Summary
One morning, Antoinette awakes with her body mysteriously
aching and her wrists red and swollen. She has no memory of what
happened. Grace tells Antoinette that her brother came to visit
her the night before, and she scolds Antoinette for misbehaving.
At first, Antoinette cannot think of who her brother is, but she
then realizes Grace must mean her stepbrother, Richard Mason. Antoinette begins
frantically searching for a letter that she wrote to Richard and
then hid, in which she begged him to rescue her from her garret prison.
According to Grace, Richard did not recognize Antoinette
when he came into the room. Almost immediately, Antoinette rushed
at him with a knife, and she later bit him. Antoinette had secretly bought
the knife the day before, when she had been allowed outside. Seeing
trees and grass all around her, she had thought she had finally arrived
in England, not understanding that she has been in England all along.
When Grace fell asleep under a tree, Antoinette traded her locket
for a knife.
Grace says that she warned Richard not to visit, but that
he insisted. She overheard Richard saying, "I cannot interfere legally between
yourself and your husband," at which point Antoinette flew at him
with the knife. After the attack, Richard fainted. Antoinette begins
to remember the look of shock on her brother's face when he first
saw her. She insists that her brother would have recognized her
had she been wearing her red dress from Jamaica, which hangs from
the closet.
Suddenly pitying Antoinette, Grace asks her if she knows
how long she has been held captive. Antoinette responds that time
is not important. She gazes instead at her red dress and imagines
she smells a bouquet of natural scents. She remembers wearing the
red dress the last time she saw her cousin, Sandi, who visited her
when the disapproving Mr. Mason was away. On Sandi's last visit,
they kissed, which Antoinette remembers as "the life and death kiss."
That night, Antoinette dreams for the third time that
she steals the keys from Grace, unlocks the door, and enters the
passage to the rest of the house, carrying candles. In the dream,
she goes downstairs and enters a red room that reminds her of a
church. When she lights all her candles, she thinks of Aunt Cora's
house and becomes suddenly angry, knocking a candle into the drapes.
Soon, in the dream, there is a wall of flames behind her.
Moving away from the flames and the sounds of yelling, Antoinette
goes back upstairs and out to the battlements, where she watches
the red sky and sees fragments of her life pass before her. She
dreams she hears Rochester crying the name "Bertha"; looking to
the ground, imagines the bathing pool at Coulibri. She sees Tia
taunting her from the ground and coaxing her to jump. As Antoinette
is about to jump, she wakes, screaming, from her dream. Feeling
that she must enact the dream, she steals Grace's keys and heads
down the passage with a candle in her hand.
