The Crimes of Charlotte Bronte

by James Tully

  I tried to get Mr Nicholls alone to see what was what, but there always seemed to be someone about and we could contrive but a few words at a time. All he said was that he would see me as soon as he could. I knew that would not be likely to happen as long as she was there, and no one knew how long that would be for because, although she kept on about how she was going to travel later in the year, just as soon as she had finished the new book that she was writing, we did not know how long that would take her.

  July came and I resolved that I would wait no longer. I had not seen Mr Nicholls alone for more than 2 minutes at a time since she came back after Miss Anne’s death, and it just was not good enough. I wanted to know from him where I stood. I thought about the matter for a long time and then I wrote a note and placed it in his hand one day as we passed in the hallway in the Parsonage. In it I said that I wanted him to meet me, without fail, in the Church that evening. I chose the Church because I thought that nobody else would be there, and even if they were they would think naught of Mr Nicholls and me being there at the same time, me being the Sexton’s daughter and all.

  I wondered whether he would heed my note and so it was with heart beating that I hurried along the lane, past our house, after I had finished work. I took the long way round the back of the Church to the little side door, because I did not want to be seen going in the front. As quietly as I could, I opened the door, went inside and looked around me. Nobody was there, and my spirits sank, and then I saw Mr Nicholls by the Vestry door waving to me.

  He looked very worried, and the first thing he did was to ask me if I was all right. Since then he has told me that all day he had been in fear that I was with child – so I can understand now why he seemed so afeared. I told him that I was quite all right, except that he seemed to have no time for me of late and I wanted to know why. At that, he locked the door and took me to the long seat that ran along the wall.

  Speaking very softly, and looking into my eyes all the while with such a tender concern, he pledged me to secrecy and then said that Miss Charlotte had a hold over him. He could not tell me what it was, and he hoped to break it soon, but in the meantime he dared not see me whilst she was about lest it got back to her. Of course, I did not let on that I knew what her hold was, I just listened to him talking so gently in that lovely smooth voice. He told me that he really cared for me, and were I patient for a couple of months it seemed that we would then have plenty of time together because she would be away a lot then.

  There was nothing I could do but agree to bide my time. I could gainsay him nothing, and when he drew me down we made love in such a way that I felt sure that his feelings for me were all that he said they were.

  As it happened, Miss Charlotte finished her book in the August, but she did not go on her travels until the October. After that she was away, on and off, for several weeks and Mr Nicholls was as good as his word. We managed quite a few meetings, in the Church and the School and on the moor – although it was a bit cold up there. Twice we even made love in the Parsonage – the first time on the night of the very day when she first went away – but I was always ill at ease doing it there, although somehow it used to excite me more than anything else.

  Then Christmas came and she was back, and Miss Nussey came and stayed well into the New Year. There was no chance at all of our long meetings, and in any case he did not seem in a very good humour although I did not know why.

  It was a long miserable time after Christmas. The weather was bad, and it was very dark and cold morning and night, and I longed for Spring to come because Miss Charlotte was dropping little hints that she would go away again then. In the meantime my days seemed endless, and I seemed to have little wish to do aught. Father became quite concerned about me, but I told him I was all right, it was just that Winter was getting me down and I longed for warm days and light nights.

  In March 1850, she did indeed go off again, somewhat earlier than I had thought she would, and she was away for several times after that. I do not know what she got up to on her travels, but she was always going on about the men she had met and stayed with, and hardly ever made mention of women. Once, though, when I was alone with her in the sitting room, and she was going on as usual about all the important men she had met, she gave little hints that she thought that one or two were would-be suitors. She looked at me as if waiting for me to say something, but I said naught. I was thinking that she must be mad to think that, but it was evident that she did.

  I do not know who else she dropped like remarks to, but once, when she was away, I was making up his fire for Mr Brontë and he asked me outright if I had heard talk of his daughter getting wed, or if she had said anything to me. It was not unusual for him to talk to me – in fact he seemed to have quite taken to me as the years went by, especially with two of his daughters dead and him being left so much alone and all – but never before had he spoken to me of family matters and at first I did not know how to answer him.

  For a start, I wondered whether I had said anything in passing to make him wonder about her, but I did not think I had. Then it came to me that he could have got it from Miss Aykroyd, or indeed anyone else in the village if she had been going around dropping hints or making little slips with them, as she did with me about ‘Arthur’. One of her troubles was that she was such a chatterer, when she was trying to seem important to folk, that she never knew when to stop.

  At first, whilst I was thinking what to say, I made out that the rattle of the coal from the scuttle had stopped me from hearing all that he had said; so when he asked me again I was ready to say straight out that I had heard nothing of the kind. Even so he looked at me in that quizzing way of his and I do not think that he believed me. From then on he seemed to go into himself and did not seem at all well, and we were all most concerned about him.

  When she finally came back, in the July I think it was, she asked me how things had been whilst she had been away which, by then, had become the usual thing because, little by little, I had come to be the one who was really in charge of the household, what with Miss Aykroyd being so old and the others younger than me. I told her that all had been well, except that her father had been ailing of late. She wanted to know what the matter was, and by then I was so sure of myself that I told her what I thought it might be. Only a few months before I would have said that I did not know, but now I came straight out with it and she did not like that one whit.

  Had she known what was going on between her ‘Arthur’ and me I supposed she would have liked that even less, but perhaps it was just as well that she did not for, one way and another, she had enough trouble in store.

  [] Here we have reached a period of Charlotte’s life of which Martha knew only the Haworth part, and in order to appreciate her tale fully it is essential to be aware of what Charlotte was doing elsewhere.

  In 1849 she completed her second novel, Shirley, which opens with a cruel satire upon three curates, whose characters were, allegedly, drawn from life. Later, however, a fourth curate, the Irish Mr Macarthey, is introduced, and the original of that character was Nicholls. He is ‘decent, decorous and conscientious’. Unlike the others, he labours ‘faithfully in the parish; the schools, both Sunday and day-schools, flourish under him. He has his faults; what many would call virtues.’ In addition, he is ‘sane and rational, diligent and charitable’.

  There is absolutely no reason for ‘Mr Macarthey’ to be in the book at all, and when one remembers Charlotte’s views on curates generally, and the period during which this part of the book was written, who can, in all conscience, doubt what was going on between her and Nicholls?

  Shirley was well received, and gave Charlotte the financial independence for which she had always striven. Now, therefore, she resolved to travel, in order to meet famous people and ingratiate herself with them. She felt that she had outgrown Haworth and, as we have seen, she had realized that there was nothing to keep her at the Parsonage if she did not wish to be there. Nicholls was not going anywhere, a
nd she no longer made any pretence of anxiety about entrusting the welfare of her father to servants.

  Charlotte began her travels modestly. In November 1849, just after Shirley was published, she journeyed to London where, for a fortnight, she was a guest at the home of the mother of George Smith, her young and good-looking publisher, and met Thackeray and Harriet Martineau, the authoress.

  The circumstances of the visit to the Smiths provide yet another example of her flawed character. During her time at the Pensionnat Héger, she had been treated most considerately by a Dr Wheelwright and his wife and family. The Wheelwrights had settled in Brussels with their five daughters, all of whom attended the Héger establishment, and they had often asked Charlotte and Emily to tea.

  In 1843, the Wheelwrights moved to London, but contact was maintained and then, in 1849, they invited Charlotte to stay with them on her next visit to the capital. That she had fully intended to do because, no matter how much money she acquired, Charlotte was nothing if not ‘careful’, and hotels could be expensive!

  Then, however, she received the invitation from George Smith, who was obviously of far more use to her, both in publishing her works and in introducing her to those whom she wished to meet. Also she found his offer flattering, and therefore it was accepted with alacrity. No one can blame her for that, but the way in which she referred to the Wheelwrights in her letter of acceptance is unforgivable. On 19 November, she wrote to George Smith thanking him for his invitation, which she was pleased to accept. That was all that was required, and had Charlotte confined herself to those few words no criticism would be possible – but she did not. She could not bear to lose an opportunity of implying how wonderful she was; nor could she resist trying to identify with the class of person she was addressing, if she considered them in any way superior to herself.

  After her words of acceptance, she went on to say that, at first, she had thought that she would have to decline, ‘having received a prior invitation some months ago from a family lately come to reside in London, whose acquaintance I formed in Brussels. But these friends only know me as Miss Brontë, and they are of the class, perfectly worthy but in no way remarkable, to whom I should feel it quite superfluous to introduce Currer Bell; I know they would not understand the author.’

  Oh, the condescension!

  I cannot help but wonder what the Wheelwrights thought of that letter, when Charlotte’s correspondence was published after her death.

  Next March she was off again. She went to stay with Sir James and Lady Kaye-Shuttleworth, at their home at Gawthorpe Hall, near Burnley in Lancashire. Sir James tended to regard her as his protegée, and had called upon her at Haworth earlier in the year. Charlotte loved her association with what she regarded as the aristocracy and, even more, she loved crowing about it, despite the reservations which she professed. For months, she went on and on, to all and sundry, about her connection with the Kaye-Shuttleworths, and about her visit.

  On 16 March 1850, she wrote to Mr Williams that she did not ‘regret’ having made the visit. Then she just had to gild the lily. ‘The worst part of it is that there is now some menace hanging over my head of an invitation to go to them in London during the season.’ My word, we had come up in the world! ‘Some menace’ indeed. She would have been over the moon at the possibility, and one wonders just how much angling she had had to do to secure the invitation. However, and yet again, it gratified her to demonstrate to the lower classes just how sought after she was, and how terms like ‘the season’ now sprang so readily to her lips. As she was to write later to George Smith, ‘Aristocratic notice is what I especially crave, cultivate and cling to.’

  Her travels continued. Charlotte was having a marvellous time. In April she paid another visit to Ellen. Then, in June, she was in London again. First, she stayed with the Smiths, and then with Dr Wheelwright and his daughter, Laetitia. Obviously the Wheelwrights had their uses after all. She dined with Thackeray, and sat for the portrait being painted by George Richmond.

  From London she went, directly, to stay with Ellen again. She did not wish to go home because the Parsonage was being re-roofed; too bad about ‘dear papa’!

  After that visit, she once again avoided Haworth and went to Edinburgh, to spend two days with George Smith and his sister. That must have pleased her greatly, because I really think that by then Charlotte had convinced herself that she was quite desirable.

  What though, I wonder, were Smith’s thoughts about Charlotte? He was almost eight years younger, good-looking and comfortably off. Living, as he did, in London, he could have had his pick of many of the eligible young women there – and probably did. It is ludicrous, therefore, to suppose that he felt physically attracted to Charlotte, and the only logical conclusion at which one can arrive about his attentions to her is that his interest was solely professional. He was making money out of her, and there was the strong probability of more – not only from any future works of her own, but also from those of her dead sisters. That being so, he would not have wished to upset her, but probably regarded her importunings with some amusement.

  Charlotte should have been worldly enough to know that, but all the indications are that eventually she deluded herself into thinking that he loved her for herself.

  When she finally arrived back at Haworth, she was told by Martha that her father’s ‘recent discomposure’ had been caused, in part, by ‘the vague fear of my being somehow about to be married to somebody’. Now Mr Brontë may have been many things, but a fool he was not. If he thought that his daughter had received ‘some overture’ then he would have had good reason for such a supposition. In the event, Charlotte ‘distinctly cleared away’ his fears, but how had he come by them in the first place?

  Later in the year, in September 1850, Ellen told Charlotte that she too had heard rumours that the latter was to marry and, although Charlotte scoffed at the gossips, I suspect that what Ellen had written was a little too near the mark for comfort. Probably conjecturing that her friend had done her own share of gossiping, Charlotte did not answer that letter and Ellen was forced to write again, later in the month, asking what was wrong and why she had received no reply.

  One is driven to wonder how the rumours had started. It may well be that they had been caused by Charlotte’s sojourn with the Smiths, and her visit to Edinburgh – but few people knew of those. A stronger possibility is that they had originated in suspicions which the villagers may have had about the relationship between Charlotte and Nicholls, and which had spread farther than Haworth. As we know from Martha, it would have been very difficult to keep anything completely secret from the servants in the Parsonage – and servants talked.

  Another likelihood must not, however, be overlooked. It would not have been beyond Nicholls to have whispered a few ideas in her father’s ear whilst Charlotte was gadding about, because Nicholls had no intention of seeing her marry, as then there would always be the possibility that she would tell her husband what she knew.

  Nicholls realized that her father did not wish Charlotte to marry anybody really, and therefore he may have invented rumours to tell the old man, or have fanned the flames of anger when he heard tales elsewhere. Were that indeed the case, he could have had no idea of how such a policy was to backfire on him.

  However, what occupied Charlotte most in the final quarter of the year was one of her favourite occupations – the acquisition of money. Her publisher had suggested that he produce a reprint of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey. She was asked to edit Wuthering Heights, and how she enjoyed that opportunity to get back at Emily. Her treatment of her sister’s book shows her at her most spiteful. She savaged it, altering many scenes and modifying the dialect, and her revenge for imagined slights would have been especially sweet if Nicholls was present while she performed her treachery. Poor Emily must have turned in her grave.

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him: but I will maintain my own ways before him.’

  J
ob 13:15

  It did not seem to bother Madam – for that was how, by then, I had come to think of her, but not in a nice way – that her father was out of sorts. She had used to make such a song and dance that he could not be left alone, but now she did not seem to care, and no sooner was she back than she was off again. Of course, I did not mind one jot as that left me in peace at work, and it also meant that Mr Nicholls and me had more chances to meet, and that was about all I lived for during that lovely summer of 1850.

  He was always so light of heart when she was away, and I just wished that we could go out together openly and just be happy, but he said that that could not be, and I understood what he meant. Instead, we had to meet in out-of-the-way places, or where we had good reason to be at the same time if we were seen. Sometimes we took little chances, but it really was not worth it because we were both uneasy all the while and our time together was spoiled. Not that I cared overmuch about being seen, for I would much rather have had things out in the open, but, as I have said, I knew that that would not do for his sake. Even so, that did not stop me from wishing, and I longed for the day when things would be different.

  Then she came back, bringing Autumn with her, and the terrible thought that Winter was almost on our doorstep. Our meetings became fewer, and I was back in the everyday rut of work at the Parsonage and village life in Haworth. I think that what got me down most was the unfairness of it all. Whenever she came back she not only took my man away from me – for that was how I saw it – but I had to put up with having her about all the time telling me what to do. She tried to do so in a nicer way than she had when I was younger, but even so I was at her beck and call and I hated it.