Bronte's Mistress

by Finola Austin

  I hovered over her, unsure what else to say.

  Instead of Lydia, I seemed to see the ghost of my former self, crying just so when I’d learned that Edward Scott would marry my cousin Catherine Bateman. I had been so sure when I was Lydia’s age that I was destined for more, for someone better than Edmund, for somebody who would lift me higher. But my ascent into adulthood had been littered with disappointments, as hers would be too.

  Motherhood was about offering truth, not comfort. For all it still tugged at my heartstrings to hear her cry so, Lydia needed to leave behind her childish notions. And I must be the one to disabuse her.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “MRS. ROBINSON?”

  I jumped. I hadn’t heard Mr. Brontë knock or come in, but there he was, standing in the center of my dressing room at Thorp Green as if I’d conjured him.

  How dare he? His sudden apparition took my breath away. And he could have interrupted me doing anything! But really, of course, there was nothing for me to do at all. That was why I’d been sitting in the window seat, staring across the lawn and delineating the intermittent bursts of birdsong.

  Wren, blackbird, thrush.

  Love, possession, warning.

  “Mr. Brontë.” I stood.

  Our eyes were level, and that made me uncomfortable. There was no way to escape Mr. Brontë’s deep blue stare. With Edmund, I was accustomed to addressing his cravat, or the back of his head, or the pages of his newspaper.

  Mr. Brontë would be here about Ned, but it was funny he should come to me. Edmund was the one with opinions on the correct way to educate boys, and though Ned was at a clumsy age, it was Marshall who pressed herbs on bruises and kissed scraped knees.

  “Is anything the matter?” I asked when he did not speak.

  “No,” Mr. Brontë said, frowning, “although I might have asked you the same. You appeared pensive just now.”

  Such familiarity might have been acceptable in the theater, in Scarborough, but it wouldn’t do here.

  “It is considered impolite, Mr. Brontë, to enter without knocking,” I said, staring back at him. I wouldn’t be the first to blink.

  “My apologies.” He didn’t play my game but bowed.

  Disappointing. I felt something slacken, like when Marshall became distracted while tightening my corset, but this time it was on the inside.

  “I came to ask a favor,” he said.

  “A favor?” I repeated.

  “Yes. But then the door was ajar. I saw you sitting there and you struck me as so mournful, like a painting—or Tennyson’s Mariana in her grange. Forgive me.”

  Mariana? I was weary, to my very bones. But she’d had someone and something to look for, wait for. I had nobody and nothing.

  “What was your favor, Mr. Brontë?” I asked.

  Perhaps he could paint me and reveal the youthful fire I felt inside. Maybe on canvas Edmund would be able to see me clearly. But then Mr. Brontë had failed as an artist; that’s why he was a tutor, after all.

  “I hoped I might be permitted to use the library,” he said. “After lessons and on Sundays, when Ned is with his sisters.”

  A practical request, then. He’d come to me only to avoid disturbing Edmund.

  “The ceilings are low in the Monk’s House and the windows let in little light,” he said. “Now summer is drawing to a close, it would be a great joy to me to have somewhere else to write. Though even at the Monk’s House I have more space than back home, where the four of us sit around one table, squabbling over ink.”

  This interested me in spite of myself. “What is it you are writing?” I asked. “More poetry?”

  “When I can.” At this limited show of encouragement, Mr. Brontë strode past me and deposited himself at the window where I’d been sitting.

  I gaped at him.

  “Although Charlotte talks from time to time of the novel as the ‘literary pinnacle of our age.’ ”

  “Do you agree with her?” I asked.

  Surprising that this female intellect who loomed large behind Mr. Brontë thought highly of novels! I’d always assumed my taste for them was confirmation of my feminine frivolity. Edmund, and all other gentlemen, he assured me, preferred “facts.”

  With each new detail I learned of her, Charlotte grew more fascinating to me. She was surprising, multifaceted, not a caricature like romantic Emily or colorless Anne. I took my place on the window seat beside Mr. Brontë, very close to the edge so there was at least a foot between us.

  He nodded. “The thing about Charlotte is that she is very often right, for all it pains me to say it.” He was gazing at me, the rosy hue of the late-summer sky shining through his hair. “But to write a novel, one must have a tale to tell—the tragedy, the great love story—and I have not found mine. Not yet.”

  I couldn’t assure him he would do so. To prophesy tragedy was morbid and love unthinkable. So I looked away, not trusting myself not to get lost in him if I met his eye. “I read a fair number of novels,” I said at last, fixing my gaze on the French clock, although I wanted nothing less than for Mr. Brontë to go. The birds would be poor company after our conversation. “I go through a box a month from the circulating library.”

  Mr. Brontë saw and took his opportunity. “Perhaps you might join me in the library?” he said. “In those quiet hours between lessons and dinner when the children are racing out to the fields? I could write. You could read.”

  He paused, but I said nothing. I’d become aware of every sensation in my body: the weight on my head from my hair, how the lace irritated my wrists at the cuffs, the strange dip in the cushion below me now there was a heavier companion at my side.

  “Unless of course you have other affairs to attend to.”

  He had me there. “No,” I said slowly.

  “I thought you might be practicing at the piano. You are a born musician.”

  “I only play after dinner,” I said. “Edmund doesn’t like to hear me in the day. He says it’s ‘tedious’ and ‘distracting.’ ”

  Mr. Brontë raised one russet eyebrow, his face the picture of Miss Brontë’s at her most judgmental. But here his verdict pleased me.

  “Yes, perhaps we might join you—Marshall and I,” I said. “On occasion.”

  * * *

  “ON OCCASION” BECAME OFTEN.

  Did Edmund think it strange that the time I spent in the library increased even as the number of novels I ordered from Mr. Bellerby’s circulating library dwindled? Had he even noticed as he jotted down the amounts that autumn in his treasured leather accounting book?

  I was still reading but now also had Mr. Brontë’s scribblings to work my way through—fantastic tales of a country called Angria, which he and Charlotte had dreamed up and peopled with hundreds of characters, and poems he signed “Northangerland.” In the late afternoon, after Ned’s lessons, Mr. Brontë would delight me again with the story of Angria’s inception or turn the force of his pedagogy on me and try to convert me from novels to his favorite poetry. There were volumes of Wordsworth and Byron, marked with his annotations, which we took turns reading aloud from. He’d written a letter to Mr. Wordsworth once, but never received a reply. Mr. Brontë told me I had a natural ear, that I felt the music in the verses that others missed.

  I tried to live up to his estimation, although often I’d tease him, chastising him for his flattery, while Marshall did her needlework, head bent low, seeing and hearing nothing.

  But she wasn’t here today. We were on the cusp of winter, struggling through a day as gray and dreary as all the others, but today, somehow, Mr. Brontë and I had found ourselves alone.

  “So Charlotte dubbed hers Lord Wellington, Emily’s was Parry,” said Mr. Brontë, who was talking again of the toy soldiers he and his sisters had played with when they were younger, which served as inspiration for many of his stories even now. “Anne’s soldier, Ross, was a queer little thing like herself, and I must needs make mine Bonaparte.” He laughed, looking not at me but seve
ral yards away toward the cheval screen and the oak sofa table, as if he could see those wooden toys made flesh before him.

  Mr. Brontë was a curious specimen. A grown man who retained a passion for playing with dolls. Another living, breathing person with an inner life as varied, complex, and tumultuous as my own, but one who cared nothing for the concerns that dogged me and consumed my waking and dreaming hours.

  What others thought of him was of little importance to Mr. Brontë, I’d found in the course of our many talks like this one. It made me wonder if Charlotte was the same. “She doesn’t spend much time on her appearance,” Mr. Brontë had told me once. “She is neat but, I’m afraid, rather plain. Yet, on closer acquaintance, men often find her fascinating. Her conversation. Her opinions. She is truly unique among women.”

  The contrast with Charlotte caused me some embarrassment about my vanity and predictability, but Mr. Brontë never accused me of either. He listened to my confidences when Edmund would have lectured, reacted with sympathy when my husband would have schooled me to be better.

  I’d liked that at the beginning—how Edmund challenged me and how he had a steady confidence that belied his true age (he was, in fact, a year my junior). But his critiques took on a sharper edge when they were no longer followed by caresses, when they came to outnumber his compliments and I could do nothing right.

  “We all had childhood games, Mr. Brontë,” I said, tracing my finger along the ridged equator of one of the globes that stood near the paneled window. “But most of us outgrow them.”

  “A tragedy, Mrs. Robinson!” Mr. Brontë cried, his humor matching mine. He caught on to the other side of the globe, halting its slow rotation and leaning toward me.

  We must have looked as if we were carving up the world between us.

  “What is the object of our existence unless creation?” he said with that intensity of his that was at odds with our age’s ever-fashionable nonchalance. “And while many of us create—I will not say replicas—but only pale imitations of ourselves, how much more incredible is it to craft a world, another reality that you can share and invite others into, as Charlotte and I have with Angria and Emily and Anne have with their Gondal? Another country, just around the corner, wherever you are and however you are trapped. Imagination is the only passport required for entry there.”

  “Hence why you call yourself ‘Northangerland,’ ” I said, pulling back, away from his face and away from the window, although it was like moving through treacle.

  “Yes,” he said, his excitement subsiding and a new hollowness entering his voice as if, in removing myself, I had reminded him of the realities between us, the fact that our very presence here, alone, was an insurrection. “Northangerland is the dark hero of Angria, a man led by his passions, who acts ever on ambition. I envy him, Lydia.”

  A shiver passed through me. Was it at hearing him say my first name or merely at the sound of it being used with affection and not as a reprimand?

  “What do you en—?” I could not complete the question. My breathy voice trailed into nothingness as I retreated. I came in contact with one of the fitted, glass-doored bookcases, solid, immovable, clearing me of all responsibility were he to come closer.

  “He is free,” Mr. Brontë said, his confidence growing as he stepped forward, narrowing the gap between us. “Free to do what he wants, take what he wants.” He stopped, raised his hand, and ran his thumb down the spine of a book to the right of my cheek.

  “And what do you want?” I asked, pausing between each word, unsure if I wanted an answer, terrified that the magic would be ruined by one false move on his part. We couldn’t sustain this bizarre, romantic, almost spiritual communion were our words and actions to descend into baseness.

  “A lock of your hair, Lydia,” he whispered. “Something to remember you by.”

  Perfect. Intimate but still deferential, physical without fording the Rubicon, venturing to the place from which there could be no return.

  I nodded.

  Mr. Brontë drew a small knife from his waistcoat pocket with one hand and, with the other, tugged at the silver comb that secured my hair. The teeth scraped against my scalp. The trinket clattered to the floor. My mass of curls hovered for a second, unsecured, before tumbling over my shoulders.

  Just as well I had never required hairpieces.

  Now his fingers were running through the thick, real, loosened tresses and skirting up my neck and I couldn’t think of hairpieces anymore, could I? Or how my hair would look when he was finished? I wasn’t meant to be thinking of such trivial things when my life, my marriage, my virtue were hanging in the balance.

  “Take the lock, Mr. Brontë,” I said, struggling not to gasp as his fingertips moved across my face, tracing their way to my lips.

  Too much.

  Too far.

  The interview was careening out of my control.

  “Branwell,” he said, correcting me and gazing at my bottom lip, which his thumb was toying with, his expression hungry.

  “Go,” I said, closing my eyes, not to drink it in but because I could no longer bear to see him.

  My scalp tautened.

  A low, rough sawing sound.

  Release.

  Branwell drew back, but I kept my eyes closed.

  “Go,” I repeated.

  A click of the door and he did.

  I walked to the fireplace.

  My face stared at me in the looking glass above the mantel just the same.

  It was like the morning after my wedding night, when I had been alone, shivering in my shift, before a maid had come to dress me.

  “No one can see it, Lydia,” I’d whispered to myself, giddy and sore and angry at being lied to. “It is not such a change. You are just the same.”

  But, now, on closer examination, there was a difference. One of the curls that framed my face was shorter than the other. How arrogant, how like a man, to go for a strand that was so visible. Marshall would fix it, without a word of reproof. And only she would have noticed anyway.

  I stooped to retrieve the comb and inhaled hard.

  A momentary aberration only. I was still mistress here.

  * * *

  “YOU ARE TOO KIND, Doctor,” I said.

  I wasn’t looking at Dr. Crosby but beyond him at my own reflection in one of the full-length mirrors that lined the passage to the ballroom at Kirby Hall. Thanks to their matriarch’s long illness and subsequent demise, it had been some months since we’d been in the Thompsons’ Palladian mansion, the finest house in the area, grander even than ours.

  Edmund had been talking to Reverend Lascelles only moments ago. Yet, infuriating as ever, he’d proven missing at the very moment we’d all been summoned from the anterooms to enjoy Harry Thompson’s long-anticipated wedding feast. Just as well the doctor had stepped up in his absence.

  Dr. Crosby was the perfect partner. He complimented me on my appearance as we made our way up the corridor, slowed by trailing dresses and a strict adherence to etiquette, and entertained me with a flurry of gossip from Great Ouseburn, a ten-minute stroll from Little Ouseburn yet a separate parish, which meant it might as well have been a world away.

  I did look beautiful tonight. I’d ordered a new dress from Miss Harvey in York. Black, of course, but with gold trim at the cuffs and along the scooping neckline. I’d thought that Mr. Brontë and Ned might come to wave us off and that the tutor would admire me with his words or his eyes. But there had only been Miss Brontë, her expression alternating between intrigued, disinterested, and judgmental; Marshall, happy and proud, eyes glittering at what she had helped create; and Mary, tearing up that she, unlike the other girls, was excluded.

  I stole a glance at my eldest daughters and smiled. Bessy was on Will Milner’s arm. They were a good match, although it was unclear who was guiding whom. I wondered if the boy had sent her any more notes since Valentine’s Day. He was an awkward young man, whose hands and feet still looked too big for him, and he held himself
stiff and unspeaking. Bessy was silent and had turned the color of her dress, which had formerly been Lydia’s and was far too pink for her florid complexion.

  Lydia, meanwhile, was paired with the youngest girl of the house, Amelia. I’d placated her and overspent on a new periwinkle gown that brought out her eyes, but her face was as downcast as it had been the day she’d first heard of Harry Thompson’s marriage.

  “What a deficit of young men we have, Mrs. Robinson!” said the doctor, tracking the direction of my gaze and thoughts. “When a daughter of a beauty such as yourself goes unaccompanied.”

  I gave his arm a squeeze. How good of him to dwell on my looks rather than hers.

  “But—” He paused and leaned in so close I could see the silvering hair on the side of his dark head. “But it’s somehow appropriate, isn’t it?”

  “How so, Dr. Crosby?” I asked, keeping up the whispering and hoping others thought us in on secrets of the party that they were not.

  “I mean that this is a house of unmarried women. What is it? Six in all? A house that’s hungered for a wedding for years and then, not only does the son wed first, but Mr. Harry must go and marry elsewhere.”

  I stifled a giggle. It was true that this was largely a gathering of spinsters. There were the Thompsons, from Henrietta, a fast-fading beauty who must have been five and thirty, all the way to Amelia, who was already too old to be bosom friends with a teenager like my Lydia. Five of the seven Milner girls were also here tonight, imagine! But no, my girls would never suffer their fate.

  Whatever my governess had written of my showiness, I would ensure my daughters married, and married well. I knew what it took. Beauty, reputation, accomplishments. Another year had all but slipped by, but soon I would take action and defend them from a woman’s worst fate—to be extraneous and unneeded. Or no, that was not quite the worst—the worst was to be forced to make your own living, like the Miss Brontës.

  Dr. Crosby pulled back my chair, which was toward the upper end of the leftmost of three long, glittering tables.