Coldbrook

Ellis Wren

Retelling en 31143 words First published 2026 United States TalesReborn

Western New York State. At eight, Ruth Amory’s parents are both dead, and her aunt, Vera Pell, takes her in at Lackawanna. Vera keeps ledgers, sorts people by what they are worth, and lets her son Bram beat the child. At ten Ruth takes the bat away from him and breaks his arm; Vera decides the girl is a liar. In January 2002 Ruth is sent to Ellerslie, a children’s home run by the Reverend Elmer Crane, where her closest friend, Tess Baird, dies of an epidemic. Ruth stays until eighteen, teaches two more years, then answers an advertisement. Coldbrook is an estate above Canandaigua Lake. Its owner, Adrian Voss, is grim and exact; Ruth is hired to teach his ward, Mila. There is laughter in the house at odd hours and the north wing is kept shut. Ruth and Adrian fall in love. On their wedding day two strangers testify that he already has a wife: Sabine Mercier, diagnosed with Huntington’s disease at twenty-five and confined to the north wing under a nurse’s care. Adrian asks Ruth to stay as his companion. She leaves with twenty dollars and a bus schedule. The Vaughn family takes her in at Welden, where she teaches farm workers’ children in an old schoolhouse. When her great-uncle Jack dies in Florida he leaves seven hundred and twenty thousand dollars, divided four ways — and Ruth and the Vaughn siblings turn out to be cousins. The pastor Silas Vaughn proposes in the language of useful work; she refuses him. That evening the answering machine holds one message: a man saying her name. She goes east at dawn. Coldbrook has burned; Sabine died in it; Adrian is nearly blind. They marry. Twelve years later he has had a corneal transplant in one eye, and they have two children.

Adapted from Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre (1847). Published by TalesReborn.

Coldbrook

Table of Contents