I’d persisted with my overtures until, one day, I’d come across a half-completed letter of hers, addressed to a sister, Charlotte. I shouldn’t have opened it—wouldn’t have if Miss Brontë hadn’t evaded me until now. But I couldn’t help myself when I saw the discarded page in the schoolroom, the impossibly regular handwriting broken off mid-word. In it she described me as “condescending” and “self-complacent,” anxious only to render my daughters as “superficially attractive and showily accomplished” as I was. It was a vicious caricature but one I could not scold her for, since I should never have seen it. That’s how I’d learned that our innocent Miss Brontë wasn’t so innocent at all.
“So where are they?” I asked her again, more sharply.
“I believe the girls went to join Ned in the stables.”
Those children had run riot for months during Miss Brontë’s absence. The least she could do was teach them now that she was here.
“And why is my son and heir spending his days in the stables?” I asked, although young Ned, bless him, had always been too slight and simple a boy to deserve the title bestowed on him. He wouldn’t be dressed properly. He’d catch a chill. The children might be fond of Miss Brontë, but she didn’t watch them with a mother’s care.
“I believe, madam—that is, I know—Mr. Brontë found him more attentive there,” she answered, without flinching.
Mr. Brontë. Of course. I’d forgotten that her brother would be returning with her. He was to be Ned’s new tutor, and so Edmund had managed everything.
As if on cue, a quick pitter-patter struck against the window and despite everything—my tiredness, my loneliness, my desire to join my mother in her grave—it pulled me to my feet. Miss Brontë and I stood as far apart as we could, looking through the checkered panes at the party gathered below.
There was Ned, without a coat. He was laughing, his waistcoat unbuttoned and his face grubby.
Beside him was Lydia, my eldest and namesake. She’d been running, which was unlike her. She’d bundled her dress and cape in her hands, revealing her boots and stockings, and her perfect ringlets had come unpinned, creating a bright halo around her face.
A few steps behind the others, my younger daughters, Bessy and Mary, giggled to each other.
And in the center of them all, his arm drawn back to fling another handful of gravel, was a man who couldn’t have been more than five and twenty, with a smile that reached to the corners of his face and hair that rich almost-red Edmund’s had been once.
He beamed back at Lydia before calling something unintelligible toward the schoolroom. His eyes were a deeper blue than Miss Brontë’s, his whole being drawn in more vibrant ink.
But when his eyes slid to meet mine, when they moved on from his sister and from Lydia—that reflection of what I had once been—his smile melted away. His arm fell. The stones ran through his fingers like dust. It was as if I could hear them scatter, although the schoolroom was deathly silent.
Mr. Brontë mouthed an apology, his gaze subordinate. Lydia dropped her skirts and smoothed her hair. Even Ned buttoned one fastening of his waistcoat, although the sides were uneven and the result comical.
“I apologize on Branwell’s—”
“You apologize for what, Miss Brontë?” I said, dragging her back from the window by her spindly arm. “You think I don’t appreciate high spirits? Or care for my son’s happiness?”
“I—”
“I fear to imagine what you say of me to others—strangers—when you think me such a dragon.” I did not wait to hear her response, but left, slamming the door behind me.
As I passed the study, I paused, panting hard.
I could go in, throw myself into Edmund’s arms, and cry, as I had to Mother when I was a girl. But when you are forty-three, you must not complain that the world is unfair, that your beauty is going to seed, and that those you love, or, worse, your love itself, is dead.
I did not go to Edmund, and alone in my rooms that night, I did not weep.
With my dark hair loose and my shoulders bare, I struggled not to shiver. I sat at my dressing table for a long time, staring into the glass and imagining the young tutor’s eyes gleaming back at me through the gloom. Branwell, Miss Brontë had called him. What sort of a name was that?
* * *
THERE’D BEEN A TIME when we’d all gather in the library or the anteroom after dinner. I would play the pianoforte. The girls would turn the pages. Sometimes they’d sing. And Edmund would quiz Ned, pointing to far-off climes on the spinning globe and asking him to name each port, kingdom, colony.
But we hadn’t done that in a long time. Not since before.
Instead Edmund would retreat to his study while I played from memory to an empty room. And our daughters would stitch and sketch in the schoolroom, supervised by Miss Brontë, long after their brother had been sent to bed. The four of them probably spent their evenings complaining about me, but I couldn’t know for sure.
Yet they were silent tonight when I ventured there for the first time in the three evenings since my return.
Miss Brontë was bending over a letter scribed in a minuscule hand.
Lydia lounged with her legs askew in a floral-covered chair by the fire.
“Good evening, Mama,” Bessy and Mary chorused with the vestiges of childish affection from the window seat, where they’d been poring over a novel.
Lydia flicked her hand at me but continued to gaze toward the hearth.
“Could you excuse us, Miss Brontë?” I asked.
She nodded and plowed past me, face still buried in the letter. It was probably from “Charlotte.” And Miss Brontë would reply to her, chronicling my family’s private moments and making a mockery of our woes.
I surveyed my girls—seventeen, sixteen, fourteen. Hard to conceive of it when their younger sister would forever be two.
Time should have halted in the year since she’d been taken from us, but instead it had marched on regardless, with the regular pattern of meals, seasons, holidays. In the course of eleven short months, my three girls had blossomed before my eyes without me even noticing. But then I had survived too. I was the same, inch for inch, pound for pound, for all I felt I should have wasted away.
“How have you been?” I asked them stiffly. The words sounded ridiculous.
Lydia and Bessy exchanged a glance across the room at the strangeness of my question.
“I am well, Mama. We missed you when you were gone,” said Mary, blinking at me through her pale lashes. Timid as she was, she’d always been the most affectionate, saying what she thought would be best received rather than speaking the truth.
I looked to the older two in turn. Lydia was blonde and beautiful even when yawning. Bessy was dark like me, but there the resemblance ended. Compared to the rest of us, she was a veritable hoyden—large and ruddy, like a fertile, oversized shepherdess. Beside them, Mary wasn’t fair or dark enough to stand out. She had neither one type of beauty nor another.
“Well, I have been bored,” said Lydia, swinging her legs to the floor. “But now here is something at last.” She was waving a letter of her own, a short note in a large and looping cursive. The writer hadn’t tried to conserve paper.