6 The voice from nowhere

Chapter 6 The voice from nowhere Two days later I was in an unknown village. In my misery, I'd left my bag on the coach. I was truly destitute. I walked on until nightfall. Drawing my shawl around me, I slept restlessly beneath a crag, shattered with longing for Mr. Rochester. In the morning, weak with hunger, I found a village shop. "Does anyone here want a servant?" I asked. "No." "Is there any work hereabouts?" "No."

Onwards again... I saw a child about to throw a mess of cold porridge into a pig trough. "Please... give that to me," I pleaded and devoured it ravenously. Exhausted, I stumbled on until I reached a cottage and knocked on the door. A young clergyman and two girls my own age opened it. "Shelter," I gasped. "I beg you." Reader, these kind strangers took me in, restored me to health, and found work for me as a teacher in the village school. They found it hard to understand my friendless state, without family, but they were sensitive, not inquisitive.

There I stayed. If I thought of the life I might have led, delirious with Mr. Rochester's love under foreign sunshine, pretending to be his wife, I knew at least that here I could be honest. I was grateful. I found my village pupils likeable, clever and anxious to learn. And so my life passed, until one day... That day I had the strangest feeling in my heart, sharp as an electric shock. Breathless, I waited and heard a voice cry: "Jane! Jane! Jane!"

It came from nowhere, but I knew it at once- Edward Rochester's voice, in pain, desperate, eerie. "I will come," I cried to the air. I gave in my notice at the school, bid my kind rescuers goodbye and caught a coach back to Thornfield. How familiar and beloved it was! Past the lanes, through the fields, the house would come into view any moment now... I saw a blackened, empty ruin.

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Distraught, I rushed to the nearest house. An old man answered my urgent questions. "It was a fire in the dead of night," he said. "The lunatic started it, Mr. Rochester's secret wife. I saw her on the roof, waving her arms, a big woman with long black hair streaming against the flames. Mr. Rochester went to rescue her, but she yelled and jumped to her death on the ground." "And HE?" I could hardly bear it. "Is he dead or alive?" "Oh he's alive, but he's blind." "Where is he?" "At a farmhouse he owns, thirty miles away. They say he's a broken man." I went to the farmhouse that very day. The place felt deserted, as though no one lived there. Inside, I found Mr. Rochester, utterly changed, not in his looks which were as strong as ever, but his countenance