Читать книгу The Mirror: A Short Story from the collection, Reader, I Married Him - Francine Prose - Страница 7
ОглавлениеREADER, I MARRIED HIM.
It turned out the sounds I heard coming from the attic weren’t the screams of Mr Rochester’s mad wife Bertha. It wasn’t the wife who burned to death in the fire that destroyed Thornfield Hall and blinded my future husband when he tried to save her.
After we’d first got engaged, he’d had to admit that he was already married, and we’d broken off our engagement. He’d asked me to run away with him anyway. Naturally, I’d refused.
But later, after we were properly married, he insisted that it hadn’t happened that way. It turned out there had been no wife. It turned out that it had been a parrot, screaming in the attic. The parrot had belonged to his wife. She had got it in the islands, where she had also contracted the tropical fever that killed her. She’d died long before I came to work for him as a governess. That was never Bertha, in the attic.
Mr Rochester couldn’t bring himself to get rid of the parrot. He had the servants take care of it, because his wife Bertha had loved it, and because it was pretty. But its cries drove the whole household mad, so they shut it up in the attic. He was sad the parrot died in the fire – but no one said the parrot had set the fire, the way they said his wife did.
