Emily's Ghost

by Denise Giardina

  “No,” Weightman said. Then he added, “That is one difference between being a cad and not being a cad.”

  Branwell looked sheepish. “I haven’t been telling the entire village,” he said. “I only talk about it among friends. Besides, no one here knows Margaret Fish. But everyone in the village gossips about it because my father is clergy. It must be like that for you as well. You could not be involved with a woman unless you were courting to marry. So what do you do?”

  “Do?”

  Branwell slapped the table. “My God, man. You’ve got desires.”

  “Ah,” Weightman said. “To quote St. Paul, I burn.”

  “You burn?”

  “Quite hotly. But there is nothing I can do, as you say.”

  “What of your Agnes Walton in Appleby?”

  “I will see her next month,” Weightman said. “Her father has invited me to go hunting. I think he has in mind to entice me with the combination of his daughter and a more comfortable living.”

  “You’ll take it, of course!”

  “Not of course. It is doubtful.”

  “You, my friend, are mad.”

  “Perhaps I am,” Weightman acknowledged. “And perhaps I shall change my mind. I want to talk with Agnes again.”

  “I’ll warn my father to be on the lookout for a new curate,” Branwell said. “By the way, why is Charlotte now angry at you?”

  “I’m afraid I disappointed Charlotte greatly,” Weightman said.

  “You see,” Branwell said. “And you didn’t even have to get her pregnant to do it.”

  9

  Branwell Brontë fancied himself a poet, an unappreciated poet. But he decided to change course. He admired the captains of industry emerging in Britain. In particular he was enthralled by the railroads thrusting their way into the isolated fastness of the West Yorkshire moors. A new line, the Leeds and Manchester, was excavating a massive tunnel beneath Blackstone Edge. A tremendous engineering feat, Branwell exclaimed over the newspapers he commandeered each morning before anyone else could read them. Here is the future! he was fond of proclaiming. (There is a fool, Charlotte added under her breath.)

  Branwell decided to seek employment with the railroad. He set about the task with what Patrick called “admirable determination,” and landed a post as assistant clerk for the Leeds and Manchester line.

  Once again a celebration was in order. It would be a small and subdued affair. Anne was away at her post as governess at Thorpe Green. Worse, as far as Branwell was concerned, William Weightman had not returned from his leave of absence.

  “I’d like Willie here,” he complained at the celebration supper.

  He did not notice the expression on Charlotte’s face.

  “I thought he’d be back by now,” Branwell continued. “I’ve had a letter. It sounds as though the wooing of dear Agnes does not go well. Her father remains unhappy that Willie resides in Haworth and she begins to look elsewhere. In any event, Willie finds Agnes a bit of a bore as well. At least, that is how I read it.”

  “Willie has gone on to South Wales,” Patrick ventured.

  “To see his inamorata!” Charlotte cried. “Whom he has been corresponding with for months. So much for Mr. Weightman’s faithfulness to Miss Walton. I do not know why Father keeps him on. I think it is disgraceful in a clergyman.”

  “Another woman?” Branwell exclaimed. “He made no mention of her to me.”

  “Of course not,” Charlotte said. “He is too ashamed.”

  Patrick cleared his throat. “There is, I believe, a young woman Mr. Weightman has been writing in South Wales. He has been open about the correspondence. I would be out of place, Charlotte, if I dictated affairs of the heart to my curate. It is none of my business.”

  Charlotte fell to dissecting a slice of roast beef, and Emily remained silent, thinking.

  Charlotte turned again to the idea of the sisters starting their own school. Emily expected the scheme would come to naught. The Brontë education was too incomplete, especially in the classics and the teaching of foreign languages, to attract students. Especially not to a place like Haworth.

  Then there was the question of money. The purchase of property would require a significant amount of capital. No one the girls knew had that sort of money. Except, Charlotte pointed out, Aunt Branwell. Their aunt had inherited a goodly amount from her family in Cornwall. But she was very close with it, since she considered that she held it in trust on behalf of her dead sisters, and there were other nieces.

  Charlotte decided to approach Aunt Branwell, whose immediate answer was “No.”

  “But I ask no more than the portion you mean to leave us,” Charlotte pleaded.

  Aunt Branwell was glad to provide for the future of her nieces. But she did not like to be reminded that she would one day die. Had the request come first from Anne, by far her favorite—sweet, docile Anne she had raised from infancy—Aunt Branwell might have considered it. But she often felt Charlotte at odds with the rest of the family. As though she were ashamed of us, Aunt Branwell thought. And she sensed Emily was not keen on the school plan. Aunt Branwell valued Emily’s help around the house. She did not want her going off to start a school.

  The scheme languished. Charlotte had resisted seeking employment because she did not want to be away from William Weightman. But that was no longer an impediment. Now Haworth was unbearable. Charlotte wished to find a position so she would never have to look upon Weightman’s cheerful, false face again. She began to scan the advertisements. Perhaps she might be lucky, like Anne, and find a family who would take her to the seashore in the summertime.

  Emily was absorbed in her writing and her animals, including the young falcon ensconced in its cage in the washroom despite Aunt Branwell’s protests. (And despite the qualms of John Brown’s wife, who came each week to help with the laundry. She was so afraid that “yon vulture will peck my een out” that Emily was obliged to carry the cage outside each Thursday before Mrs. Brown came to supervise the tubs.) Emily continued to help Tabby in the kitchen and walked upon the moors with Charlotte. The arrival of autumn brought the heather to full bloom, carpeting the hills a brilliant purple. The royal season, Emily thought it, her favorite time of the year.

  In addition to the poems she showed no one, Emily wrote stories about her fantasy island of Gondal. These she sent to Anne, who replied with a fillip of her own. In one of her letters, Anne noted in a teasing manner, “Your tales of Gondal are more and more, shall we say, passionate. Alexandrina Zenobia’s latest encounter with her lover had me quite limp at the end of reading it. Needless to say, we could never share that with someone else.”

  Emily knew why her writing had taken this turn. At night she lay on her bed, alone since Anne was away, and dreamed of William Weightman. She remembered the brief moment on Penistone Hill when she had leaned against him and rested her head against his shoulder. She recalled his smell. She wondered what his mouth would taste like. She wondered what he would look like if he stood before her as naked as a Greek statue. She shivered, and shook herself and thrashed on her lonely cot. Next day, she would write.

  And then, although William Weightman had not yet returned from his time off, he enlivened life at the parsonage. Even at a distance, Emily thought, he gives us a frisson.

  A special delivery post wagon arrived with a crate for the parsonage. Weightman was in Appleby after his return from Wales, and invited to hunt with the father of Agnes Walton. A farewell engagement, Weightman explained in the letter that accompanied the crate. “We part on good terms. He respects me even as he has given me up as a future son-in-law.”

  The crate stood encased in ice, which the driver assured had been replenished at regular intervals. A brace of wild birds—grouse, duck, and partridges, all still in their feathers—lay spread upon the frozen shards. Beneath the ice was a large salmon. All shot or taken by his own hand in the past day, Weightman assured them.

  “Law!” Tabby cried, her hand to her breast, “h
ow busy our lad has been!”

  “Mr. Weightman is a veritable slaughterhouse,” Charlotte said before she turned away.

  Emily began to laugh. “Are you ready to pluck, Tabby? And should we serve the fish tonight before it goes off?”

  The rest of the day was spent preserving the fowl in confit—it was already determined that Weightman’s homecoming would be celebrated with the very ducks he had provided.

  But next day a man in a black suit and tall black hat banged upon the parsonage door. When Emily opened it she disliked him at once for his small eyes which darted here and there, sizing up everything he saw, both Emily and the interior of the hallway. Although she usually stood back and threw open the door, assuming the visitor wished to see her father and was in some need, she stood firm.

  “Constable Massey with the Metropolitan Police,” the man said. “I must speak with the Reverend Patrick Brontë.”

  “Is anything wrong?” Emily asked. She wondered if Branwell was in trouble at his new job.

  The man looked Emily up and down with a bold eye that seemed to undress her and then dismiss her. He said, “When did a chit like you start asking the questions? Now go and tell your master I haven’t got all day.”

  Emily realized that the man—taking in her loose shift, her untidy hair, and the smudges upon her hands and face from cleaning the parlor fireplace—assumed he was talking to a servant. She took her time answering.

  “The Reverend Brontë,” she said in her strongest Yorkshire accent, “is working on his sermon. I hope you will not disturb him.”

  “Sermons can wait until Sundays,” the man said.

  “Excuse me,” Emily said, and shut the door in his face.

  She went at once to her father and explained the situation. They knew the sermon must be interrupted and the man dealt with, so Patrick put down his pen and fixed upon his nose the spectacles that aided his failing sight.

  The man had begun to pound once more on the door. When Emily opened it, he said, “Careful lass,” an edge to his voice, “or I shall have you sacked,” and gave her a poisonous look as he passed. She was careful to pull the parlor door only partially closed. Patrick had grown hard not only of sight but of hearing; Emily hoped that would force the visitor to speak up. She sat on the bottom stair to listen.

  “You are a long way from London,” she heard her father say.

  “On business from Sir Robert Peel’s government,” the man said. “I need say no more about its importance.”

  Her father’s reply was inaudible. The man’s voice dropped as well but rose after Patrick interrupted to say, “Speak up, please. I am not so young as I was.”

  “I said,” the man repeated more loudly, “I have it on good authority that you are a true son of the Church, a good Tory, and a patriotic Briton.”

  “I hope I am all three,” Patrick agreed.

  The constable continued, “You have a curate here. One William Weightman.”

  Emily froze.

  “Yes,” Patrick said. “A fine young man.”

  “Surely he has some faults?”

  Emily hoped the nature of the question angered her father as it did her.

  Patrick’s voice was careful. “His sermons when he first came were above the heads of our more uneducated parishioners. I spoke to him and he has since made great improvement.”

  Emily could imagine the glazed expression on the face of the impatient visitor.

  “Mr. Brontë, are any of these names familiar to you? William Lovett? Henry Vincent? John Cleave?”

  Emily assumed her father had shaken his head.

  “You are familiar with the Chartists?” Constable Massey said.

  Caution, caution, Emily silently counseled Patrick, remembering the time Chartists had shared a platform with her father. She squeezed her hands into fists and prayed he would not mention it.

  “I read about them in the newspapers,” Patrick said.

  “Mr. Peel’s government abhors their aims. They want a greater voice for the lower orders. All men over the age of twenty-one should vote, they claim. A secret ballot, most devious. No property ownership would be required, so a layabout in the London gutter or an agitator in a Leeds factory would stand equal to a lord.”

  “That would be a great change,” Patrick said.

  “The Chartists are agitating in London,” Massey continued, “in Leeds and Bradford and Manchester, and in South Wales. We expect to have several leaders in hand any day now. At a meeting two days ago attended by some thousands, one of them spoke against the Metropolitan Police. The blackguard called us ‘evil,’ and charged we were ‘an unconstitutional force.’ I expect that fellow will be serving a year in jail for libel soon enough.”

  Silence in the study.

  Massey said, “We have reason to believe your curate is in touch with Chartists in Bradford and in South Wales, in Swansea, Cardiff, and Monmouthshire.”

  Emily closed her eyes and whispered, Please, Papa, take care.

  “How do you know all this about my curate?” Patrick asked.

  “We have our means,” Massey said.

  Emily could have strangled him for the unctuousness of his voice alone. Oh, that I were a man, she thought. I would kill him and leave him on the moors to be picked apart by carrion crow. She was shocked at the violence of the thought, and then she was not. She thought herself capable of it, in will if not in physical strength, and she did not care.

  “What I know of my curate,” Patrick said in a careful, measured voice, “is that he is a fine clergyman. He often goes to Bradford on his day off. And he has been in Wales, yes, to see a young lady.”

  “I don’t know about young ladies,” Massey said. “But he has been spending his time in the company of coal miners.” When Patrick did not respond, Massey continued, “We think he has been a sort of courier, a go-between for the radicals in Bradford and Wales. Saying to their faces what they do not care to put on paper, or delivering letters they do not wish to post.”

  “Do you charge him with something?” Patrick said sharply.

  “We do not. Not yet. We are content to watch him. You should consider whether you wish to continue on with such a man as your assistant. Given your own admirably patriotic views, which are evident to all who speak of you, it would seem like an odd match.”

  Patrick said, “I will take that into consideration.”

  “However,” Massey continued, “we think it wise you keep Weightman on for a time. That way we can keep an eye on him, and see if he leads us in any interesting directions. Are you aware of any correspondence he has received? An abundance of letters, perhaps, from unlikely sources or locations like Wales?”

  “No,” Patrick lied.

  “We will peruse his mail,” Massey said. “We shall intercept and read anything that comes from South Wales or Bradford or other industrialized areas before sending it on. But if you notice anything that alarms you, please let us know.”

  “Of course,” Patrick said.

  “If, after a few months have passed, you want to let this fellow go, that will be understandable. Assuming he is not in custody.”

  “Thank you.”

  It had gone on long enough, Emily decided. She went to the door, knocked, and looked in.

  “Sir, your dinner will be cold soon,” she said to Patrick, careful not to call him Papa. She looked at the constable. “I am sorry, we do not have enough to offer you anything.”

  Massey looked put out and his neck turned a telltale red. “I am not here to socialize,” he said. “I have said all I have to say.” He turned to Patrick. “I am in Bradford at the Savoy Hotel if you would like to make inquiries. I may stop in again when your Mr. Weightman has returned. Just to have a look about. If you see me, I would ask that you not seem to recognize me.”

  Then the constable left, stuffing his hat on his head as he went out the door.

  Emily sat in the chair Massey had vacated.

  “Dear God,” Patrick said, “did you hear
that?”

  “I did. I was sitting on the stair.”

  “You know I do not approve, Emily!”

  “I also know you are glad I did it this time.” She took her father’s hand. “Are you going to turn on him?”

  “Turn on Willie?” Patrick reached for the pipe on his desk but did nothing with it, only stared. “Did you hear what he called me? A patriotic Briton. But what does that mean? I would have thought it meant one upheld ancient moralities and individual virtue and common decency. It does not mean that one sets a police force to spy on a young man because he cares for the poor.”

  Emily went to her father and flung her arms around his neck. “Please, Papa, what will you do?”

  “What any Christian would. As soon as I see Willie, I will warn him so that he may avoid the trap they have set.”

  “Is he really involved with the Chartists?”

  “He is. He told me as much. He’s kept nothing from me except the Welsh correspondence. The young lady does not exist, I suspect. I shall rebuke him for that dishonesty.”

  “I expect he wanted to spare you worry.”

  “I expect so. But it was wrong of him.”

  “But was it also not wise? When they throw men in jail for speaking their minds? For standing up for common humanity? Dear God, I am so proud of Mr. Weightman.”

  It was an old cry of Emily’s. To calm her, Patrick said, “Daughter, did you not call me to dinner?”

  “Yes,” she said, “but only to get rid of that horrid man. It is too early.”

  “That was inhospitable.” Patrick smiled and squeezed her arm. “And I thank you for it.”

  That night as they waited for their father to emerge from his study and lead them in their nightly devotions, Charlotte perused the Leeds Intelligencer.

  “I see the Duke of Wellington is urging Mr. Peel to crack down on those awful Chartists,” she said. “The dear old duke. What should we do without him?”

  Patrick had entered the parlor, carrying his prayer book. He shot a look at Emily that stopped her before she spoke. So she bit her tongue.