“What is it that you’re looking for here?” he asked.
“Whatever my dad found, when he visited.”
Sir John gave a small tilt of his head but didn’t say anything. Without another word, he turned to his right and opened the closed door. I dropped my bag and followed him, heart racing. We ducked inside a small, darkened parlor, decorated with a bloodred carpet and old-lady wallpaper. Lord, here it was! The gloomy, dramatic room where the three girls had written their novels. I had been in this room a thousand times in my own mind. It was a modest chamber that boasted a fireplace, three empty chairs, and a square card table. Emily had died on the black couch over by the back wall, right underneath the portrait of her brother, Branwell. I took a deep breath, as if I might be able to inhale all the fights and laughter and brilliance that had transpired in here. But this room was nothing like I’d imagined. It was much too quiet, and the smell of hand sanitizer caught me off guard. There was little to make me think we hadn’t walked into an old mental institution.
I waited for grand and magical things to happen. Dad? Dad? Where was my dad? Had he left me any notes, riddles? Come on, Dad—I’m here! Where are you? I scanned the room for bits and pieces of him. Had he scratched something into the wall? Stashed something behind the couch? Sir John let me make a small sweep of the room. Everything was clean. Pristine. I felt a growing despair. Emily, Charlotte, and Anne had never seemed further away. I turned to Sir John, mouth slightly open. He stared at me coolly. I suppose I had discovered his secret. This house was dead.
Silently, I followed him out of the room. The tour of the upstairs was perfunctory and brief, like an irrelevant autopsy. Sir John let me pop my head into various bedrooms like a dog he was letting lead him to the scene of the crime (that is, before he shot the dog). Patrick Brontë’s room was small and tidy, featuring a handsome painting and a large, square window, out of which, I learned, he used to fire his guns every morning. The girls’ old playroom was a dimly lit rectangle that did not receive much in the way of natural light. The window ledge housed a variety of mildewed books, whose varying states of dilapidation proved them to have been well used. Here were the authors and books that fashioned the Brontës’ minds: Shelley. Byron. Sir Walter Scott. The Bible. To my displeasure, I did not find a single snoop-worthy nook, cranny, attic, or secret passageway, or even one loose floorboard. All I found was one quill, which was arranged just so on Emily’s old desk, as if someone were going to come back looking for it.
Charlotte’s room was the dullest. Its only notable features were the bed in which she’d died, and a headless mannequin in the middle of the room, which was wearing an old, boxy dress, and lived in a thick, protective glass case. Nothing, it seemed, could be touched. Cases surrounded all of the notebooks on display. Sir John waited patiently as I made a thorough inspection of everything. I was hoping to find at least one piece of evidence that would point to the fire that had long ago ravaged this room—charring on the walls, perhaps, or a commemorative plaque. But I found nothing out of the ordinary. The walls must have been rebuilt in the last century, the scars washed away with time. Or, perhaps the fire I was so quick to associate with Charlotte had never had anything to do with her in the first place. What a thought.
Finally, I turned back to Sir John. “This is just terrible.”
“What were you expecting?” he asked.
“Drama.”
“You read too many novels.”
“So did they.”
I had always assumed that my relatives would be alive in this home, somehow, and that the job of a curator was to keep their ghosts as happy and well fed as possible. I was wrong. The parsonage was standing here only thanks to a century of life support. Sir John tended to it as he would a sick relative whose illness was worse than anyone knew. The excitement I’d felt earlier had melted off me. I was just a little girl in a big house, pretending that it was the other way around. I would not be finding the Warnings of Experience today. I would not even be finding the Brontë Parsonage.
I said, “You left Cambridge for this?”
It was the wrong thing to say, of course, but in my defense, it had sounded better in my head.
Sir John’s eyes narrowed. “People do many things out of passion.”
The word passion sounded foreign coming out of his graying mask of a face.
“I wonder what my father thought when he saw all of this,” I said.
Sir John gave a bark of laughter. “Is that what he told you, that he came here?”
“Yes—why?”
“Your father never set foot in the parsonage. It was a matter of principle, he said.”
I stopped. “But he told me I’d find him here.”
“Your father said many things that were not true.”
He leaned back against the doorframe. I fell silent. A familiar, exhausted anger welled up inside of me, directed at the invisible man with glasses and three fake names, and at his incurably gullible daughter. I tried to recall the exact conversations we’d had about this house, and found that the more I tried to remember, the fuzzier the memories became. Were they real at all, or had I just planted them there, years after the fact? It was becoming unclear to me which one of us had been the bigger liar. Who was the real fiction writer: Dad, or me?
Carefully, I reached into my purse and pulled out The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. I looked at it only a moment, then handed it to Sir John in an act of surrender.
It was over an hour before I could come downstairs again. I sat against Anne Brontë’s old wall like a misbehaved child on time-out, who was waiting for her sisters to notice that she was pouting. I closed my eyes and strained to hear the conversations that had played out in this room one hundred and sixty-seven years earlier. But my imagination was not terribly advanced, and all I could hear was the soft whimpers from someplace deep inside my own torso. My body seemed to understand what my mind could not grasp yet: I was truly alone.
By the time I returned downstairs, it was almost dark. Sir John was sitting in the old chair by the front door. He was picking his fingernails. Tenant was resting on the table next to him like a sleeping tiger, next to dozens of wishful Vast Brontë Estates. I went to stand by a dirty glass window overlooking the graveyard. The storm had decided to get its act together. The beginnings of a white flurry swarmed around us like lost and frenzied shoppers.
“Well?” I said to the window. “What did you think of Tenant? Did it answer anything for you?”
“Your father’s notes are incomprehensible,” said Sir John, from behind me. He did not hide disappointment well; he sounded like a small boy who had just discovered he was not destined to be tall.
“I warned you about that,” I said.
“The only note of his that I can even read is on the last page, where he wrote: Econ 101.”
“Did he write that? I didn’t make it to the end of the book this time.”
“Does it mean anything to you?”
“To me, or to my father?”
“To your father, of course.”
I turned around and pursed my lips. All I was, apparently, was a conduit of information between the living and the dead. No one had ever bothered to listen to my opinion—not Sir John, not Orville, and at times, not even Dad.
I said, “You should have talked to him yourself.”
“I told you,” he said. “He was impossible to get ahold of.”
“You should have tried using smoke signals. He liked those.”
Sir John glared at me. It was astonishing how sociable I felt in comparison with him. I understood his frustration, though. This copy of Tenant had solved no mysteries for him.
“Can I ask you something?” I said. Outside, the wind was howling at the house with extremely bad manners. “What ever happened to that Anne Brontë watercolor you discovered? Remember—the discovery that changed your life? You told me about it when we met. Is it here? I’d like to see it.”
He pointed to the nearest copy of his magnu
m opus, The Vast Brontë Estate, which was resting with its fifty unloved brothers and sisters.
“Page two seventy-five,” he said.
I walked to the table and picked up the nearest book. It was glossy and smelled of chemicals. I found the page and cracked open the spine.
“Painting of Two Turtledoves?” I said, looking up. “Is this it?”
Sir John nodded.
I inspected the page. Underneath the italicized title was a copy of a pretty little painting—a snapshot of two birds sitting on a branch above a young, blue-eyed girl. It was surprisingly upbeat for an original Anne. The birds were borderline cute. The girl was plump and vaguely sexual. One sleeve of her dress had fallen, exposing an ivory shoulder. I ran my finger along the shiny page. Midway through, I stopped. My eyes narrowed. The scene looked awfully familiar. I looked at Sir John, who was staring out at the storm, then back at the page. I was sure that I had seen this scene somewhere before—hadn’t I? Maybe I had imagined it. Or had I perhaps read it?
Silently, without disturbing my surly companion, I put the book down and picked up The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. I flipped through the pages expertly, as Orville might have done. There, on page one hundred and twenty-one, I found a passage I recognized. I had read it only a few weeks ago, on the train to Paris. My father had highlighted the paragraph in pink.
I had ventured to give more of the bright verdure of spring or early summer to the grass and foliage than is commonly attempted in painting. The scene represented was an open glade in a wood. . . . Upon this bough, that stood out in bold relief against the somber firs, was seated an amorous pair of turtledoves, whose soft sad-colored plumage afforded a contrast of another nature; and beneath it a young girl was kneeling on the daisy-spangled turf, with head thrown back and masses of fair hair falling on her shoulders. . . .
I snapped the book shut.
Sir John glanced at me. “Is something the matter?”
“No,” I squeaked.
He returned his gaze to the storm outside, which was slapping disorganized snow against the headstones. I waited, but nothing happened. Had Sir John, the Great Sir John, failed to see the resemblance between the passage and the sketch? Was it too simple, too obvious? It was right in front of his nose.
I reached for The Vast Brontë Estate and opened it back up discreetly. The two turtledoves stared innocently up at me. Anne must not have painted this with the intention of having anyone else see it. She had barely colored within the lines. There was a stray piece of green over here, a line of blue over there. The birds, too, looked fat and happy. Possibly drunk. Were they grinning? The more I stared at the girl, the more radiant she appeared. She might have just emerged from a Turkish bath. She and those birds looked like they were sharing a joke and couldn’t quite contain themselves.
I would have to give Sir John a bit more credit—this painting was of no little significance. In Tenant, when Helen paints this picture, she is a love-addled teenager who is daydreaming of her (pre-alcoholic) dream man, Arthur Huntingdon. In a scene suspiciously similar to one of Jane Eyre’s first encounters with Edward Rochester, Arthur walks in and stumbles upon Helen’s secret stash of unfinished sketches. He begs to see them. “I never let anyone see them,” Helen weakly responds before grudgingly showing him a self-portrait. Arthur is too intrigued for her comfort. Out of terror that he might show her work to other people, she snatches the drawing from him and tosses it into the fire. (Indisputably an Emily Brontë move.) There is only one explanation for Helen’s behavior: her sketches are a reflection of her most private self, expressing sentiments that she would never expose to the world. Anne Brontë, the original artist of Helen’s painting, must have felt the same way. Her sketches comprised a visual diary, one that would never have been sent to publishers around London. I closed the book.
“How did you recognize this as Anne’s painting?” I asked. “It looks different from everything else she painted.”
“Stylistically, it is the same.”
I nodded. “Can I see it up close, please?”
“Pardon?”
“This watercolor. I’d love to see it.”
“The parsonage is closing.”
“It will only take a moment.”
A pause. “It’s not here.”
“Where is it?”
“It’s in its logical place.”
“A more logical place than the Brontë museum?”
“You’re very irritating, Miss Whipple.”
He stood and turned to face the back window. His body was thin. With his sleeves rolled up, I could see every detail in his arms, which were covered with ropy veins and signs of decay. I walked around so that I was standing right in front of him.
“Well then—where is it?”
“Where is what?”
“The painting. Did you give it back to the man who owned it? What was his name—Elmes?”
“He asked me to see to it for him.”
I paused. “Was there a knife at his throat when he said this?”
Sir John’s eyes narrowed. “I beg your pardon?”
I swallowed. “Sorry.”
“What are you insinuating?”
“Nothing.”
We paused.
“Or—” I said.
“Out with it.”
“Well—why would he give it to you if it’s so valuable?”
“Not everyone is as selfish as your father was. He recognized that relics such as that painting should be in the hands of a qualified historian.”
“So do you have it, then?”
“Why does it matter to you?”
“Because this is my family.”
The words tumbled out of me with more verve than I’d anticipated. I had meant to put the emphasis on family, not my—but, well, there you had it. I had never been much for possessiveness, but I suddenly couldn’t help but feel like these were my relatives, my story, and maybe even my house, too, that Sir John had rudely invaded, like it was the Ardennes.
Sir John’s lip curled. “How similar you are to your father.”
“What did you do with the painting, sir?” I pressed.
“I had to put it in the hands of someone who would appreciate and take care of it. Edward Elmes had no idea what this sketch was worth.”
“And how much was it worth?”
“Nearly a million British pounds.”
My eyes widened.
“There are people who would pay,” he said.
“So that’s what you did?” I asked. “You cashed in? You stripped it and sold it for parts?”
“I am an academic, not a pirate.”
“Which means you probably needed the money.”
His gaze turned brutish. “I will not be insulted like this. You may collect your belongings.”
“I’m right, then?” I pestered. “No wonder my father didn’t trust you. I bet you wanted to hunt down every single possession the Brontës ever owned, only to auction everything off. He was in the business of resurrecting his relatives; you were busy prostituting them.”
“Don’t be crude, Samantha, it’s very unbecoming,” Sir John said. “And to ease your overly inquisitive little mind, it was only the one painting, which would have been severely damaged had it been left above Edward’s decrepit fireplace any longer. The man who now owns it is one of the premier art collectors in the country. It is in very, very safe hands. There. Has your curiosity been satisfied?”
“The man who bought it—is he a gravedigger, too?” I asked.
Sir John straightened his scarf. “The term you’re looking for, Samantha,” he said with a note of finality, “is grave robber.”
I pressed my lips together. He walked straight past me, to the coatrack. It bothered me that he wasn’t more ashamed. Professors were supposed to be bastions of intellectual integrity, forces to be revered by friends and enemies alike. They weren’t supposed to think of money, the same way they weren’t supposed to think of women.
“Where
will you stay tonight?” Sir John asked, changing the subject. He didn’t seem to care what I thought of him at all—a talent I wished I could have stolen from him.
I crossed my arms. “I’m not sure. Some bed-and-breakfast.”
To be honest, I had no idea where I was supposed to go. My phone was dead, and the storm was bellowing. I could hide away in this house, maybe, or else I could just wander out into the storm and die on the moors, like a true Romantic.
“You will never find a taxi,” Sir John said.
“Don’t be dramatic.”
I brushed past him and opened the front door. A gust of frosty wind greeted me like a shock wave. I squinted. It was no longer light, but I still could make out the front yard, which was cupcaked in snow. He was right. I would never find a taxi. I shut the door.
We were silent. Sir John looked severely displeased, like a father whose duties disgusted him. He let out a breath. “I have guest quarters at my home, should you require them.”
I paused. He paused. He seemed as unhappy with the prospect as I was. After all the insults I had just thrown at him, his magnanimity made me feel somewhat guilty.
I glanced behind me. “Maybe I should just stay here.”
“You cannot stay here.”
“I’ll burrow under the carpet like Emily Brontë.”
“Emily Brontë did not burrow under carpets.”
“That’s what you think.”
He threw on his coat. “Make up your mind. Will you stay with me, or will you try your luck on the streets?”
I didn’t answer.
He said, “Well?”
“I’m thinking it over.”
He began fiddling with his keys. No, no, no. I did not want to spend an entire evening with Sir John. But when a blast of snow thumped against the door, I realized the decision was out of my hands.
I let out a breath. “How do we get there?”
He threw open the door. “We walk.”
The Madwoman Upstairs Page 25