The Crimes of Charlotte Bronte

by James Tully

  Anyway, off she went and I looked forward to some happy meetings with Mr Nicholls, but they turned out to be few and far between because for most of the time he just was not his old self and, when I think back, they were of my making and not his. His mind seemed always to be somewhere else, but he would not tell me what he was thinking and I just had to put up with it. Once, as a joke, I said that I thought he was pining for Madam, but he snapped at me so badly that I soon learned that there was little laughter in him. Truth to tell though, we did have one or two times together when things were much as they had been, and they made up for everything – so much so that all my old hopes started to come back to me.

  Then she was back in the Parsonage, and everything went back to as it had been, until all Mr Nicholls seemed to be able to say – and he did not seem to care who heard it – was that he had had enough of it all. Even so, I did not sense how badly he had been feeling until the day he met me in the lane and told me he was leaving!

  At first I thought it was just another of his moods, but when I saw that he was in earnest my head went round and I was like to have fainted had he not taken hold of me. There were a few folk about so we could not linger any longer than it took to settle upon a time to meet later in the Church, and it was there that he told me that he had already given his word to take another job miles away. It was an awful shock, and once I had taken his words in I could scarce stop weeping, and clung to him as if to root him to the spot. But it was no good – his mind was made up and all was settled.

  All I could think of was what was to become of me, and if we should ever see each other again, but his answers were of no help and it became evident to me that it was likely to become a case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’. That hurt me very much, and I all but refused him when he asked for a last meeting, but I did not and two nights later we met on the moor and said our farewells. Of course, I was tearful again, but I had come a little way to accepting what was to happen for I could not believe that this was to be the end of us altogether after all we had meant to each other. That feeling was made even stronger by his seeming so very sad at our parting, and for, I think, the very first time, I knew that he really cared for me.

  So away he went, leaving a great hole in my life and the Parsonage and our house. I thought of him day and night, and sometimes when I was home I would go into his old room and wonder what he was doing and who he was with. His spirit seemed to linger in there, and sometimes it was almost as if we were together again – but we were not, and my world was empty and had no meaning.

  As for how things were in the Parsonage, probably the least said the better. Madam went about as if bewitched, and things were very bad between her and Mr Brontë, especially as he seemed forever to be calling Mr Nicholls to her. There seemed to be no chance of them coming together either as they could be apart in the same house all day if they so wished. They did not even meet at meal times because ever since I had been at the Parsonage I had never known Mr Brontë do other than take his meals alone. His children did not care in the old days, because they could do and say much as they pleased with him out of the way, but now, with her sisters and brother all dead, Madam also ate alone. I never knew how they could do it because, whenever possible, we had always eaten together in our house and they were happy times with everyone talking 13 to the dozen, and Father smiling and keeping an eye on everything.

  Then, only a week or two after Mr Nicholls had gone, they were both taken very ill, with Mr Brontë again having some kind of fit, which sent him blind for a while, and her ending up having to be blistered.

  It was all very miserable, especially as she kept us running up and down stairs all the time as if we had naught else to do but wait on her hand and foot. As far as I was able, I looked after Mr Brontë myself and left her to the others, but there were things that she would allow only me to do and I came to hate my work. That is not to say, though, that things were much better when I had finished my work and had my supper because I lacked company outside of the family. My one good friend had gone into service with a family in Keighley, and I seemed to have no interest at all in lads after Mr Nicholls. Many was the time that I just wandered about on the moor thinking of past and happier times, or I would sit upstairs in a dream for so long that someone would come to see if I was all right.

  Then, of all things, I began to hear talk of Mr Nicholls being seen about in Haworth, and all of a sudden my hopes were raised that he had come back. I even made so bold as to ask Madam about the truth of the gossip, but she said she did not know what I was talking about – though something in her manner made me suspect that she knew more than she was letting on. I started to walk to places where they said he had been seen, but I never set eyes on him.

  In August she went off again, that time up to Scotland as I recall, and life became so much easier at the Parsonage with just old Mr Brontë and Miss Aykroyd to look after and I felt happier with her away than I had been in a long while. Only much later did Mr Nicholls let it slip out that he had met her on her way home and that they had had two nights together – in Harrogate, I think he said. Had I known that at the time I do not know what I would have done – especially as I still wandered about at nights hoping to catch sight of him – but I never did.

  Then the Summer was gone, and once more my worst time of year was nearly upon us. I became quite down, and had many daydreams of moving away to service elsewhere – perhaps even to where Mr Nicholls was – but I could not face leaving my family, and in any case as far as I knew Mr Nicholls had made no move to see or write to me since he left. I liked to think that there was a good reason for that though, and that is why I did not really believe the gossip of him being seen about, for I just knew that he would never have come back to Haworth without somehow letting me know.

  That is why I was so angry with him when many years later he finally got round to telling me that he had been meeting Madam on and off ever since he left, but they were not able to resolve the differences between him and Mr Brontë. In the end it would seem that though Mr Nicholls had become more and more displeased with the way things stood he was forced to leave it to her to carry on trying to wear down her father’s objections to their marriage because by then, he said, he was set upon seeing everything through to a close. Only years after that talk with him did I get to know what he meant by that, but I must say now that I had my thoughts at the time but chose to take no notice of them.

  [] Relations between Charlotte and Nicholls were very strained for the three days following her return from her visit to Ellen Nussey. She must have known that she was out of favour with Nicholls, and must have expected to be. However, she could have had no idea of the intensity of the emotions which were churning away within him. Then, when he did finally get to see her alone, I think that she must have been shocked by the vehemence of his verbal attack, and stunned by his charges. Of course, Nicholls had no idea that she did not want to marry Taylor, nor that George Smith felt similarly about her, but Charlotte did and her thoughts must have raced while Nicholls ranted on,

  I think it safe to say that she had virtually come to terms with the probability that she was destined to become an old maid, and that the prospect would not have been to her liking. The possibility of marrying Nicholls must therefore have entered her mind more than once and that, I suggest, is why she accepted his proposal, albeit with an initial appearance of reluctance.

  However, having accepted, it must have taken only a short time for her to realize that she was faced with two immediate, and major, problems.

  Firstly, and although she was not certain, she had a very good idea of how her father would react to the news. Hitherto, Mr Brontë had made it abundantly clear that he did not wish her to marry at all. However, there had been an unspoken agreement that if she ever felt so inclined it would be into wealth or rank – preferably both. Neither had ever considered for one moment that marriage to a curate might become a subject for discussion.

  Then there was the quest
ion of how to put a brave face on the matter when telling her friends and acquaintances because, as we know only too well, she had been at pains over the years to let them know her opinion of such lowly creatures as curates.

  In the event, her father did not disappoint. When she told him the news he, quite literally, had a fit! She wrote to Ellen about it: ‘. . . Papa worked himself into a state not to be trifled with, the veins on his temples started up like whipcord, and his eyes became suddenly bloodshot.’ She had to back-pedal hurriedly, otherwise he would probably have dropped dead in front of her. As it was, he used ‘such epithets’ about Nicholls that her blood ‘boiled with a sense of injustice’. In order to calm him, and buy time, she was forced to promise that Mr Nicholls ‘should on the morrow have a distinct refusal’.

  Charlotte may have placated her father, but then she had to face Nicholls and he, also, was livid. He told her that he would tolerate the situation no longer, not even temporarily as she had begged; he had had enough and was leaving. She and her father could do exactly as they wished. He retired to his lodgings in a fury, and sent a letter of resignation to Mr Brontë who replied with ‘a hardness not to be bent, and a contempt not to be propitiated’. The two men did not meet.

  It was only when his temper had cooled that Nicholls realized that he had burned his boats rather prematurely. He knew that he could not live for very long on the small amount of money at his disposal, and certainly he could not afford to travel far. It must have been an agonizing decision for him to take, but in the end he was forced to eat humble pie by writing to Mr Brontë asking if he could withdraw his resignation. However, the reply stated that he could do so only ‘on condition of giving his written promise never again to broach the obnoxious subject’ to him or his daughter. Nicholls’ rage flared again at that, but he had no option but to accept the stipulation while he determined his future.

  Mr Brontë’s reaction had been much as Charlotte had anticipated, but then she was forced to think very hard about how to explain the situation to everybody, because she knew that the facts were bound to come out. Eventually she decided that the only thing to do was to portray the whole matter as such a romantic story that everybody would understand that she really could not have helped being swept off her feet.

  Her letter to Ellen, of 15 December 1852, is a gem. It is so patently a work of romantic fiction, that one cannot help but be amused. When considering what she wrote, it should be borne in mind that Nicholls was almost thirty-five years of age at the time. This was no lovesick adolescent, but just listen to Charlotte as she tells the tale to her friend: ‘He entered – he stood before me. What his words were you can guess; his manner – you can hardly realise – never can I forget it. Shaking from head to foot, looking deadly pale, speaking low, vehemently yet with difficulty – he made me for the first time feel what it costs a man to declare affection where he doubts response.’

  There is more in the same vein. It is a masterpiece. I doubt very much, however, whether Ellen or anyone else was taken in by it for one moment, and one can but wonder how Charlotte could ever have imagined that they would be. Nevertheless she had to start the story somewhere, and that letter was the blueprint for the account which she gave to the world.

  Charlotte’s story of Nicholls’ proposal has been accepted as the truth by every writer about the Brontës whom I have come across. Nobody appears to have doubted it nor, although it could almost be a scene from Jane Eyre, to have recognized her literary style. It was the tale to which she adhered for the rest of her life, and I think that in the end she came to believe it herself.

  After the Christmas of 1852, Charlotte decided to go ahead with a planned visit to the Smiths and Nicholls was left to face the adverse local reaction that the knowledge of his proposal had engendered.

  The people of Haworth had never liked him, and because of the, now open, hostility which he was experiencing from all sides, Nicholls stayed away from both the Parsonage and the church, even to the extent of procuring a locum-tenens for Sundays. John Brown made no bones about his feelings, saying that he ‘should like to shoot him’. Martha, also, was said to have been ‘very bitter against him’ although, as she tells us, her reasons were very different from those of her father.

  Some confirmation exists of the tactics which Martha says she used in order to drive a wedge between Charlotte and Nicholls – and it comes from Charlotte’s own pen. In her letter to Ellen Nussey of 4 March 1853, she wrote that Martha had told her of certain ‘flaysome’ looks which Nicholls had given her mistress, and which had ‘filled Martha’s soul with horror’. Then, on 6 April, Ellen was informed, bluntly: ‘Martha hates him.’

  Of course, none of that helped Charlotte to resolve her dilemma. She had tried, ceaselessly, to persuade her father to change his mind, but he was adamant and called the whole matter ‘degrading’. Then there was the fact that nothing which she said or did could dispel the dark cloud of anger and despair which hung over Nicholls. She felt absolutely torn between father and lover, and so she did what she normally did when she was in any state of emotional turmoil or indecision – she went on her travels.

  In April she stayed with Mrs Gaskell, in Manchester, and took the opportunity to propagate the story of Nicholls’ ‘proposal’, just as she had during her visit to the Smiths a couple of months before. From Manchester she went to Ellen.

  She returned to the Parsonage somewhat refreshed but, hardly surprisingly, she found that nothing there had improved during her long absence – in fact, if anything, the situation appeared to have worsened. Nicholls seemed now to have no intention of trying to appease her father, and was rude and abrupt with him in public. Charlotte described it as ‘a dismal state of things’.

  Nicholls now obtained a curacy at Kirk Smeaton, near Pontefract, which, although also in Yorkshire, was some fifty miles from Haworth. He left on 27 May 1853, and Charlotte told Ellen she was desolate: ‘he is gone – gone – and there’s an end of it.’ However, even as she wrote, she knew that she had no intention of allowing his departure to be an end of anything.

  Unknown to her father, Charlotte corresponded with Nicholls after he resigned, and also met him on the several secret visits that he made to Haworth during that summer of 1853. He would not take up his new post until the August, and so he had decided to stay with his friend Grant, who was the incumbent of the next parish to Haworth. The rumours which Martha heard of his having been seen about the village were therefore true.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘My bone cleaveth to my skin, and to my flesh, and I am escaped with the skin of my teeth.’

  Job 19:20

  Christmas 1853 came, and it was another miserable one, especially as Madam did not go away. She just moped about the Parsonage, and seemed to have no interest in anything except being as bad-tempered as she was able. To tell the truth, I came very close to putting in my notice at that time, but I bit my tongue and went off home for what was left of Christmas contenting myself with thinking about what a cheerless time she was having stuck in that big cold old house with naught but 2 old people for company – both ill and crochety – and her father not speaking to her either. It is a terrible thing to say, but I was so pleased at the prospect that I almost sang my way down the lane.

  As it had turned out, things had been so arranged that I did not have to go back to work until 2 days after Christmas Day, and I went in bent upon being full of cheer, and rubbing it in about what a happy time I had had, to what I thought would be a sick-at-heart Madam. To my great surprise though, she was as full of cheer and smiles as I had meant to be, and greeted me as if I was her best friend. She said she could hardly wait to tell somebody, and then went on to tell me that her father was no longer against her seeing Mr Nicholls, and that he was coming back to Haworth as soon as possible.

  Even after such a long time, as I write this the thoughts that I had then come flooding back as if it was but yesterday. At first I just could not take it in and thought it was a joke. Then,
to my surprise, I was not angry and miserable that I was to lose Mr Nicholls, but rather my spirits were raised higher than for a long time at the thought of having him back, because I remembered his words that though things might be difficult for us for a time I should trust him and that naught would ever come between us.

  Within just a week or so I saw him again! He turned up at the Parsonage all smiles and almost as if nothing had happened. She had warned us when he would be coming, and all morning I was aflutter with every sound on the path. When, at long last, he did arrive I had to hold myself back from running out and throwing myself into his arms. I heard them talking in the passage and then, with a big smile all over her ugly face, Madam was leading him down to see her father. I stood by the kitchen door with the others, just looking, but when he saw us he gave us a big wink over Madam’s head. Well I say he gave it to us, but I knew that it was meant only for me and I could have kissed him for it.

  He left that same day, but he came back a few times over the next couple of months, although I was never able to say more than a few words to him, and then only when others were about. Then, almost before we knew what was what, he and her were betrothed and Father said that he was coming back to his old job. All in all, I could not have been more happy, but there was a great disappointment in store for me. All along I had thought that he would come back to stay in our house, but now Father said that that was not to be – he was going to live at the Parsonage even before they were wed.

  At first I could have wept, because I knew that with him under Madam’s eye all the while there would be very few meetings between us. However, I soon overcame my feelings and comforted myself with the thought that I would probably see more of him if he was living under the same roof as me.

  I knew that he did not love her – very much the other way, in fact – so I was sure that he had his own good reasons for going into it, and I trusted his promise that nothing would ever come between us. In the meanwhile, though, he was back and the wedding was arranged and that, of course, caused a great deal of talk in the village about it all.