At dinner time, I looked up to see a girl of about twelve, with a box face and sparse fair hair, standing over me.
‘Spare me a little piece won’t you, new girl?’ Her hand was already moving towards me. ‘Brontë, isn’t it?’ I shielded my bowl, which contained a ladleful of thin stew and a slice of bread with a scrape of butter. Maria and Elizabeth were sitting with girls of their own age towards the middle of the room. Charlotte was at the next table, but with her back to me. At the head of my own table, sat my teacher. I tried to catch her eye, but she stared straight ahead, her mouth moving, eyes unseeing. ‘You can’t need that whole slice to yourself.’ The girl’s eyes were set deep in her square face, giving her a sly look. ‘I can be your friend if you like.’
‘I’ve friends of my own,’ I said, thinking of Jane and Margaret and our games at recreation. ‘And I don’t like the look of you.’ I picked up my slice of bread, crammed the whole thing into my mouth, then gulped it down.
‘How I hate Sundays!’ Charlotte looked up at me as she fastened her pattens. Every week we had to walk the two miles from Cowan Bridge to the church at Tunstall to hear the Reverend Carus Wilson preach. The Reverend was very holy but in a miserable way, his sermons designed to make everyone join him in his misery. After the first Sunday, I made sure to listen out for any matter I might be asked to repeat by one of the teachers later and took no notice of the rest. When I recommended this to Charlotte, she was shocked. She was terrified of the Reverend, worried that I might get into trouble.
‘If Papa doesn’t believe we’re evil then neither do I,’ I told her. ‘He is just as holy as the Reverend.’
‘But why would he make us stay here?’ She gave me a look. ‘If he didn’t believe it just a little?’
‘He does not,’ I said. I was glad she was speaking to me again.
Everything was cold about Sundays at Cowan Bridge: the walk to and from the church across the open fields, the draughty pews, the outlook for sinful children. Even the big girls—who passed the time by imitating the Reverend’s solemn speech and doleful look whenever our teachers were out of earshot—dreaded the walk. Our clothes weren’t quite warm enough for the winter weather and none of us had boots to keep our feet properly dry. Poor Charlotte had developed chilblains and was in agony for the whole of the day. My own feet were as wet and cold as anyone else’s by the end of the walk, yet I longed for that one day of the week when we weren’t confined to the courtyard and the garden for our short periods of recreation. We walked in crocodile—Jane and I holding hands and our teacher following with Margaret—so there was no chance to run free or to catch up with my sisters ahead, and yet how joyful it was to be out in the world again, the landscape opening before me like an enormous map, the black branches of an immense ash tree clutching at the horizon. The fields were edged with hawthorn, bare of leaves yet still throwing thorny sprays up to the blue December sky. The haw berries were flat crimson like the dead blood of the year, but the rosehips were a sign of hope, little lamps shining from the hedgerows. A fat robin watched from a fence post, its eye bright with curiosity, and in a thicket of oak, the glossy leaves of the holly gleamed like a secret. When the frost was hard, we slipped and slid across the frozen brown ruts left by the plough and the whole world glittered crazily, buzzards crying overhead. Sometimes the mist hung low, and we walked in silence across the fields, listening to the dripping of the trees, the muffled sound of horse hooves from the lane. Ahead of me, girls rising out of the mist like wraiths, then disappearing.
Two days before Christmas, we woke to a lacy crust of snow over the fields. I thought of Christmases at home, the band playing carols outside the Black Bull, the mantelpiece in the dining room crowned with holly and ivy, the smell of roasting goose. How we longed for the first taste of that rich, dark meat. On St. Stephen’s Day, Papa would say fetch your cloaks and we’d climb up onto the moors, follow the bare paths through the winter heather with the wind crying in our ears. Then during the last week of December, snow fell in earnest, and again in the early days of January. The blankets on our beds seemed thinner than ever and the water in the pitchers on the nightstands turned to ice, had to be broken before we could wash in the mornings. We were confined to school for days on end, not even able to take the walk to church which pleased most of the girls if not me. Instead, we had to sit quietly, studying our Bibles until evening where there was Catechism and then one of the teachers might read a story from the Scriptures, or from Reverend Carus Wilson’s horrid little book of fables which he’d written to remind children how wicked they were. Recreation was spent huddled in the walkway, which acted as a tunnel for the icy easterly wind or running for warmth along the pathways that the gardener cleared through the snow from time to time. Even those girls who detested exercise were restless and the teachers found fault everywhere: an untidily made bed, an irritating cough, lessons poorly learned. But I was top of my class in all subjects except one—Margaret being a little ahead of me at ciphering still—and it was a matter of pride to me. (Jane Sykes was a very pleasant girl but remarkably slow in all things.) There was history and geography and grammar, and I was surprised to find that the more I learned the more my mind made space for new ideas. Knowledge was like the mountain I had seen on the horizon that day, a vast and unknown territory waiting to be explored. The only time I got into trouble was when I had too many questions and forgot to control my tongue.
One morning when the teachers were particularly bad-tempered, Miss Andrews made Maria stand in the corner of the schoolroom with a sign reading SLOVEN around her neck. My sister had come down to breakfast with a crooked collar and a missing button on her pinafore. I don’t care for your airs and graces, Brontë, Miss Andrews had said, or that sullen look. Margaret swore that Miss Andrews had only become a teacher because she was jilted at the altar by her childhood sweetheart. No-one else wanted her, on account of the fleshy bobble at the end of her nose and the way she hissed her s’s: sssssullen ssslovenly, so she’d turned into an ogre. Margaret was given to exaggerating though, sometimes lying outright, though she swore this particular story was completely true, that her aunt who lived in the next village to Miss Andrew’s family knew all about it. Jane Sykes liked to point out things Margaret said that did not add up, but I thought a good story did not have to be entirely true, would sometimes suggest other incidents that might also have happened. For the rest of the morning’s lessons, Maria stood in the corner of the schoolroom, hands behind her back and her head slightly bowed, displaying no sign of airs or graces. No-one would have considered my eldest sister pretty, but something more than empathy kept drawing my eye to her during that hour of punishment. Always pale, the spots of colour on her cheeks gave her a rare glow of health today, and her high forehead looked as smooth as marble in the grey, morning light.
At recreation, Charlotte interrupted our game of skipping, her eyes ablaze.
‘How dare Miss Andrews make Maria stand all that time!’ She dug her fingers into my arm. Her face looked tight, had the greenish, turnipy tinge it always took on when she was ill or angry, and which made you see what she would look like when she was an old lady. I looked around. There was Maria beneath the covered walkway, with a book in her hand and a small smile on her lips. Elizabeth was keeping her company, but there was no need. Maria was completely absorbed by her reading, despite the wind that was tunnelling along the passage, whipping at her hair and at the pages. And Miss Andrews was forever hanging signs round necks—I’d thought it a better punishment than blows from the switch which she also favoured.
Weeks passed and then the snow melted away, leaving only icy caps on the fells to the north, and in sunless hollows. Snowdrops lifted their dainty heads above the dark winter soil of the garden plots and on the hillside the sheep rose and fell across the stony ground like dirty mops. We woke one day to a world that was sunlit and golden-green, buds bursting on the tree branches and new leaves unfolding, fresh and hopeful as morning. This was the secret that the trees harboured all winter long when the world had seemed a dead and dark place. At recreation, I saw pink growth sprouting on the rose bushes that edged the courtyard, and in the flower plots, tips of green pushed up through the dark soil, small and determined. Lambs started to appear on the fellside, legs trembling, pure white fleeces. They leapt after their siblings, tottered back to their mothers, the valley echoing with their complaints. Soon the hedges would be clouded with blackthorn blossom, and when Margaret and I poked a hole in the ice on the beck at the foot of the garden, we saw movement in the blackness below. By the following day the ice had quite melted, and I thought of the story Papa once told us about a poet called Coleridge who loved to throw himself down the sides of mountains, letting the land take him where it would. I’d always imagined him laughing to himself at such freedom, at the madness of it, all his poetic words churning inside him and then bursting forth as he tumbled, and this was the sound of the beck as it broke free from the chains of winter and rushed down the hillside. The coughs that had rattled around the dormitory every night faded away, and everyone said spring had come early this year, until one morning we woke to find that fog had rolled down the fellside and settled over Cowan Bridge like a pall.