Emily's Ghost

by Denise Giardina

  Then one afternoon the headmaster called the three sisters to his study. They stood on the carpet before the desk. Elizabeth, who had never been in the study and who was by nature the most timid, was terrified but kept her arms around her little sisters to protect them. William Carus Wilson studied them implacably for a moment, and then picked up an envelope that lay on the desk.

  “I have a letter from your father,” he said, his voice warm not with compassion, but with import. “Your sister Maria has died.”

  Charlotte cried out and Elizabeth began to tremble. Emily said nothing.

  The headmaster waited and then added, “We have written to inform your father that you, Elizabeth, are often ill as well. We are recommending he send for you to return to Haworth.” Then the Reverend William Carus Wilson stood and came around the desk. He leaned closer and said to Emily, “Do you understand, child? God has called your sister away. It is your fault. It is a warning to you. If you continue in the devil’s ways, perhaps Elizabeth here shall be lost as well.”

  Elizabeth, who had begun to weep, clutched Emily more tightly.

  “God is punishing you, Emily,” the headmaster continued. “When you tell stories about the devil, and bite your teacher, you must be punished, must you not? You will have a taste of what Hell is like. If you are one of the lost, you may at least convince Elizabeth and Charlotte to follow in the paths of righteousness.”

  Emily stared at him. As she stared she called for Agatha the giantess. And then Agatha was leaning down, from very high up. She engulfed William Carus Wilson so that he withered and disappeared like a wisp of smoke. She looked down on Emily and smiled, her green robes flowing about her.

  Did you eat Mr. Wilson? Emily wondered.

  Of course not, the giantess said. He is not real.

  Emily had the strength to look away then. As far as she was concerned, William Carus Wilson had once again ceased to exist.

  2

  When Patrick brought the girls home to Haworth, Emily lingered outside Elizabeth’s sickroom. Aunt Branwell bustled about the bed, or sat sewing, or nodding, while waiting for Elizabeth to beg to sit up and cough, or to ask for a sip of water. Though Patrick would have much preferred a physician, none resided in the vicinity of Haworth and so the family must make do with the occasional visits of the local surgeon, Mr. Wheelhouse. Emily thought he caused more misery than anything. The smells from the room where Elizabeth lay, the large corner room she shared with Aunt Branwell, were of camphor and blood. Emily noted that when Elizabeth coughed, the cloth Aunt pressed to the sick girl’s mouth came away spotted bright red.

  Then Elizabeth died. Baby Anne was not allowed into the bedroom where the corpse lay, but Emily was judged old enough for a brief visit. She was just tall enough to see over the edge of the bed. Elizabeth looked like a wax doll, an effigy of her former self. Her freckles had faded. The story people gathered close, whispering sadly among themselves, and then vanished as well.

  No one could be bothered with Emily. Patrick Brontë was prostrate with grief and Aunt Branwell, who had been nursing night and day, was exhausted. Yet the adults must husband enough strength to order a coffin and arrange for a clergyman to conduct the service, since Patrick had no will to bury his own children. Branwell and Charlotte, who had always been close, went off to console themselves. And so Emily wandered away to the moors behind the house. The house dog, Grasper, followed her, so she was not alone. She crouched amid a stand of bracken and lay down on her back. The dog settled beside her. It was a glorious day in May, not at all the sort of day when someone should die. Emily smelt the fragrant air, listened to birdsong, and watched the clouds lumber like great elephants across the sky.

  Emily, someone said, it wasn’t your fault.

  Emily turned her head. She recognized Maria’s voice.

  Elizabeth is here, Maria continued. She told me what that horrible headmaster said. It wasn’t your fault.

  “No, it wasn’t,” Emily said.

  God wasn’t punishing you.

  “No. God wouldn’t do that, would he?”

  Of course not. How very silly.

  Emily began to cry. “Maria, will you talk to me every day?”

  No. I’ve too much to do here. There’s ever so much to explore. Elizabeth has already gone on, and so shall I. I wanted to tell you, that’s all.

  “Where are you? Where are you going?”

  I met Shelley just now and I’m going to talk to him. After that we shall see. Elizabeth is with Mama so perhaps I shall visit them.

  Emily nodded. It did sound lovely. She would like to meet Shelley someday. She lay quiet for a time and heard voices swirling all round, though she could not make out what they said. Then she got up and went back home to the parsonage. She was hungry and it was time for tea.

  Part Two

  1

  William Weightman was afraid of Haworth; his friends in Bradford, for he thought of them as friends—though he knew there was more to it than camaraderie—had been ecstatic. Perfect for the cause! various ones had exclaimed. You could not be better placed. Take a wager which will blow first, South Wales or West Yorkshire.

  After his experiences among the Tyneside coal pits he thought himself ready for an upheaval. But he had his call, one that scalded the soul, to add the white heat of religious conviction to the cause, like his hero William Wilberforce. He thought it propitious that he shared a first name and a set of initials with the great emancipator of slaves. He had not told these thoughts to his bishop, who suggested Haworth as his destination. Perhaps the bishop knew and was secretly sympathetic; perhaps the bishop was oblivious. But he was an instrument of God’s call one way or the other.

  When William Weightman made his way alley by alley, hovel by hovel, dodging septic effluent as best he could, he stopped to take the hand of a small girl who had wandered out into the air and to wish her good day, making the circuit from Gauger’s Croft to Ginnel to West Lane and back to the Black Bull, where, shaking with both fear and a corrosive anger and drenched with sweat, he had another cider and steeled himself for his first meeting with the Reverend Patrick Brontë.

  William Weightman was not alone in his anxiety. Patrick had awaited his new curate with apprehension. Several years earlier, after serving Haworth for his entire incumbency, after an unceasing round of baptisms, marriages, and funerals—especially funerals—he had given in to the pleading of his children and sent out a cry for help. He was sixty-two years old and suffered from failing eyesight. The work was more and more beyond him. With contributions from the Pastoral Aid Society (and a bit from his own meager income), Patrick scraped together enough to hire an assistant. The Reverend William Hodgson had proved less than satisfactory. He was a cold and formal man who kept his own company. It was rare to receive Mr. Hodgson for a visit to the parsonage, much less to hear from the poor of Haworth that he had come to call.

  Even Patrick did not find much solace in his fellow clergyman. Though he stood as strongly as anyone in defense of the established Church and its privileges, he went for comfort himself, on a Sunday evening when his own duties were done, to the Methodist chapel in West Lane. He found he needed to rest, one of the congregation, and be ministered to. Now and then. He would sit quietly in the back, undisturbed by the preacher—who knew him well and respected him—and pray silently and watch while others sang and wept. The Methodists were not hateful and narrow as were some sectarians, Patrick observed. Besides, they were so close to the Anglicans, like cousins. Their existence, Patrick said more than once, was a reproach to those in the established Church who would turn their backs on the poor. His own dear late wife had been a Methodist before her marriage. Aunt Branwell, who had come to Haworth to tend to the children after her sister’s death, had herself just transferred back from the followers of John Wesley.

  When the Whig government passed a Poor Law Act, supported by the mill owners, Patrick joined his Methodist colleague in assailing it. According to the new law, the churches were no lo
nger to provide charity—instead the poor, the sick, the elderly, must apply for aid at workhouses. After hours of tedious labor they would receive a daily ration of a potato, a lump of cheese, and a stringy morsel of shredded meat. The timing could not have been crueler, Patrick thought, since many in Haworth were laid off due to a downturn in the market for cloth. He opened his Sunday school building for a meeting, and the weavers and mill workers crowded in.

  Patrick faced them and said, “As most of you know, I am a Tory. And this Poor Law has been forced upon us by the Whigs. But I do not stand before you to promote any party. I stand here as a representative of Jesus Christ, to plead for the poor. If hard times should come upon us, and people are deprived of relief, then rebellion may break out as it did in France, and that concerns me as a citizen. I believe this law is contrary to the constitution of England, and that concerns me as well. But most important this law is contrary to Scripture and the teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

  They interrupted with applause on several occasions and stood at the end to acknowledge him. Other speakers followed, all of them radicals and Chartists. Strange bedfellows, Patrick thought. And Hodgson, his assistant curate, spoke briefly. Patrick had appreciated the gesture of support. He also knew that the man’s heart wasn’t in it, not really. The crowd listened politely. Patrick sensed from their reserve that they didn’t really know the speaker. When Hodgson left two years later to take over his own church in Lancashire, hardly a ripple was felt in Haworth.

  Patrick again tried to go it alone. He baptized and he married and he buried. Incessantly. He fell ill himself and took to his bed. When he was somewhat better, sitting up in a chair in his bedroom and looking out the window, Aunt Branwell entered with a bowl of bread and milk. His youngest daughter, Anne, slipped in quietly behind her aunt.

  Patrick took the bowl from his sister-in-law and worked to corral a bit of bread with his spoon.

  But Anne stepped forward and spoke. In her usual way, she hesitated before the words came, as though she had some difficulty forming them, and then rushed to get them all out.

  “You must have an assistant,” said Anne. “If my brother and sisters were not from home, they would stand beside me and say the same. Soon I shall be gone for a governess as well and only Aunt will be here to persuade you. Or to help you.”

  Patrick paused to consider his youngest daughter over his glasses. “And if an assistant is no more help than Mr. Hodgson?”

  “You must try,” Anne said, her voice warm with resolution. And so difficult it was for Anne to speak forcefully, he knew he must consider her plea.

  Patrick despaired of finding a suitable candidate. Most of the clergy he encountered seemed called, as he complained to Aunt Branwell, “to comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted.” He decided to consult the Bishop of Ripon for a recommendation. “Please,” he begged, “suggest someone who might have some sympathy for the poor of Haworth. As for myself, I also could not bear a Calvinist, who would preach the unchristian (to me) doctrine that many people are born damned with no hope of salvation. We all of us here could use a man of hope.”

  To his astonishment the bishop wrote back at once. “Your letter seems providential, for a young man of my acquaintance is set to matriculate from Durham who would fit your needs quite adequately.”

  Quite adequately would be more than sufficient, a beleaguered Patrick decided. The spring and early summer had been unusually damp, promising to ruin the peat harvest and leaving Haworth to face a winter short on fuel.

  As for Patrick, he was by then overwhelmed by family problems. His son Branwell had been in Bradford seeking a living as a portrait painter but had returned, his venture a failure. Branwell spent an inordinate amount of time drinking at the Black Bull. Charlotte had completed a temporary position as governess and seemed out of sorts and disinclined to seek another. Emily had attempted to teach at a nearby girls’ school but fell ill and returned miserable to Haworth. Her father, who feared the ghost of past association with such schools, was not surprised. Only Anne was now gainfully employed at her new position of governess in a local gentleman’s house, but she wrote heartrending letters about her unhappiness.

  So Patrick waited anxiously in his study after receiving word the new curate would arrive that hot August day. When the knock came, he did not wait for anyone else to answer, but threw open the door himself.

  To open a door to a stranger is to open the door to a new life. Both Patrick Brontë and William Weightman sensed it, though neither was aware of framing a thought. Weightman saw a man of advanced years—thin, gray, and slightly stooped though still tall—with the searching gaze of one whose sight is impaired. Patrick, despite his weak eyesight, could make out at close range a frank, open face, youthful and fresh with a pleasing English blush across the high cheekbones. Brown hair with a hint of auburn, brushed forward in the modern manner, registered in a brief moment. But what touched Patrick, what remained with him ever after, was the warmth of the hand that gripped his own, firm and welcoming. As though William Weightman ushered in Patrick Brontë, and not the other way around.

  “You must be—” Patrick hesitated, surprised at his own shyness.

  “William Weightman,” the young man finished for him, and stopped inside as though he had arrived at the place he would rather be than any other.

  And Patrick thought, Here is indeed hope. “Come in, come in,” he said, and calling toward the kitchen, added, “Tabby, our visitor is here. We should like some tea, and bread and butter.”

  The servant Tabby Ackroyd appeared at the kitchen door, a sturdy woman with a smudge on her cheek, her cap askew and a small shovel in her hand, for she had been cleaning out the ashes in the stove when Weightman arrived.

  William Weightman said at once, “May I help?” and indicated the shovel.

  Tabby gaped at him, so surprised she was that a visitor should ask such a thing. Then she managed to say, “Nay, sir, I have just finished. But thank ye kindly.”

  Patrick put his hand on the young man’s arm. “Come in my study,” he said. “We shall talk, and have our tea.”

  “You are most kind,” said Weightman. “It is early for tea. Will it be an imposition?”

  “No, no. I expect you will be tired and hungry after your journey.”

  “I am indeed. Breakfast was far too long ago.”

  “We shall set that right,” Patrick said. “Do you have a trunk?”

  “It is just outside. I shall carry it in myself when we are finished.”

  “Good, good.” Patrick indicated a straight-backed chair by the window and took his own seat at his desk.

  Weightman made mental notes of the parsonage to judge his new situation. The entryway leading to the kitchen was bare save for several framed drawings on the wall. Patrick’s study was also plain, the furniture utilitarian. The only luxury was a cottage piano that stood against the far wall.

  “Do you play?” Weightman asked, and nodded at the instrument.

  “Not I,” Patrick said. “My daughter Emily. You shall meet her, and her sister Charlotte, when they return from their afternoon walk. I have another daughter, Anne, who is away serving as a governess, and the children’s Aunt Branwell is gone for a few days as well, visiting a friend. Then there is my son Branwell.” Patrick stopped a moment as though searching for words. “He is, um, about. He may be back in time to join us for supper. But most likely not.”

  “Ah,” Weightman said. He waited while Patrick removed his spectacles, wiped them with his handkerchief, and returned them to his rather sharp nose.

  “Well then,” Patrick began. “The bishop has written to tell me something about you. You are from Appleby.”

  Weightman nodded. “Yes.”

  “A pleasant place, I have heard,” Patrick continued. “I must confess I have not been to Westmorland.”

  “It is a quiet farm country,” Weightman said, “and not in the way of drawing visitors save those with farm business.”

&
nbsp; “Is your father a farmer?”

  “My father owns the largest brewery in Westmorland,” Weightman answered, his eyes downcast. “He is well positioned because of his trade.”

  Something about the young man’s demeanor gave Patrick pause. He made a canny guess. “Is the elder Mr. Weightman pleased with your choice of vocation?” he asked.

  “He is not,” Weightman said, still refusing to meet Patrick’s eyes. “Nor am I reconciled to my father’s vocation, which contributes to inebriation, and so a great deal of misery.”

  The older man tactfully changed the subject. “And you studied at the new college in Durham. I am curious why.”

  Patrick had indeed been curious at this piece of information from the bishop. He had himself been proud to study at Cambridge, a more welcoming place for evangelicals than Oxford. More welcoming as well for a poor scholar from Ireland, as he had been. His own impoverished background ensured that his curiosity about Weightman’s choice of a school was not based on snobbery. But University College, Durham, was new, it was not Oxford or Cambridge, and he wondered what sort of young man might be drawn to it.

  But before Weightman could answer, the sound of the back door being thrown open could be heard, followed by women talking and laughing, accompanied by the scrabbling of claws on the flagstone floor. A large dog burst into the study. The beast stopped dead at the sight of a stranger and let out a sharp bark, then seemed to determine that anyone allowed into the sanctum of the study to sit peacefully upon a chair must be a friend. A small ruckus ensued, the dog heading straight for Weightman to offer a greeting and Patrick crying “Emily!” A young woman rushed into the room calling with equal vehemence “Keeper!” She reached for the dog but the animal had already placed its front paws on the visitor’s knees and raised himself up. The beast thus arrayed was as tall as the seated man. It offered a slurping kiss, which only partially missed its mark. Emily grabbed Keeper by the collar, but Weightman stopped her.