“MRS. ROBINSON?”
I jumped. I hadn’t heard Mr. Brontë knock or come in, but there he was, standing in the center of my dressing room at Thorp Green as if I’d conjured him.
How dare he? His sudden apparition took my breath away. And he could have interrupted me doing anything! But really, of course, there was nothing for me to do at all. That was why I’d been sitting in the window seat, staring across the lawn and delineating the intermittent bursts of birdsong.
Wren, blackbird, thrush.
Love, possession, warning.
“Mr. Brontë.” I stood.
Our eyes were level, and that made me uncomfortable. There was no way to escape Mr. Brontë’s deep blue stare. With Edmund, I was accustomed to addressing his cravat, or the back of his head, or the pages of his newspaper.
Mr. Brontë would be here about Ned, but it was funny he should come to me. Edmund was the one with opinions on the correct way to educate boys, and though Ned was at a clumsy age, it was Marshall who pressed herbs on bruises and kissed scraped knees.
“Is anything the matter?” I asked when he did not speak.
“No,” Mr. Brontë said, frowning, “although I might have asked you the same. You appeared pensive just now.”
Such familiarity might have been acceptable in the theater, in Scarborough, but it wouldn’t do here.
“It is considered impolite, Mr. Brontë, to enter without knocking,” I said, staring back at him. I wouldn’t be the first to blink.
“My apologies.” He didn’t play my game but bowed.
Disappointing. I felt something slacken, like when Marshall became distracted while tightening my corset, but this time it was on the inside.
“I came to ask a favor,” he said.
“A favor?” I repeated.
“Yes. But then the door was ajar. I saw you sitting there and you struck me as so mournful, like a painting—or Tennyson’s Mariana in her grange. Forgive me.”
Mariana? I was weary, to my very bones. But she’d had someone and something to look for, wait for. I had nobody and nothing.
“What was your favor, Mr. Brontë?” I asked.
Perhaps he could paint me and reveal the youthful fire I felt inside. Maybe on canvas Edmund would be able to see me clearly. But then Mr. Brontë had failed as an artist; that’s why he was a tutor, after all.
“I hoped I might be permitted to use the library,” he said. “After lessons and on Sundays, when Ned is with his sisters.”
A practical request, then. He’d come to me only to avoid disturbing Edmund.
“The ceilings are low in the Monk’s House and the windows let in little light,” he said. “Now summer is drawing to a close, it would be a great joy to me to have somewhere else to write. Though even at the Monk’s House I have more space than back home, where the four of us sit around one table, squabbling over ink.”
This interested me in spite of myself. “What is it you are writing?” I asked. “More poetry?”
“When I can.” At this limited show of encouragement, Mr. Brontë strode past me and deposited himself at the window where I’d been sitting.
I gaped at him.
“Although Charlotte talks from time to time of the novel as the ‘literary pinnacle of our age.’ ”
“Do you agree with her?” I asked.
Surprising that this female intellect who loomed large behind Mr. Brontë thought highly of novels! I’d always assumed my taste for them was confirmation of my feminine frivolity. Edmund, and all other gentlemen, he assured me, preferred “facts.”
With each new detail I learned of her, Charlotte grew more fascinating to me. She was surprising, multifaceted, not a caricature like romantic Emily or colorless Anne. I took my place on the window seat beside Mr. Brontë, very close to the edge so there was at least a foot between us.
He nodded. “The thing about Charlotte is that she is very often right, for all it pains me to say it.” He was gazing at me, the rosy hue of the late-summer sky shining through his hair. “But to write a novel, one must have a tale to tell—the tragedy, the great love story—and I have not found mine. Not yet.”
I couldn’t assure him he would do so. To prophesy tragedy was morbid and love unthinkable. So I looked away, not trusting myself not to get lost in him if I met his eye. “I read a fair number of novels,” I said at last, fixing my gaze on the French clock, although I wanted nothing less than for Mr. Brontë to go. The birds would be poor company after our conversation. “I go through a box a month from the circulating library.”
Mr. Brontë saw and took his opportunity. “Perhaps you might join me in the library?” he said. “In those quiet hours between lessons and dinner when the children are racing out to the fields? I could write. You could read.”
He paused, but I said nothing. I’d become aware of every sensation in my body: the weight on my head from my hair, how the lace irritated my wrists at the cuffs, the strange dip in the cushion below me now there was a heavier companion at my side.
“Unless of course you have other affairs to attend to.”
He had me there. “No,” I said slowly.
“I thought you might be practicing at the piano. You are a born musician.”
“I only play after dinner,” I said. “Edmund doesn’t like to hear me in the day. He says it’s ‘tedious’ and ‘distracting.’ ”
Mr. Brontë raised one russet eyebrow, his face the picture of Miss Brontë’s at her most judgmental. But here his verdict pleased me.
“Yes, perhaps we might join you—Marshall and I,” I said. “On occasion.”
“ON OCCASION” BECAME OFTEN.
Did Edmund think it strange that the time I spent in the library increased even as the number of novels I ordered from Mr. Bellerby’s circulating library dwindled? Had he even noticed as he jotted down the amounts that autumn in his treasured leather accounting book?
I was still reading but now also had Mr. Brontë’s scribblings to work my way through—fantastic tales of a country called Angria, which he and Charlotte had dreamed up and peopled with hundreds of characters, and poems he signed “Northangerland.” In the late afternoon, after Ned’s lessons, Mr. Brontë would delight me again with the story of Angria’s inception or turn the force of his pedagogy on me and try to convert me from novels to his favorite poetry. There were volumes of Wordsworth and Byron, marked with his annotations, which we took turns reading aloud from. He’d written a letter to Mr. Wordsworth once, but never received a reply. Mr. Brontë told me I had a natural ear, that I felt the music in the verses that others missed.
I tried to live up to his estimation, although often I’d tease him, chastising him for his flattery, while Marshall did her needlework, head bent low, seeing and hearing nothing.
But she wasn’t here today. We were on the cusp of winter, struggling through a day as gray and dreary as all the others, but today, somehow, Mr. Brontë and I had found ourselves alone.
“So Charlotte dubbed hers Lord Wellington, Emily’s was Parry,” said Mr. Brontë, who was talking again of the toy soldiers he and his sisters had played with when they were younger, which served as inspiration for many of his stories even now. “Anne’s soldier, Ross, was a queer little thing like herself, and I must needs make mine Bonaparte.” He laughed, looking not at me but several yards away toward the cheval screen and the oak sofa table, as if he could see those wooden toys made flesh before him.
Mr. Brontë was a curious specimen. A grown man who retained a passion for playing with dolls. Another living, breathing person with an inner life as varied, complex, and tumultuous as my own, but one who cared nothing for the concerns that dogged me and consumed my waking and dreaming hours.
What others thought of him was of little importance to Mr. Brontë, I’d found in the course of our many talks like this one. It made me wonder if Charlotte was the same. “She doesn’t spend much time on her appearance,” Mr. Brontë had told me once. “She is neat but, I’m afraid, rather plain. Yet, on closer acquaintance, men often find her fascinating. Her conversation. Her opinions. She is truly unique among women.”
The contrast with Charlotte caused me some embarrassment about my vanity and predictability, but Mr. Brontë never accused me of either. He listened to my confidences when Edmund would have lectured, reacted with sympathy when my husband would have schooled me to be better.
I’d liked that at the beginning—how Edmund challenged me and how he had a steady confidence that belied his true age (he was, in fact, a year my junior). But his critiques took on a sharper edge when they were no longer followed by caresses, when they came to outnumber his compliments and I could do nothing right.
“We all had childhood games, Mr. Brontë,” I said, tracing my finger along the ridged equator of one of the globes that stood near the paneled window. “But most of us outgrow them.”
“A tragedy, Mrs. Robinson!” Mr. Brontë cried, his humor matching mine. He caught on to the other side of the globe, halting its slow rotation and leaning toward me.
We must have looked as if we were carving up the world between us.
“What is the object of our existence unless creation?” he said with that intensity of his that was at odds with our age’s ever-fashionable nonchalance. “And while many of us create—I will not say replicas—but only pale imitations of ourselves, how much more incredible is it to craft a world, another reality that you can share and invite others into, as Charlotte and I have with Angria and Emily and Anne have with their Gondal? Another country, just around the corner, wherever you are and however you are trapped. Imagination is the only passport required for entry there.”
“Hence why you call yourself ‘Northangerland,’ ” I said, pulling back, away from his face and away from the window, although it was like moving through treacle.
“Yes,” he said, his excitement subsiding and a new hollowness entering his voice as if, in removing myself, I had reminded him of the realities between us, the fact that our very presence here, alone, was an insurrection. “Northangerland is the dark hero of Angria, a man led by his passions, who acts ever on ambition. I envy him, Lydia.”
A shiver passed through me. Was it at hearing him say my first name or merely at the sound of it being used with affection and not as a reprimand?
“What do you en—?” I could not complete the question. My breathy voice trailed into nothingness as I retreated. I came in contact with one of the fitted, glass-doored bookcases, solid, immovable, clearing me of all responsibility were he to come closer.
“He is free,” Mr. Brontë said, his confidence growing as he stepped forward, narrowing the gap between us. “Free to do what he wants, take what he wants.” He stopped, raised his hand, and ran his thumb down the spine of a book to the right of my cheek.
“And what do you want?” I asked, pausing between each word, unsure if I wanted an answer, terrified that the magic would be ruined by one false move on his part. We couldn’t sustain this bizarre, romantic, almost spiritual communion were our words and actions to descend into baseness.
“A lock of your hair, Lydia,” he whispered. “Something to remember you by.”
Perfect. Intimate but still deferential, physical without fording the Rubicon, venturing to the place from which there could be no return.
I nodded.
Mr. Brontë drew a small knife from his waistcoat pocket with one hand and, with the other, tugged at the silver comb that secured my hair. The teeth scraped against my scalp. The trinket clattered to the floor. My mass of curls hovered for a second, unsecured, before tumbling over my shoulders.
Just as well I had never required hairpieces.
Now his fingers were running through the thick, real, loosened tresses and skirting up my neck and I couldn’t think of hairpieces anymore, could I? Or how my hair would look when he was finished? I wasn’t meant to be thinking of such trivial things when my life, my marriage, my virtue were hanging in the balance.
“Take the lock, Mr. Brontë,” I said, struggling not to gasp as his fingertips moved across my face, tracing their way to my lips.
Too much.
Too far.
The interview was careening out of my control.
“Branwell,” he said, correcting me and gazing at my bottom lip, which his thumb was toying with, his expression hungry.
“Go,” I said, closing my eyes, not to drink it in but because I could no longer bear to see him.
My scalp tautened.
A low, rough sawing sound.
Release.
Branwell drew back, but I kept my eyes closed.
“Go,” I repeated.
A click of the door and he did.
I walked to the fireplace.
My face stared at me in the looking glass above the mantel just the same.
It was like the morning after my wedding night, when I had been alone, shivering in my shift, before a maid had come to dress me.
“No one can see it, Lydia,” I’d whispered to myself, giddy and sore and angry at being lied to. “It is not such a change. You are just the same.”
But, now, on closer examination, there was a difference. One of the curls that framed my face was shorter than the other. How arrogant, how like a man, to go for a strand that was so visible. Marshall would fix it, without a word of reproof. And only she would have noticed anyway.
I stooped to retrieve the comb and inhaled hard.
A momentary aberration only. I was still mistress here.
“YOU ARE TOO KIND, Doctor,” I said.
I wasn’t looking at Dr. Crosby but beyond him at my own reflection in one of the full-length mirrors that lined the passage to the ballroom at Kirby Hall. Thanks to their matriarch’s long illness and subsequent demise, it had been some months since we’d been in the Thompsons’ Palladian mansion, the finest house in the area, grander even than ours.
Edmund had been talking to Reverend Lascelles only moments ago. Yet, infuriating as ever, he’d proven missing at the very moment we’d all been summoned from the anterooms to enjoy Harry Thompson’s long-anticipated wedding feast. Just as well the doctor had stepped up in his absence.
Dr. Crosby was the perfect partner. He complimented me on my appearance as we made our way up the corridor, slowed by trailing dresses and a strict adherence to etiquette, and entertained me with a flurry of gossip from Great Ouseburn, a ten-minute stroll from Little Ouseburn yet a separate parish, which meant it might as well have been a world away.
I did look beautiful tonight. I’d ordered a new dress from Miss Harvey in York. Black, of course, but with gold trim at the cuffs and along the scooping neckline. I’d thought that Mr. Brontë and Ned might come to wave us off and that the tutor would admire me with his words or his eyes. But there had only been Miss Brontë, her expression alternating between intrigued, disinterested, and judgmental; Marshall, happy and proud, eyes glittering at what she had helped create; and Mary, tearing up that she, unlike the other girls, was excluded.
I stole a glance at my eldest daughters and smiled. Bessy was on Will Milner’s arm. They were a good match, although it was unclear who was guiding whom. I wondered if the boy had sent her any more notes since Valentine’s Day. He was an awkward young man, whose hands and feet still looked too big for him, and he held himself stiff and unspeaking. Bessy was silent and had turned the color of her dress, which had formerly been Lydia’s and was far too pink for her florid complexion.
Lydia, meanwhile, was paired with the youngest girl of the house, Amelia. I’d placated her and overspent on a new periwinkle gown that brought out her eyes, but her face was as downcast as it had been the day she’d first heard of Harry Thompson’s marriage.
“What a deficit of young men we have, Mrs. Robinson!” said the doctor, tracking the direction of my gaze and thoughts. “When a daughter of a beauty such as yourself goes unaccompanied.”
I gave his arm a squeeze. How good of him to dwell on my looks rather than hers.
“But—” He paused and leaned in so close I could see the silvering hair on the side of his dark head. “But it’s somehow appropriate, isn’t it?”
“How so, Dr. Crosby?” I asked, keeping up the whispering and hoping others thought us in on secrets of the party that they were not.
“I mean that this is a house of unmarried women. What is it? Six in all? A house that’s hungered for a wedding for years and then, not only does the son wed first, but Mr. Harry must go and marry elsewhere.”
I stifled a giggle. It was true that this was largely a gathering of spinsters. There were the Thompsons, from Henrietta, a fast-fading beauty who must have been five and thirty, all the way to Amelia, who was already too old to be bosom friends with a teenager like my Lydia. Five of the seven Milner girls were also here tonight, imagine! But no, my girls would never suffer their fate.
Whatever my governess had written of my showiness, I would ensure my daughters married, and married well. I knew what it took. Beauty, reputation, accomplishments. Another year had all but slipped by, but soon I would take action and defend them from a woman’s worst fate—to be extraneous and unneeded. Or no, that was not quite the worst—the worst was to be forced to make your own living, like the Miss Brontës.
Dr. Crosby pulled back my chair, which was toward the upper end of the leftmost of three long, glittering tables.
At the head of the central table was the man of the hour, Harry Thompson. He was handsome, well dressed, and roaring with laughter at something Reverend Lascelles had said. This was strange, as the Reverend wasn’t known for his humor, but the Thompson heir was one of those men who lived for pleasure, unracked by spiritual or artistic dilemmas, never looking any deeper, just the opposite of Bran—Mr. Brontë.
Beside the cackling bridegroom was, presumably, his bride. I’d already forgotten her name. She was small and unassuming, and her complexion was a little green. She was probably pregnant already, poor thing. That was the way of things once men decided the time had come to secure their inheritance.
“Any money on old Thompson spending half his speech talking of his mother?” Dr. Crosby muttered, as the tables filled with a flock of brightly colored dresses, occasionally broken by a pillar of black.
“You are terrible, Doctor, as is your wager.” I laughed and hit him with my fan, but with a slight delay. I was fretting that Frederick, the younger, plainer, and more stuttering Thompson son, was trapped between two Miss Milners, while my Lydia languished like an unplucked lily between Mary Ann and Amelia Thompson.
There was still no sign of Edmund.
“Mr. Brontë is quite the specimen, my dear Mrs. Robinson,” Dr. Crosby said.
I jumped at the sudden change of topic. It must have been at that.
“Just what one would want in their son’s tutor,” I replied, trying to mimic his dry, sardonic tone.
“Ha!”
A servant leaned in with a silver platter of steaming vegetables, dividing us for a second.
“I, for once, am being serious,” he said, reappearing through the fog. “What we need around here are new ideas. However did you conjure up such a novelty?”
“I have my ways, Dr. Crosby,” I said, inhaling my champagne too hard and before anyone had thought to give a toast.
“You do indeed.” The doctor clinked his glass with mine as I struggled not to cough. “All of us at the Lodge thank you.”
“Oh, the Lodge.” I’d recovered my composure and was back on steady ground. “I wonder what you men think to speak of there without the fairer, and wittier, sex to entertain you.”
So Branwell was a Freemason. No wonder he and Dr. Crosby had struck up such a fast rapport. Men often joined the order when they shared their home with a gaggle of women. My husband was also a member, although he hardly ever attended the meetings now. The ride to York was exhausting and the Lodge (in truth, a room above an inn) too smoky and crowded. That was Edmund’s excuse, anyway. He avoided company more and more and had nearly entirely withdrawn from the circle of friends we’d once reigned over.
“Ah, I thought you were a worldlier woman than that, Mrs. Robinson.” The doctor twinkled at me, looking more like an indulgent and eccentric uncle than a man my own age. “In the most respectful sense, I assure you. But you should know that it is when you are absent that gentlemen most wish to speak of you.”
The blood flew to my face as it hadn’t since I was a girl. Had Branwell really spoken about me? Could he have been so indiscreet? My hand reached, before I could stop it, to touch the curl he had stolen two weeks before.
But before I could open my mouth to speak, our host had risen to his feet. “Ladies—I say, ladies and gentlemen!”
A hundred conversations were cut off mid-sentence, mid-thought, even mid-word, as Richard Thompson tottered to his feet. A host of family portraits, including his own, were to serve as backdrop to his soliloquy and we as the unwilling crowd.
“There are many, my own dear mother included, who would have longed to be here on such a joyous occasion.”
Dr. Crosby elbowed me in the side. I gave him an appreciative nod.
“My darling mother was taken from us, too soon, this April.” Old Mr. Thompson wiped away a tear, but then, with age, eyes were prone to watering.
I snorted, and the bubbles raced up my nose. Too soon? He was on the edge of the grave himself. For his mother to have lived as long as she had was ridiculous.
But his lip was tremoring, his grief was real, and my own mother’s face flashed before me. I drank long so that she might fade, and no sooner had I replaced the glass on the thick ivory tablecloth than it was refilled as if by magic.
“But now we welcome Elizabeth—”
Ah yes, another Elizabeth. I couldn’t stand the name, as it was Edmund’s mother’s name. That’s why our Bessy was “Bessy.”
“—into our family and into our home. In some months Harry— where is my Harry?—will carry her off to Moat Hall, but for now she is ours.”
There was a smattering of applause. I drank again, doing another scan for Edmund. He hadn’t reappeared.
“Moat Hall? That rundown old place?” Dr. Crosby hissed in my ear, clapping loudly and with obvious relish. “Couldn’t they have put the old maids out to pasture there?”
“Give them time,” I said darkly.
Was Moat Hall really such a step down in the world? The property was a little too close to the village, it was true, but it must have been the same size as Thorp Green Hall.
“So eat, drink, be merry!” With every word, Mr. Thompson forestalled our enjoyment. “And join me in toasting to Mr. and Mrs. Henry Thompson!”
“To Mr. and Mrs. Henry Thompson!”
My glass was nearly empty when I raised it, but I drained the dregs anyway.
A clatter. The guests set upon their meals like animals.
There was gravy on Bessy’s chin, but she was leagues away from me, and besides, young Milner was too afraid to look at or talk to her.
The room was rotating a little before me, but only by an inch or so. It halted when I watched it too closely, like the music box I’d had when I was a child. The dancer always did one final pirouette if you looked away from her, and the last doleful note never sang out in tempo.
I couldn’t eat much. My corset was laced too tight. But I’d had enough food to bring me back to myself if I remembered to stop reaching, reaching for another sip and another.
The party was diving into dessert, and Dr. Crosby and I were laughing at how the new Mrs. Thompson’s head was obscured by a decorative pineapple, when there was a tap on my shoulder.
I turned. Edmund. He was pale, almost gray.
“Wherever have you been? Are you ill?” I asked, trying to stand, although the space was tight and my gown was cumbersome.
“You needn’t worry yourself, Lydia.” His fingers rested on my bare upper arm as he forced me into my seat and a faint, incongruous thrill rippled through me, exacerbated by drink. “I came for the doctor. I’ll send William Allison and the carriage back for you and the girls. Enjoy the party.”
Dr. Crosby nodded and dabbed his mouth with his napkin, preparing to leave.
“But how can I enjoy myself if you’re ill?” I asked.
“I’m sure you’ll find a way,” Edmund said, withdrawing his hand and then turning to my companion.
They exchanged a few hushed, indistinguishable words and then left me—stranded, unable to converse with those on my right whom I had ignored for so long.
And what was there to look forward to? Only dancing, or rather, standing at the edge of the room, watching Bessy and Will Milner stumbling into each other, while Lydia sulked at my side. Whereas, with Dr. Crosby, we could have spoken further of “Mr. Brontë.”
FOR ONCE, WE’D ALL retired to the anteroom together after dinner. It was warmest in here. Besides, the rest of the Hall felt curiously empty since many of the servants had departed for the holidays. The Brontës were in Haworth, the Sewells Durham, and even Marshall had abandoned me for two days to visit her sister in Aldborough.
“I’ve eaten so much I could burst,” said Ned, lying in front of the hearth like a pig volunteering to be roasted.
“That’s hardly something to be proud of, Ned,” said Lydia, with a sniff, from the window seat.
“It don’t matter for boys!” cried Ned, rolling onto his rounded stomach and propping his chin on his hands. “Only girls like Bessy need to eat less.”
Bessy, cross-legged in front of Mary, who was braiding her hair, stuck out her tongue at her brother but didn’t otherwise retaliate. The children were always on their best behavior when Edmund was there. And so he never understood the trouble I had with them.
“ ‘Doesn’t’ matter. Not ‘don’t,’ ” I said, mildly, pulling the curtain across the window unblocked by Lydia. Better to do it myself than wait for Ellis, who’d been fulfilling all the female servants’ duties with a sour face and varying levels of incompetence.
“Could you read to us, Papa?” ventured Mary, nearly dropping Bessy’s hair mid–intricate knot as she twisted toward Edmund’s chair.
I wasn’t even sure he was awake. Our Yuletide festivities, tame though they’d been, had been enough to exhaust him. He was sitting in one of the shell-back chairs, with his eyes closed, moving now and then to change the crossing of his ankles.
“Hmm?” he grunted by way of reply. “I’m tired, Bessy dear.”
“I’m Mary,” said Mary, pivoting again.
“Ouch,” called Bessy. “You’re pulling my hair.”
“Lydia, will you play something?” Edmund said, through a yawn.
“I won’t,” said Lydia, staring out at the black.
“No, not you.” He waved his hand. “Your mama.”
I did as he asked, nearly falling over the chess table in my haste to reach the pianoforte. My fingers sought out the ivories even as I slipped onto the stool in front of it.
Edmund hadn’t asked me to play in so long, although there’d been a time when he’d delighted in hearing me. The Robinsons weren’t in general a musical race, but Edmund had appreciated my talents and turned the pages for me at countless gatherings, before and after our betrothal. It was too bad that the children had inherited his ear. Lydia was a fair player at best. And Bessy and Mary had no conception of rhythm.
I tinkered until I found the chords of a carol—one of Wesley’s, I think—but I’d had more than enough Christmas for one year and soon strayed into singing popular ballads, enjoying how the room fell quiet, even if the audience wasn’t as admiring as in my youth.
My heart ached for Kathleen Mavourneen as I sang the good-byes of her departing lover and for the girl in “The Old Arm-Chair,” although I’d never understood how she could give up her man to another without so much as a word of protest.
With Branwell away for a few weeks, all of it—our whispered conversations, the lock of hair he had stolen from me, the way my stomach dropped at the sound of his name—seemed very foolish. He was young, yes; attractive and attentive, certainly. But he was a boy compared to my husband, and sometimes I couldn’t tell where my interest in him ended and my fascination with his family—with Charlotte—began.
Besides, it was a woman’s nature to be constant. Maybe there was still a way to bring Edmund back to me. Maybe he was watching, each note adding a drop to the shallow cup of affection my husband could offer me, and convincing him that, twenty years and five children later, I was still his Lydia.
I started to play snatches of a tune from memory before realizing it was a duet. The soprano line sounded lonely without the accompanying bass but I persisted, imagining Edmund’s voice mingling with mine.
“The last link is broken that bound me to thee, and the words thou hast spoken have rendered me free,” I sang.
Bessy and Ned struck up a whispered argument.
I increased my volume, drowning them out. I closed my eyes and lost myself in the music and in the unfairness of it all. How was it that love—not a girlish love, but a love that was true and deep—could be one-sided?
“I have not loved lightly, I’ll think on thee yet, I’ll pray for thee nightly till life’s sun is set—”
“Lydia—” Edmund said, cutting across my reverie.
“The heart thou hast broken once doted on—”
“Lydia.”
My hands clunked down on the keys. “Yes?”
He was still lounging back, not looking at me. “A little quieter,” he said, patting the air with his hand.
A shock of tears overwhelmed me, raining down in torrents. I rested my elbows on the piano with a clash and leaned my head against the cool, hard wood.
“Lydia!” and “Mama!” cried Edmund and Mary at once.
“Oh, please,” said Lydia. Her skirts swished as she, presumably, quit the room.
“Ned, Bessy, Mary—follow your sister. To bed,” said Edmund, his voice matter-of-fact. His chair made a creak as he stood. “Run along with you.”
The door closed behind them.
I wanted him to wrap me in his arms, but of course he kept his distance. He’d never reward me for such a display.
“You should learn to better regulate your emotions, Lydia,” he said, without much inflection. “Does Dr. Crosby need to prescribe a sedative?”
“Dr. Crosby?” I said, incredulous, starting up and not caring in that moment that my face was puffy and red. It didn’t matter how I looked. There’d been a time when Edmund had told me every morning that I was beautiful, from my crusted eyes to my ever-expanding or deflating belly. But he never wanted me anymore, even when I was at my most alluring. “I don’t need Dr. Crosby.”
“Then what do you need?” He jerked the curtain across the window where Lydia had been sitting.
Why was he doing that now? He must be worried that someone could see us.
“You, Edmund. I need you.” I rushed toward him, but he rebuffed me, gripping both my wrists in one hand and keeping me at arm’s length.
“I am your husband, Lydia. Isn’t that enough?”
“No,” I whispered, the thought inflaming me. I didn’t want the conventional, the everyday. I wanted the excitement that even a boy as inexperienced as Branwell could choreograph. “No, it is not enough. I want you to need me—to kiss me and hold me.” I went up on the tips of my toes and pressed my wet face against his dry one, but his mouth was impenetrable.
“Lydia, you are unwell,” he said, guiding me toward a chair, where I collapsed, defeated by his coldness.
I shook my head.
“And your behavior is unladylike. I don’t say you mean anything by it—you were always naive—but you spend too much time with the tutor. You look to your own pleasure, keep up flirtations, when you should be setting an example to our daughters and our son.”
“It is you who are unwell,” I countered. He had not even given Branwell the dignity of a name. But he had noticed. And that meant jealousy could still seep, if not course, through him. That meant he still cared. “You are always tired. Your complexion is unhealthy and—” I didn’t know how to word this but I wanted to provoke him. “And, at night, in our bed, you neglect your wife. How can you still think yourself a man when you fail in a husband’s duties?”
He did not engage. He was moving away from me. “Good night, Lydia,” he said.
“Wait!” I cried, in one last-ditch attempt to keep him. There was still one source of power that wasn’t lost to me. “Edmund, please. Give me another child.”
This had worked before, with Georgiana. Her birth had brought my husband back to me. Though perhaps her death had lost him to me forever.
“Another child?” he repeated, slowly, looking down at me with distaste. “Is that really what you want?”
“It is, it is,” I said, although the thought had not come to me until a moment ago. But wouldn’t that be magical? Months of my body blossoming with the surest sign of my youth and my husband’s love for me, and then another unspoiled, loving child, one who, like Georgiana, would gaze up at me as onto a god. “Please, Edmund. For me.” A nail in the floorboards was digging through the carpet and into my knee. A draft was flooding into the room from underneath the door, sending a shiver through me.
“Lydia, you are too old,” Edmund said, a softer note entering his voice.
“No,” I mouthed, shaking my head. “Edmund, please. I can’t bear it.” I had to force the tears from my eyes now. The real ones had stemmed as soon as he’d turned back to talk to me. “Without Georgie—”
This was a misstep. We never spoke of her.
A bolt of amber passed through Edmund’s deep brown eyes. “Do not talk of Georgiana. Do not say another word.”
I stayed on the floor that night, unmoving but unsleeping for a long time as the candles burned low, and staring into the heart of the ceiling rose. And I woke to a clatter and an exclamation of surprise as Ann Ellis dropped the coal scuttle on seeing me there the next morning.