Jane Grey (The Brontë Brothers Book 1)

by Nina Mason

  She’s everything he ever wanted in a woman,

  apart from one significant snag…

  Matthew Brontë, a true romantic at heart, believes the only happiness in life is to love and be loved. And yet, he fears he lacks the capacity to love…until he meets Jane Grey. Jane, a humble English governess, seems perfect for Matthew, apart from one significant snag: Jane can only marry a man of means and Matthew must give up his fortune if and when he marries.

  When faced with the choice between love and money, which will each of them choose?

  ALSO BY NINA MASON

  The Knights of the Tarot series

  Knight of Wands * Knight of Cups * Knight of Pentacles

  The Royal Pains series

  Devil in Duke’s Clothing * The Duke’s Bedeviled Bride *

  The Devil’s Masquerade * The Devils Who Would be King

  Single Titles

  Sins Against the Sea * Queen of Swords * The Tin Man

  Jane Grey

  ___________________

  NINA MASON

  Copyright © Nina Mason 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieved system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the author, excepting snippets or small excerpts for blogs and/or reviews. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  This is an original work with bits and pieces quoted from or inspired by works of literature and poetry in the public domain.

  Chapter One

  The Loire Valley, France

  September 12, 1850

  Of all the many mistakes Matthew Brontë had made in the pursuit of art and love, the first was the one he remembered most fondly. He was sixteen at the time, unschooled in the ways of love, and utterly unaware of his attractions to the opposite sex.

  “Have you ever kissed a girl?” his cousin Charlotte had asked.

  “No,” he replied, ashamed to admit his inexperience.

  “Would you like to kiss me?”

  Yes, he would. Very much indeed. For he’d always found her as bright and lovely as the day they were presently enjoying picking berries in the garden of the parsonage where she lived with her family in Yorkshire. At the same time, he knew kissing her would be wrong. He was, nevertheless, tempted. She was a quiet, thoughtful girl whose petite figure and diminutive hands and feet were very much to his liking. Her face, too, was pleasing with its large almond-colored eyes and bowed mouth, which, at the moment, was stained with the juice of the strawberries they’d been eating. So was her little gauze dress with its faint pattern of flowers.

  “I want to, but we shouldn’t.” The day was warm and he was sweating under his neckcloth and waistcoat. “If we are found out, there will be the devil to pay.”

  “Don’t be afraid of that.” She stepped closer, canted her head, and began to play with the knot on his cravat. “We can go into the garden shed where no one will see us. And if someone should come, we can pretend we were only looking for something. A basket or bucket, say, for the berries.”

  Though her plan seemed solid, Matthew was too afraid of what his unreasonably strict father would do if he caught them. Yes, people often married their cousins, but not at his age and not in his family.

  Eventually, her powers of persuasion—helped along significantly by his raging adolescent hormones—won out and he followed her into the dark and musty shed. When she turned to face him, he stood there awkwardly, unsure what to do next. He understood the mechanics of kissing, of course, but understanding how to do a thing and actually doing that thing were hardly the same.

  When she set her hands on his shoulders, he felt a quickening in his groin. Holding his gaze, she tilted back her head, offering him that tempting strawberry-stained mouth of hers. Still, he hesitated, fearing the repercussions.

  Somewhere outside, a crow cawed. The unexpected noise made his pulse race faster. He was sweating profusely now and his penis was as hard as flint inside his breeches.

  She raised a hand to his face and ran her fingers along his jawbone. “Don’t you want to kiss me, Matthew?”

  All at once, his neckcloth was strangling him. “I do, but…”

  She danced her fingertips over his lips. “You are too handsome for your own good, dear cousin. Mark my words, your face will bring you trouble one day.”

  He swallowed before lowering his face to hers. “And you are too clever and self-possessed for yours, dear Charlotte, which will bring you trouble in equal measure, I’ll wager.”

  Before she could respond, he joined his lips to hers. They were as supple as rose petals and tasted scrumptiously of forbidden fruit. As he swiped his tongue against hers, he slid his hands to her buttocks and pulled her tiny body against his.

  As the kiss grew more rapacious, they rubbed the sinful parts of their bodies together, longing to connect more than their mouths. When the dinner bell rang an hour later, they exited that shed with far more experience than they’d possessed when they went in.

  He’d never told anyone what happened that day—not even his brothers, with whom he shared most of his secrets (or used to before he left England). He fancied himself a gentleman, after all, in character if not in status, and gentlemen didn’t kiss and tell.

  Picking up the brown-paper parcel that had triggered the cherished memory, Matthew turned the package over in his hands. Charlotte hadn’t been in touch since she went off to Brussels, so he couldn’t image what she might be sending him now.

  Taking the package to his desk, he used his brass letter knife to break the twine holding the paper in place. He was in the fabrique in the château’s formal gardens, which served as his studio and sanctuary. When the light and weather were good, which was most of the time, he painted here and often napped in the afternoons on the old iron daybed he’d had the servants bring down from the attics. It was a habit he’d acquired since moving to France, where it was the custom to enjoy a mid-afternoon petit somme.

  Over time, he’d added to the furnishings to make the space more functional and comfortable. A table here and there, a high-backed chair by the fireplace, a desk for sketching and making notes, and a collection of his favorite novels and poems for when he felt more like reading than painting or napping.

  Today, he’d come here to forget his troubles—something only painting made possible. When he had a brush in his hand, everything else—the world, all his worries, and even the passage of time—magically fell away.

  Holding his breath, he tore the paper off the package, finding a letter and book within. The book was Jane Eyre, which he’d read three years prior when first it was published. His mother had sent it to him with a note telling him Charlotte had adopted the male nom de plume of Currer Bell, both to protect her privacy and increase her odds of finding a publisher.

  He broke the seal on the letter and, while unfolding its pages, stepped into the puddle of sunlight spilling through the front windows. The words, written in French, were in Charlotte’s small, slanting cursive.

  My Dear Cousin,

  Though we have not set eyes on each other for a dozen years, I’d like to think we would still recognize each other if we happened to meet on the street. I am certain I would know you—by your wild gypsy eyes, if nothing else. Did you know you were my first love? Did you have any idea you’d stolen my heart long before I let you steal my kisses that long-ago summer?

  Even if you could not see the girl I was in my face now, you would see her in the book I have enclosed. You might
see a little of yourself, too, dear cousin, for I could not resist borrowing a few insights from your letters. These I have marked in the enclosed copy, to save you the trouble of hunting them down.

  Matthew tasted strawberries as he turned the sheet over.

  I hope Cupid has been kinder to you than he has been to me. His arrows have the habit of attaching my heart to the wrong men, an unfortunate fate that has brought me only suffering and searing regrets. But when I am at my lowest, I think of you, and that hour we spent in the shed. The poor do not need a great deal to live on—they ask only the crumbs of bread which fall from the rich man’s table—but if they are refused these crumbs—they die of hunger. No more do I need a great deal of affection from those I love—I would not know what to do with a whole and complete relationship—I am not accustomed to it—but you showed a little interest in me in days gone by, and I cling to those memories of our affectionate friendship. I cling to them as I would cling on to life.

  Ever your devoted cousin,

  Charlotte Brontë

  Matthew set the pages aside and wiped a tear from the corner of his eye. Alas, Cupid had been no kinder to him than to Charlotte. If only their fathers had allowed them to marry when they came of age, both of their lives would have been so much happier. But alas, it was not to be. She went to Belgium to study and teach and he came to France to paint.

  And now, it was too late. For the passion he’d mistaken for love back then had long since cooled into esteem. And hers for him, she’d transferred to her married professor in Brussels. She remained, however, his model of womanly perfection.

  Oddly, the woman he’d chosen to make a life with was Charlotte’s opposite in every way. Mathilde was statuesque, domineering, and utterly uninterested in the things he burned for. Art, music, poetry, and literature being primary among them.

  Releasing a heavy sigh, he stretched his gaze across the garden beyond the window—his botanical tribute to what his heart most desired but could not seem to feel. He wondered sometimes if he was deficient in that way, for despite having lived for four-and-thirty years, he’d never come close to experiencing anything like the all-encompassing emotion described by the romantics he so admired.

  With a sigh, he picked up Jane Eyre, but didn’t open the book. There was no need. He already knew the passages she’d taken from his letters. The excerpt he particularly recalled was this one, which she’d attributed to Edward Rochester, the novel’s eccentric hero:

  To women who please me only by their faces, I am the very devil when I find out they have neither souls nor hearts—when they open to me a perspective of flatness, triviality, and perhaps imbecility, coarseness, and ill-temper: but to the clear eye and eloquent tongue, to the soul made of fire, and the character that bends but does not break—at once supple and stable, tractable and consistent—I am ever tender and true.

  Matthew raked his fingers through his unruly dark hair. If only he’d found such a woman before he met Mathilde Moineau,the titled mistress of Cœur Brisé, the Loire Valley château he’d called home for the past ten years. But alas, he’d not, and as Charlotte had so astutely observed, the poor must have something to live on, if only the crumbs and scraps which fall from a rich man’s table—or, in his case, a rich woman’s.

  And when his patroness died in a matter of hours, he would be left with only the clothes on his back and the difficult choice between returning to Paris as a pauper and going home to England as a failure.

  His cousin also had been right about his looks being a bane. Walking over to the empty fireplace, he lifted his gaze to the mirror above the mantle. The wild eyes of a fiend looked back at him from his own reflection. Light shone in their depths—a good and noble man hiding behind a thin curtain of bitterness and disappointment, his shadow visible to any who took the trouble to look.

  He’d inherited his mother’s eyes; his mother, who’d recognized and encouraged his fledgling talent for drawing, to the great consternation of her husband. God, how he missed that sweet, refined lady who gave up her privileged life to marry for love and quietly encouraged an appreciation for the arts in all four of her sons.

  As a boy, Matthew had done his best to please both his parents by filling his sketchbooks with studies of commonplace objects—to celebrate the sacred in the familiar.

  “If you must paint,” his father would say in a tone radiating disapproval, “why can you not paint scenes that glorify God? Biblical scenes, angels, and saints—like Michelangelo or Botticelli.”

  “What I paint does glorify the Almighty,” Matthew would attempt to explain. “For is God not everywhere and in everything? And by painting the ordinary—tables and chairs, bowls and pitchers, flowers and fruit—am I not paying homage to the divinity all around us?”

  He needn’t have wasted his breath, for his father, like Mathilde, saw only fruit and vegetables where he saw minor miracles.

  Stepping nearer the fire, he ran his fingers over the tooled leather spines of his cousins’ novels. Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, among them. If his muse didn’t reawaken, his only notoriety would be his relationship to the talented Miss Brontës. Would living in their shadow prove as detrimental to his ego as it had to their brother Branwell’s?

  Tearing his gaze from his reflection, Matthew crossed to his easel and ran a critical eye over the painting he’d been working on before the package arrived. He wasn’t satisfied with his efforts. Not at all. Like everything else he’d attempted in the last decade, his execution fell woefully short of the vision in his head.

  Fighting the impulse to put his fist through the canvas, he picked up his palette, grabbed one of his brushes, and dabbed the stiff bristles in a glob of cobalt blue. Determined to persevere, he applied the paint to the image—a romanticized version of Persephone, who, after being abducted by Hades, was forced to live part of every year in the underworld.

  Matthew could relate to her plight, though, unlike Demeter’s daughter, he’d entered his hell willingly—and now hated himself for his shortsightedness and all the regrets he’d allowed to silence his muse.

  But maybe, just maybe, if he could escape his self-imposed prison, she might speak to him again. Or, better yet, sing in the dulcet tones of artistic genius.

  If, however, she continued to elude him, he would die in obscurity because of his own foolish choices. The thought was a torment, for something in his make-up craved greatness the way an opium-eater craved laudanum. If he didn’t achieve fame in the art world of Paris, he might well be driven mad by his frustrated ambitions—or, at the very least, be driven to seek solace in drink, as his late cousin Branwell had done.

  Giving up on the painting for now, Matthew put down paint and brush and returned to the window. Alarm sparked in his chest at the sight of Mathilde’s doctor hurrying down the gravel path toward the fabrique. Throwing open the French doors, he stepped into the warmth of the day to learn what news the physician had come to relay.

  “There you are, Monsieur le Comte,” the out-of-breath doctor said. “I have been searching for you everywhere. There has been a sudden change for the worse. It now seems quite probable your wife will not survive the hour.”

  Matthew felt an inner pang that might have been guilt, grief, or a combination of the two. He was neither a count nor Mathilde’s husband, but saw no reason to give up the charade until he left this life behind.

  “She is very weak,” the doctor said, herding him toward the château, “and can hardly speak—but has been calling for you. You must go to her—at once, sil vous plait—and give her what comfort you can."

  Matthew hurried along, forgetting he still wore his paint-splattered artist’s smock. As he entered through the French doors into the morning room, he found Mathilde’s priest waiting inside.

  “We have done all we can for her,” he said, his voice and expression solemn. “But you are what she needs now. You must go to her, Monsieur. Quickly. For there is not a moment to waste.”

/>   With leaden legs, Matthew climbed the stairs, made his way down the portrait-lined hall to Mathilde’s bedchamber, and seated himself in the chair beside her canopy bed.

  “Is that you, Matthew?” Her voice was choked and tremulous.

  “Yes, Mathilde. It is I.”

  The distasteful odor of calomel, the quicksilver cure-all the doctor had administered without result, hung heavily in the air. Matthew set his hand upon hers, which lay cold and withered upon the bedclothes. In his chest, his heart resided in a similar state of atrophy. If only she’d been more like his mother and cousins, who were clever, well-read women with a keen appreciation for art, literature, and poetry, he might have been able to care for her.

  The drapes, of the same lavender velvet as the bed curtains, were closed, making the room airless and dark. A pair of votives on the bedside table provided the only light. In the soft glow they cast over her face, he could see the glistening dabs of the priest’s anointing oil.

  “Will you not hold me?” she croaked through cracked and flaking lips.

  The suggestion made him recoil. In the three days since she’d first been afflicted with cholera, her eyes had recessed into their sockets and her formerly rosy complexion had turned a ghastly shade of bluish gray.

  But it wasn’t just her disease-ravaged body that put him off the idea of physical contact. It was that holding someone who’d berated, manipulated, humiliated, and emasculated him for so many years held little appeal for him. Intellectually, he understood those behaviors reflected her own defects more than his, but it was still hard to take being treated like an errant child whenever he said or did something displeasing to her.