Romancing Miss Bronte (21 page)

They had the coffin finished by nightfall, and when they brought it upstairs Martha exclaimed that Thomas must have got his measurements wrong because the wooden box was barely big enough for a child.

That night, with Branwell laid out nicely in his coffin in the dining room, mild and serene in the golden glow of lamplight, a quiet descended on the parsonage. Gone were the loud drunkenness, the raised voices, the distressing sounds of a restless man searching for a way out of his misery in a locked room in a parsonage in the middle of the night. They all lay awake listening, but the only sounds that broke their grieving silence were an occasional cough, and the wind rattling the window-panes, and the clock ticking away the hours on the landing.

Arthur wanted very much to be a comfort to them that week, but there didn’t seem to be a place where he could fit in. He came by every day, but he found few people he cared to engage in conversation. There were artists and poets from Halifax and Bradford and plenty of dissenters, and village men from Branwell’s circle of drinking friends at the Black Bull. Branwell’s weaknesses were common enough to the Yorkshiremen—they were hard-drinking, entertaining types, talkers rather than doers. Arthur greeted them with stiff civility and then looked in on his parson.

Mr. Brontë kept to his study that week, receiving the vicars and incumbent clergymen from all the neighboring parishes who had known him these thirty-some years. It was an older, tight-knit crowd, and they passed the time reminiscing, soothing their sorrows with anecdotes of bygone days. Arthur was himself a big talker and was well known for his love of argument in the circle of his brethren, but on this occasion he held his tongue and showed himself perfectly mild-mannered.

He looked for Charlotte but never found her. On Wednesday he
found Martha in the scullery with her arms in a tub of water, scouring a heavy pot, and asked if Charlotte was ill.

“Aye, she is,” Martha snapped impatiently. “Took to her bed with one of her headaches the day her brother died an’ hasn’t been down since. Got a fever now. An’ she’s the one the reverend depends on so, an’ the house full of people mornin’ to night, an’ the funeral tea tomorrow. Miss Emily helps me out in the kitchen, but she ain’t no good with the visitors, an’ Miss Anne’s not much better. Those girls’d rather walk on fire than chitchat to folk.”

She hung the pot on a hook and shook her head. “What kind of headache hurts that long. I can’t understand it. If she’s grievin’ it ain’t no more than anyone else.”

Branwell’s godfather came up from Bradford to perform the burial rites. Arthur merely assisted, along with Sutcliffe Sowden, the only clergyman Branwell had ever befriended. Throughout the service Arthur strained to catch a glimpse of Charlotte’s face behind her black silk bonnet, but she was too small, and seemed swallowed up in the crowd.

S
eptember brought forth a few last gasps of glory—bright, sun-filled days with balmy breezes—but then the dreary autumn crept in, trailing a wind that smelled sharply of cold rain. The sky hung like a canopy of gloom that barely changed its countenance from dawn to dusk, and the earth was muted to a single tone of gray the color of stone. On some mornings the village was swallowed up by fog that lifted only at noon, and darkness fell all too soon. The cold weather confined them once again to the parsonage, their lives unfolding quietly within its walls, in rooms shorn of all but the most necessary comforts by a father with spartan tastes and an eye on heaven. Coals were used sparingly; fires were lit in the study and the dining room, but they burned brightly only after nightfall or when visitors came to call.

As the days marched by, each of the sisters wrestled with her brother’s ghost, and shifted around the material remains of his sad life in an effort to put order in death where there had been none in life. Branwell’s amateurish portrait of his sisters, which hung on the landing next to the clock, where it might catch the eye of visitors, was taken down. Patrick carefully rolled up the canvas and stored it away in the deep drawer at the bottom of his dresser beside treasured keepsakes from his dead wife and daughters. On her hands and knees, Martha scrubbed and oiled the wood floor in Branwell’s bedroom. A freshly laundered counterpane was spread on the bed and every nook and cranny thoroughly dusted, so that when they were finished the room had the same austere sheen as the rest of the parsonage, and not a trace of shame remained. Emily, as self-appointed
trustee of his literary estate, had long since gathered up all his personal papers, his scattered poems, the novel fragments and childhood stories, and quietly taken them to her room.

“What should we do with it all?” Charlotte asked one evening as they sat in the dining room. Still weak from the fever that had laid her low, she sat wrapped in a heavy shawl, her feet on a stool before the fire, looking through Branwell’s notebooks, which Emily had placed on her lap.

They reflected on the question, each of them turning it around in her thoughts in her own way.

Anne said, “It only reminds me of how terribly unhappy he was.” She leaned into the warmth of the fire. “But he’s at peace now, and we can find strength in the knowledge that God is merciful and loving. There is no sin so great that He cannot forgive.”

“He wasn’t always unhappy,” Emily said.

Emily rose to add a few lumps of coal to the fire. She pumped the bellows until the coal burst into flame, and in the sudden flash of light Charlotte scrutinized her sister’s face. Her cheeks seemed to have lost some of their plumpness. She professed only to have a touch of bronchitis, but to Charlotte’s ears her cough had the deep, hollow ring that suggested something more serious. Now the physical effort of working the bellows brought on a spasm of coughing. Emily returned to her chair, pressing a handkerchief to her mouth and avoiding Charlotte’s sharp, inquisitive stare.

Charlotte resisted the urge to inquire about the state of her health. It would achieve nothing. Instead, she asked, “Has Papa seen any of this?”

“No. I took everything before he had a chance to go through his room.”

This was the way they always handled their father, protecting him from anything that might upset him.

“What about the letters from Mrs. Robinson?” Charlotte asked.

Anne and Emily exchanged a look.

“There weren’t any letters from Mrs. Robinson.”

“The ones he carried around in his pocket.”

“They weren’t from her. They were all from Dr. Crosby. The Robinsons’ family doctor.”

“They were very kind letters. But they repeatedly urged him to forget the lady—”

“She was no lady.”

“Well, whatever she was, she seems to have left poor Branwell high and dry, without a word all these years. It seems that all the news he ever got from Thorp Green came from this gentleman.”

Charlotte thought of the desperate letters she had written to Heger and wondered what he had done with them. His letters to her were locked away in a japanned box at the bottom of her dresser; she could not bear to destroy them, although she never took them out anymore. After all these years, the slightest evocation of his memory still elicited a dull, aching sadness.

“Well, I suppose we should burn them, all the same,” Charlotte said quietly.

Emily and Anne nodded.

Anne rose. “Where are they, Emmy? I’ll fetch them.”

When she came back downstairs, she untied the packet and one by one, slowly and with great care, fed each letter to the fire. The flames shot up around the edges and ate up the words until nothing was left but curled gray ashes that settled lightly upon the black dust. Then Anne picked up the poker and stirred the red-hot coals so that not even a feathered trace remained.

Emily rose and bid them good night. She nudged the dogs with her toe, and they stretched and followed her to the front door. She waited in the cold draft of the doorway while the dogs sniffed the hawthorn bushes. The icy wind felt like knives in her chest, and she muffled her cough with her shawl.

Their bedroom was cold, and Charlotte was quick to finish brushing her hair and scurry to bed.

She withdrew the brass warming pan, set it on the floor, and crawled between the sheets. “I’m very worried about her,” she told Anne. “She seems so tired. And her cough sounds frightful.”

Anne sat on the edge of the bed, pulling on long woolen socks. “But you mustn’t allude to it—she gets very annoyed.”

Anne fished behind her pillow for her nightcap and pulled it down over her ears, then crawled in next to her sister.

“I’m sure it’s only an inflammation.”

“The cold is always hard on us. You have a cough. Papa has a cough.”

“We just need to stay inside and keep warm.”

Charlotte raised herself on an elbow, cupped her hand around the candle on their bedside table, and blew out the flame.

“How is she taking his death?”

“Much as you would expect. Quite serenely.”

There was a silence, and then Charlotte said, “Sometimes she frightens me, with the way she holds so lightly to life. She sees too much romance in death.”

“She has her strange ideas, as do we all.”

The thought of losing Emily terrified Charlotte. Without Emily, the light would go out of her world, although she could not say as much to the sister who lay beside her.

A sudden gust of wind wailed down the chimney like something alive and grieving, causing them to burrow down beneath the covers and cling to each other for warmth. They were quiet for a long moment, listening to the mournful wind.

“Good night, Genius Annie,” Charlotte said sleepily.

“Good night, Genius Tally,” Anne replied.

Genii they had all once been, named in a flight of imagination by their brother when they were children and believed anything to be possible, when they ruled supreme over their imaginary kingdoms, and life could be created or destroyed with the stroke of a pen.

They all pressed on with their work; Emily and Charlotte were finally well advanced in their next novels. As winter approached, the east wind
blew wild and keen over the frozen hills, bringing a cold that chilled the stone flags and spread from the glass panes of the windows. Emily’s cough worsened, but any questions about her health met only with flashes of annoyance from her intense gray eyes.

“Why do you worry yourself about my health?” she would say, looking up from a book with a slightly contemptuous air. “One’s health is such a wearisome subject.”

“You’re not eating,” Charlotte lamented.

“None of us have an appetite. None of us are in robust health. We never have been. We are all quite used to these little annoyances.”

“But your cough sounds quite serious, dearest.”

“It’s nothing I can’t bear—and I would bear it with pleasure if you’d stop pestering me.”

And bear it she would. It had always been in her nature to bear up, to refuse any appearance of weakness. She would no more seek sympathy than she would go begging in the streets, and she would certainly not keep to her bed and play the invalid. She still rose punctually at seven, dressed, and made her way to the kitchen, where she sat before the fire to put up her hair. One morning as she wound a knot at the back of her head, the comb slipped from her grasp and fell into the grate. Seeing that Emily was too weak to get out of her chair, Martha rushed in with a poker to sweep it out of the fire, but by then the teeth had burned away.

“I’ll fetch ye another comb, miss. Don’t ye budge,” Martha said, scurrying out before Emily could sound her opposition.

Tabby rose from her chair to stir the porridge on the stove. “Ye shouldn’t be up,” she scolded. “Ye should be in yer bed sippin’ bran tea, with a warmin’ pan under yer feet.”

“Have you ever known me to lie in bed all day?”

“I’ve never known ye so pitiful thin,” Tabby answered, “lookin’ like a skeleton.”

When Martha came down with another comb, they watched while she coiled her hair and secured it in the back with her comb. They could see how much that small effort took out of her; her breath came short and quick.

Tabby shook her head in bewilderment and muttered, “Ye’re a strange one.” She ladled a little of the porridge into a bowl and set it in front of Emily.

“Now, ye’ll eat some o’ that if ye want to get yer strength back.”

Emily stared at it with a kind of bewilderment.

“I threw in a few currants and a little honey,” Tabby said gruffly, “although I don’t know why I troubled, seein’ as how ye got no interest in feedin’ anything ’cept that dog o’ yers.”

Tabby deliberated over the bent head, Emily the porridge.

Then the old servant turned back to her chores, flashing a look to Martha to leave her be.

Emily swallowed only a few spoonfuls and then set the bowl on the floor for Keeper, who had been poised and alert at her side. But Tabby felt herself the victor and bragged to Charlotte that morning that she’d coerced Miss Emily into eating three spoonfuls of porridge, although in truth it had been only two.

Charlotte quickly took the cheering news to her father. He shook his head gloomily. “The disease works like this. Don’t be fooled.”

“How can you be so sure it’s consumption?”

“I’ve seen it before.”

Charlotte preferred her own foolishness to his bleak pessimism, and the women saw this small success as a sign of improvement. Their steps were a little lighter that morning and smiles broke out in the kitchen, all for a few bites of porridge.

Emily’s fierce stoicism was a thing of wonder to Charlotte, and she danced tenderly around her sister, fearful of ruffling her feathers and trying valiantly to keep her own fears from showing too keenly on her face.

The only interference Emily welcomed was the flood of books that continued to arrive at the parsonage, gifts from Charlotte’s sympathetic publisher, who wrote discreetly that they hoped the books would offer a distraction for Ellis Bell while he recovered from his cold.

In her own letters to Mr. Williams, Charlotte poured out her despair. When Mr. Williams wrote recommending homeopathy for Ellis Bell, Charlotte showed Emily the letter.