Emily's Secret

by Jill Jones

  “Hand me those glasses,” Matka said, “and help me put ’em on my nose.” She stared at the words for a long while, saying nothing. Then she looked up at Alex. “These words are the same as in the letter tha’ carries the curse.”

  “Does Selena have the letter?”

  Matka shook her head. “I gave her a copy of it once, but I thought she’d thrown it away. Because she so strongly denied her belief in the curse, I never trusted tha’ she would not break Romany law by destroying the letter. I could not take tha’ chance, for she doesn’t understand the fate tha’ would befall her for doing so.”

  “What fate?”

  The expression on the old woman’s face grew dark. “Oh, a terrible fate. The curse must be lifted before the letter can be destroyed.”

  Matka’s fatalism troubled Alex more than he wanted to admit. “But surely the curse can be lifted?”

  “Mikel brought down a curse upon his family because in his heart he left the Rom. He left the Rom because he wanted to marry a Gorgio woman. ’Twas the curse tha’ killed the Gorgio woman. Just before he died, Mikel told his wife tha’ the only way for the curse t’ be lifted was for the Gorgio family to grant forgiveness for his reckless actions,” she said. “But tha’ has been impossible, since no one knew who the Gorgio woman was.” Matka’s eyes pierced his own. “Until now.”

  Neither spoke for a long moment, then Matka added, “Y’ know her, don’t y’?”

  Alex leaned back with an audible sigh, overwhelmed by the possibilities. “I don’t know anything for certain. I have suspicions, but until I can see the entire letter, have the paper and ink analyzed, and the handwriting, it would be impossible for me to prove what we both suspect.”

  The old woman stared at him, as if contemplating a decision. “In the crystal ball, I saw something else,” she said at last. “I saw hope tha’ the curse might be lifted. Perhaps y’ be tha’ hope.” She reached for the small drawer under the lace covering on the table, but her fingers were unable to grasp the metal pull. “Help me wi’ this, will y’?”

  Alex opened the drawer and watched with growing excitement as she painstakingly retrieved a yellowed piece of paper that was the sole content of the drawer. Her hands quivered as she unfolded it slowly, slowly. Alex yearned to reach out and accomplish the task for her, his mind screaming to know if this was the evidence he had been searching for that would prove that Emily did indeed take her own life. But he held his eagerness in check, waiting respectfully for Matka to make her move.

  “If I entrust y’ with this letter, will y’ be able t’ prove who wrote it?” she said at last, looking up from the paper with brooding eyes.

  Blood sang in Alex’s ears. He was in agony to examine what Matka held in her hand. He could see from where he sat across from her that the handwriting on the paper was tiny and cramped. Familiar. Brontë.

  But he couldn’t promise what she was asking him to deliver.

  “I can only try,” he said at last. “I don’t know for sure…”

  She held it out to him. “’Tis our only hope. And take care tha’ nothin’ happens to it. If it be destroyed before the curse is removed, someone will die a terrible death.”

  Alex stared at her, thinking of the responsibility she was placing in his hands. Even if he didn’t believe in the power of a curse, she did. And if something happened by accident to destroy that letter, Alex was afraid the old woman would somehow fulfill its fatal legend.

  He also needed to explain to her that even if the letter proved to have been written by Emily Brontë, there would be no way to petition forgiveness of her descendants, for there were none, but before Alex could say a word, the door flew open and Selena raged into the room.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” she demanded, her face flushed and eyes wide with anger.

  Alex jumped out of his chair. How did she know he was here? He groped for words, something that would secure his innocence of wrongdoing in her eyes. “I came to get some answers that you wouldn’t give me, Selena.” Truth was easier than fiction, he found, even though he risked making her even angrier. If that was possible.

  “Answers? Or nonsense? I don’t know what you’re up to, Alex, but you have no business invading my privacy, or my grandmother’s. So just get out.”

  “I was invited here,” he pointed out, unable to rise to an argument with her. Matka’s story had explained many things to him, and though he was no psychologist, he understood, even if Selena didn’t, that the so-called curse might have more influence over her life than she would ever admit.

  Selena looked from Alex to her grandmother, who sat watching them serenely, a small smile playing on her lips. Alex saw Selena clench her fists tightly in frustration. Then she turned on him again.

  “Get out,” she hissed. “Just get out!”

  Alex picked up the envelope and slid his homemade jigsaw puzzle back inside, but made no move to take the letter from where it lay in Matka’s lap. He turned to the old woman.

  “It’s been a delightful visit,” he said, bending to kiss her cheek. “But I think it’s time for me to go now. I will help in any way I can,” he added, looking into her clouded eyes, “but I can do nothing without…uh, certain tools.”

  Matka only nodded but made no move to give him the letter. “Perhaps in time,” she said.

  July 7, 1848

  I have attempted to tame my passion, but I fear that door has been opened and the beast unleashed. There may be no turning back, nor am I certain that I wish it to be so. I must only be very careful not to reveal my secret. I have spent my lifetime protecting my privacy, and there is reason to believe I can continue this practice, a most necessary endeavor where Mikel is concerned.

  Charlotte and Anne have impulsively left for London, where they intend to reveal their feminine identities to George and William Smith. There is much confusion, created by Newby, that Currer Bell is the only novelist, publishing under three names, and Charlotte is in a furor to clear the situation. I have forbidden either to mention my name or that I am a woman. I want no part of their notoriety. I know not where I wish my future to lie at the moment. Anne has already published her second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and Charlotte is finishing up a work she calls “Shirley,” while I continue to battle my way through a work I no longer have an interest in.

  My interest is in discovering the outside world, with Mikel’s tutelage. Once I showed him how to read and write; now he is showing me things secret and forbidden. I have at last kissed a man, a true and vigorous kiss, and in so doing have changed my life forever. I have no illusions that there is any future for me with this gipsie, but I have no intentions of having a future with any other man, either. This is an interlude at best. Perhaps I am sinful, but because I believe not in sin, how can that be? I am hurting no one, and I am learning at last what it is to be a woman.

  July 30, 1848

  It is my birthday, and Mikel has made me a special present of polished rocks tied in a kerchief. I hold them in my hand as I write this, their presence cool and comforting in his absence. I shall sleep with them beneath my pillow. He fried up a fat rabbit, which we shared by the campfire. (Keeper is as in love with my gipsie friend as I, especially when Mikel throws the scraps his way.) We lay upon his cloak on the hillside beneath the stars tonight, giving them fantastical names such as my brother and sisters and I used to do in Angria and Gondal. I began to tell him Gondal stories, for I was afraid if I did not keep talking, I would succumb to the desire that flamed through me as I lay next to him. He leaned on one elbow, and with his free hand touched me, here, and I could no longer speak. He leaned into me and kissed me, parting my lips with his, letting his hand roam across my body as he roams the wild moors on his pony. I must write this, although I live in terror that it will be discovered. I must write it, just as I had to write W.H., for in the writing I gain some semblance of control over feelings I do not understand. I had no wish to cease the madness that had overtaken us, even though I am ter
rified of that passion he stirs within me. Tonight we did cease, but I know that if we are together in such a manner again, there may be no such escape.

  August 21, 1848

  It has happened. My most terrible fear and my most rapturous desire. I know now the secrets of love, for right or wrong. Oh, such fools we are to think we can control the urge of nature, for that rashness to which I have succumbed is nothing more than the force of nature moving upon itself. I can hardly write of what I have done, for there are no words to describe the quenching of that secret fire which has burned so long in my dreams. I have experienced true freedom today, in a bed of soft grass upon the moor, beneath a sky so blue the forget-me-not would pale against it. It is a freedom unlike any I have dreamt of, a freedom that released my spirit to join its counterpart in the Invisible. But to experience such limitlessness, I had to relinquish the control I have always held so dear. It was not such a high price after all, at least in that temporary moment, for the passion of two souls unleashed together cannot be controlled. Mikel speaks of love, and I myself have discovered another aspect of the love I have held for him since the days I nursed his injuries by the beck. There is no hope for any tomorrow between us, and I expect none but the memory we will be able to share when he is once again called back to his people in Wales and I return to my own dear family who know nothing of this secret.

  September 1, 1848

  Mikel has astounded me by declaring he wishes us to wed! Never did I encourage such a thought, for it is impossible. He is a gipsie, born to wander and to live a life of such freedom that it would frighten even me. I am content to find my freedom within, while he is destined to be free in the outside world. He claims he no longer feels part of his tribe, or of his culture, so changed is he by our love. I am saddened at his words, for I never meant this to happen. I love Mikel, but I am content with what we have had and I want no more. I cannot marry this man. My own family would desert me, and that is a price I am not willing to pay, even if he is. I wish he had not urged this upon me. It is not my wish to wed, Mikel nor any other man. I must make my feelings clear when we meet tonight. He must return to his people in Wales. He must! And perhaps he must never come back to me.

  September 15, 1848

  The air grows chill even as the purple heather nods and dances upon the moors, and today my heart grows chill as well, for I bade farewell to my own true love. Oh, how can I bear this anguish? It would seem the freedom I found in his love has now bound me to the most tormenting agony. No torture I could have dreamt of in the dungeons of Gondal can compare to the misery of seeing my beloved ride away to the west, stopping before he disappeared over the crest of the moors to wave one last salute my way. But it is as it should be, although we are both in torment. He pressed me until the end to marry him, saying we could run away, move to America, not knowing how ill I fare whenever I leave Haworth. I am a prisoner here, and he is my freedom. To send him away was the most difficult decision I have been called upon to make in this lifetime. I sent away my freedom, my love, my life, but in so doing I regained my world within once more. Will he return to the moors when spring time makes the world alive again? I do not know, nor do I know if I wish it so. The world within is safer, less complicated.

  “Be careful of that man, Gran,” Selena warned, hoisting herself up onto the tall hospital bed, glad now that the mechanic had been able to repair the Land Rover in such a short time. If she hadn’t walked in on Alex and Matka, there was no telling what he would have cajoled out of her trusting grandmother.

  Since talking to Tom earlier in the day, Selena had let her anger build up a healthy head of steam. Where once she’d thought Alex might have been using a pretended interest in her work to get to her sexually, now she wasn’t sure it wasn’t the other way around. She didn’t understand Alex’s strange behavior in sneaking the copies of her word pictures, but his guilty exit from her studio had generated all kinds of questions. Maybe he was some kind of crook, although Selena was mystified as to what he was after. Whatever it was, seeing the vintage Jaguar in the nursing home parking lot had been the last straw. Now he was conniving to get whatever it was he wanted from her grandmother. Maybe he was selling something. She’d heard of people preying on innocent elderly people.

  Then Matka spoke, her voice barely above a whisper. “He loves y’.”

  Selena, startled out of her suspicious accusations, was sure she hadn’t heard correctly. “What?”

  Her grandmother raised her head, a satisfied smile on her lips. “He loves y’, daughter. I saw’t in the ball, and in his face as well.”

  Selena scowled. “He’s just using you, Gran. He knows what you want to hear. Did he try to sell you something?”

  Matka let out a low “harrumph,” her version of a laugh. “No. He’s not selling anythin’.” Then she trained her clouded gaze upon her granddaughter and said, “You’re not angry at him, y’ know. Y’be angry at yourself.”

  “What are you talking about? Have you lost your mind?”

  Matka snorted. “No. In fact, I think I be seein’ things quite clearly today.”

  Selena stared at her grandmother, knowing that Matka’s words, as usual, cut to the heart of the matter. It was true. She wasn’t angry with Alex. She was angry with herself that she wasn’t able to get past her own irrational fears and for once act like a normal human being. Her anger at his snooping was just an excuse to send him away.

  Safely away.

  She was unable to contain the tears that suddenly sprang to her eyes and spilled down her cheeks. Never had she been this frustrated or miserable. And never had she wanted a man like this, nor been so afraid of the consequences.

  “Oh, Gran, I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I’m so…so confused. I want to believe what you’re telling me, but if that’s how he feels, why hasn’t he said it to me?”

  “I suspect he may not know it yet himself,” she answered with a shrewd smile.

  “He frightens me, Gran.”

  “Do y’ love him?”

  Selena turned her head to see a golden halo of sunshine surrounding her grandmother’s silhouette against the window. Matka, her guardian angel. Selena was once again a little girl, running to the safety and shelter of this wise woman. “I don’t know what being in love means,” she said with a sob that ended in a hiccup. “You know how I have always said I would never fall in love.”

  “There comes a time, Selena, when y’ have t’ outgrow the hurts of your childhood. What happened t’ y’ then, and whatever went wrong between your mother and father, y’ must learn t’ let them go so y’ can get on about your life.”

  Selena sat up again. “How can you say that when you have spent your life believing in a stupid curse that’s been handed down for generations? Shouldn’t you learn to let that go, too?”

  Matka looked at her thoughtfully. “So tis the curse what y’ be afraid of?”

  “No,” Selena retorted quickly. “I don’t believe in the curse, you know that.”

  “But y’ be afraid of somethin’?”

  Selena hesitated, then retorted, “Yes, damn it, I am afraid. But not of the curse. I’m…I’m afraid of losing all that I have worked for. Afraid of giving up my independence. Afraid that all men might be…might be…like my father.” She broke down again and cried like a lost child.

  “I can’t get up n’ come t’ y’, daughter,” Matka said. “But my lap be here for your head, if y’ve come t’ me for comfort.”

  And like a child, Selena slid off the bed and crumpled into a heap at Matka’s feet. She rested her head in the old woman’s lap and let the tears fall.

  “What makes y’ think this one be like your father?” Matka asked at last, stroking Selena’s dark hair with her gnarled fingers. “Has he shown y’ any sign o’ violence?”

  Selena shook her head.

  “Has he ta’en too much t’ drink?”

  Again Selena shook her head, knowing it was she, not Alex, who had tried to drown her fears the nigh
t before in a wine bottle.

  “Do y’ want t’ love him?”

  Selena thought about that for a long moment, then raised a tearstained face to her grandmother. “I…I don’t know. I think so.”

  Matka wiped Selena’s face with a soft handkerchief from the table. “Sometimes, daughter, we can’t always know tha’ what we be doin’ is right. We have t’ take a chance. The best we can do is listen t’ what be deep inside. Y’ be afraid t’ let yourself fall in love? What if fallin’ in love be the best thing for y’? Would y’ not be makin’ a mistake not t’ listen t’ your heart?”

  Selena had never been very good at overcoming Matka’s sensible arguments. And her grandmother’s words released her from the terrible weight of doubt and fear she’d been carrying since kissing Alex the night of the party.

  “What should I do, Gran?”

  “Trust yourself. Go to him, if you think he is the man for you.”

  “I’ve acted like such a fool,” Selena said, half to herself. “What if he doesn’t want me anymore?”

  “Do y’ really believe that?”

  Selena gave Matka a small smile. “No.”

  “There is somethin’ y’ must do, however, if y’ want t’ take every precaution t’ protect yourself from the curse.”

  “Gran! I keep telling you, I don’t believe in the curse.”

  “Y’ don’t. And y’ do. Do I not be right?”

  Selena looked away from her grandmother, into the shadowy corners of her own mind. Yes, she admitted finally, she feared the curse. It was that fear that plagued her every working hour and had caused her so much agony in her painting. And, she supposed, it was a subconscious fear of the curse that was nagging at her now. Taunting her. Convincing her not to get involved with Alexander Hightower, no matter what she felt for him.