“To hear them, you’d think they didn’t have an ounce of breeding or cultivation between them. You should get rid of that woman,” she concluded with a flourish.
“Of Miss Brontë?” exclaimed Bessy, dropping her spoon into her bowl with a clang that rang through me. “But we all care for her very much.”
“Enough, Bessy,” I said as mildly as I could. I gave her shin a sharp kick under the table and watched her eyes grow watery and accusing.
“Ned’s new tutor, Mother, actually came to us by way of our governess. They are brother and sister.” Edmund, ever the diplomat, dabbed at his beard with his napkin.
Old Mrs. Robinson smiled. “I see. The father is a clergyman, I think? How fitting that the son should be one too.”
I dropped my chin so she wouldn’t see me smile. How horrified she’d be to hear Mr. Brontë’s views on God!
“Mr. Brontë isn’t a clergyman,” said Bessy, too foolish to keep out of the fray. “He used to be a painter and he wants to be a poet.”
“A painter and a poet?” Our matriarch spoke the words slowly, sounding them out. “How eminently unsuitable. This is your doing, Lydia, I suppose?”
The good Reverend Eade stared up to heaven as if praying for our souls.
The smile dropped from my face. Blood rushed to my head. I wasn’t so special. Others also knew of Mr. Brontë’s poetry. It was as if the scene in the woods were playing out before me amongst the half-eaten dishes of custards and preserves, shaming me. The poem, Mr. Brontë’s hand on mine, the words he’d spoken about souls, words I’d struggled to remember precisely since.
I opened my mouth to speak, but my throat, still coated with crumbs, was too dry.
“All my doing, Mother,” said Edmund. “I assure you.”
“Don’t defend her, Edmund,” Mrs. Robinson said. “This tutor is young, I suppose, girls?”
Lydia and Bessy nodded.
“Unmarried. Unordained. And you invite this man, this self-proclaimed poet, around your daughters? What were you thinking? There can only be one result.”
“I—”
She waved my unvoiced protest aside. “These eccentricities, these flights of fancy, might have been charming in a bride, Lydia, but at your age, you should know better.”
“Edmund, girls, we’re leaving.” I rose, steadying myself by grasping the table.
“Lydia, sit down,” said Edmund, without an ounce of passion.
The Reverend coughed and sneezed at once, breaking the silence.
“Well, I’m leaving,” I said.
My husband didn’t repeat his objection.
I practically ran from the room and from the house, back toward the carriage.
William Allison was leaning against one of the old poplars, smoking. When he saw me, he stood up straight and clasped his pipe behind him as if to hide it. The plumes of smoke radiated around him before vanishing into the air.
“Is owt the matter, ma’am?” he asked, cautious, scared to address me, as if I were a small child mid-tantrum.
“Oh, William!” I cried. “I wish I were dead.”
A shadow of panic passed over his face.
But I laughed one of those laughs that’s on the edge of tears and held out my hand.
“Ma’am?” he said slowly.
“Your pipe, William.”
I could tell he didn’t want to, but he handed it to me.
There was a pleasing weight to it. The wood was smooth where William had circled his thumb, caressing the bowl for years. He was younger than me. Perhaps it had been his father’s before.
I inhaled, closing my eyes as the smoke clouded my insides, then exhaled with the world still dark, although I could feel that Allison was still watching me.
“Thank you,” I breathed, as the grounds of Green Hammerton Hall came back into focus—row after row of regimented and labeled rosebushes, with the dark shadow of the house behind.
Once I’d returned his pipe, Allison handed me into the carriage. As soon as he shut the door, I began to cry.
Two hours Edmund and the girls tarried while I waited there. And they all avoided my gaze when we finally wended our way back to the Hall through the shadowy dusk.
The night was drawing in, making the fields, us, and me, most of all, invisible. The unbearable monotony of my life pressed heavier on my chest as we rounded the corners before Thorp Green Hall. How funny it is that men and women struggle as they die, but few of us kick or scream as we are lowered alive into our tombs.
* * *
FOR THE FIRST TIME in recent memory, Lydia and Bessy trod the stairs to their bedrooms unbidden. When both doors had closed and the creaks of their floorboards above us stopped, Edmund and I walked into the drawing room.
“Go on. Tell me how I embarrassed you in front of your mother,” I said, too weary to argue, wishing this Godforsaken day were over.
But he would not give me an escape.
“Mother can be blunt—difficult—but she was only trying to help, Lydia. She raised three children herself. And she raised us well.” Edmund was not looking at me but at the chimney glass, which reflected his expression, tired and pained.
“Raised? Rather, tyrannized,” I spat, the anger surging again inside me.
“Quiet,” he said, pacing even farther away. “The servants and the children will hear us.”
I imagined the girls stealing to their doors, Ned hiding beneath the covers, and Marshall at my dressing table, ready to take down my hair, pretend the day was uneventful, and guide me, like a frail and senile woman, to bed.
“You are all afraid of her,” I said. “You, Charles and Mary Thorp, John Eade. You all do exactly as she says.”
He did not answer.
“I daresay it was the shock of being free from that woman that killed Jane rather than her condition,” I went on, taking a different tack and watching for any response from him. “She didn’t know, at more than forty, what it was to be her own mistress.”
Edmund stiffened, but that was the only change perceptible in him. I flailed about as if drowning, clutching at anyone, even if it meant dragging him down with me.
“How can you live with yourself?” I cried, even louder. “How can you think yourself a man, still clinging to your mother’s petticoats?”
“Lydia.” It had worked. Edmund said my name, turned, reached out his hand, and took a step toward me. But tonight I could not stop. My anger burst from me, like the sparks from the fireworks I had seen many years before one Guy Fawkes Night.
“I have had enough.” My tears streamed now, undermining each word and underscoring my volatility. “I will not have her speak to me like that or hold the Thorps up as a paragon. She must not come to Scarborough this summer. I will not have her ruin my life in the last days of hers.”
“Were we speaking of Scarborough?” Edmund raised his voice for the first time. He hated how, with me, one fight became all fights, forming and re-forming like different configurations of dancers at a ball.
Why was it that when I wanted love, I took anger as a worthy consolation?
“I need some air,” I said, starting for the door. “Do not follow me.” And although we had been married nearly twenty years and I knew he would take me at my word, somehow I still hoped that he’d ignore me.