Romancing Miss Bronte (22 page)

“That’s very good and kind of him,” Emily said with halting breath. “Do tell him … that Ellis Bell is most grateful for his advice. But … your dear Mr. Williams is quite delusional. Homeopathy is just more quackery.”

“Well, perhaps Ellis would consent to see a doctor.”

“Ellis will not have a doctor near him.” She glanced up from the book she was reading, her eyes flashing a sober warning. “Certainly not … that repulsive Wheelhouse.”

“We’ll send for Dr. Teale from Leeds.”

“Absolutely not. And should you go … behind my back and send for him anyway, Ellis … will refuse to see him and the poor fool will slog all the way here in the snow for nothing … and undoubtedly charge Father an exorbitant fee for his trouble.”

To have body or mind exposed was inconceivable to Emily, and Charlotte sometimes thought there was more than rational skepticism behind her resistance, that it must be grounded in some irrational fear. But it did no good to try to penetrate her thoughts or comprehend her strange ways.

“For my sake, please?”

Emily’s eyes remained on her book.

“I cannot bear to see you so ill.”

Emily turned a page.

“I could not bear to lose you.” Charlotte’s voice faltered.

“Oh, hush. Must you be so morose?”

“Perhaps if you saw the sister I see, you would be inclined to treat her a little less harshly.”

Emily’s breath was now coming in short, uneasy pants. “You see me … as you would like me to be.”

“I see what you might become. An author who is just coming into her own—a woman who has just started to exert her extraordinary powers—”

“Come now, after I’m gone …” She paused to catch her breath. “Do you honestly think … anyone will ever notice … this obscure life of mine?”

“You have written a powerful novel.”

“Which everyone … views … with horror.”

“What of your poems?”

“My little rhymes.” She coughed, a hoarse, racking sound. “Sold all of two copies.”

“You could be a great essayist. Like the American Mr. Emerson.”

“I shall gladly … leave … essays to Mr. Emerson and his ilk.”

“Please, Emmy. Just a simple visit from a doctor. A good one from Leeds or Manchester. If he confirms it’s nothing serious, then I promise I shall leave you in peace.

Emily’s expression hardened. “No doctor.”

“Must you always be so unyielding?” Charlotte cried.

“My fate is … in God’s hands. I am … content to leave it there.”

Then, suddenly softening when she saw the anguish in her sister’s eyes, she said simply, “I’m not going to die.”

Charlotte believed her.

One day when Martha was doing the washing, she came across a handkerchief coated with dried bloody phlegm. With a wooden stick she fished it out of the tub of boiling water, dropped it onto the washboard, and ran to find Charlotte. It was indeed Emily’s—her initials were embroidered in faded thread in the corner.

“Ye need to tell the master,” Tabby said.

“No. He worries endlessly about our health as it is. And still, it may prove to be only an inflammation.”

“But ye need to find a way to help the girl, miss, since she won’t help herself.”

“I know that, Tabby,” Charlotte snapped. “She forces me to neglect her, and I cannot bear it.”

Tabby shook her head pitifully. “Always been a stubborn child. She was never so ’appy as when we was all scolding ’er at once, and ’er defying us. Always liked to bait us. She knew she’d win. She knew she’d get ’er way.”

At this, Charlotte’s face clouded, and she sat down on a stool in the laundry room and broke into tears.

Finally, deceptively, Charlotte resorted to consultations by correspondence. She sat down and wrote a detailed account of Emily’s symptoms: the shallow panting, the sharp, stabbing pains in the side, the flesh wasting away before their eyes. If it was consumption, might she still be saved? Was there any hope? Were there cures that might be pressed upon an unwilling patient? The physicians in London and Leeds sent back their replies, full of weighty words that signified authority and knowledge, much of it as difficult to decipher as an oracle’s utterings. One sent a prescription for a serum, which Charlotte quickly obtained from the chemist and left in a vial on Emily’s bedside table, along with a note indicating instructions for its dosage. The vial, unopened, was shuffled around from bedroom to kitchen table to mantel, where it sat until Martha got tired of dusting around it and stored it away in their medicine chest.

Even as she grew steadily worse, Emily refused to alter her daily routine; she bore up without a word of complaint, and so the illness swept her along. The harder she fought it, the more quickly it advanced on her. She answered the burning pain in her side not with a gasp and a sharp cry, but with the stiffening of her jaw while she swept the hallway or cleared the dishes from the table. She pushed herself to the limit while the disease gnawed at her insides and spat her out. As the diarrhea worsened, she had to make her way on feeble legs a dozen times a day through rain and snow to the privy in the backyard. Once the wind was so fierce that it knocked her down and Martha found her sprawled helpless on the frozen ground. Sometimes the privy door froze shut, and she would have to stand in the cutting wind, shaking with fever, while one of her sisters pried it open. There was not one indignity that could strip away her supreme command of her spirit. As her body failed, her harsh indifference became a thing of wonder. Charlotte watched her for a sign of panic or despair, but Emily’s cool eyes never betrayed so much as a flash of weakness.

By the time the tuberculosis had reached its latter stages, they had grown accustomed to the strange ritual of acting as if nothing were
wrong with her. At dinner and tea, they orchestrated their conversations around the sound of her deep, hollow cough, which tore at their hearts. They looked on as she went about the few daily chores she could still perform, although she had become so emaciated that her wool shawl seemed like a crushing burden on her frail shoulders. She still rose and dressed every day, fed the dogs, and sat in the rocking chair sewing on buttons or darning socks. When she became too weak to sew, she read. When she could no longer hold up a book, Charlotte or Anne read to her. Keeper never left her side and padded anxiously behind wherever she went, with the kind of mute and mysterious comprehension of death that only animals possess.

Few people outside the parsonage and its regular visitors were aware of Emily’s condition. Arthur had not laid eyes on her in months, and it was on Keeper’s account that he was admitted to the heart of the home and saw with his own eyes that she was dying.

It was a wintry afternoon rendered even more miserable by a sharp wind and stinging sleet. Arthur had just come from a deathbed and was plodding up the snow-covered lane to find John Brown and give him instructions for yet another name to be engraved on the Sugden family tombstone. It wasn’t the deaths that disturbed him so much, but the misery of the living, and he was pondering God’s baffling will when he heard Keeper’s bark—a relentless yelp that warned of strangers. With a good hold on his hat, he lifted his head and squinted through the driving sleet. A horse-drawn wagon had pulled up beside the chipping shed, and when Arthur approached he found that the drivers had stepped inside to take shelter from the wind. They stood glowering at him with their gloved hands thrust deep into the pockets of their heavy coats, stamping their sheepskin boots, their caps pulled down over their ears, their faces red and raw from the icy wind. Arthur could see that they were waiting for John, and he figured they were out of temper at not being able to make their delivery and get on their way. He had not even noticed their dogs until he heard the growling coming from the beneath the wagon. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Keeper stalk across the lane; then
Martha came running out of the back kitchen crying his name. Within a flash the three dogs were at one another, a fury of vicious snarls and growls in a flurry of fur and snow. With bared teeth they went for the eyes, the neck, and the chest, and Arthur could see that old Keeper was no match for the two of them, tough and weathered though he was.

“Hey there!” he shouted to the carriers. “Hey! Call off your dogs!” But they only watched from the shed, grinning from ear to ear like they were proud of how their dogs could draw blood. Martha had advanced into the lane, flapping her apron and shouting at Keeper to come away, and Charlotte was calling from the yard, but they knew there was nothing they could do. Arthur was so sickened by the men and their cruelty, and seeing the women helpless and the old dog being mauled, that he fairly lost his temper. He threw down his prayer book and let loose a string of curses at the carriers that quite shocked them all. He grabbed the feed bucket from the back of the wagon and marched into the fray. He knew he’d get bitten, and he only hoped he could distract the other dogs long enough to draw Keeper away. Arthur managed to beat off one of the dogs, but Keeper—his eyes swimming with blood—was fighting blind and had his teeth sunk well into the black jowls of the other. It was only when Arthur crept close enough to catch the old dog’s attention that Keeper recognized a voice of authority and loosened his grip a little. By then the carriers had come out of the shed and stepped in to give him a hand. Arthur took Keeper by the collar and escorted him, bloodied and limping, back to the parsonage.

Arthur was given a hero’s welcome in the kitchen, although the bulk of sympathy went to the old dog. Martha and Tabby and Charlotte worried over them, fussing about with pans of boiling water and clean rags. Arthur had a bad gash in his hand, but he was more concerned about a cut in Keeper’s chest that wouldn’t stop bleeding. Arthur knelt down on the floor with the dog and got him to lie still while he sponged away enough of the blood to find the wound.

“Here it is. Nothing so big that it won’t heal. If he can keep it clean with his tongue, it’ll be all right.”

Keeper lifted his swollen head and licked the curate’s hand.

“Well, now.” Arthur smiled, patting the dog gently. “I’ll take that as ample payment for my troubles.”

They were all touchy and on the verge of tears these days, and Arthur’s gesture of kindness was sorely needed in a home that had seen so much sorrow. Tabby turned away so that they wouldn’t see her tears, and Martha would have thrown her arms around his neck and hugged him shamelessly were it not for the presence of Charlotte. They knew how she spoke so harshly of the curate, and they would not do anything to cross her.

Arthur was suddenly aware of their eyes on him; he rose and self-consciously smoothed back his wind-blown hair. “Well, ladies, I don’t see anything else. Those wounds should heal up if you keep him still.”

“You’ll have a nice cup of tea before you go, Mr. Nicholls,” Charlotte said unexpectedly.

Arthur’s first reaction was to decline, and he almost had the words out of his mouth, but then he changed his mind. “I would be very grateful for a cup of tea just now, Miss Brontë.” When he looked up, his face burst into that broad smile of his that lit up a room, but Charlotte had turned to the cabinet to get down the tea things and didn’t notice.

“We are the ones who are grateful,” Charlotte said quietly. “Emily would have been out there in the fray herself, were she well enough.”

“I don’t doubt that for a minute,” Arthur said, shaking his head in a gesture of respectful awe. “I remember once watching Miss Emily traipse across a field right in front of the Heatons’ bull, and that is one bad-tempered creature. Well, she crossed right under his nose. And he respectfully let her pass. She seemed to know he wouldn’t harm her. She does indeed have a way with animals.”

Arthur noticed then that Martha was wiping back tears, and he wondered what he’d just walked in on, because it couldn’t be just about the old dog.

Charlotte said, “I apologize for serving you in the kitchen, but Papa is over at Oxenhope for a meeting.”

“Here’s your hat … an’ your prayer book, sir,” Martha said, setting both on the table behind him. “I’m sorry, but the cover got a little wet from the snow,” she added timidly.

It was just the kind of thing that would put him out of sorts: a damaged prayer book, a tarnished chalice, a hat worn during service—any little thing that might imply disrespect to the church. But he only glanced at it and said, “It’s a prayer book. It can be replaced. This old warrior here is one of a kind.”

A strange sound cut through his talk, a rapid, rasping breath. He turned to find Emily paused in the doorway, lost in the folds of a heavy shawl. Her face had the appearance he had come to recognize in consumptives, the skin clinging to the bones, with no flesh to give contour or shape, so that she was hardly recognizable.

Arthur pushed back the bench and rose to his feet. “He’s all right, Miss Emily. He’ll be as good as new in a few days.”

Emily fixed him with a dim and indifferent gaze, as if she didn’t recognize him. Keeper, detecting her presence, lifted his head. With great effort, he got to his feet and limped painfully toward her, wagging his tail. Slowly, weighing every movement against the reserve of strength left in her body, she turned and shuffled out of the room with Keeper trailing behind her.

Charlotte set a pitcher of milk on the table and then turned away.

“I do believe her inflammation is subsiding,” she said, “and all these symptoms will presently be leaving her, and she’ll be gaining back her strength. I am not so gloomy as my father; he has seen this affliction in our family before, and he warns me that I must not hope—but I cannot renounce hope. I cannot. I cannot.”

She spoke with a steady, mild voice, but she was trembling so much that when she turned toward him with cup and saucer, it rattled in her hand. He reached for it and took it from her, and this time he caught her eye. For once she did not avoid his gaze or cut him with an impatient and curt remark. It was not so much his countenance as it was his entire bearing that spoke of a tenderness, a willingness to shoulder the burden of
her particular grief, an offer of understanding; it broke through her taut and stiff reserve and softened her like a beam of sunlight on a harsh winter day.