Bronte's Mistress

by Finola Austin

  “Did he tell you to prepare for…?” My question trailed off.

  Edmund shook his head. “No need for you to panic. He plans to visit here in the next months. To call upon me as a friend, you understand, not to treat me as his patient. I insisted. But on my ride back, it struck me that one day, you and the children must manage without me.”

  No need for you to panic. He was frightening me for nothing.

  “Edmund, you are younger than me,” I said. I rarely admitted this. “I won’t entertain this morbid humor.”

  “You must.” Edmund grabbed my arm and tried to force me to sit again. “And so, tonight, I wish to talk to you of my will.”

  “Your will? At eleven at night?” I was veering between annoyance and alarm.

  “Lydia, be reasonable.” He was almost shouting now. “For the last couple of months, you have fawned over me and dogged my every move. But tonight, when there is something I actually want from you, you protest. It is intolerable.”

  Edmund had noticed my efforts. He just didn’t care. Dart after dart, piercing my pride. And I had thrown away Branwell, who noticed even the slightest change in me, and parsed my every sentence as if it were a line of poetry.

  I nodded.

  “Should the day come before Ned’s majority, you must look after everything. See this little red book? Accounts. Consult it when wages are due or to pay the old servants their pensions. And use it to record your own spending. See, here in the margin, the date, the payee, and the amount, in pounds, shillings, and pence? And here, the opening and closing balance? Ensure that you note to yourself where you could be more economical.”

  “Edmund, I am not a fool,” I said, tipping the book shut. I had my own money, after all, from a small inheritance. Had he forgotten that I kept accounts with milliners and dressmakers and had never kept them waiting for their dues? “Was this what you wished to tell me?” The only thing worse than Edmund’s silence was when he insisted on speaking so far from the script I would have written for him.

  “No, Lydia.” He drew another paper to him. “About the will. Charles Thorp will be the executor.”

  His brother-in-law? An unsurprising choice, but should Edmund die before his mother did, he might as well have crowned her directly.

  He handed the paper to me. I scanned it, but unless I was misunderstanding the elaborate prose, there was nothing in here that was unusual.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Is there something in here that should seem strange to me?”

  Edmund stood and strolled to the window. “Some husbands, Lydia, are draconian in their last wills and testaments.” He paused.

  Was he about to threaten me?

  “But I want you to know—need you to know—that I will not be.”

  I nodded, although he wasn’t looking at me.

  “When I die, you may do as you wish. Marry whom you like.”

  “Marry again? I don’t inten—”

  “No, Lydia.” He raised his hand to stop me as if he were saluting the far wall. “I would not have you tell a falsehood. We both know that should the time come, you will remarry before the grass has even cloaked my grave. You have too much life in you to be loyal to the dead. But, Lydia, today I ask you to choose wisely.” He turned, his eyes as earnest as they were in prayer, and took a step toward me. “If not of me, think of our families and of the children—the example you must set for them, the chances that might be denied them if—”

  “I reject the notion that I would not think of them,” I said, just above a whisper.

  Give up your body for years to birth them, stand quiet when they reject, deceive, abuse you, and, if you are a mother, you will still be called selfish, probably by the very man who gave your children nothing but his name.

  “I see how you look at the tutor, Mr. Brontë,” he said.

  I flinched. Not speaking of Branwell directly had been an unspoken rule between us.

  But Edmund’s voice was oddly calm, as if he were reciting a psalm. “I see the stream of intelligence that flows between your eyes. You look at him as you once did me, now that I can no longer please you. You look at him as if he carried your heart in his hand.”

  “I… I,” I stuttered. “Edmund, I do not.”

  How dare he bring it back to what did or didn’t happen between our sheets at night? How dare he suggest that everything was so simple? Yes, I longed to wrap my arms round Branwell’s neck and feel the warmth of his body against me at night, but not just because he was young and beautiful, broadening into a man while Edmund weakened with each passing day. Branwell had spoken to me, listened to me, made me whole again.

  “You slander your wife, Edmund Robinson,” I said. “I’ve never given you reason to doubt me.”

  “Lydia,” he said, so softly he might have been speaking to an invalid. “I am not angry.”

  “But you should be angry.” I was shaking. “You should drag Brontë out of bed and horsewhip him outside the Monk’s House if you think he is taking your money and eating your food, while all the time attempting to seduce your wife.”

  “Mr. Brontë seduce you?” Edmund laughed. “I should think it’s the other way around. The boy is a painter, a poet, an innocent. I doubt the thought has even occurred to him. You are much older than him, after all. He is practically the same age as our children.”

  I couldn’t speak.

  “Do not be ashamed, Lydia. God is merciful.” Edmund was close now. He stroked my arm, his touch alien. “But should my time come soon, do not marry one so far beneath you.”

  “Marry?” I thrust his hand aside. “You think I would marry into his family of sickly paupers?”

  “You are impulsive.”

  He was slicing me apart with a blunt knife, or lacing the strings around me even tighter, cleaving me in two. And I could only lash back at him, like the crushed bee who stings with his final breath.

  “I married a man who was not worthy of me once before,” I said. “Believe me, I will not make the same mistake again.”

  * * *

  I PRESSED THE GRAVEL into my hand as I trudged the path to the Monk’s House, but however hard I tried, I could not break my skin.

  It didn’t matter that Edmund had heard me leave the house, after I’d paused, panting, in the hallway for some minutes, testing to see if he would follow me. Why not go to Branwell if my husband already suspected us? Or, rather, suspected me of ruining the “innocent” boy, tempting him into sin?

  Standing on the lawn to the left of the cottage, I went to throw the jagged and irregular stones at Branwell’s window, but they clung to my sweaty palm. I tried again, but I was unskilled at throwing. The gravel didn’t reach, not even close, but rained around me onto the grass, like early hailstones.

  “Branwell,” I hissed, but there was no way he could hear me, and if I spoke louder, I was sure to wake Tom Sewell.

  I sank down on a fallen tree trunk and contemplated summoning the energy to cry, but it was harder when I was by myself. What was the point if Edmund saw only the swollen, ugly aftermath or if nobody saw me at all?

  Maybe I should go inside. I didn’t even have a shawl, and in the Hall, there were fires and blankets. Marshall could even undress me if she wasn’t already in bed.

  Just then, Branwell’s window swung open, and there he was, the kind of hero Byron would have created—his arms bare to the elbows, his hair tousled and falling over his eyes. He leaned on the sill and puffed on his pipe.

  “Mr. Brontë!” I nearly fell as I stood. “Branwell!”

  He straightened up so quickly that he struck his head.

  “Be careful,” I said, but he had already disappeared, without bothering to close the window.

  Before I’d had time to worry about Tom Sewell hearing him, Branwell was beside me, pipeless and dressed only in a long nightshirt.

  “Oh Lydia,” he said, tracing his fingers down the sides of my face. “Did he, your husband, upset you?”

  I nodded.

&nb
sp; “That brute.”

  “We mustn’t be seen,” I said, eying Sewell’s darkened bedroom window. “Follow me. I know where we can go.”

  I pulled him by the hand away from the lawn and into “the woods,” my body singing when his skin met mine. We walked along what had once been a path but was now only a channel of slightly sparser brush, snaking between the trees. It was too dark to see, but I knew the way.

  I’d come to this building in those early years, when I’d been treasured and loved, and yet—I’d forgotten why now—still yearned for moments alone. There was no door, but the night felt milder now that I had company. Branwell procured a stub of candle, as if by magic, and lit it, making us feel even warmer.

  “What is this place?” he asked as the light danced, illuminating only a few of the hundreds of nooks that lined the curving stone walls.

  “A dovecote,” I said.

  It had been years since it had been used as such. When I’d discovered it, not long after my honeymoon, there’d been a handful of pigeons that still haunted it, slaves to their homing instincts, although the servants no longer tended to them and gave them food. Over the next months and years, they had all disappeared—died, I guessed—until only one, a dirty, limping, silent bird, had remained.

  He and I were the only creatures to come here for a time, but one morning, I’d found his body bent at angles on the ground. I’d picked him up, felt, even through my glove, that his body was cold and his tiny heart was still, and thrown him aside into the shrubs.

  I must have been pregnant with Georgiana then and unable to comprehend death. It was impossible to do so when new life was pulsing into being inside me. So I stopped walking here altogether and tried to be satisfied with the sterile and picturesque nature surrounding the artificial pond and the company of the children. Oh, how Lydia had tortured me with her never-ending questions! I loved to be with her and Bessy and Ned for an hour or so. But they always demanded more of me. I never had any time to myself. Years had gone by, and I hadn’t even commissioned that water feature I’d wanted.

  Branwell ran his hand along the wall. Didn’t he desire me?

  I stared, desperate with sadness and longing, urging him to come back.

  When he saw my eyes, he understood. Branwell leaned toward me, paused to see if I would pull back, and when I did not, he kissed me—strong, selfish, and deep.

  It was a good kiss, breath-stealing, knee-trembling, but I didn’t respond as I should.

  I wanted to cry—for Georgiana, the pigeon, Edmund. To mourn the vows I was breaking. Yet I had no intention of stopping the inevitable.

  Branwell kissed me again, and this second time I gave in to the feeling, the waves of pleasure that ran through me, drowning out all else.

  Branwell was rushing and already fumbling with the fastenings of my dress.

  I’d imagined it so many times, how he would unfurl me, like a corpse being freed from her shroud. The air would bite at me, but his kisses—reverent, methodical—would dispel the cold and beat back the encroaching minutes, hours, and seasons. He would marvel at each inch of me, like the tenant who has purchased a poor scrap of land, to turn and till as he has for years, but now—miracle of miracles!—every square inch of it is his.

  But Branwell did not delay.

  He tore my bodice, half freeing my breasts. He hitched my skirts up around my waist. His hands were everywhere, probing at me, as if he were searching a servant who’d made off with her lady’s rings.

  I made some noise of protest but this only inflamed him further.

  He lowered me onto the cold, filthy, feather-strewn ground, clawed at me, nibbled my nipples, sucked on my neck.

  At other moments I might have been horrified, but the danger electrified me. Still, he mustn’t leave a mark.

  “Branwell—” I ventured. The shape of his name was strange in my mouth. “Be careful.”

  He seemed far away, even as he burrowed into the hollow between my breasts, ran his hand up, around, and up my thigh again.

  Instead there was Edmund, the only man who had ever seen me like this. He’d been patient on our wedding night and even more scared than me. “Can you take any more?” my new husband had asked, his tone almost coy. And his eyes had grown wide when I’d pulled him deeper, when I’d gasped at how close we were, and rocked him like the babies we dreamed we’d make.

  Panic rose inside me. I’d gone too far to turn back.

  Yet wasn’t this what I’d wanted? I needed to escape my own head, to enjoy the sensations of Branwell’s skin against mine, marvel in the feeling of being wanted.

  I turned my mouth aside to avoid Branwell’s almost medicinal breath and—I hadn’t noticed him pull his shirt off, but—there he was, ready and naked, the hair bearding his crotch as fiery as the strands on his head and even more unruly.

  This was enough to shock me back to myself. My body responded to the cue. Oh, it had been so long, and even before our love had cooled, Edmund had grown too familiar and too changed by age. From my navel down, I had turned to water.

  Branwell cried like a girl when he pushed inside me, arching his back and turning his face to the domed roof as if he were saluting the hidden moon.

  My dress, bunched up as it was, acted as a sort of pillow beneath me but the ground was still hard. Each thrust slammed the small of my back into the stone.

  “Lydia, you’re an angel, a goddess, a—” Branwell’s stream of incoherent compliments was torrential, making up for my silence. “Oh, God, oh, God!” he called, screwing up his face like a prisoner praying at the scaffold.

  “There now,” I soothed. “There.”

  But Branwell was alone, riding the waves of his ecstasy, thrashing so far out that I had no hope of reaching him.

  “Lydia, I love you,” he breathed with the final shock. He rolled off me, his expression as blissful as if we’d been lying on a cloud-soft bed. “One day, my darling, I swear we’ll be together.”

  Wetness seeped out of me and pooled in a puddle between my legs.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “MISS BRONTË, MADAM. SHE insisted,” said Miss Sewell with a sniff from the doorway. She must have thought such introductions beneath her.

  I’d been sequestered in my rooms for a week since my argument with Edmund and what had followed. For once, I hadn’t even claimed indisposition but instead simply issued an edict that all of them stay away. All of them except Marshall, my steady, unobtrusive companion. She didn’t remark on my chin—red and flaking, scratched raw by Branwell’s whiskers—or the bruises that dotted both sides of my neck. She brought me tray upon tray of food, emptied my chamber pot without complaint, and sat for hours at a time holding my hand as I watched summer decay into autumn through the ornate bars of my dressing room window.

  “I hope—” began Miss Brontë, stopping just inside the threshold.

  I raised an eyebrow in the direction of Miss Sewell, who was still standing beside her. She withdrew with a saccharine smile, shutting the door too hard.

  “I hope you’ll forgive the intrusion, Mrs. Robinson.” Miss Brontë stepped forward and halted again. “But I can stand aside no longer. I simply must speak with you.”

  Anxiety suited her. It brought a little color into her pallid, almost corpse-like face.

  “Indeed,” I said, pushing my half-finished letter to my sister, Mary, to the edge of my desk and dismissing Marshall, who’d been darning at the window seat, with a wave of my hand.

  Could Branwell have told Anne? Anything was possible in his strange family. Branwell seemed closer to his sisters than any grown man I knew, although his deepest secrets he shared only with Charlotte. If I were to beg Miss Brontë’s forgiveness, fall on my knees before her and plead weakness, could she understand? I imagined Miss Brontë’s wheezing breaths made even shallower, her eyes rolling back in delicious agony as Branwell’s had.

  “Won’t you sit, Miss Brontë—Anne? And stop fraying your cuff. You are testing my nerves.”

  Sh
e jumped when I said her forename as if I’d pinched her, but Miss Brontë did as I’d asked. The chair opposite me—the chair Branwell had sat in during our first tête-à-tête—seemed to swallow her whole. She was clutching a letter in her left hand.

  Could she be Branwell’s go-between? I strained to see the script and signature, the distinctive loops of the name “Northangerland,” but my sight, as ever, failed me.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “Mrs. Robinson, it has come to my attention that—”

  If only she would spit it out.

  “That a correspondence of an illicit nature has been conducted from this house.”

  Sweat gathered between the sleeves and bodice of my gown. The silk was a dark green, so at least it wouldn’t stain. Perhaps Branwell’s letter spoke only of his own infatuation, sparing me from blame. I started to frame an excuse.

  “Bessy came to me—” There were tears in Miss Brontë’s eyes.

  “Bessy?” I repeated. Vicious Lydia, yes, or Mary and Ned in their naivety, but Bessy?

  “She was in great distress, Mrs. Robinson. She is only a child and, what is more, she chose to confess. Do not be harsh on her.” Miss Brontë dropped the letter onto her lap and clasped her hands together as if in prayer.

  My shoulders slackened, my panic subsided. She wasn’t here to talk of Branwell at all.

  “Miss Brontë, I must ask that you be direct,” I told her, recovering my poise and examining the half-moons and the flecks of white in my fingernails.

  She gulped air and launched into the longest speech I had ever heard from her.

  “Bessy came to me last night—late, it must have been after midnight—and insisted on slipping into bed beside me. When she appeared at my door, my heart nearly stopped, for she looked like a ghost in her nightgown. And it took some time before I could glean from her what on earth was the matter. She wept but would not speak until I mentioned rousing other members of the household and fetching Dr. Crosby. Then she told me the truth, in fits and bursts, and through more tears.