. John Rivers.”
“So what will you do?”
“Do? I won’t do anything. Existence pretty much ceases for me about then.”
“Death?”
“Not as such,” replied Rochester, choosing his words carefully. “Where you come from you are born, you live and then you die. Am I correct?”
“More or less.”
“A pretty poor way of living, I should imagine!” laughed Rochester. “And you rely upon that inward eye we call a memory to sustain yourself in times of depression, I suppose?”
“Most of the time,” I replied, “although memory is but one hundredth of the strength of currently felt emotions.”
“I concur. Here, I neither am born, nor die. I come into being at the age of thirty-eight and wink out again soon after, having fallen in love for the first time in my life and then lost the object of my adoration, my being! . . .”
He stopped and picked up the stick that Pilot had considerately brought him in place of the rabbit he couldn’t catch.
“You see, I can move myself to anywhere in the book I wish at a moment’s notice and back again at will; the greatest parts of my life lie between the time I profess my true love to that fine, impish girl and the moment the lawyer and that fool Mason turn up to spoil my wedding and reveal the madwoman in the attic. Those are the weeks to which I return most often, but I go to the bad times too—for without a yardstick sometimes the high points can be taken for granted. Sometimes I muse that I might have John stop them at the church gate and stall them until the wedding is over, but it is against the way of things.”
“So while I am talking to you here—”
“—I am also meeting Jane for the first time, wooing her, then losing her forever. I can even see you now, as a small child, your expression of fear under the hooves of my horse—”