“Let me take care of you.”
She made a choked noise against his shoulder. It might have been a sob.
“It’s all right.” His words were a husky murmur at her ear, meant for her and her alone. “You don’t always have to be strong, my love. You can lean on me awhile.”
She swallowed and nodded her head.
John exchanged a few brief words with Mr. Fairfax. The butler was more than capable of meeting the engines and seeing to the servants’ welfare. They would be in no danger. The fire was confined to the stone walls of the Hall.
Bertha cast it a final look as John drew her away. He urged the boys along with them toward the stables. The riding horses had already been evacuated. Two half-dressed footmen struggled to control them at the edge of the drive.
The carriages had been evacuated, too; rolled out into the stable yard, both the larger coach, and the old one-horse gig that had brought John to Thornfield so many months before.
Jenkins was hitching the coach to a team of bays.
John addressed him quietly. “I need to get Mrs. Rochester and the boys to an inn for the night. Somewhere in Hay.”
“We’re taking the horses to the Three Bells,” Jenkins said.
John was familiar with the place. It was a clean, respectable establishment, with plenty of room to house the displaced residents of Thornfield. “That will suffice,” he said. “Once you’ve delivered us there, you can return for the others.”
“Right-o, sir.” Jenkins opened the carriage door and set down the steps.
John assisted Bertha up into the cab and lifted the boys in with her. He climbed in after them. Jenkins shut the carriage door.
Inside the darkened interior, neither Bertha nor the boys wished to be apart from John, not even by so much as an inch. They all huddled together on the same upholstered seat, Stephen and Peter at John’s left, and Bertha at his right, her head resting on his shoulder, and her arm circling his midsection.
Jenkins hopped onto the box and gathered the ribbons. The coach gave a shudder as the horses sprang into motion. And then they were rolling away down the drive, the flames that consumed Thornfield Hall dancing in the carriage window at their back, and ahead of them, an endless expanse of perfect night—free of mist, free of evil.
John gathered his family close. Soon, he had no doubt that the shock would set in for all of them. But for now, they were together, and they were alive. It was a blessing. A miracle. And he was resolved to view it as such.
Mrs. Bertha Eyre’s Journal.
7 May 1845. Val d’Arno, Italy. — It’s been a month to the day since we settled into our new home in Florence’s river valley. The Villa della Agnello is nothing very grand—merely an old farmhouse, formerly owned by a wool merchant. For us, however, after a year spent wandering the length and breadth of Italy, the quiet comfort of the rambling property is something very near to heaven.
There are no villagers nearby to disturb our peace. No busybodies to ply us with questions. Our closest neighbors are the monks at the local monastery. Good and pious men. I can sense their eyes on me when we pass on the road. I wonder if evil leaves a mark? A stain, readily observable to those of true and honest faith? If so, that stain is daily fading.
The boys have already begun to heal. They spend their days out of doors, basking as much in the sun as they do in John’s company. Their skin, no longer pale as death, has been burnished to a deep bronze. One might easily mistake them for native Florentines. They can even speak creditable Italian, finding more confidence in the rounded vowels and melodic rising-and-falling syllables than in the languages of their past—a past we are all of us trying to forget.
In that, John is our lodestar. He draws us out of ourselves, out of the villa and into the sunlight, no matter how low our spirits. If his own spirits suffer, he doesn’t show it. It’s only on rare occasions that I’ve observed him looking solemn and pensive, his pencil stilled over his sketchpad, as if a stray memory has caught him unaware.
When that happens, it’s up to me to take him by the hand and bring him back to the present. To the love and laughter of our little family, safe here in the Italian sunshine, far away from