Mr. Brontë looked down at my fingers but did not pull away. His hand was large and soft, his fingers stained with ink.
“Good.” I drew back, surer now in my control. He had thought me one way and I had surprised him. “Lydia is young and impressionable,” I continued, reveling now in the years I had on him, the years that made him closer in age to Lydia than to me. “And she sees little of the world here. Even the two villages—Great and Little Ouseburn—are at least half an hour’s walk away. The advent of a young and handsome man might unsettle her.”
The tutor’s face reddened when I called him handsome. “Of course,” he said, nodding. “I understand.”
“I knew you would.” I smiled wide and gracious, bringing my hands closer to my chest and circling my wrists, thrilling to see that his gaze followed the movement. “After all, you have a sister.”
“I have three. I had five,” he said, his tone different—sharp, raw. “But that was a long time ago.”
The correction threw me. “Oh, yes,” I said, with a nervous laugh.
Three years Miss Brontë had lived in my house, and now her brother knew I had never discovered much about her family, though I’d often wondered what else she wrote of me to Charlotte. My father had had some connection to hers at Cambridge, and that had been enough of a reference to satisfy me. She’d rebuffed my early questions about her home with short answers until I’d given up asking. I hadn’t even known she had a brother until Edmund, or rather, Edmund’s mother, decided that Ned was now old enough to require a tutor.
“So you know what young ladies can be like. Fanciful,” I said as lightly as I could, although I was imagining these other Brontë sisters, the ones who had died. In my mind they were twins, Georgiana’s age, with her button nose but Mr. Brontë’s curls. Their baby lips rested on their pillows when the coughing subsided and they at last found rest, but soon after, their perfect, pale skin would turn purple as they gasped for air.
“I wouldn’t describe my sisters as fanciful, Mrs. Robinson. My sister Charlotte is the cleverest woman I know.”
I don’t know why—we had only just met—but this seemed like a rebuke. His words confirmed everything I’d feared, that this Charlotte Brontë was just like our Miss Brontë, thinking herself better than other women for having read a few more books.
I stood and stalked to the window, forcing Mr. Brontë to stand too. I imagined him dithering behind me, wishing I would touch him again, and resisted the urge to turn.
Outside, the steward Tom Sewell was berating our stable hand, Joey Dickinson, pointing at Patroclus’s front left hoof, which the poor horse was raising and replacing on the ice-coated gravel in turn. Joey bowed his head in submission. I pictured the quiver of his smooth upper lip.
Was I clever? I’d never really considered it. Mother had praised me for being “beautiful,” “neat,” and “well mannered,” but never “clever.”
“Tell me more about her, about Charlotte.” The words left my mouth before I had judged them prudent.
The old French clock, a wedding gift, ticked behind me. My corset creaked as I inhaled hard.
Joey led Patroclus back to the stable, burrowing his face in his sleeve for a second as if to wipe away a tear. Tom Sewell turned his attention to Ned, who had hopscotched into view, glad no doubt that Mr. Brontë had released him early from his studies.
The compulsion to turn was strong, but I held out, daydreaming that when Mr. Brontë next spoke, his breath would blow against my neck.
“Perhaps another time,” he said, as far away as ever.
I glanced back, ready to do battle, but almost gasped at the intensity of his stare. No one had looked at me and really seen me for months—years, maybe—but this boy, his red-rimmed eyes, bore into my soul. I was afraid to know what he found there.
“Good day, Mr. Brontë,” I whispered.
With a slight inclination of his head, he left me.
* * *
“I THOUGHT YOU WERE dying of boredom, Lydia,” I said. “Desperate for something to do.”
“I was. I am!” cried my eldest, tossing her bonnet on the schoolroom floor. “But this is worse than nothing. I won’t go! It is beneath me. Why can’t Miss Brontë go alone as she always does?”
“Miss Brontë, will you excuse us, please?” I asked, holding out my hand for Lydia’s bonnet, which the governess had rescued from imminent destruction.
She gave it to me, bobbed, and left, silent as a shadow.
“Lydia, this behavior is uncalled for and unseemly,” I tried again. “It is our duty to visit the poor, the sick—”
“You haven’t been in months!” Lydia shot back at me, her eyes burning like a demon’s, framed by her angelic curls.
Bessy let out a snort from the corner.
“I am going today,” I said, as calmly as I could, as if to prove that Lydia had not inherited her petulant humor from me. “I cannot force you to join us, but only imagine what Mother—your grandmother—would have thought.”
“Grandmama is dead!” Lydia shrieked. “And I wish our other one was too.” She grabbed her bonnet from me and flew from the room.
I shut my eyes, calculating the likelihood of the onset of one of my headaches.
“We’re ready, Mama,” said Mary, slipping her arm through mine and bringing me back to myself.
“Good. Very good,” I said.
Bessy rolled her eyes at her sister but walked over to me too.
The three of us trudged along Thorp Green Lane in silence. It was muddy underfoot from the last few days’ rain, which had washed away the children’s hopes of snow. At times it was difficult to navigate around the puddles that had gathered in the ditches, reflecting the canopy of gray clouds above, so my dress grew heavier with each step. And the basket of gifts I carried—old linens, freshly baked pies, jams from the pantry—weighed down the crook of my arm, cutting into my flesh.
But I had determined to do something other than wait. I ignored all this and Mary, who was wrinkling her nose at the stinging odor of manure. If Mr. Brontë was as pious as his sister, my Christian gesture was sure to impress him when he heard of our outing from Ned. Though I had a lingering suspicion that Miss Brontë went visiting so often less due to her Godliness than to her desire to escape our house and spend more time with the curate, Reverend Greenhow.
The Stripe Houses were a row of dirty, mismatched cottages, a few inhabited by the most destitute in the vicinity of the Ouseburns but the majority abandoned. The first was home to Mrs. Thirkill and Mrs. Tompkins, widowed sisters who were already half-deaf in their sixties. They nodded with hungry eyes at the gifts bestowed upon them and curtsied to the girls and me in turn, which was gratifying. All too often the poor give you only suspicious glances when you bring them aid.
We did not go into the next cottage. Beth Bradley stood at her threshold with a baby on her hip, a toddler clinging to her ankle, and an expression of exhaustion on her face. Benjamin, their eldest boy, had fallen ill, she told us, and Dr. Crosby said it might be the scarlet fever.
I ushered Bessy and Mary away from her and from the remaining Stripe Houses. Yet I glanced back at the upper windows of the two-story shack as we continued toward Little Ouseburn, almost hoping I would catch a glimpse of the sickroom, barer than Georgiana’s but with the same unmistakable scent of vomit, iodine, and sweat.