Bronte's Mistress

by Finola Austin

  “Are you really that unhappy here?” I asked him, as he sequestered the escaped paper amongst the others. “You might have told your father so.”

  He shrugged. “I am as happy here as I’d be anywhere else.”

  The bitterness of his reply shocked me. He was young, unfettered, and the darling of his father’s eye. Could he have felt life’s cruelties already? I don’t want a repetition of what happened at the railway. That’s what the Reverend Brontë had said. Whatever had brought him to this place, and to me, Mr. Brontë had the look of the man who wrestled with demons.

  “And you, Mrs. Robinson?” he asked, the left side of his lip curling. “Are you happy?”

  I struggled between my desperate want of company and a desire to put him in his place, but he went on before either side could win the battle.

  “To lose your mother and your daughter in a year must be a lot to bear. Do you think of her often? I’m sorry, I do not know her name.”

  “Georgiana,” I whispered. I’d missed saying it. “I do.”

  “And when you think of Georgiana, do you dream of some glorious day when she will be returned to you, when the dead will join the living throng, or do you see only the day that you lost her, when she was stolen from you, although she was innocent and you have always praised God and considered Him kind and just?” His rage bubbled below the surface, shooting up like sudden hot springs in the sea of his eyes.

  “I cannot—that is to say, I dwell on it only rarely,” I answered, not looking at him but somewhere beyond him, near the washhouse, turning over each word before speaking, inspecting its honesty.

  Yesterday Ned had run into my dressing room, excited, his foolish fears of a few weeks before forgotten. “Do you know what Mr. Brontë says?” he’d asked, tugging at me. “He says that in Egypt, they weighed your heart against a feather to see if you were good enough for heaven.”

  I walked away from the house, where others would be stirring, sure that Mr. Brontë would follow me.

  “When I come too close to it,” I said, “to thinking of Georgiana, I mean, it seems to me that I am in danger of blinding myself by staring into the heart of the sun.”

  Ned’s talk of an exotic afterlife must have given my thoughts an imaginative bent. I almost cringed at my sincerity but spoke on, my opinions on questions others had never asked me about crystallizing before me, my words tumbling out as if I were afraid I might lose them.

  “Edmund and my father wouldn’t like to hear me say so, but with others I have seen buried, I see nothing, nothing at all, beyond absence and darkness—the same darkness I know will one day swallow me, you, and everyone up.”

  We had passed the last of the outbuildings, the granary, and were now quite alone and out of sight. But which way to go? If we veered left, we’d end up back at the Monk’s House, where Mr. Brontë slept. I made instead for the track that ran through a thick cluster of trees that the children called “the woods.”

  “Mr. Brontë, it is my deficit of feeling that alarms me, then,” I continued. “My eyes stay dry, although when I was a child, they could have watered the world with my tears. But Georgiana’s loss—it burns through me. So I busy myself with ordering Lydia’s bonnets or correcting Bessy’s manners, even though they don’t care for me at all and didn’t even when they were little. Not the way Georgie did when she threw her arms around my neck or called out for me in the night. Only I, not Marshall or your sister, could console her then.”

  I could not remember the last time I had spoken at such length, and panic rose inside me when he did not reply at once. But I shouldn’t have feared. Mr. Brontë was a rebel as much as me, both of us the children of dour clergymen yet unsuited to a life of piety.

  “It is not the same, of course,” he said quietly. “But when I was a child—barely eight years old—two of my sisters died. Our mother had passed four years before. The girls left for school so happy, but first Maria and then Elizabeth came back to us, wasted, pale, and struggling to breathe.”

  “You were at home?” I asked.

  Mr. Brontë nodded. “My father wished to educate me himself, relive his boyhood years, and keep an eye on me. And Anne was still in Haworth too, as the baby.”

  I stayed quiet so that he’d continue.

  “Their deaths were weeks apart, yet the scenes have melded together in my mind. Blood on a pillow. My father weeping. A small coffin lashed by rain on its short journey to the church. How could I think God great after that?” He had drawn alongside me and was gazing at the path, beating back the encroaching greenery with his cane.

  A few more weeks, and bluebells would cloak the woodland floor. Not as brilliant as at Yoxall, my first home, but stirring in me the same longing that spring had awakened in the final years of my girlhood, a yearning for activity, purpose, change. I had thought to hold them in my wedding posy, but my marriage had come in the dead of winter, when the woods around the Lodge were bare and stripped of their majesty.

  “Maria was the best of us,” he said, coming to a complete halt. “The most talented and the most tender. She corrected my father’s proofs before many children can read. She taught Anne and me not just the words of the Lord’s Prayer but the feeling behind them. Maria was just eleven when she left us and yet still it was like losing a second mother. In her absence, Charlotte took up the mantle as the eldest. She has ever fought to be as kind as Maria, and as good, though her nature is wilder, her anger is quicker, and her sense of injustice runs deep.”

  Charlotte again. Not only was this woman clever, but she’d conquered the faults that I could not, and quenched the fire within.

  “You must think I am spoiled,” I said. “To have suffered keen losses only now, when you and your sisters saw so much, so young.”

  Mr. Brontë caught my hand so abruptly that it stunted my breath. “I thought what you said about Georgiana very beautiful,” he said, gripping me so hard that the skin buckled and my bones cracked.

  Heat tingled in my cheeks, and I pulled away, walking ahead, without him playing advance guard. Stems caught at my skirts. The dew sketched a spider’s web over the hem.

  “I did not mean you to think it so,” I told him, the words catching in my throat, for how could I know whether anything I said was true? Maybe I had framed that speech only so he might think me just as clever, just as deep, as Charlotte.

  “No. There is artistry, not artifice, in you,” he said, half to himself. “You too are a poet. I feel it in you when you play and sing.”

  His compliment, if this was meant as one, made me laugh out loud. I was a lady, who dabbled in the activities on which I spent my time. Nobody had ever even pretended to take my music seriously. The weight on my chest lightened, the phantom pressure of his grip evaporated.

  “And you are a fool, Mr. Brontë,” I said, spinning round to face him. “Or maybe just very young.”

  “You may tell me these are one and the same, Mrs. Robinson, but I believe that some of us have souls that are ageless, timeless, and when two such souls meet—” He faltered and blushed. “Have you never felt that there is, or ought to be, something of you beyond you? And if you found that, well, the sheer force of it would wipe all other considerations aside, right every wrong?” He stepped closer, his face inches from mine. “Emily and I have spoken of it often. To resist that call would be as futile as wishing to delay the sun, sitting on the sand in hope of holding back the tide.”

  Red lips, imperfect, flushed, boyish skin, the light aroma of fresh sweat. The fact of his body forcing the knowledge of its existence upon mine, even if his bundle of papers acted as some security that he could not take me in his arms.

  “I fear you have lost me, Mr. Brontë,” I said, stiffening. “You and your nomadic sister, Emily, are too poetic for me.”

  I pushed past him to take the path to the Hall, dodging his protesting arm, and ran back with my skirts scrunched in both hands. Drinking in the air, I smiled with abandon, like a child skipping home from a day of play.
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  CHAPTER FOUR

  EASTER. IT WAS A day when Reverend Lascelles subjected us all to a second lengthy sermon without the relief of the curate Greenhow’s concise preaching, and the occasion of another dreaded ritual—late luncheon at Green Hammerton Hall, home to my mother-in-law.

  I had pleaded for reprieve to no avail and remained stoic when my daughter Lydia came to me begging likewise.

  “The servants appreciate the chance to visit their families,” Edmund had admonished me as I’d hovered by the study door a few days previously. “And it means so much to Mother.”

  “We’re going, Lydia,” I’d snapped at my daughter when she’d interrupted my toilette that morning, as I was focusing on the gray strands streaking my black locks rather than on her fair head in the looking glass. “That’s all there is to say.”

  Edmund, Lydia, Bessy, and I set off in the carriage a little after one, at least three of us wishing we could eat cold meats with Mary, Ned, and Miss Brontë. This party, due to the younger children’s ages, was excused from today’s feast. Would Mr. Brontë join them? I imagined mirth ringing out from him; Miss Brontë giving in to a rare smile; and Ned and Mary chuckling with glee.

  The countryside was chill and damp, the milestones we passed along the short and jolting ride to Green Hammerton familiar—the fallen bridge, the barn where a farm laborer had hanged himself, the old oak.

  My mother’s words seemed to float to me across the years. You’ll never be good enough for that wretched woman, Lydia. Tie yourself to a man that attached to his mama and you might as well be marrying her. But I wouldn’t take the bait. Not today. How difficult could it be to play the obedient daughter-in-law? And, besides, the Reverend John Eade, who’d been married to Edmund’s late sister, Jane, would be there too, and that was sure to be a distraction. Edmund had informed me he was visiting from County Durham.

  We rounded the corner, and the house came into view. Large, it was in a darker brick than ours and covered in matted ivy, which obscured the windows and strangled the many chimney pots. There’d been little to recommend the place when Edmund’s mother had taken the lease around the time Mary had been born, except, of course, its proximity to Thorp Green. I might have proven victorious in the battle ejecting her from my house, but her move here rang as clear as a bugle, letting me know the war was far from won.

  Our coachman, William Allison, handed me down from the carriage. Even he looked far from his cheerful self. Perhaps he was imagining his wife and children eating their Easter dinner without him.

  “So you’ve arrived at last, Edmund,” our hostess squawked at us as soon as we joined her in the parlor, which smelled of decaying flowers and sherry.

  She was an imposing woman, one who had always been more impressive than handsome.

  “Lydia,” (this addressed to me), “you’re too pale and Bessy is getting fat.”

  I kissed the old lady’s parched cheek and watched the girls do the same, viewing Bessy’s figure with something between distaste and defensiveness. I chastised her for eating too much, it was true, but Bessy was taller and more active than the rest of us. It was hardly fair to call her fat.

  “You look wonderful, Grandmama,” said Lydia, who gave out compliments only in hope of receiving them. “I wish I could wear lilac. I do miss color.”

  Her grandmother waved her aside. “Dear John is recovering from a dreadful cold, isn’t that right, Reverend?”

  I noticed John Eade for the first time. He was standing sentinel in the corner, by a tasseled lamp, and watching the proceedings with an expression as morose as if he’d been beside an open grave.

  “A terrible cold, Mrs. Robinson,” he confirmed, with a sniff. “Just terrible. I feared I’d be unable to visit at all. I didn’t wish to subject any of you, and you especially, madam, to such a horror. But your last letter convinced me.”

  “Stuff and nonsense, John!” Mrs. Robinson threw the Reverend toward me and grasped Edmund’s arm. “I am of good Metcalfe stock. It’ll take more than a cold to kill me. Now, to luncheon.”

  I didn’t wish to touch the clergyman’s arm and so merely pinched his sleeve, leaning away from him and trying not to listen to his congested breathing. Lydia and Bessy linked arms and fell into step behind us. This was it, then, the dreaded dinner. We trailed, two by two, behind our hostess, like slaves going to the galleys.

  * * *

  YET IT WASN’T UNTIL the end of our meal, when I was struggling through the final forkfuls of a dry, week-old seed cake, that the expected onslaught came.

  “John brought letters from my Mary’s girls,” Mrs. Elizabeth Robinson began, settling back in her chair—the only one with arms—for a round of interrogation, her favorite digestive.

  “Indeed,” I said, as this comment appeared to be directed toward me.

  “Her Mary” was Edmund’s other sister, the one who, despite her obvious failing in not being Jane, was favored for the large brood of biddable girls and necessary son she’d borne to Charles Thorp, who had the living in Ryton, not far from Aycliffe.

  “Your cousins write so well, and with such penmanship, Lydia, Bessy!” Edmund’s mother continued, turning to my daughters. “And show such care for their grandmama, despite the distance between us.” Here a pause, a sigh. “I thought—didn’t I say so, John dear?—that I would see you two, and your brother and sister, more often now that I am your only grandmother. You might even walk here from Thorp Green were you not so lazy.”

  I winced.

  The Reverend Eade nodded with slow solemnity, closing his eyes and resting his hands high on his domed belly. A dewdrop was hanging from his left nostril.

  “Hmm?” The old woman rounded on Bessy, who jumped in her chair. “Have you stopped and thought, girl, what your life might be like if I were gone as well?”

  “No, Grandmama,” said Bessy, tracing the floral pattern around the edge of her bowl with the tip of her spoon.

  “Duty. Didn’t I say so, Reverend? A decided lack of duty is what defines the younger generations. That is what Mary and Charles Thorp have fought so hard against. Most young people care only for their parties and their gossip and their ringlets.” She shot a glare at Lydia, whose hand froze mid-twirl, a curl still wrapped tight around half her finger. “Not like my Jane.”

  “We are all very happy your health is so strong, Mother,” said Edmund, ignoring her oft-repeated invocation of his dead sister’s name. He took her right hand from where it lay on the table between them and planted a kiss on the raised network of veins. His chin puckered, wedged against one of her rings, a garish ruby that brought out the blotches in her skin.

  “And there is old Mrs. Thompson lying on her deathbed at Kirby Hall.” Edmund’s mother had veered onto an entirely different topic: our grand neighbors. She was gesturing so widely that she nearly smacked a servant in the face as the woman bent in to remove the remnants of a jelly. “Over ninety years she’s lived, and for what? To be forgotten in her own home and ill treated by that brood of spinster granddaughters?”

  “Oh no, Grandmama,” said Lydia, her interest piqued at the mention of the Thompsons. I could practically see the wheels in her head turning as she plotted to bring the conversation around to Harry, the heir. “Miss Amelia, who, you know, is my most particular friend, says they treat old Mrs. Thompson royally. Mr. Harry Thompson even brought her—”

  “Lydia, why do you let these girls interrupt their elders?” Mrs. Robinson blinked at me. “No expense has been spared on them. They’ve had gloves, hats, countless dresses, a governess.”

  This was a point of debate between us. She, who had petitioned for Ned to have a tutor, had told Edmund not once but several times that she couldn’t see what I did all day if I let some other, less accomplished woman finish my headstrong daughters. And educating girls hardly merited such an expense.

  “To hear them, you’d think they didn’t have an ounce of breeding or cultivation between them. You should get rid of that woman,” she concluded with a fl
ourish.

  “Of Miss Brontë?” exclaimed Bessy, dropping her spoon into her bowl with a clang that rang through me. “But we all care for her very much.”

  “Enough, Bessy,” I said as mildly as I could. I gave her shin a sharp kick under the table and watched her eyes grow watery and accusing.

  “Ned’s new tutor, Mother, actually came to us by way of our governess. They are brother and sister.” Edmund, ever the diplomat, dabbed at his beard with his napkin.

  Old Mrs. Robinson smiled. “I see. The father is a clergyman, I think? How fitting that the son should be one too.”

  I dropped my chin so she wouldn’t see me smile. How horrified she’d be to hear Mr. Brontë’s views on God!

  “Mr. Brontë isn’t a clergyman,” said Bessy, too foolish to keep out of the fray. “He used to be a painter and he wants to be a poet.”

  “A painter and a poet?” Our matriarch spoke the words slowly, sounding them out. “How eminently unsuitable. This is your doing, Lydia, I suppose?”

  The good Reverend Eade stared up to heaven as if praying for our souls.

  The smile dropped from my face. Blood rushed to my head. I wasn’t so special. Others also knew of Mr. Brontë’s poetry. It was as if the scene in the woods were playing out before me amongst the half-eaten dishes of custards and preserves, shaming me. The poem, Mr. Brontë’s hand on mine, the words he’d spoken about souls, words I’d struggled to remember precisely since.

  I opened my mouth to speak, but my throat, still coated with crumbs, was too dry.

  “All my doing, Mother,” said Edmund. “I assure you.”

  “Don’t defend her, Edmund,” Mrs. Robinson said. “This tutor is young, I suppose, girls?”

  Lydia and Bessy nodded.

  “Unmarried. Unordained. And you invite this man, this self-proclaimed poet, around your daughters? What were you thinking? There can only be one result.”