In the New Year, Charlotte returned to Brussels alone and Anne went back to Thorp Green. Shortly afterwards—and certainly because of Anne’s influence—Branwell was offered a position in the same household, as tutor to the family’s eldest child, a boy who had outgrown her teaching. My brother had brushed off dismissal from the railway as nothing more than an accounting error, but the loss of his great friend William, followed so quickly by Aunt’s death, had plunged him into a state of depression. He’d spent most of Christmas locked away in his room, showing little interest even when Charlotte tried to engage him in their usual discussions about Angria. This new offer of employment had an immediate effect on him, like a flame catching paper, and I was pleased to see him leave for Thorp Green in buoyant mood, spilling over with plans for the enrichment of his young charge’s mind.
With all my siblings away from home, I shut up the bedroom that Charlotte, Anne and I shared and moved my things into the room at the top of stairs, a tiny space that had served as our nursery, playroom and then a bedroom for occasional guests. That bare little room, with just a bed and chest for furniture, was all I needed, and its cell-like quality was useful for imagining the plight of Fernando and Oswald, the two Gondal noblemen I’d recently cast into jail for treasonous activities against the ageing Julius Brenzaida. On dark mornings in the dead of winter, I was first to rise, moving round the house in silence, lighting lanterns, clearing and setting the fires, fetching water from the pump, putting the kettle on the range. In the yard I fed the geese and the chickens, checked for eggs, watched the cold red dawn breaking. By the time I came in, Martha would be putting on the porridge for breakfast, Tabby coming to join us soon afterwards. Papa slept a little later these days, but would soon be at work in his study, writing letters and grant applications, or seeing to parishioners who would call by with one concern or another. The rest of the morning, I was busy with the housekeeping tasks that had once been the preserve of Aunt, studying too, with my textbooks propped up in the kitchen, until it was time to take Keeper out for his walk. I was mistress of my own kingdom, every hour of the day arranged just as I chose. If it pleased me, I need not speak to a single stranger from one day to the next. Sometimes, when I awoke and breathed in the achingly cold air of home or found myself going about my work with a quiet song on my lips, I felt something swelling in my chest. I recognised the feeling like an old companion, absent for many years, still wonderfully familiar. It was freedom, all the sweeter because I’d overcome that intense desire to abandon Brussels in those early months, to make the same tired, etiolated mistakes. Right up to her departure, Charlotte had urged me to change my mind, to return to Belgium with her, but for once I’d resisted and nothing bad had happened.
I thought about her often, sleeping in our little curtained-off area of the dormitory at the Pensionnat, shopping for gloves on the Rue Royale, lessons taken in private with Monsieur Héger, just the two of them now. At the same time, I found myself in thrall to a new force which sent me climbing up towards Top Withens every time I left the house. In that harshest of winters, even someone as familiar with the moors as I was could easily miss the path. I’d sink knee-deep in the snowy crevasses between the heather or lose my footing in the boggy ground beneath. I brushed the snow from my stockings, pulled my boots free of the sucking peat, then kept on towards that dark building on the horizon. As I drew closer, I’d smell the animals, warm and earthy, the peat-smoke that curled like question marks from the chimneys, but the gate was always barred, the footprints in the snow by the doorway already blurred by fresh falls, and there was never any sign of the man I’d seen entering the yard with his horse. Just once I caught the shadow of movement in one of the front rooms, where I could see a great fire burning in the hearth, the glint of copper pans hanging either side. I’d scrabbled in the snow, fingers closing round a stone that had fallen from the dry boundary wall. I wanted to fling it through the bright window, to smash my way into that snug room with a fire of my own in my veins, but the stone turned my fingers to ice and after a moment I’d let it drop, turned for home.
Charlotte wrote:
I cannot tell you how wonderful it was to walk along Rue d’Isabelle again! There was the dear, familiar sight of the Pensionnat, and Monsieur and Madame waiting to greet me as if I was one of their own children! That first breakfast tasted even more delicious than I’d remembered, though it was only the usual coffee and brioche. I had forgotten what a beautiful city this is, even now, when it is supposed to be spring but all in the garden is black and frozen and the cold feels as if it might be fatal to someone with my constitution. It was very strange to return without you and I do feel lonely at times, but I believe it was the right thing to do, that these extra months of study will pay off when it comes to attracting pupils to our remote little school. Monsieur and Madame wonder why I do not make friends with my fellow teachers—knowing them as well as I, you will quite understand why I don’t seek companionship in that direction!
Evening-time was for writing. Augusta Almeda had dismissed all the simpering suitors who hung around the palace wanting to talk about their feelings, spent her time devising clever plans to escape the palace to be with the shepherd boy. Together they galloped across the hills till dusk, urging their horses on. They climbed mountains, swam in a secret pool in a deep forest glade, feasted on purple berries which stained their lips, and never tired of one another’s company except when he grew jealous of her past lovers, or she laughed at his rough ways, and then they fought bitterly. The story came easily, with just one thread eluding me. I’d planned that Augusta would teach her shepherd prince how to read and write, pictured delightful scenes of the two of them with their heads bent together over a book, a tender love developing, but as soon as I transported them to a domestic setting, they repelled one another like magnets. When the clock on the stairs struck midnight, I’d say farewell to the Gondals, happy in the knowledge that I would return to that kingdom of all possibilities tomorrow and the next night too. From the window, I wished a silent goodnight to Charlotte in Brussels, to Anne and Branwell at Thorp Green, to the silent souls in the graveyard and in the vaults of the church. Outside, the stars were cold little fires, the sky a dark prairie; behind me the quietening fire, the steady flame of my lone candle.
Mostly, I did not read over what I’d written, but one evening, when Papa was taking longer than usual to go up to bed, I turned back through my notebook and could not help noticing the influence of Monsieur Héger. I remembered him dropping our essays back on our desks, how he’d insisted on removing every extraneous word, every diversion from the thrust of an argument. The words on the page must be transparent, he liked to say, the reader should see straight to the thought, the image; this and this was an obstacle, glowering as he slashed his pen through line after line of a devoir. It offends my eye! Charlotte bore the worst of his wrath, sniffing quietly to herself while he destroyed some particularly florid piece of prose. In my case, he was more likely to point out a factual error or a misspelling, but occasionally I would have to defend my choice of word or phrase, if need be until the lesson came to an end or, as often happened, Monsieur lost his temper, which I also took as a victory. Against my better judgement, I had already conceded to his favoured teaching method—it would not do for him to prevail on every matter. Now though, with a distance between our opposing forces, I recognised a new clarity in my writing. I knew that it could not have simply dropped out of the sky, could just about bear to admit that to myself now that I was safe in my own world again. If I were Charlotte, I would have written Monsieur a gushing letter, praising him above all teachers. As it was, the idea irked me, and I resolved not to think about it again.
Happy as I was, it was a long and dreary winter. When spring finally arrived, the birds sang wildly in celebration, and on Penistone Hill the wildflowers burst from the gently-warming soil. Summer followed, the asphodels pushed their yellow spikes towards the sky and the first swallows returned. One morning Keeper came upon a leveret, asleep in the long grass, and sent it bounding. The sunshine was tempered by a cold wind blowing over the tops. On my way to Top Withens, I suddenly changed my mind and dropped down instead towards South Dean Beck, following its course until it met Sladen Beck at the indentation in the land we liked to call the Meeting of the Waters. Here was a secret valley, like the swipe of a Titan’s thumb when the earth was still malleable, where we’d picnicked over the years, its steep sides woven by bracken and heather and bilberry bushes. I scrambled down the hillside into the valley and immediately found myself sheltered from the wind, hidden from the eye. Keeper chased his tail in the shallows of the beck, growled at the thin waterfall that stumbled from the high rocks and then went off to a spot at the far end of the valley, carrying the hambone I’d brought for his dinner. I took off my boots and stockings and paddled through the icy water which was a shade between green and rust. Around my toes swum tiny, almost-transparent fish for whom this was a whole world. Tadpoles punctuated the mineral-dark water, translucent, still jelly-like at their edges. I wondered if they were aware of my presence above them, if they sensed their half-formed state, the miraculous transformation that was coming.
When my feet turned numb, I sat on the bank by a stand of young, pliable alders and pulled up my skirts to let my legs dry. The spring sun warmed my skin and my limbs felt pleasantly lazy. I stretched out like a cat, was almost drifting into sleep, when I jolted upright, wide-awake. Standing on the edge of the valley and looking directly down at me, was the figure of a man. I dragged down my dress, the warnings Aunt had given so often sounding in my ears as I scrabbled for my stockings and looked around for Keeper. But the man was moving along the ridge now in the direction of Stanbury, away from me. I kept my eyes on him the whole time until he was out of sight, and then a feeling of disappointment settled over me. He’d been only an outline against the sky, but I knew for sure that he was the farmer from Top Withens. For once I did not understand myself. Had I wanted him to carry on watching me? To clamber down the side of the valley and approach me? I thought of all the times I’d climbed up to that lonely farmhouse in the hope of seeing him. Now I wondered what I would have done if we’d actually come face-to-face. I looked down at my pale legs, my feet, tender and exposed beneath the sunlight, and then lay back on the grassy bank and tried to transport myself back to our meeting on the pathway: the watchful eyes, those impatient hands pushing back his shirt sleeves. Long fingers. But instead came a vision of Monsieur Héger hunched and scowling at his desk, followed almost immediately by another: the sickly, mummified hands of Papa’s visitor in the study. Repulsed, I turned on my front and closed my eyes, pressed myself against the earth until the sound of the beck rushed through me.