by Juliet Gael
There would be no adventure in the Highlands, but George was adamant that she should see the literary shrines of Abbotsford and Melrose Abbey, even though it meant rising in the pitch dark to be on the road at the break of dawn. Abbotsford, the fantastic baronial castle built by Sir Walter Scott, was nearly a four-hour drive from Edinburgh, through magnificent wooded valleys. Once in the carriage, Eliza removed her bonnet, settled into her corner with her shawl behind her head, and slept most of the way, but Charlotte hung at the open window, determined not to waste a single precious moment.
They jostled along in silence, swaying with the coach as it wended its way through the valley. After a long while, George folded his newspaper.
“Are you ready to eat something?” he said quietly. “We have fresh buns the inn packed for us.”
Charlotte drew her head back inside. “In a little while,” she smiled. A strand of hair had blown loose and she tucked it into her bonnet. “It might amuse you to know that when my brother and I were young, we were slavish imitators of Scott. It was all very childish, but it was a source of pure enjoyment to us, re-creating those wild adventures, all those stories of revenge and power and love.” A dreamy look came over her, softening her face and distancing her eyes.
“Have you any inclination to return to that kind of story again?”
She answered with a firm shake of the head. “I don’t believe in fairy tales anymore.” Then, sweetly, she turned her eyes on him and said, “I’ve never enjoyed myself so much, George. I don’t know how to thank you.”
He raised a hand in protest. “I will not hear any more professions of gratitude. This is quite as much fun for me as it is for you. I haven’t been to Abbotsford since I was Alick’s age.” He shifted his weight and grew suddenly thoughtful. “He has an advantage over me, Alick does. He’s much more studious than I was. I was quite unruly in school.”
“Unruly?” Charlotte prodded.
“I was expelled. That’s when Father put me to work as an apprentice in the firm.” He gave her a dimpled smile. “We exported ladies’ bonnets to India. It was a thoroughly practical education.” He straightened his broad shoulders and drew a deep breath before confiding, “But it puts me at a disadvantage. Sometimes I find myself quite overwhelmed by the company I keep.”
“You have a great intellectual capacity, George. There is nothing to stop you from acquiring knowledge.”
“I don’t have the time. I don’t have a spare minute in my day.”
“Then hold on tenaciously to what you have, and remember, when you’re surrounded by the Ruskins and the Leweses and—”
“—and the Brontës—”
She flapped her tiny hand at him. “Remember that it is not that they have any greater capacity than you do. Perhaps through circumstances of fate they have acquired an erudition superior to yours, but Nature is a wonderful school—my sister Emily is a brilliant example of this—and you can arrive at a knowledge unsophisticated but genuine.”
“That’s what I find so remarkable about you,” he said with a broad smile. “Any other woman would have flattered me. Told me I was perfect the way I am.” He added with a shade of regret, “I wish we could have visited the Highlands together.”
She leaned forward and placed her featherlight hand on his knee. “I have no regrets. These few days have surpassed anything I’ve ever known.”
She shifted her gaze back to the window. “This country inspires such romance, doesn’t it? It tempts one to do something wild and unpredictable.”
“Like what?”
“Like …” She hesitated, her eyes flashing brightly. “Like hopping down from the carriage and setting off through the hills on foot!”
“Then I’ll stop the driver right now!” George teased, reaching for his walking stick to tap on the roof.
“George! Don’t you dare!” she cried with a twinkling smile.
The carriage hit a hole, tossing them to one side. Protectively, George reached out to brace Charlotte with one hand and his sister with the other. Eliza stirred in her sleep, and her bonnet slipped from her loose fingers to the floor. George retrieved it, and when he laid it on the seat he said, “I shouldn’t have let you leave London. I knew you’d change your mind. I should have kept you captive until it was time to go, and then abducted you.”
“An abduction! Straight out of Walter Scott!” Charlotte teased.
He spread his hands. “If it makes you happy …”
“Truly, a longer excursion would have been very difficult. I’ve been gone from home far too long. Papa’s all alone now except for the servants.”
“You’ve said he keeps himself very busy.”
“Oh, he does. He’s always knee-deep in all sorts of petitions and reforms. He still preaches on Sundays, and he’s very much in demand as a speaker. And he has frequent visitors.” She gave George a wry smile. “Mostly of the clerical sort.”
“But what about you? What will you do down there in the winter?”
“You know very well what I’ll be doing. I’ll be writing my next book. I can’t run away forever.”
“Why don’t you move into London?”
“And leave my father?”
“You’d bring him with you. After a few more novels, you’ll be earning enough to live very comfortably.”
“I couldn’t do that.”
“But you would greatly benefit from the company of friends so nearby. And you have friends in London, Charlotte.”
She shook her head. “I could never induce my father to leave. I don’t believe he has slept away from home once in nearly ten years. His entire life has been devoted to his parish.”
“Do you intend to bury yourself up there in Haworth for the rest of your life?”
“I have no choice.”
With a lighthearted smile George turned to admire a bit of scenery floating by the window. To him, the suggestion was nothing more than a passing whim, but it seemed to Charlotte that something had happened, something subtle and perhaps imagined, but it was enough to leave her with a gnawing sense of loss, like someone cut off from hope and set adrift with no dreams left in sight.
They returned late and Charlotte spent a sleepless night grappling with her emotions. She was more than a little in love with him, and their growing intimacy had given rise to a sense of possibility. But George was as unsuited to her soul as she was to his body, and Charlotte was profoundly aware of this. She thought there must be something dreadfully wrong with her that such a man would leave her so unfulfilled. He was a man graced with everything she lacked. A businessman, straightforward and uncomplicated, fascinated by a woman of psychological complexity. There, that was the end of it. There was nothing more to it. “You mustn’t make demands on him,” she warned herself. “Not if you want to keep him, or have any little portion of his affections. Don’t expect too much of him or he’ll feel you to be troublesome, and then it will be all over. Deny yourself and your needs, and be still.”
Arriving at Ellen’s directly from Scotland, she came undone. The stimulus of place and people had proved too much for her, and she landed at Brookroyd pale, trembling, and slightly feverish. After several days she roused herself enough to write George a cheery, playful letter in the voice of her author-self, Currer Bell, who always, at a distance, spoke more assertively than Charlotte Brontë. In it she attempted to place their relationship in the context of their vastly dissimilar lives. She wrote:
You are to keep a fraction of yourself—if it be only the end of your little finger—for Currer Bell, and that fraction he will neither let gentleman nor lady—author or artist—take possession of—or so much as meddle with. He reduces his claim to a minute point—and that point he monopolizes.
“Oh, miss! Oh ye’re home!” Martha cried. She stood at the front door of the parsonage drying her hands on her apron, and in the same breath she shouted over her shoulder, “Tabby, the mistress is ’ome!”
Charlotte was trying to fend off the dogs while directing
the footman shuffling up the garden path with her trunk on his back. “Please to take it to the top of the stairs,” she said to him while she herded Keeper back into the house. Old Tabby came hobbling out of the kitchen and added to the fracas with a sob. “Aye, miss, we’ve been worried sick about ye!”
Charlotte hurried forward to give the old woman a reassuring hug. “Tabby, what is all this nonsense?” she scolded tenderly. “Where’s Papa?”
“Across the lane in the chippin’ shed.”
Charlotte handed her bonnet to Martha and hurried through the kitchen to the backyard.
Her father was coming across the lane from the shed, scattering the chickens with his walking stick as he swung open the gate. He was seventy-three now and his knees were failing him, but he still bore himself perfectly erect with the dignified air of an old warrior. Charlotte was ready to be annoyed with him until she saw the tears swelling in his eyes.
“Oh, my dear daughter. I’m so relieved!” he said as he drew her into a crushing embrace.
She squirmed loose and tilted back her head to look up at him. “I was in the cab down at the foot of Bridgehouse Hill when I saw Mr. Greenwood with his walking staff. He saw me and waved me down. He said you were quite beside yourself with worry about me, and that he was setting off to Brookroyd to get news of me!”
“Don’t be annoyed, Charlotte. God knows how worried we’ve been, ever since I got Miss Nussey’s letter. She said that as soon as you got back from Scotland you took straight to bed. I didn’t know if it was one of your bilious attacks or something more serious.”
He scanned her face with a worried frown. He had grown increasingly careless in his appearance; his shirts were frayed at the edges, and he never wore a proper necktie anymore. She stood on her toes and gave him a kiss on his bristled cheek.
“She’s unduly vexed you, Papa. I was exhausted, and I have a slight cold. That’s all. I needed to rest.”
“You look pale. Is everything all right?”
“Everything is quite all right.” She took him by the arm and led him back inside. “Come. Let me pour you a nice cup of tea to calm you down.”
Early that evening, after she had settled him quietly in his study with his slippers, pipe, and a glass of port, she sat in the kitchen with Tabby and Martha, going over the household accounts. Charlotte had grown softhearted with the servants and long ago ceased questioning the occasional excesses. She suspected Tabby of pocketing a little soap and candles for her nephew now and then, and she imagined that some of their sugar and flour ended up in Martha’s mother’s larder. All she could do was voice a mild exclamation from time to time about how much sugar they went through in a month, although they rarely made fruit pies anymore. No one could make fruit pies as good as Emily’s.
“You musn’t let Papa work himself into such a fever pitch of excitement,” she said to Martha, looking up from a bill in her hands. “It’s not good for his blood pressure.”
“Master gets hisself that way without no help from us.”
“But you mustn’t encourage him. You know how prone he is to look on the dark side of things. He can always find some way to torment himself. He’s quite good at it.”
As Charlotte set the bill aside, her glance took in both of them: Tabby in her chair in the corner pitting a bowl of cherries and Martha at the table sorting out the tradesmen’s bills.
“It seems he was worried about more than my health.”
Martha kept her head low and swatted at a fly. Tabby didn’t hear, or pretended as much.
“He’d quite got it into his head that I had run off to Scotland to get married, or at least was on the verge of it.”
A look passed between the servants. “Is it true, miss?” Tabby asked.
“Absolutely not.” She leaned down to pick up some cherry stones that had rolled to the floor. “I’m quite annoyed with Ellen. She must have put that idea in his head.” She dropped the stones into the pile on Tabby’s lap and said, “Time to light the lamp, Martha. I can’t see well enough to finish these accounts.”
“Aye, miss,” Martha said, and she rose from the bench to fetch the lamp.
In August, Richmond’s portrait of Charlotte arrived, along with an engraving of the Duke of Wellington, a gift from George to Charlotte’s father. Both had been beautifully framed at George’s expense, and that same day John Brown came around with his ladder to hang them. The entire household had gathered in the dining room, and they were in the thick of discussion, each with an opinion as to the most favorable lighting and position, when Flossy came wagging into the hall, his curly hair matted and wet, and his tongue lolling half way to the floor.
Charlotte spied him and clapped her hands, herding the dog back into the kitchen, where she found Arthur standing in the doorway in his rumpled linen jacket and straw hat, clutching a string of trout.
“Good day, miss. Sorry about Flossy, there,” he said. “Thought you might like a few of these for your dinner.” He raised the string to show off his catch. The sun had burnished his fair skin, setting off the sky blue of his twinkling eyes. Without his clerical garb he had the air of an amiable country gentleman, and there flashed before Charlotte’s eyes the memory of that encounter years ago when she had come upon him knee-deep in the stream, trout tickling with the village boys. The smell of the moors on a breezy summer day clung to his clothing, and she felt a peculiar longing as she imagined him rambling through the moors with Flossy, chasing up birds and watching the clouds sweep across the sky.
“What shall I do with them?” Arthur asked, noting her blank-faced silence.
Charlotte came to her senses. “Why, that’s very kind of you, Mr. Nicholls,” she said. “Let me fetch Martha.”
A moment later she returned with the servant. Martha gave a little exclamatory cry and came bustling around the table toward Arthur. “Why, what good-lookin’ trout, sir. This’ll make for a pleasant change.”
As she slapped them down on a sheet of newspaper and opened the knife drawer, the sound of voices in the other room drew Arthur’s attention.
“Am I interrupting something?”
“Oh, not really,” Charlotte replied with a dismissive shake of her head.
Martha gave a grunt of dissent. “The mistress had her portrait made in London, sir. Have to be somebody important to have yer portrait made by a famous artist, that’s what I say.” She finished sharpening the knife and, with swift strokes of the blade, began gutting the trout. “I think it’s a good and proper likeness of the mistress. Tabby don’t know what she’s talkin’ about. Anyway, she’s half blind.”
At that moment Tabby hobbled in, shaking her head and muttering under her breath, “Makes her look old.” She saw Arthur and repeated her cry: “Makes her look old, I say.”
“You remember me young, that’s all, Tabby,” Charlotte said loudly.
“But the portrait of the master is a good ’un.”
“It’s not Papa, Tabby. It’s the Duke of Wellington.”
Tabby only scowled and put up her hands as if to ward off any dissenting thought.
“You’re welcome to come throw your opinion into the arena,” Charlotte told Arthur.
“I’ll call this evening,” he said with a tip of his hat. “When I’m not smelling of fish.”
That evening they stood gazing up at her portrait above the fireplace. The summer sun had slipped below the hills, and Charlotte struck a match to light the lamp.
“What do you think, Nicholls?” Patrick asked. Without waiting for a reply, he went on: “You need to see it in the daylight, without the glare from the lamp.” Patrick stepped up and peered at it closely through his spectacles. “Wonderfully good and lifelike without flattering her, don’t you think? A very correct likeness.” His voice dipping in a sudden tone of remorse, he added, “Although there is one who could have appreciated it with more skill and taste than mine, but that person is gone now. And I must take the blame for that.”
There was a moment of uncomforta
ble silence. Then, controlled, he went on: “It improves upon acquaintance. I like it more this evening than I did this morning. I fancy I see strong indications of her genius there.” He raised his hand to silence Charlotte’s rebuke. “Don’t deny me my opinion, daughter. It may be that I’m partial and too enthusiastic, but that’s my prerogative as your father.”
Charlotte had been observing Arthur keenly. The granite-like face remained immovable while he gently fingered the rim of his hat. “Very fine. Very fine indeed,” he said in a subdued voice.
A pang of disappointment tweaked her heart. She had hoped for a meaningful comment, a sign of critical appreciation, but there was none. Only this dull platitude. He turned to Charlotte. “I’ve neglected to thank you properly for the altar cloth. It was beautifully done.”
“You’re very welcome. I thought the white would come in useful.”
“Indeed. It’s already been put to good use. We’ve had three marriages this week.”
As they moved toward the door, Patrick said, “That’s the one duty I’m glad to relinqish to you, Nicholls. Marriage is pure folly, wouldn’t you agree? A few days of madness followed by years of suffering. Marriage is for the weak. The wise remain single.” He clapped Arthur on the back jovially and said with a burst of laughter, “A course you seem destined to follow, my friend.”
Arthur stiffened. He turned toward Charlotte. “Well, good night, Miss Brontë.”
“I’ll see you to the door.”
“Such a beautiful night,” she declared in the doorway, glancing up at the stars shining brightly in the eastern sky.
He paused on the gravel walk and turned, his imposing figure in tall black hat and black garb blurred by the falling shadows.