Romancing Miss Bronte (14 page)

The “nothing” of which they could not speak and that kept them so busy was all the more essential to their peace of mind because of the madness raging at home. As much as they would have liked to avoid their brother, they were forced by the circumstance of his dependence to live his miseries day in and day out. The family was slowly coming to terms with his uselessness. He seemed to be one of those Darwinian experiments destined for extinction: what could possibly be worse than a smorgasbord of talents coupled to an ultrasensitive nature without a lick of self-discipline? Disappointments forced him into retreat; opposing winds knocked him down and left him bitter, whining, incapable of moving on. He had been given every privilege their meager means could afford; adoring sisters and proud father had fed his ego and allowed him every indulgence; and all had been squandered.

Oh, but what promise he had shown in his youth! Such exuberant charm! “Send for young Patrick Brontë!” they would cry at the Black Bull when a gentleman of distinction passed through, and little Johnny Robinson would race up to the parsonage and beg for Branwell to come down. Dazzled by his silver tongue, strangers never knew what hit them. Was it the particularly potent ale they served at the Bull or was it that carrot-headed little chap’s zinging wit and intellectual precociousness? They knew Genius when they saw it. They fully expected to see the day
when his name would be glorified far and wide, like Wordsworth and Tennyson. “Brontë!” they would say. “Of course, we knew him well! What brilliance! What a gift for storytelling!” They’d tell how he’d blow in on a summer day crooning a tune, his tongue itching to drink and jest; he’d sweep off his sweat-stained tall hat and what would fall out but some of his latest verse! And what about the time he fooled a Londoner into thinking he knew that Great City like the back of his hand, when in reality he’d merely memorized the maps? How he’d sit in his chair by the fire on stormy nights and bewitch them with long passages from Shakespeare, Shelley, or Byron. At the slightest encouragement he’d strip off his jacket, roll up his sleeves, and strike a sparring pose, faking punches as he sprang light-footed around the sawdust-covered floor, just a little exhibition to remind them how he’d boxed in his younger days. To prove he had some well-toned muscle attached to his five-foot-three-inch frame. That virility came in miniature as well.

But the sad truth was that none of this energy carried over to the canvas or into verse. He had been infinitely entertaining in his golden days, but now nearly everyone—even the locals at the Black Bull and his fellow artists in Halifax—found him a bore. It is indeed one of those small human tragedies—some might even say one of God’s nasty little jokes—to fill a heart so full of desire, mold it so perfectly to a vocation, and then deny the man the courage equal to the task.

In truth, his struggle was not any different from Charlotte’s: both of them had addled their brains with romantic stories of aristocratic heroes and heroines pining after forbidden love, and both struggled to resign themselves to the fact that life was not going to live up to their dreams. First, their family was neither high-bred nor glamorous; and second, adulterous love was messy. In real life the home wrecker who went off to live with the beloved suffered social alienation and, often, loss of fortune as well. But we mustn’t judge Charlotte and Branwell too harshly for their fantasies. They lived in a time of straitjacket morality when the slightest quiver of the flesh gave cause for outrage. Denial of human desire was the battle cry of the day. God help those poor souls who had desire
in abundance, who had what it took to love heatedly, passionately, to the death.

Branwell lived and died by his family’s judgment, and his contempt flowed from a sense of utter helplessness. At home every glance, every innuendo, every silence carried a resounding echo of his failures. He hated feeling dependent upon them—his aging father and sickly sisters—and he spewed out his frustration in venomous rage.
Look at them!
he’d think as he caught glimpses of his sisters scurrying about the rooms, tending to their domestic trifles, scribbling out their poems—vainly attempting to get them published. He knew their secret. He’d noticed the brown-paper parcels—snatched from the postmaster in the lane and concealed behind skirts with fidgeting fingers before disappearing forever God-knows-where. They must have dipped into their little savings for the writing paper and postage. Illusion, all of it. Naïve dreams that would amount to nothing. Just last year Emily had come to his room to ask him to read something she had written, but he had refused.

“My dear sister, I can’t even summon the courage to concentrate on my own poetry. Let alone yours.”

“It’s not verse. It’s a story.”

“It will just distract me.”

“From what?”

“From what I should be doing, which is my own work.” He locked his fingers behind his head and looked up at her with mournful eyes. “I’m thoroughly exhausted. The slightest excitement and my heart starts beating wildly. All this business has brought me so low.”

“What a whining coward you are.”

He roused himself to shout after her as she disappeared down the hallway. “You know it’s useless, don’t you? It’s impossible to break into that business. You won’t get anyone to publish it. Some poor underpaid lackey will just feed it to the printer’s fire!”

He collapsed back against his pillow.

Good Lord
, he thought with a mental scowl,
what could my virginal sisters
,
enclosed in their miniature lives, possibly have to say? What kind of stories could they tell? Surely the same sort of childish fantasies they have been writing since girlhood
.

It was easy for them to nag him about trivial matters—Charlotte always on him for his appearance, chiding him to change his shirt, take a bath, shave. Emily with her stony looks and Anne with her smiles reeking of piety. But his father! To hell with clean linens—the old evangelical would have a son cleansed of sin! Every night just before the stroke of eight his father appeared at his door with prayer book in hand, summoning him to evening prayers in the study. Now, there was a standoff worthy of great theater. The erect old parson with his trademark scowl, bristling hair, and snowy neckcloth rising to his chin, waiting … waiting. Sometimes Branwell was still sleeping off the gin. But often he was just drunk enough to be nasty. His father would find him sitting on his bed chomping on a cold pipe (he could rarely afford tobacco), his writing desk propped on his knees while he sketched or wrote by the light of a single candle.

“Branwell, we’re all assembled. Come downstairs and pray with us,” he said one night.

“Great God! It’s the good reverend!” Branwell cried in mock astonishment, whipping off his wire-rims and blinking up at his father. “Oh, so sad, old man. Why so sad? A degenerate son causing you problems? Well, take it to the Lord our Savior! Indeed, get thee downstairs to thy knees and save that reprobate’s soul!”

The old reverend never so much as batted an eye through all the blasphemy, but inside his heart was breaking.

“You’re weak. We’re all weak, but I believe this is a peculiar sort of disease from which you suffer—”

“Disease?” Branwell interrupted. “Rubbish. What I suffer from is an infuriating family that refuses to understand what I’m going through.”

“Men do not die of love.”

“Well, you certainly won’t. You’re immune to that disease.”

“If you would but turn to Christ for strength.”

“Ah, yes!” He winched his brows together like a man pondering a grave problem. “Now, there’s an intriguing idea for you! Take a poor soul they hammered to a cross a couple of thousand years ago and get him to sort out the mess! Brilliant, Father! Brilliant! That’s the spirit!”

“He will, if you would only repent—”

“Repentance? Is that the recipe?” He screwed up his mouth again. “But repentance of what? I mean, good God, man, we could get bogged down here …”

There was no point going down that road. Branwell would declare that he did not regret for a moment the affair—that Lydia had taught him the realities of life: what real suffering is, what real love is.

“Our Savior will deliver us…. He alone has the power to transform our hearts—”

“Actually, I have my own little list here…. Just this morning I was thinking of all the miseries laid in our path…. Now I, for one, would like to be saved from Virgil’s plagiarisms and Homer’s repetitions—and what else? Oh yes—please, dear Lord, save us from Queen Elizabeth’s brand of virginity and Pretty Mary’s death! And none of us wish to go the way of Cromwell’s nose and Charles the First’s head!”

A shadow moved in the hall.

“Come, Papa,” Emily said softly as she stepped into the room. She took her father’s hand, gently drawing him away. “Come away. Leave him be.”

Branwell rambled on with his ridiculous prayer, enjoying himself immensely, until Emily darted back in and hissed, “Shut up, Branwell.”

But the old man would be back again the next evening.

What he dreaded most was finding his son curled in a shivering ball in a tangle of filthy sheets, staring up at him with the eyes of a man possessed by the devil. Through chattering teeth Branwell would threaten to kill himself if his father didn’t give him a few coins to buy a drink or a little laudanum to relieve the pain.

On these nights the father would slowly, painfully get down on his stiff knees beside the bed, and with tears in his eyes he would beseech God for mercy.

Yet despite the scorn and mockery heaped upon his head, he was the last—the only one—who refused to give up on his son. With characteristic determination and insight far ahead of his time, he spent hours pouring over medical journals, seeking to understand the frightening disease that was consuming his child. In the margins of his own copy of
Modern Domestic Medicine
, next to the entry on insanity, he made detailed notes about delirium tremens and the effects of intoxication. Instinctively, he knew that his son’s weaknesses—his epileptic fits, his susceptibility to intoxication—were the results of a peculiar disorder of the mind, possibly a hereditary predisposition. Deep in his heart he believed that his son was not so much a sinner as he was one who had been sinned against—by this Jezebel, Mrs. Robinson. By himself, a father too poor and too protective to give him the formal education he deserved. That winter the old parson nursed his son through hellish hours of delirium, witnessed the sweating and uncontrollable tremors of the body and the demonic hallucinations of the mind. He had prayed over a dying wife and two daughters, but he prayed more fervently now than he had ever prayed in his life, fearful that he might lose his son for all eternity.

“You humiliate us,” Charlotte said to her brother one day, her eyes flashing with restrained fury. “I don’t dare invite anyone to visit. Not with you in the house.”

“Give me a few shillings and I’ll be out of your hair in the time it takes me to pull on my boots.”

“And from now on, if you want to eat,” she continued, ignoring the halfhearted plea, “you can drag yourself down to the table on time.”

She was fuming, ready to stamp her tiny foot at him the way she’d done when they were children and he had shown himself heartless and insensitive. He recalled the incident when he’d stolen her favorite character, Mary Percy, and killed her off. Charlotte—never one to concede defeat—had raced back to her writing desk, sharpened her quill, and worked out a plot twist to bring Mary back to life.

“I have no appetite,” he moaned. “Just go away. Leave me be.”

“Well, your appetite seems to make an appearance as soon as the dishes are done. It’s unfair to Tabby, begging a meal from her that late at night. She can barely walk anymore. And I’ve told Martha she is no longer to bring breakfast to you in your room. They have enough to do without serving you hand and foot.”

“You’re heartless,” he said in a wounded voice.

Charlotte complained to Emily, “Have you seen his sketches? They’re dreadful—distraught women on their knees, and himself hanging from a noose. He feeds on his own misery—he wallows in it like a pig in its swill.” She would begin to grow agitated, and then Anne would remind her that they had work to do.

With no resources of his own, his only opportunity for escape was to take himself off to nearby Halifax, a thriving wool town nestled in the Calder Valley. It boasted its own circle of notable poets, artists, and musicians, and his good friend the sculptor J. B. Leyland was one of them.

Leyland was a kindhearted soul with a soft touch and a weakness for drink. He was easily drawn to excess, and when inebriated, the two men got on like wildfire. Later they would awake in Leyland’s rooms with gray plaster casts of dead men staring them in the face, not knowing how they’d gotten there but relieved to be indoors and not sprawled in a mucky cobbled alley behind the Old Cock. Leyland, overworked and in debt, was a perfect companion for Branwell’s misery.

“Do you suppose she’s forgotten me?” Branwell said one night as he leaned on the table and focused his weak, watery eyes on his companion.

He swayed, just slightly off balance; his elbow slipped off the table. Leyland grabbed for him and caught a handful of jacket.

“Steady there, man.”

Branwell pulled himself up and tried to remember what he had been saying. All he could notice was his empty glass.

“What letter?” Leyland prompted.

Branwell reached for the bottle of wine and cautiously maneuvered the neck over his glass.

“Steady on …” Leyland muttered, watching him fill the glass.

“The letter … got a letter from their family doctor. Been a good friend to me, he has. Writes to me from time to time. But such damned depressing news. Tells me I should give up hope. But she can’t have forgotten me—I know she loves me still.”

“They’re a fickle sex,” Leyland slurred, stumbling over his consonants. “Can’t be trusted.”

“You should have seen me. I was the favorite of all the household.”

“Don’t doubt that …”

“I even started perfuming my handkerchiefs just to please her.”