The Case of the Missing Bronte

by Robert Barnard

  ‘Not really. For the last thirty years she had been a mistress at Broadlands — private girls’ school near Harrogate. Bit snobby, but a thoroughly good school, sensible people in charge.’

  ‘Clean slate there, naturally?’

  ‘Oh, of course. She’d have been out on her little pink ear if not. They’re very concerned and shocked, naturally. According to them Miss Wing was totally upright, responsible, common-sensical. Probably was. We’ve no reason to think otherwise.’

  ‘That was certainly the impression she made on my wife and me,’ I said.

  ‘Good. Well, she inherited a lot of stuff from a friend and distant relation, who died in January.’

  ‘Rose Something-or-other.’

  ‘Rose Carbury. Books, records, personal mementoes — and apparently this mass of papers. I presume she told you something about that, did she? Did she say that this manuscript, if it existed, was part of this inheritance?’

  ‘Yes, she did. And certainly one page of it existed, because she showed it to us. It looked perfectly authentic — I couldn’t go further than that.’

  ‘Good. It’s not very likely she’d take up forging in her twilight years, is it? But it’s obviously something we have to keep in mind. Now, the fact is that we know that after she had talked to you, she dropped hints to other people. Nothing much, but she certainly did talk about the thing — in the pub, and so on. Silly woman.’

  ‘As it turned out,’ I conceded. ‘And I certainly warned her about keeping something potentially valuable in her cottage. But she could hardly have been expecting something like this to happen — nobody would. And she wouldn’t, I suspect, have realized its value herself. When she gave these hints, did she say what she thought it might be?’

  ‘She may have. So far all I’ve heard is that she said she “had reason to think she might have inherited a quite valuable manuscript” with her friend’s things.’

  ‘Hmmm. Quite vague. On that basis they’d hardly know what to look for. Do you know if she got around to consulting an expert?’

  ‘We haven’t got as far as that. That’ll be for you. The cottage is all yours. The boys have been over it, of course. You can see their report as soon as you like, but there’s precious little in it. The only fingerprints are Miss Wing’s own, apart from some old ones on the inherited stuff that are pretty clearly the dead relative’s. The window, as I said, was such a piece of cake that there’s little to suggest whether it was an amateur or a professional job: kids learn that sort of thing in school these days.’

  ‘And was the manuscript the only thing taken?’

  ‘With Miss Wing in a coma it’s difficult to say. We’ve had a friend in to look round, and as far as she can see nothing has been touched in the rest of the house. But of course she has no idea of what exactly there was in the stuff Miss Wing inherited. The room with those papers in wasn’t ransacked, as you will see, but since it was there that she was found, naturally it was there that we concentrated our attention.’

  So that was that. I was given a car for the duration, and drove out to Hutton-le-Dales. I found the cottage without any difficulty, because there was a police car outside it. It was, as Miss Wing had said, down a lane from the little main street. I put the car into reverse and drove along to the Dalesman. Bill Martin’s wife was fully recovered, and I managed to get a room for the next few days. Then I walked back to the cottage in the early evening sunlight. I introduced myself to the constable on duty — a heavy chap of forty or so, pleasant enough, but not giving the impression he was ever going to make the big time in the Police. I told him I could take over at the cottage for the next day or two, and sent him back to his job of protecting the Prime Minister from hordes of stone-throwing unemployed youth — a job which must involve a delicate balance of lack of sympathy. Then the cottage was mine.

  It was really two cottages put together: two two-up-two-downers, in fact. Together they made a nice-sized dwelling for a single person, set well back from the main road, and with a garden which must recently have been a wilderness, but which showed signs of determined effort to bring it round. I suspected Miss Wing had originally acquired the left-side cottage, and only more recently the right-side one. The left one had been decorated, by an enthusiastic but amateur hand, in a conventional, pleasant way. The living-room was comfortable, with old, sat-in furniture. There was a black and white television, and an elderly gramophone with a surprisingly large collection of records: no doubt partly inherited from Rose Carbury. The bookshelves were at the far end of the room, and I went over to inspect them.

  The books seemed to be divided into two lots — Miss Wing’s own, and those she had inherited. The cousin’s were a fairly conventional collection of classics, ancient and modern, in undistinguished editions. Hardly interesting — the sign of a well-read woman, but not one of any individual taste. Miss Wing herself had a lot of books of travel, some school text-books, many volumes on cookery and embroidery. There was only one book of poetry — not Emily Brontë, but Emily Dickinson — another young lady one would not take along to the Annual Police Ball. No sign, then, that Miss Wing had had any previous interest in the Brontë family. There were a few favourite novels, all modern: South Riding, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, Olivia Manning. Later I was to find the cousin’s copy of Wuthering Heights by Miss Wing’s bed upstairs.

  There had been a connecting door let into the wall of the living-room, which led through into the little hallway of the right-hand cottage, and thence through to the other living-room. That room was very different. The wall-paper was musty, and of a hideous cheap design. Quite a bit of furniture seemed to have been dumped here, pending redecoration. But that was not what one noticed. The room had been taken over by a large trunk and several cardboard boxes, the containers of the family papers that Miss Wing had inherited. The Yorkshire police had been very careful in their investigations, and it was possible to see that Edith Wing had gone systematically about her work on the papers, as one would have expected. Gradually the papers had come to take over the room.

  The cardboard boxes, for example, had been nearly emptied, and the various items stacked in piles around the room, on the furniture or the floor. Some were neatly tied up with string or ribbon. There was a series of letters written in the eighteen-nineties from ‘Your loving sister Amy’ to her ‘Dearest Louise’. There were documents relating to the sale of a manor house in the East Riding, in the early years of the century. There were photograph albums, birth and marriage certificates, three sad War Office telegrams from the First World War. There was material here for a detailed family history (of which Emily Brontë, who was fascinated by family, would surely have approved). But it was all much too late in date to be of much interest to me. I turned my attention to the centrepiece of the room, the trunk.

  Here we were much further back. The little piles around the trunk related to the eighteen-fifties and –sixties. There were letters from Mrs Robinson, now Lady Scott, to her daughters. These made my heart thump: here one was in direct contact with one of the players in the Brontë saga — the destroyer of Branwell (or the innocent victim of his unlawful advances, depending on whom you wanted to believe). I could not forbear untying the packet and glancing at their contents. From the earlier letters I had a feeling of coldness — of egotism masking itself in conventional expressions of love, concern, motherly admonition. The later letters had a hint of querulousness, a genteel whine: they seemed to ask, between the lines, why the girls weren’t better daughters, and seemed unaware of the obvious answer.

  There was another interesting pile of letters from Lady Scott’s solicitor, concerning her threat of libel action against Mrs Gaskell and George Smith, her publisher. Mrs Gaskell had been foolish enough, in her biography of Charlotte, to print the account of Branwell’s dismissal from his post at the Robinsons’ exactly as she had heard it from Charlotte, which meant the account of the affair that Branwell put out for family consumption. Mrs Gaskell added a fine paragraph or two of mora
l outrage at the conduct of the ‘wretched woman’ who now ‘goes flaunting about to this day in respectable society; a showy woman for her age; kept afloat by her reputed wealth.’ Very understandable, even admirable, but not something one could get away with even today, unless one is the fiercely moralistic editor of Private Eye. In Victorian days, it was legal suicide. Lady Scott had all the cards in her hand, and would not be content with anything less than a grovel. Mrs Gaskell grovelled.

  But the neat piles around the trunk were not all. In the bottom of it was a disorder of papers not yet sorted. I knelt down by it and scuffled around. Odd pages which had fallen out of lengthy documents, various keepsakes such as childish drawings and dried flowers falling to pieces, even a fob watch. I was just giving up when my tumbling about in the debris of past loves and losses turned up riches. My eye caught the signature at once, and I drew it carefully forth. It was the second page of a letter, and it had obviously fallen apart from the other section of the folded sheet. But it provided, even in its fragmentary state, the first direct link with one of the Brontës:

  care of it for me. I trust in God, and hope for a few more years of life yet, not only that I may accomplish the many schemes I have in my mind, to do good while I may, but also for Charlotte’s sake. However, if this be not His will, I bow to it.

  Please accept, dear Mary, my assurance of the great happiness it gave me to see you again, and believe that you have the warmest good wishes of your friend and governess

  Anne Brontë

  I wanted to jump up and shout a Eureka that would be heard all the way to Milltown. All right — this was not evidence. Certainly not the police court evidence I was talking about earlier. There was nothing to indicate what the Robinson girl or girls were to take ‘care of’ for Anne. But it was one piece of beautiful significance in the whole jigsaw puzzle. It showed that Anne, in her last illness (it could surely not have been earlier, because of the reference to Charlotte, without mention of Emily), had in fact entrusted something to her former pupil. If it was in fact the manuscript, it could hardly have been one of her own: she would not have had time to finish anything after writing The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Why should it not be the manuscript of Emily’s second novel? She knew that Charlotte deeply disapproved of Wuthering Heights. She knew she was also fantastically protective about Emily’s reputation. What she could not know, but what perhaps she would not have been surprised at, was that Charlotte would try to suppress one of her own novels, The Tenant, after her death. Might she not, fearing that she was about to die, have preferred to trust her sister’s manuscript to one of the few people outside the family she had been close to?

  I had a strong desire to get on the phone to Jan, and get her to check carefully the events of Anne Brontë’s last few months of life. As luck would have it, I sat there on Miss Wing’s floor in the gathering twilight, dithering whether to ring from the cottage or go back to the Dalesman and do it. And it was while I was dithering there in the gloom that I heard a scuffle of leaves from outside in the garden.

  Quick as a flash I crawled from the musty old living-room into the dark sanctuary of the hallway. There was no glass in the front door of the right-hand cottage, and I stood by the opening between the hall and the left-hand cottage. Somebody was there, all right. I heard careful footsteps. They did not try the doors, no doubt realizing that the police would certainly not leave them unlocked. But I heard faint sounds of the windows being tried, the front windows first of the right-, then of the left-hand cottages.

  Then I remembered. When I had first come in, while I was inspecting the bookcases in the main living-room, I had opened a window to let in some air. The main living-room, Miss Wing’s main living area, extended the width of the cottage. It had been the back window I had opened. I thought I had closed it again, but certainly not latched it. I waited. The back windows were tried on the right side, without luck. There was a long pause. I imagined him looking in, trying to catch sight of the trunk and documents. Then he struck it rich. I heard the bottom window in the room next to me being cautiously opened. I waited a few seconds, then crept noiselessly forward to the doorway of the living-room.

  Inserting itself through the space of the lower window was a large bottom, clad in cheap suiting shiny from use. It came slowly, as if half expecting to be branded. I paused. Then first a left leg, then a right one was swivelled into the room, hands gripped the windowsill, and the top end of the figure began to ease itself through. I could still not see the face, but as it cautiously straightened I observed to my surprise that around its neck it wore a clerical collar.

  ‘Is this just a formal call, or shall I put on the kettle for a cup of tea?’ I said.

  The head jerked upwards and hit itself on the raised window. The voice, when it spoke, was high and quavery with shock.

  ‘The blessings of the Lord and his prophet Moses be upon you, brother!’ it said.

  CHAPTER 4

  MAN OF GOD

  There is this to be said for conventional modes of introduction: you know where you are with them. You stiffen, pull out your mouth to the length that pleasure or anticipation seem to require, hold out a paw and judge the pressure to be applied. The encounter between myself and the reverend, or at any rate clerical, or at any rate dog-collared gentleman, had no such preliminaries. We just stood there, looking at each other. Neither of us, I imagine, liked what he saw. He, though, was obliged to put up a better pretence. He made a valiant attempt to normalize the situation by delving into the inside pocket of his shiny suit, drawing out his wallet, and producing a card.

  ‘Perhaps you’ll allow me to introduce myself,’ he said, in a quavery voice that was striving to regain normality and clerical fruitiness. I allowed him. The card that I took was dog-eared, almost grimy.

  Revd Amos Macklehose,

  Tabernacle of the Risen Moses,

  Leeds.

  ‘My friends call me Andy,’ continued the bulky figure ingratiatingly.

  ‘Really, Mr Macklehose?’ I said, anxious to be on the right footing from the start. I considered the card. It impressed me disagreeably. Totally meaningless, but designed to impress the ignorant. I am not religious, but I do like my religion, or rather other people’s religion, to have some respectable theological content. It was clear that Mr Macklehose’s was all wind, or all fraud. I looked at Mr Macklehose. He impressed me disagreeably too — very disagreeably. He was overweight, in his late forties, with full lips, cunning eyes and greasy hair, thinning, but smarmed across his pate. He smiled appeasingly at me, and rubbed his hands with that false good-fellowship that is worse than enmity.

  ‘Well now,’ I said, after regarding him in silence for long enough to augment his nervousness considerably, ‘perhaps you’d like to explain how you come to be here. In this manner.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ said Amos Macklehose, as if there was nothing he’d like better, ‘naturally you’d want to know.’

  He took back his card to gain time, and seemed to be working up an air of breeziness. His voice was odd: the basis was middle-class Yorkshire, but there was something else there too that I could not identify. Could it be American? In spite of the breezy bluff, he was sweating as he meditated his explanation. Licking his tongue furtively around his lips, and sweating. All in all, he was as unattractive a specimen of clerical gentleman as you’d be likely to meet!

  ‘Well?’ I said.

  ‘Yes. Well, I suppose it must have looked a bit odd,’ he said, with an attempt at urbanity. I nodded, and said nothing. The Br’er Possum ploy. It made him still more uneasy and sweaty. But he tried, I’ll say that for him.

  ‘Well now, Sergeant — it is Sergeant? — er — well — it’s like this. When I read in the papers about Cousin Edith’s terrible accident — ’

  ‘Ah — Cousin Edith.’

  ‘That’s right. Though quite distant. Not close kin. When I heard about her terrible — well, attack, I suppose I should call it — dreadful, the violence in our streets these days, as I
’m sure you have cause to know, Inspector . . . Well, when I heard that Cousin Edith had been Set Upon by Thugs, I said to Mother — that’s my wife I designate by that name — I said, Judith, I said, we should go and see Cousin Edith when she comes round. It’s only natural she’ll want to see her own Kin. And we talked it over a little, and sought Divine Guidance together in the usual manner, and then it came to me: there must surely be some little thing of hers from home that Cousin Edith would like to have round her when she Comes To.’

  ‘Are you sure it wasn’t some little thing of hers that Cousin Edith was unlikely to find round her when she gets home that interested you?’ I asked.

  He drew himself up, and aimed at me a magisterial rebuke.

  ‘Are you implying what I think you are implying, Constable? You seem to forget that you are addressing a Man of God.’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m mainly concerned with upholding the law of man,’ I said. ‘I don’t know if there is any biblical warrant for the crime of breaking and entering, but whether or not, that is what I’m thinking of charging you with.’

  ‘You seem to forget, Officer,’ he said, rubbing his hands as if kneading very sticky dough, ‘that I am Kin to the good lady who owns this property.’

  ‘True,’ I said. ‘But not close kin, I believe you said. The lady is unfortunately not in a condition to tell us just how close kin she actually considers you.’

  ‘Ah yes, well, technically, as I admitted, we are quite distant. But we met — the poor lady, and my wife and I — in connection with the Tragic Last Illness of a close cousin of mine, a Miss Rose Carbury. Also a cousin of Miss Wing. We rediscovered the connection then, so to speak. Miss Wing was with her a good deal, nursing her, towards the End. And naturally we were round her a great deal at that time as well.’

  ‘Naturally,’ I said. He was impervious to irony, and seemed to get the idea that I might be coming round to his side. Actually his habit of rubbing his hands as if he were wiping grease off them, and of speaking certain words with clerical emphasis, as if they were Holy Writ, was really giving me the gripes.