“You do me such good, my child, thank you,” he said, shutting his eyes from the effort of speaking.
My heart seemed to swell bigger.
“Your visits always do me so much good,” he croaked. “Yours and the curate’s. You are truly an angel, Miss Brontë.”
I jerked away from him and dropped the cup to the floor.
Eliza turned to scrub the already clean table, unable to look at me.
“Mary, put that boot on now,” I said, grabbing my still-dripping cloak and hauling her up. “We’re leaving.”
CHAPTER THREE
“A LEG OF MUTTON for dinner tonight, Lydia. Have Miss Sewell see to the extra settings,” Edmund barked at me from behind his newspaper, as I stood to leave the breakfast table.
I sat down again, as happy to have something to speak about as I was curious to hear what was happening tonight.
I hadn’t been able to bear the silence that had fallen over the room since I’d dispatched the children to their lessons, leaving me with only the portraits on the walls for company. Ned had skipped off to the Monk’s House. Lydia and Bessy had grumbled their way upstairs. And Mary had sloped away, her head bent in chagrin, after I sent her to Marshall to see to the jam stain on her dress. A girl her age—she would be fifteen in just over a week—shouldn’t be so clumsy.
“Is company expected?” I asked, leaning closer to Edmund. I replaced the lid on the silver butter dish when he did not emerge.
“The Reverend Brontë is coming to York,” he said, his voice as tired at nine in the morning as it was late at night.
“He is coming to York? Or coming here?” I asked, my heart quickening.
What if Mr. Brontë was going and his father had come to take him away? Although why I should care if that was the case, after only a handful of conversations had occurred between us, I could not say.
“Yes,” Edmund said, absentmindedly.
“Must you do that?” I asked.
The housemaid, Ellis, who’d appeared at the door to clear the last of the breakfast things, retreated, as if I’d chastised her.
“Do what?” Edmund sighed, folded the paper, and set it before him.
My face flushed, knowing that he thought me difficult.
“Make your answers ambiguous,” I said, smiling to lighten the mood. “So Reverend Brontë is to dine with us tonight. Is he to bring his other daughters?”
Funny how the idea of clever Charlotte had taken such a hold of me. I longed to assess her intelligence for myself and examine her to see if she could provide the key to the mystery of the Brontë family. What sort of household could produce such different specimens as the dashing Mr. Brontë and docile Anne?
“No indeed,” said Edmund. “His is not a social trip. Business brings him to York. And seeing as he has connections in the Church and is a John’s man—”
“Business, what business?” I asked, cutting him off.
Edmund just wouldn’t stop talking whenever he invoked the name of his beloved Cambridge college. Soon I’d be forced to endure reminiscences about rowing races and long-dead horses.
“He is to testify in a forgery case,” he replied.
“Forgery?” I gasped.
Edmund’s face crinkled at my overreaction. “Nothing to Reverend Brontë’s discredit, Lydia. What has come over you?”
“Me? Nothing.” I looked down at my lap and swept away a crumb.
“Are you unwell? Your nerves—” He trailed off. “Should I call for Dr. Crosby?”
Anger bristled in me, but I quenched it. With Edmund it was always “Call for Dr. Crosby.” My reactions were never acceptable and were often the subject of discussion, dissection, and medication. When I kept my feelings to myself, I was “unfeeling,” but if I voiced them, I laid myself open to the worst of charges: that I was “hysterical.”
“I am well, Edmund.” I stood and ran my hands along my sides, taking reassurance from the hug of my corset beneath the silk. “The children should dine separately tonight,” I added, imagining Lydia, her head thrown back in laughter, batting her eyelashes at the Brontë father and son in turn.
Edmund yawned. “As you think best.”
* * *
DESSERT HAD BEEN SERVED, and the evening was drawing to a close. The time had come to make the conversation more personal. I surveyed my audience. The candlelight and shadows danced across their faces, obscuring the finer details of their features, but every one of them was turned toward me.
And why wouldn’t they be? I had taken nearly three hours preparing for tonight, helped by Marshall, the nurse I couldn’t bear to part with as the children aged and so made her my own untrained, unskilled lady’s maid. She’d dragged a copper tub to the center of my dressing room and helped me bathe for the first time in weeks, making no remark as I dabbed perfume along my collarbone and massaged it into the blue rivulets at my wrists. I’d schooled her in how to fix my hair, using a spring plate from one of the London magazines that Lydia devoured, and she’d endured my commands without complaint, teasing my curls higher, and draping three perfect ringlets so they fell against the snowy skin of my partially exposed shoulder.
I’d been nervous when I emerged, but Edmund had kissed me on the cheek for the first time in a long time, his lips rough and dry. “Lydia, you are yourself again,” he’d said, looping my hand through his arm. “I am a fortunate man to have you for a wife.”
I’d proved him right. My performance thus far had been admirable, as the Reverend Brontë was the kind of man I knew how to handle—the kind of man who’d frequented my father’s set. They shared not only the same Cambridge college but their religion—Evangelical, of course. It took only the smallest of encouraging interruptions and the occasional question from me to delight him. I nodded at his interpretations of Scripture, cooed in sympathy at his struggles with finding an appropriate curate, and, when an opening in the conversation presented itself, expressed my distaste on the subject of slavery and delight at manumission, another of my father’s hobbyhorses.
“You must be proud to have such talented children, Reverend,” I said now.
“I am, Mrs. Robinson,” the Reverend Brontë replied, his face grave, but with a warmth in his unexpected Irish lilt. “It brings joy to a man like me to see his son and daughter valued in their positions, to know there is a place for them at their employer’s table.”
Mr. Brontë was watching me, or rather the path of my hand as I grasped the crystal stem and brought the wineglass to my lips.
Heat slid down my throat as I swallowed, kindling a fire deep inside me. Nothing could suppress my fevered joy tonight, not even Miss Brontë’s silent accusations. A place at my employer’s table, her eyes seemed to say. Until my brother came, Mrs. Robinson never asked me to dine with the family—not once.
I still could not have the Brontës join us at dinner every day. I’d first suggested the idea around a month ago as an antidote to Edmund’s lack of male conversation, without thinking that the invitation must naturally extend to Miss Brontë too. Every few evenings, Edmund and I sat at opposite ends of our long mahogany table, the Brontës and Ned stationed along one side, the girls on the other. Mr. Brontë was always farthest from me, placed at my husband’s elbow so that he could listen to Edmund elucidating his latest agricultural experiments.