“I cannot—that is to say, I dwell on it only rarely,” I answered, not looking at him but somewhere beyond him, near the washhouse, turning over each word before speaking, inspecting its honesty.
Yesterday Ned had run into my dressing room, excited, his foolish fears of a few weeks before forgotten. “Do you know what Mr. Brontë says?” he’d asked, tugging at me. “He says that in Egypt, they weighed your heart against a feather to see if you were good enough for heaven.”
I walked away from the house, where others would be stirring, sure that Mr. Brontë would follow me.
“When I come too close to it,” I said, “to thinking of Georgiana, I mean, it seems to me that I am in danger of blinding myself by staring into the heart of the sun.”
Ned’s talk of an exotic afterlife must have given my thoughts an imaginative bent. I almost cringed at my sincerity but spoke on, my opinions on questions others had never asked me about crystallizing before me, my words tumbling out as if I were afraid I might lose them.
“Edmund and my father wouldn’t like to hear me say so, but with others I have seen buried, I see nothing, nothing at all, beyond absence and darkness—the same darkness I know will one day swallow me, you, and everyone up.”
We had passed the last of the outbuildings, the granary, and were now quite alone and out of sight. But which way to go? If we veered left, we’d end up back at the Monk’s House, where Mr. Brontë slept. I made instead for the track that ran through a thick cluster of trees that the children called “the woods.”
“Mr. Brontë, it is my deficit of feeling that alarms me, then,” I continued. “My eyes stay dry, although when I was a child, they could have watered the world with my tears. But Georgiana’s loss—it burns through me. So I busy myself with ordering Lydia’s bonnets or correcting Bessy’s manners, even though they don’t care for me at all and didn’t even when they were little. Not the way Georgie did when she threw her arms around my neck or called out for me in the night. Only I, not Marshall or your sister, could console her then.”
I could not remember the last time I had spoken at such length, and panic rose inside me when he did not reply at once. But I shouldn’t have feared. Mr. Brontë was a rebel as much as me, both of us the children of dour clergymen yet unsuited to a life of piety.
“It is not the same, of course,” he said quietly. “But when I was a child—barely eight years old—two of my sisters died. Our mother had passed four years before. The girls left for school so happy, but first Maria and then Elizabeth came back to us, wasted, pale, and struggling to breathe.”
“You were at home?” I asked.
Mr. Brontë nodded. “My father wished to educate me himself, relive his boyhood years, and keep an eye on me. And Anne was still in Haworth too, as the baby.”
I stayed quiet so that he’d continue.
“Their deaths were weeks apart, yet the scenes have melded together in my mind. Blood on a pillow. My father weeping. A small coffin lashed by rain on its short journey to the church. How could I think God great after that?” He had drawn alongside me and was gazing at the path, beating back the encroaching greenery with his cane.
A few more weeks, and bluebells would cloak the woodland floor. Not as brilliant as at Yoxall, my first home, but stirring in me the same longing that spring had awakened in the final years of my girlhood, a yearning for activity, purpose, change. I had thought to hold them in my wedding posy, but my marriage had come in the dead of winter, when the woods around the Lodge were bare and stripped of their majesty.
“Maria was the best of us,” he said, coming to a complete halt. “The most talented and the most tender. She corrected my father’s proofs before many children can read. She taught Anne and me not just the words of the Lord’s Prayer but the feeling behind them. Maria was just eleven when she left us and yet still it was like losing a second mother. In her absence, Charlotte took up the mantle as the eldest. She has ever fought to be as kind as Maria, and as good, though her nature is wilder, her anger is quicker, and her sense of injustice runs deep.”
Charlotte again. Not only was this woman clever, but she’d conquered the faults that I could not, and quenched the fire within.
“You must think I am spoiled,” I said. “To have suffered keen losses only now, when you and your sisters saw so much, so young.”
Mr. Brontë caught my hand so abruptly that it stunted my breath. “I thought what you said about Georgiana very beautiful,” he said, gripping me so hard that the skin buckled and my bones cracked.
Heat tingled in my cheeks, and I pulled away, walking ahead, without him playing advance guard. Stems caught at my skirts. The dew sketched a spider’s web over the hem.
“I did not mean you to think it so,” I told him, the words catching in my throat, for how could I know whether anything I said was true? Maybe I had framed that speech only so he might think me just as clever, just as deep, as Charlotte.
“No. There is artistry, not artifice, in you,” he said, half to himself. “You too are a poet. I feel it in you when you play and sing.”
His compliment, if this was meant as one, made me laugh out loud. I was a lady, who dabbled in the activities on which I spent my time. Nobody had ever even pretended to take my music seriously. The weight on my chest lightened, the phantom pressure of his grip evaporated.
“And you are a fool, Mr. Brontë,” I said, spinning round to face him. “Or maybe just very young.”
“You may tell me these are one and the same, Mrs. Robinson, but I believe that some of us have souls that are ageless, timeless, and when two such souls meet—” He faltered and blushed. “Have you never felt that there is, or ought to be, something of you beyond you? And if you found that, well, the sheer force of it would wipe all other considerations aside, right every wrong?” He stepped closer, his face inches from mine. “Emily and I have spoken of it often. To resist that call would be as futile as wishing to delay the sun, sitting on the sand in hope of holding back the tide.”
Red lips, imperfect, flushed, boyish skin, the light aroma of fresh sweat. The fact of his body forcing the knowledge of its existence upon mine, even if his bundle of papers acted as some security that he could not take me in his arms.
“I fear you have lost me, Mr. Brontë,” I said, stiffening. “You and your nomadic sister, Emily, are too poetic for me.”
I pushed past him to take the path to the Hall, dodging his protesting arm, and ran back with my skirts scrunched in both hands. Drinking in the air, I smiled with abandon, like a child skipping home from a day of play.
CHAPTER FOUR
EASTER. IT WAS A day when Reverend Lascelles subjected us all to a second lengthy sermon without the relief of the curate Greenhow’s concise preaching, and the occasion of another dreaded ritual—late luncheon at Green Hammerton Hall, home to my mother-in-law.
I had pleaded for reprieve to no avail and remained stoic when my daughter Lydia came to me begging likewise.
“The servants appreciate the chance to visit their families,” Edmund had admonished me as I’d hovered by the study door a few days previously. “And it means so much to Mother.”