Romancing Miss Bronte

by Juliet Gael

  “Not at all, Mr. Nicholls.”

  “Then you’re well.”

  “Quite well.”

  Meeting her unexpectedly like this seemed to both fluster and please him. He smiled nervously. “You do indeed appear in good spirits.”

  “I’m sure it’s the exercise. I’ve had a brisk walk.”

  “Ah, yes. A good brisk walk does a body good.”

  Arthur generally doted on the dogs, and they were circling at his feet, whining for attention. But he seemed oblivious to them; he stood blocking the narrow path, wearing a strained and tentative look. Charlotte had begun to notice this strange behavior, but she was not inclined to examine it too closely.

  “And your book is coming along well?”

  “I finished it. Just this morning.”

  “You’ve finished! This is quite good news. Indeed, very good news!”

  “Why, thank you.” Impulsively, in the fog of her own happiness, she blurted out, “Perhaps you’d like to come to tea this afternoon?”

  “Today? Why … uh, yes, I would be delighted. A sort of celebration.”

  “Yes, if you wish.” She smiled kindly at him. “It’s just tea, Mr. Nicholls.”

  “Of course, of course!”

  He hesitated as though he would like to say more. There was an awkward silence, and then he came to his senses all of a sudden, stepping out of her way so that she might pass.

  “Good day, Miss Brontë.”

  “Good day, Mr. Nicholls.”

  At tea that afternoon Charlotte was talkative and engaging. Arthur was uncharacteristically mild-mannered and quiet. When she passed him a cup he took it meekly, with a furtive but piercing glance. Arthur had never before struck her as meek or mild-mannered. She hoped he had not misunderstood her lightheartedness. If she had suspicions she dismissed them. At this moment she was riding on a swell of pure joy. He happened to be there, and she swept him along with her.

  That evening Arthur dashed off a short note to Sowden:

  She’s finished her novel. I daresay I have no more excuses. It’s now or never. I’m in a wretched state. I lose all composure in her presence. Fear I’m making a great fool out of myself. How odd that after all these years it’s finally hit me like a ton of bricks. (I am not good at simile, but this one—although overused—is quite accurate.) Next Monday I shall pop the question. God give me strength! BURN THIS AFTER READING.

  Three days later Charlotte finished the fair copy of Villette and posted it to Cornhill. Then she rewarded herself with a visit to Ellen. Arthur was deeply chagrined to discover she had gone. Also, as he confessed to Sowden, somewhat relieved.

  Having earlier submitted the first two volumes of Villette—of which both George and Mr. Williams had warmly approved—Charlotte was confident that the finished book would provoke little controversy and find greater approbation than her previous work. Most of all, she was relieved that George had seemed pleased with the character of Dr. John. Yet she waited anxiously for a response.

  “I can hardly tell you how much I hunger to have some opinion besides my own,” she wrote him,

  and how I have sometimes desponded and almost despaired because there was no one to whom to read a line—or of whom to ask a counsel. Jane Eyre was not written under such circumstances, nor were two-thirds of Shirley. I got so miserable about it, I could bear no allusion to the book—but it is finished now, and I eagerly await your verdict. Remember to be an honest critic and tell Mr. Williams to be unsparing—not that I am likely to alter anything—.

  George could not help but recognize himself in the character of Dr. John Graham Bretton, and his mother in the figure of Mrs. Bretton. At first, his vanity had been flattered by the portrayal. But then, in the third volume, he sensed a certain contempt creeping into Lucy’s attitude toward the doctor. He made no mention of it to anyone, but it wounded him deeply.

  There were a startling number of incidents that he recognized as having been drawn directly from their shared moments: the visit to the theater where a fire broke out, the intimate evenings in his home; only now did he realize to what degree her work was autobiographical.

  He had always assumed that Charlotte would play the romantic card and at the conclusion throw cold little Lucy Snowe into the arms of the genial doctor. So when he finally had the third volume in hand and began to read, he was greatly disturbed.

  “Good grief, Mother. She completely switches the narrative.”

  He’d come wandering into her bedroom that night with the manuscript in his hand.

  “Oh dear. Is it too awfully confusing?”

  “It certainly throws off the reader. She starts off building up the relationship between Lucy and Dr. John—”

  “Dr. John. That’s your character.”

  “Well, yes. Thinly disguised. What I find so unacceptable is that the entire last volume develops the love story between Lucy and her irritable old professor.”

  “Is he old? I thought the professor was a young man.”

  “I’m speaking figuratively, Mother. Yes, he is a young man. But my point is that Dr. John almost entirely disappears from the story, and the reader will want her to marry Dr. John. Not that dark and stormy little Frenchman. And then she sends him off on a voyage at the end and he disappears at sea.”

  “Dr. John?”

  “No, the Frenchman. Paul Emanuel.”

  “He dies?”

  “We are to assume as much. Drowns in a shipwreck.”

  “How dreary. What happens to Lucy?”

  “She opens a little school and seems quite content.”

  His mother peered at him over the rims of her glasses. “And what happens to Dr. John?”

  “Oh, he marries this little doll of a creature. Not a very interesting character at all. Indeed. A completely failed character.” So, he had thought upon finishing the novel, this is the manner of woman of which you deem me worthy.

  “What a pity,” his mother replied. “I thought her characters were generally quite fascinating.”

  “Charlotte has difficulty portraying pretty women who are clever and sociable.”

  “Well, dear, she writes what she knows, I suppose, doesn’t she?”

  “I wanted romance. This is hardly romantic.”

  When Charlotte returned from Brookroyd ten days later and there had still been no response from George, she sent off an anxious letter, asking if he had some occasion for disappointment. In response she received a check for five hundred pounds indicating acceptance of the work, although the sum was two hundred less than she had anticipated.

  “Five hundred? That’s all?” her father scowled. He made an attempt to restrain his disappointment, for her sake. Charlotte felt it keenly, nonetheless, and his disapproval festered in her thoughts the way it always did.

  Still, from Cornhill there was no reply.

  When several more days went by without a letter, she panicked. She told her father she was going down to London to find out what was the matter.

  “There’s something horribly wrong,” she said anxiously. “He has never kept me waiting more than a week.”

  She had her bags packed and ready to go that morning when a letter came.

  “He says he would have preferred a different resolution.”

  She stood by the window in her father’s parlor reading the letter by the pale winter light. She would not permit him to read it.

  “He’s quite vague. Something in the third volume sticks confoundedly in his throat, but he makes quite a mystery out of it.”

  Charlotte immediately wrote a reply. George’s next letter was only slightly more substantial.

  “He writes that he finds Polly an odd, fascinating little puss but he’s not in love with her.”

  “In love with her? Are those the words he uses?”

  “He means as a publisher he’s not in love with the character.”

  “That’s an odd way to put it.”

  She immediately sent off a reply: “I understand that the spir
it of Romance would have indicated another course, far more flowery and inviting, but this would have been unlike Real Life, inconsistent with Truth—at variance with Probability. How would you have seen the ending, given the characters as they are? What other conclusion might be possible? I see none.”

  George’s reply was terse: “I shall answer no more questions about Villette.”

  When he saw that she would not change her mind, George gave the manuscript to Mr. Williams to read. The following day they sat in George’s cluttered office.

  “Flawed as it is, I think it will receive wide praise,” Williams said. “And there is nothing controversial that would cause censure.”

  “I agree. But I would like to see a more satisfying resolution.”

  “You would have preferred Lucy to marry Dr. John.”

  “That’s what our readers will want. They’ll want to see her win the hero.”

  “I don’t think Miss Brontë sees herself in that light,” Williams said in the quiet voice of one murmuring a delicate truth.

  “How she sees herself should have no bearing on what the reader wants. If Jane Eyre can snare Rochester, I see no reason why we can’t have Lucy Snowe win the heart of Dr. John. This is a character we’re talking about, Williams. Not Miss Brontë’s life.”

  They fell silent. Rain tapped gently on the skylight.

  George knew quite well how insensitive he had sounded just then.

  “I’m a businessman, Williams,” he mumbled. “I try to bring the public what they want.” He sat up and with an air of finality gathered up the manuscript and returned it to Williams. “Here. Let’s get it into print. Quickly. The public wants more of Currer Bell and they shall have him.”

  Arthur had stopped trying to track Charlotte’s whereabouts, had indeed given up hoping for any kind of favorable timing for his proposal. When she returned from Brookroyd he was taken up nearly every evening with a flurry of duties, and then there was a visitor at the parsonage, a tall, well-dressed young man whom Arthur had seen a number of times over the years. Arthur became extremely nervous and convinced himself that it was a suitor.

  “That fine young gentleman is Mr. Joe Taylor. Mary Taylor’s brother,” Martha’s mother replied when he inquired.

  “I see. And who is Mary Taylor?”

  “The mistress’s old school friend. She lives …” She turned to her husband, who had fallen asleep before the fire with his stocking-clad feet propped on the fender. “John,” she cried, poking him with a knitting needle. “Where’d that spunky Miss Taylor move to? Not America …”

  “New Zealand,” he mumbled.

  Arthur sat staring gloomily into the flames. His palms were sweating. He didn’t dare ask more.

  Mrs. Brown resumed her knitting. After a moment she added, “Aye, that Mr. Taylor’s a nuisance these days, Martha says. Comes beggin’ the mistress’s advice on ma-tri-monial matters.” She spoke the word slowly, feeling her way through the syllables.

  Arthur’s heart skipped a beat. He tried to keep his voice light. “Do you mean Miss Brontë is to marry the gentleman?”

  Mrs. Brown screwed up her face. “Him? He’s not good enough for her,” she declared.

  Arthur remained in the little parlor for a good half hour without muttering another word. They were accustomed to his taciturn silence. Mrs. Brown was glad he’d come out of his room that evening and thought this was a sign that he was on the mend.

  “Charlotte, I’d like to have Nicholls to tea this afternoon.”

  “If you wish.” She waited while he spooned potatoes onto his plate, then took the bowl from his hands.

  “He’s quite put himself out these past few weeks. A workhorse if ever I’ve seen one.”

  “I’ll send Martha out for some meat pies. And we have some of her sponge cake in the cellar.”

  “Good. Good. He’s very fond of Martha’s sponge cake.”

  She smiled to herself. He never admitted to treating anyone badly, but he would make these small signs of atonement.

  Arthur’s legs felt like lead as he climbed the lane to the parsonage and let himself in through the garden gate. From the moment Martha answered the door and he caught a glimpse of Charlotte in the passageway, he began to unravel.

  They sat in Patrick’s parlor as they had so many times over the past three years, just the three of them; Charlotte poured tea, two fingers pressed gently on the porcelain lid, with the little finger arched as she tipped the pot. The gesture mesmerized him. As she performed the small domestic ritual he followed from the corner of his eye the graceful movements of her hands until she folded them quietly in her lap. A swan settling down upon the surface of a perfectly still lake.

  He was keenly self-conscious and ate practically nothing, taking only a small piece of Martha’s sponge cake. It stuck in his throat and he had to wash it down with tea. He could not recall what they talked about.

  After tea Charlotte left them alone, and for more than an hour the two clergymen discussed parish matters. There was little to provoke disagreement. Both bemoaned the illnesses and deaths caused by Haworth’s tainted water supply; recounted their ceaseless efforts to persuade the wealthy to pay to improve the lot of the poor; vented their despair at learning that the Merralls and Thomases, who lived in fine Georgian houses with fresh water and privies, had secretly petitioned for exemption from the proposed taxes to pay for water and sewage reform; talked about the need to find a new burial yard—there being no more room for new graves in the old one.

  Those brief minutes when he took up his hat and bade good night to his parson were the longest minutes of Arthur’s life. It flashed into his head that this must be what a condemned man endures moments before his execution.

  The parlor door shut behind him, leaving him standing in the dark passageway gripping his hat. His jaw was trembling.

  He tapped lightly on the door. There was a hesitation, and he imagined he heard the rustle of her skirts as she rose.

  She opened the door.

  He stepped inside and closed the door behind him. Too loudly. He flinched at the sound and turned to face her.

  Her eyes told him that she knew why he had come. That he had been so transparent in his intentions only exacerbated his nervousness. He had imagined this moment a million times and had rehearsed the words he would say, but it all flew right out of his head.

  “Miss Brontë,” he croaked. Parched lips, parched throat—that was how his wretched body betrayed him at this moment when he needed steadiness. He clung to the brim of his hat, digging his fingers into the soft felt like a man in a tempest clawing at the earth to keep from being carried away by turbulence. He grew light-headed. He thought he might faint. “Dear God,” he muttered to himself, “don’t let me faint.”

  “I … I … oh dear. I must begin somewhere, and I don’t know quite where. I … Miss Brontë, I have …” He scowled, and a look of utter dismay swept across his face. If she would but help him out, encourage him with a tender smile. But her eyes seemed to bore straight into his heart, and what she saw there inspired only pity.

  He drew a deep breath and exhaled the words: “I can no longer bear to remain silent. I … I have cared for you for too long. My sentiments are not … my sentiments are of the most”—he was going to say “pure” but caught himself in time—“of the truest, most ardent, most fiercely devoted …” He stopped himself. He had ruined the brim of his hat. Crushed it. He dropped his hands to his sides.

  “I am asking you to marry me, to be my wife. I grant this may come as a shock to you. A declaration of this sort is generally preceded by …” He faltered. “By a good deal of … of fanfare, and frenzy. I, more than anyone, wish it might have been otherwise. For I have … I have loved you deeply and truly for longer than you know.”

  She heard him out with an expression of deepest empathy. He saw that she was not in love with him. Miss Dixon had been in love with him, and Charlotte did not look at him with Miss Dixon’s eyes. But neither was she cruel or p
roud to him. She knew suffering. Her novels had reassured him of that.

  “Oh, Mr. Nicholls,” she sighed. “I confess, I have not been inclined to give much thought to the matter.”

  “Yes, I understand. Of course. But you will, will you not? You will think upon it, give it some thought?”

  “I …”

  “Allow me at least the privilege of speaking to you again on this subject, for there is so much more I should like to say, but I find myself quite senseless at the moment. An absolute idiot. And before stepping into this room I was a sane, rational man.”

  “Have you spoken to my father?”

  He drew a deep breath. “I dared not.”

  “Oh dear. That was most unwise.”

  “I know what his answer will be unless you petition him on my behalf. I beg of you to give me reason to hope. For the moment I ask for nothing else.”

  “You must go. I should not like Papa to find us like this.”

  “Can I have reason to hope?”

  “Please, Mr. Nicholls. Leave. Quickly. You shall have my reply in the morning.”

  Of course she would not marry him; she did not love him. Yet his proposal had moved her deeply. A man she had known for years, ordinarily so statue like, making such a spectacle out of himself—trembling, stirred, and overcome. My God, he loved her. A man didn’t look like that, didn’t take that kind of risk unless he truly loved. She stood in shock for a long moment and then went to find her father in his study.

  Her father was already suspicious. He had heard Arthur go into the dining room. It had been awhile later when the front door closed.

  “What did he want? What was he up to?”

  “He asked for my hand in marriage.”

  There was a moment of silence as his eyes darkened and his face drew deeply from some hidden well of irrational rage, and then the exclamations began, low and rumbling, seething with contempt. Charlotte had expected sarcasm, mockery, even cruelty, but not this vilification—not this branding of his high-principled curate as deceitful, vile, and traitorous. He went on and on, his wrath gathering bile and indignation like a livid storm feeding on the elements. She thought he had quite lost his sanity.