EASTER. IT WAS A day when Reverend Lascelles subjected us all to a second lengthy sermon without the relief of the curate Greenhow’s concise preaching, and the occasion of another dreaded ritual—late luncheon at Green Hammerton Hall, home to my mother-in-law.
I had pleaded for reprieve to no avail and remained stoic when my daughter Lydia came to me begging likewise.
“The servants appreciate the chance to visit their families,” Edmund had admonished me as I’d hovered by the study door a few days previously. “And it means so much to Mother.”
“We’re going, Lydia,” I’d snapped at my daughter when she’d interrupted my toilette that morning, as I was focusing on the gray strands streaking my black locks rather than on her fair head in the looking glass. “That’s all there is to say.”
Edmund, Lydia, Bessy, and I set off in the carriage a little after one, at least three of us wishing we could eat cold meats with Mary, Ned, and Miss Brontë. This party, due to the younger children’s ages, was excused from today’s feast. Would Mr. Brontë join them? I imagined mirth ringing out from him; Miss Brontë giving in to a rare smile; and Ned and Mary chuckling with glee.
The countryside was chill and damp, the milestones we passed along the short and jolting ride to Green Hammerton familiar—the fallen bridge, the barn where a farm laborer had hanged himself, the old oak.
My mother’s words seemed to float to me across the years. You’ll never be good enough for that wretched woman, Lydia. Tie yourself to a man that attached to his mama and you might as well be marrying her. But I wouldn’t take the bait. Not today. How difficult could it be to play the obedient daughter-in-law? And, besides, the Reverend John Eade, who’d been married to Edmund’s late sister, Jane, would be there too, and that was sure to be a distraction. Edmund had informed me he was visiting from County Durham.
We rounded the corner, and the house came into view. Large, it was in a darker brick than ours and covered in matted ivy, which obscured the windows and strangled the many chimney pots. There’d been little to recommend the place when Edmund’s mother had taken the lease around the time Mary had been born, except, of course, its proximity to Thorp Green. I might have proven victorious in the battle ejecting her from my house, but her move here rang as clear as a bugle, letting me know the war was far from won.
Our coachman, William Allison, handed me down from the carriage. Even he looked far from his cheerful self. Perhaps he was imagining his wife and children eating their Easter dinner without him.
“So you’ve arrived at last, Edmund,” our hostess squawked at us as soon as we joined her in the parlor, which smelled of decaying flowers and sherry.
She was an imposing woman, one who had always been more impressive than handsome.
“Lydia,” (this addressed to me), “you’re too pale and Bessy is getting fat.”
I kissed the old lady’s parched cheek and watched the girls do the same, viewing Bessy’s figure with something between distaste and defensiveness. I chastised her for eating too much, it was true, but Bessy was taller and more active than the rest of us. It was hardly fair to call her fat.
“You look wonderful, Grandmama,” said Lydia, who gave out compliments only in hope of receiving them. “I wish I could wear lilac. I do miss color.”
Her grandmother waved her aside. “Dear John is recovering from a dreadful cold, isn’t that right, Reverend?”
I noticed John Eade for the first time. He was standing sentinel in the corner, by a tasseled lamp, and watching the proceedings with an expression as morose as if he’d been beside an open grave.
“A terrible cold, Mrs. Robinson,” he confirmed, with a sniff. “Just terrible. I feared I’d be unable to visit at all. I didn’t wish to subject any of you, and you especially, madam, to such a horror. But your last letter convinced me.”
“Stuff and nonsense, John!” Mrs. Robinson threw the Reverend toward me and grasped Edmund’s arm. “I am of good Metcalfe stock. It’ll take more than a cold to kill me. Now, to luncheon.”
I didn’t wish to touch the clergyman’s arm and so merely pinched his sleeve, leaning away from him and trying not to listen to his congested breathing. Lydia and Bessy linked arms and fell into step behind us. This was it, then, the dreaded dinner. We trailed, two by two, behind our hostess, like slaves going to the galleys.
YET IT WASN’T UNTIL the end of our meal, when I was struggling through the final forkfuls of a dry, week-old seed cake, that the expected onslaught came.
“John brought letters from my Mary’s girls,” Mrs. Elizabeth Robinson began, settling back in her chair—the only one with arms—for a round of interrogation, her favorite digestive.
“Indeed,” I said, as this comment appeared to be directed toward me.
“Her Mary” was Edmund’s other sister, the one who, despite her obvious failing in not being Jane, was favored for the large brood of biddable girls and necessary son she’d borne to Charles Thorp, who had the living in Ryton, not far from Aycliffe.
“Your cousins write so well, and with such penmanship, Lydia, Bessy!” Edmund’s mother continued, turning to my daughters. “And show such care for their grandmama, despite the distance between us.” Here a pause, a sigh. “I thought—didn’t I say so, John dear?—that I would see you two, and your brother and sister, more often now that I am your only grandmother. You might even walk here from Thorp Green were you not so lazy.”
I winced.
The Reverend Eade nodded with slow solemnity, closing his eyes and resting his hands high on his domed belly. A dewdrop was hanging from his left nostril.
“Hmm?” The old woman rounded on Bessy, who jumped in her chair. “Have you stopped and thought, girl, what your life might be like if I were gone as well?”
“No, Grandmama,” said Bessy, tracing the floral pattern around the edge of her bowl with the tip of her spoon.
“Duty. Didn’t I say so, Reverend? A decided lack of duty is what defines the younger generations. That is what Mary and Charles Thorp have fought so hard against. Most young people care only for their parties and their gossip and their ringlets.” She shot a glare at Lydia, whose hand froze mid-twirl, a curl still wrapped tight around half her finger. “Not like my Jane.”
“We are all very happy your health is so strong, Mother,” said Edmund, ignoring her oft-repeated invocation of his dead sister’s name. He took her right hand from where it lay on the table between them and planted a kiss on the raised network of veins. His chin puckered, wedged against one of her rings, a garish ruby that brought out the blotches in her skin.
“And there is old Mrs. Thompson lying on her deathbed at Kirby Hall.” Edmund’s mother had veered onto an entirely different topic: our grand neighbors. She was gesturing so widely that she nearly smacked a servant in the face as the woman bent in to remove the remnants of a jelly. “Over ninety years she’s lived, and for what? To be forgotten in her own home and ill treated by that brood of spinster granddaughters?”
“Oh no, Grandmama,” said Lydia, her interest piqued at the mention of the Thompsons. I could practically see the wheels in her head turning as she plotted to bring the conversation around to Harry, the heir. “Miss Amelia, who, you know, is my most particular friend, says they treat old Mrs. Thompson royally. Mr. Harry Thompson even brought her—”
“Lydia, why do you let these girls interrupt their elders?” Mrs. Robinson blinked at me. “No expense has been spared on them. They’ve had gloves, hats, countless dresses, a governess.”
This was a point of debate between us. She, who had petitioned for Ned to have a tutor, had told Edmund not once but several times that she couldn’t see what I did all day if I let some other, less accomplished woman finish my headstrong daughters. And educating girls hardly merited such an expense.
“To hear them, you’d think they didn’t have an ounce of breeding or cultivation between them. You should get rid of that woman,” she concluded with a flourish.
“Of Miss Brontë?” exclaimed Bessy, dropping her spoon into her bowl with a clang that rang through me. “But we all care for her very much.”
“Enough, Bessy,” I said as mildly as I could. I gave her shin a sharp kick under the table and watched her eyes grow watery and accusing.
“Ned’s new tutor, Mother, actually came to us by way of our governess. They are brother and sister.” Edmund, ever the diplomat, dabbed at his beard with his napkin.
Old Mrs. Robinson smiled. “I see. The father is a clergyman, I think? How fitting that the son should be one too.”
I dropped my chin so she wouldn’t see me smile. How horrified she’d be to hear Mr. Brontë’s views on God!
“Mr. Brontë isn’t a clergyman,” said Bessy, too foolish to keep out of the fray. “He used to be a painter and he wants to be a poet.”
“A painter and a poet?” Our matriarch spoke the words slowly, sounding them out. “How eminently unsuitable. This is your doing, Lydia, I suppose?”
The good Reverend Eade stared up to heaven as if praying for our souls.
The smile dropped from my face. Blood rushed to my head. I wasn’t so special. Others also knew of Mr. Brontë’s poetry. It was as if the scene in the woods were playing out before me amongst the half-eaten dishes of custards and preserves, shaming me. The poem, Mr. Brontë’s hand on mine, the words he’d spoken about souls, words I’d struggled to remember precisely since.
I opened my mouth to speak, but my throat, still coated with crumbs, was too dry.
“All my doing, Mother,” said Edmund. “I assure you.”
“Don’t defend her, Edmund,” Mrs. Robinson said. “This tutor is young, I suppose, girls?”
Lydia and Bessy nodded.
“Unmarried. Unordained. And you invite this man, this self-proclaimed poet, around your daughters? What were you thinking? There can only be one result.”
“I—”
She waved my unvoiced protest aside. “These eccentricities, these flights of fancy, might have been charming in a bride, Lydia, but at your age, you should know better.”
“Edmund, girls, we’re leaving.” I rose, steadying myself by grasping the table.
“Lydia, sit down,” said Edmund, without an ounce of passion.
The Reverend coughed and sneezed at once, breaking the silence.
“Well, I’m leaving,” I said.
My husband didn’t repeat his objection.
I practically ran from the room and from the house, back toward the carriage.
William Allison was leaning against one of the old poplars, smoking. When he saw me, he stood up straight and clasped his pipe behind him as if to hide it. The plumes of smoke radiated around him before vanishing into the air.
“Is owt the matter, ma’am?” he asked, cautious, scared to address me, as if I were a small child mid-tantrum.
“Oh, William!” I cried. “I wish I were dead.”
A shadow of panic passed over his face.
But I laughed one of those laughs that’s on the edge of tears and held out my hand.
“Ma’am?” he said slowly.
“Your pipe, William.”
I could tell he didn’t want to, but he handed it to me.
There was a pleasing weight to it. The wood was smooth where William had circled his thumb, caressing the bowl for years. He was younger than me. Perhaps it had been his father’s before.
I inhaled, closing my eyes as the smoke clouded my insides, then exhaled with the world still dark, although I could feel that Allison was still watching me.
“Thank you,” I breathed, as the grounds of Green Hammerton Hall came back into focus—row after row of regimented and labeled rosebushes, with the dark shadow of the house behind.
Once I’d returned his pipe, Allison handed me into the carriage. As soon as he shut the door, I began to cry.
Two hours Edmund and the girls tarried while I waited there. And they all avoided my gaze when we finally wended our way back to the Hall through the shadowy dusk.
The night was drawing in, making the fields, us, and me, most of all, invisible. The unbearable monotony of my life pressed heavier on my chest as we rounded the corners before Thorp Green Hall. How funny it is that men and women struggle as they die, but few of us kick or scream as we are lowered alive into our tombs.
FOR THE FIRST TIME in recent memory, Lydia and Bessy trod the stairs to their bedrooms unbidden. When both doors had closed and the creaks of their floorboards above us stopped, Edmund and I walked into the drawing room.
“Go on. Tell me how I embarrassed you in front of your mother,” I said, too weary to argue, wishing this Godforsaken day were over.
But he would not give me an escape.
“Mother can be blunt—difficult—but she was only trying to help, Lydia. She raised three children herself. And she raised us well.” Edmund was not looking at me but at the chimney glass, which reflected his expression, tired and pained.
“Raised? Rather, tyrannized,” I spat, the anger surging again inside me.
“Quiet,” he said, pacing even farther away. “The servants and the children will hear us.”
I imagined the girls stealing to their doors, Ned hiding beneath the covers, and Marshall at my dressing table, ready to take down my hair, pretend the day was uneventful, and guide me, like a frail and senile woman, to bed.
“You are all afraid of her,” I said. “You, Charles and Mary Thorp, John Eade. You all do exactly as she says.”
He did not answer.
“I daresay it was the shock of being free from that woman that killed Jane rather than her condition,” I went on, taking a different tack and watching for any response from him. “She didn’t know, at more than forty, what it was to be her own mistress.”
Edmund stiffened, but that was the only change perceptible in him. I flailed about as if drowning, clutching at anyone, even if it meant dragging him down with me.
“How can you live with yourself?” I cried, even louder. “How can you think yourself a man, still clinging to your mother’s petticoats?”
“Lydia.” It had worked. Edmund said my name, turned, reached out his hand, and took a step toward me. But tonight I could not stop. My anger burst from me, like the sparks from the fireworks I had seen many years before one Guy Fawkes Night.
“I have had enough.” My tears streamed now, undermining each word and underscoring my volatility. “I will not have her speak to me like that or hold the Thorps up as a paragon. She must not come to Scarborough this summer. I will not have her ruin my life in the last days of hers.”
“Were we speaking of Scarborough?” Edmund raised his voice for the first time. He hated how, with me, one fight became all fights, forming and re-forming like different configurations of dancers at a ball.
Why was it that when I wanted love, I took anger as a worthy consolation?
“I need some air,” I said, starting for the door. “Do not follow me.” And although we had been married nearly twenty years and I knew he would take me at my word, somehow I still hoped that he’d ignore me.
I WALKED UNTIL I reached the Monk’s House, which was shrouded in darkness. The Sewells, like most of the other servants, had not yet returned. Only one light burned in one of the upper rooms—Mr. Brontë’s room.
Would he be preparing Ned’s lessons or reading a letter from Charlotte or Emily? There was a chance he was tinkering with his poetry. Whatever the pattern of his solitary hours, he would set everything aside were I to come to him, were I to let him see me with my face red and tears in my eyes. And it wouldn’t just be for manners’ sake. He would understand.
But I couldn’t go in, could I?
Just about visible through the gloom was the white statuette of the monk himself. The figure, hood worn so low it covered his face, had watched over the entrance to the Monk’s Lodge for centuries from his niche above the door. One of his hands was raised, making the drapery of his robes uneven. I hadn’t thought it before, but perhaps his hidden gesture was a warning or a threat, not a blessing.
The front door opened at my touch. I stepped inside.
It looked the same: narrow, uncarpeted, with low, dark beams and an uneven central staircase. The hallway was empty except for a stand, which held a broken umbrella and a pair of Tom Sewell’s discarded boots.
I had not been in the Monk’s House above a handful of times since the morning after our honeymoon. Edmund had led me by the hand from building to building and from room to room of my new home.
“You are mistress here, and here, and also here,” he’d said. “The bells of Holy Trinity have been ringing out your arrival. They will fête you in the villages.” He twirled me so hard I nearly fell, but then caught me just in time and pushed me up against the wall to kiss me.
I gave the place little notice then, for all it was a fine house, beautifully preserved and unmistakably English, with its sloping roofs and lattice windows. I’d cared only for the Hall. I would drape curtains fit for the stage in my dressing room just to see Mother gasp at the expense. I’d take inspiration from the Venetian frescoes I’d just seen for our dining room. I thought then they’d never fade from my memory. And I’d commission a great fountain to make a feature of the stew pond.
“It’s allegorical,” I would say with a wave of my hand, when my unmarried friends came to marvel at my good fortune. “Edmund, my husband, can explain the mythological subject.”
But a month later, I was pregnant, sick to my stomach, and fretful when I slept. My grand schemes evaporated faster than Edmund’s ardor and sounded as distant as Italy’s opera houses. Soon I was unable to either sit or stand with ease, and the doctor prescribed rest. My own mother came to nurse me, and Edmund’s mother extended the time she was to live with us, reclaiming her dominion over the household. She, just as domineering then as she’d been tonight, hung floral chintz curtains in my dressing room, in the very same material she now had in her own.
“Mr. Brontë?” I called from the bottom of the stairs, hanging on to the wooden banister, but afraid to venture any farther, get any closer.
He didn’t answer.
I climbed the first step with my left foot, as always. The habit brought me some comfort, but a lump was rising in my throat.
The second. The house gave a great groan. It knew I was here.
This was foolish.
The third, taking two steps this time, regardless of the pattern.
I would go to him. And then?
I paused. Something had caught on my hand. A splinter.
He would understand if only I could find the words with which to confide in him.
I climbed again.
Other young men might think it improper, my coming here, but he would not care for such niceties. Our conversation in “the woods” had confirmed this. And what was it the Reverend Brontë had said? Mr. Brontë and his sisters were children raised by the moors.
I cupped my eyes with my hand to protect them from the light that streamed across the landing. His door was ajar.
Maybe when he saw me, he would take me in his arms, and I would have no choice but to melt into him. His kisses would be fevered like my bridegroom Edmund’s, drinking deep of me, his hand guiding me by the waist, drawing me down.
“Mr. Brontë,” I stuttered, rounding the door.
But it wasn’t Mr. Brontë, or at least not the strong, willful, sure version of him I had conjured up.
The tutor was lying on a low and threadbare couch. His head was thrown back, his shirt open at the neck and stained with something yellow, and an empty bottle was discarded by his side.
“Mr. Brontë!” I repeated, catching onto the doorframe to support myself.
He was drunk.
Mr. Brontë raised his head, looking the wrong way, to the side, at first, before seeing me. “Lydia!” he cried, flinging his arms wide in welcome.
I froze. How dare he?
“Lydia Gisborne,” he said, hissing out the “s.”
Which of the servants had told him my maiden name?
“Join me!” he cried. He grabbed the bottle and offered it to me, upside down.
“Mr. Brontë, I’ll ask you to address me only by my married name,” I said, feeling myself turning as red as he was, ashamed that all it had taken was a petty argument with Edmund to send me running to him.
“Lydia, you are beautiful,” Brontë said, attempting to rise but giving up when his legs did not cooperate. “I thought you’d be old, but you’re not. Or at least not to me.”
I didn’t stay to hear more. I turned and closed the door, although Mr. Brontë was in no state to follow me. Taking my dress in my hand, I raced down the stairs, skidded across the hall, and nearly hurtled into the housekeeper, Miss Sewell, as she stepped through the front door.
She let out a yelp of surprise. “Mrs. Robinson?” she said, hesitating, as if distrusting her eyes.
I was frozen, like some statue of a fleeing nymph, my weight on my front foot, my free hand reaching for the knob.
“What was that, Liz?” Her brother appeared behind her but stopped in his tracks at the sight of me. “I hope nothing is the matter, madam,” he said, removing his hat slowly, eyes exploring the darkness behind me.
His question brought me back to myself.
“The matter?” I dropped my skirts, brought my feet together, and pushed a strand of hair behind my ear that had been plastered to my face by nervous sweat. “No, yes—That is to say, nothing serious. Mr. Brontë has taken ill. A bad cold.”
“Ill?” said Miss Sewell, her morbid curiosity awakened. “Should Tom ride out for the doctor? I’ll bring him some sage and honey and take care of the boy.”
“That won’t be necessary, Miss Sewell,” I told her. “I won’t have Dr. Crosby called at every sneeze, or ‘the boy’—who, might I remind you, is a man nearly as old as yourself—bothered when all he needs is a day’s rest.”
“As you think best, madam.” She pursed her lips together and glanced at her brother.
“I just brought him some brandy to see him through the night,” I continued, hoping I was not protesting too much. “He is not to be disturbed until tomorrow luncheon at least.” I gave them each a sharp nod.
“Very good, madam,” said Sewell, stepping to the side to make room for me to leave.
“You brought him brandy?” parroted his more suspicious sibling, her confusion returning.
“Is that worthy of commentary, Miss Sewell?” I asked.
“I only meant to say that was very kind of you, ma’am.”
What else could she say? She lowered her head as I floated past her, wishing the pair a happy Easter.
Tonight, before the housekeeper returned to the Hall, they would discuss the lady of the house tending to the strange young tutor.
“I always knew she was a hypocrite,” Miss Sewell would say, her viperish eyes flashing as she kissed her brother good night. “She’s never let me have a man. How many years do you think she has on him?”