Author(s): Emma Tennant

Fiction.

I loved to be tomorrow,
walking always a few feet behind today.
Little did I know then the cruel pantomime I would
be coerced into making come true.

The daughter of a celebrated Parisian actress, Ad?le is a homesick, forlorn eight-year-old when first brought to Thornfield Hall by Edward Fairfax Rochester, her mother's former lover. Lonely and ill at ease in the unfamiliar English countryside, she longs to return to the glitter of Paris ... and to the mother who has been lost to her. But a small ray of sunshine brightens her eternal gloom when a stranger arrives to care for her: a serious yet intensely loving young governess named Jane Eyre.

As time passes, Ad?le watches with wonder as an unexpected romance blossoms between her governess and her guardian -- even as her curiosity leads her deeper into the shadowy manor, toward the dark and terrible secret that is locked away in a high garret. And on Jane and Rochester's wedding day, it is Ad?le who brings about the fiery catastrophe that will shatter her "family" and send her fleeing, frightened and alone, back to Paris.