The Case of the Missing Bronte

by Robert Barnard

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  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1: Interrupted Journey

  Chapter 2: The Brontë Bug

  Chapter 3: Pastoral Visit

  Chapter 4: Man of God

  Chapter 5: Matters Academical

  Chapter 6: Expert Adviser

  Chapter 7: Man of Books

  Chapter 8: The Rich are Different from Us

  Chapter 9: Eavesdropping

  Chapter 10: At the Sign of the Risen Moses

  Chapter 11: Double Fault

  Chapter 12: Hospital Visiting

  Chapter 13: Leaning Heavily

  Chapter 14: Breaking and Entering

  Chapter 15: Grievous Bodily Harm

  Chapter 16: Peregrine Contra Mundum

  Chapter 17: One Fell Swoop

  CHAPTER 1

  INTERRUPTED JOURNEY

  ‘Can we stop and send a few postcards?’ said Jan, as we drove through Hutton-le-Dales. ‘I just love these small Yorkshire villages.’

  ‘Heaven on a postcard, hell to live in,’ I muttered.

  ‘Oh, you’re just grumpy,’ said Jan.

  And I suppose I was. Jan, Daniel, our son, and I had been spending an early summer holiday with what remains of my family in Northumberland. Seeing my sister again was all right, but she was so taken up with her baby that we might have been day trippers passing through for all the notice she took of us. For the rest there was my Aunt Sybilla, increasingly uncertain on her pins, who had taken to wearing monstrous turbans in the Edith Sitwell style — except that where Dame Edith carried hers off, Sybilla in hers looked as if she had been extinguished by some enormous candle-snuffer. Then there was my hygienic cousin Mordred, who has taken over the running of the house as a showplace, and is now the complete aesthete’s tour-guide, full of out-of-the-way information and one-up jokes. And my Aunt Kate, much occupied with the fortunes of some ultra-rightist paramilitary splinter group of the National Front, whose slogan is ‘Keep England Anglo-Saxon.’ No, it wasn’t much of a summer holiday. Broadmoor would have been more restful. I probably was grumpy.

  I was even grumpier after we had stopped for twenty minutes for Jan to write postcards and Daniel to eat something fluorescent on a stick, because we no sooner got started again than, two minutes outside Hutton-le-Dales, the car belched, coughed wheezily, and chugged to a halt. I blamed Jan, of course. I’m a great believer in the idea that if you keep going in an old car, things will probably be all right: stopping only gives it the chance to meditate on what’s wrong with itself. Anyway, I poked around experimentally in the engine, and could find nothing amiss. It seemed to have an automobile version of one of those nervous diseases that kept Victorian women chained to their sofas. So we trudged back to the garage on the road out of Hutton, and the proprietor fetched the car in and pronounced that he would need to get a part from Leeds. That I could have guessed. As it was now nearly five, he wouldn’t be able to get it till the morning. That I could have guessed too. Bang went our chances of getting home that night.

  ‘I’ll have the old girl ready for you by midday t’morrow,’ said the garage man, patting her bonnet as if she were indeed an ailing maiden lady. ‘And I can’t say fairer than that, can I?’

  I thought that if he had been willing to get his finger out, he could have said a lot fairer than that. But garage men — like plumbers and electricians — are part of the modern aristocracy, people one insults at one’s peril. I sighed, and asked if the local pub took overnight guests.

  ‘Well, they do, as a rule, like, but Mrs Martin — that’s t’landlord’s missis — has been poorly, and I doubt they’d be willing. There’s Mrs Hebden down the road: she does bed and breakfast in the season. Happen she’ll take you. Why don’t you try?’

  There seemed to be no option but to throw ourselves on the mercies of Mrs Hebden, so we shoved a few necessaries into a bag and traipsed off in the direction pointed out to us. She lived in a sturdy, grey-stone Edwardian house, three stories high, at the other end of the village. When she first opened the door, she looked suspiciously at us in the gaunt, bony way some Yorkshire women have, but it was really only the local wariness, and as she told us later she had been ‘that plagued with Jehovah’s Witnesses of late’ that it was not surprising. When we had explained to her what we wanted, she became half-way gracious.

  ‘Well, I could, I suppose,’ she said. ‘If it would suit. It’s nothing grand.’

  It was two clean bedrooms, with the offer of baths, and a high tea at only £1.50 extra a head. It seemed grand enough to us. We trooped in, and gradually we took over the house, as always happens when there is a child around. Over tea Daniel regaled Mrs Hebden (whose gauntness turned out to be a matter of bone rather than spirit) with descriptions of my Aunt Sybilla — descriptions which made her sound like something out of the Brothers Grimm. We decided he must have scored a decided hit, because after we had made a splendid meal, Mrs Hebden volunteered to baby-sit if we would like to go to the pub for a drink.

  ‘Oh yes, please go,’ said Daniel. ‘Then I can tell her about Aunt Kate.’

  So, not at all reluctant, that is what we did. We walked through the village, which was basically the one street of sandstone houses and cottages, with other cottages set back down side lanes, and after a bit of a walk around the countryside we settled into the pub, the Dalesman, for a quiet beer. After a week of my Aunt Kate’s dandelion wine (which seemed to have curdled rather than matured) not even champagne could have cheered us up better. The reputation of Yorkshire village pubs is that you have to drink regularly there for a year before they so much as nod good-evening to you. But like so much people say about Yorkshire, this turned out not to be true, or not true of this pub. Bill Martin, the landlord, was a foreigner himself, coming from close to the Yorkshire-Lancashire border, so he was broad-minded enough to welcome a pair who, coming from London, could almost be classed as Undesirable Immigrants. The other drinkers were mostly old men, and though they didn’t volunteer any observations, or expect anything from us, they smiled cheerily enough. I was disappointed: they ought to have been looking at us with hell-fire in their glances.

  So we were all set for a nice cosy evening. Jan and I settled into a corner, and began to have our first real talk for a week. As usual with horrific occasions, this one began to seem almost jolly in retrospect (did the Sabine women, I wonder, get together in old age to giggle over former times?). I told Jan of my interview with Aunt Sybilla, closeted alone, during which she had complained bitterly about what she termed my refusal to take over the headship of the family.

  ‘The headship of the family was never really on offer,’ I had protested.

  ‘You could have had it if you had fought,’ she had said, ‘fought for it in the true tradition of the Trethowan family. Or made Wally an offer.’

  ‘Making an offer is much more in the tradition of this family than fighting,’ I had said, and she had glared — malevolent little eyes peeping out from under twenty folds of turban. For Aunt Sybilla has constructed an imaginary line of crusader knights and Tudor magnates for us, which has quite eclipsed in her mind the reality of hard-fisted mill-owners, borne aloft on wings of brass.

  Jan in her turn told me of her session exchanging recipes with Aunt Kate, the experimental gastronome of the family. When she was offered an exclusive recipe from the sweets chef at the Savoy (whose wife Jan went to school
with), a recipe involving three days’ soaking, marinading, slow-boiling, and God knows what else, she had read the thing through, put it aside, and said: ‘These restaurant chefs are so uninventive, aren’t they?’

  Anyway, we were rolling around about this and some of the other eccentricities of my appalling family, when the pub door opened, and a little old lady came in. Well, not really little — and in fact not all that old: about five feet eight and sixty-three, if you want my guess. But there was something slightly old-fashioned and spinsterish about her, something un-with-it, that invited the description. Her clothes were smart enough, but in a fashion of several years ago — rather severe, with the skirt down to the calves, though the frilliness of the blouse somewhat mitigated the formality. Her hair was grey, her eyes keen but friendly, and she clutched a capacious blue leather handbag.

  ‘Good evening, Bill,’ she greeted the landlord. ‘The usual, please. Good evening, Harry . . . Joseph . . . Bert.’

  She got friendly nods from all the locals. She was obviously a regular in the sort of pub where normally a woman on her own would be nervous about intruding. However, when she had got her drink, a gin and tonic, and paid for it, she went to sit with none of the locals, but brought it over to our corner, and brightly said:

  ‘Do you mind if I join you?’

  It’s an unanswerable question at the best of times, and though we were in fact enjoying at last being on our own again, we jumped up, cleared a space for her, and muttered our names.

  ‘I’m Edith Wing,’ she announced. ‘I live here — the cottage up Carter’s Lane, if you know it. Oh, but of course — you wouldn’t. You must be visitors, of course. Are you the first of our holiday-makers?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said. ‘It’s more involuntary. Our car broke down.’

  ‘Oh, of course. I should have connected. I saw a strange Morris 1100 sitting in the garage forecourt. One notices things like that in a place this size. How fortunate. For us, I mean. We don’t get so many visitors, even in the summer, that we can afford to waste them.’

  ‘You make us sound like precious metal,’ Jan said.

  ‘Well, of course, you are — to me. It’s a lovely life here . . . so peaceful . . . but one does miss, just a little, the contact with the outside world . . . the stimulus. I used to be a schoolmistress, you see. Quite a good school. Broadlands. Further to the north of the county. We used to pride ourselves on being open and receptive — not too fuddy-duddy. And we had a great number of distinguished old girls, who brought in a breath of the outside world when they returned for visits. I retired early, and I do sometimes miss that. I’ve seen so many mistresses, colleagues, you know, retire and go — well, funny, to put the matter bluntly. I wouldn’t like the same to happen to me.’

  ‘I do know what you mean,’ I said. ‘When they haven’t got a job to do every day, they sort of go off. It’s not just schoolmistresses that happens to. I’ve known policemen go the same way.’

  ‘I’m sure. So you’re a policeman? Fascinating. In London? How wonderful. The centre of crime, as it were. I’ve always longed to be in the centre, but I’ve always had to be satisfied with the periphery. And do you work, my dear?’

  ‘Arabic — I study Arabic,’ said Jan. ‘I’ve just finished.’

  ‘How clever of you to pick a coming subject. It must be a coming subject, mustn’t it? I’m afraid my subjects were geography and biology, and however much one tried to make them interesting to the girls, one always had the slight suspicion that there was something musty about them, goodness knows why.’

  She settled herself well down into her chair, and took a parsimonious sip of her gin.

  ‘These last few weeks I’ve been wishing my subjects had been history, or English, or something that could be really useful to me at the moment.’

  She seemed to be one of those direct, forthright souls who ignore the usual middle-class discretions and confide their business to the world whether the world wants it or not. Because it only needed Jan to say ‘Oh?’ for her to launch straight into her current preoccupation.

  ‘It was my cousin, you see, Rose Carbury, who died in February. She was a schoolmistress too — deputy head of a very nice little private school in Scarborough. We were distant cousins, but we were friends as well, and we used to meet when we could. Now and then we’d have a weekend in London — for a play, and the museums. We were typical schoolteachers, as you can see. Now, Rose retired last year, and she was already sick, poor thing. She had a cottage the other side of Leeds, and I went up there as often as I could, stayed with her, tried to cheer her up. There were nearer relatives in the area, but they — well, let’s just say that they weren’t close. So when she died, Rose left all the family valuables to this nephew and niece — she thought that was only right — but she left her library (so valuable to someone in retirement) and all her papers to me. Much of it was old stuff that she’d had packed away in her attic.’

  ‘I love old papers,’ said Jan.

  ‘Yes, indeed. This was mostly family stuff: letters and wills and so on. And of course it is my family as well. But that’s why I’ve felt the need for a historian’s training — to know what is valuable and what isn’t. It cost a mint of money to get the stuff here, I can tell you, and I don’t want to throw out anything that might be useful or valuable. It’s been fascinating going through it, as you can imagine.’

  ‘I’m sure it has,’ said Jan. ‘You should take care of it all, if you have the space. Libraries are keen on that kind of stuff for their archives.’

  ‘Of course they are. And I’m sure that’s what Rose would have wanted. The family, you know, made a fuss about my having it, but . . . well, they’re funny people. But the fact is that now I’ve come upon something that’s quite different.’

  She said it with a queer air of excitement, and she snapped open her handbag and took from it, enclosed in a folder, a yellowing sheet of paper. It was a large sheet, folded twice, and cut roughly along the edges. Each of the small pages thus produced was covered from top to bottom with tiny writing — almost a child’s writing, for each letter was separate from the other. But no child could have written such a tiny script, one would have thought. And when I looked closely I found that new paragraphs were marked off with a stroke, and there were frequent speech marks. This was certainly no child’s essay.

  ‘It looks like part of a story of some kind,’ I said. Jan took it and pored over it, but kept silent.

  ‘It does, doesn’t it?’ said Miss Edith Wing. ‘But I think it must be more than that. Because there are pages and pages of it — at least two hundred, I should say, and probably more.’

  ‘A novel,’ I said. And then it struck me, and I looked at Jan. ‘But — that handwriting . . .’

  ‘You are slow, Perry,’ said Jan. ‘And you’re supposed to be so literary. It’s just like the Brontës. Like those little poems and diaries we saw at Haworth last year.’

  ‘And those childish booklets,’ said Miss Wing. ‘You know, that’s what I’ve been thinking. Naturally I’ve been to Haworth now and then, with the girls. But I feel so foolish, so unqualified. Of course I’ve read Jane Eyre and the other things, but so many years ago!’

  I took the page back, and tried to decipher it.

  ‘I don’t recognize it,’ I said. ‘But then, I wouldn’t necessarily. But these names here — Thomas Blackmore, Marian Thornley . . . Lingdale Manor. I don’t remember any of them.’

  ‘Neither do I,’ said Jan. I refrained from pointing out that this was probably due to the fact that she had not read any of the Brontë novels.

  ‘I feel so uncertain,’ said Edith Wing. ‘It could be anything, couldn’t it? Perhaps lots of people had handwriting like that in those days. Awfully paper-saving it must have been. On the other hand, it could be an early draft of one of the Brontë novels. Or even an unpublished one — ’

  ‘Another novel by Emily Brontë!’ I said.

  ‘Because you see, long, long ago our family did have
some connections with them. Not with Emily, though. With Anne and Branwell. Mrs Robinson, who employed them as governess and tutor to her children, was my five-times great-grandmother. Or is it six? Anyway, it’s not something we usually tell people about, because there was a scandal at the time . . .’

  ‘I remember,’ I said. ‘She seduced Branwell, or he seduced her, or something.’

  ‘We don’t admit that in the family,’ said Miss Wing, primly. ‘But it’s what most people thought. So you see — there is a connection.’

  ‘How absolutely extraordinary,’ I said.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ asked Jan.

  ‘That’s what I wondered,’ said Miss Wing, looking very perplexed. ‘Of course, it could be some kind of forgery . . .’

  ‘Then why keep it secret all these years?’ I said. ‘All that effort, just to hide it away? That’s more unbelievable than the idea that it could be a genuine Brontë novel. Forgeries are made to be sold, believe me. Obviously you are going to have to get in touch with an expert. I think the best thing to do would be to take it to Haworth.’

  ‘I thought of that,’ said Edith Wing. ‘But it’s more than forty miles away, and such a difficult place to get to, if like me you have no car. First to Leeds, then the train to Keighley, then bus. And that hill! Perhaps later in the summer I could manage it.’

  ‘I really shouldn’t leave something like that lying around in your cottage. Isn’t Milltown fairly near here?’

  ‘About thirteen miles.’

  ‘Well, they’ve got one of those newish universities there, haven’t they? There’s bound to be someone or other there who would know something about it. If I were you I’d get in contact with them.’

  The awful thing is, that with those words I very nearly sent her to her death.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE BRONTË BUG

  The next week, as you can imagine, was devoted to Brontë research. We had been left, after all, on a knife edge. On the journey back to London Jan talked about practically nothing else, and as soon as we got into the flat she took down Wuthering Heights and stayed up half the night with it. The next day we went to the local library and fetched home a formidable pile of books.