The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [99]
Bowden said nothing. Working with me, I suspected, was the first time he had really started to enjoy being in SpecOps. I shifted down a gear to overtake a slow-moving lorry and then accelerated away.
“How did you know it was Jane Eyre when I rang?”
I thought for a minute. If I couldn’t tell Bowden, I couldn’t tell anyone. I pulled Rochester’s handkerchief out of my pocket.
“Look at the monogram.”
“EFR?”
“It belongs to Edward Fairfax Rochester.”
Bowden looked at me doubtfully.
“Careful, Thursday. While I fully admit that I might not be the best Brontë scholar, even I know that these people aren’t actually real.”
“Real or not, I’ve met him several times. I have his coat too.”
“Wait—I understand about Quaverley’s extraction but what are you saying? That characters can jump spontaneously from the pages of novels?”
“I heartily agree that something odd is going on; something I can’t possibly explain. The barrier between myself and Rochester has softened. It’s not just him making the jump either; I once entered the book myself when I was a little girl. I arrived at the moment they met. Do you remember it?”
Bowden looked sheepish and stared out of the sidescreen at a passing petrol station.
“That’s very cheap for unleaded.”
I guessed the reason.
“You’ve never read it, have you?”
“Well—” he stammered. “It’s just that, er—”
I laughed.
“Well, well, a Litera Tec who hasn’t read Jane Eyre?”
“Okay, okay, don’t rub it in. I studied Wuthering Heights and Villette instead. I meant to give it my fullest attention but like many things it must have slipped my mind.”
“I had better run it by you.”
“Perhaps you should,” agreed Bowden grumpily.
I told him the story of Jane Eyre over the next hour, starting with the young orphan Jane, her childhood with Mrs. Reed and her cousins, her time at Lowood, a frightful charity school run by a cruel and hypocritical evangelist; then the outbreak of typhus and the death of her good friend Helen Burns; after that of how Jane rises to become a model pupil and eventually student teacher under the principal, Miss Temple.
“Jane leaves Lowood and moves to Thornfield, where she has one charge, Rochester’s ward, Adele.”
“Ward?” asked Bowden. “What’s that?”
“Well,” I replied, “I guess it’s a polite way of saying that she is the product of a previous liaison. If Rochester lived today Adele would be splashed all over the front page of The Toad as a ‘love child.’ ”
“But he did the decent thing?”
“Oh, yes. Anyhow, Thornfield is a pleasant place to live, if not slightly strange—Jane has the idea that there is something going on that no one is talking about. Rochester returns home after an absence of three months and turns out to be a sullen, dominating personality, but he is impressed by Jane’s fortitude when she saves him from being burned by a mysterious fire in his bedroom. Jane falls in love with Rochester but has to witness his courtship of Blanche Ingram, a sort of nineteenth-century bimbo. Jane leaves to attend to Mrs. Reed, who is dying and when she returns, Rochester asks her to marry him; he has realized in her absence that the qualities of Jane’s character far outweigh those of Miss Ingram, despite the difference in their social status.”
“So far so good.”
“Don’t count your chickens. A month later the wedding ceremony is interrupted by a lawyer who claims that Rochester is already married and his first wife—Bertha—is still living. He accuses Rochester of bigamy, which is found to be true. The mad Bertha Rochester lives in a room on the upper floor of Thornfield, attended to by the strange Grace Poole. It was she who had attempted to set fire to Rochester in his bed all those months ago. Jane is deeply shocked—as you can imagine—and Rochester tries to excuse his conduct, claiming that his love for her