“I’ll write.”
“I don’t want Charlotte to see your letters. Otherwise she will say terrible things about you and I can’t bear it. I shall not be in a foreign country with the one person I must cling to for support, and hear her say such things.”
“I’ll write through your father. And don’t worry, I shall take good care of Keeper and Nero.”
She nodded.
“Emily,” Charlotte called, “are you coming?”
Emily turned and saw that her sister was already in the gig, and her father waited, holding the door for her. The expression on Patrick’s face was apologetic. She turned toward Weightman, a look of panic on her face as though she might fling herself upon him and refuse to go.
Weightman took her hand. “Miss Emily,” he said, “you shall take Brussels by storm.” With that, he handed her to her father.
As the gig rolled down Church Lane, Emily stole a glance back. Weightman stood beside Aunt Branwell, his arm around her for support. He waved. Then the gig turned the corner into Ginnel and he was gone.
13
Emily’s time in Brussels passed like a prison sentence. She kept a running tally on a piece of paper, numbers from one hundred eighty-four to zero. Each night before she went to bed, she held the sheet up in the flickering light of a candle and marked through the highest number. She circled the zero and placed a star beside it—the day to go home.
She had been entranced by her three days in London. The dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral loomed over the Brontë lodging in Paternoster Row. Emily loved to stand beneath that dome inside the venerable church, and stare upward. A miniature of heaven, the light altered, suffused with the divine. She took in the paintings at the National Gallery and communed with the kings and queens of Westminster Abbey (alive, she knew, for she sensed their presence as clearly as the anonymous spirits of Haworth).
London taught her that she could bear the press of people for short periods of time, and even study them with fascination. She resolved that once she returned home, she and Anne should go together to towns, Manchester, or York, or Liverpool. They could even go to Edinburgh and on to the highlands of Sir Walter Scott, if Branwell might be persuaded to escort them. Or perhaps—but her mind drew back from the thought of William Weightman’s company on such a journey. The likely disappointment of those hopes was too painful to contemplate.
The little party crossed the Channel, and the immensity of the expanse of water, the roughness of the waves, awed Emily and appealed to her romantic nature. But she felt physically pummeled by her first sight of the Belgian countryside. It was flat. Entirely flat. How on earth could people go from place to place? How keep from becoming utterly lost, with no winding streams, no heights and moors in distinctive shapes to guide them or force their path in any direction? Then she began to wonder how people decided where to place their towns, their houses, their barns. Any one site would do as well as another, and would the array of choices not be maddening? And how become so attached to a place that one’s soul became a bondsman to it, so that one would die for that patch of earth? Flat land demanded no allegiance. Emily pitied the Belgians.
Brussels swallowed her. She found the Pensionnat Heger imprisoning as she had feared, but she was also oddly relieved to be within its confines. One would not become quite so disoriented, since here were garden footpaths and four closed walls, and a schedule that must be followed. She now understood how Nero had adapted to his cage in the Brontë washhouse. It was not the hawk’s birthright. But it was a fixed point to keep him from utter annihilation. Emily thought of herself as the merlin’s sister.
Although the Brontës lodged in one of the dormitories, a long room lined with cots, Madame Heger had put up a curtain at one end. Behind it, the Brontës found two cots and two dressers, as well as their own washbasin. Charlotte sank onto her bed with a murmured “Thank God for privacy.”
The other pupils, young girls, stared at Emily with her tall, lanky body, her carelessly tossed hair, and plain, unfashionable clothes. She gathered from Charlotte, who was far more adept in the language, that they thought her clothes ugly, and her aspect glum and off-putting. Charlotte was the strange foreigner; Emily the monster who accompanied her.
“You really should smile more,” Charlotte offered. “You scare them. And I said you should get new petticoats. See how full they wear them here; they are stiffer even than mine.”
“I don’t care what they think about me,” Emily answered. “Nor will I spend what little money I have on new petticoats. These girls look ridiculous—if you pushed them over, they would roll like balls.”
Emily was not inclined to do anyone’s bidding at the Pensionnat Heger, least of all Charlotte’s, the author of her misery. The price of Emily’s company was Charlotte’s acceptance of her sister’s independence.
Monsieur Heger, who would tutor the two Englishwomen, was short, sturdy, and dark with piercing eyes and a pockmarked face. When he met with the Brontës in his study, he made clear what he expected.
“I will assign passages of great French writers,” he said, while Charlotte translated for Emily. “You will write essays on subjects I assign, and you will try to write in the style of French of those writers. That way you will be forced to pay close attention not only to what they say, but how they say it.”
Emily objected. “I write in my own style,” she said, “not someone else’s.”
Monsieur Heger, upon receiving this impertinent objection in Charlotte’s hesitant translation, said, “But my dear mademoiselle, your style is in English. How do you know what it is in French?”
Charlotte translated and looked at Emily with an expression that pleaded for good behavior.
“I don’t care what it is in French,” Emily said.
Charlotte shut her eyes and sighed, then offered her answer in a tentative voice. Emily guessed that her sister did not translate exactly. Even so, Monsieur Heger gave Emily a sharp look.
“We will start with something simple,” said Monsieur. “Each of you will give me an essay you will title “The Cat.’ Two pages in French, please, so I may judge where we stand.”
Emily received these instructions with relief, for what better did she know than animals? But what took her a few minutes in English took hours to translate into French. She wrote:
I like cats. The cat is more like humans than any other creature. Dogs are too good to be compared to humans. Cats, on the other hand, are cruel, ungracious, and hypocritical. They pretend to love and then kill, and think nothing of it. This is like humans. We call this politeness.
Compare how a cat plays with a mouse to the way men torture a fox and then throw it to the dogs. I have seen small children act in the same fashion. They kill butterflies and smile. Imagine your lovely little angel as a cat, with the half-swallowed tail of a mouse dangling from his mouth as he beams at you.
Monsieur Heger, when he met to discuss their work, told Emily, “Your written French is simple but adequate, though you have trouble with the spoken language. I would ask you not to rely upon your sister as we speak. Mademoiselle,” he said, with a nod to Charlotte, “I ask you to wait outside.”
Charlotte retreated reluctantly and closed the door.
“Your content—” Monsieur Heger hesitated, and then said to Emily, speaking slowly so that she might more easily comprehend, “mademoiselle, I have not encountered such a thing. Not even in a boy.”
Emily would not be bullied. “You see why copying someone else would not come naturally to me,” she said in awkward French.
Monsieur studied her. Then he said, “Let me make myself clear. Mimicking the style of French writers can help you gain an understanding of the language. I do not mean to stifle your originality. Even if I think what you say inappropriate. You are,” he added, “a misanthrope, mademoiselle, to compare people, especially children, to cats in this manner.”
Emily considered, and then said, “But a misanthrope does not like people. I do compare people to cats
, but as I say in my first sentence, I like cats. I sleep with one at home.”
Monsieur Heger gave a sudden loud laugh so that Charlotte, listening in the anteroom, grew alarmed. What, she wondered, had Emily done to embarrass them? She was relieved, when her sister emerged from the study, to see Monsieur seemed pleased.
When they were walking back to their quarters, Emily said, with grudging respect, “He is difficult. I rather like that.”
“He is,” Charlotte proclaimed, her face flushed, “the most fascinating man I have ever encountered.”
Emily saw then where things stood. Once again. She sighed, for she sensed that most of the English words she would hear over the coming months would be about Monsieur Heger.
Charlotte and Emily received their first letters from home.
“Why is yours longer?” Charlotte wondered. “I assumed Papa would tell me the same things he told you, and that he would write to both of us in one letter.”
“No,” Emily said quickly. “My letter has a great deal about my animals that would only bore you.” She was careful to keep the pages with their different handwriting out of Charlotte’s sight.
“The difficult winter is almost past,” Weightman wrote,
and we look forward to spring. There have been too many deaths this season, even more than last year. But I hope spring and summer may soon come to the entire north of England and Wales.
Emily took this last oddly phrased sentence to refer to the continuing development of what Weightman called the Plug Plan. Weightman went on to tell Emily that Keeper was well, “although he misses you terribly. Your father says that when he rises in the morning, he finds the dog lying across the doorframe of your bedroom, waiting for your return. As for Nero, I take him out often when I walk Keeper, and he returns to the glove most reliably.”
Emily had not quite believed Weightman would write. When alone, she read and reread the letter for sustenance. Each time she was done, she put it at the bottom of her trunk out of Charlotte’s sight.
When a second letter arrived the next week, Weightman wrote,
Your Monsieur Heger sounds a despot, but a kindly one, and you rise to that challenge. Emily, I am proud of you.
By then she had composed her second assigned essay, on the caterpillar. Charlotte disdained the subject. She wrote:
The caterpillar crawls, and it eats. It crawled and ate yesterday. It will crawl and eat in the future.
Good, Charlotte thought as she paused in her writing, for I demonstrate my mastery of verb tenses.
Because she was so much less competent in French, Emily again took hours longer to write her essay. First she questioned God’s creation, which “exists upon a principle of destruction. Creatures must kill others in order to live themselves.” But, she continued,
Just as the lowly caterpillar changes into the magnificent butterfly, so this world is the embryo of a new heaven and new earth. Its poorest beauty will so far exceed our mortal imagination that we will hate our blind presumption of blaming God for creating such a world as this.
She sent the essay to Weightman in its English translation. In his next letter, he wrote,
I read your essay to the Sunday school, and when they see a butterfly this summer, I have urged them to view it as a sign of God’s promise. The children long now for butterflies.
Yours, WW
Emily found life at the Pensionnat Heger not so difficult as the time she had tried to teach at an English school, for she had no responsibilities except to learn. The greatest trial was not the school itself, but the regular invitations to tea from families of English expatriates who had been urged by Charlotte’s school chums to befriend the Brontës. Emily hated everything about the visits—the formal manners and social graces, the exquisite china and delicate finger foods, the hothouse atmosphere of the parlors with their carefully arranged flowers and expensive furniture. Emily would have felt more comfortable if she could have escaped to the scullery and engaged the maids in conversation, even scraped a pot or two. But that would not do. So she sat miserable in a corner, not attempting to engage in conversation. One family she especially disliked, the Jenkinses, sent their two sons to escort the Brontës to their house. The young men seemed put out to be seen with two such unfashionable young women, and equally unable to offer any but the most silly topics for conversation. The visits were so awkward that the Jenkins family finally stopped inviting the Brontës altogether, to the relief even of Charlotte.
The girls at the Pensionnat continued to avoid Emily. But one spring day she sat on a bench in the garden’s Allée Défendue, a tree-shaded arbor, and drew a study of the tunnel of branches with their play of light and shadow. Emily found the atmosphere claustrophobic; although sunlight stippled various corners of the enclosed garden, it was filtered with dust motes and there was no breath of a breeze. Frustrated, Emily looked up from her work to see a girl of eleven or twelve staring at her, as though waiting to catch her eye. The girl smiled and gave a brief curtsy. She had a gap-toothed grin, freckles, and a pair of auburn braids that hung below her shoulders.
“Je t’aime,” the girl said. “Tu es différente.”
“Merci,” Emily said dryly, “je pense.” She asked the girl’s name.
“Je m’appelle Louise de Bassompierre.” The girl plopped down on the bench to look at Emily’s picture. “C’est joli,” she said, and offered to show Emily some of her own drawings.
They became fast friends. They shared their drawings, Emily gave Louise piano lessons and the younger girl drilled Emily in French much more thoroughly than did Charlotte, who spent most of her time intent upon impressing Monsieur Heger and ignoring her sister. I can survive with only one friend, Emily thought, and the letters I receive.
One day Louise separated herself from a group of her friends and came running to Emily. “Voilà!” she cried, and indicated her skirt.
Emily saw that, unlike the skirts of the others, with their full bell shapes, the girl’s hung limp like Emily’s. Louise had taken her scissors to her petticoat, she explained, and hacked away the unnecessary cloth. “It was quite a lot of material,” she said excitedly, “and now I don’t know what to do with it.”
“Perhaps you should donate it to a hospital,” Emily suggested. “They could use the strips for bandages.”
Louise brightened, “There is a charity hospital nearby. And I am so much more comfortable, Mademoiselle Emilie. It is easier to walk.”
“You may even run,” Emily suggested. “But have your friends teased you?”
“Mai oui. I laugh at them and tell them they are jealous because they are not so comfortable.”
Emily wondered how the girl’s mother would respond. But she envied Louise, who showed no sign of losing her old friends because of her unconventionality. A rare gift, Emily thought, which I do not possess.
So Emily had her friend. And to her great joy she had been to performances at the Théâtre de la Monnaie, the Brussels opera house, where she heard Mozart’s Mass in C Minor and Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.
“Mozart is heaven come to earth,” she wrote Weightman. “And can you believe it? Instead of my little cottage piano, I roam the range of an “Érard grand in the school drawing room. If only you could hear.”
Monsieur continued a hard taskmaster. He and Emily were often at loggerheads, for if he was not critiquing her content, he pushed her to make her writing more precise, marking through a vague phrase here, a superfluous word there. On a few occasions they even engaged in shouting matches, to the great alarm of Charlotte, who continued with her infatuation and lived in terror that she would be judged badly because of her sister. But Emily throve on these sessions; she thought Monsieur Heger enjoyed them as well, for he was always in a better mood when Emily left than when she came in, rubbing his hands and smiling broadly after each clash. As for Emily, she watched her prose grow tighter, more alive, and she thought, This is what it is like to have an editor.
Emily shared all this in her l
etters home. And though she did not attempt to hide her general unhappiness, it seemed to those who read them that she not only endured, but grew.
A letter from Brussels was cause for Patrick Brontë and William Weightman to share a pot of tea and consult. Weightman could not have been more pleased.
“I miss her a great deal,” he told Patrick. “And yet you can see she is stretching.”
Patrick agreed, but added, “My boy, you should be cautious. It may not be what you require, and you won’t know until she is back.”
“But I have been thinking,” Weightman said. “When I read her descriptions of how she despises to sit in parlors and take tea, I sympathize. Emily was not meant for society, but why should that be a barrier to her happiness or mine? Who looks askance at her? Only society ladies and gentlemen. The poor certainly do not.” Weightman held his cup frozen to his lips, as though so deep in thought he forgot to drink. Then he set his cup down. “And perhaps I am not so different. If I spent my entire ministry laboring among the poor, I believe I might marry Emily happily.”
“But Willie,” Patrick said gently, “would Emily wish to take the time required, and give up the liberty necessary, to be a wife? To have children of her own and raise them? She lives in that fantasy world of hers.”
Weightman looked crestfallen. “But would it be so much loss of liberty? I would be indulgent. And freedom may be increased with some security.”
Patrick smiled and shook his head, for only Emily could answer.
The six months passed quickly enough. Charity efforts throughout the district continued, the predictable round of baptisms, marriages, and funerals consumed both clergymen. Weightman was busy behind the scenes with the evolving Chartist plot to sabotage the mill boilers. Aunt Branwell demanded attention. She grew frailer, her mind muddled. Yet she thought Emily’s absence forced her downstairs to supervise the housekeeping, much to Tabby’s dismay.
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