I think of my dead brother, his skin so pale, so frozen to the touch, and how he sought death, how he wished for it, welcoming it like a lover. All I know is that I wish to run from it. To never know its face. To never be that cold, lifeless thing that he was, devoid of soul. I fear death, I fear the oblivion and I fear the entrapment. To be nailed into a box, to rot to dust and never again feel the cold air on my face or the rain in my hair? For heaven will not want me, and I will not want it. I fear it, and I feel it. I feel my own death deep inside me. I feel it wheeze and creak and rattle.
But I refuse it. I won’t die. I will write – for Agnes and for Emily Jane Brontë. I’ll write so that Agnes’s story will have an end, and that we will not die. I will hold hard against the dark.
Papa and Charlotte will most likely not let me come here again when they see how I am weakened now; they will want to call for doctors, but I will not see them. I do not wish for Charlotte or Anne to see what I write, for I know Charlotte will be worried that I am too brutish, coarse and male; but I must write what I am, and what I know, and if that is coarse and despicable, then so am I. I fear that if I leave these pages for Charlotte to find she will burn them. But Robert will help me – I have made him swear on the love he used to hold for me. I will post him my pages and he will conceal them for me at Ponden; he has sworn it, and none shall set eyes on them or know of them but he and me. And when I am recovered, and only then, I will retrieve them and send them to London and let the world make of it what it will.
For I will not die. I do not wish it. I do not wish for that cold box, the lid nailed down. EJB
Reading the words she has written, the first person, perhaps, to have ever read them, tears flow down my cheeks, as if I am her, as if I feel every ounce of pain and regret that she does.
Because I know that, within two months of writing these words, Emily had succumbed to tuberculosis. To read her thoughts, her hopes, to hold this paper, even with my gloved hands, when I know that she was the last person to touch it, is profoundly moving. All the fear and strangeness of the last few hours falls away when I look at it. The house chose me. It chose me to reveal its secrets to, and even though that terrifies me, it comforts me too.
The words are like nothing else that remains of Emily’s writing, outside her novel and her poetry. All that remains of her voice is just fragments, hurriedly scrawled letters and diary papers that seem to belong to another person entirely from the one who wrote such searing verse, such an impactful novel. This changes everything, and it is beautiful and thrilling and heart-breaking all at once. Tenderly, I place it with the other papers, then turn to Agnes’s story, and I see the scraps she wrote on, the paper she stole, how she had to scratch out her words with a makeshift nib, how, in every painstaking letter, she was willing to risk everything to write her tale down. I see the same story of a girl unfold that Emily did, low-born, seduced by the son of the house, cast out for her seduction; a story that has been lived a million times, by a million anonymous women lost to history, collateral damage in a world run by men.
This girl was a miracle, a faraway star that has been shining her light for centuries, waiting until now for it to be seen.
‘Mummy?’ Will pushes open the door, walking into the room. ‘What’s that stuff?’
‘Treasure,’ I say, holding my arms out to him.
‘Doesn’t look like treasure,’ he says, falling into my lap. ‘It looks like writing.’
He turns my face to his.
‘Are you crying?’
‘Not in a bad way,’ I tell him. ‘I’m crying because this treasure will mean so much to so many people, and I am the one who gets to give it to them.’
‘Some writing?’ Will looks dubious.
‘Of course, words are the most precious treasure that we have,’ I tell him. ‘This person, she wrote these words four hundred years ago, and now, all these centuries later, I am able to hear her voice, right now, in this moment. There isn’t another technology invented that allows feelings and thoughts to travel through time faster than the speed of light, is there?’
‘I haven’t invented it yet,’ Will says. ‘So what will you do with the treasure?’
I hesitate for a moment. What I want to do is hold it close. I want it to be mine, but that isn’t why the house has revealed it to me. The house needs it to be seen.
‘I’m going to show it to an expert,’ I tell him. ‘Experts are good at knowing exactly what to do.’
‘Mummy?’ He winds his arm around my neck and I feel the curl of his hair against my cheek. ‘Are you afraid?’
‘Me, afraid? No,’ I tell him.
‘She says to be afraid.’
I’m about to ask him who when I stop myself.
‘Can you see her now?’ I ask, and feel Will shake his head against mine.
‘No, she only comes to me in dreams and she always walks in green, the greenest green. Last night she was covered in red, every part of her except her eyes. But I wasn’t scared because I knew she was showing me something – I don’t know what, but something. And she said that you shouldn’t be afraid of her. That any child of Robert’s needn’t ever be afraid of her. But that you should be afraid of the bad one.’
Robert, my dad’s name. I think Will knows that, but even so, even if his words are just the jumbled-up remnants of a scrambled-up dream, I feel better, somehow. The cold is receding.
Will hugs me once again, and I turn back to Agnes and her words, the echo of a dreamed warning, slip away unnoticed on the air.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Grace Fullerton smiles at me politely as she shows me into the Parsonage library, offering me a seat at a large table where I put down the box folder I’ve brought with me. I recognise her smile; it’s the same one I used to give to people who would bring me artefacts they’d uncovered in elderly relatives’ attics or understairs cupboards when I worked at the Lister James museum. They’d present me with boxes of letters, postcards or photographs of people that no one recognised any more. Items that seemed too personal, still covered in the residue of life, to just throw away but that no one knew what to do with. I always accepted whatever they gave me with exactly Grace’s smile, and archived each item with just as much care as if it had been Queen Victoria’s lost love letters. Even so, as central as each letter or trinket had been to one life once, now it was simply something to catalogue as one of many more lost memories. This find was nothing like those.
‘A Ponden Hall Heaton.’ Grace leans on the table. ‘Please accept my apologies for staring at you, but I love the idea that you Heatons have lived there for five hundred years, and your relatives knew the Brontës. It’s amazing. It’s like that Kevin Bacon thing, six degrees of separation.’ She laughs. ‘And Ponden Hall is such an incredibly important building. I’ve always wanted to come and see that box bed.’
‘Welcome,’ I tell her, liking her at once. ‘Come whenever you like. Well, maybe not just yet. We have a few … disturbances to settle first.’
‘I heard Mrs Heaton doesn’t like visitors,’ Grace says, nodding.
‘Oh, Ma hates them. But the house loves them and so do I.’
‘Forgive me, but Haworth is a small village, so I heard about your husband, and I was out with the others looking for your son the other day. I just wanted to say that … I know that times must have been hard.’
‘They have been. They are.’ I’m caught off guard by her kindness, her willingness to talk head-on about what so many people I meet either ignore or refer to in oblique euphemisms. Instinctively, I trust her.
‘Grace, while I’ve been getting the house ready, I’ve found some incredible things and I want to show them to you. I need someone with your level of Brontë expertise to look at them – but I also need to know that you will not discuss them with anyone outside of this room. Not yet.’
‘Wow, did you find the lost manuscript of Wuthering Heights?’ Grace jokes.
‘Almost,’ I say, and the look on her face is priceless
.
‘This is …’ Grace stares at the papers. ‘I mean this is … You have the newspapers with the dates on, which were covering the floor? They will help to establish provenance.’
‘For the first packet, yes. There’s a selection in the box folder, and the packaging and binding is in there, too.’
‘I need to put this before expert eyes, get the paper dated and the ink. But if we can prove that Emily’s note has been there for a least a hundred years, then … Bloody Hell, Trudy, this is her. I know it is, I feel it. I can see it’s her – and it’s the most wonderful thing I have ever set eyes on.’
‘This is nothing like anything else she wrote in her correspondence,’ I add. ‘To get this glimpse of her … And it was in my house all along. I walked over it a thousand times.’
‘This, this is Emily the writer.’ Grace’s eyes are glowing. ‘Emily the poet. Not the bored girl, dashing off a thank you or playing with her sister. This is the real her, the private her. I suspect that there were once many more documents that showed us this side of Emily, but Charlotte got rid of them, trying to protect her sister’s legacy.’
‘So she was right to be afraid of Charlotte burning them, then?’
‘Yes.’ Grace nods firmly. ‘Yes, I believe she was. Charlotte was terribly worried what people thought of Emily and, by extension, of her. She did her best to protect them both; if Charlotte had known there was a second manuscript … Oh, Trudy, this is huge.’
‘It is, isn’t it?’ I can’t stop grinning. ‘And what about Agnes?’
‘Huge!’ Grace repeats herself. ‘Women of Agnes’s status didn’t read or write or record their story; there is hardly anything like this, a few testimonies written by a scribe, perhaps. The only thing I can think of that compares is the autobiography of Mrs Thornton, written after the Civil War, but she was a woman of learning. This is simply remarkable – and that it was Emily who uncovered these pages, and Emily that wanted to write her story?’ Grace can’t speak for a few moments and I understand why. ‘It means that the whole world will read Agnes’s words now. She’ll be famous.’
As I carefully put everything away, she asks me, ‘What are you going to do with them?’
‘I want to look for more, more of Emily and Agnes. I think, you see, that there is more of a story that needs to be told. Emily was ill, but she may have been able to write. Robert may have hidden more of her work somewhere in the house, and after she died he left it where it lay. After all, she made him swear that none but her would retrieve it. And as for Agnes … she was in love with my ancestor. But I have never heard her name in any of the stories. I’ve heard the name Casson, the man who married a Heaton and then cast out her firstborn son, the Robert that she loved, forcing him to buy back his own inheritance, but not of Agnes.’
‘It’s likely that no one thought she mattered,’ Grace says. ‘But if you want to find out more about her, then there are a few church records that date back that far, held in Keighley now. Only they aren’t originals – many were lost in a flood, I think – and, of course, someone like Agnes may not have an entry for their birth or death in the church records. It’s not really my area of expertise.’
‘Or mine,’ I say. ‘I’m much more used to spending my time with dead Victorians.’
‘Trudy—’ Grace smiles hesitantly ‘—what will you do with this find, once you’ve completed your research? There are private collectors who would pay a lot – and I mean a lot – of money for this.’
‘I know,’ I assure her. ‘But I wouldn’t do that. I want the world to own these words. But before that, I want to keep looking. This is a story that needs an ending. And until I find out what that was, it’s a story that belongs to Ponden Hall alone.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
As I walk out of the Parsonage and into the sunlight, I look back up at what was once Emily’s window and smile. Grey clouds pile up on one another on the horizon, but the last few minutes of a sunny hour cast a golden light on everything in its path, warm and reassuring; the last remnants of that terrifying touch have evaporated away. For a few hours I thought that the only answer had to be gathering up my son and running away, but Will made me see the opposite is true; Ponden is my haven, my protector, and I am the custodian of everything within it, including those who are not quite gone. If there is danger coming, then I want Will safe in the sanctuary that has always kept us safe.
As I walk past the graveyard, which is covered in coppery leaves, a beautiful cockerel, black and gold, catches my eye as he stands proudly amongst the headstones.
And I feel something like a focusing.
A cloud passing over the sun washes the colour out of the leaves and a chill sends prickles down my spine; in the distance, between the green and grey of the tumbledown graves, I hear a baby crying – and at once I feel that familiar tug in my chest. The cry is so plaintive, so lost, that tears sting my eyes. I can’t see anyone, not a mother with a buggy, a father carrying a child in his arms. The graveyard is empty.
The cries grow louder and, as a swirl of dead leaves whips over the stones, I follow it, gripped by a sudden need to offer comfort. Searching for the source, I weave in and out of the trees, step over grave after grave; and then suddenly it stops abruptly. When it does, I long for it again, and it hits me, this awful thought: it was my lost baby crying, my little girl looking for me, searching for me. The tears come, hot and thick, and I am so overwhelmed with grief that I can’t move, or speak. I can’t breathe.
I hear the cries of crows again, the sound of schoolkids laughing in the alley, the leaves gusting around my feet. My face is wet with tears, and I can feel it, that tiny child’s loss and desperation, as sharply as if it were my own. If I stay there for a moment longer I’m afraid I’ll dig my hands into the soft, damp earth looking for a baby to hold.
As the sun returns, dappling through the leaves, I see the worn-out inscription on the stone at my feet.
CATHERINE BOLTON, INFANT
BORN 1658 DIED 1659
BELOVED DAUGHTER. GOD HAVE MERCY ON HER SOUL.
All the little lives that lie beneath my feet, so small they hardly mattered at all, except to those that lost them. So much love, so much heartbreak and loss in these few square feet. All at once I understand. There is only one force in the universe strong enough to tether a soul to the earth, constantly seeking and searching for that which is lost. Only the human heart can contain enough love – or enough hate – to keep on beating long after death.
There is only one love I know that will never be defeated, not by any foe. The love of a mother for her child. And I think of the Ponden Child, crying in the night to be let in and suddenly I understand everything. Agnes Heaton is a mother. A mother looking for her child.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
When I get back, Ma is sitting at the dining-room table, and the sight of her takes me by surprise. She’s brushed her long fair hair back from her face and pinned it into a bun on the back of her neck. And she’s dressed, not in her usual dressing gown and slippers, but a blue polo-neck jumper that I think I remember her wearing when I was a child, and a pair of jeans that are a little too big for her now. Still slippers on her feet, but she is dressed.
‘Now then,’ I say, ‘what’s the occasion?’
‘No occasion,’ Ma says. ‘Just felt like it. How did you get on?’
‘Good. Grace is great and she thinks they are genuine.’
‘Of course they are.’ Ma snorts her response.
‘And how have things been here?’
‘Peaceful.’ Ma nods at Will, nose deep in The Secret Garden. ‘He’s been reading, and the house feels relaxed, like it’s got something off its chest.’
‘I need to find out more about Agnes.’ I lower my voice. ‘Dad liked to tell me stories, but he never showed me any records and there must be a lot of paperwork somewhere – tax records, staff wages. Maybe I can find a trace of her there.’
Ma shakes her head. ‘What little we do have will be
in your dad’s office, I suppose. Everything else, centuries of family history, were more or less stolen with the contents of the library when your great-grandfather nearly lost it all. All those precious books – a Shakespeare First Folio, Aubudon’s The Birds of America – gone, vanished into thin air.’
The story of the lost Ponden library was legendary, more heart-breaking to think of than ever, now, knowing what might have been hidden amongst the pages of the books. The family was down on its luck, the hall mortgaged up to the hilt, so everything worth anything was sold to placate debtors. A local schoolteacher came in and made an inventory of all the books in the library and realised that some of it was quite valuable. But when the house sale took place, the books, the most precious asset that Ponden had, all vanished into thin air, and though the teacher did his best to track them down, they were never found. Everything else went for a paltry sum, and there is no record to say where. It was only some years later, when the inventory came to light, that we realised how valuable some of the books were, including two worth millions. If Emily’s manuscript was amongst those stolen books too … it doesn’t bear thinking about. I can only hope that Robert Heaton thought of a more original hiding place than Agnes had.
‘I wish Dad was here to ask,’ I mutter.
‘I’m here to ask,’ Ma says. ‘You never really ask about me and your dad, but I’ll tell you a secret. I was in love with this house before I was in love with him. History was my favourite subject at school, but in those days there weren’t no talk of university, or jobs like yours. Not for a girl off a farm like me. I’d walk past Ponden and look up at the windows, and think about all the people that had looked out of them.’ When she smiles, I capture a glimpse of her as she would have been then, more than thirty years ago. ‘That’s how I met your dad, who thought I was hanging around outside his house to meet him. He knew all the stories about Ponden, but I know plenty, too.’
The Girl at the Window Page 17
