IT WAS HOT OUTSIDE, and some of the poorer worshippers had failed to secure a pew, so busy was church on a sunny Sunday in Scarborough. But the building, with its imposing tower, was cavernous enough that the air still circulated.
We were a strange party.
John Eade, who was on my left, was in fine form. He had an innate distrust of hymns, deeming singing too Catholic, and perhaps even too pagan, a practice to introduce it into the religious services that he himself conducted. But when he was in the congregation? That was another matter. He’d been blessed with a rich baritone and was chanting the familiar encomium about the “wondrous cross” as my mother-in-law nodded across me, making her displeasure at my silence known.
Edmund, who was beside his mother, had that glazed look in his eyes that haunted him often now, as if he were staring without seeing. But I could feel other eyes on me from behind—Branwell’s, Miss Brontë’s, the children’s—even if my husband ignored me. They were witnesses to my humiliation. I had fought hard for a chance to summer with my sister at Allestree Hall, or at the very least to travel to Yoxall to see my father, with words and tears and week-long silences, and yet here we were in Scarborough at my mother-in-law’s behest, playing out the roles required of us.
The motley choir reached the final bars, though the organ, which the inhabitants of Little Ouseburn would have thought a wonder, droned on for at least half a minute. The overconfident singers, John Eade amongst them, held the final “aaa” for as long as they could, if not a second longer, before spitting out the last consonant. The rest of us had already slumped back, anticipating a sleepy sermon.
John Eade and the rest of them, did they really believe that there was some all-powerful being who cared about the choices we made and the pain we felt, even if He made no effort to relieve it?
This was something Branwell and I had talked about more recently. When we were together, which was nearly every day now, he never gave full force to the passion that burst through the floodgates in the letters he sent by Marshall. Perhaps because he didn’t have “Northangerland” to hide behind, or perhaps because he knew I would reject him. Instead he railed against convention, society, religion, talking about us but not about us, redirecting his fire toward the legal and spiritual strictures that kept us apart.
He said I understood in a way that others, even Charlotte, did not, and so I joined him, dancing closer and closer to the precipice and uncovering aspects of my nature I’d never thought to expose to the light, delighting in our shared, secret, impotent rage.
Branwell’s anger, though, was fiercer. I had never believed in God as he had in those years before his eldest sister, Maria, the girl who had taught him to think and dream and pray, had died. Or at least I had never had his fervor. When I was a child, being a Christian had only ever been an act I had rehearsed and refined, like smiling sweetly at the grown-up visitors, eating without setting my elbows on the table, and crossing my ankles when I sat. And now I was too surrounded by clergy to take them or their doctrine seriously. There was John Eade, prating, Reverend Lascelles, dull, the curate Greenhow, meek. And then of course there was Edmund, who was ordained himself, although he rarely practiced. He’d preached at each of our children’s baptisms, but refused to preside over Georgiana’s funeral.
“What then are we to do with the woman taken in adultery?” the Scarborough minister asked, the sudden increase in his volume jolting me back to myself. “We have heard that we are not to stone her, that we must first ponder our own sins, our failings, our manifold faults. But—” He paused.
Here it came—the stone throwing.
Edmund ran his hand over his forehead.
John Eade bit his bottom lip.
Old Mrs. Robinson leaned forward, her breath bated.
“But a woman who commits adultery is committing a sin that drags many down to Hell. Not only herself or the man whom she has tempted away from the path of virtue. She infects her husband, her house, all who come near her, with her wanton deception. She sacrifices her home for a fleeting pleasure, and the best that can be said of her is to question her sanity.”
I brought my handkerchief to my mouth to stifle my angry laugh with a cough.
And what if her husband is the one infecting them? I wanted to ask. Or, worse yet, what if their house was rotten from the very start?
But the thing was that ours hadn’t been. The change had been creeping, almost imperceptible, and my realization that it had all gone wrong had been too. There hadn’t been one day when Edmund’s kisses had stopped or when we no longer had anything to say to each other. I hadn’t treasured the last time he slipped in beside me as I slept, just to dream away the night together, or the last look of understanding that had passed between us over the children’s fair heads. All that had simply faded and wasted away. Maybe because I was older, or he was, or we both were. Maybe because we had been wrong to think what we had to be love at all.
Yet there had been a moment when the nail was hammered in and the case closed, when our happiness had evaporated forever.
Georgiana had come into the world on one of those days when workmen down tools to lie back in the long grass and boys from the twin villages swim naked in the Ouse, whooping to each other. Her delivery had been easier than with the others. Dr. Crosby was tending to me, as he had done with Ned, his eyes full of kindness.
Agony, release, a first triumphant cry.
He’d placed my darling in my arms and said, “What a beautiful, healthy girl, made for midsummer.”
I basked in my absolute happiness, in the radiating love that had been tinged with sadness and weighed down by expectation before. “Georgiana,” I whispered. “You will be the sunshine of our lives.”
For the next few years she was.
I didn’t wish to employ a wet nurse as I had with the others, but instead fed her myself. I could interpret her every expression and movement, from the curlings of her fists to the unfurlings of her toes. As soon as she could walk, she ran, hurtling along hallways, chasing her older siblings, racing to “Papa,” who met her invasions of his study with a smile. Unlike her older sisters, she was musical. She clapped her little hands in time to songs. She joyed to see mine skid across the keys.
I don’t remember any winters in the years we had her with us. So it’s fitting that the day that changed everything—a Monday in March—was unseasonably warm.
Flowers had bloomed too early, the birds were all a-chatter. Yet I’d felt ice cold, though my robe was drenched with sweat and sticking between my shoulder blades. In the weeks she’d been ill, I’d thought my love alone could protect her. Now I wasn’t so sure. I’d raised my eyes to heaven and tried to pray. Save her. Save her. Take me instead. But the words wouldn’t come.
Just then Georgiana had gasped, coughed up a newer, blacker, more pungent blood, and gone limp.
“She has left us,” Marshall said, resting her hand on my shoulder. “God has taken her.”
And I fell to my knees, holding my baby and bellowing like a milk cow divided from her calf, pleading with my Georgie, trying to shake the life back into her.
Dr. Crosby—there at the end as at the beginning—had wrested her from me, closed my daughter’s eyes in one deft, practiced motion, and carried the news to Edmund, as if the whole house wasn’t already shaking with my cries.
It was up to Miss Brontë, dry-eyed but quivering, to tell the other children, whom I would not see. They looked too like my darling. What if my all-enveloping grief confirmed to them that their sister had been my favorite? And even if they did in time prove a comfort to me, what was to stop this cruel world snatching them from me too? I stayed away.
Dr. Crosby left the house, leaving me to keep vigil by Georgiana’s body alone. My husband did not soothe me. Instead, after thanking the doctor for his efforts, he locked his study door.
“Suffer little children to come unto me”: those were the words he’d had carved on my Georgiana’s gravestone. She might be at peace, but God didn’t seem to care for the suffering He left behind.
“A powerful sermon today, I thought, Lydia. Don’t you agree?” said my mother-in-law, gripping my arm so hard she left marks as we walked down the aisle.
The poor were waiting for those in the front pews to file past them. A seagull peered its curious head around the left of the open double doors.
“Yes, Mrs. Robinson,” I said.
“A reminder to us of our wifely duties. Be sure you remember how lucky you are to have those. My daughter, Mary, why, the devotion she shows to Charles Thorp is an example to all! My poor Jane dead—what?—four years now? The good Reverend Eade will never marry again for grief. And my own husband departed this world more than forty years ago. I loved him, for all I stooped to marry him. I was a Metcalfe before.”
I nodded. It was her usual monologue. I dropped my gaze to study the intricate geometric tiles. I’d done this before. The maze was inescapable. And yet I followed each twist and turn as if the next tile, or the next, would break the pattern.
God, how I hated her. How I’d triumphed when Edmund had at last sent her away from Thorp Green Hall, although it had taken until my third pregnancy and a threat that I would set fire to the house or throw myself from the roof before he’d told her she could no longer live with us.
“For your husband’s family must always come first, Lydia,” Elizabeth Robinson continued. Her nails dug into my flesh. “Edmund says you harangue him about visiting your father in Staffordshire or your sister in Derbyshire, and that you’d gad about the North of England unaccompanied if you had your way. And that is no way for a wife, or any woman, to act.”
“My sister, Mary, writes that my father is ill,” I said, as we left the church. I pulled away from her to free my arm and shield my face from the direct sunlight. “I wouldn’t wish to go to Yoxall Lodge too late, as I did with Mother.”
Old Mrs. Robinson nearly took my eye out as she opened her parasol. “And what use would you be, my dear?” she asked, already waving to an acquaintance, as worship turned to gossip in the crowded churchyard. “You’ve never been a natural nurse.”
THE SCARBOROUGH SEASON WAS in full swing. Over the next few days, there was hardly an hour when invitations did not arrive for Lydia, Bessy, and me, asking us to join dinners, dances, entertainments, and card parties. Bessy must have known that she and I had only her sister’s face to thank for the courtesy. We weren’t invited on our own accounts, and that was just the same as not being invited at all.
I let Miss Brontë play chaperone as often as I could avoid attending any of these diversions myself. It gave me some pleasure to imagine her making small talk with the more fashionable companions and governesses ranged around the edges of whichever room “society” was overrunning today. What would she speak to them about? The folly of parties and the edifying nature of solitude? I’m sure she criticized every family in Scarborough in her notes to Emily and Charlotte.
Yet the natural, and equally unattractive, alternative to these evenings was engaging in the interminable games of whist that my mother-in-law, Edmund, and John Eade delighted in. I could hardly fan my hand wide enough to obscure my yawns.
Tonight I had conjured up an excuse to forgo both activities. I’d take Mary and Ned—still deemed “children” and so in need of some attention—to the concert at the Spa Saloon. I’d bid Branwell join us in an hour or so. It was safer that way, for if Edmund didn’t see the tutor leave with us, there’d be no reason for him to question the children or me about our behavior later.
We set off late. A letter from Dr. Crosby had distracted me. He wrote that Harry Thompson had been sorely disappointed. Instead of his expected heir, his wife had brought forth a girl. And just when we’d been about to leave, I’d caught sight of my reflection and had Marshall set upon the forest of grays along my parting.
By the time we entered the concert hall, the performance had begun, the place was packed, and there was no hope of fighting our way to our seats.
We were a sorry trio. Me, twisting toward the entrance to check for Branwell, Mary on her tiptoes but still failing to see the stage, and Ned falling back against me as if he were a boy half his size and age.
“Ned, you are too heavy for that.” At a pause in the music, I pushed him off me, shifting my weight from one foot to the other and trying and failing to find a stance that was more comfortable for my back.
Another pair of suited and sweating men had materialized onstage. Their bald heads bobbed above the crowd, disappearing between bows. The hall had erupted into a cacophony of coughing and chatter between performers, and the silence was not absolute when the first man raised his flute to his mouth and played. It must hurt, the disinterest. Or maybe this musician, like the mediocre players who had preceded him, was here only for his meager pay.
Where was Branwell? Shouldn’t he be here by now?
But the second player brought his instrument to his lips and my chest swelled with the lower, richer note, long and mournful below the bright birdsong of the melody. In spite of myself, I leaned forward, craning my neck as if by making out the man’s features, I could understand.
Around me, gentlemen still cleared their throats, Mary frowned, and Ned fidgeted, but I was spiraling above them, pulled in by the flutist, whose pace increased and notes quavered higher, weaving above and below his partner’s tune, like the pied piper dancing round the bend in the road, ever out of sight. The concert was no longer just an escape and a pretense. Here was passion, here was music.
I dropped my chin, closed my eyes, and focused on my breathing, drinking in the beautiful confusion now that it was impossible to know whose was the first line and whose the second. Would they—could they—reach the end of the piece and divide? Shake hands at the close of the concert and walk home alone? Or would that be an insult, a denial of what they had shared, as it was each time I dismissed Branwell Brontë, ignoring, as he would put it, the “cues of our nature”?
A tug on my hand, a tether binding me to earth, lest I floated away and never came back. Branwell. His face flickered into focus between my lashes.
“Are you well?” he whispered, our closeness going unnoticed in the crush. “Lydia, are you faint?”
“Tonight,” I said, smiling at his concern and clasping and unclasping his hand.
Music. This was my religion, a faith distinct from that of John Eade or Edmund’s mother. The sermon on Sunday had only confirmed it. Their hell didn’t hold as much fear for me as their heaven, for it was cold and sexless, sanitized and chaste.
Branwell’s brow furrowed. He could not read me.
“I will come to you,” I said, just under my breath, pulling him closer. “It would be a sin not to. To resist.” I inhaled him.
His lips parted. He was trembling.
“Do not ask me if I am certain,” I said. In his desire for affirmation, he might make me retreat.
I dropped Branwell’s hand and turned toward the stage, then ran my fingers through Ned’s soft hair.
The music washed over us in wave after cleansing wave. I knew—hoped—that Branwell heard in the music what I heard, that his soul was vibrating at the same frequency as mine. The thought stilled the ache in my back and left me dripping with happiness.
At the final applause, the crowd pulsated and swirled like boiling broth. Our party was among the first to emerge into the balmy air, although Mary and Ned weighed me down, clinging on to each of my arms as if they’d been years younger.
The children were tired, and I should have been too, but my feet hardly seemed to carry me. Mary whined and Ned stomped, but I floated, not glancing at Branwell but staring straight ahead. The notes inside me soared even higher, sustaining me through the slow, tedious walk home.
PARTING WITH BRANWELL DID not hurt tonight. Rather, it was a relief.
I couldn’t meet his eye as we waited before the door of Number 7 at the Cliff Lodgings for the man to admit us, so stared instead at the sky. The servants had forgotten to light the lamps around the door, and there was barely a moon. But the stars shone back at me, constant, unmoved by our human dramas.
Branwell played the jester, shaking Ned’s hand and making Mary an elaborate bow. He even managed to draw a giggle from her after an evening when she’d been more sullen than grateful.
“Good night, Mr. Brontë,” I said.
“Good night,” he repeated, flashing ten fingers.
Ten minutes.
I nodded and sailed past the footman, not glancing back.
Inside I was spinning, like a spider descending from her web. In moments, Branwell and I would be in each other’s arms. We had come close before, snatching at each other, engaged in an elaborate and futile tug-of-war, without quite crossing into the territory that would damn us. But it would be different now. Tonight our actions would be slow, deliberate. We would be prostrate, exposed, vulnerable to attack.
The excitement of it dried my mouth and turned my arms to goose-flesh, but still, something inside me twisted in rebellion as the children kissed my cheek good night. I pulled Mary closer and tried to embrace her (it wasn’t her fault, after all, that she was at a miserable age) but she was hard and angular. I kissed her hair, released her, and shooed her away.
Marshall brought a jug of water to my room, and I splashed my face, more to remove the lingering sensation of Ned and Mary’s lips than to prepare myself for Branwell.
“Mr. Robinson and my elder daughters?” I asked, not bothering to complete the sentence, as Marshall unlaced me.
“They went to bed an hour ago, madam,” she said. “Will that be all?”
“Yes, Marshall. Good night.”
There was no need for any special preparation. I’d done enough of that for Edmund, arranging and plucking myself before bed like a fowl being readied for the oven.
Tonight, for the first time, I would go to a man as I was—without caring what he thought of me—and go to him as a lover rather than a wife.
I could not risk bringing a candle into the hallway, and it was difficult to navigate in the dark. How much easier would it have been at Thorp Green Hall, where I knew the outline of every piece of furniture, the pitch of every creaking floorboard. But then again, there would have been an even deeper depravity in that, in going to Branwell in the place I had entered as a triumphant bride.
My hip, unprotected by my flimsy summer nightgown, struck a table and I cursed. I froze and listened hard for any movement. I couldn’t be caught sneaking out dressed like this. But there was silence. I rubbed my side so the stinging would subside, following the edges of the bone and wishing the lines of my body were softer and more curved, as they had been in my youth, pillowed by plump and malleable flesh. My body seemed alien without my crinoline. For so long its outline might as well have been the shape of me. I had become as useless as a doll or a puppet without legs.
Our plan hadn’t been precise, but Branwell should have the sense to linger outside. I didn’t wish to be out there alone. And then—well, we had nowhere to go. Branwell’s room shared a wall with the one where William Allison and Bob Pottage were sleeping, and smuggling him into the family’s apartments was unthinkable. I’d have to lie down in the stables like a dairymaid, with my shift around my waist and hay clinging to my hair.
A beam of light. The front door was open?
I smiled. Branwell. Silly, impatient. He would grab me the second I stepped outside, push me against the wall, and burrow his face in my neck and hair, not caring that the newly lit lamps by the doorway illuminated us, in plain line of sight from the other apartments. Seeing Elizabeth Robinson’s horrified face pushed up against the glass, with John Eade aghast beside her, would almost be worth it.
I pushed the door and stepped into the near-blinding light.
But there was no Branwell.
A night mist was descending on our lodgings, obscuring the stars. My skin tingled, although it was not cold.
Being locked out would be disastrous. I wedged the door in place with two large stones, before stepping into the shadows and inching toward the servants’ quarters.
Black.
“Branwell,” I breathed every few yards, but there was nothing except the low hum of my pulse in my ears. It had been at least ten minutes, hadn’t it? Where was he?
My slippers slid noiseless through the grass. Thank God it hadn’t rained in weeks, and there was no mud to sketch telltale trails of green and brown across the ivory silk.
Was Branwell holding back to watch me approach through the fog, a spectral figure in white? Could he anticipate my breath and scent and the incongruous warmth of my skin?
My foot met only air, and I stumbled. I reached out to save myself and scraped my palms on the rough brick of the outbuilding. Ah yes, a manicured flower bed skirted the perimeter. It would be disordered now by a patch of trampled sunflowers.
The humming grew more insistent.
That stupid, ungrateful boy. He was late. I should go back and hide under my sheets, resolve to set aside my foolish cravings, and not condescend to speak to Branwell again. But then the weight of my loneliness would suffocate me as it had before I’d known him. I’d be buried deeper, unable to reach Georgiana although she was beside me, clod after clod of earth piled higher above me, and Edmund farther away—above—than ever.
Maybe Branwell had also thought to go to the stables and was ahead of me? Was he stacking the bales to fashion a rustic bridal bed?
I hurried in that direction, seized again by the euphoria I’d felt at the concert.
There, beyond the carriage house, a feeble light was just visible through the crack of the stable door.
Inside was comfort, salvation, love.
I flew in as fast as I could without hitting the door off the wall, ready to throw myself into Branwell’s arms and tell him anything that he’d wish to hear. Even that I loved him.
A scramble, a shout, a flurry of ringlets and petticoats.
“Lydia?” I gasped. My look of horror must have mirrored my daughter’s.
She stood mute.
“I can explain,” said a man, a boy, to my Lydia’s right whom I’d hardly registered.
He was wearing an old-fashioned military jacket, unbuttoned at the front, but was otherwise clothed. Lydia was dressed only in her chemise, corset, and petticoat.
I was more naked than either of them. I drew my hands to my chest, conscious of the shape of my breasts, and glanced over my shoulder. If Branwell were to appear now—
Lydia’s expression metamorphosed from terror to surprise at my silence. “Mama?” she whispered. “I am sorry. We were only talking.”
I laughed and slumped onto the mounting block, my body shaken by something between mirth and agony.
The scene, lit by a solitary candle, was ridiculous. The virgin begging forgiveness from her whorish mother, the strangely familiar boy acting the part of a cowardly soldier, and old Patroclus lifting and replacing his hooves and looking from each of us to the next, as if shaking his head in disbelief, shocked at this unprecedented disturbance to his slumber.
“Henry, say something,” said Lydia, running her hands through her hair to dislodge a stalk of hay.
“Henry Roxby, Mrs. Robinson,” the boy stuttered, extending his hand, although we were too far apart to touch. “A pleasure to meet you again.”
Again?
A vision came to me, his face but even smoother and younger, his muscular legs hugged by tights. This was the actor Harry Beverley’s boy. He was just in a different costume.
“Lydia, come!” I said, standing and holding my hand out toward her, although I kept the other clamped across my chest.
“Mrs. Robinson, I love your daughter,” shouted Roxby, the words bursting out of him. “We have been writing to each other for a year, and we wish to be married.”
“To be married?” I repeated, staring at Lydia to see if this struck her as absurd. “Lydia, you have not lost—?”
“Oh no, Mama.” Lydia clasped my hand, tears pooling in her brilliant azurite eyes. “I would never be so foolish.”
I could have slapped her. At eighteen, she had more sense than me. She knew her body wasn’t to be given away, that she’d been bred only to be valued, bargained for, then bought.
“Mr. Roxby,” I said, trapping Lydia’s hand beneath my arm. “You will leave and never speak to my daughter, my family, or me again. Do you understand?”
“Lydia?” The boy turned to my daughter, his eyes as watery as hers. “Will you be so cruel?”
Her peony mouth opened, but no sound came out.
I held her hand tighter against me, trying to remember the grasp of her baby fist, but I hadn’t tended to her then. Marshall had. I could only recall Georgiana’s fading grip and the salty, sweet taste of her fingers when I’d nibbled her nails to protect her from herself in her delirium.
“Mrs. Robinson?” Branwell appeared on the threshold. He was fully clothed. Thank God. And his formal manner made me think he’d been listening to our dramatics for some time. “Is anything the matter? I stepped outside to smoke my pipe and heard voices.”
“Mr. Roxby was just leaving,” I said.
Henry surveyed the newcomer, weighing up his own advantage in terms of height against Branwell’s broader shoulders and the fiery Irish temperament suggested by his hair.
When Branwell took a step forward, this seemed to decide the boy.
“Write to me!” Roxby called in Lydia’s direction, before scurrying past all three of us. Soon he was absorbed by the mist and the dark.
“Mr. Brontë,” I said, my voice cold and my expression fierce, hoping to convey the double import of my words. “Your discretion is required and appreciated. Lydia made a mistake tonight but, thankfully, not a fatal one.”
Branwell looked as if he might cry too.
Just as well Lydia had not noticed. She, deceitful girl, was contrite and weeping into my shoulder.
“My husband must never, ever know what transpired tonight,” I pressed on. “And, in time, we will forgive Lydia. Do you understand?”
Branwell dropped his chin to his chest. “I understand, Mrs. Robinson,” he said, his voice hollow.