by Celia Rees
“What about Natalie? Milo?”
“Unh-hn.” She could hear the shake of his head. “Won’t see them. Not allowed within a mile of the place. Only his family. And you. Nobody else.”
Lucy had wondered. Nothing about Tom on Natalie’s social media, or Milo’s. No #boyfriendsback or #bestmateoutofcoma. She hadn’t seen or heard from either of them, but it was the holidays and their social worlds did not coincide.
“OK,” she said. “When does he want to see me?”
“Now would be a good time.”
Tom was sitting up in bed. He smiled when she came in.
“At last! I’ve been waiting for you. Where have you been?”
“Uh, nowhere really.” She was tempted to take the “busy” line again but lying to him would be like lying to Joe. “I didn’t know if you’d want to see me,” she said.
“Why wouldn’t I? You were the only one who was there for me day in, day out—except for Joe.”
“And your parents.”
“They didn’t have a choice so they don’t count. Come—come here.” He patted a place next to him. “Sit on the bed.”
She went over and perched awkwardly.
“I do remember, you know,” he went on, as if he was the one who should put her at her ease. “I used to like you coming, you reading. I’d look forward to it. You have a nice voice, you know that?”
Lucy could feel herself blushing. “Yeah, well…”
“Don’t say anyone would have done it cos they wouldn’t and didn’t. My sister? Too busy getting her nails done—important stuff like that. Natalie? Too busy being Natalie and posting selfies. What were you reading, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Wuthering Heights. Emily Brontë. Didn’t you recognize it?”
He shook his head. “I’ve heard of her, of course. Just never read the book. Strictly science and maths, me.”
“Are you OK?”
He was trying to make a joke about it but his voice was weak and all the colour had drained from his face.
“Maybe I’m tiring you. I better leave…”
“Oh, no, no. Don’t go. I’m OK. Just low blood pressure, probably. Something like that…”
He lay back. How can I explain? Just her name had sent a deep, jolting pain to the region of his heart. But what could he say? How could he tell her? Tell anybody? He’d met a world-famous writer and she was just an ordinary girl. No. Not ordinary. Never that.
“Will you lend it to me? The book?”
“Sure.”
“I should get out of bed. Move about. Will you take a walk with me? Nowhere too exciting. End of the corridor and back is about all I can do. I’m supposed to take exercise. Left me weak as a kitten. Legs are a bit wobbly. Can you grab that dressing gown for me and the slippers?” He gave a wry grin. “They’re my dad’s. Feel like an old man in more ways than one. I might have to lean on you.”
“That’s OK.”
“Awkward, huh?” He leant into her. He was taller and she thought he’d be heavier. He’d lost weight, lying there on the bed. “What do you reckon on our chances in the three-legged race?”
“At the moment? Nil.”
“High as that?”
“We might get better with practice.”
“Practice? I’d like that. Same place, same time?” He stopped at the turn of the corridor. “We could build it up. Go further. I don’t even know what’s round the corner. We could explore! It gets boring in here,” he said as they started off again. “And I miss you reading.”
“You can read yourself now.”
“I guess. Tell you what I won’t be doing—playing video games. Milo was here just now. Desperate to tell me how he’d saved me, what a hero he was. Then he offered to let me try out his latest ‘gaming concept’—still at development stage, he says. Can you believe that?”
“Of Milo? Yes. Totally. I thought you didn’t want to see him?”
“I relented. I guess I owe him.” He couldn’t explain just how much. If it wasn’t for Milo, he never would have met her… “Emily,” he said as they came back to his door. “What else did she write, besides Wuthering Heights?”
“Nothing.” Lucy shrugged. “No more novels, anyway. Poetry. I can bring you some in to read.”
“I’d like that.”
“She died before she could write another novel.”
“How old was she?”
“She was thirty.”
“That’s not very old.” His eyes suddenly filled. “Sorry.” He sniffed. “I get emotional for no reason.”
“That’s OK.” She handed him a tissue from the box on the stand by the bed. “Understandable after what you’ve been through.” She helped him up on to the bed. “A lot of her writing was destroyed.”
He frowned. “How was that?”
“Who knows?” Lucy sat on the side of the bed. “Maybe she did it herself. Or maybe it was her sister, Charlotte.” There was a pause. Lucy took a deep breath. What the hell—she had nothing to lose. “Tell you what. I’m planning a trip to Haworth, to the Parsonage, where they lived. Would you like to come with me? When you’re better, I mean. When you’re stronger, obviously. And only if you’re interested, that is. I’ve passed my test. I can drive us there.” It all came out in a rush, too fast and too much. “Of course, you don’t have to,” she added quickly. “Really. I don’t know why I thought… We’re doing Wuthering Heights for A level and… and I’ve developed a bit of an obsession—with Emily. I was going to go with my mum, but I just thought… You don’t have to, honestly. Forget—”
“Sssh!”
Tom laughed and shook his head. He laughed because it felt good to laugh; because he could; because he was so glad to see her, and she was funny, even when she didn’t mean to be—especially when she didn’t mean to be; and he liked the way she blushed and the way she caught the tip of her tongue between her teeth. Joe called her the margay, the pretty one. Tom could see what he meant.
“I’d love to,” he said. “I really would.”
TOM WAS OUTSIDE THE PARSONAGE, leaning on the grit-stone wall. He couldn’t be inside any longer, going from room to room, up and down the narrow stairs, the guide’s voice droning in his ears. This was a special year and she was everywhere, her face on boards six foot high, the image taken from Branwell’s famous portrait of the sisters. Photographs of the actresses who’d played her in various films. Some pretty close likenesses; others nowhere near.
He’d suddenly felt faint and had to go out. It felt better outside. The weak autumn sun appeared from behind the running clouds, casting a golden light over everything. The wind, tugging in his hair, dried the sweat from his skin. He closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths, as Joe had told him to do, and then focused on the rough stone under his fingers, the grey and yellow frills of lichen, the bright green of the moss growing on the wall.
“Just breathe,” Joe had told him. “Take your attention to something outside yourself.”
If ever he felt like this, if ever any kind of panic threatened to overtake him. And it did. He had to admit. He wasn’t over it yet. Not fully. It would take a long while.
He breathed deep, nostrils flaring, and caught the tang of woodsmoke in the air, with a sharper note of burning leaves. Someone having a bonfire. There was an allotment behind him. Probably coming from there. He looked round—actually, the smoke was coming from up behind the house. Tom boosted himself off the wall. He hadn’t noticed anything there before.
He crossed to the wall opposite and looked over. Up a slight slope, next to rows of bean sticks, a bonfire was burning. A girl stood next to it, a girl in a long chequered dress with a grey woollen shawl wrapped tightly around her. She was feeding small ink-marked pages, like leaves, into the fire. Tom looked around. Was this a re-enactment, a workshop, or what? But the wall he’d been leaning on just now had disappeared, along with half the buildings and all of the trees. He looked up at the girl as he opened the gate into the garden.
She
looked older than he remembered, thinner, taller. Keeper was by her side, wearing the big brass collar Tom had just seen in the museum. The dog got to his feet slowly as Tom approached. He was older, too. The growl growing in his throat turned to a yelping yawn as Tom held out his hand. The big dog reared up, paws on Tom’s shoulders, nearly knocking him over.
“Hey, boy.” Tom stroked the big head. “Good to see you, too.”
Emily looked up at the sound of his voice. She tucked a lock of straying dark hair behind her ear and shaded her eyes against the dazzle from the fleeting sun.
“Oh, it’s you.” She smiled, her grey eyes pale as the clouds scudding over the moors behind her. “What took yer so long?”
She tore up the last of the little books and dropped the leaves into the fire.
“Come, lad.” She held her hand out to him, so thin and white it was almost transparent. “Come wi’ me.”
She led him out of the little garden and up on to the moors that lay beyond it.
“There you are! I wondered where you’d got to!” Her voice changed to concern as she saw his face. “Are you OK? You look very pale.”
Tom turned, and the world turned with him. Woodsmoke drifted from the allotments. An old man was raking leaves. The modern world came crashing back. Tom was outside the Parsonage as it was now, surrounded by trees, swollen with extensions and the extra buildings tacked on to the back of it, beleaguered by groups of visitors who had come from everywhere: Malaysian girls in hijabs; Japanese students taking selfies; Chinese tourists taking a group photograph, making rabbit ears above each other’s heads.
Lucy was looking up at him, a Brontë Parsonage Museum bag swinging from her arm. The group of Japanese students was forming up outside the entrance, the air full of their excited chatter. Another lot were in the garden, taking more photographs, swarming everywhere. Still more were issuing from the gift shop’s exit, toting bags like Lucy’s.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. I’m good. Felt a bit strange in there, that’s all. Claustrophobic. Too many people. Just needed to come outside. Get some fresh air.”
“Are you sure you’re all right? You’re not supposed to overdo it.”
Tom’s strength was coming back, but recovery was a slow process and it was going to take some time before he was back to normal.
“Yeah, yeah.” Tom boosted himself off the wall. “What now?”
“I want to go into the church. See where Emily’s buried.”
Tom looked up at the grey stone building and frowned.
“It’s not the original church,” Lucy said. “Not the one they knew. It was rebuilt in 1879.”
“What’s the point, then?”
“They’re still buried there.”
“It doesn’t seem right.” Tom shook his head. “She should be out here, not in some mouldy old vault.”
“Please, Tom. I’d really like to see her final resting place.”
“OK. Tell you what. Why don’t we go up on the moor, pick some heather for her? If she can’t be out here, we can take the moor in to her.”
“What a good idea. Are you sure you’re up to it, though?”
“We don’t have to go far. Don’t fuss. You’re my girlfriend, not my mother.”
“OK.”
They linked arms and set off, following a worn track up on to the moors.
“Let’s go a bit further—away from the tourists taking selfies.”
They walked on until they’d lost the crowd. Tom stopped next to a little dell. Above it stood a formation of rocks that looked very much like a chair.
“Oh, I know this,” Lucy said. “I read about it.” She took a photograph with her phone. “Ellen Nussey mentions it in her biography of Charlotte.”
Tom wasn’t listening. He was staring off at the skyline, at two figures silhouetted there, turning away from him—always turning away from him. Emily and a version of himself.
“Tom? The heather?”
“Oh, yeah. Right.” Tom took out a penknife and cut some sprigs, bound them into a bunch with a few spikes of rush.
They walked back to the squat, grey church, making their way through the crowded gravestone slabs and going in at a side door.
It wasn’t hard to find the Brontë Chapel. They were all buried together—apart from Anne, Lucy explained, who had died in Scarborough and was buried there.
THE
BRONTË FAMILY
VAULT
IS SITUATED BELOW
THIS PILLAR,
NEAR TO THE PLACE WHERE
THE BRONTËS’ PEW STOOD
IN THE OLD CHURCH.
THE FOLLOWING MEMBERS
OF THE FAMILY
WERE BURIED HERE
MARIA AND PATRICK.
MARIA, ELIZABETH,
BRANWELL,
EMILY JANE, CHARLOTTE.
“Why are they buried under a pillar?” Tom objected. “That’s a bit weird.”
“I don’t know. Maybe it happened when the church was rebuilt.”
“But why would they do that?” Tom went on. “I mean, these are the most famous people to be buried here and they stick them under a pillar!”
“I don’t know, Tom. Does it matter?”
“Suppose not,” he muttered, but somehow it did. It mattered a lot. He could feel the anger rising inside him and fought to control it, taking deep breaths. That was one of the things he’d been left with: mood swings.
He looked around for somewhere to place the heather. He didn’t want to put it at the bottom of the pillar. He had no sense of her there.
Nearby was a brass plaque set into the floor. Again, it seemed really arbitrary—vaguely positioned between a pillar and a wall.
IN MEMORY OF
EMILY JANE BRONTË
WHO DIED DEC. 19TH 1848,
AGED 30 YEARS.
Tom placed the little bunch of heather next to offerings laid by other people. He stood, hands clasped, head bowed, but he wasn’t praying for her because she wasn’t here. She was out there, somewhere, out on the moors, and some part of him would always be with her.
“Come, lad.” He heard her voice whisper. “Come wi’ me.”
“We Wove a Web in Childhood”
IN JUNE 1826, Branwell Brontë was given a box of wooden soldiers by his father, Patrick. He shared the gift with his sisters: ten-year-old Charlotte; Emily, who was eight; and Anne, the youngest, who was six. Each child seized a soldier and named him. Branwell called his Buonaparte, Charlotte chose the Duke of Wellington, Emily and Anne called theirs Gravey and Waiting Boy, later to be changed to the explorers Parry and Ross. These became the Young Men. The children immediately began to make up stories. They sent the Young Men off on an epic voyage of exploration and conquest that would take them to the west coast of Africa, where they would found their own country and build a new city, Glass Town, at the mouth of the Niger River.
The adventures of the Young Men were first explored as plays but soon they were written down in minuscule writing in tiny books no bigger than the palm of a child’s hand. The little books were stitched together and bound in sugar bags and wrapping paper—anything that the children could find about the Parsonage. The books contained stories, poems, articles produced for, about and by the inhabitants of Glass Town. They were handwritten, handmade versions of adult books and magazines with author, editor and publisher carefully printed out on the title page. The miniature books were for their toy soldier readers but their diminutive size also kept them away from the prying eyes of adults. The Brontë children wrote for themselves, for each other, the early stories reflecting their interest in violent battle scenes, bodysnatching and hauntings, magic and the supernatural. Their focus on the whole book, not just what was inside it, suggests that, even as children, they wrote to be published.
The siblings had plenty of material; they were very well informed. They studied current affairs in magazines and newspapers: the history of the Napoleonic Wars, the military leaders Wellington and Napoleon, explorati
on and emigration, national politics, local events like the riots and strikes in rapidly industrializing Haworth and nearby Halifax. They read widely and they absorbed everything: natural history and geography, the novels of Sir Walter Scott, The Arabian Nights (from where they borrowed the Genii), folk stories of fairies and ghosts on the moors. All that they read, all they were told, all that they learned fed into their writing and into the creation of the intense, complex fantasy worlds that were Glass Town, Angria and Gondal.
Over time, the writing became an increasingly sophisticated, fully realized world that was constantly evolving, added to and changing. They were creating a continually shifting social and political scene, which they illustrated with maps, drawings and paintings. The characters they had first created acquired stories and personalities of their own. Branwell’s Napoleon became Alexander Augustus Percy, Duke of Northangerland, also known as Rogue. Charlotte replaced the Duke with his sons, Arthur Wellesley, Marquis of Douro, and Lord Charles Wellesley. They peopled Glass Town with many other characters, high born and low: Branwell’s “rare lads”, the resurrectionist Dr Bady. Charlotte provided various wives, lovers and mistresses: Lady Zenobia Ellrington, Mina Laury, Marian Hume. Many of these characters appear in Glass Town Wars. Charlotte and Branwell wrote extensively about their characters, adding others and involving them all in a dizzying catalogue of wars, feuds, and a complex web of relationships. Ross and Parry remained Emily and Anne’s preferred characters, along with Johnny Lockhart. I confess to borrowing Augusta (Augusta Geraldine Almeida) from their later fantasy of Gondal.
At the beginning, all the siblings were involved in Glass Town and Angria, but nothing written by Emily or Anne survives. All of the little books in existence now are the work of Branwell or Charlotte. An intense rivalry developed between these two. Maybe Emily and Anne tired of this exclusion, or the society as imagined by Charlotte and Branwell was not to their liking. In 1831, the two younger sisters went off to found Gondal, an island in the Pacific Ocean ruled by a passionate, powerful queen, in contrast to the male heroes of Angria and Glass Town. Unfortunately, all we have left of Gondal are a few poems. The worlds that they created had a powerful hold on all the siblings well into adult life. Charlotte bade farewell to Angria when she was twenty-three, but Branwell and Emily continued to be absorbed by their imaginary worlds right up to their untimely deaths in 1848.