Emily's Secret

by Jill Jones

  Emily’s Secret

  Jill Jones

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 1995 by Jill Jones

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email info@diversionbooks.com

  First Diversion Books edition October 2014

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-462-2

  More from Jill Jones

  Emily’s Secret

  My Lady Caroline

  The Scottish Rose

  A Scent of Magic

  Circle of the Lily

  The Island

  Bloodline

  Remember Your Lies

  Every Move You Make

  Beneath the Raven’s Moon

  Shadow Haven

  For Peggy and Val

  Acknowledgments

  Excerpts from Emily Brontë’s poems are taken from The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Brontë, edited by C. W. Hatfield, New York: Columbia University Press, 1941.

  Excerpts from Wuthering Heights are from the edition of that novel published by Signet Classics, New American Library, a division of Penguin Books USA, Inc., New York, 1959.

  I am deeply grateful to the Brontë Society and the Brontë Parsonage Museum Library for making the materials necessary for the research of this book available to me. I also wish to express my gratitude to Kathryn White, Assistant Curator/Librarian, Brontë Parsonage Museum, for her professional and conscientious assistance.

  My thanks go to my husband, Jerry Jones, for his research and editing help, his creative ideas and unconditional support; to my stepson, Brad Jones, for his research at the University of Texas, and to Carol Gaskin, Maggie Davis, Glenys Steger, and Virginia Esson for their assistance in assuring the authenticity of the content and suggestions concerning style.

  He comes with western winds, with evening’s wandering airs,

  With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars;

  Winds take a pensive tone, and stars a tender fire,

  And visions rise and change which kill me with desire—

  Emily Jane Brontë

  Prologue

  December 1848

  Blizzard-whitened winds blasted across the desolate high moor country, enshrouding gorse and heather in a sheet of shimmering ice. Gales surged down the open hillsides and into the churchyard, moaning across the ice-encrusted gravestones that shouldered against one another in the December darkness. Then the winter wraiths combined their attack, encircling the old stone Parsonage at the edge of the village, shaking it and shrieking,

  Let me in!

  Like relentless, malevolent ghosts, they battered the brittle windowpanes, wailing their demand for the warmth and life inside.

  Within, three unmarried sisters huddled by the fire in the dining room, trying to ignore the death call that grew louder with each tick of the clock. Charlotte drew her chair closer to the fire and tucked her heavy skirts around her ankles. She adjusted the queer little spectacles on the bridge of her nose, then resumed reading aloud from the book she had purchased at the stationer’s shop the day before. It was the work of an American writer, Emerson, which she found intriguing. Perhaps it would please her sister Emily, who sat next to her large yellow dog on the rug, pale and still, holding onto her rosewood writing box with a kind of quiet desperation. If only Emily would have let them call a doctor, Charlotte agonized, glancing at her stricken sister in the flickering firelight. Then she looked up, and her eyes met those of her other sister, Anne, the youngest of the three at twenty-seven. There she saw a reflection of her own grief. They both knew that now it was too late. There was little they could do for their brilliant but determined sister except stay with her until the end.

  Suddenly, Emily’s shoulders hunched, and she was wracked by a deep and terrible cough that echoed into every chamber of the house. Across the hall in his study, her father tried in vain to concentrate on reading his Bible, peering at the printed page through a large magnifying glass. His heart was heavy as the snow-laden clouds outside, knowing he would soon bury another of his children in the cold vault beneath the stone church floors.

  The spasm subsided, and with trembling fingers Emily opened the writing box that had been her closest friend and confidante through the years. She knew and was grateful that she hadn’t much time left. Only one thing remained to be finished in her waning lifetime.

  Inside the box lay a slim, red-covered volume that, until this moment, only Emily knew existed. For the past three years she had written in it furtively almost every night. She had kept it hidden beneath the mattress of her small bed, risking exposure of a dark and dangerous secret should one of her sisters discover it. But it was a risk she had been willing to take, because writing was the only way she had been able to sort out her terrifying thoughts. Writing had led the way through the treacherous anger, fear, and despair that had at times engulfed her like the mists on the moors, leaving her lost and helpless. Writing was the rock of sanity to which she clung desperately after a chance encounter on the moors had sent her hurtling into a frightening chaos of emotions that she neither understood nor had the experience to control. With no one to confide in, she turned, as always, to the patient page.

  A sob escaped her throat, and the effort sent her into another coughing fit. Surely it couldn’t take much longer, she thought. She hadn’t known her dying would be so attenuated.

  I know there is a blessed shore

  Opening its ports for me, and mine;

  And, gazing Time’s wide waters o’er,

  I weary for that land divine…

  Emily had planned to burn the diary earlier, when the others were not looking, but she’d waited too long. Her sisters had become anxious nursemaids as her illness worsened, hovering around her, not leaving her a moment alone in weeks. The clock on the stairwell chimed the quarter hour. Emily paused. She had no choice but to carry out this final task before their eyes. Slowly, with great effort but steadfastly, Emily ripped away the first few pages, crumpled them, and threw them into the fire. The flame leapt momentarily, consumed the tidbit, then returned to its normal glow.

  Startled, Charlotte closed the book she was reading and leaned forward. “Emily, what is that?”

  Her sister’s only reply was to turn her back squarely to Charlotte, tear more sheets from the book, wad them, and feed them to the flames.

  “Emily, stop!” Charlotte cried out in alarm. She knew her sister prized her privacy, but she could not sit by and allow Emily to destroy her work, for there would be no more of her strong and energetic poetry, no more strange and moving novels like Wuthering Heights. If Emily Brontë had created more work than what Charlotte had already found, Charlotte felt it her duty to rescue it from the sure death Emily obviously intended for it. The poet might go to her grave, but her poetry must live on. Charlotte sprang from her chair and knelt by Emily’s side, eager to see what the volume contained.

  Emily slammed the book shut and crossed her arms over it. Charlotte was such an impossible meddler. I should have burned this long ago, she thought, disgusted. She looked up at Anne.

  “Help me,” she whispered, her words ending in a rattling cough.

  Anne looked from Emily to Charlotte, uncertain what to do. She knew Emily was loath to give the outer world so much as a gl
impse of her private thoughts, even in her poetry. But did she not recognize her worth as a writer? Of them all, Emily was the true genius. But Anne had long since given up trying to understand her difficult and enigmatic sister. Right now, all she wished to do was ease Emily’s pain. Whatever she had written, it was clear her sister did not want it to survive her. “Yes,” Anne said quietly at last, and looked at Charlotte. “Let her be.”

  “No!” Charlotte insisted. “You know how she is. She’ll destroy all the beauty she has created. I won’t let her do it!”

  “It is hers to destroy if she wishes,” Anne said patiently.

  “It is not hers,” Charlotte cried, vexed at being crossed by her normally compliant younger sister. “Those poems belong to everyone who loves her work.”

  Emily tore more pages from the diary and crumpled them hastily. She handed them to Anne, who dutifully threw them into the fire. “Not poems,” Emily managed.

  “A novel?” Charlotte could not bear the thought. “Is it a new novel you were working on?” She reached out and attempted to wrest what was left of the volume from Emily’s grasp but stopped short when her sister’s deep gray-blue eyes froze on hers, daring her to intrude further. Charlotte sighed and backed away, and Emily resumed the chore at hand. When the last of the diary was gone, her secret would be safe. Hopefully, the savage wind and rain on the moors would have destroyed the letter she’d foolishly left under the message rock.

  Since she didn’t believe in heaven or hell, she had no fear that she would burn for what she was doing. Dying now would put a natural end to the horror almost before it began. She was safe. Her family was protected. Her secret was secure. Emily felt light-headed with relief as the last paper blazed and the cover turned to ash.

  The flames crackled contentedly, like the purr of a cat with a belly full of cream. Emily tried to breathe deeply the fullness of her release, but consumption stole her breath and allowed only another coughing fit. The clock on the stair struck ten. Emily nodded to Anne in gratitude for her help. Then, without speaking, her two sisters helped her off the floor. She refused further aid and made her way slowly, painfully, up the stairs. She eased down onto the narrow bed in the tiny, unheated room that had been her private quarters since she’d returned home for good six years ago. In the dark, she listened to the wind wailing outside her window.

  Let me in!

  Throughout the night, the tempest continued its assault on the darkened Parsonage, and the following day, shortly after two o’clock, a windowpane finally burst under the force. The icy wind found Emily on the sofa in front of the fireplace, and without hesitation, completed its mission of death.

  Chapter 1

  Thunder shook the sodden skies over London as Alexander Hightower topped the stairs of the Underground, exhausted to his bones. Across the traffic-choked avenue the chimes from Big Ben somehow managed to overpower the street noise below, where red buses roared and taxicabs honked, competing with private cars and commercial trucks in the muddy, endless race of commerce.

  One o’clock.

  Alex drew the black mackintosh closer around him and moved under the protection of a nearby archway. Above him pigeons clucked and cooed in the shelter of windowsills and alcoves, the rain sending their residue like so much whitewash to the pavement below.

  He spotted a display of umbrellas in the window of a nearby souvenir shop and decided immediately on his first purchase on British soil.

  “I’ll take that one.” Alex indicated the largest black one in the lot. He paid the vendor with soggy pound notes, opened the umbrella with a snap, then ventured into the heavy traffic, making his way across the circle and past the park.

  One o’clock.

  He had exactly two hours. Two brief hours until he had to face Maggie Flynn. And into those two hours he had to cram what under more leisurely circumstances could easily take him several days.

  Damn!

  He walked briskly, dodging puddles, wishing he hadn’t agreed to this afternoon’s meeting. He was in no shape to spar with Maggie Flynn. His clothes were rumpled, travel-worn from the long night spent cramped in the coach class seat on the flight from New York. He was in need of a shower, a shave, and a nap. But as it was, he’d barely had time to check into his hotel and sling his bags into the room before starting off again.

  Maggie Flynn, it would seem, had bested him again.

  Alex reached the ancient shrine of Westminster Abbey, where a service was in progress inside the magnificent Gothic structure. Organ music swelled to the tops of the intricate arches and reverberated off the smooth stone walls, loud enough to shake the crumbling bones that lay beneath the floors and in the tombs and vaults. Lightning flashed fiercely through the majestic stained-glass windows, and moments later thunder echoed throughout the cavernous cathedral.

  Alex felt the hair on his arms stand on end, and he shivered. He was not a religious man, but if there was a God, he thought it likely He might call this place Home.

  But it wasn’t God he had come here to see. He waited until the music died, the aisles emptied, and a tall man in a red coat indicated that the Royal Chapels would be reopened. Then Alex made his way through the gate among the throngs of other sightseers, paid the entry fee, and entered a time warp.

  Tread softly past the long, long sleep of kings…

  They were all there, virtually every monarch who had held power over Britain since there was a Britain. Edward the Confessor, who established the Abbey, followed by a parade of Henries, Richards, and Jameses along with their wives and consorts and various and sundry relatives. He paid his respects to Queen Elizabeth I, whose carefully carved marble effigy slept peacefully atop her tomb. In the room opposite, given almost equal space, the bones of that throne-usurper, Mary Queen of Scots, reposed restlessly for eternity. Lightning flashed, eerily illuminating the sepulcher.

  Alex moved on, filing past the ancient coronation chair and the legendary Stone of Scone. Most of Britain’s monarchs had been crowned on this chair, and he was duly awed by the sheer weight of the history that surrounded him.

  But it was another kind of hero he’d come to honor today. Royalty of a different sort from whom he sought a silent blessing for his improbable quest.

  He stepped into the South Trancept, better known as the Poet’s Corner, and allowed the moment to envelop him. Here his true heroes were either buried or memorialized. The giants of English literature. Those whose works he had studied and taught and loved most of his life. Dryden. Dickens. Johnson. Kipling. Hardy. They were all buried right here, beneath his feet. The walls, columns, and floors were filled with memorials, tributes to the likes of Milton, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Tennyson, Coleridge, and many more.

  And then, there to the right, Alex spied an inconspicuous, inornate square framing three names, engraved in plain letters:

  Charlotte Brontë

  1816–1855

  Emily Jane Brontë

  1818–1848

  Anne Brontë

  1820–1849

  With courage to endure

  Another streak of lightning pierced the afternoon gloom.

  Alex stood for a long moment, gazing at the memorial, wondering what these three strange and provincial women would think about having been enshrined here. Charlotte, who sought fame and fortune, would be ecstatic, he felt certain. Anne, in her own quiet way, would be pleased. And Emily, at the very least, would approve of the plainness of the memorial.

  Alex allowed himself a small smile. As a scholar of early Victorian literature, he had studied the lives and works of these three writers so long and so intensely he felt as if he knew them intimately. He knew what clothes they wore and what food they ate. He knew much of their suffering, as well as their victories. At times he felt almost a part of the family.

  His eye was drawn to the middle name on the memorial—Emily Jane Brontë. Of them all, she was his favorite. Perhaps because she was the most elusive. Little work remained from which to try to piece t
ogether the personal and literary puzzle she presented. Less than two hundred of her poems existed, many only fragments, along with one strange and darkly fascinating novel, Wuthering Heights. She had lived only thirty years and died after a short illness. It was her death Alex found most inexplicable about Emily Brontë. A young woman. A strong will. A premature death. She died, he theorized, if not by her own hand, then certainly by her own design.

  O for the day when I shall rest,

  And never suffer more!

  His theory, that Emily’s death was, in essence, a suicide, was not popular among Brontë devotees.

  Although many concurred that in those final months she seemed to have lost the will to live, most attributed it to her grief over her brother Branwell’s death, while others offered more complex psychological explanations, including anorexia nervosa.

  Alex alone among his contemporaries in the world of academe had dared mention suicide. Emily Brontë was, after all, something of a sainted literary figure. A scholar’s monarch. One was not welcome to loosely question tradition.

  But Alex sensed there was something that had driven this intensely private woman to take her own life, not with a gunshot or a dram of poison, but rather in a way that would not raise the suspicion of others, based on her past behavior.

  Through willful neglect.

  What else but a deep and unyielding desire for death would cause her to refuse, totally and absolutely, all medical help when she became so gravely ill? Something devastating must have happened to her in those last few months, something so frightful and traumatic that death had seemed the only escape.

  Something she had successfully hidden from snooping biographers like himself.

  Alex had been vocal about his opinion, both to his students and among his colleagues, and the latter had called his hand. The academic world, like science, scorns conjecture. His peers, Maggie Flynn foremost among them, demanded proof.