“YOU HAVE TO COME with me, ma’am. Now.” Panic was written across Marshall’s wan face.
“What is it? It is not—? Is he here?”
She nodded, and I gripped her arm tight.
“Lydia, must you whisper with the servants?” my mother-in-law called across the front room of our Scarborough lodgings. She was lying on the chaise with her eyes, mercifully, closed, fatigued from “too much sunlight.”
“I’m not whispering. Maybe you’re going deaf?” I called out as loudly as I could without shouting.
I steered Marshall through the door, down the hallway, and into the garden.
“Well?” I rounded on her.
“You dismissed me for an hour or so, ma’am, and so I went with the others to see the new train come in from York.”
“The others?” I squeezed tighter.
“Just some of the Scarborough servants, ma’am. Nobody as knows Mr. Brontë.”
“Go on, go on.” A lump was rising in my throat as it had when I was a girl and one of my brothers had run to Father, saying I’d struck him. And I had. But I’d had right on my side, and if anyone else had had such a provoking brother, they would have done the same, and even if they wouldn’t have, well, that was my mother and father’s fault too, wasn’t it? For where was I to learn except from them?
Marshall looked at her arm, and I released her.
She spoke on. “It was such a to-do. Hundreds of folks had gathered, with the children and women waving flags and handkerchiefs, and street sellers racing their model engines. I never seen nothing like it. Then the train was here with a confusion of noise and smoke. A lady fainted away at the sound of the whistle. It rounded the corner so fast I must say it took my breath away. Gentlemen spilled out of all the carriages, brandishing their top hats, their faces red from the thrill of it, and the wine I daresay.”
“Never mind all that, Marshall. Mr. Brontë was there?”
So much for John Crosby’s promises: I will watch Brontë and ensure he doesn’t overdo it. It was always the same when men got together, away from the critical eyes of their womenfolk.
“I was about to turn back when I saw him emerge,” said Marshall. “He was one of the last. I couldn’t believe my two eyes, but it was him, all right. On the platform and swaying so much I feared he would fall onto the tracks. I sent the others away, said he was a cousin of mine, for I was afraid what he might say of you. When I reached him, he was talking of the railway, how they’d ill treated him once and had now done so again.”
“But did he come with you without protest?”
“Oh, yes, ma’am. He recognized me all right, though he said once or twice you might have greeted him yourself. How he thought you knew he’d be on the train, I don’t know. Kept talking about souls, he did. Connections, messages that can be sent through the air. At first, I thought he was talking of the telegraph, but I reckon it was some sort of magic. Love that defies the laws of nature and even God, madam. That’s what he said. There was no reasoning with him, so I put my efforts into helping him walk straight. He’s safe now. And I fetched him some water.”
The wind stirred, buffeting the grass and forcing the sunflowers into graceful and sweeping bows.
“Oh, Ann Marshall,” I said, overflowing with a sudden rush of tenderness toward her. “You are the best servant that a lady could ask for.”
Her cratered face flushed crimson in patches, but her expression registered only alarm. Servants hate nothing more than when their masters act out of character. “But whatever’s to be done with Mr. Brontë, madam?” she asked. “Will you see him?”
My heart was tied to a spiraling anchor. “I suppose I must,” I said.
She led the way past the buildings that made up the holidaymakers’ homes, around the stable where I’d found Lydia with the acting boy—was that only a year ago?—and along a path that snaked down the side of the Cliff itself, a path I’d chided Ned for using once. It was rocky and steep with no railing. One misstep and you’d tumble like an acrobat to the crowded beach below.
“Where on earth are we going?” I called after Marshall, struggling to keep my footing for the third or fourth time. My ankles were weak. On terrain like this, it was tricky to keep to my pattern. Left, right; left, right. I didn’t like to stop on an uneven number.
“We servants call it ‘the boathouse,’ madam.” She turned to face me so her voice wouldn’t fly from us on the wind. Strands of her hair had come loose from her exertions in the last hour. They streamed around her like a mousy gray mane.
“A boathouse? Up here?”
I didn’t think she could hear me, but she understood the sentiment.
“It’s more of a shed, ma’am. You’ll see.”
Clinging to the promontory was a shack, scarcely six feet high and only a little broader, with an ill-fitting door and holes in the roof. No one would think to lug a boat up here unless it was in pieces.
Marshall fought with the door to hold it open for me. Mr. Brontë didn’t come to her aid. There was just a gaping void where light and warmth would have welcomed me had this been a home. Had the tutor been capable of giving one to me.
“Go!” I cried to Marshall, when we were at last opposite each other, the door threatening to whack into me were she to lose her grip. “Leave me!”
“But—” At least I thought she called “but,” but the wind was even louder now and pelting sand at us, as if for ignoring its angry roar.
“Go!” I screamed again.
This time she obeyed.
I’d just fallen inside when the door closed behind me, shaking the building to its seams.
Darkness and dust, the distinctive tang of men’s urine and the taste of tobacco.
“Branwell?” I ventured, with the same softness I’d adopted for Ned after nightmares. “Branwell, it is me. Don’t be frightened.”
“There, there, she’s come for me. I told you!” I made out Branwell, delirious, crouched in a corner, talking to the walls of the dingy hut. He looked bad, even worse than that day long ago in the Monk’s House. His face was pale, his shirt was untucked, and he seemed to have misplaced his coat.
“Branwell.” I dropped to my knees beside him, entangling my skirts in the cobwebs. What would Edmund’s mother say were she to see me now? “Branwell,” I said again. “Why are you here?”
“Why am I—?” he repeated, but the sentence trailed off. His pupils were so wide that his eyes had lost their blue. Had he only been drinking or had he tasted something stronger? “Why, to save you, Lydia. Crosby—”
“What of Dr. Crosby?”
“He delivered the death blow. Is it true, Lydia?” He grabbed my arms and shook me. “Am I to be banished forever from your sight?”
“Things cannot go on as they are,” I said, slow and measured, wishing I’d bidden Marshall stay so that I had a protector here beside me. “You need to go home. To your father. To Emily and Anne. And to Charlotte.”
“But, Lydia, I love you.”
Branwell had told me that a thousand times, but this one hit me, strong and true as an arrow with a poisoned tip. I nearly called out in surprise at how it conjured Edmund before me, young and shy at confessing the mundane secret of his heart to mine for the first time. We’d been in the library of Yoxall Lodge, while our elders, who’d seen it all before, waited a few rooms away, hushed and mock-reverent as you are with children, counting the interminable days and hours until Christmas.
But Branwell was young, behind. He did not know. He felt each cut as if it were the first. I had been subject to vivisection upon vivisection, in public and in private, had had men peer at my most private parts, examine my soul with judging eyes, prescribe me drugs and rest and prayer to fix me.
“I am sorry,” I said, kissing his crown. My tenderness surprised me. By God, I missed Georgiana, the smell of her, the soft wisps of her newly curling hair.
I felt hope stir in Branwell at this act of compassion on my part, but for me, the end was definite. There was no way back now that he was not just a boy but an infant to me, bare of armor, yesterday’s fool.
A cough.
The far wall moved.
And—
No, it wasn’t a wall at all. The gardener, Bob Pottage, appeared through the gloom. He’d been here the whole time. He’d seen everything. His eyes were wide, transfixed at the scene before him, and he was deathly white.
“Bob—Mr. Pottage—” I started.
It was not one of the Sewells, at least, or William Allison, who’d always thought so well of me. Just soulless, stupid Bob Pottage, who spent his days thinking about cabbages and rosebushes, who understood that steady, predictable propagation, not the intricate irregularities of the human heart.
“I didn’t believe it, madam,” Pottage stuttered. “Though Mr. Sewell and his sister said—I didn’t believe it, e’en when Mr. Brontë spoke of you so.” He pointed an accusing finger at Branwell. “I just came in here for a smoke. The other missus, the master’s mother, hates the smell of it about the garden and stables. But I found him layin’ here. The way he spoke of you! I’d have gi’en him a good braying had he been himself and not in the drink.”
Clumsy, stammering man. And now he held my heart like a quavering nestling in his rough, unready hand.
“Bob!” I crawled forward and grabbed him by the ankle. Lydia had done that to me at two or three years old when she’d screeched so loud I thought the house would fall around us. “Keep our secret, my secret. I’ll do anything.”
“I’m an honest family man, madam. I’ve got six bairns.” Pottage jerked his foot away from me, disgusted.
I hadn’t meant what he thought. But give yourself to one man, and they’ll all think you’d just as easily give yourself to them, or, perhaps, that you have nothing else to offer.
“You have to help me.” My tears fell unheeded to the damp and uneven stone. “At the very least, take him away.” I gestured toward Branwell, who was hiccupping beside me.
“That, ma’am, I can do,” Pottage said. He grasped Branwell’s collar between his calloused workman’s hands and hauled him toward the door.
FOR NINE DAYS I waited, breathless, for the death knell. The railway between Scarborough and York had opened a dangerous portal between my world and Branwell’s, a gaping wound that cut through fields and hills, obliterating paths trodden by peasants for centuries, revealing England’s murky insides, perhaps even disrupting time itself.
Still Branwell’s expected letter of resignation did not come. Only several notes of apology from Dr. Crosby, which I ignored. I was petrified, unable to dismiss Branwell myself, for Ned’s education was Edmund’s domain, or to beg my husband to do so, given his anger the day the Brontës had left for Haworth.
There was fear in Marshall’s eyes when I asked for the post five times a day. I slept late in the morning but could not still my mind at night. At dusk, when the other ladies had all retreated to their bathhouses, I paddled and dreamed of wading out farther and farther. I longed for the sea to embrace me like a watery quilt, as if my body wouldn’t fight and swim and rage against the surf’s dominion, unwilling, even now, to submit.
It was just as well dying was not easy. If it were, women and men would choose it oh so often, in each blinding rush of fresh pain. Instead we soldier through, thralls to that irrational master who bids us “live,” clinging to the hope of waking to a brighter dawn.
Once a day, Bob Pottage made some small pretense to talk to me. And his question when he found me was always the same: “Has Mr. Brontë written to the master yet, madam?” he’d ask. “He must resign. This can’t go on so.”
Yet he was wrong. The world carried on regardless.
We attended parties so numerous that even Lydia bored of them, preferring, oddly, solitary walks. And then there were the picnics and card games and concerts and Ned reciting poetry, eager to impress Mr. Brontë on our return to Thorp Green.
“Could we stay in Scarborough a little longer?” I asked Edmund on a night when he suffered me to sit at the base of his bed and massage his ugly, mannish feet. “What is it that calls us home?”
“What has come into you, Lydia?” He laughed. “Are you actually asking to spend more time with my mother? You must be unwell. But no, you have never looked better.”
An exaggeration, perhaps, but this was not entirely untrue. It was as if I were operating under some species of mania, which brought blood to my face and energy to my once listless limbs. I outdanced our boisterous Bessy at a gathering in the Scarborough assembly rooms and flirted as Edmund liked me to, with a lightness of touch that could cause no misinterpretation. I was the calculated, social creature whom he had married, alive enough for the both of us, an antidote to his constant fatigue and dull conversation.
“We should go home,” Edmund said. “Nathaniel Milner’s widow writes, at last, about the necessity of discussing a union between her son Will and our Bessy. It is high time one of our girls was married.”
Strange. I felt for Lydia when he said that. Bessy’s union would be hard for her. A girl’s vanity is a fragile thing, her worth determined solely by a market run by men. That was why, when my cousin Catherine had married Edward Scott, who would be a baronet, I’d been inconsolable for days.
Nine days and still no letter from Branwell. When I woke that morning I asked at once—although the sun was so high it might already have been noon.
“No letter, ma’am,” Marshall said, tightening my corset, her voice low and serious. “But Mr. Robinson is asking for you.”
This was it, then. Bob Pottage had broken, had told him.
Did Anne Boleyn, kneeling for her execution, feel as I did, walking the hallway to Edmund’s room? I pictured her, chin raised and snowy throat unfettered by her jewels, which were too precious to fall alongside the droplets of her ruby red blood.
But no, Edmund wouldn’t strike me. He wouldn’t force me against the wall. I’d committed the ultimate sin by bringing disgrace upon us, and so lost forever the honor of his touch.
What I didn’t guess was that she would be there. Although Edmund had turned to her at the beginning, when our arguments were rare, I wouldn’t have thought it possible. Yet when I entered Edmund’s room, his mother had been restored to her “rightful place” at his side. She was stroking his hair, with the authority of one who had loved him longer, had thrilled over his every breath and heartbeat.
“Lydia, the tutor Brontë is dismissed,” she said, once I’d closed the door. “Edmund just dispatched the letter.” Her fingers sharpened into points, clawing at his scalp. Edmund’s eyes rolled back in pleasure.
“It is just as well that your mother isn’t here to see your shame,” she added. “And that your father is too senile to know it.”
How Mother had hated her. She’d cautioned me the day Edmund proposed about the consequences of marrying “that woman’s” son. She would have flown at her throat for these insults.
But I no longer had a mother. Nobody loved me now.
I was mute, pleading wordlessly with Edmund, who looked through me as if I were a stranger.
“I always knew she would muddy our Metcalfe blood.” A thickness entered Mrs. Robinson’s voice as she turned and addressed her son. Could it be that she would cry? “But all is not lost. My grandchildren still have half of you in them.” She nodded hard, as if trying to convince herself. “Your servants sneer at you, but at least your neighbors—our neighbors—back home know nothing. And you, Lydia. You can still behave with honor.”
“Edmund?” I ventured, ignoring her. “Say something.”
His mother gave his shoulder a squeeze and walked toward me. “Take to your bed, Mrs. Robinson,” she said, her lip twitching at the mockery I had made of our name. “You are ill.” Her withered face was only inches from mine.
“Ill?” I echoed.
“So ill, so broken, you cannot have your children near you.”
“Is that how it’s to be?” I asked, searching behind her, desperate for it to be Edmund’s voice that sounded the sentence and banished me to the shadows.
“That is how it’s to be,” she said. She brought the back of her bejeweled hand across my face in a decisive, stinging slap, branding me with the fortune I had sold myself for.