In May, when the cherry blossoms were whirls of pink confectionery against the bright blue sky, Branwell received a letter from the Robinsons’ physician.
‘The old man’s weakening,’ he said flying into the kitchen. ‘He won’t last much longer!’
Anne bit her lip, in a low voice said: ‘You mustn’t rejoice, Branwell. It’s too wicked.’
‘Why should I care? He’s made poor Lydia miserable for years.’
‘You might think of the children.’
For the next few days, Branwell was half-crazed with excitement; could not sleep, barely ate. With a new idea for Gondal forming in my mind—an invasion of barbarians from the north—I did my best to ignore his agitation, though I couldn’t help wondering why the Robinsons’ family surgeon should be in contact with a disgraced tutor. Another letter came, written in the same hand. Branwell snatched it from the postboy and then dropped to his knees in the hallway. Mr. Robinson was dead.
A week passed without further communication from Thorp Green. We wondered if grief had brought Mrs. Robinson to her senses; if Branwell had started to have second thoughts about pursuing a woman newly-widowed. I was out in the yard one morning, tending to the geese, when young Joe from the Black Bull Inn came through the gate.
‘There’s a man wanting to speak to Master Branwell, Pa says. I forgot his name.’
He stared at his feet in discomfort, but I could see him edging towards the snowy geese, wanting to take a better look. Victoria and Adelaide had pure white plumage, pristine against the clear morning light. I liked to watch them move around the yard in tandem, a stately dancing pair, talked to them in my own way. I knew that Joe was fond of animals, so I handed the bowl of vegetable peelings to him, then spread my palms, indicating that more information was needed. ‘A coachman, I reckon. He says to come quickly.’ He threw a great handful of the peelings, just missing Adelaide’s head. With a degree of reluctance, I went inside to relay the message. Branwell tore out of the house without a word, but within the hour he was back, half-carried into the back kitchen by John Brown. The commotion drew the rest of the household, including Papa who immediately began trying to heave a stupefied Branwell from his chair.
‘We’ll manage,’ I said, signalling to the sexton for help. Branwell was lightly built but neither Papa nor my sisters had the strength to move him in this drunken state. Between the two us, John Brown and I managed to get Branwell out into the hallway. As we began climbing the stairs, his feet slithered from underneath him, banging against the stone. We released him only when we reached his room and could drop him onto the bed. He lay stiffly at first, with his arms above his head like a man on the rack. In a moment of tenderness at odds with his rough exterior, John Brown removed his shoes for him and placed them neatly by the wardrobe. Branwell gave an anguished moan, then curled in on himself and began to sob.
‘Branwell!’ I shook him to restore some sense. He flinched and withdrew to the far corner of the bed, turning away from me.
‘I’d leave him be,’ said John Brown. ‘For now.’
Anne, Charlotte and Papa were waiting in the hallway—three white faces, Papa’s eyes like frozen milk.
‘What on earth now?’ said Charlotte. ‘Come into the kitchen, Mr. Brown.’
Planting himself by the range, though Anne urged him to sit, John Brown told us all he knew. Mrs. Robinson had dispatched her coachman to share the contents of her late husband’s Will, which had been rewritten at the beginning of the year. In this new version, Mr. Robinson no longer provided for one of his daughters, who had married unwisely and against his wishes. This new Will also stated that if Mrs. Robinson chose to remarry after her husband’s death, she would forfeit all rights to her income.
‘The fellow said the lady’s right upset, talks of entering a nunnery.’ John’s face twisted into a grimace. ‘But maybe she’s not so keen on the lad, now her old man’s gone, and she can do as she pleases.’ He motioned to the ceiling with fingers knotted from years of labour. It was strange to see him inside the house like this. I couldn’t remember the last time he’d come past the front door. It struck me what an odd friendship they had, he and Branwell. John was many years older, lived such a different life. But Branwell could make a friend of anyone, was easy to love when he was at his best, with his endless chatter and laughter, his enthusiasms. ‘You can’t tell that to the boy though,’ John said. ‘He’s taken it hard enough already.’
‘Thank you for bringing him home.’ Papa held out his hand.
‘How cruel to break the news to him so publicly,’ said Charlotte afterwards, when Papa had shuffled upstairs to check on Branwell. ‘She must have planned it that way, but why? At least this will be an end to it now. He will know that it’s over; that there is no hope.’ She winced and then changed the subject. ‘If only Aylott & Jones would write with news. I wake up with knots in my stomach every morning, thinking about our little book being read by strangers.’ We’d asked our publisher to send copies to all our favourite authors, as well as newspapers and literary journals. ‘It’s like waiting for execution.’ She closed her eyes and held her hand over her heart. Melodrama usually brought out the stoic in me, but for once I knew exactly how she felt.
At last, we heard from London. Reviews were always a challenge, the publisher wrote, especially when the authors were unknown in literary circles; when they did not even live in, or write about, the capital. To date, Poems, Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell had sold two copies.
‘What does it matter?’ I said, when Charlotte fell into instant despair, certain that she must become a governess again. The rain was rattling against the window, driven by a pettish wind, and the garden and churchyard were a grey-green blur. Hearing Branwell outside the door, I dropped my voice. ‘Our poems are published. They can’t be erased now.’
Branwell did nothing without conviction. In the days following the coachman’s visit to Haworth, he paced around the house in a restless fever, his eyes as unseeing as a sleepwalker’s. None of us knew what Papa had said when he called Branwell to his study after breakfast one morning—I imagined it to be the sort of frank talk men had among themselves—but the whole house heard Branwell flying into a fit of rage. I ran downstairs from making the beds to find him on his knees in the hallway, collapsed in agony so extreme that it seemed to emanate from some animal part of him. Saliva stretched from his mouth and mucus dripped from his nose as he howled and rocked, cursing the late Mr. Robinson for ruining his life. When I tried to lift him to his feet, he wrestled free and began dashing his forehead against the flagstones. Keeper, thinking me in trouble, launched himself down the hallway, knocking Papa off his feet and sending Mamma’s little sea-green vase crashing from the hall table to the floor. I dragged him into the back kitchen, fetched a broom to sweep up the shards of china which would never fit back together again, then washed away the blood. The collapse was followed by complete apathy. For the next few days, Branwell lay in bed, refusing food or comfort.
‘I’m starting to wish he’d stay there,’ said Charlotte when we heard him moving overhead once. ‘I should be writing again, but it’s impossible to concentrate with all this . . . tragedy going on.’ By the next morning she’d forgiven him, taking a plate of food and the newspaper up to his room, and in the afternoon, he managed to get himself out of bed and downstairs, though he wasn’t properly dressed. He spent the next day or so marching in and out of rooms, wanting to air his latest theory on Mrs. Robinson’s predicament to anyone unlucky enough to encounter him. Charlotte was at one moment sympathetic to his plight, convinced he’d been cruelly manipulated by his lover, then enraged by the storms of tears that erupted at the very mention of her:
‘Imagine if one of us were to indulge in such behaviour!’ she complained to me. ‘Everyone would say we were weak and womanish, while a man is admired for his delicacy of feeling, his ability to name his suffering. I don’t understand it.’
My own sense was that the storm must be allowed to rage until it blew itself out. When a friend from Halifax invited Branwell to stay, a sculptor by the name of Leyland, his spirits lifted immediately. Watching him prepare for the trip, it seemed to me that this latest fixation had already begun to wane, and that it would soon go the way of all his past passions.
The day after he set off, we received a short note from Aylott & Jones with two cuttings enclosed.
‘“Here,”’ read Charlotte, white with excitement, ‘“we have good, wholesome, refreshing, vigorous poetry—no sickly affectations, no namby-pamby, no tedious imitations of familiar strains—”’
‘I should think not,’ I said.
‘“. . . original thoughts, expressed in the true language of poetry . . .”’ Charlotte’s eyes moved down the column, ‘“We see, for instance, here and there traces of an admirer of Wordsworth, and perhaps of Tennyson; but for the most part the three poets are themselves alone.”’ She stopped to breathe.
‘And the other?’ said Anne. The second review began in a more restrained fashion, seeking to differentiate between the merits of each of writer and finding ‘Acton Bell’s’ work the least successful.
‘Then they’ve no ear for nuance,’ I said, seeing Anne flush. ‘We should pity them.’ It was time to sweep the hearths, to get on with the rest of the morning’s chores.
‘But look what they say about you, Emily!,’ said Anne, reading over Charlotte’s shoulder.
‘“A fine quaint spirit has the latter, which may have things to speak that men will be glad to hear.”’ Charlotte’s voice was rising in pitch. ‘“And an evident power of wing that may reach heights not here attempted.”’ She shook the review at me. ‘Didn’t I tell you? Was I not right?’
‘We had to pay to be published,’ I reminded her, affecting only now to notice a scuff on the wall that Keeper had made yesterday. I rubbed it with my apron, magicked it away.
Our brother returned from Halifax determined to resume the old plan of travelling.
‘I thought you’d given up on your Grand Tour,’ said Charlotte, a bite of sarcasm in her voice, but when he fetched the atlas, she couldn’t help being drawn in. Ever since we were children, sketching outlines of Ashantee, of Gondal and Gaaldine, maps had been the beginning of a story. I waited for Charlotte to make some comment about the cost of the proposed journey or ask when Branwell would get round to looking for new employment, but for once she kept her thoughts to herself.
‘Branwell thinks novels are the only way to make money from writing,’ she said, coming through to the kitchen a little later. I’d just finished preparing stock from leftover beef bones and vegetable peelings and was now scouring the table. ‘I’ve not said a word,’ she added, seeing the look I gave her. ‘He was talking about himself.’ Despite our agreement, it was a small miracle she’d resisted sharing the news of our recent publication. The real battle would come, I knew, if our poems sold, or received any more favourable reviews.
‘I’ve actually made a start on something,’ said Anne. She was kneeling beside the range, stroking Flossy’s stomach. He lay with his legs up in the air and did not care how foolish he looked.
‘A novel?’ said Charlotte. ‘You’ve never mentioned it before.’
‘I’ve only an outline so far, but I’ve been thinking about it for a while. Even before I came home from Thorp Green.’ She stood, then began smoothing down her dress self-consciously. ‘It’s about a plain, quiet girl who is eventually rewarded for resilience and virtue, a governess, in fact.’
Not a Gondal tale then.
‘Didn’t we read that that publishers like stories in the same vein as established works, to be sure of sales?’ said Charlotte. ‘I don’t recall ever reading a servant’s story.’
‘Then nothing original would ever see the light of day,’ I said. On the range, the stock was bubbling too fiercely. I moved it to a cooler spot.
‘I’ve always thought I could write a novel with popular appeal,’ said Charlotte with a sigh. ‘I’ve read enough of them to know how they work. I just need to settle on the right story.’
I felt her looking at me out of the corner of her eye. It was the old game, played at least with a modicum of subtlety now. For once, I didn’t bother to resist.
‘I have hundreds of stories,’ I said.
A letter came for Branwell from Lydia Robinson. He replied immediately, and then wrote again the following day. Within the week, there was no more talk of Europe or seeking a new position. Francis Grundy was in town, a friend from his time on the railways, and the two of them spent most of that visit in the Black Bull Inn.
‘I’ll fetch him myself!’ said Papa in a sudden temper, when Branwell had been late for prayers on three consecutive evenings. Always punctual himself, Papa hated even the smallest disruption to his routine—a meal delayed, a visitor arriving late. It set him out of countenance for days to come. He fumbled for his staff in the corner of the study where he’d left it earlier, and then waved it in the air, seemingly intent on driving Branwell home. There was a crash—the sound of the back kitchen door being flung back—followed by smothered laughter.
‘Mr. Grundy goes back soon,’ said Anne, staying Papa with a gentle touch to his shoulder. Papa nodded, his colour returning to normal.
‘You test our patience, boy,’ was all he said when Branwell entered, carrying himself rigidly, the caramel smell of rum on his breath.
Several days after Francis had gone home, Joe from the Black Bull arrived in the yard again.
‘Someone’s to come for Master Branwell,’ he said, his eyes already drifting to Adelaide and Victoria. ‘Pa’s busy.’
I hurried out of the yard and down the lane to the inn. As I arrived, Branwell was being shouldered to the door.
‘You’ll manage?’ said the landlord, looking doubtfully at me. He held on to Branwell as he attempted the first of the steps. My brother’s shirt was hanging half loose from his trousers. One sleeve of his coat hung empty.
‘Put your arm around me,’ I said.
‘S’not necessary.’ He drew himself up, immediately lost his balance and then stumbled down the remaining steps. Grasping him round the waist, I managed to turn him in the right direction, and then we tacked our way up Parsonage Lane, a small unshipshape vessel bound for home. When we reached the hallway, my sisters stood aside, heeding my command, but Papa could not be deterred from helping, so I found myself supporting two grown men up the stairs, one half-blind, the other incapable. Somehow, we got Branwell to his room and onto the bed. In the time it took me to pull a blanket over him and fetch a pitcher of water, he had already fallen asleep, breath coming thickly from his throat.
‘What must people think?’ said Charlotte, finding me in the back kitchen the next morning. Sometime during the night, Branwell had been sick on his bedside rug. I’d opened the window to let out the cloying, acrid smell and then dragged the rug down here for cleaning.
‘I didn’t have you marked as one who would care,’ I said, bringing a can of water from the stove, and then looking around for the scrubbing brush. ‘Branwell’s never lived gently.’
‘I don’t mind for myself, but I’m thankful we’ve no interest in our school at the moment. Imagine!’ I said nothing, began with the soap and brush. ‘You might at least let him clean up after himself.’ Her voice was as sour as an underripe plum.