You’re very thin,’ said Charlotte, eyeing me at breakfast one morning. ‘And pale.’ It was November, a month since Branwell had died. A fog had been hanging over the house for days. It wiped out the hills and dripped softly from the eaves. Anne’s asthma was always bad at this time of year and Charlotte and Papa were little better—the weather settled on their lungs as soon as the wind came from the east. ‘You need some beef tea. Or I could order some mutton for a stew?’
Keeper clipped into the room, threw himself against my thigh, a slab of warm flesh. I reached down, both to nuzzle his damp, leathery nose and to hide my smile. Charlotte hated cooking and this antipathy found its way into any dish she attempted. Cakes stayed resolutely flat, pastry was overworked and hard, gravy full of lumps. ‘I’m dreading Christmas,’ she went on. ‘It feels wrong to celebrate with Branwell only just—’ Her eyes swum with sudden tears. She blinked, annoyed with herself for giving way.
Both she and Anne had finished their breakfasts. I tried to do the same with mine, if only to stop Charlotte from commenting, but the porridge was a beige unnavigable sea on my plate, each spoonful seeming to thicken and stick in my throat. Recently, I’d noticed my bowels cramping painfully as soon I started eating, had put it down to an excess of nervous energy since Branwell had died.
‘The preparations will do us good,’ I said. ‘Even if we can’t be merry.’
‘I’m worried for Papa,’ said Charlotte. ‘He takes on so much, will make himself really ill if he doesn’t take more care.’ In the last month, I’d noticed the colour seeping out of our father, his skin and hair now gradations of grey and white. It was hard, at first glance, to tell where the dividing line sat.
‘Work’s a comfort to him.’ Sensing Anne watching me too, I forced down the last few mouthfuls of porridge, then scraped the remains from the pan into the dogs’ bowls.
As soon as the fog lifted, I took Keeper and Flossy for a proper walk. Freed from the weight of condensation, the moor relished itself, an exuberant wind charging through the purple-brown heather and flattening the bracken which had been turned crisp by the autumn frosts and was now dampening towards decay. I threw a stick and the dogs raced after it, Flossy’s enthusiasm never waning, even if Keeper always won the race. I’d planned to walk to the Meeting of the Waters—I wanted to see the waterfall in full spate—but long before we reached that secret valley, I found myself tiring. I turned for home, the dogs still bounding with energy. By evening I had a pain in my side which distracted me from writing. I moved to the sofa just to change position, thinking that I must have twisted something while throwing the stick earlier.
‘Anne and I think you should see a doctor. You’ve been coughing for weeks now.’
‘We are all coughing,’ I said shortly, measuring flour by eye as I scooped it into the mixing bowl. When Charlotte co-opted Anne into an argument it was because she expected resistance. I would not disappoint her.
‘I don’t mean Dr. Wheelhouse,’ she said. I used my hand to stir in the warm, yeast-frothed liquid. ‘I know you don’t have much faith in him since . . . But Mr. Smith recommended an excellent homeopath. Of course, you won’t go to London, but apparently he is happy to dispense . . .’
‘Mr. George Smith, you mean?’ Charlotte kept up a regular correspondence with her publisher, savouring his interest in her, and also the gossip from London literary circles, a world removed from her life here in Haworth. Recently, she’d talked of going to stay with him and his mother, though she maintained she’d be too nervous to meet the great Thackeray in person. I’d witnessed her ordeals in public too many times to doubt her—was equally sure that she yearned for the very thing that paralysed her. Curiosity about the true identity of Currer Bell showed no sign of waning, either in London or here, in our own part of Yorkshire—the who and what and where. She’d started exchanging letters with other authors now: G. H. Lewes, Julia Kavanagh. Names we’d only read in newspapers. It was easy to forget that she was tiny and plain when you’d witnessed the ambition that drove her over and over into an until-now indifferent world. How long could she bear to hide behind her pseudonym? I did not think it would take much to persuade Anne to put her name to her own novels now that she’d raised her voice enough to be heard. Some hope then, of Ellis Bell remaining a mystery to the world. ‘Why are you speaking about me to a man I’ve never met?’ I asked. ‘And have no intention of meeting.’
It occurred to me that Charlotte might invite her Mr. Smith here now that Branwell was gone. No matter how affable a man he might be—and Charlotte was evangelical on this point—I could only think of such a visit with horror.
‘I understand why you’d be reluctant, Emily, but you’re ill. Even Papa has noticed, and he can think of nothing but Branwell. You’re exhausted, I know—Anne and I ought to have helped more in those last few months with—’
‘I’m perfectly well,’ I said, flouring the table and then tipping the dough from the bowl. ‘Except for this cold on my chest. And I certainly don’t need a diagnosis from Mr. Smith.’ I began to knead, my body swaying with the motion, my hands, as ever, firm. ‘Or his poisoning doctor.’
Blood came before Advent, red as holly berries. In the back kitchen, I rinsed my handkerchief under the pump and carried on blacking the fire grates. At night, Keeper shifted and turned on the rug beside my bed, unable to settle until I slept. The ache in my side insisted on itself. When the coughing would not stop, he clambered up beside me and I buried my face in his fur to stifle the noise. Charlotte was at my door now, with a jug of fresh water, a mouth full of words she was desperate to speak. I drank the water and sent her away. When we gathered in the dining room at night, I kept my head down over my work but the room was too quiet, waiting for my coughing to fill it. A feeling of intense irritation came over me one evening, a desire to sweep everything from the table, to smash this eggshell silence. I could not stand to be watched every minute of the day like some . . . invalid, my sisters’ concerns so tangible that they might as well be daubed on the dining room walls. The pain in my side was a dagger wound. I pushed my hand into my mouth to suppress a cry and stared down at the page. There was my sloping handwriting, the neat curl of the letters, but I could make no sense of the words. Eyes on me still as I gathered up all the pages and put them aside. I went to the window and cupped my hands to blinker the light from the room behind me. The wind had eased, was moaning gently through Papa’s cherry tree, and the fog had not returned. I strained my eyes, but the stars were out of reach, high above the churchyard, and the moon would not speak to me. It hung like a blank eye socket in the night-sky, just a lump of inert rock, stealing light from another source. Grief collided with me so forcefully that I had to grip the sash to prevent myself from falling though I did know where it came from, to whom or what it pertained. The remains of half my family lay in the church, Mamma, Maria, Elizabeth, Aunt, Branwell and the graveyard was full of bones, but I had never been melancholy by nature, saw it only as a place of beauty and life: the sunlit green of the mosses, their spongy filaments softening the stone, frescoed lichen, the flick of a squirrel’s tail, the glint of his dark eye as he searched for his cache of nuts among the gravestones. Mamma, Maria, Elizabeth, Aunt, Branwell—a soothing repetitive litany in my mind. For a moment I saw my eldest sister catching her breath in the dusk, with her hand pressed to her side and the green-black fellside rising like a monument behind her. Elizabeth too, asleep on the little sofa in this very room, her face white against the dark fabric, soft brown hair spilling over the cushion, her neck a stalk that might break at any moment.
My sisters gave up offering to help, but one or another of them was always there first. Charlotte, who hated rising in winter, now insisted that setting fires was just the kind of task to take her mind off the dark mornings and the trouble of thinking up the next bit of plot for her novel. I came down to the kitchen before daybreak to find that Anne had already fed the dogs and made a start on breakfast, had also been out to the icy yard to feed the geese and the hens. I kept my patience until I found Charlotte and Martha in the storeroom trying to work out the butcher’s order between the two of them.
‘Don’t treat me like a child!’ I said, snatching the order from Charlotte’s hand and finding that they had forgotten the extra bones for Keeper and Flossy. I might have gone on, but I could feel a cough rising. I hurried out into the yard and slammed the door behind me, my chest about to explode. The cough bent me double, was both wet and dry at the same time. I put my hands to my mouth to contain it. Phlegm hit my palms, warm and viscous. A stab of pain in my side. I’d spent too much time in the house when Branwell was ill, I told myself, or around the village where the unhealthy air rose from the valley at this time of year, got into everyone’s lungs. As soon as my legs were back to strength, I’d let Anne and Charlotte have their way with the chores and take Keeper out for the whole day. We’d climb the lane where the birds searched for winter food in the stark hawthorn, the rowan, carry on until we were high up on the moors, where the good, clean air stung your cheeks and sliced cleanly across the tops. There would be little sign of life, but Keeper would bound after the odd grouse, barking with excitement, and the call of the wind would be enough.
In December, Charlotte wanted to know when we should order the meat for Christmas.
‘I’ve already done it,’ I said. I turned away, leaving these words unspoken: I will not be here. The knowledge did not seem new, yet I reeled from it. By Christmas I would not be. I’d understood for weeks, ever since the first spatter of blood on the blank canvas of my handkerchief, but only in a closed-off room of my mind. My heart had denied the truth, carried on beating like an arrogant drum, and death had remained incomprehensible. Yet in recent days I’d sensed that organ slowing, forgetting its purpose once or twice. When did a heart start to function, I wondered now? It felt important to know. I imagined a ripple in the crimson darkness of the womb, like a fish rising to the surface of a pool, and then that tiny knot of flesh contracting for the first time as it began to beat out its lifelong rhythm. How many beats? How many hours, months, years till silence fell and the darkness returned? There wasn’t a doctor in the land who could say. Perhaps the heart knew better, understood its own capacity, the chain of days allocated, right from the beginning. I opened my palms, examined them as if I were the fortune-teller who came each year to Haworth Fair. The skin on the inside of my wrists was fine-grained, so delicate that the blue-green veins seemed to stand proud. How perilous, how vulnerable was life, and yet this body of mine had functioned almost faultlessly till now, every intricate, complex system working in unison with the whole. Even my monthly bleeding had caused me little bother, while others curled up in agony, turned white and sickened. Half my family were dead. Mamma, Maria, Elizabeth, Aunt, Branwell. Still, I struggled to conceive of a world in which I no longer existed, every thought and feeling inside this me-shaped container of flesh and bones, gone. Life could end with the snap of a bone, one misfire of a heart, and yet mine had seemed unending, unbreakable. I pushed back my right sleeve to examine the triangular scar on my forearm. The skin was dented and ugly, forever altered by the hiss of a hot iron. The wound had healed though, never shown any sign of infection. All my life I’d withstood any damage inflicted on me, even by my own hand, felt sure that I would always recover.
That night, the weight of Keeper was almost too much to bear. He muscled down next to me and lay his nose against my outstretched hand, his huge paws sticking out over the edge of the bed. His head was bone-hard, and he smelt of woodsmoke, animal, clean air. A wholesome warmth rose from him, like a loaf straight from the oven.
‘Don’t worry, darling,’ I whispered, when one of my wrenching fits of coughing made him whimper. ‘Hush now.’
I was not scared to die, but I was afraid of mental weakness, and the failing of the flesh was more humiliating that I could have imagined—the run to the privy as soon as I ate, gasping for breath halfway up the stairs while the clock in the alcove ticked on. My eyesight was dimming. When I tried to read, I had to hold the book as close as Charlotte did, whose own short-sightedness did not prevent her from noticing this new development. The terror of doubt gripped me then. How would I bear it when the light was gone, when I could no longer see dearest, exasperating Charlotte, Anne’s sweet, grave face? Now I understood why Papa’s spirits had almost failed him when his cataracts were at their worst. It was hard to believe in anything when the light was fading. Perhaps there was no other light than that of this world, eternal darkness looming from the moment we were born.
Twilight came early at this time of year. One afternoon in the week before Christmas, I took the pages of my new novel from my writing desk and folded them into an old tin box from the cellar, once used for storing nails. Then I carried the box outside, taking with me a trowel I’d found hanging on the cellar wall. When I could be certain that no-one was nearby, not even in the shadows, I went into the churchyard and made my way past the sloping headstones towards the far corner, a place where the top section of the wall had tumbled inwards and was yet to be repaired. Already, a tangle of bilberry was starting to creep in from the moor. With my trowel, I sliced through the grass and then dug a hole in the rich, black earth. By the time I had finished, my breath was coming fast and hard and the light was almost gone. I lowered the tin into the hole, backfilled it, and then covered the little mound with dried leaves and some thorny strands of bramble.
The following morning, my comb fell from my hand and clattered into the fire grate. Martha rescued it before the flames could take proper hold, knew better than to say anything. I came down to find that the bread dough had risen in a half-hearted way, had swollen to little more than its original size, which meant the loaf would be leaden. I had never failed at bread-making since Tabby Aykroyd had stood over me as a girl, giving me instructions, the rocking motion as natural to me now as walking. The east wind must have chilled the dough to recalcitrance. It soured my temper too.
‘I’ll take the dogs out this afternoon.’ Anne and Charlotte glanced at one another over their breakfasts. ‘Please don’t try to stop me. Have they had the scraps?’
‘I fed them first thing,’ said Anne. ‘Keeper always wants more.’
I rubbed his jowls, loose and warm beneath my hand. He pushed his nose into my palm. ‘Come on, boy!’ I carried my breakfast plate out into the hallway, where the dogs’ bowls were lined up next to the pantry. In his eagerness, Keeper pushed past me. I stumbled and felt my shoulder hit the wall. In the blackness I heard the smash of a plate, barking.
I used to think of angels as Titans, their wings like the sweep of great forests, brows as immense as the horizon. This angel was small and white: Charlotte in her dressing gown. A candle burned on the chest by my bed. She was curled up on a chair that did not belong here, feet tucked in and her eyes closed.
‘The doctor’s been, dearest,’ she said, waking. ‘You said we might call him. He bled you, which is why your arm is sore, and will come again tomorrow.’ I tried to focus on her, but my vision began to skew, and my thoughts were flying. I was crossing the frost-covered fields at Cowan Bridge. The church steeple pierced the sky and little Jane Sykes walked ahead of me, her thick red plait fresh with dirt. I heard a voice which I knew to be Mamma’s, felt arms drawing me onto a soft lap. There was no fire, but I was burning. Someone—Anne, I thought—put a cool cloth on my forehead, soothed me, as ever, without a word. I knew it was daytime.
‘I’ve brought you something.’ Charlotte was gentler than she’d ever been. She lay something on my pillow. ‘Oh, she cannot see it!’ I heard the break in her voice.
I sensed Papa’s presence then—could feel his height; the gravity that surrounded him.
‘Charlotte found a sprig of heather for you,’ he said. ‘In December too.’
I tried to turn my head, to speak, but my body punished me with a fit of coughing so violent that everyone fought to contain it. There was someone behind me, supporting my shoulders, a hand beneath my chin, another brought something soft to my mouth. Wet flesh and blood jammed my throat. I felt panic rise in my chest, an iron taste on my tongue then at last, air.
My words all folded away now, tucked beneath the earth forever. Shadows passed and then gathered round me.
The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom then shall I fear?
Papa’s voice. I felt hands over mine—Anne’s or Charlotte’s? Cool skin against fire. Diamond-cold world and angels closing down on me with eyes like stone. A realm without sky or hills or horizons or the dear, fallible earth. Papa was summoning it. Or was it just sunlight on my face? I was pushing through the Fairy Cave and out into the awful glare. No Anne or Charlotte, no good smells coming from the range, no vegetable peelings, no chamber pots to be emptied, no mess and sprawl and noise of animals, no wind in my face, or cloud or sudden shower, touch of sun upon a newly spun spider’s web, its maker suspended, fat-bodied, at the centre of a new world. No blackbird dropping from the sky, yellow beak, yellow-rimmed eye, the sharp green of the lawn. Where was Keeper? Dear, brutal boy; dark eyes that followed me always, monstrous paws, meaty breath. Here was another place, so dazzling that I could not see. No muddy boots, no peat-stained petticoat. Aunt would be happy about that. Aunt, Mamma, Maria and Elizabeth. Branwell too. All cold. Icy angels edged towards me, lips of blue. Branwell came, hair so red against the whiteness. Ice and fire. I felt a cold hand reaching for me. I could not catch my breath. My lips were moving now. Forgive me, Papa but I cannot—
Lead us not into temptation
Breath won’t come. Lead on my chest. They must not shut me in a coffin, Anne. Who will bake the bread? Lay me in the peaty earth. A terrible light coming now, a tidal drag pulling me under, quicksand; thunder of wings; reaching hands, pulling, pushing, I do not—Eyelids burned to the rim, scourged to the bone. Turn away, resist with every last strength in my—
Quiet. The hush that descends when the earth stops exploding. Hands and knees, darkness. The sense of falling gone now. The End. Then a movement so familiar. Could it really be? It is the wind! The same wind that cuts across the moor tops in all weathers, in every season, and there, there is a glimmer of friendly light, a scrap of moon over the dark hump of the hills! The ground beneath my hands is solid and springy at the same time, as I have always known it. I stand and by some miracle, the strength has returned to my body. When I look down I see that I am wearing my winter cloak and my brown boots. The wind is butting at my face, drying my tears, though I do not remember crying. It is cold, but it is the chill of life not death. Curve of heather. The moon is over Keighley. It’s no more than a sliver but my feet have known these pathways since childhood, and it is enough. I take a step and then another, testing my bones, my flesh. My breath is coming faster now but the pain in my side is gone, my cough quite healed. I stride out in the old way and when I reach the swell of Penistone Hill, I start to run, the friendly earth carrying me up, up. Up to the crest of the hill I climb, and then down again towards the village, my boots clattering on the lane. There are no lights to be seen. The cottage windows are all dark and not a living soul abroad. When I reach the parsonage, I let myself in through the front gate. It closes silently behind me.
It is late. Hours since Papa would have locked the front door for night. But look, there is the glow of a candle upstairs, coming from my bedroom window. The wind swirls around me, catching my cloak. The window is open, I see, just a crack. Someone is crying and it sounds like Charlotte. I hear a mournful howl. Hush now. The wind is howling too, carrying snow in its icy palms. Snow is already gathering around my boots. The branches of the cherry tree are pawing the starry heavens. I look for the spot where the branch broke beneath my weight all those years ago. It is there, above me, the wound now hardened by time. The trunk of the tree has thickened with age and the bark has lost some of its ruddy shine. Even in the dark I can see the striations that mark it, broken circles reaching towards the sky. The wind drives through the thorn bushes and turns my hands to stone, but Keeper is waiting for me, Charlotte is in need of comfort, and here is Papa’s tree, strong and steady in the wildest of weather, no longer young.