Juliet Gael

by Romancing Miss Bronte (v5)

  Branwell’s head drooped lower. “I’m sure if I write to the good doctor—he’ll make an appeal to her on my part….”

  “Lord, I hope so …”

  Branwell began to slip into his moody worst. Tears swelled in his eyes. “It’s the mind, Leyland. It’s dried up. Frozen. Nothing rouses my imagination anymore.”

  “You’ll find your way back,” Leyland said, with more reassurance than he felt.

  “I fear it’s worse than that … it’s not just about inspiration. I’ve never told anyone this before …”

  “What?”

  “It doesn’t work anymore, Leyland. I can’t find the words. My powers have greatly diminished. I can feel it. Nothing I do is any good.”

  Leyland could not bring himself to do anything but give a somber and sympathetic nod.

  “All I know is that it’s time for me to be something when I’m nothing. Nothing at all. My father can’t have long to live and when he dies, my evening will become night.”

  There was a long, difficult silence.

  “God, Leyland, she did love me once. We did have hope for a future together. And I swear to you, she loved me even better than I did her.”

  Even in his lucid moments he could not admit to himself that it was the loss of the lady’s estate that had dealt the final blow to his dreams. He knew, deep down where truth swims in the murky subconscious, that without her money the only future for him lay in a lifetime of demeaning labor as a lowly tutor in the service of those more fortunate than himself.

  “Let’s order another bottle,” Leyland said, lifting a sluggish arm to his friend’s shoulder. “The night’s on me.”

  “Too good of you. Such a bore. All this bother about bills.”

  “We’ll manage.”

  “Bugger the bastards.”

  “Amen.”

  Despite the lamentable state of his mind, Branwell plodded on—scribbling a few lame verses from time to time, trying to squeeze from his damaged brain cells a handful of worthy words. All his life he had turned to his imagination for delivery from worldly cares; there lay his inner sanctum. Increasingly, he replied on opium; a few grains dissolved in alcohol—a tincture cheaper than gin—produced fabulous dreams. And dreams were the stuff of which great poetry was made. Coleridge and De Quincey had proved as much, and he—Patrick Branwell Brontë, the great Romantic with a grief-stricken heart—he would imitate them.

  The Halifax Guardian, a reputable newspaper with high standards, had published a number of his earlier poems, and so one fine spring day, his pocket jingling with a few shillings courtesy of a father grateful for the slightest effort, Branwell rode the train into Halifax with the intention of placing an ad for a position as a tutor on the Continent and—more important—submitting his latest labor for publication. It was an earlier poem he had reworked, transforming his grand passion into great art; he had dedicated it to Lydia and signed it by his pen name, the noble (and pretentious) Northangerland.

  Just outside the Guardian’s office he collided with January Searle, a critic and editor-at-large in the district. Searle was a dreaded figure, a self-important man with harsh opinions; the local writers cultivated his friendship, but they all despised him.

  “Mr. Brontë!”

  “Mr. Searle. Good day.”

  “A coincidence, running into you …”

  “How’s that, sir?”

  “Because I’ve just finished this strange novel—surely you’ve heard about it—Wuthering Heights. Supposedly written by the brother of the author of that improbable melodrama Jane Eyre.”

  “Oh, I’ve heard of the books, sir. Caused quite a stir—”

  “So you haven’t read them?”

  “Don’t have time for that sort of thing, sir,” he replied. “Been busy with my own work …”

  Searle leaned closer and said in a low voice, “You sure you’re being straight with me?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Searle eyed him closely. “You really don’t know what I’m talking about?”

  “I am indeed baffled, sir.”

  “You sometimes write under a pen name, is that correct?”

  “I do. I publish my poetry under the name of Northangerland.”

  “Not Bell?”

  “Bell?”

  “So you’re not the mysterious author of Wuthering Heights?”

  Branwell screwed up his brow. “I am not.”

  “Well, I’d have sworn it was written by you. Thought I saw something of your brooding in it—all that business about love beyond the grave. Just the sort of strange fancy that a diseased genius such as yours might produce. And the setting appears to be Yorkshire, you know.”

  “You prick my curiosity, sir. I shall have to read it.”

  “You must! A devil of a hero. Byronic and quite Romantic. But shocking beyond words. I dare say I’m a little disappointed. Thought I’d unmasked one of the infamous Bell brothers.” Searle touched his hat and sped away.

  Branwell was a familiar face around the Guardian, and the editorial clerk found him unusually subdued that afternoon. He was in a hurry to do his business, and then he went quickly on his way, which was not like him at all.

  The bookseller said, “Beg your pardon, sir, we got in only a few copies and sold them right away.”

  “Wuthering Heights?”

  “Yes, sir—comes in a three-volume set with a shorter title. Don’t recall the other one straight off. Name of a woman.”

  “Jane Eyre?”

  “No, sir. That was published last September.” The bookseller opened a ledger and squinted through his spectacles at the entries. “But I’ve got more on the way if you’d like to place your order. Be more than happy to hold—”

  Branwell cut him off. “Who are the authors?”

  “All three titles written by the Bells. Relatives I hear, and rumor has it they’re—”

  “The surnames,” Branwell snapped. “What are the surnames?”

  “The surnames? Rather unusual names, as I recall. It was Currer Bell wrote Jane Eyre—”

  “Currer?”

  “Yes, sir. Rather odd for a Christian name. More often a family name.”

  “And the others?”

  He lowered his nose closer to the ledger. “Here we are. Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey by Ellis and Acton Bell.”

  “Ellis and Acton.”

  “Would you like to leave your name, sir? We should have them in next week.”

  Immediately upon arriving at the Old Cock he sent off a note to Leyland.

  My dear sir,

  I have come to town on a small matter of business—and having tried your rooms and all your usual haunts, I am now at the Old Cock waiting for you. Haworth is overrun with men of Gothic ignorance and ill-breeding and I cannot return until I have drunk from the well of your sympathy—providing that I have not already drained it dry. Unspeakable sorrows overwhelm me at present, and although outdoors all is sunshine and blue sky, I am lost in darkness. For mercy’s sake, come and see me, for I shall have a bad evening and night if I do not see you—I hardly know where to send the bearer of this note so as to enable him to catch you.

  NORTHANGERLAND

  Like many provincial inns, the Old Cock maintained a lending library for its patrons, and Branwell was told that he was indeed lucky to get his hands on one of the novels because there was a waiting list a foot long; Elijah Daniels was next up for Wuthering Heights but he hadn’t come to claim the book yet, so Branwell was welcome to it without charge for a few hours.

  He ordered a whiskey and settled in a chair by a window where the light was good enough to read by.

  The prose was new and fresh to him, but within a few pages he recognized the raw materials of his sister’s imagination. This was certainly not Charlotte’s writing: this was no tale of slavish submission, of yearning for the sophisticated and the glamorous. Here was the creation of a wild, natural world populated by people of violent, raw emotions; he could easily see Emily l
iving here—content, at peace, at home.

  “My God,” he muttered, his heart thumping.

  Then he began to laugh.

  That was the last thing he remembered. Sometime later he woke up with the Old Cock’s owner staring down at him; worry was etched on her kindly, florid face. He’d had a sort of fit, she explained, just fell off his chair and went quite unconscious—although he’d barely touched his glass of whiskey. After it had passed she’d had him carried to the back room and laid out on a bench. Branwell begged her forgiveness, praying he’d done nothing to offend her, and as soon as he had the strength to walk he took himself out.

  Leyland’s landlady let him in, and Leyland found him wrapped in a grimy blanket, asleep on the floor.

  “Not drunk,” Branwell said, raising a gaunt hand to grip his friend’s arm. “Had a little illness—you know what I mean—quite temporary. All right now. Not drunk … promise you. Just need to sleep.”

  That spring they noticed a change for the worse; he seemed entirely broken down and embittered. He borrowed money everywhere and owed everyone. He had run up such a bill at the Old Cock that the owner took her case to the authorities. A sheriff’s officer from York came around one day with a warrant for Branwell’s arrest.

  He behaved appallingly, crouching in the chipping shed behind a chubby marble angel until Emily came to get him.

  “You can come out. He’s gone,” she said sharply, hugging her shawl around her bony shoulders. “Thanks to you we’ll be eating potatoes for the rest of the month.”

  He rose, shivering, his nose red from the cold. A hoarse cough shook his small frame.

  “If it’d been up to me, I’d have let you go to prison.”

  “How can you say that?” he cried. “Can’t you see how ill I am? I would’ve died.”

  Emily was struck with sudden remorse. The idea of Branwell in a rat-infested prison, shivering on a straw mat teeming with vermin. Her brother.

  “Don’t be a fool,” she said gruffly. “We would never let them take you. Papa would sell our last stick of furniture rather than see those monsters take you away.”

  She put an arm around him to steady him. “Come inside now. It’s safe.”

  There was no one else home that fine April morning. Martha had gone to the butcher’s, their father had driven to Griffe Mill with Stephen Merrall, and Charlotte had taken Tabby to visit her nephew in the village. Later they all wondered at the seemingly insignificant circumstance that prevented a tragedy, how Anne, who was in the kitchen with the glue bottle mending a chipped teapot, had suddenly recalled that there was a broken china cat sitting on her dresser. How she had deliberated, thinking about the other chores that needed to be finished that morning, but had opted in favor of fetching the cat with the broken tail.

  Branwell had not been out of his room all morning. Now, reluctant to disturb him, Anne climbed the stairs on tiptoe. Mounting the last few steps she noticed gray smoke seeping from the crack beneath the door of his room.

  Her heart in her throat, she pounded on the door.

  “Branwell!”

  When there was no reply she threw open the door; a gray cloud wafted from the room, and through the veil of smoke she saw her brother on his bed against the wall, stretched out like a dead man on a funeral pyre.

  His sheets, tumbling over the side of the mattress, had caught fire from a candle set on the floor.

  “Oh Lord—oh mercy!”

  Holding up her skirts, she dashed inside.

  “Branwell! Get up!”

  He lay in a drugged stupor, eyes wide open and staring, incapable of either speech or movement.

  There seemed no way to reach him without breaching the wall of flames.

  “Emily! Help!”

  The washstand! she thought. But the washbasin stood empty. “Where’s the pitcher?” she shouted at him. “What did you do with it?”

  She spied it on the floor beneath the window, but it, too, was empty. Finally, in a panic, she flung it against the wall above his bed.

  “Branwell!”

  At the sound of shattering pottery and his sister’s shouts he turned his head, bringing his glassy eyes to rest on her.

  Just at that moment Emily flew into the room. With the seeming strength of a Titan she grabbed her brother by the collar of his nightshirt, heaved him off the flaming bed, and dragged him across the room to safety.

  She yanked the burning sheets from the bed, hiked up her skirts, and kicked the flaming bundle into the corner. She was still stamping out the flames when Anne came back up from the scullery lugging a bucket of water.

  Once the fire was out, Anne slumped to the floor, her back against the wall. Emily stood in front of her, protective, feral, the dripping bucket swinging from her hand.

  “Are you all right?” she asked Anne.

  “I think so. Are you hurt?”

  “No.”

  But their hearts were pounding and every limb was shaking violently.

  “I shouldn’t have thrown the ewer. I was trying to wake him up.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “It was Aunt Branwell’s.” She mustered a weak smile. “It’ll just give me something else to glue together today.”

  Anne lowered her head between her knees and began to sob.

  Emily was far from tears. She glanced around the room, at her sister weeping and her stupefied brother who was now sitting in the middle of the floor examining his ripped nightshirt with an idiotic look on his face. The room was a disaster: shards of the shattered ewer all over the bed, a sodden bundle of burned sheets in the corner, piles of waterlogged papers and books scattered across the floor; had the papers caught fire, they would have taken the entire house with them.

  “You fool!” Emily seethed, wheeling around to face her brother. “You selfish, self-pitying fool!”

  “It’s no use,” Anne said, looking up with a tear-streaked face. “He can’t hear you.”

  “Damn you, Branwell!” She threw down the bucket and slapped him hard across the side of the head.

  He flinched and turned horrified, baffled eyes on her.

  “Emily Jane, don’t!” Anne cried, stumbling to her feet.

  Emily struck him again. He curled into a ball and covered his head with his hands to protect himself from the blows.

  “You could have burned down our home! Is that what you want? You want us thrown out on the street and homeless?”

  Anne began to scream, begging her to stop.

  They had all grown up with a dread of fire, instilled in them by a father who had prayed over too many children who had burned to death. He allowed no curtains on the windows, only wooden shutters, and they had been taught to zealously tend all fires, oil lamps, and candles. That evening they sat with their father in his study and discussed how they were going to protect themselves from their brother. Patrick saw only one solution: Branwell needed to be under constant surveillance. His door would remain open at all times during the day, and at night he would sleep in his father’s room. Patrick would lock them in at night and keep the key on himself so that Branwell would not wander.

  “I am persuaded, children, that if I can keep him off drink long enough, these terrible deliriums will pass.”

  Charlotte was firmly against the plan. “But what shall you do? Stay awake with him all night?”

  “If I must. We will face his demons together.”

  “He still manages to get himself drunk in the day, Papa. We can’t keep him a prisoner.”

  “At least at night my household can sleep without fear.”

  “Hardly, Papa. We’re more afraid for you than for ourselves.”

  “He can’t harm me. He’s weak and ill.”

  “And so shall you be if you spend your nights locked in a room with him.”

  But he was resolved.

  The following morning, when her father left the house for a meeting, Charlotte found John Brown in the churchyard. She asked him to come quickly to the parsonage to remov
e the loaded pistol hanging in her father’s bedroom; he was to take it up to the field, discharge the thing, then return it to the wall.

  After that day, their father’s declining health began to concern them as much as their brother’s. In truth, the seventy-one-year-old parson had a remarkably strong constitution, although he would have his daughters believe otherwise; every attack of influenza or bronchitis sent him spiraling into a gloomy, mildly hysterical state of mind where he would convince himself that he was about to die and leave his children penniless. And now his spirits, too, were being worn down. They couldn’t help but notice the strain on him, and they talked about what they might do to cheer him. It was Emily’s idea to tell him about Jane Eyre.

  The servants were out that afternoon and Emily was baking, a chore she thoroughly enjoyed. She liked working at something that was physical and sensual, yet mechanical enough so that she could read while she kneaded, and compose lines of poetry in her head.

  “I think Papa should know,” she said as she sprinkled flour over the table.

  Charlotte looked up from the account books. “Know what?”

  “That you’ve written the best novel of the season.” She scooped the sticky dough out of the bowl and worked it into a ball. “Anne and I have already discussed it.”

  Charlotte glanced at Anne, who looked up from the silver teaspoons she was polishing and smiled in agreement. “We thought it might be just the thing to cheer him.”

  “But he can’t know about our books, Anne’s and mine.”

  A breeze swept through the window, and Charlotte laid down her pen and snatched the coal merchant’s bill just as it flew into the air.

  “I’m not sure I want him to read it,” she said.

  “Why?”

  She closed the ledger and leaned forward on her elbows. She thought for a moment, then replied, “I’m afraid that he’ll find it second-rate. Just some silly domestic novel.”

  Anne gasped, “Charlotte! What ever would make you think that?”

  Charlotte said quietly, “Because I’m not his son.”

  They were a little stunned at her frank admission, although they knew it was bitterly true.

  Charlotte watched Emily knead and turn the dough, admiring the smoothly powerful movements of her hands and lean arms, and after a moment she added, “Deep down he will always regret that it wasn’t Branwell who earned all the accolades. We are his daughters, and it’s just not the same.”