The Crimes of Charlotte Bronte

by James Tully

  As I have said, Mr Nicholls was not deceived because it was the sort of answer that he had expected from careful, sly Miss Charlotte. He simply pretended to agree with her, safe in his knowledge that Miss Emily would not be a problem for much longer, and that he might expect no bother from Miss Charlotte when she died.

  From what he says, there was a little kiss on the cheek when they parted, each knowing what was on the other’s mind, but I knew nothing of that because at that moment I had had to creep quietly back to the kitchen.

  I heard Mr Nicholls leave though, and a few minutes after that Miss Anne was closeted with Miss Charlotte in the same room, and with the door once again closed tight. However, I was busy getting the vegetables ready with Miss Aykroyd; so any hopes of getting back to listen were dashed, and it was not until some months later that I learned what had passed between the sisters.

  According to what Miss Anne wrote, Miss Charlotte told her that she had spoken to Mr Nicholls and had told him, very firmly, that she would make his misdeeds known unless he married Miss Emily. That, she said, had quite taken him aback and he had said that he would marry her just as soon as she was well again. Miss Anne took that as the truth for, after all, she had no reason to doubt her sister, and her mind was set at rest. Not only had she been able to share the secrets that had burdened her so much, but now there was to be a happy outcome.

  Of course, Miss Emily knew naught of any of this, and certainly she did not know how angry Mr Nicholls was with her for blabbing to Miss Anne in spite of her promise to him to keep everything secret. On the outside, though, he kept up his show of loving care, and Miss Emily became quite sure that he would marry her as soon as she was well enough.

  That Winter of 1848 was a very cold one, and in December it was bitter. I would dress as warmly as I could, and sometimes I even wore my mittens, but it did no good and the Parsonage was always so cold once you were away from the stove or a fire. I was plagued with chilblains, and everything froze up. On several mornings I had to let the bucket drop quite heavily into the well to break the ice. The dark days dragged by, and with each one Miss Emily got worse until she looked nothing more than skin and bone.

  Miss Charlotte put on a show of concern about her, and she told folk that she had sent away for something for her sister to take, but it was all an act. One day I asked Miss Emily if the medicine was doing her any good, but she looked at me askance and asked what I was talking about. I felt myself going red, for it was evident to me that she knew naught of any medicine and that I had opened my mouth too widely, and stammered that I must have been mistaken for I thought she was taking something.

  As Christmas neared we were all kept very busy getting things ready for the Feast, both at the Parsonage and at home. It was always a happy time for me, and I was quite caught up in the general excitement. I was 20 by then and, in particular, I was looking forward to having some time off so that I could get to the 2 dances that were to be held in the village.

  It makes me sad to think of it now, but in all the hustle and bustle most of us tended to forget about poor Miss Emily, and many a time since I have wondered how she must have felt seeing everyone elso so happy. Mind you, she was never one to complain, and so it was simple for us not to notice how very much worse she must have felt, poor woman. Taken up with myself, I now recall prattling on about my own concerns, and telling her about one certain lad that I was hoping to see a lot more of. Once she smiled and said I was a comely lass, and that she had little doubt that I would soon be leaving them to get wed. I always feel a strong sense of guilt when I recall that talk because it was on the very next day – the 19th – that, to my great surprise, I was told by Miss Charlotte that I was to hurry for Dr Wheelhouse and ask him to come at once.

  As I say, the errand came very much as a surprise to me for, many times, the latest being when I had asked her about the medicine, Miss Emily had told me that she had no time for doctors and so I knew that something had to be very much amiss for her to have changed her mind.

  I ran as hard as I could, holding my skirts up out of the mud as I went which made a lot of folk turn and look at me, especially some lads, but I did not care. Miss Emily had always been very kind to me and it was the least I could do.

  It was quite a way, and I was puffing, and quite hot for a change, when I got to the doctor’s house, and I had to catch my breath before giving the message to the housekeeper who answered the door. I waited in the hall for what seemed an age before he came out, but he was soon ready, with his coat and hat on, and his little carriage had been brought round so we were quickly back at the Parsonage.

  Somehow I knew as we hurried up the path that something was very much amiss. The front door stood wide open, and everything was so very quiet. As we got inside I could see Miss Anne at the end of the hall, near the bottom of the stairs, and she seemed to be weeping. At that moment, though, Miss Charlotte came out of the sitting room and said quietly, ‘I’m sorry, Doctor, but you are too late.’ She told me to go into the kitchen, and then led the doctor into the room where, with the door being ajar, I could see Miss Emily lying on the sofa, with Mr Brontë sitting in a chair pulled close to it.

  I walked across the hall to the kitchen and by then Miss Anne was in a corner and I could see quite clearly that she was indeed weeping, but I said naught. In the kitchen, Miss Aykroyd sat at the table, also weeping, and with her head in her hands, whilst a young girl – whose name I now forget, but who had worked with us for a short time – stood as if not knowing what to do with herself.

  Of course, I knew by then that Miss Emily had passed on, but I asked the girl when she had died, and she told me that it must have happened almost as soon as I had left, because she heard Mr Brontë calling for Miss Charlotte whilst I was running down the path.

  It was a terrible day, and then, what with the funeral and all, Christmas was a very sad time. I still went to my dances, but my heart was not really in anything and I must have been a disappointment to the lad I had my eye on because he seemed to want naught to do with me after that.

  That, though, was the least of my worries because, even though I knew very little then, I felt that something very bad was going on, and I wondered what the New Year would bring for us all.

  [] As usual, most of what we know about Emily’s symptoms comes from Charlotte. She stated that Mr Williams had recommended two fashionable London doctors whom Emily might consult, and that when Emily had rejected their services he had suggested that she might turn to homeopathy for relief. He advised that Dr Epps be consulted, and therefore, in her reply of 9 December 1848, Charlotte sent a description of what she said were her sister’s symptoms in the hope that Dr Epps would prescribe by mail.

  Now the symptoms which she listed coincided neatly with those of consumption, many of which she would have remembered, as both her elder sisters had died of consumption when she was a child – but there was one important, and interesting, omission.

  On the very next day after replying to Mr Williams, Charlotte wrote to Ellen Nussey and told her about her letter of the day before. She stated that she had written to ‘an eminent physician in London’, and had given him ‘as minute a statement of her case and symptoms as I could draw up’. Note that word ‘minute’. Earlier in her letter to her friend, Charlotte told her: ‘Diarrhoea commenced nearly a fortnight ago, and continues still. Of course it greatly weakens her, but she thinks herself it tends to good.’

  So there we have two sentences devoted to diarrhoea in the same letter to a friend but, amazingly, there was not a single mention of it in the ‘minute’ statement sent to a doctor on the previous day! Is that not strange?

  One could understand the omission had it been the other way round and she had mentioned it to the doctor and not to the friend. I do not suppose that diarrhoea would really have been considered a proper subject of correspondence between two genteel Victorian ladies, and therefore it would not have been surprising had Charlotte not mentioned it to her friend. On the other
hand, it would not only have been acceptable but very relevant to have included the symptom in a letter to a medical man. It was a most peculiar omission but, as we shall see, there was a very good reason why it was not included.

  I think that we may safely assume that Emily did not suffer from diarrhoea during the early stages of her ‘illness’ because, in that same letter to Dr Epps, Charlotte told him that her sister had occasionally taken ‘a mild aperient’. Now one does not take a laxative if suffering from diarrhoea, and so we know that only one of the two statements is true. Either Charlotte was lying about the aperient, and Emily was subject to diarrhoea throughout the whole of her illness, or she was telling the truth. If she was not lying, then her sister must have been slightly constipated during the first two months of her incapacitation, but was affected by constant diarrhoea from the end of November.

  There are two important reasons why I have gone into this matter at some length, distasteful though it may be. The first is that, if Charlotte was not lying about the aperient, the onset of Emily’s diarrhoea coincided with the beginning of the poisoning. Then, secondly, comes the question of why Charlotte concealed her sister’s distressing symptom from Dr Epps because – let there be no mistake about it – conceal it she did. Now why should she have done that? The answer, to my mind, is simple. It is because diarrhoea is a very common and well-known symptom of irritant poisoning, and Charlotte did not wish to alert Dr Epps to the possibility that all was not as it should have been.

  Actually, she need not have worried herself. Diarrhoea often occurs during the later stages of tuberculosis, but it would seem that she did not know that.

  All this, of course, goes a very long way in confirming what Nicholls told Martha, namely that Charlotte had every reason to suppose that Nicholls might be poisoning Emily, but that she did nothing about it.

  It was two days after her momentous meeting with Nicholls that Charlotte sent the list of symptoms to Dr Epps, yet for nearly three weeks Mr Williams had been anxiously advising action on Emily’s illness, and suggesting that she be introduced to homeopathy. In her letters of 22 November and 7 December, Charlotte had told him that she had discussed his suggestion with Emily, but that it had been rejected. Personally, I doubt whether the subject was ever mentioned between the sisters.

  Only after the meeting with Nicholls did Charlotte’s self-defence mechanism click into action, and she decided to continue the correspondence and send the list. Beyond all reasonable doubt, her reasoning must have been that should Nicholls, in fact, poison Emily to death and then, somehow, be discovered in his crime, she would be able to show that, despite anything he might say, she knew nothing of what he had done but, on the contrary, had tried to help her sister. Therefore, I submit, it was for that reason, and that reason alone, that the list was sent but, because she did not wish to queer Nicholls’ pitch, she omitted any mention of diarrhoea.

  Chapter Eight

  ‘Their feet run to evil, and they make haste to shed innocent blood.’

  Isaiah 59:7

  The year 1849 arrived, but the New Year did not seem to make much difference to anyone. There was never any especial regard paid to a New Year during my time at the Parsonage, and in any case the weather carried on as cold as ever, with folk seeming to have little on their minds but keeping warm.

  For my part, I must say that I was more taken up with my own matters than perhaps I should have been. I realize now that I was being selfish and unfair but, because of Miss Emily’s death and all, Mr Brontë had not given us our usual Christmas gifts and it did not look as if we were going to get them. It was Mr Brontë’s custom to hand each of us an envelope with some money in, which I knew that Miss Emily used to get ready for him, and I had been counting on it for a linsey-woolsey skirt that had taken my fancy. I had given Mr Whitehead a few pence deposit on it just before Christmas, and had promised him that I would pay the rest and collect it by New Year. Now I could not, and I did not know what to do.

  So things at the Parsonage went on much the same as ever, but I must say that it was strange to start a New Year with two of the family gone. Mind you, there seemed to be less work, although Miss Charlotte did her best to keep us slaving away at this and that. She did not seem to miss Miss Emily though, and hardly ever mentioned her unless someone from outside the family was about, and then I wondered how she could make up such tales about how sad she was. I thought it odd at the time, though, that she seemed to take to me more. Now I began to get smiles, and indeed she was altogether less dour than usual. She also took to talking to me, and sometimes she would quiz me about the lads in the village I had walked out with from time to time, and quite often I found that I was becoming a little red at some of the things she asked me. Of course, I know now why that was: she thought she had Mr Nicholls where she wanted him and was allowing him hardly any peace.

  He has told me that he tried to put on as good an act as possible of returning the advances that she made whenever she could do so safely, but that he never felt anything for her at all. Any interest that he may have had was only of the body, and there was very little of that, with him doing only what he felt was expected of him. All the time, though, he wondered what she had in mind for the future, and dreaded it lest she was set on marriage.

  That is not to say that he was not fairly content with his lot. As he has often told me, with Miss Emily’s death he felt that he was no longer under threat, and he could put up with her sister’s attentions, although sometimes they were a bit too much. He knew that as long as he did not upset her she was now no danger to him, and he began to sense – much to his relief, he said – that she did not have wedlock in mind. Of course, it was always possible that something might happen to change her mind about that, and he knew that then he would be unable to refuse her, but he began to think that even that might not be too bad. He knew that she had quite a lot of money by then, and there was another book on the way. Not only that, when the old man – as Mr Nicholls always called Mr Brontë to me – died, and that surely could not be too far off, he would expect to step into his shoes. As he said to me with quite a laugh, money and his own parish and a quiet life was not at all a bad prospect should the worst have happened, and even Miss Charlotte would have had to keep her mouth shut then.

  Both of them were therefore quite at ease with their understanding and, indeed, their lives in general, but then, as is so often the way, something came along to put an end to their contentment.

  This time, seemingly, it was Miss Anne who was the problem. I know for a fact that she was nearly out of her mind with grief when Miss Emily died, and I can well understand that because she had not only lost her sister but her lifelong best friend as well. I do not suppose that the fact that she was not feeling well herself helped either. She had been saying just before Miss Emily died that she had pains in her side, and then she had a very bad cold and fever. Dr Wheelhouse came to see her, but he seemed to me to be as doddery as ever. He said that she should be blistered, but Miss Emily told me that, if anything, that had made her sister feel worse.

  Over and above everything else though, I sensed that something was bothering her, and in the light of what happened later I now have a good idea of what it was. She seems to have stayed longer in her jobs than her sisters did, and I suppose that that had given her a better insight into how folk behaved behind their own closed doors, and she had probably seen a great deal more of the wickedness of the world than they had. That, I feel, was why she began to think how well it must have suited Mr Nicholls to have Miss Emily die and, knowing that he had poisoned Master Branwell, she kept wondering if he had done the same to her sister.

  Later, Miss Charlotte told Mr Nicholls that Miss Anne had said to her that she tried to put such thoughts from her, but they kept coming back, and the time came when she felt that she just had to do something about them.

  She went to Miss Charlotte with her fears but she, of course, pooh-poohed them, but underneath she became very alarmed when Miss Anne sa
id that she was thinking of telling their father everything now that Miss Emily was dead and could no longer be hurt by what she had to say.

  Mr Nicholls has told me that Miss Charlotte hardly knew what to say to her sister, and she ran straight to him to see what he thought. They had a long talk, and then she went back to Miss Anne. She pointed out to her that if she did go to their father, and he reported Mr Nicholls, Miss Emily’s memory would suffer when the story got out. Not only that, the whole sorry tale would be bound to leave a stain on the name of Brontë, and the whole family, but especially their father, would suffer.

  It seems that Miss Anne was affected by what Miss Charlotte said, but it was evident that she was not happy with matters and Mr Nicholls has confessed to me that he became very disturbed. His words to me were: ‘I wondered if the whole nightmare would never end.’ Miss Charlotte was making constant demands upon him, and he was then having to make calls to the Parsonage almost every night, which is something I can vouch for because I saw him when he called and all of the family at home had seen him going to the Parsonage, and one night he was so late in coming back that Father, just in from the Black Bull, asked him whether something was amiss with Mr Brontë. What we did not know at the time, though, was that that was just about when Mr Nicholls had decided that he could put up with Miss Charlotte, but was worried to death about what he was going to do about her sister and her worries.

  Miss Charlotte seems to have done her best to console him, and told him that she did not want him to worry. She said that she would see to it that Miss Anne kept quiet and that, in any case, the way things were going it did not seem that she was long for this world anyway. It took some time to calm him, but in the end it was agreed that Miss Charlotte would keep a close watch on Miss Anne, and would tell him if anything arose that he should know about.

  According to Mr Nicholls, he and Miss Charlotte became a little easier in their minds as the weeks wore on, because it did indeed seem as if Miss Anne was following in Miss Emily’s footsteps to the grave. Even so, they felt the need to stay watchful, because there always seemed to be something which looked as if it would cause bother – and it was not long in coming!