Bronte's Mistress

by Finola Austin

  I’d feared for my Lydia’s life in the days after Edmund’s death—each tragedy makes the next less unthinkable—but Roxby had written that she was out of danger now. I would be the one to suffer when she heard that her father had left them nothing in his will.

  Allison opened the carriage door with a bow. “Welcome to Thorp Green Hall, sir. I’ll have Joey see to your bags,” he said.

  William Evans, my sister Mary’s husband, nodded toward him, but did not take his hand to quit the carriage. William was a large man and one who hardly knew his own strength. With a jump, he crunched onto the gravel and closed the door himself.

  She wasn’t here.

  “Mary?” I repeated, questioning this time. I walked toward my sister’s husband with my hands outstretched, still staring at the empty carriage behind him.

  “Lydia, you don’t look well.” He took me by the shoulder, his grip powerful, sure.

  “She isn’t here?” I asked, blankly, hating him for not being her.

  “No,” he said kindly, weaving his arm through mine. “I’m afraid my wife is convalescent with a cold. It has, after all, been a busy few weeks.”

  “Busy?” I echoed.

  I’d endured months of the sickroom and doctors, of servants complaining about overdue wages. At night, Edmund had sweated and moaned as I watched over him, but he still struggled to lord over his account book, propped up against his pillows, in the day. It had been months of fear—fear that I would prove unworthy of the task that falls to half the married, as I had been deficient in all my other duties as a wife; fear that everyone would find me out and know that I was just an ignorant child, hiding behind an older woman’s face and a married woman’s name; fear that the money and Dr. Crosby’s letters would not be enough to keep Branwell Brontë away.

  And yet my sister, Mary, was the one who was busy? Too busy to come to me?

  “Our son Thomas was just married,” William Evans said, talking to me slowly as if I were a child.

  “Yes, yes.” I shook my head to unfog my mind.

  “Your dress.” He gestured to the exposed skin at my neck. “Perhaps you had better go to your rooms, to your maid?”

  “Yes. No. That is, then, what will you do?” I said, grasping his arm, overcome with the panic that I was failing as a hostess somehow, that Edmund or his mother or somebody would be angry if I left him outside in the driveway.

  But Charles Thorp, a man who towered over even William Evans, had appeared on the front steps, his greeting booming out toward us.

  “Charles!” William Evans said, untangling his arm from mine. “It has been too long.”

  “Quite, quite. Terrible circumstance, of course,” said Thorp, jerking his head in my direction. I wasn’t sure if the tragedy he referred to was Edmund’s death or the sorry state it had reduced me to. “A lot to tell you. Edmund made me his executor, you know. But first, a brandy?”

  William Evans strode away from me and up the steps, then followed Charles Thorp through my front door.

  The breeze was biting for all that the day was mild. I attempted to close the fastenings of my dress, but my fingers wouldn’t work. My body shook with something between a hiccup and a sob.

  “Madam,” William Allison said softly, placing his rough hand with infinite gentleness where William Evans’s had been.

  “Yes, William?” I said, looking him square in his rosy and wind-worn face.

  “We are all so sorry, madam, about the master. If there’s anything I can do to help, you tell me. Anything, ma’am. I’d do it without question.”

  “Would you, William?” I grasped his other hand in mine. “There might be something. Wait here.”

  * * *

  CHARLES THORP AND WILLIAM Evans’s voices emanated from the library, cut off now and then by my mother-in-law’s strained questions. Hopefully, there would be enough time to go to the study and do what needed to be done before the men went back to deciphering the paperwork, totaling up what I, and my remaining children, had to live on.

  Edmund’s study was as quiet as a mausoleum. It had been months since he’d last spent time here.

  I’d been a little in awe of the place when he’d first taken to his bed. I would only enter for practical reasons, such as issuing the servants’ salaries or recording the collected rents. I hadn’t followed Edmund’s notes blindly, at least where the servants were concerned, but had made adjustments. A little less for that upstart Miss Sewell and the hapless Ellis, a little more for Marshall and Allison.

  When Bob Pottage stood before me, cap in his hands and eyes downcast, I could tell he was expecting the worst. “I’ve six bairns, ma’am,” he muttered, as if I didn’t remember him telling me that before, in Scarborough. Then he added, raising his chin, “And I’m a good worker.”

  “I know you are, Mr. Pottage,” I said, dignifying him with a “Mr.” and opening my own coin purse. “Which is why I’d like to give you this.” I pressed a ten-pound note into his hand.

  His eyes grew wide as serving plates. It was doubtful he’d possessed such a sum before. “Ma’am,” he said, more as an exhale than with his voice.

  “I think the time has come for you to leave us,” I said, retying the bag.

  Pottage nodded.

  “Is there somewhere—at some remove from here, perhaps—that you can go?”

  “We’ve some family in Dringhouses, ma’am,” he said after a pause.

  I suppressed a smile. Dringhouses wasn’t much above ten miles away, but that was far beyond the limit of our servants’ worlds.

  “That should do nicely. You’ll depart tomorrow, shall we say?” I made a point of glancing toward the door. “You may go.”

  After that encounter, I’d come into the study more regularly and often for no reason at all. I would creep into the room in the middle of the bitter winter nights, when my shift in the sickroom was done, just to sit opposite Edmund’s empty chair and watch my breath in the light of a candle. Once I’d even smoked one of his cigars, gagging at the smell and choking on the smoke, but struggling through to the end.

  Charles Thorp had been working his way through the papers methodically, judging from the piles of yellowing manuscript spread across the desk. It had never looked as organized as this in Edmund’s day. But I didn’t care to look at these. I sat in the desk chair, opened three drawers before I found clean writing paper, and then wet the discarded nib pen.

  Mr. Brontë, I wrote.

  I crossed it out and began again on a new page.

  Branwell,

  I send this letter by William Allison. See to it that he has beer and victuals after his journey and, if you can, keep him from Anne so that no one in Haworth will know whence he hails.

  There is no need for you to send a reply. I would rather indeed that you did not.

  I write only to say—

  I balled the discarded paper in my left hand, crumpling the well-formed letters of Brontë between my fingers and fighting back tears.

  My head swam with memories of Edmund signing his correspondence with a flourish, as sure of his convictions and decisions as I was uncertain, unshaken in his authority, while I was like that poplar beyond his window, still standing but swayed by the slightest breeze.

  I write only to say that my husband is dead.

  I had never sat in his chair before.

  And that, when it comes to you and me, all connection must be severed between us.

  My hand juddered, making the full stop into more of a comma.

  Would I could have ended the letter there, but a vision of Branwell’s baby face seemed to beseech me, his tears hanging like ripening fruit on his lashes, even thicker than Georgiana’s. Branwell had not yet accepted life’s capricious cruelties. For him, every pain demanded an explanation. But what could I write? Could I tell him that at Thorp Green, he’d been my distraction, just as, when a boy, he’d been in Charlotte’s shadow?

  No. I could raise the knife but not deliver the final blow. So I libeled the ma
n whose house I had sullied with shame, whose ring I still wore on my finger, whose corpse lay quiet in the anteroom below.

  My husband’s will precludes our union.

  That was what Edmund had said, wasn’t it? That some men wouldn’t surrender their monopoly over their wives’ bodies, even in death? They were the husbands who would wed you to the grave.

  Choose you and I must relinquish all—the home I have created, the friends I have around me, and, worst of all, my children. I must choose and, Branwell, I choose my fortune and the world it represents, a world in which a man like you could never be my equal.

  I pictured him, his face falling at every word, his hand running through his frizzing curls.

  I needed to give him something, some small kindness to hold on to.

  But know, I wrote on, that I will always be your princess in Angria. You will never know me as I am now—an old and unloved widow. There I will ever be young and always beautiful, accepting your arm at the Duke’s grand balls, running hand in hand with you, Northangerland, amongst the bluebells.

  I reread my words and shuddered. They were designed only for effect, as transparent as a child’s first lie. And I had believed Branwell’s flatteries when he’d sworn he saw a musician and a poet in me, Charlotte’s equal, fighting against my chains and screaming at the very walls around me.

  My convulsion turned to a retch. Nausea swept through me like the sickness I had suffered with Ned. My body’s rebellion, which, the doctor had told me, meant that this time, at last, I was growing a boy inside me. But there would be no more babies now.

  I should go.

  The paroxysm passed. I signed and sealed the letter.

  Marshall was waiting for me when I reached my rooms. She didn’t look well herself. She was thin and wan from her exertions in the sickroom. But after taking one look at my face, she guided me to my bed.

  “Marshall, you are very good to me,” I told her, slumping back. “I know that caring for me is not always easy.” I stroked the rough wool of her dress, a decades-old indigo thing of mine that she was trying to pass for mourning.

  She unwound my fingers and wove them between hers, her grip light yet sure as a sparrow’s on a twig.

  “Send William Allison to me when you go,” I said.

  She nodded, with a furtive glance at the letter I still clutched in one hand.

  “Only, do not leave me yet,” I whispered.

  Her other arm slipped around me and I let her rock me, just as she had the children in their infancy. Once or twice she coughed, shaking me from near-sleep, but then she’d still and soothe me.

  “Quiet now, madam,” she whispered. Her breasts were warm and soft for all that her hands were clammy and the rest of her was bony. “It is all over now.”

  1st June 1846

  Manchester

  Mama, is it true? Has Papa left Henry and me with nothing, abandoning his eldest daughter at this time of my direst need?

  He would not have done so without you at his ear.

  You have always hated me. How could you? How could you, my mother, have despised me so when my heart aches with love for the child I might have held, although he never even had a chance to draw breath?

  I loved him before I felt him kick. I loved him, or the thought of him and his siblings, from the day I first met my Henry’s eye. In the theater, in Scarborough, do you remember? Our eyes locked across the crowd and that was it. The course of my life was determined.

  God punish you, even as He holds close my father’s soul.

  Your daughter no more,

  Lydia Roxby

  2nd June 1846

  The Parsonage, Haworth

  My one, my only Lydia,

  Your letter affected me so deeply that I was incapacitated for some days. Charlotte says they feared for my life. Oh, that unfeeling fiend, who once had the honor of calling you his wife! Lydia, must I abandon all hope? I penned the following poem when I recovered my powers of speech and thought to title it “Lydia Gisborne” in anticipation of the day when you will cast off the shackles of your husband’s name and tyrannous last will and testament.

  Yours, even in the face of cruel rejection,

  Branwell Brontë

  LYDIA GISBORNE

  On Ouse’s grassy banks—last Whitsuntide,

  I sat, with fears and pleasures, in my soul

  Commingled, as “it roamed without control,”

  O’er present hours and through a future wide

  Where love, me thought, should keep, my heart beside

  Her, whose own prison home I looked upon:

  But, as I looked, descended summer’s sun,

  And did not its descent my hopes deride?

  The sky though blue was soon to change to grey—

  I, on that day, next year must own no smile—

  And as those waves, to Humber far away,

  Were gliding—so, though that hour might beguile

  My Hopes, they too, to woe’s far deeper sea,

  Rolled past the shores of Joy’s now dim and distant isle.

  8th June 1846

  Manchester

  Mama,

  I was too hasty in my last letter, forgive me. What could you have known of Papa’s will? Men do, I am learning now, often keep us in the dark.

  Henry had told me all was well and that we were making ends meet, but he admitted tonight that, in attending to my doctor’s fees, we have missed several rent payments. If we cannot find the means to pay we will be evicted in one week.

  Send money if you can, Mother, do.

  Ever your darling daughter,

  Lydia

  11th June 1846

  Great Barr Hall

  My dear Mrs. Robinson,

  I write to express my condolences on the death of your husband. I did not hear of it until after his interment last week, or else I would have written sooner.

  Edmund Robinson was a good man and news of his untimely departure must, I think, affect all who hear of it.

  My wife, Catherine, would also have written, but sadly her poor health does not allow for such exertions. She does bid me send you word of her cousinly affection.

  I do not know what your future plans may hold. Do you intend to give up the house? Do not hesitate to write to me if there is any service, however small or large, I can render. And do know that you are always welcome at Great Barr Hall. Perhaps Catherine’s health will have improved by the time you grace us with a visit.

  Yours, with regret,

  Edward Scott

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  DO YOU INTEND TO give up the house? The question haunted me over the next few months, lingering on the tips of my interlocutors’ tongues, although few voiced it as directly as Sir Edward Scott, that old hero of my girlish heart, had in the only letter he had ever written to me.

  Edmund was gone. The carriage bearing his body had crunched over the gravel in our driveway, carrying him from his home one last time, and trundled down Thorp Green Lane, with all of us—Ned, as was to be expected, but also, breaking with convention, Bessy, Mary, and me—walking behind.

  Reverend Lascelles had sprinkled the earth over him.

  Old Mrs. Robinson had stayed in our pew in the chancery of the church, staring up at the plaque dedicated to her daughter, Jane, too overcome to stand at the open graveside.

  And, one by one, on that day and over the months since, the other mourners had melted away, making my isolation complete.

  “Another one of our men gave notice today,” I said as Edmund’s mother and I sat next to each other in my dressing room.

  She was sewing with a steady rhythm in spite of the swelling in her bejeweled, arthritic hands, in the last of the day’s feeble light. Winter was coming, and the nights were starting to draw in.

  My own work sat in my lap, forgotten. I couldn’t embroider when the weight of our futures was upon me. By Edmund’s own calculations, which Charles Thorp had found in a stark addendum to the official accounting book, we we
re in trouble. Even with the land I’d let this summer on the advice of my brothers-in-law, the children and I would be in dire straits within a twelvemonth. No more small sums sent to Lydia in response to her pitiful letters, no dowries for the girls, no Cambridge for Ned, and for me? Who could I turn to with father and husband gone? Must the burden, which neither of them had schooled me for, fall on me?

  “Hmm?” said old Mrs. Robinson. Her eyes looked tired and less fierce than usual.

  I’d nearly forgotten what I’d said to her.

  “One of the laboring men,” I continued, when the thought came back to me. “He married a dairy maid and is to go to Eshelby’s farm.”

  “Loyalty. No servant knows the meaning of the word nowadays,” she started to complain, but I could tell her heart wasn’t in it. She looked exhausted, weak. Maybe now was my chance to tell her.

  “Mother,” I said stiffly. She’d asked me some months ago to call her that.

  “Yes, Lydia?” There was a hint of wariness in her voice when she heard me obey her.

  “With the farmland leased and more and more servants leaving, I have been thinking. It may be prudent for us to go too.” I managed to hold her gaze.

  “Go, Lydia?” She placed her hoop on the side table. “Whatever do you mean?”

  “Dismiss most of the servants, shut up the Hall. Or, better yet, let it. The girls I could send to relatives while I deal with the house, and then we could all three go visiting. Perhaps we will join my sister, Mary Evans, at Allestree Hall in Derbyshire. Ned could live with a tutor. And you could—”

  “And I could what?”

  “Well, you could go home.”

  She drew herself up tall, ready to tear into me, but the truth had streamed across me like a beam of light. She could no longer turn Edmund against me, secure in her prior claim. And that meant there was nothing she could threaten me with.