Arrival at Thornfield — Jane Eyre

Jane arrives at the George Inn in Millcote after sixteen hours on the coach, expecting someone to meet her. No one comes. She waits half an hour in a private room with all sorts of doubts and fears before ringing for the waiter, who tells her a person is waiting. A plain servant, a one-horse car, six miles in the dark to Thornfield.

On the drive Jane calibrates her expectations carefully. Mrs. Reed taught her that high hope is dangerous; she prays only that Mrs. Fairfax will not turn out a second Mrs. Reed, and reminds herself that if she does, she is not bound to stay. When the car stops at the front door and she is ushered into a firelit room, she finds an elderly woman in widow's cap and black silk knitting with a cat at her feet. Mrs. Fairfax comes forward at once, removes Jane's shawl, calls for hot negus and sandwiches. She treats me like a visitor, Jane thinks, bewildered and warned against trusting it too soon.

Mrs. Fairfax turns out to be the housekeeper, not the mistress. The owner is Mr. Rochester, a gentleman and landed proprietor, says Mrs. Fairfax, who cannot describe him further. Adèle Varens, Jane's pupil, is a French child who arrived recently with her nurse. Jane meets her the next morning: chatty, performative, sings a French song at the breakfast table. The first lesson goes tolerably.

Afterwards Mrs. Fairfax shows Jane through the house. The front chambers are grand. The third-storey rooms are low and dark and filled with furniture of a hundred years ago, the chairs and chests and embroidered stools of generations who are coffin-dust: a shrine of memory. Jane likes the hush of it by day. Coming down from the roof, she lingers in the long third-storey corridor: narrow, low, dim, with two rows of small black doors all shut, like a corridor in some Bluebeard's castle.

Then she hears it. A laugh: curious, distinct, formal, mirthless. It passes off in a clamorous peal that wakes an echo in every lonely chamber. Jane calls to Mrs. Fairfax. Some of the servants, very likely, the housekeeper answers. Perhaps Grace Poole. The nearest door opens. A woman comes out: between thirty and forty, square-made, red-haired, hard plain face. Too much noise, Grace, says Mrs. Fairfax. Remember directions. Grace curtseyed silently and went in.