Before they left York the next day, at Anne’s especial request, they paid a visit to York Minster, which had always impressed her as it had Branwell: gazing up at its fluid heights, the massive stonework contrasting with the delicacy of the tracery and sculpture, Anne was moved to say, ‘If finite power can do this what is the …’, before emotion stayed further speech. Anne’s happy mood sustained her throughout the train journey to Scarborough during which she delightedly pointed out all the best views to her companions. Arriving in Scarborough itself, she was again revived by her joy at seeing the sweeping sandy bay and the glorious stretch of sea once more.78
Anne was determined not to lose a single moment of her stay; equally, she had decided that Charlotte and Ellen should not be held back by her weakness but should explore the place for themselves. The morning after their arrival, Saturday, Anne insisted on going to the baths and being left there with only the attendant in charge. She later paid for her stubbornness in walking back alone to their lodgings when, overcome with exhaustion, she fell at the garden gate. Typically, Anne kept her accident from Charlotte and Ellen, who only heard about it some time afterwards. In the afternoon, she drove herself in a donkey cart on the beach for an hour. She had taken over the reins herself, fearing that the boy would force the donkey to go faster than she or it wished. Like all her family, Anne had always been fond of animals and could not bear to see them ill treated. When Ellen joined her she was just giving the boy a lecture on treating the animal well.79
Anne devised plans for Charlotte and Ellen in the hope that they would learn to love Scarborough as much as she did. She even insisted on taking them along the famous bridge across the ravine in the middle of the bay, which afforded a glorious prospect of the cliffs and sands with the sea beyond. Apart from this extravagance, their expenses were meagre: two shillings for dandelion coffee, three pennies for a glass of lemonade, four for half a dozen oranges.80
On Sunday, 27 May, Anne wanted to go to church, but was dissuaded by Charlotte and Ellen, who also refused to go themselves because it would have meant leaving her unattended. While Charlotte occupied herself in writing to Williams, Anne sat at the window of their ‘pleasant’ lodgings looking down on a sea as calm as glass. As she drew her pitifully impeded breath, Charlotte implored Williams, ‘Write to me. In this strange place your letters will come like the visits of a friend.’81 In the afternoon Anne took her customary short walk but, overcome by exhaustion, she asked to be left alone to enjoy the view from a comfortable seat near the beach while her companions went on to the saloon which they had not yet visited. In the evening, Anne tried and failed again to persuade Charlotte and Ellen to leave her and go to church. They did allow her to sit quietly by the window, however, watching with rapt expression a particularly splendid sunset. It was clear to them all that she had not long to live. As the last rays of the sun sank beyond the horizon, Anne returned to the fireside and, with that practical concern for others that was a hallmark of her character, discussed with Charlotte the propriety of them returning home. She did not wish to do so for her own sake, she said, but because she thought others might suffer more if she died in Scarborough.82
The discussion was unresolved. Anne passed a reasonable night, rose and dressed herself before seven o’clock the following morning and was ready to go downstairs before the rest of her little party. As she reached the top of the stairs, she was overcome with faintness and, smiling, informed her concerned sister and friend that she was afraid to descend. Ellen immediately offered to try to carry her, a suggestion which pleased Anne as much as it frightened and distressed Charlotte. An argument ensued in which Ellen emerged triumphant and Charlotte was persuaded to go back to her room so that she did not have to witness the spectacle. Ellen, going down a couple of steps below Anne, told her to put her arms around her neck saying, ‘I will carry you like a baby’, and promising to put her down if she was too heavy. More by determination than physical strength, Ellen succeeded in carrying the prostrate Anne downstairs. At the very bottom, however, Anne’s head suddenly fell forward like a leaden weight on top of Ellen’s: shocked by the blow and by the thought that only death could have caused it, Ellen staggered to Anne’s easy chair and, dropping her into it, fell on her knees in front of the invalid. Despite being shaken, Anne put out her arms to comfort her friend and said, ‘It could not be helped, you did your best.’83
Anne had her breakfast of boiled milk, prepared especially for her, and all seemed well until about eleven o’clock, when she suddenly announced that she felt a change. Believing that she had not long to live, she again asked whether it would be possible to return home in time. Unable to give an answer, Charlotte summoned a doctor and Anne asked him ‘how long he thought she might live – not to fear speaking the truth, for she was not afraid to die’. The doctor admitted that death was close at hand, she thanked him for his truthfulness and he left, returning two or three times in the next few hours to check on his patient.
For some time Anne continued to sit in her easy chair, looking, as Ellen later described her, ‘so serene & reliant’ as she prayed quietly, invoking blessings on her sister and her friend and enjoining Ellen: ‘Be a sister in my stead. Give Charlotte as much of your company as you can.’ When she became restless as death approached, she was carried across to the sofa. On being asked if she were easier, she replied, ‘It is not you who can give me ease, but soon all will be well through the merits of our Redeemer.’84 The doctor, ‘a stranger’ as Charlotte bitterly remarked, ‘wondered at her fixed tranquillity of spirit and settled longing to be gone’: in all his experience, he told them, he had never seen such a deathbed and it gave evidence of no common mind. Even while she lay dying, her thought was for others: seeing Charlotte barely able to restrain her grief, Anne whispered, ‘Take courage, Charlotte; take courage.’85 Conscious to the last, Anne died, very calmly and gently, at about two o’clock in the afternoon on Monday, 28 May 1849.
Her passing was so quiet that no one in the house, except the mourners at her side, was aware of it: dinner was announced through the half-open door even as Charlotte leaned over to close the eyes of her dead sister. The ‘dreary mockery’ of the intrusion of daily life at such a moment was enough to send Charlotte into paroxysms of weeping. All the force of the grief, frustration and bitterness she had kept in check over so many long months now overwhelmed her. For the remainder of the day she was in a state of nervous collapse and it was not until the next day that she was able to recover some semblance of calm and set about the duties required of her. Then, in a state of feverish exhaustion, she wrote brief notes to her father anxiously waiting alone in Haworth, and to Williams.86 It was Ellen who had to go into town for the unpleasant duty of registering the death, giving as its cause ‘Consumption six months’. It was probably Ellen, too, who got in touch with Margaret Wooler, to tell her of Anne’s death. Though living in the town and aware of the Brontës’ impending visit, Miss Wooler seems to have kept a tactful distance until her sympathy and practical assistance were required in the aftermath of Anne’s death.87 No doubt she and Ellen were responsible for sending the obituary notice to the local papers. By a strange irony, it appeared in the same issue of the Scarborough Gazette as a frontpage advertisement for the Scarborough Circulating Library which put Jane Eyre at the top of its list of new popular novels.88
The funeral arrangements were complex. To take Anne’s body back to Haworth would be a devastating experience for both Charlotte, who would have to accompany the coffin, and her seventy-two-year-old father, who would have to be present at the burial of his third child in nine months. Though it may have seemed morally wrong to lay Anne apart from the rest of the family, Charlotte could comfort herself that her sister had always loved Scarborough and would have been happy to have found her resting place there. She therefore determined to bury Anne in the town where she had died, but she had to make the arrangements quickly to prevent her father making the long and difficult journey from Haworth to Scarborough to
attend the funeral. In her letter written the day after Anne’s death, Charlotte informed her father that she had planned the funeral for the next day, Wednesday, 30 May: as he would not have received the letter until the very morning of the funeral, there would be no way in which he could possibly get to Scarborough in time.89 He therefore had to accept Charlotte’s fait accompli and, alone in his study at Haworth, pray for his daughter’s soul while her body was interred seventy miles away.
It was an additional distress to the mourners that the parish church of St Mary at Scarborough, where Anne was to be buried, was undergoing extensive rebuilding. The funeral service had to be held in the daughter church of Christ Church, virtually next door to Wood’s Lodgings, and then the little cortege had to wind slowly up the steep, narrow streets to St Mary’s churchyard where the burial took place in the midst of the rebuilding work. There, on the headland, just below the dramatic ruins of the castle on the clifftop and looking out across the bay she had always loved, Anne Brontë was laid to rest.90 The doctor’s kind offer to attend her funeral had been turned down so that her only official mourners were her sister and Ellen Nussey. At the church, however, they were unexpectedly joined by Margaret Wooler, who had come to give Charlotte her support by her kind and unobtrusive presence.91
Once the first desperate agony of grief had passed, Charlotte grew calmer and was able to reflect more positively on her sister’s death. Describing it to Williams a few days later, she was able to take comfort from the contrast of Anne’s gentle passing with Emily’s last violent struggles for life:
she died without severe struggle – resigned – trusting in God – thankful for release from a suffering life – deeply assured that a better existence lay before her – She believed – she hoped, and declared her belief and hope with her last breath. – Her quiet – Christian death did not rend my heart as Emily’s stern, simple, undemonstrative end did – I let Anne go to God and felt He had a right to her.
I could hardly let Emily go – I wanted to hold her back then – and I want her back hourly now – Anne, from her childhood seemed preparing for an early death – Emily’s spirit seemed strong enough to bear her to fulness of years – They are both gone – and so is poor Branwell – and Papa has now me only – the weakest – puniest – least promising of his six children – Consumption has taken the whole five.92
The passage of even such a short time had altered Charlotte’s perceptions of Anne’s death: her own outburst of grief had become a resigned ‘letting go’, her declaration the day after Anne’s death that ‘I did not think it would be so soon’ had become an expectation of her early death since childhood. Charlotte even persuaded herself that she had known from the moment of their departure that Anne would die in Scarborough and that she herself had acquiesced in the plan because ‘I wanted her to die where she would be happiest.’93 Curiously, too, Charlotte seems to have formed the odd impression that Anne was glad to die. Anne had had enough of life such as it was – in her twenty-eighth year she laid it down as a burden. I hardly know whether it is sadder to think of that than of Emily turning her dying eyes reluctantly from the pleasant sun.’94 Such an impression was totally at odds with all the ‘humble and limited’ schemes for future practice which Anne had still cherished only weeks before her death; it suggests a total misunderstanding of Anne’s resignation at the end which was not due to a disillusionment with life but merely an acceptance of the inevitable and a firm belief in life after death. However often Anne might have trembled in the past at the seeming magnitude of her sins, her precious doctrine of universal salvation had offered her sanctuary and security at the end. Perhaps subconsciously Charlotte felt that Anne’s early death was not as tragic as Emily’s, or even Branwell’s, because there was not the same sense of unfulfilled promise. Since she could not admit this feeling, even to herself, she found acceptance of Anne’s death in believing that her sister was glad to die. How else, indeed, could she come to terms with the loss of the last of her siblings?
As the sole survivor, Charlotte could not suppress an anguished questioning of her fate: ‘Why life is so blank, brief and bitter I do not know – Why younger and far better than I are snatched from it with projects unfulfilled I cannot comprehend’, she wrote to Williams, repeating a week later that ‘life seems bitter, brief – blank’.95 There was some comfort in the kindness of her friends: Martha Brown, who had written to assure Charlotte that all was well at home in her absence so that she did not feel obliged to return at once; Ellen, ‘a calm, steady girl – not brilliant, but good and true’, whose presence was a solace that stood between her and total isolation; Williams, upon whom she had no claim but who wrote to her constantly ‘in the strain best tending to consolation’.96 Her father, too, deeply concerned by her own poor health and the effect of the unremitting stress of the last nine months, wrote and ‘ordered’ her to remain at the seaside, thereby defying her often-expressed belief in his inability to manage without her.97
Charlotte could not bear the gaiety of Scarborough, with its now painful associations, so about a week after Anne’s death she and Ellen moved ten miles down the east coast to the smaller, less fashionable resort of Filey. There they again engaged cliff-top lodgings, this time not in the centre, but at the southern-most edge of the town, where they were most likely to find the peace and quiet Charlotte so needed. Cliff House, which was kept by Mrs Smith, widow of the land agent who had built it, looked straight out on to the sea and Charlotte found consolation in viewing the ‘wild rocky coast’ and ‘very solitary’ sands, which suited her desolate mood.98
Shortly after her arrival she wrote to her father to tell him her new address and the arrangements she had made in Scarborough. She had paid all the expenses for Anne’s funeral out of the money Anne had taken with her and had ordered a stone to be erected over her grave. The inscription was to be plain and simple: ‘Here lie the remains of Anne Brontë, daughter of the Revd. P. Brontë, Incumbent of Haworth, Yorkshire. She died, Aged 28, May 28th 1849’.99 A week later, Charlotte found time to write sadly to Williams ‘because I feel in the mood to do so without, I trust, paining you’. She now found some consolation for her sisters’ deaths in contemplating the fact that they had left her a noble legacy in her memories of them:
Were I quite solitary in the world – bereft even of Papa – there is something in the past I can love intensely and honour deeply – and it is something which cannot change – which cannot decay – which immortality guarantees from corruption.
They have died comparatively young – but their short lives were spotless – their brief career was honourable – their untimely death befel amidst all associations
The searing sorrows of the last nine months, which had deprived her of a brother and two sisters, had left her emotionally drained and, without the religious faith which had sustained her, would just as surely have destroyed her too.
A year ago – had a prophet warned me how I should stand in June 1849 – how stripped and bereaved – had he foretold the autumn – the winter, the spring of sickness and suffering to be gone through – I should have thought – this can never be endured. It is over. Branwell – Emily – Anne are gone like dreams – gone as Maria and Elizabeth went twenty years ago. One by one I have watched them fall asleep on my arm – and closed their glazed eyes – I have seen them buried one by one – and – thus far – God has upheld me. from my heart I thank Him.100
Charlotte would have preferred to stay at Filey but Ellen, perhaps finding the strain of coping alone with her grieving friend too much, insisted that they should move on to Bridlington and spend a week with the Hudsons at Easton Farm. The move was not a happy one and even though Charlotte deferred her return home for a day to fit in with the carrier’s arrangements, they did not spend a full week there.101
The return to Haworth Parsonage had to be faced and on 20 June Charlotte and Ellen packed their bags and set out for home. ‘I got home a litt
le before eight o’clock’, Charlotte later told her friend.
All was clean and bright waiting for me – Papa and the servants were well – and all received me with an affection which should have consoled. The dogs seemed in strange ecstasy. I am certain they regarded me as the harbinger of others – the dumb creatures thought that as I was returned – those who had been so long absent were not far behind.
I left Papa soon and went into the dining room – I shut the door – I tried to be glad that I was come home – I have always been glad before – except once – even then I was cheered, but this time joy was not to be the sensation. I felt that the house was all silent – the rooms were all empty – I remembered where the three were laid – in what narrow dark dwellings – never were they to reappear on earth. So the sense of desolation and bitterness took possession of me – the agony that was to be undergone – and was not to be avoided came on – I underwent it & passed a dreary evening and night and a mournful morrow – to-day I am better.102
On the ‘mournful morrow’ Charlotte attempted to find some relief for her overcharged feelings in writing a poem on her sister’s death. The unfinished lines were eloquent testimony to her later comment on Tennyson’s In Memoriam: ‘bitter sorrow, while recent, does not flow out in verse’.103
The daily routine of the house went on as usual, despite the fact that three of its inhabitants were now dead. ‘The great trial’, as Charlotte confessed to Ellen, ‘is when evening closes and night approaches – At that hour we used to assemble in the dining-room – we used to talk – Now I sit by myself – necessarily I am silent.’104 Perhaps surprisingly, she was not afflicted by the same suffocating oppression of the spirits she had suffered after her return from Brussels. Now that she had a real and terrible grief to bear, it was a sense of Jane Eyre-ish rage at the injustice of her threefold loss which attacked her at these moments. This she preferred to confide in the less shockable ear of Williams.
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