Bronte's Mistress

by Finola Austin

Any token you can send for the benefit of your grandchild would be appreciated by both of us. We are behind on rent by some weeks.

  Ever your devoted son-in-law,

  Henry Roxby

  23rd August 1847

  Great Barr Hall

  My dear daughter Lydia,

  How is little Henry Edmund, my grandson? Is he still suffering with colic? I do wish to see him and judge for myself if he has the look of your father about him.

  But for you and your husband to come to Great Barr Hall is, I hope you know, for the time, impossible. Sir Edward is kindness itself; so accommodating and attentive, a consummate gentleman. But I cannot countenance inviting an infant and an actor into his well-ordered home.

  Enclosed instead is a check. Use it well and do not think that the frequency of my gifts to you over the last few months is set to continue.

  Be wise, Lydia. Drag your husband up with all your might, if you have to. And, above all, avoid the expense of having another child. You owe it to your sweet boy.

  Bessy wishes to add a postscript. I will turn the page to have her write there.

  Lydia,

  A piece of gossip from back home, for the Ouseburns are our home and Mary and I miss them. Great Barr Hall may be very grand but we have no friends here and are beyond bored. Well, to the news.

  Remember Henrietta Thompson, the confirmed spinster? Would you believe she is a spinster no more? She married that painter who came to Kirby Hall to do the family’s portraits! And back in April, too. Fancy that we only heard of it now! I presumed you would not know of it either. It is not likely Amelia would have kept up her correspondence with you, all things considered.

  With love, your sister,

  Bessy

  Lydia, do not heed your sister’s complaints. She was always prone to sulking. Great Barr Hall is as good a home as any of us could wish for.

  Your mother,

  Lydia Robinson

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “THERE IS SOMETHING ON your mind today, Lydia,” said Sir Edward as we took our accustomed turn about the grounds.

  He had given up the “Cousin” months before. We were something else—something better though less certain—to each other now.

  “Yes. Edmund’s mother,” I said. “She has written.”

  The sky was the color of amber, and with the sun playing peekaboo above the horizon, I had to shield my eyes to look at him. The occasional browned leaf had already fallen, plotting our course across the grass (there were no paths here) like litter from an old parade.

  “And what does she say?” Sir Edward asked. I could feel his confusion that I hadn’t volunteered this information sooner.

  Usually during our walks, I played the role of entertainer. I’d retell the plots of novels he didn’t have the time or inclination to read, teach him about music (he had a good ear but had never studied with a master), and ask for explanations of the latest speeches in the Lords and Commons. These I read to him from the newspaper each morning in his study. By the time this ritual was finished, it was sometimes past noon.

  “Where have you been, Mama? Reading to Sir Edward all this time?” Bessy would ask, her expression skeptical.

  She was getting impertinent, as was Mary, for that matter.

  It was true that Sir Edward did wish to have me near him more and more. But perhaps that was because he missed his wife rather than because he found me charming. I tried not to hope, imagine, dream, that he or the house or any of it could be mine, and fixed my mind instead on the image of Lady Scott as she had been the one time that I had seen her.

  She’d been pale, yes, with yellowed cheeks and palsy in her hands, but she was still heartier and more solid than most invalids I’d seen in my time. She didn’t have the look of one standing at death’s threshold. And it horrified me that I wished she did.

  Sometimes I dreamed that she stood beside my bed, glaring down at me and angry at my secret desires. Once she was joined by another figure—short, shadowy, and slight. I understood, although we had never met, that this was Charlotte Brontë. The figures flanked my bed on either side. Each grabbed one of my hands so I could not escape. And then, with a smirk, Charlotte touched a flickering candle to the curtain of my bed, enveloping me with fire. I awoke screaming and screaming that they’d come to kill me, but Great Barr Hall was large and no one heard my cries. That was probably just as well.

  I hadn’t yet risked much with Sir Edward. I hadn’t shown him anything of my true self or spoken with him on those subjects that mattered most. And neither had I, as I had over the course of months with Branwell, talked of nothing at all, luxuriating in discussions that begged no firm conclusion. It was tiring, always calculating how I might appear best, but what other options were open to me? If I had to tie myself to a mast—and I had to—it might as well be to the one on the grandest, proudest ship.

  “Edmund’s mother says she misses her granddaughters,” I answered. This was part of the truth, at least. “She accuses me of keeping them from her.”

  Sir Edward’s brow furrowed. A strong, steady, principled man like him couldn’t resist coming to the aid of the mistreated or weak. “Was Edmund’s family unfair to you?” he asked at last.

  We had stopped. He took a step closer to me.

  I shrugged one shoulder and dropped my chin to my chest, but I couldn’t even summon a single tear. Had the stream run dry? Had I shed them all? For Marshall, Edmund, Father, Mother, Georgie?

  “Lydia?” He was used to having his own way.

  “There are many wives who have been happier,” I said, after a pause. I mustn’t overstate my case, overplay my hand. Sir Edward was such a solid, unemotional man that in doing so, I might lose him.

  “Because,” he spoke on, “if you are fond of her and she so wishes to see the children, you know Edmund’s mother would be more than welcome here.”

  “No!” I cried.

  That startled him.

  “No,” I repeated more softly, correcting myself. “She cannot. Please.”

  My vehemence had taken him by surprise. His face had a hardness about it I hadn’t seen before. There was a small bead of doubt glimmering in his eye. “Show me,” he said.

  “Show you what?” I asked. But I knew what he wanted. I took a step away from him.

  “Show me her letter,” he said, holding out his hand.

  I twisted over my shoulder toward Great Barr Hall, whose turreted towers were gleaming in the final fiery flood of light.

  Could I say I had left it in my room? No, I had been with Sir Edward since the afternoon post had arrived, and we’d each read our respective correspondence in silence. He would know I was being untruthful.

  “Lydia,” he said. From his tone, he might have been my father, although he wasn’t that much older than me.

  I could refuse, but then all intimacy between us would be over. He would not trust my word again.

  I retrieved the paper from inside my pelisse and nearly dropped it as I handed it to him.

  That witch and her bitter accusations. It was just like that woman to blight my last chance of happiness, even from leagues away.

  Sir Edward read and reread the letter for a long time, and I studied him for as long, but his face was unmoving, like the bust of an inscrutable Roman senator. “Lydia,” he said at last. “What does Mrs. Robinson mean by this?”

  He held the page toward me, but I could not see without my reading glasses, which I’d left in his study.

  “I cannot—” I stuttered. “What does she say?”

  He pivoted into the last of the light.

  “She talks of ‘Bessy and Mary learning from your shameful behavior’ and says—” He swallowed. “She says ‘you are running after a married man now, as you did a serving man before’?” He turned this last charge into a question. His proud face was the color of the reddening sky behind him.

  “I am not running after you,” I said quickly.

  Worst of all accusations! It was the place of a w
oman to be pursued, hunted, felled, not to throw herself at any man, especially not her host as his wife lay dying.

  “Never mind that.” He flapped the page for emphasis. “A servant? A—” He took a step toward me. His voice dropped in pitch. “Not the coachman, Allison? Don’t tell me I’ve played the part of an unwitting fool in keeping the two of you together.”

  “William Allison?” I repeated, horrified, before he finished his sentence. “No, Edward, no.”

  I hadn’t called him just Edward before. My hand was on his shoulder.

  He glanced at it as if he might cast me off.

  “May I explain?” I asked.

  “Yes.” He broke from me and massaged his forehead as he walked away. “I thought— Please explain.”

  His distress was confirmation of what I had only hoped before. My performance had been virtuosic and my arrows had found their mark. Sir Edward would believe me no matter what story I concocted and would accept any explanation that preserved the place I had held in his thoughts before now. And this meant that I would be acting always—not just until Catherine died, until Sir Edward confessed his love, until we were married. I wouldn’t be a woman at all but a mannequin, forever holding a convoluted pose in the tableau of his home, his castle.

  “Ned was not always away from us,” I said. “Before Edmund died—I mentioned the girls’ governess, I know. But there was a tutor too. Her brother.”

  Sir Edward ground a weed into the lawn with the toe of his shoe but remained silent.

  “And this tutor, he—” He saved me and destroyed me all at once, taught me I could still feel so I could discover that I needed more than him. “He was a drunkard.”

  The word had a harsh sound to it. But I had to follow the pattern I had set for myself and sew Sir Edward a new story, the canonical tapestry of our shared life from this point forward, were my life to be tied to his.

  I went on. “He was a drunkard, a failure, brought up in an industrial town on the edges of the bleak moors by a doting father along with a pack of unmarriageable sisters—Anne placid, Emily tormented, Charlotte stern. He’d been dismissed by the railway, was unskilled in painting, and deluded about the poetry he composed when he should have been giving lessons.”

  No reaction.

  “I did not, of course, know all this at the beginning,” I added, with a touch more desperation. Maybe I had painted Branwell too darkly. “Edmund managed the man’s appointment, and I, of course, deferred to my husband.”

  “How could he?” asked Sir Edward, his reaction cued as an audience’s at a pantomime. “How could Edmund have let such a man around his wife and children, into his house?”

  I took these questions as rhetorical. “At first, I admit, I showed some kindness to Mr. Brontë—that was the tutor’s name. And, more so, to the governess, his sister. She was a sickly, quiet girl, with little to recommend her. But I took to her as if she’d been my own.”

  “Of course.” He nodded. “Quite so.”

  “The pair of them dined with us on occasion. I gave her my old clothes and the bookish brother run of our library. They even had a holiday of sorts in the summers when they accompanied us to Scarborough.”

  “You were too kind, Lydia,” said Sir Edward. Somehow he was beside me again. “People like that never know their place.”

  I nodded. “So I found out, to my horror. Mr. Brontë, he— I can hardly say it.”

  “He fell in love with you.” Sir Edward caught my gloved hand in his.

  I didn’t disagree. “He dogged my steps, wrote me poems, and even published some, under a nom de plume, in the local newspaper. And when I went to Edmund, later perhaps than I should have—”

  “He didn’t believe you,” said Sir Edward, squeezing my hand harder.

  “Worse. He accused me of encouraging Mr. Brontë, and believed the slanders of his jealous mother over me.”

  “Lydia, my darling, how could they?” Sir Edward pulled me close and planted a kiss on my temple.

  “And now she has poisoned you against me too.” I sprang from him, nearly tripping on a tree root that had been hiding in the grass. “You, a married man, take me in your arms and kiss me. You must think I am a— Or too weak to resist you.”

  “No! No! Lydia, it is I who am weak, not you.” Sir Edward was pacing and looking at intervals toward the upper windows of the Hall.

  Inside Catherine was waiting for him. He always went to her around sunset, although the hours he spent each evening at her bedside had dwindled soon after I had arrived.

  “God, what are we to do?” he said. “You have no home, nowhere else to go. And besides, you have grown so necessary to me.” He stopped himself from touching me this time, but the impulse was there. I could tell.

  Winning the admiration of such a man—a baronet—was meant to be difficult. This was the prize I had coveted since girlhood, so how had I won it so easily?

  “I will be strong for us,” I said. “Make sure we don’t give in.” What I felt inside was far from lust. It was hard to believe that I had been the woman on the dovecote floor or in George Walker’s bed with Branwell. “I have held steadfast before, Sir Edward. In the face of my husband’s distrust, his mother’s cruelty, and Mr. Brontë’s infatuation. I can do so again.”

  “Oh, Lydia, marry me!” he cried.

  Why, with some men, was a woman’s indifference so appealing?

  My hand was in his once more, and he was kneeling on the grass, gazing up on me as at an altar.

  “Rise, Sir Edward, please.” I tried to drag him up but was not strong enough. “It is too early for that. You still have a wife. Would you compromise my position and force me into leaving?”

  “No,” he said, scrambling to his feet. “No, I would not. Lydia, please forgive me.”

  * * *

  “MAMA?”

  Odd. The girls knew never to interrupt my toilette. Yet both of them had entered my room just when I was waiting for Lady Scott’s maid to prepare me for tonight’s dinner, the first in a series of festive entertainments in the weeks before Christmas.

  “You aren’t wearing that,” I said.

  Bessy’s dress was torn at the hem. And Mary had been wearing the same gown for days. At this rate, they would make us look every inch the poor relations when Sir Edward’s guests arrived.

  My new gown lay on the bed in preparation for its debut. The beading around the neckline glinted at me in the candlelight.

  Maybe that was it? Were Bessy and Mary jealous I hadn’t ordered anything for them? But they would be out of mourning soon, unlike me, and getting not just one new gown but many. This had been my first extravagance in months. I’d had a dressmaker travel from Birmingham to take my measurements, although I hadn’t gained or lost an inch in years.

  “We’re not coming to the dinner,” Bessy said.

  Mary nodded, her eyes downcast.

  “Nonsense. I might even have something of mine for you to wear,” I said, trying to be consolatory. I rose from the dressing table and gestured toward the open armoire.

  The girls had to be there tonight. It wouldn’t do for me to be the only lady. Great Barr Hall was a destination, I’d found, for widowers and escapee husbands. Here, with Lady Scott safely out of sight and Sir Edward’s wine cellar open for business, they could fly, for a night at least, on the wings of a second bachelorhood.

  “It is not about our clothes, Mama,” said Bessy. “We”—she gulped—“we don’t wish to witness you making a spectacle of yourself.”

  “Making a spectacle of myself?” I repeated. “Mary, what is your sister saying?” I rounded on the weaker half of their partnership.

  “I am saying that you are behaving disgracefully, Mother,” said Bessy, answering for her sister. “And that Sir Edward is too.”

  “What exactly is it that you say we are doing?” I asked, walking past them to secure the door.

  I couldn’t have the lady’s maid overhear us, for all that her English was limited.

 
; “Why, flirting,” said Bessy, haltingly.

  “And what do you know of flirting?” I laughed. “Oh, yes, you wrote a few foolish letters to Will Milner once. I hope he’s burned them. Did you bid him do so when you sent him away at Allestree?”

  She lit up like a lantern.

  “Oh, Mama,” said Mary, taking Bessy’s confusion as her opportunity to try a different tactic. “Mightn’t we go home to Thorp Green?”

  God knows how she thought we’d afford that.

  “Or, if not home,” she added, following up quickly, “back to Allestree, to Auntie and Uncle? There is nothing for us here.”

  Nothing here? There was nothing at Allestree Hall, except fading into the wallpaper as my sister and her husband used the girls as pawns in their scheming games.

  “Enough,” I said. There was no time to disillusion the pair of them about the Evanses now. I had to look dazzling. My hair was too flat, my complexion dull. “If you wish for a change of scene, the pair of you may have one. Your grandmother has given up Green Hammerton, but I’m sure Christmas at her new apartments in York will be just as entertaining as Easter used to be at the Hall.”

  “Send us to Grandmama?” said Bessy, recovering. “You wouldn’t.”

  “I will if you do not get dressed for dinner at once,” I said, walking to and opening the door.

  My daughters looked at each other in a fleeting conference.

  “We’re not coming, Mama,” said Mary. “We are sorry.”

  The door closed behind them. I inhaled and turned back to what needed to be done.

  * * *

  THE MAID’S FINGERS WERE clumsy, my hair wouldn’t sit right, a fastening on the new dress kept coming undone. I was late by the time I joined the gentlemen in the dining room.

  “There she is,” said Sir Edward as I swept in, smiling apologies. “The inimitable Mrs. Robinson!”

  Some of the gentlemen had already taken their seats, but at my entrance, they all stood to greet me.

  My hand was pressed, shaken, kissed, as I danced the dance of greeting with all five visitors. After a dizzying turn, I at last took my place on Sir Edward’s right.