Bronte's Mistress

by Finola Austin

  Send my regards and regrets to him likewise.

  Ever your devoted cousin,

  Yours very truly,

  Lydia Robinson

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “I KNEW YOU’D COME to me, my darling.” Branwell’s mouth was hot against mine. His breath tasted sweet, without a hint of the liquor that had overwhelmed me the first time.

  In the months since then, we’d discovered a shared rhythm when we kissed that was uniquely ours. When we paused to speak, which was rarely, we’d take it in turns to pick up the beat again. Sometimes we marveled that we’d once agonized over what felt so easy. Often we giggled together, imagining the straitlaced matrons whom we saw at church pecking their portly husbands good night with their mouths closed, never experiencing the joys that were ours for now.

  “You knew nothing of the sort, Mr. Brontë.” I made a play of pushing him away. “What was so important that you summoned me?”

  The May Day sun streamed through the gaping holes in the thatch, illuminating George Walker’s hovel. I closed my eyes to bask in it. The old man had been unwell for some weeks, with Miss Brontë making the journey each day to tend to him. But he’d at last succumbed to his family’s petitions, permitting his daughter-in-law, Eliza, to nurse him at her home in Little Ouseburn instead.

  “He looks frail, but in truth, he’s as strong as an ox. I doubt it’ll prove fatal, even yet,” Dr. Crosby had told me as the congregation milled about in groups outside Holy Trinity last Sunday, enlivened by the temperate weather. The doctor usually attended services at St. Mary’s in Great Ouseburn but had come to Holy Trinity especially to see me. “Yet I should think his cottage will lie empty for some weeks.” He’d added this casually, without caring that Mary and Miss Brontë stood beside me. But there was a glint in his eye that made me wonder if he was delighting in the romance of helping us. I hadn’t confided in him further since that day in his parlor, for all that his attentions had been decorous and constant. Yet perhaps Branwell too had turned to the doctor with our dark secret, bound as the pair was by their Masonic brotherhood.

  I opened my eyes.

  “You taste of blackberries and sugarplums and claret.” Branwell kissed me again, with the confidence I had taught him—not too fast and not too soft, exploring but not invading me.

  When I pulled back this time, it was with a smile that lingered on my lips. “You abuse your privileges, sir. You were to send for me only in the case of an event that might be deemed exceptional.”

  Joey Dickinson, in his slow, uncomprehending way, had delivered the coded message as I strolled around the perimeter of the stew pond half an hour before. “Mr. Brontë says, missus, there’s a fox about,” he’d said. “He’ll tell Mr. Pottage.”

  Branwell stroked my cheek with the back of his hand. “I did deem it exceptional, miraculous even, until I saw your face,” he said. “But now all else pales in comparison.”

  “Enough.” I laughed.

  He swept me up in his arms with ease, although my dress was heavy and our heights were equal, and deposited me on the low and narrow bed. It still smelled of age and decay, although Branwell had spread fresh blankets over the straw. But it was better than the dovecote, or the carriage house, or the granary, or the stables. Much better than those months when our desire for warmth and desire for human heat had fought against each other, when we’d writhed against the back wall of the Monk’s House, our fingers so numb they’d felt like strangers’.

  With the spring and with practice, our lovemaking had become more luxurious. Branwell no longer tore at me or ripped off my buttons. I’d have him watch me undress layer by layer, the breeze light against my skin, feeling his eyes touch every part of me, before his hands. Or we’d play a game where I’d struggle as if to get away until he held me close and wrestled me, laughing, to the ground. Our meetings were like musical variations. Whichever note we began on and whichever trills we added, we’d return at last to a familiar theme.

  Branwell snaked his mouth along my collarbone and tugged gently upon my ear.

  “Tell me, I command you,” I whispered, focusing on the patches of pink scalp I could see through his thick curls.

  “What would you say if I told you I had at last received news from the Gazette?” he asked.

  “No!” I clasped my arms tight around him.

  “Yes.” He laughed and rolled over to lie in my lap, his blue eyes gazing up at me. In this pose, he bore a remarkable resemblance to Flossy, Miss Brontë’s lapdog.

  “Well, what did Mr. Bellerby say?” I asked. “Do not tease me so. Did he think the verses fine?”

  A month or more ago, Branwell had been in one of his brooding humors, bewailing the lack of recognition the world had shown for his genius thus far and the sad want of poetic souls in the Ouseburns, ourselves excepted.

  It was in these moods of his that the difference in age between us most showed. I relished Branwell’s immoderate passion and his vitality, the energy with which he swept me off my feet, pinned me against walls, flung me across the bed. But other aspects of his youthfulness were less appealing. He sulked when we argued. He complained about writing more than he wrote. And he often gave in to fits of paranoia that Charlotte would publish a novel before he did.

  Trusting that, as with Ned, exercise would do Branwell the world of good, I’d suggested that day that he ride to York with William Allison. Our coachman exchanged a box full of novels for us there each month, providing the perfect opportunity for Branwell to speak with Mr. Bellerby, the bookseller and newspaper owner. Maybe that was what he needed—something to write for. To my surprise, Branwell had agreed. The Freemasons would be meeting there that night, and he enjoyed any excuse to drink with them.

  “Fine? Well, Bellerby didn’t say so,” said Branwell, pain entering his eyes for a second. “But he writes that they are to print two of the sonnets on the tenth of this month.”

  “Sonnets?” My heart beat faster.

  “Not those sonnets, Lydia.” Branwell reached up his hand and cupped my face.

  I kissed his hand. Were I to die, would Marshall take those incriminating poems, fit only for my eyes, from their secret place—the drawer in the back of my jewelry box—and destroy them?

  “ ‘Black Comb’ and the sheepdog sonnet—two the Bradford Herald published years ago.” His hand dropped as he sighed. “But it is something.”

  My pulse slackened. There was no danger in these.

  “It is more than something,” I said, running my fingers through his hair and staring up at the cobwebs.

  It would be too risky, but much as I feared his more recent poems’ publication, there would be something beautiful in it. In having Branwell’s love for me printed there in indelible ink right in front of Edmund at the breakfast table. But then the name “Northangerland” would mean nothing to him, and poetry, if anything, even less. When he discarded the paper, clumsy, illiterate Ann Ellis would crumple it up to act as kindling for the fire, and all would be as before.

  “It is more than something,” I repeated, thinking how frequently Branwell had been disappointed—in painting, the railway, his writing most of all. “But was that all?”

  “Was that all?” Branwell echoed, springing up and dragging me down the bed. “No, it was not, Miss Gisborne.”

  I laughed my most girlish laugh, in keeping with my childhood name.

  He pulled up my skirts, mock-smothering me, and dived below them so I could no longer see him. His lips left a trail of kisses along my upper thigh, sending a shiver through me.

  The sun shone warmer through the graying straw, bathing my face in light. A baptism of sorts and without an ounce of guilt now. Not this time, or any time since I had trained and guided him and since our encounters had become less about him and more for me.

  Sometimes I had him pleasure me and then didn’t let him inside me at all. Sometimes we came to the brink, before I bid him leave me. And loyal subject that he was, he always did as I said. The power was in
toxicating. This must be how a husband felt when first seeing his bride below him, her naked body his to own, demand, explore, tonight and every night until death or indifference.

  Branwell pulled away.

  I flinched with disappointment.

  “Lydia—” he said, his voice quaking with emotion. I still couldn’t see his face, but I recognized the tone.

  “Don’t mention ‘love.’ Not a word of it. Do you understand me?” I said.

  He did that when impassioned sometimes, making this all too real and dampening my desire.

  I found the back of his neck and pulled him down where I wanted him. His baby hairs were just long enough to hold onto.

  Yes. No. Higher. A little lower. There.

  “Don’t stop,” I breathed. “Faster, softer. Still faster. Yes.”

  I arched, twisted, struggled, but he knew by now to keep going.

  If only I could hold on to this moment, feel this joy flooding through me forever.

  * * *

  WHEN I CAME DOWNSTAIRS to the breakfast room on the tenth and saw the folded Gazette in front of Edmund’s place, that was something else entirely. I did not dare touch it. I’d smear the print with my moist fingertips and be unable to replicate the folds, as tight and crisp as those Ellis made at the corners of our many beds each morning.

  Somewhere amongst those pages lurked the name “Northangerland.” And even if the name didn’t underscore the real poems, those guilty poems, it proved that Branwell had a mind, pen, voice of his own, much as he had deferred to me and to my wishes until now. A wrong word from him, whether spoken or written, in passion or in malice, could destroy me.

  “No sign of your master, Miss Sewell?” I asked. Edmund was normally here before I was.

  “I believe he is unwell, madam,” she answered, not taking her eyes from Ellis, who was pouring tea under her supervision.

  “But now there is no room for cream!” cried Lydia, pushing the cup away from her.

  She and Bessy, freed from the travails of the morning lessons that had called Mary and Ned away, were still here—Lydia reading, Bessy eating more than her fair share.

  Ann Ellis bobbed in apology and started to pour a new cup.

  Miss Sewell rolled her eyes and plucked the newspaper from the table.

  “Leave it,” I said, my vehemence surprising me. It wasn’t as if Edmund were likely to peruse the literary section.

  Bessy paused mid-bite into her toast and glanced at her sister.

  “I thought Mr. Robinson might like to read in bed.” The paper hovered in midair in Miss Sewell’s hand as she chose whether to indulge my caprice. “But you know best, madam.” She threw it down rather than setting it, so that the borders no longer ran parallel to the table edge. Her skirts rustled as she left the room, like leaves detecting the first stirrings of a storm.

  “Any news from the village, Ellis?” I asked. Of my three companions, she was sure to be the most agreeable.

  A look of panic spread across her small, irregular features. “The Reverend’s wife had her baby, madam. A son,” she said at last, her relief palpable at having settled on a suitable subject.

  “Reverend Lascelles must be delighted,” I said without an ounce of joy. I imagined him holding up his son, enraptured, as his poor wife languished in her distant bedchamber, his daughters banished to the nursery, and the prayers of thanksgiving we’d all be forced to endure for the next rash of Sundays.

  “Indeed, ma’am,” she said.

  “Well, are you going to clear the table?” I asked, my desire for conversation evaporating. “Bessy, you have had enough.” I slapped her hand away from the butter. “Run on, now.”

  Lydia and Bessy swung their legs round in unison and linked arms before exiting the room. They were hurrying off somewhere to complain about me, no doubt. I was the evil witch, without whom they’d be glutting themselves to their hearts’ content, penning scandalous notes to the neighbors, and rolling around with actors in the stables. Give them twenty years, until they had their own daughters to worry about. Then they’d understand.

  Ellis struggled under a tower of crockery, weaving her unsteady way to the door—anything so that she didn’t have to return to me.

  Was Edmund really ill, or was he too avoiding me? Was it possible that he had sensed the change in me? The sleepy, not-quite-happiness that settled over me in the days after my more recent encounters with Branwell? It wasn’t the happiness I’d had once with Edmund. Not the steady, sure warmth you feel when you slip to sleep beside a man who loves you and wake to his breath, his arms, his half-remembered dreams come dawn. With Branwell, things were never safe and rarely so simple. His flights of fancy were unappetizing as often as they were enticing. The more poetry I read, the more I concluded that his verses didn’t have the power of Wordsworth’s or Southey’s. Perhaps he’d overstated his skill as a painter too and given too flattering an account of his dismissal from the railway.

  Sometimes after our passion was over and I lay alone, not suffering Branwell to touch me, I was reminded of how Edmund had described those youthful encounters of his, with women in Cambridge, before we were married. He’d “confessed” these to me in an Italian inn, with his head in my lap, contrasting his weakness with my purity. A few moments of mania, he’d said, after too much wine and at the urging of friends. And then shame and disgust—at her, the room, the damp and dirty bed—unclouding his judgment and calling him home. Was Branwell the same—an object of lust only if you dimmed the lights and trusted the make-believe of powder and rouge?

  “Mrs. Robinson.”

  I blinked. Not only had Miss Sewell reentered the room, but, unbidden, she had taken the seat opposite me. Her hands were stacked before her on the table.

  “Miss Sewell,” I said, trying to sound more horrified than shocked.

  She thought too highly of herself, although in truth she was doing well, with a housekeeper’s salary at her age, along with an indulgent and unattached older brother to spoil her. Her dress was modest but cut in the latest style, and her sandy hair was coiffed and curled. It was her hands that gave her away. Red and coarse, with close-clipped nails, they weren’t the hands of a lady.

  “You know perhaps there is a gentleman farmer sometimes brings news from Great Ouseburn, madam?” she asked. “And that he always makes it his business to speak with me?”

  “I do not, Miss Sewell, make a practice of observing my servants’ social habits,” I said, fixating on her nails and trying to catch the drift of her questioning.

  “Funny that.” She let out a sharp, shrill laugh. “We observe yours.”

  I stiffened. “Miss Sewell?” I met her glittering black eyes and willed my breath to stay even.

  “Well, my Robert—his name is Robert, madam—would like to call on me, walk me to church sometimes, take me to dances and the like in his gig, if you’d be so good as to give us your blessing, madam.” From her condescending smile, you’d have thought that I was the one petitioning her.

  But if she had observed me, us, if she knew— I stood. It was impossible to sit. “I don’t know what has come over you, Miss Sewell,” I said, pushing in my chair. “You’ll do well not to mention this again. I know you are young, but to have gentlemen come courting our housekeeper? What kind of example is that for you to set to Ellis and the others?”

  “I look to my betters for an example, Mrs. Robinson,” she said, the left-hand corner of her upper lip curling further.

  How dare she remain sitting while I stood?

  “And I know my brother, Tom, does too,” she continued. “Such strange comings and goings he sees out there at the Monk’s House, madam. Mr. Brontë is always ranging the grounds, walking here, there, and everywhere, and talking when he’s in the drink, which is on most nights. I don’t say my brother’s not partial to the whiskey as well, madam, but he takes one only on occasion. With such a pattern to follow, whom are we to look to for our examples, if I might be so bold?”

  “Hold your ton
gue.” The table was between us, or I would have struck her.

  “Then there is the matter of my pay.” Her confidence was growing. She started to flex her wrists, roll her shoulders, and relax. “All it would take is a word from you, and Mr. Robinson’d be sure to reward my brother and me for our continued service. And, of course, for our discretion.”

  I tried to speak but only a splutter came out.

  Miss Sewell’s eyes were roaming all over me, as if taking an inventory of my dress, rings, the locket around my neck, and all she would try to sweat from me. “Maybe you need a few weeks to think on it, madam?” she said, hopping to her feet. “I’m a reasonable woman. Did Ellis take the newspaper? The master asked for it in particular.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  WEEKS OF WHISPERING BEHIND doorways, pacing my dressing room at night, pressing coins every other day into the scheming housekeeper’s hands.

  And yet life went on as ever. Nobody knew. Edmund haunted his study. The servants’ gossip was benign, self-centered, mundane. And the children wished away their lives in anticipation of summer. They gazed like augurs to discern snatches of blue sky between the rainstorms. Lydia spoke only of Scarborough.

  In public, I treated Miss Sewell with condescension, perhaps more harshly than before. I disguised my new expenses as brooches and shawls in Edmund’s account book. It wasn’t like he noticed what I wore anyway. But still the upstart woman asked for more, threatening dire consequences if I didn’t indulge her.

  “What, Miss Sewell?” I’d said, trying to regain the upper hand. “You’d have me think you’d tell my husband? Cut off your supply of pocket money?”

  “Oh no, madam,” she answered. “Something much worse than that.”

  I didn’t tell Branwell much, only that we had best be more careful. Our meetings became less frequent. Once a week, or thereabouts, we followed our routine, like dancers tracing familiar steps. Otherwise we were strangers. It was torture for Branwell, or so he claimed during our rendezvous, although he made no other attempts to see me. But I was unchained, freed from the tyranny of his emotions. His frenzy when the words came to him fast and easy, even without the ready lubrication of wine. His abject misery when the page was blank or, worse, a distorting mirror, failing to reflect his self-professed genius. But I couldn’t give him up, not entirely, not yet. How could I turn away from his words and the reassuring warmth of his body, lose again that part of me I’d thought already in my grave?