At last, after weeks of false hope, summer. The sun shone golden, bringing out the red in the Hall’s brick walls. The planting around the pond, which Bob Pottage had slaved over in the drizzle only a few weeks ago, had issued forth a crush of copper marigolds, fighting against each other to drink in the light. Our little world was undergoing a glorious renaissance. It was hard to imagine that it wouldn’t extend to the rest of us.
“In the center.” I pointed past the halo of flowers to the middle of the pond.
Bob Pottage noted something down on the sketch that I’d given him and grunted. It was surprising that he, a mere gardener, could write at all.
“We’d have to run it by the master,” said Tom Sewell, who was hovering, unhelpfully, to my right.
“Would you?” I countered.
“I mean just the cost, madam. I’m sure everything else is in order.” Sewell exchanged a glance with his fellow servant.
Did it really require two of them to understand such simple instructions? I’d wanted that fountain for twenty years, but I’d waited just as long before taking matters into my own hands. I didn’t wish to broker any further delay.
“Beggin’ yer pardon, Mr. Sewell, Mr. Pottage.” Joey Dickinson appeared before us. He was still at least a head shorter than they were, although his upper lip now sported a downy mustache.
“Joseph, what do you mean by interrupting us?” said Tom Sewell, whose seniority meant the task of disciplining the boy fell to him. “And with the lady of the house here too.”
“But Mr. Sewell, sir, I’ve a message. And it’s for the missus.” Joey had made himself even shorter. He was hunched over as if he expected a strike.
The men’s heads swiveled in my direction.
There was only one reason he would have a message for me.
“Very good, Joey. You can run along now,” I said, locking my eyes with his, willing him to have some sense and remain silent.
“But I ain’t given you the message yet, ma’am,” said Joey, nearly crossing his eyes as he frowned.
“Well, out with it, lad!” said Pottage. “He’s that gormless you’d think he was daft in t’ head.”
Joey lowered his brow even further, as if struggling to remember. “It’s about the fox, missus—”
“Fox!” the gardener cried. “What fox?”
“That’s to say there’s another one, ma’am,” Joey concluded. “I was to tell you.”
I flushed. Was there any scenario in which such a public summons from Branwell would be justified?
“More than one fox?” said Pottage. “And I’ve heard nowt of neither. I’ll get my shotgun.” He thrust the sketch at Sewell and strode toward the outbuildings.
Tom Sewell looked from me to Joey.
I held my breath, waiting for his comment or question, but he shrugged and started to study my design for the pond’s centerpiece. He tapped his pocketknife against the bowl the proud goddess held aloft, water cascading over the sides.
“Thank you, Joey,” I said, through a forced smile.
The boy scuttled away without bowing.
“Excuse me, Mr. Sewell,” I said and turned toward the house. I’d skirt the perimeter and take the long road in the direction of Little Ouseburn, George Walker’s cottage, and Branwell.
“What about the fountain, madam?” Sewell called after me.
“We shall speak of it tomorrow!” I threw back.
* * *
I SHOULD HAVE LEFT my shawl behind. The sun, which had warmed me when we stood at the pool’s edge, was sweltering, sticking my dress to the small of my back and the hollows beneath my arms. If only I could abandon layer upon layer of clothing on the hedgerows, which were resplendent, green, skirted with late-flowering yellow cowslips. I’d take Branwell’s hand and race with him across the sodden fields so fast we wouldn’t sink, throw us both into the swollen river Ouse and steal our breath away, resurface laughing, splashing, grasping for a branch or root along the bank. That was if I weren’t so angry with him.
He was standing just inside the door of George Walker’s cottage when I reached him, staring through a crack in the floorboards as if he’d dropped something.
“Have you lost your mind?” I asked, pushing him farther inside and trying to recover my breath.
He recoiled, offended. It was the exaggerated gesture of a drunk.
“We have to be careful,” I said. “And send messages only in a crisis. I was with Sewell and Pottage, but then Joey—”
“But I don’t understand,” Branwell said. “You summoned me.”
“Have you drunk so much you’ve forgotten yourself?” I rounded on him. “I mean for God’s sake, it’s hardly noon.”
He shrugged.
“On a Wednesday.”
I don’t know why this made it worse, but it did. I dropped onto George Walker’s stinking, uncovered bed and let the tears I had fought against for what seemed like years wash over me.
Branwell stood a few feet away, mouth open but otherwise too shocked to react. “Sorry,” he stuttered at last. “Maybe I did send for you. I can’t remember. Lydia?” He was beside me, prying apart my fingers to interweave them with his.
The straw mattress buckled under our combined weight.
“The words would not come,” he said. “And Tom Sewell offered me a dram. I thought it might act as a sort of medicine.”
“You cannot say that you drink to aid your writing, Branwell. That you think of your poetry first.” I wanted to shake him, but at least my growing anger stemmed my tears. “Every night you tell me you will write the next day, but each time you turn instead to the bottle. How long before your employment at Thorp Green goes the same way as your painting or your job at the railway? Before you lose your position—and me—to this insatiable thirst?”
He retracted his hand and ran it over his face as if he would have wiped the slate clean. “You are right,” he said. “I haven’t written anything of any worth in a long time, if I ever have. I disappoint them all—my father, my sisters. Charlotte is writing again—I know it, although she no longer shares her tales with me. Maybe Emily too. I even saw Anne writing what looked like a story the other day. I was their hope, their light, but I have wrecked my talent, left that early promise in ruins, and now look forward only to my own extinction.”
Miraculous. He did not heed my practical warnings, but fixated instead on his self-pity. I’d thought him so sympathetic, but he was envious of the sisters who’d done nothing but support him. He no longer cared for my tears, but had dissolved into his own. Branwell rocked backwards and forwards, lost in himself, not moved by my unhappiness.
A surge of jealousy flooded through me. He should try being a woman for a day. I’d never enjoyed the luxury of drinking alone. I’d only ever delighted in wine that appeared at its appointed time, matched to each course and spirited away just as soon, excluded as I was from the room when the men pored over their brandies or eyed the dining table and the world through the golden haze of their cognac glasses. Men had liquor, tobacco, horses, and whores. But there was no poison I was permitted to administer to myself. Instead I relied on Branwell for the release he found for himself in drink.
Still, whoever had summoned whom, and whatever force had drawn us there, there was a vacuum in my heart, an ache that could be quieted but never silenced. My body was calling out for distraction and for him, however briefly, to make me whole again.
“Branwell.” I kissed his forehead and his eyebrows, avoiding the salt of his tears and the stench of his breath. His arms were sure and strong through his shirtsleeves, proffering protection and certainty. I need only stroke faster, breathe harder, and he would respond as surely as the ivories under my practiced fingertips.
“Mhmm.” He smiled, although dewdrop tears still clung to his lashes. Whiskey, with that edge that makes your eyes sting and your throat burn, surrounded him like a halo, a fog of eau de toilette.
I slipped off my pelisse and threw it to the side with my shawl.
Freedom. Air.
I pulled one of Branwell’s hands to my breast.
His other found my face.
I jerked away, positioning my head so he could only kiss my neck.
Move. No, don’t press so hard.
Muddled as his mind was, he still used my smiles and winces as a barometer. The promise of me—velvet, dark, deep—sobered him, even if the world still spun around him.
“Oh.” A gasp, not from Branwell, not from me, but from somewhere behind us, followed by a lung-rattling cough.
I leapt from Branwell’s embrace and from the bed and twisted toward the door.
There was Miss Brontë, blocking the light in the doorway, a slender silhouette against the sky. She seemed taller than she was and held herself as rigid as St. Joan at the stake.
“Miss Sewell told me George Walker had returned and needed me,” she said, more to the room than to me or to her brother. Then, with a moan of almost-pain, she added, “Oh, Branwell.”
“Anne,” he said, but he was slurring again, now that there was another witness to his drunkenness. “Lydia, help me rise.”
I didn’t. I let him flounder there before us—the chaste sister and the bad wife—as he struggled to his feet to go to her, to make things right.
“Please, Anne,” I said, her name sticking in my throat.
The plea shook Miss Brontë from her reverie. She turned, left, fled.
“Lydia—” Branwell called after me as I began to follow her, but he was a broken wreck of a man, and there was nothing here to keep me.
Miss Sewell had raised the stakes and made good her threat, hoping to sap still more from me. She’d used Joey and her brother (still ignorant, surely?) to catch me in her trap. But I had fight in me yet.
I scooped up my discarded clothes and ran from the cottage, after Miss Brontë, my hair streaming in the wind, as fleet as if I had been on horseback, bare-armed like a savage, desperate and true as the bitch tracking the bloodied hare.
* * *
I GAVE UP ONCE I’d lost sight of Miss Brontë, which was soon, despite the coughing that usually overwhelmed her at even the slightest of exertions. It was best to stop and fix myself. I’d give credence to her tale if I returned to Thorp Green undressed. Where would she go? To Edmund? The girls?
But when I entered my rooms, she was waiting for me.
She was standing with her back to the door, gazing out across the driveway as I had the day when I first saw her brother. My old gray muslin, fraying at the hem, hung loose around her childlike frame, so that she looked for all the world like my emaciated ghost come back to haunt me with the things that I had done or thought, and those I had not—the things I was not woman or wife or mother enough to feel.
My entrance did not startle her and it was several seconds before she turned to face me, her expression calm, her breathing steady, excepting that little catch in her throat that had always irritated me.
“Mrs. Robinson,” she said, clasping her hands in front of her waist, “I have come to tender my resignation.”
“Your resig—? No, Miss Brontë—Anne—you mustn’t.” I took a step toward her, but she recoiled, hitting her calf against the window seat in her haste to get away from me.
I would rather she had slapped me.
“I don’t know what you saw, or thought you saw—” I paused but she gave me nothing. “But it isn’t as you think. You are young and inexperienced, and know nothing of the world or of men, but you must understand how persuasive your brother can be, how easy it is to be caught up, swept away to the kingdoms and castles he builds in thin air.”
No one believes in me as my sisters do, Branwell had told me time and again. This was the line I would take to try to win Miss Brontë over.
“There is nothing you can tell me of my brother, Mrs. Robinson.” Miss Brontë’s voice was flat, expressionless. “I know him as I know my sisters. Better than I know myself. You must step aside. I can no longer work here.”
“Nonsense,” I said, dropping my skirts, which I’d been holding since climbing the stairs, and relaxing my hands, seeking to reassure her that I was not afraid. “Your family needs you to work. And you simply do not know—cannot appreciate, I think—Branwell’s genius.”
No response. She might have been a woman made of stone, silent and stubborn, as impossible as Edmund. I needed to draw a reaction, any reaction, from her.
“Ask Charlotte,” I went on. “She has some understanding of what Branwell is and of the great writer he could become. Your brother tells me she has his spirit, a twin flame burning red inside her. That same light he saw smoldering in me.”
Miss Brontë raised one eyebrow. How dare she stand in judgment over me? I had a mind and a soul as much as the Miss Brontës. What had any of them ever achieved to hold themselves so high?
I lashed out. “But you don’t have it in you. That is why you will always be in your siblings’ shadows.”
Was that a tear, hovering in her eye? If it was, she willed it not to fall. Miss Brontë held every muscle in her body tense as if steeling herself for a physical blow.
“Strength of passion should not be judged by its outward manifestations, Mrs. Robinson,” she said, as if delivering a lesson in the schoolroom or a sermon from a pulpit. “Just as a quiet, steady faith is as precious as martyrdom to Him, who watches over us all. And while it is true my experience of men may be limited, I can tell you that affections are felt no less deeply when they remain unspoken. You think perhaps you love him?”
If this was a question, she gave me no chance to reply.
“To love, Mrs. Robinson, is to treasure your beloved’s soul and protect it even above your own. But you! You have corrupted a soul too gentle for this world and unsuited to its harshness.”
Gentle? Branwell as I had seen him on that Easter night more than two years ago flashed before me, his eyes roving independently of each other, vomit on his shirt, the discarded bottles rolling across his bedroom floor.
“A gentle soul?” I laughed. “Anne, please! You are being naive. You are mistaken in what you think you saw. I take some small, patronizing interest in my son’s tutor. That is all. Your brother is emotional. A writer. I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”
Her face folded into a small, sad smile. I couldn’t imagine why.
“You can’t tell me you know nothing of illicit passion,” I pressed on. “I see the way you look at the curate Greenhow when he preaches. I know how wounded you were when he married another.”
I couldn’t tell if my shot had been true. As I spoke, she didn’t move, her expression didn’t change. “Good-bye, Mrs. Robinson,” she said, walking past me toward the door.
“Wait!” I called.
She did.
“The girls. They will miss you,” I said in one final attempt to keep her.
Lydia without a governess was a daunting prospect, for all that Miss Brontë had utterly failed to police her thus far.
“And I will them,” she said. Her hand was on the doorknob.
“My husband?” I could barely frame the question.
Would she tell him? Or was she too loyal to Branwell even now? It had come to this, then. To me, acting as Miss Brontë’s supplicant. Indignity after indignity, eating me from the inside.
“Pass on my apologies and thanks to Mr. Robinson,” she said, as she left the room. “He has been very kind to me.”
Mercy comes easily when you believe that condemnation is inescapable, although no doubt Miss Brontë thought herself very virtuous.
I stood for at least a minute, hearing her coughing her way down the landing and staring at the patch of carpet where she had stood. Then I reached out my hand to pull the bell cord.
Seconds later, Ellis quaked before me.
“Did you call, madam?” she asked.
“Tell Mr. Allison to prepare the carriage, Ellis. Miss Brontë is leaving us.”
“Very good, ma’am.” Her face didn’t betray a response. “I�
��m to tell you, madam,” she went on, “that Miss Sewell wishes to have an audience with you.”
“You may inform Miss Sewell that I am indisposed.”
A nod, a tremble, and a hasty retreat.
“And, Ellis?”
She tripped over herself, twisting back toward me. “Yes’m?”
“Ensure Miss Brontë leaves those old gowns of mine she wears. You are welcome to them.”
“Thank you, madam. You are too good, you—” She tried to wring my hand.
“Do not touch me, Ellis.” If anyone showed me tenderness now, even her, I would buckle. “Only leave me.”
* * *
AS IT WAS, MISS Brontë did not leave that day, or the next, or the next, although she kept to her room and to the schoolroom, out of my sight. She was to depart with Branwell, as planned previously, for their usual summer trip. But this time, after five years of service at Thorp Green, she would not return from Haworth. She would instead quit our lives forever.
I waited until the girls’ wailing good-byes were done and the carriage door had slammed before peeking around the curtain, resting my knee on the dressing room window seat and trying to stay out of view. I couldn’t see Miss Brontë, or Branwell for that matter, only Flossy’s furry face pressed against the carriage window, as if the little mutt was doing her best to make Mary’s misery complete.
The three girls were holding on to each other. For all the world, you would have thought they were penniless orphans, huddling against the cold. Even Ned looked dejected, staring at an unmoving whirligig between his feet as he sat on the steps of the Hall.
William Allison said something in a jovial tone, but none of the children laughed in response. A crack of his whip, a loud “That’s a boy, Pat,” invoking his favored moniker for Patroclus, and the Brontës were on their way, the carriage lurching down the driveway.
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