Becoming Jane Eyre Read Online Free PDF Page B

sideboard and politely offering him lemonade from a glass pitcher. After his long walk in the August heat, he is thirsty. “I’d appreciate that,” he says, though he would prefer something stronger. He stares at her as she pours, and she glances back. There is something frank and playful in her smile that moves him as she offers him the glass and her cold fingers touch his.
    He thinks how his wife’s family would have scorned his poor parents, the Pruntys, from County Down, had he not entered their parlor caparisoned in the sable of the clergyman, with his degree from Cambridge and his altered name.
    He remembers his wife’s easy wit, her irreverent sense of fun, her good sense, her strong Methodist faith, and what pleased her “saucy Pat,” as she called him, best of all: her fast-growing infatuation with him. He remembers her lively letters, in which she told him that he was replacing her God for her.
    At twenty-nine, his wife was not much younger than this daughter at his side. She must almost have given up hope of marrying, despite her dowry of fifty pounds a year.
    He remembers the joyous wedding, her frightened shyness on the wedding night. “Let us first get to know one another better,” she had said firmly, leaving him breathless beside her, filled with lust, the scent of her skin in the air, the soft sound of her breathing in the dark. The soft sweetness of her body against his, the night when she finally succumbed to him, comes back.
    “Perhaps we could wait a few more days,” his wife had said, as he dared to reach for her waist, to draw her firmly to him. She had kept him waiting a long while.
    “I have been waiting for years,” he had found the courage to say, half-playfully, half-exultantly, as she lay trembling beside him in her long white nightdress, her frilled nightcap. “What difference would a few more days make? I am your husband. I have been patient, and you have promised to obey.”
    “Tell me what I must do,” she had whispered then. And, indeed, when he thinks about it now, it was a fearful thing to have done.
    Then, young, impatient, and sure of his rights, he had told her. He has almost forgotten the feeling of her tender, shy touch, as he guided her small hand to the place where he throbbed and yearned.
    “No, I can’t,” she said, drawing back as though he were made of fire. “Not that.”
    “Help me. Then it will be quick,” he promised, and indeed, it was.
    He has not forgotten those wild, brief plunges into her small, obedient body, nor the prayers she offered up to her God as he worked fast with quick, brutal thrusts; and the relief she brought him again and again, a relief he came to count on night after breathless night, and one she never denied him, despite the repeated pregnancies, one every year for six years, despite her soft pleas for respite.
    “Not yet. I’m not well yet. In a while, please, dear. I am so tired. Another baby would kill me,” she would say.
    “A wife’s duty,” he had only to remind her for her to open up her body to him. Somehow, strangely, it excited him to think of his wife performing her duty, muttering her prayers: please God help me, please God help me, please, while he took his rightful pleasure. He remembers how she would cross herself afterward and say, “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, amen.” He remembers the strong odor of her body after sex.
    Perhaps, he thinks, if he could have found another wife who would have taken them on, been a real mother to them, they would all have prospered. They cannot say he did not try. But what woman in her right senses would take him and six small children in charge in that remote, cold place on a stipend of two hundred pounds a year?
    He thinks of the irony of his solitary cohabitation for so many years with his wife’s spinster sister, her fifty pounds a year replacing his wife’s fifty. How she hoarded her store. He remembers her five-pound gift for the new church