Bronte's Mistress

by Finola Austin

  Kiss my nieces, and kiss my darling nephew twice, for me. And do let me know how Edmund likes your plan of forgoing Scarborough for Derbyshire this summer. Your mother-in-law has you near her the rest of the year, there is plenty of space at Allestree, and we would all so love to see you.

  I remain, your most affectionate sister,

  Mary Evans

  29th March 1844

  Thorp Green Hall

  How should I address you? Sweet forest nymph, ever out of reach? Cruel queen, banishing your most faithful servant from your sight? Lydia Gisborne, your true name restored to you once more? I cannot now refer to you by any other.

  Why do you torture me with your coldness these last few weeks? We both know it will take more than walls to divide us. Absence will not diminish the intensity of my passion, nor closing your eyes detract from the perfect symmetry of our souls.

  The kiss we have never shared hangs over us like Damocles’s sword, inescapable, inevitable.

  You claim the sanctity of your marriage vows.

  I say we are subject only to the cues of our nature.

  You are wasting away before me, my love. You are the very picture of grief. Your eyes reproach me, whether I come close or stay away. I wander through the gardens each night, the cold eating at my hands and face, as I study the solitary light in your window. Yet I am hot—with desire, yes—but also with hatred for the man who neglects you, the husband in name only whom you are true to even yet.

  Unfair! Unequal! You will burn this paper, although it is a piece of my heart, while I worship the very ground on which you walk.

  Lydia, the power is all yours. Summon me, any time and anywhere, and I swear I will come to you. No task is too small or too great, no hour too late, no service too insignificant.

  I yearn for the freedom of the summer months, which must throw us into closer proximity.

  Ever at your service and hopeful that Love must triumph, I sign myself,

  “Northangerland”

  15th April 1844

  Green Hammerton Hall

  Lydia,

  What is this nonsense I hear about you and Edmund not visiting Scarborough this summer? It is too ridiculous. I tried to be forgiving when you did not come to my luncheon on Easter Sunday last week. Why, your husband himself has called it a “highlight of the season”! You claimed indisposition and I chose to believe you, although your “illness” robbed me of a chance to see my grandchildren and my only son.

  But to disrupt my holiday plans!? And talk of going to Allestree Hall to your sister and that political husband of hers (I mean it in the worst possible sense)? Lydia, what is the use of Derbyshire? The waters at the spa in Scarborough are the very thing to settle your nerves or cure whatever it is that is wrong with you. Your capriciousness is too much for an old woman to bear.

  I write to Edmund by the same post telling him that this just won’t do.

  The Reverend Eade has already promised to join us this year (dear John, the only reminder I have of my dead daughter, Jane). You must not think to pass up on such edifying company. Spiritual succor is as necessary to your health as adequate medical supervision, something I doubt that upstart gossip John Crosby is providing.

  I also include information regarding two alternative and well-regarded physicians, a Dr. Simpson and a Dr. Ryott, whom I’ve been suggesting Edmund consult on his own behalf. Dr. Simpson is a York man. Fancy, he was even president of the Medical Society for a time. And Dr. Ryott comes with the highest recommendations. If they cannot “cure” you, only G-d can.

  How is it that I, who was born a Metcalfe, a woman still in possession of all her faculties at five and seventy, is connected to such a family of invalids, I don’t know, but I cannot have you go on so on my watch.

  It is high time you thought of getting those girls married (I said the same thing to my daughter Mary of the Thorp girls). Lydia will be nineteen before long and we both know her looks will decline from then. She has a pretty face, yes, but unfortunately she has inherited her figure from you and a larger bosom does have a tendency to sag with age. Bessy is as wild today as she was at ten, and Mary—well, at least that girl is biddable.

  I will visit Thorp Green Hall next week to put things to rights. Do see to it that I don’t have to converse with the insolent tutor or his plain and pious sister, and that you keep that ugly lady’s maid of yours out of my way.

  I remain your caring and long-suffering mother-in-law,

  Elizabeth Robinson

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  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 sto
ne 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 w
ith 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.