Emily's Secret

by Jill Jones

  So Perkins would have the pleasure of discrediting him after all, Alex thought, as he was certain to do, by introducing Selena to the facts about Henry Bonnell. That didn’t matter to him nearly as much, however, as Selena’s innocently giving the toad the chance to discover what Alex believed to be the truth about the letter. If Tom Perkins had so much as an inkling that Emily’s letter existed, he would latch onto it like the greedy bastard he was, and Alex feared it would disappear into the hands of the highest bidder.

  Chapter 25

  October 15, 1848

  My illness worsens even as the cold descends upon us once again. Today dark clouds spilled heavy snow into the garden and churchyard, and I cannot seem to get warm. I will write here briefly, then attempt to bake the bread. Perhaps the warmth of the oven will take this chill from my bones. I cough incessantly, and the sickness in my stomach seems as if it will never end. My monthly flow has not come since Branwell’s death, although I expect it any day. Once that has passed, perhaps my health will return.

  October 21, 1848

  In the kitchen last night, I listened to Tabby’s gossip, and the turn of her conversation has struck terror in my heart. There is a village girl, she related, who indulged in an indiscretion, as she called it, with the son of a wealthy farmer nearby. She is with child, and the shame of it has caused her family much grief. The boy’s family refuses to acknowledge his responsibility, and her own family has sent her away, abandoning her to a fate of poverty and disgrace, as if she were not of their own flesh and blood. “Where is their compassion?” I cried, unable to believe such callousness. “We all forgave Branwell.” Tabby looked at me as if I had lost my head. “It is not the same, Emily. You know that.”

  I know so little of troubles such as these, but I fear I, too, may have fallen victim to my indiscretion with Mikel. It has been two months now since our time together, and since that time, I have not been visited with my monthly flow. If it doesn’t come by next week, the most unthinkable fate may be mine.

  November 3, 1848

  I am convinced of my predicament, after making careful inquiry into certain symptoms which I have suffered since the summer. My clothing is loose, so no one has yet suspected, but my melancholy continues to cause both Charlotte and Anne great concern. How would they feel if they learned the truth? Would I, like the village girl, be turned out by my family? If my plan works, it will not be so, for I will turn myself out, into that Invisible world where I will be with Branwell once again, and there will be no pain and suffering, no shame for my beloved father and sisters.

  But until I succeed, there is pain like I have never borne before, an inner sorrow that the little happiness I knew with Mikel could turn to this. Oh why did it have to end this way? Was I never to know happiness on this earth? I know I will never see him again, but it is the price I must pay for losing control. I have written to him, and yesterday when Charlotte and Anne went with Papa to tend the sick in the village, I crept out of the back door and made my way to the back ravine. It was a terrible journey, as the wind was bleak and I could not catch my breath. But I had to let him know. I left a brief message beneath the rock. Perhaps if the winter does not destroy it, he will learn my fate when he returns in the summer, and know of my deep love for him. I am worse for the effort, but it is my wish now only to get it over with. I will see no doctor, take no nourishment, until nature collects my withered body and turns this wasted lifetime into sand.

  I think of the lines I once wrote, and I laugh at my false courage. No coward soul indeed. I fear not death, but I tremble before the dying. How could I have so severely misplaced my control?

  I will write no more. It is finished, and now it, and I, must be destroyed.

  Domino jounced happily in the seat beside Selena, his nose out the window, hungrily capturing the wild smell of the moors as they drove higher and higher into the desolate countryside. Selena did not know exactly where she was headed, nor why she felt compelled to make this early morning journey. It was as if some unseen hand was guiding her, and she could only hope that it would point out what to do next.

  Cresting a hill, she spotted a wide place in the road, the first she’d come across. Instinctively, she pulled over and turned off the engine, and the world grew suddenly quiet. The air was breezy, with thin clouds brushing a soft mist over the swaying grasses. The cry of a meadowlark in the distance was the only sound that pierced the silence.

  “Well, let’s see what happens next,” she said resolutely to the dog, who was doing a turnabout in the seat, anxious to spring free into the moors. Selena had never allowed herself to think about inner guidance before, although her grandmother had often talked about listening for directions from some invisible source. Selena had considered it all just old-fashioned Gypsy stuff, but this morning she had awakened with an inexplicable urge to go deep into the moors to sort out her confusion. Not that she hadn’t often sought tranquility in the peaceful countryside, but this morning was different.

  It wasn’t tranquility she sought, but rather direction.

  Guidance.

  All night she had tossed restlessly on her bed while her fears and her desires battled each other for supremacy. By first light neither had won and she was exhausted. At last she’d drifted off into a heavy, dream-filled slumber, and when she awoke, she knew in some deep part of her that an answer was at hand. She had only to seek it, and the place to do so was here, high on the moors, at the juncture of earth and sky.

  She opened the door and barely made it out ahead of the exuberant dog, who bounded away through the grass. Selena reached for the bag she’d brought along, then turned to survey the landscape. Far below she could see the haze of civilization hovering in the air over the valley. Behind her was a ravine with a large outcropping of rock. She could hear the sound of water trickling over stones, and she soon discovered a small beck flowing in the crack of the hillside.

  This was the place.

  She settled on a large flat stone and leaned back against a rock that stood perpendicular to it, her face to the sun. A sense of peace surrounded her, and she breathed deeply. Only then did she allow the troubling thoughts to take center stage once more.

  Alexander Hightower played the lead. Why was she so afraid to let herself love him? It was the crux of the matter, and she knew that until she came up with an answer to this one question, there could be no future with him.

  Fear.

  Selena recognized she had lived with fear for a very long time. Not an overt, identifiable fear, but one buried deeply within her soul.

  But what was she afraid of? She knew now with certainty it wasn’t the curse. No, there was something else…

  Selena reached into the bag and found the crystal globe. It was irrational, she knew, to believe she would find any answers within its glistening depths. But perhaps it would give her something to focus on until her subconscious let loose the dragons she suspected lurked in the midnight caverns of her soul. Dragons she must now bring to the surface and face in the light of day.

  Selena stared into the glass for endless moments, watching the sunlight play among the formations that swirled inside the globe. She was reminded of swirling water, swirling skirts, music that awakened her with its loud blast from the next room. She saw herself as a little girl, maybe three or four years old. The room she was in was cold and dark, and voices came from the next room.

  She heard her mother’s voice, taunting her father, scolding him like a shrew, demanding things he could not deliver.

  Her father’s voice replied in angry, insulting threats.

  Selena saw tiny fingers widening the crack in the door that allowed light into the darkened room. She saw shadows in silhouette against the low lamplight and heard her mother’s drunken, derisive laughter as she swirled her skirts high on her legs, teasing, tempting her father. Then she screamed in hateful rejection, repulsing her father’s advances.

  In the crystal depths, Selena recognized the angry man who was forcing her moth
er beneath him, shredding her clothing and twisting her slender arms, pinning her beneath his weight. She heard a scream, and it sounded like her own voice, only younger. She saw the child dart forth from the room, running to protect her mother. The child beat its small fists with all its might against her father’s back.

  The images took on a deeper aspect, as if she were not only seeing and hearing them, but could feel them as well. Her father was like an angry animal, turning blindly and striking out with the force of thunder.

  Red hot pain shot through her body, pain that filled her until she knew nothing else. She felt herself stumbling, falling terrified into midnight darkness.

  A hoarse cry escaped Selena’s throat, and the horrible images faded abruptly, but suddenly she remembered it all—that terrible night when her father had beaten her so badly he’d broken her arm. His deep grief when he sobered up and realized what he’d done. Her mother’s rage against him, and her fear.

  And then the tears came. Selena sat hunched over the globe of crystal and let herself cry from the most inner depths of her soul. She cried in anguish for that small girl. She cried in despair for her mother and her father. She cried for all the dark nights she’d huddled in her bed, fearing, not understanding, trying to forget what had happened so she could get up in the morning and somehow manage to still love her parents. She cried in relief, at last understanding.

  The dragons had surfaced at last. Now it was up to her to conquer them.

  Selena sat beneath the brilliant morning sun trying to regain control, dazed by the intensity of the memories that flooded through her now. Memories of this incident, and others, that she’d buried deeply and thoroughly throughout a childhood of violence.

  Denying.

  Denying.

  Invisible memories that had frozen her emotions even as Matka had spun her tales of the curse, laying the blame for her parents’ cruelty and self-indulgence at the doorstep of some long-dead ancestor.

  Selena sobbed. The curse. A convenient excuse for inexcusable behavior. But was that how a curse worked? Had her parents, believing they were cursed to be “unlucky in love,” fulfilled its prophecy with their own reckless behavior?

  Likely.

  She considered the idea of a curse and where such a thing originates. What kind of father would bring down such a damnation on his family? A tormented, guilt-ridden father, or one like her own, willful and self-absorbed?

  Suddenly, Selena wanted to know what kind of man was Mikel Wd, King of the Gypsies.

  Staring again into the crystal, Selena let her focus go soft once again, let her mind wander freely back into a greater Mind that might encompass all time. She heard water running over rocks, and she knew it was the beck nearby, but she was hearing it from a great distance of time. Her skin grew cold and she shivered in the wind, which seemed suddenly icy.

  She saw a man standing on the flat rock where she now sat, his eyes searching for something, then catching the flicker of white against the dark shadow of a moss-stained stone. Leaping across the snow-clogged beck to where the tiny flag of paper flapped in the wind, he stooped to retrieve it, almost losing it in the winter blast.

  Frowning, he strained to read the tiny words printed on the crumpled paper. The color drained from his face, and Selena felt his anguish and disbelief. Surely he had not read correctly! She watched as he read the paper again, then fell to his knees in the snow.

  “No!” A cry was torn from his mouth and carried away by the wind. “No!” he cried again, and then, “Emilie…” And then his voice was drowned in bitter tears.

  Selena heard a horse whinny. The sky grew dark and the snow fell in thick flakes, whitening his long, dark hair and dusting the shoulders of his rough hide jacket.

  Silence.

  Darkness.

  The image blurred before Selena’s eyes, then formed again. The man stood beside his horse at the top of a hill, gazing down at a village below, where gray stone houses huddled beneath snow-covered roofs. Vague lights shone from small windows, the only sign of life in the winter darkness. One house stood alone at the edge of the moor, isolated from the rest by a vast churchyard with snow-covered tombstones shining ghostly in the cloud-veiled moonlight. It was a house he had seen many times before, Selena sensed, although the dwellers within were unaware of his observation. It was the house of the Gorgio woman. Does she still live there? Selena felt the man ask himself.

  Does she still live…?

  As she watched, Selena had the strange sensation that she actually became the man. He tethered the horse to a gnarled, ice-clad tree, and a clump of frozen heather caught his eye. He stooped and snapped off a brittle stem. It had been a symbol between them. He will place it on her doorstep. Perhaps she will know and will somehow come to him.

  If…

  He couldn’t bear the terrible thought that death might have already taken her from him. With a leaden heart, he strode through the drifts toward the village, but he did not knock on the door of her house. He would not be welcome there in any case.

  Clinging to the shadows of the night, not knowing for sure where he was going, the man knew only that he was being led toward an answer he did not wish to learn. His footsteps came to a halt at the doorway of the old church, only a few yards from the darkened house. Her house. Does she sleep in that house, he wondered, or here beneath one of the grim, snow-draped headstones?

  He tried the door of the church, not expecting it to open, but it gave beneath his firm insistence, and he stepped inside. The wind howled to be let in, but he closed the door against its shriek and took refuge in the silent darkness. On stealthy feet he made his way to the front of the small sanctuary, but barely halfway there, he stumbled on a large stone in the floor which had been dislodged.

  Recently dislodged.

  Kneeling, he ran his hand over the outline of the stone, his eyes searching through the thick darkness. She was here. He knew it. He could feel her presence. “Emilie,” he whispered, and the word ached as it struggled over his unshed tears.

  The only reply was silence.

  Deathly silence.

  And a knowing.

  The man placed the stem of thawing heather reverently on the stone that sealed her tomb, its purple bloom now black as death. And as silently as he entered, he returned into the night.

  Selena’s fingers were cold as ice as she forced herself to reclaim her consciousness and return into the present. She replaced the crystal ball in the bag, her mind numb. She managed to stand up and, on unsteady legs, made her way back to the Land Rover.

  Who was that man? What had she just experienced? A dream? An hallucination?

  Uncertain of the state of her sanity at the moment, she felt exhausted and emotionally drained. She whistled loudly for Domino, and the sight of his black and white form wriggling toward her through the tall grass gave her a welcome dose of reality.

  “C’mon, boy,” she called, not caring that the dog silted the car seat with sand as he leaped into the vehicle. She sat behind the wheel for a long while, breathing deeply, an intense sadness enveloping her. It was as if the emotions of the man kneeling in the church’s darkness had left their residue in her heart, and Selena allowed a tear to slip down her cheek in his behalf.

  Who was Em-ilie? she wondered as she switched on the ignition. Whoever she was, Selena knew that it was Em-ilie who had written the letter she now carried in her own purse. She turned the vehicle around and headed back toward the village of Haworth. Intuitively, just outside of town, she felt compelled to pull over once again. Parking the car in the shade of a stunted tree, she rolled down the windows. “Stay,” she commanded Domino. “I won’t be long.”

  She went to stand at the crest of the hill. Below her, the scene was strangely familiar. A building nestled at the edge of the moors, a two-storied house, with an addition that hadn’t been there that dark, snowy night. But it was the same place, Selena knew, as she had just seen in the crystal ball. In front of it spread a grimly overpopulated cemet
ery, on the other side of which stood a church.

  Selena remembered visiting this place as a schoolgirl on special outings. It was the Brontë Parsonage Museum. She began walking toward the structure, as she had seen the man do. She paused at the gate to the museum, then moved on down the cobblestones to the church. Looking up, she saw a blue and gold clock face, newly painted. Two o’clock.

  She went into the church.

  It, too, was the same as she had just envisioned, and yet not. Or perhaps her vision had not been accurate. She walked to the far aisle and went halfway to the front of the church, then stopped, feeling the hair rise on her arms. Looking down, she saw she was standing on a large, flat stone. Selena stepped off the stone, then with the toe of her shoe tapped the slab.

  It moved. Ever so slightly, it rocked against its neighbors, and she knew the place was the same.

  At the front of the church a bronze plaque was set into the floor, a memorial to the writers Charlotte and Emily Brontë, whose graves were sealed beneath a nearby pillar. And on the plaque, someone had placed a sprig of heather in a small vase.

  Emily.

  Em-ilie?

  Haunted, Selena left the church and went directly to the Parsonage. Had this been the home of the Gorgio woman her ancestor had loved? Or was her imagination wildly out of control? She paid the entrance fee and stepped inside. It seemed strange that this had actually once been someone’s house, for it felt undoubtedly like a museum now. Rooms were cordoned off with gold braid roping. Items were displayed behind glass.

  It wasn’t large, and it took only a short while for Selena to make the tourist’s rounds. She had grown up in the area and of course knew of the Brontës, but she hadn’t paid much attention to her famous neighbors. Now, her eyes scanned each room hungrily, searching for something, she knew not what, the reason she’d been drawn to this place on this hot summer afternoon.