Solsbury Hill

by Susan M. Wyler

  It was a pile of letters. The paper was thin and dry and some were rumpled as if they’d been tossed away. There were no envelopes, but they were ordered by date, and it seemed someone had arranged them, taken good care of them. They were letters from a man named Robert Macaulay.

  Dear Sudden Surprise, the first one began. Just days before I set upon the journey which brought me to find you, I heard a whispering. I knew not whence the whispers came, believed, at first, it to be the wind whistling in the way it can; or whales in the deep distant ocean off the coast of our land speaking to one another in that high-pitched unheard language they have; but the longer I listened the more I was sure that the whisper was meant for me; whether the wind, or the whales, or God himself (though I am not a man God speaks to commonly), the whisper spoke to me and told me, plainly, to begin a walking holiday, a pilgrimage toward I knew not what, but I would walk until I knew I’d found that which I’d set out to find, to discover, to be led toward, a kind of oasis in this world of doubt and fear, an answer to my soul’s longing . . .

  Taken aback with feeling, Eleanor dropped the letter to the table. Her heart beat fiercely and her breath was held in abeyance as she picked up the next note and read.

  My Fearless Beloved, it began. The bold strokes of his handwriting suggested urgency and zeal. I shall not be leaving. Have arranged with the inn to stay on in these two rooms for as long as I might, and believe that there is no greater pleasure for me than to spend the rest of my lifetime waiting for the sound of you, then the fragrance you carry all about you, then the feel of your lips on mine, and so we will begin again, tomorrow. I have only to make it through this night.

  You speak of these moors as your one great companion, and I dare to hope, then even to believe, that I have become a part of these moors which you see and touch and allow to flow inside your being, so deeply.

  It takes courage, you say, courage and then something more than courage to withstand the passion this land can inspire; and I am a convert, converted by the vigor inside you, by the sublime spirit in the tenderness of your corporality. You are the most courageous being and I the most fortunate man this earth can ever have known. I rush to sleep now, to hasten the dawn.

  Tucked between the letters was a tiny book written in an immaculate hand. It was a diary, some thirty pages long and just a few inches square, with handwriting so precise it was like a printed manuscript in miniature. In the first pages of the diary, written months before the notes from Robert began, Emily wrote, My brother Branwell storms, drunk and sick with love turned rancid; it is all I can do to keep my face above the drowning water of passion he feels and the way he pulls at me, pulling me down like a child fallen from overboard in this wild river raging beneath the placidity of our quiet home, with Father merely watching.

  Some few pages later, the writer wrote, It is Queen Victoria’s birthday and in celebration I have arranged for a respite away from here where I can write in peace on the other side of the Pennines, at dear Julia Enswell’s home.

  Eleanor was well through the looking glass.

  Eleanor took another and then another deep breath and went back to read the diary. Emily wrote about the moors, about coming to trust and know herself, and then about a man she met while walking up the hill to her favorite tree with, as she put it, mangled branches so full of leaves that to sit beneath it was like sitting in the shade of a kind mother’s watchful gaze.

  Emily described the man named Robert Macaulay.

  Come this warm summer, Robert set off on a walking tour as was Wordsworth’s wont, but Robert is a gentleman farmer, no poet, he, no thoughts of fancy and love in his head, till the late evening when he found me. We sat together for hours and he managed to bring laughter from inside, this strange new man I feel I have known since before I was born, this strapping man with dark curled hair and deep blue eyes.

  He left his home in the Outer Hebrides, for a whisper that maybe spoke my own name before he knew enough to recognize it; perhaps God had a plan we are too mired in sleep to know, but I feel called awake now and though I have asked my heath and the cliffs above the sea for guidance and some word clearly spoken to affirm what I feel, I feel carried. I believe I have been carried toward my destiny and am compelled to accept it willingly.

  And on the next page Emily wrote,

  Heartbreak! I am called home to Haworth, to care, as I am accustomed to care, for my brother Branwell as he twists and turns in a nightmare of many agonies. Robert will head home. I cannot go with him. I ran fleeing from my responsibilities and here in the Enswells’ home I am resolved to choose what I believe is right, to heal my brother, and if God sees fit, once he is healed, to find my way home to where I know I belong. The Enswells have kept this room for me and now also my secret.

  Eleanor’s eyes hurt and she was overwrought from the transport to another time. There was not enough light in the room in the afternoon and even that light was fading. She closed the diary and began to tie the letters together, then picked up the last letter from Robert, a short note that read,

  The breathtaking sight of you I shall ne’er forget but always carry. Your lovely head bowed in prayer to your earth as you walked slowly toward me until that first instant, when you glanced up and I could see you could not see me, quite, but I saw you for the low sun on your face and also in your bright eyes. You saw the silhouette of me, you say, and were terrified, believing you might be seeing God, my precious and credulous love. I will wait in the Hebrides and will ever be yours, Robert Macaulay.

  It was the summer of 1845, just months before Brontë started to write her one novel, Wuthering Heights.

  Eleanor pushed away from the table and gathered the drawing, the tiny diary, and the letters into a pile, grabbed the ribbon, and went into the hall. The bank of French windows had a view into the courtyard and she saw Mead shaking out his raincoat and heading toward the house.

  Her intestines were twisted like a fist till she thought she’d die of the weight of it, and she found herself unable to catch her breath. She tiptoed down the hall, ran up the front stairs, around the landing, and down the hall to her bedroom.

  Her tears tasted like salt and her bones felt cold even under the covers. The tree was scraping the window and she picked up Wuthering Heights and started to read from the beginning again.

  Reading it was different this time. Again, she recognized the room in which she was living. She recognized the cadence of the Emily she’d known, in the writing. She got to the scene where Catherine is dying and cried as she read Heathcliff and Catherine’s words.

  “I have not one word of comfort. You deserve this. You have killed yourself. Yes, you may kiss me, and cry; and wring out my kisses and tears: they’ll blight you—they’ll damn you. You loved me—then what right had you to leave me? . . .”

  “Let me alone. Let me alone,” sobbed Catherine. “If I’ve done wrong, I’m dying for it. It is enough! You left me too: but I won’t upbraid you! I forgive you. Forgive me!”

  “It is hard to forgive, and to look at those eyes, and feel those wasted hands,” he answered. “Kiss me again; and don’t let me see your eyes! I forgive what you have done to me. I love my murderer—but yours! How can I?”

  Emily was an unmarried woman who’d never been in love, so it said, in so many words, in the introduction to Emily’s novel, Wuthering Heights. The passion in Emily’s novel, the scholar wrote, was based on her inviolable love of God, and readers of the time, it went on to say, were shocked by the cruel and the malicious in Wuthering Heights, couldn’t fathom how a virgin spinster could be behind such writing.

  They hadn’t read what Eleanor had read. Emily had been in love. Robert was her promise and life, but her conscience had pulled at her, pulled her home to Haworth to care for Branwell. Torn between two men.

  Like a faint sense of the sun before it would rise, it dawned on Eleanor what kind of difference the right and wrong choice mig
ht make, in loving.

  Branwell died in September and Emily in December 1848. But Robert . . . Eleanor wondered if Emily had ever gone to find him.

  Tilda always kept the pitcher in Eleanor’s small room filled with clean, cold water. Eleanor poured some into the large bowl and splashed her face. It was late in the evening and she was hungry. Going down the tight back stairwell, her right shoulder bumped the wall and shook the sconce, whose light flickered, and she had the feeling that she had been bumping into that same wall for decades, even centuries, and it brought a sense of faith and hope. Simple things that encouraged her. She continued down the stairs and saw Mead at the kitchen table reading his pink newspaper.

  “You’ve been inside all day,” he said.

  “I’ve just come down to make a sandwich. Were you out walking?” she asked.

  It sounded bewilderingly like a married couple’s everyday exchange. She tried to find something sassy to say, but it wouldn’t come. The kiss he’d given her in the car had disoriented her completely.

  “I didn’t go out today, no,” he said, “but the library’s nearly finished.”

  They’d each spent the whole day at home. It was evening and hours stretched before them. She took bread from the bin and slathered it with mayonnaise. The kitchen seemed to her, for the first time, like a common kitchen, a place for making cheddar cheese and tomato sandwiches.

  He seemed to sense she was uneasy. “Why don’t I open some wine?”

  “That’d be great.”

  Mead put down the paper. “I’ll go to the cellar and grab a good bottle.” She thought he might kiss her again, but he headed out the door and she was glad.

  It was hard not to imagine that Mead might be able to make sense of a lot of things. He had already begun to understand about the woman she’d seen on the moors, and he might be able to make sense of the letters she’d found. Knowing Haworth and how much was invested in the accepted story of the Brontës, she wasn’t at all sure she should say something, but neither could she fathom holding on to it all by herself.

  Rattling in her mind were thoughts about Emily and her sad choice and the way she died. She couldn’t shake the thought that her mother had died, had died young, but she didn’t know of any choice she’d faced, except the little boy her grandmother had called her mother’s shadow. And Alice had maybe escaped all this, by wearing the ring, in loving Gwen, in loving Gwen well, in staying close to home. Eleanor didn’t know how to add it up, what it all meant. Emily had driven her toward the letters without explaining. If there was a curse, Eleanor feared she was somehow a part of it. She had tears in her eyes when Mead came in.

  “Hey, what’s the trouble?”

  He put the bottle of wine on the table and walked around behind her chair. He put his hand on her neck like a friend might, though the feeling he pulled inside was nothing like the feeling a friend might. The knot in her hair loosened and Mead said a swift sorry as he took the loose hair he’d undone and pulled it into a ponytail, tried to help with a bun, as she reached back and his hand was on her hand and she showed him how she twisted it and knotted it in one swift move. He leaned toward her, over the back of the chair, over her shoulder, and he kissed her cheek and tasted what was left of the tears.

  He walked around to the other side and sat across from her.

  “Tell me,” he said. He said it so kindly, so simply, so completely without guile. He opened the wine. Poured two glasses, moved slowly and quietly enough not to interrupt her at all.

  Her words tumbled out. “Today, I wandered through that closed-up part of the house, and I saw my mother’s room up there. I saw the room she grew up in. Have you seen it? Was it there when you were small, just frozen in time like that?”

  He bobbed his head back and forth to say “more or less.” He took a great swallow of the rich red wine.

  She didn’t know how to continue. “I’ve been reading some letters my mother wrote to my father and there was one she wrote the year before I was born. She wrote to ask him to promise to come back here with her. Here to Yorkshire. She said it a bunch of different ways, but it was the same idea, she just kept asking him to promise he’d come back with her, but even more that he wouldn’t let her come back alone.”

  “Did he answer?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think he ever came, but I know she came back alone. At least that once.”

  Mead’s eyes held hers with compassion.

  “It seemed like she wanted my father to leave his print on this place. To mark it, make it not just hers but his, too.” She stopped and shook her head as if she were trying to shake sense into it. How crazy would it be to tell him she was afraid of a curse?

  Mead refilled their glasses and offered her some water to drink, because he knew she liked drinking water.

  “Did you know she died here in a car crash?” she asked.

  “I didn’t know exactly that. I knew she died here. I remember her a bit.”

  “Shit. I never even thought of that. You knew her.” Wispy dismay. “Now, I am spinning.”

  “I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “No, it’s okay.” She looked at his green eyes, his dark hair with hints of red Viking underneath, and she remembered how complex it was where he’d come from, who he was, who he might feel himself to be.

  “It’s great that you knew her,” she said.

  “I wish I could say I knew her. I just barely remember . . .”

  “I didn’t even know my mother was coming here. That’s kind of weird, I think, right?” Her brain felt heavy with thinking and her body was tired and she realized how long she’d been carrying the weight of mystery around, unasked and unanswered, inside her.

  She felt Mead’s presence, more conspicuous than ever before.

  He could carry some of the weight of it. He already did. He had dazzling eyes and there was something arresting in the way he listened to her, carefully, spoke sparingly, and paid attention to little things. Small things. Important things.

  He pushed away from the table, came around again to her, and took her face between his hands and kissed her lips. Deliberately and passionately he kissed her and she felt herself unwinding, disintegrating, and coming back together all at the same time. He kissed her again, this time lightly.

  “Take a bite of your sandwich,” he said, and she did. The grainy bread and cheese. He sat down across from her.

  “Maybe you know more about all this than I do,” she said.

  “I don’t think I do. I know a thing or two, but not more than you.”

  She sighed. “I want to tell you about something I found.”

  “Should I be worried?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “But you’re not sure.”

  “No, I am sure. Up in that strange part of the house. I was looking because Emily told me she’d hidden letters somewhere in this house. That it was important that I find them. And I did. It was a fluke that I found them, but they were in a little box. They were handwritten letters to Emily from a man named Robert Macaulay.” Her eyes were glassy as she looked into his.

  “I can honestly say you’ve got my full attention.”

  “This man named Robert Macaulay walked here, to Yorkshire, from the Outer Hebrides.”

  Mead’s eyebrows rose and fell.

  “He walked all the way to the moors, close by here, close to Trent Hall, and out there, by accident one day, he ran into Emily Brontë. She was staying here with friends, and she and Robert Macaulay fell in love.”

  “This was all in the letters?”

  “It was. And more.” Again she paused. “Robert wrote about setting out and walking to clear his head, to get away from his life and find quiet . . .”

  “Ah, he was a scarperer,” Mead interjected.

  “I don’t think so.” He didn’t seem to be ta
king it in. “Have you heard this before?”

  Solemn, Mead shook his head.

  “They had this place they met where they had picnics she brought and they went for walks and then in the evening . . . it’s fancy language but it sounds like they made love out there. He stayed at a pub nearby and she was here, at this house.”

  He reached across the table and took both her hands in his. “I’ve heard about some of this from Alice. Not facts and not from letters. Don’t be troubled, tell me more,” he said.

  Relieved, she went on. “Emily told me all of this. Everywhere she found me, she urged me to find these letters in the house, and I found them. I can hardly believe I found them. All these years, letters from him and a diary of hers, a drawing of Emily that he did . . .”

  Mead rubbed the side of his face with his hand; there was a burden in what she was telling him.

  “Emily’s brother, Branwell, was a twisted guy—something wasn’t right there. She didn’t go off with Robert, because of him. She was scared of lots of things, Emily. But, God, she was passionate. In one letter Robert wrote that she loved like she was dying of it.”

  Mead was deep in thought. He spoke softly. “I suppose she did die of it.”

  Eleanor looked up at him with tired eyes.

  “You have raw material, Eleanor, real evidence,” he said.

  Not fully comprehending the weight of this, Eleanor nodded. “Yes, I guess, evidence. She wrote the novel right then, too, in the middle of it all, after she went home to Branwell.”

  “It would mean a lot, to a lot of people, you know, to know this,” Mead said.

  “I don’t think anyone needs to know.” She held his eyes with hers.

  “It would become a spectacle.” Mead contemplated.

  “Emily wanted me to know. No one else has to know,” Eleanor said.

  His eyes took in the whole of her: spark, ground, wisdom. “Right,” he said. “Okay, then . . .”