MYSTERY “BRONTË MANUSCRIPT” DISCOVERED AT YORKSHIRE SCHOOL
YORKSHIRE—Brontë scholars and fans are reeling today from the discovery of a manuscript purported to describe a long-suspected affair between Branwell Brontë, ill-fated brother of the famous Brontë sisters, and his employer’s wife.
Steven Hill, janitor at Queen Ethelburga’s Collegiate in Yorkshire, was cleaning a storage room in preparation for the new school year when he came across the document. “It was very yellow, very dusty,” he told reporters who’d flocked to the quiet village of Little Ouseburn. “And the only name on the front was ‘L. Robinson.’ I was about to chuck it out with the rest of the rubbish when I flicked through it and noticed a word several times that stood out to me— ‘Brontë.’ ”
Queen Ethelburga’s has long been proud of its Brontë heritage. The school is on the site of Thorp Green Hall, the house where Branwell worked along with his youngest sister, Anne, whose novels Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall have won more modest fame, compared to Charlotte’s Jane Eyre and Emily’s Wuthering Heights. The students chose Charlotte Brontë’s novel Villette as the inspiration for their end-of-year play last term, while one of the younger classes has been caring for four pet mice appropriately christened “Charlotte,” “Branwell,” “Emily,” and “Anne.”
“We’re all very excited about the manuscript,” a spokesperson for the school told reporters today. “Though we fear not all of its contents may be suitable for children.”
Indeed, if the manuscript is genuine, it promises to put an end to nearly two centuries of speculation about the Brontë/Robinson affair—one of the most scandalous episodes in the literary family’s brief but momentous lives. Mrs. Gaskell, fellow Victorian novelist and Charlotte’s first biographer, described Lydia Robinson, the assumed authoress of the text, as a “profligate woman” who tempted Branwell “into the deep disgrace of deadly crime.”
The school board must also be anticipating the potential financial windfall from any sale of the document. The Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth didn’t even wait to confirm the manuscript’s veracity before launching a crowd-funding campaign to secure this salacious piece of British history, while wealthy American collectors are said to already be circling this sleepy English village.
Generations of book lovers have delighted in the “madwoman in the attic” and the timeless love of Cathy and Heathcliff on the moors. Will Mrs. Robinson’s newly discovered account prove that fact can be just as dramatic as fiction?
CHAPTER ONE
January 1843
ALREADY A WIDOW IN all but name. Fitting that I must, yet again, wear black.
Nobody had greeted me on my return, but Marshall at least had thought of me. She’d lit a feeble fire in my dressing room and laid out fresh mourning in the bedroom, spectral against the white sheets. I smoothed out a pleat, fingered a hole in the veil. Just a year since I’d last set these clothes aside, and now Death had returned—like an expected, if unwanted, visitor this time, not a violent thief in the night.
What a homecoming. No husband at the door, no children running down the drive.
I’d sat alone in the carriage, huddled under blankets, through hours of abject silence, with only the bleak Yorkshire countryside for company, but I didn’t have the patience to ring for Marshall now. I tugged, laced, and hooked myself, racing against the cold. I had to contort to close the last fixture. My toe caught in the hem.
The landing outside my rooms was empty. The carpet’s pattern assaulted my eyes, as if I’d been gone for weeks, not days. Home was always strange after an absence, like returning to the setting of a dream.
But it wasn’t just that.
Thorp Green Hall was unusually still. Silence seeped through the house, except for the ticking of the grandfather clock that carried from the hall. Each home has its music, and ours? It was my eldest daughter banging doors; the younger girls bickering; Ned, my son, charging down the stairs; and the servants dropping pails and pans and plates with clatter upon clatter. But not today. Where was everyone?
I halted before the closed study door and gave a light rap, but my husband did not respond, much less emerge to greet me. Edmund would be in there, though. He was always hiding in there. I could picture him—taking off his glasses and squinting toward the window at the crunch of the carriage wheels on the gravel, shaking his head and returning to his account book when he realized it was only me.
I shouldn’t have expected anything else. After all, I hadn’t bid him good-bye on my departure, just turned on my heel and exited the room when he’d told me he wouldn’t come with me to Yoxall.
“Your mother’s death was hardly unexpected,” he’d said with a shrug, and something about how she’d lived a good life.
He was right, of course. Or, at least, the world’s opinion was closer to Edmund’s than to mine. Mother had been old and ill. Her life had been happy and her children were many. Few thought it fit to weep, as I did, at her funeral.
But something had come over me after the service when the splintered crowd stood around her open grave, although I wasn’t sure it was grief for Mother at all. The wind howled. The sleet smacked against us. My brothers flanked our fading father, their faces uniform as soldiers’. My sister was solemn, with her eyes downcast, as her husband thanked the vicar. But I had been angry, with an anger that leaked out in pathetic, rain-mingled tears and made me angrier still.
I didn’t knock again but went instead to the schoolroom—to the children. I needed them, anyone, to embrace me, touch me, so I could feel alive.
I could not suppress my disappointment when I reached the threshold. “Oh, Miss Brontë,” I said, my voice flat. “I didn’t know you’d returned.”
Our governess was alone. She’d been retrieving a book from below the Pembroke table but at my entrance, she stood to attention. “I arrived back yesterday, Mrs. Robinson,” she said. “I hope you’ll accept my condolences.”
Was it the ill-fitting mourning dress, or was she even thinner than when I had seen her last? Her gown gaped at the cuffs and hung loose around her waist.
“And you mine,” I said, avoiding her eye.
I’d taken to bed with a headache that day a few months ago when a letter had summoned Miss Brontë home to her dying aunt. I had meant to write to her, but somehow there had never been time, what with the house and Christmas. Or perhaps the empty words would not flow from my pen now that I’d been forced to endure so many.
“Where are my daughters?” I asked, anxious to end our tête-à-tête.
Miss Brontë gestured toward the clock on the mantel, half-obscured behind a volume of Rapin’s History of England. It was five minutes past four. “We have just concluded today’s lessons with an hour of arithmetic,” she said, failing to answer my question.
I sighed and sat, slumping onto the low and book-strewn couch and staring into the last of the spluttering fire.
It had never appeared to bother Miss Brontë, the lack of common ground between us, but it stung me as yet another rejection. She had been little more than a child when she’d joined us nearly three years ago. Pale, mousy-haired, unable to meet my eye. I had thought she might look up to me. I could have acted as her patroness, bestowed on her my attention and all I could have taught her of the world. But time and again, she’d snubbed me, preferring the solitude of her books and sketching.