“More like you need to learn some respect.”
“Oh, really?” Toby has the mad, giddy sensation that he might be about to enter into his first ever fight. If he imagines that the stranger’s face is that of the noted cultural commentator Dr J J Salazar he suspects that he might even stand a chance.
The man steps closer. “Who uses a phone box these days, anyway?”
“Besides you, you mean?”
“I’m waiting for a call. I weren’t making one.”
“I see. Then I’m terribly sorry to have hijacked your office.” His appetite for confrontation already flagging, Toby turns now and starts to walk again the way he has come, towards the bench and the town beyond.
“Mate!” The man is shouting after him.
“What?”
“You’re not scared? Turning your back on me?”
Judd stops, turns back. “No, I’m not frightened of you,” he says. “Not that I mightn’t have been once. But after today—when you realise the scale of what’s against you, when you realise you’ve got nothing left to lose… well, there’s an odd kind of liberty in that. You don’t know it but you were present when I made the most important decision of my life and—I freely accept—very possibly the last.”
“Which was what?” asks the man contemptuously.
Toby looks him directly in the eyes. “To get to the truth. Whatever the cost.” He smiles and bows his head. If he had a hat, he thinks, he’d doff it. “Good afternoon to you.”
ALMOST EXACTLY ONE hour later, a man pays cash for a one-way coach ticket to Edinburgh. He is small, slim, rather beleagueredlooking and dressed in an old cord jacket. He sits quietly towards the back of the vehicle as it trundles towards Scotland. He is meditative in Southampton, faraway in the Midlands, lost in the North and almost asleep as darkness falls and they approach the edge of England. No-one sits next to him—he has, you see, become the kind of man whom other travellers avoid, the one who talks to himself, the oddball, the nutter. On the empty seat beside him is an old sports bag, with a copy of the London Evening Standard laid on top. The headline of the day is just visible. It reads: MURDERED COP NAMED.
As for the close-up photograph which accompanies the piece, you would no doubt recognise—as did Toby Judd, with grief and panic seizing at his heart like a snake about a mouse—the honest, pensive face of Sergeant Isaac Angeyo.
1842
THE PARSONAGE HAWORTH
LONG HAS THE shadow of death enfolded the parsonage. Showing no deference to the season, it is palpable here, now, even upon Christmas Day, as the family gather in their little parlour, filled with heartache and sorrow. They are five in number yet they are grievously depleted—a father is present and three girls and a son but their dear mother is twenty years in her grave and two other daughters, departed too soon, lie mouldering beside her.
It is of mortality, of course, that the patriarch is speaking as we draw near to them, of fragility, inevitability, impermanence. He is white-haired, bowed, sixty-five years old though he seems more senior still, with that great cravat which is bound about his neck like a funeral shroud, with his watery, sorrowful eyes and his trembling arthritic gait. When he speaks, his three surviving daughters—Emily, Charlotte, Anne—listen with dutiful attentiveness though the thoughts of that triumvirate are all, in their own ways, far from this isolated spot. The young man, Branwell, seems rather unsteady on his feet, a glass of whisky punch clasped in one hand.
The smell of roasting goose pervades the building. Outside, beyond the little window stretches the vast expanse of the moor. Bleak and seemingly limitless, it fills the horizon, its light dappling of snowfall serving not to render the scene a festive one but rather to accentuate its inhospitable, minatory qualities, its utter absence of mercy.
The old man’s voice is tired from hours at the church in the morning yet it is still firm from years of practice and skilful use. Whilst the rest of him, beset by grief, decays, that voice goes on.
“I wanted,” he begins, “before we sit down to eat, to say a few words about the year that has passed.”
His children, accustomed to such pre-prandial sermonising, listen respectfully. Only Emily, the middle daughter, seems distracted, her eyes flicking constantly from her father’s face to the view from the window, to the cruel sweep of the moor.
“Our losses have been severe. Mr Weightman has gone to a better place. Your beloved aunt also. And our particular friend, Dr Andrew. Such things are always hard and they seem at such times as these almost impossible to bear. Nonetheless, we must trust in the wisdom of the Lord and that, in drawing our dear friends to Him before what seems to us to be their natural time, He is fulfilling a divine design of which we are not granted comprehension. Today, of all days, we must trust in Him and we must yield to His wisdom and to His grace.” He turns to the youngest of his daughters. “Anne, my dear, I believe that you have something that you wish to share with us?”
The young woman in question, sober, dark-haired and with a certain pinched quality to her jaw, says: “A poem, father. In memory of Mr Weightman.”
“And you wish to recite it to us?”
“I do.”
At the prospect, her brother takes a sip of the punch. Charlotte’s lips purse. Emily’s gaze wanders outside towards the moor, the muddy green-brown of it capped with white. Her eyes seem to linger now upon a particular spot—on a dash of black in the palette. Something alien in the wilderness.
Her sister begins to speak, her words sugared and prim:
“I will not mourn thee, lovely one, Though thou art torn away.
’Tis said that if the morning sun Arise with dazzling ray
And shed a bright and burning beam, Athwart the glittering main,
Ere noon shall fade that laughing gleam Engulfed in clouds and rain.”
As her sibling speaks, Emily’s attention is all outside. The black speck, she sees now, is no mere quirk of the landscape, no stunted tree or discarded implement but rather something animate— something human.
“And if thy life as transient proved It hath been full as bright, For thou wert hopeful and beloved; Thy spirit knew no blight.”
These words barely penetrate Emily’s consciousness. The speck has resolved itself into a man, tall, saturnine and dressed in dark and sombre clothes. His movements are unsteady; he seems, more than once, to stumble and at the sight of the stranger’s approach, Emily, oddly, remembers her father’s description of the moor aflame that summer, when the rioters had come to Haworth, and feels, as then, a sensation of wrongness, an invasion from forces which do not belong to this place or this time. She looks at her family—their attention either on her sister or upon the whisky punch—and realises that she alone has seen the arrival of the newcomer.
Anne speaks on (“If few and short the joys of life / That thou on earth couldst know / Little thou knew’st of sin and strife—”) but Emily feels that she has no choice but to interrupt her. “Father!”
Anne stops speaking, the quaint Sunday school rhymes dying on her lips.
The old man is reproving yet indulgent. “Tish, Emily. Your sister was reciting.”
Outside, the stranger comes closer still, as if he moves faster when her eyes are not on him.
“I know that, father. Forgive me, but…”
“Yes, my dear. What is it?” A note of concern in the old priest’s voice. Disapproval from her sisters. Quiet amusement from her brother.
Outside, the dark man is nearer still, almost at the parsonage.
“There is a gentleman approaching us, father. It seems to me that he is in need of help.”
“A gentleman?” repeats the old man.
“There!” Emily all but shouts, frustrated that the others do not sense the urgency of the moment. She points dramatically, almost with a flourish, and the family turn to look.
And there he is, the tall man, staggering towards the parsonage. Spurred on, perhaps, by the sight of civilisation, by the proximity of people, he reaches the window, an
d for one delirious instant, Emily thinks that he might be about to break the pane and crash through it, tumbling into their sitting room. Instead, almost within reach of the sill, he simply stops and stands, like a seeker after alms, although Emily can tell from his clothes that he is nothing of the kind. He stares at them—and the family gaze bemusedly back. He stumbles as if he is about to fall, righting himself but barely. A moment later, he moves uncertainly away—searching, Emily has little doubt, for the front door.
“Who is that man?” says Anne.
Her father is abrupt. “He is not known to us. No parishioner he.”
Then, the inevitable: the stentorian sound of metal on wood.
“It’s him,” Charlotte all but squeals. “Knocking at our door!”
“Branwell?” The old man’s voice is grave. “Pray, put down your glass, sir, and come with me. It would seem that there is a matter which demands of us our immediate attention.”
The young man grudgingly sets down his drink. His father glances rheumily back at the ladies.
“Girls,” he says (for such is how he still addresses them for all that they have achieved their majority). “Stay in your proper place.”
And so Emily is left with the others with nothing to do but wait. As she does so she cannot help but think and in the course of her meditations, oblivious to the chatter of her sisters, a stray reflection becomes a certainty—that when the dark-haired stranger gazed wildly through the glass, that it was by her, and by Emily alone, that his attention was riveted.
A few minutes pass and Emily, frustrated, strains to hear what is taking place outside. There is but little to be heard—the reedy, insistent tones of her father, the slurred baritone of her brother and nothing at all of the voice of the stranger. In the corner of the room, her two sisters whisper excitedly to one another like elderly gossips and Emily suddenly finds herself of a mind to hurl something at them, to enjoin them to silence and ask them in her most unyielding tone whether they do not understand the evident severity of the thing which was now almost in their midst.
Then, before she can speak, the stranger is present, helped in by the two men of the family in the manner of a wounded general being helped from the battlefield by subordinates.
Even in his presently dilapidated state—wet, muddy, clothes a little ragged, unsteady on his feet and desperately short of breath— there is a presence to the man, Emily thinks, a sense of purpose and a kind of fierce dignity which does not somehow strike her as altogether benign. Above all, there is a wrongness, even an injustice, to his presence here, in their little parlour on this holiest of feast days, as though his likeness has been clipped from some unsuitable volume and pasted with slipshod malice upon a page of scripture. Her father and brother look surprised and out of sorts at his arrival.
When he speaks, the stranger’s voice is melodious and deep, with an undertow of something strange, less than orthodox. He stands free of his two rescuers.
“Ladies, I trust you will forgive me for my interrupting in so rough and vulgar a fashion…” He stumbles forwards, gasps. One hand darts towards his side. “I was lost, you see, and I had begun to fear the worst. I was lost upon the dreadful moor. You can scarcely imagine how grateful I was to spy your little dwellingplace and know that the promise of sanctuary lay within.”
“Enough, my boy.” Her father sounds, as he often does, kindly but abrupt. “You are quite exhausted and you must not excite yourself any further. Girls, girls, stand away from that young man.”
Charlotte and Anne who have clustered around the stranger cringe back at his command.
“Perhaps, father…” This is Branwell, already edging back towards the punch. “Perhaps a drink might revive our guest?”
“I wish to cause no trouble to you, friends,” says the stranger. “Only for a few moments respite. Then you have my word that I shall be on my way.” He sways, stumbles, gasps a little as if in pain. “You see…” His eyes dart towards the window and to the moor beyond. “I believe myself to be pursued.” He shudders, not theatrically, Emily thinks, but rather from some profound internal conflict. He smiles weakly and Emily sees that there is blood— there is blood in his mouth. “Yet I am forgetting my manners. I have yet to introduce myself. I am very pleased to make your acquaintance. My name—” He totters, rights himself, winces. “My name…”
No further words come. His hands drop by his side and without any sound at all, like a tree felled in the forest, the stranger falls forward upon the parlour floor, with a look of something close to agony on his face.
HOURS HAVE PASSED. That late luncheon has become early supper. A little singed and spoilt, perhaps, but it has been devoured with gratitude all the same. The family, sated and drowsy, have returned to the sitting room, the shutters of its windows closed now against the night and against the oppression of the moor. Branwell is already asleep, a half-empty glass in one hand, the remaining liquid tilted within. Charlotte and Anne sit beside one another, exchanging whispers. The word “Brussels” is regularly heard. Their father sits with his eyes closed and the top of his cravat loosened, whether in a posture of penitence or somnolence it is impossible to tell.
Emily sits apart from the rest. A book—the Biographia Literaria—lies open but unread upon her lap. Her lips are a little parted, her eyes are shining and she is listening. As for the parsonage’s unsolicited guest, he is upstairs in the room which had until less than two months before been occupied by the nowdeparted aunt. The men had laid him down in there as gently as they were able. The parson himself had spoken a prayer over his comatose form but it had been decided that he should be left to recuperate until the morning. They could not call out the doctor on so sacred an evening and, besides, they were not certain that they entirely trusted the new physician yet.
So there he is, thinks Emily, lying asleep in a dead woman’s bedroom. Emily knows it is most improper yet she feels drawn to the stranger as might a hare to a baited trap and so, having thought of little else, through the family’s repast and the homilies and speculations which have provided much of the surrounding conversation, she arrives at her decision.
Emily sets the book aside, rises to her feet, murmurs her excuses and leaves, ascending the stairs as gently as she can, her footfalls as soft as she can make them.
On the first floor, she steals along the hallway to the cramped bedroom at the end of it. The door is ajar, the chamber within shadowed and still. Suddenly a little doubtful but knowing that it is far too late to turn back, she steps inside.
The visitor is almost too large for the bed and his position seems oddly precarious, as if he might at any moment vanish from their lives as swiftly as he has entered it. For a time she does no more than watch him sleep, sprawled out in that little space, his breathing feverish and irregular, his handsome face slick with perspiration.
Emily, sensing that she has intruded, wonders why she has come, marvelling at the way in which, even in so reduced a state as this, the man can exert so awful an fascination. Nonetheless, summoning all her powers of resistance, she turns her back upon him and is about to creep from his presence when she hears from behind her his soft voice. “Emily?”
Slowly, she turns to face him.
“Yes,” he says. “Yes, I had hoped it would be you.” She feels hot and she is herself perspiring, as though she has stepped too close to a furnace. “Sir?”
“Will you sit beside me for a while? I’d like someone with me… at the end.”
She does as she has been asked, almost without thinking. There is a stool beside the bed upon which she sits, dragging it a little closer to the stranger so that she might take his hand in hers. His skin is clammy and febrile.
“Perhaps you have caught a chill, sir?” she says, although she fears that the man’s complaint may be rather more severe than that. “We shall call for the surgeon in the morning.”
He smiles strangely. “He is not for me. Nor I for him. And by the morning it shall certainly be too late.”
He breathes out. The process sounds as if it is a painful one.
“You will die here,” he says matter-of-factly. “Here in this house.” Emily thinks before she replies. “I believe… that I have always known that, sir.”
“Forgive me. I am on occasion granted glimpses of what is yet to come. Of late, such instances have been becoming more frequent.” Emily could not explain her certainty but somehow she does not doubt him. Fearful, she asks: “What are you, sir?”
“For a long time I had but an imperfect notion. But now I believe that I am finally starting to understand. This is the year, you see— this is the year of foundation. And this very moment, somewhere in London, it is beginning. And the darkness is almost upon me.
I am to be granted new purpose and I can hold out against it no longer.”
To her surprise, for she is far from unaccustomed to illness and suffering, Emily’s cheeks are wet with tears. “Please, sir. Please!
You have to try.”
“I have done my best to be a good man, Emily. I fear I have succeeded only in proving ineffectual. All that is to be swept aside now.”
“You speak of sin, sir?”
“Yes. If you like. A great tide of sin that is to swallow me at any moment. And after that deluge I fear I shall not be the same man.
I will be… grievously transformed.”
She feels such pity for him for she discerns within his words a terrible truth and so she holds his hand a little tighter and she squeezes, willing him to be wrong, urging, like Polidori and Maria before her, the good man to thwart the other.
“Do you sense it?” he asks now. “It approaches. The tide draws near. My transformation is at hand.”
She understands whereof he speaks. Do not the shadows of the place seem deeper now and darker? Is not the air charged and in a state of strange excitation as it is before the mightiest of thunderstorms? And is there not to be heard, faraway but growing swiftly closer, a sound like rushing water?
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