“I fear— I hardly know what exactly, but that my own position will be compromised,” said Miss Brontë, her voice more animated than I had heard before. “Did you see how much wine he drank at dinner? Or how he looked at Mrs. Robinson? He’s immoderate, reckless. I wish you would take him away. No good will come from this.”
My heart expanded and contracted with each sentence she uttered, then overflowed with the most important revelation. He had looked at me. He had noticed me. I was no longer alone.
“Hush, daughter,” Reverend Brontë said.
There was a pause. I imagined they were embracing and gave them a moment before I swept down the staircase and into sight.
“Dinner is over, then?” I asked them with a smile.
Father and daughter exchanged a worried glance.
“Mr. Robinson and my son are settling a geographical dispute by consulting an atlas in your library, Mrs. Robinson. When they are finished, I’m afraid I must be on my way,” the Reverend Brontë said, with a short bow.
“You won’t stay?” I reached out my hand so the Reverend would kiss it. It was difficult not to let my face fall.
There would be no music tonight, then. No more chances for me to watch Branwell and assess the truth of Miss Brontë’s observation. At the beginning, in the early years of living at the Hall with Edmund, I couldn’t wait for guests to depart at the end of the evening, leaving us, at last, to each other. But now—
“I’m afraid not,” Reverend Brontë replied. “My presence is necessary early tomorrow in York. Please accept my deepest thanks for your hospitality and that of your husband.”
* * *
“OH, I DOUBT ANYONE will even notice, and here I am fretting, Marshall. You shouldn’t let me rattle on so,” I said, turning from the mirror.
“I’m sure they’ll mark how fine you’re looking, madam, but they won’t pay no attention to some gray crepe at your cuffs. At least I reckon not, ma’am.”
Marshall was right. Nobody but me would care if my black was trimmed with gray, a promise of an easier tomorrow. Besides, it was a foolish thing to wear your grief, to veil yourself with what you felt inside.
I smiled up at her, leaning against Marshall’s bony chest since the dressing stool had no back. She always knew just what to say, in situations when Edmund would not. Or no, he knew by now what it was that I wanted to hear, but withheld it almost from spite.
“Leave my hair.” I grabbed her hand—large, chafed, red—a little too hard and then kissed it by way of apology. “It is early and the sun is shining at last. I’ll take a walk and let it dry in the air. The exercise will do me good.”
“You’ll catch a chill, madam,” she said, but she stepped aside to let me go, lifted a silver brush from the dressing table, and started to extract the hair, remnants of the youth and beauty I would never regain—long, silky, black.
I passed the housekeeper, Miss Sewell, on the landing. My throat tightened to think that she might note the lighter details in my dress and judge my grief light also. But she was scolding Ellis and didn’t notice me sail by.
There was something delicious about the solitude of the Hall’s grounds early in the morning, when the sun was out and the world alive to the promise of spring. I threw back my head to let the rays lick my face. The wind lifted my hair, dispersing the water that had weighed it down. A duck skipped from one spot on the fishpond to another with a confusion of wings, setting circle upon circle vibrating across the surface.
I imagined Edmund, deep in thought, strolling from his desk to the window and catching sight of me far below, his heart stirring in recognition of the girl I had been, sensitive to each tremor of nature’s orchestra, subject to the seasons as much as the birds and the flowers and the trees.
“Your capacity for joy almost scares me,” he’d said once, in the weeks before our wedding, when we, a betrothed couple, were at last allowed some time alone. “For mustn’t it be matched by fathomless unhappiness? I have always been a quiet, steady man. No woman has moved my heart before. Until you.”
I sat on the low stone wall that surrounded the pool, but not because I wanted to rest. It completed the picture—the woman in black gazing out across the troubled reflection of the sky, trailing her gloveless fingers in the water.
I drew back. It was cold. Winter was not ready for her abdication. I rubbed my hands together and glanced back at the house and then in the other direction, toward the outbuildings, to check if anyone had seen me indulging in my fantasy. I might not be as young as I was back then, but mightn’t I still move him?
I was alone, but floating toward me on the wind was something unexpected—a sheet of paper. It circled nearer, yet evaded me when I reached for it. I jumped up and grasped it with my wet hand, leaving a constellation of dark blots along the right side.
March 30th 1843, Thorpe Green
I sit, this evening, far away,
From all I used to know,
And nought reminds my soul to-day
Of happy long ago.
“Thank you!” I was interrupted before I could read the rest—four more verses that snaked down the page in strong, dark, even handwriting. Mr. Brontë was striding toward me, his shirt hanging loose, his hair uncombed, and a bundle of manuscript pages and sketches clamped under one arm, while in his other hand he held a cane.
“Mr. Brontë,” I said, flustered. I proffered the page, as if there were no scribblings in the world I wished to read less.
“Please excuse my appearance, Mrs. Robinson,” Mr. Brontë said, equally embarrassed, not taking the poem, but switching his cane to the other hand and smoothing his hair. “A morning habit of mine—editing last night’s feeble attempts at poetry. Forgive me.”
It was ridiculous. Me, with wet hair, in a gown too frivolous for a housekeeper to see me in, constructing a tableau for an absent audience, and the unkempt tutor playing the eccentric poet. I laughed, and, while Mr. Brontë looked puzzled, I felt a new fragile bond forming between us.
“Are you really that unhappy here?” I asked him, as he sequestered the escaped paper amongst the others. “You might have told your father so.”
He shrugged. “I am as happy here as I’d be anywhere else.”
The bitterness of his reply shocked me. He was young, unfettered, and the darling of his father’s eye. Could he have felt life’s cruelties already? I don’t want a repetition of what happened at the railway. That’s what the Reverend Brontë had said. Whatever had brought him to this place, and to me, Mr. Brontë had the look of the man who wrestled with demons.
“And you, Mrs. Robinson?” he asked, the left side of his lip curling. “Are you happy?”
I struggled between my desperate want of company and a desire to put him in his place, but he went on before either side could win the battle.
“To lose your mother and your daughter in a year must be a lot to bear. Do you think of her often? I’m sorry, I do not know her name.”
“Georgiana,” I whispered. I’d missed saying it. “I do.”
“And when you think of Georgiana, do you dream of some glorious day when she will be returned to you, when the dead will join the living throng, or do you see only the day that you lost her, when she was stolen from you, although she was innocent and you have always praised God and considered Him kind and just?” His rage bubbled below the surface, shooting up like sudden hot springs in the sea of his eyes.