Bronte's Mistress Page 2

  “I suppose we’ll have to content ourselves with Mr. Brontë,” said Lydia, when Bessy paused for breath. “I’ll pay calls to the Monk’s House and have him read Byron to me.”

  “You’ll do nothing of the sort,” I snapped, trying to create one more bend in the paper.

  So Mr. Brontë liked poetry.

  The fold wouldn’t stay. I flicked the page into the fire, where it flared for a second before crumbling.

  “My letter!” cried Lydia, as if it had been precious. “How could you?”

  “Oh, please!” I’d discarded it without thinking, but that hardly merited an apology. I couldn’t deal with any more of Lydia’s histrionics. “It’s time we were all abed.”

  “Couldn’t you stay with us a little longer, Mama?” whispered Mary from the corner.

  Her sisters glared at her.

  “Not tonight,” I said. Yet I gestured for her to come to me.

  She ran over and planted a fleeting, wet kiss on my cheek, as she had countless nights before.

  Lydia and Bessy stood still, united in their act of small rebellion.

  * * *

  I UNDRESSED QUICKLY, WITHOUT Marshall’s help, and discarded my petticoats like a second skin on my dressing room floor.

  There was a romance in walking the corridors barefoot and dressed only in my nightgown, even though this was my house and I could wander where I wished. I tiptoed down the landing, dancing to avoid the floorboards that creaked, my body lighter without the swathes of fabric that weighed me down in the day.

  “Edmund?” I opened his bedroom door just wide enough to peer in and shielded the candle I was carrying in case he was already asleep.

  “Lydia?” my husband called out, the confusion that comes with being pulled back from the precipice of slumber evident in the haste and volume of his reply.

  In the days since I’d returned from Yoxall Lodge, our communications had only been of the most perfunctory kind. Each morning Edmund had asked me what was for dinner from behind the Times. And each night I had lain in my bed, flat on my back and hands rigid by my sides, waiting for his tread outside my door.

  But tonight, prompted perhaps by the warm relief of Mary’s lips pressed against my face, I had softened and come to him.

  “Is anything the matter?” he asked.

  “The matter? No, not at all.” I hurried in, shutting the door behind me.

  Edmund half closed his eyes, shrinking from the light, but then clambered onto his elbows and propped himself up against the bolster behind him.

  I set the candle on the mahogany washstand and twitched the hangings of the four-poster bed over a few inches, protecting him from the glare.

  “I am very tired, Lydia. It has been a taxing day,” Edmund said, stifling a yawn. But he moved over to accommodate me, lifting the sheets so I could slide under the heavy scarlet blankets, faded from years of use.

  My legs were cold beneath my nightgown. He flinched when our limbs made contact, flinched and then tensed as I wrapped myself around him like a limpet and rested my head on his chest.

  “You haven’t asked me about Staffordshire,” I said after a minute or two of enjoying the familiar waves of his breath, like an aged sailor who can now only find his legs at sea.

  “What is there to ask?” he said. “It was difficult?”

  I nodded as much as I could, held fast as I was against him. He didn’t want me to move. He wanted only to sleep, exhausted by a day of— what? Account books and reading the sporting pages? I wanted to run a mile, release the horses from the stables, and gallop beside them, crying, No more! No more needlework and smiling through stunted arpeggios for me.

  “Your father must know it’s for the best,” he said. “She had suffered—”

  “And what if it were your mother?” I bit my tongue too late, knowing how he hated being interrupted.

  “Lydia,” Edmund warned. Eviction would follow if I continued in this strain.

  Somehow it was even colder under the covers. The hairs along my legs stood up against the sheet.

  “People rarely call me that now,” I said, snuggling close against his hard, ungiving chest. “It is like I lost my name to our daughter.”

  Down here, I could pretend Edmund was the boy I had loved, a boy with chubby cheeks and a full head of hair, the boy I had won into wooing me, despite his shyness and that endearing stutter he’d had when conversing with the opposite sex.

  How proudly I had sat, watching him give one of his first sermons, thinking, That is my husband, the father of my sons, whether the thought had crossed his mind yet or not. Less than three months later, he was mine.

  “We must speak of the children,” I said. My hand burrowed under his crisp nightshirt to play with the wisps of hair that led from his heart to his belly. “Lydia thinks I am a tyrant for refusing a dinner invitation from the Thompsons so soon after her grandmother’s death.”

  “Lydia is bored,” Edmund said. “We should send her away. To your sister, Mary, perhaps, or to Lady Scott at Great Barr Hall. The Scotts see more society than us.”

  “I doubt it,” I said, stiffening. “My cousin Catherine is an invalid.”

  “But she is married to a baronet.”

  All these years later and that still stung. It was Valentine’s Day 1815 in Bath, and I was my cousin Catherine’s bridesmaid. I’d held the train of her dress as she married Edward Scott, heir to his father’s baronetcy, a minor member of the nobility, but to me, the hero of a fairy tale.

  He would have been mine had I only been older, I’d wept, wishing for a few more years on top of my fifteen. And now? Now I wished I could be Lydia Gisborne once more, uncrease the lines in my forehead, shrug off my worries and turn back the years as easily as I could wind back the clock on the mantelpiece.

  “And then there’s Ned,” I said.

  “Ned?”

  “The new tutor, Mr. Brontë,” I said. “Ned seems to like him.”

  My hand circled lower, scuttling spider-like across Edmund’s paunch.

  “Lydia, that tickles,” he said, levering me off him as he sat up to blow out the candle. He rearranged the pillows and lay back, pulling my hand higher to rest on his chest.

  This was it, then. Our conversation was at an end.

  The darkness enveloped me. I imagined the trail of smoke snaking its way to the ceiling but couldn’t even discern the shape of Edmund’s chin. From the pattern of his breathing, I knew he was slipping away from me.

  “Has Mr. Sewell said anything about him?” I asked, tapping Edmund like piano keys to bring him back to me.

  “Hmm?”

  “I wondered if Sewell had any complaints about his new companion.”

  Mr. Brontë wasn’t sleeping in the Hall, but in the Monk’s House, where our steward, Tom Sewell, lived. I’d insisted, for the girls’ sake, that the young man’s sleeping quarters be far away rather than in the main house. And that was probably just as well, since his brooding brow and love of poetry marked Mr. Brontë out as a romantic.

  It’s a strange little property, the Monk’s House. It dates from the 1600s, Edmund would tell visitors. Not nearly as old as the Hall, of course. It could have housed Henry the Eighth himself. And his chest would swell with pride.

  The cottage was too grand for servants, to my mind, if you wanted the staff to know their place. No wonder Tom Sewell’s sister, our housekeeper, gave herself such airs. Miss Sewell was a flighty thing, too young to manage a household, and yet she thought herself mistress of two, whiling away evenings with her brother at the Monk’s House. No doubt she’d be there even more frequently now there was an unmarried gentleman to toy with.

  I hadn’t even seen the new addition to the household since Mr. Brontë had hurled stones at the window. The schoolroom was the girls’ domain, and Ned was taking his lessons at the Monk’s House. The weather had proved too inclement for wandering outside or hunkering down in the stables.

  “No, no complaints.” Edmund’s voice was just louder
than a whisper.

  To others, he was the stern father and the generous landowner, above all a man of morals and convictions. But to me, he was as vulnerable as a child, my partner through the years, my companion in the dark. Driven by an unexpected impulse, I kissed his neck, his cheek, his nose, like an explorer in the desert who has finally happened upon water.

  He grunted.

  “Edmund,” I said, lips skirting across his collarbone, hand reaching through the thicket of hair between his legs.

  “Lydia,” he said, very much awake. He grabbed my hand and pushed it aside. “There’ll be none of that.” He turned onto his side, his face away from me, pitching up the sheets so a draft flew across my body.

  I’d been a fool to attempt when it had been so long. That was a second cruelty—how our marriage had died along with our daughter. But I should have accepted it by now. Being with Edmund was like being in my own bed but lonelier. Having someone, but someone who did not want you, was worse than having nobody at all.

  Edmund was asleep by the time I had conquered myself enough to excuse him. I wrapped my arm around him and he did not stir, brought my mouth close enough to his back to drink in his smell without risking a kiss.

  All through the night, I stayed there on the brink of sleep, terrified to wake him, the cold playing across the goose bumps on my arm.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “DON’T YOU WISH TO hear about Mary too? She has made admirable progress,” Miss Brontë asked me, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.

  We were sitting in the bay of my dressing room window, looking out at the stew pond, which had frozen over in patches. A few more days of this cold, and Bessy would have her fondest wish: the children could go skating.

  “There is little life in her. I fear she hasn’t the older girls’ character,” I said, watching my breath steam up the triangular panes of glass and cursing the interminable winter.

  “Mary lacks Lydia and Bessy’s vitality, perhaps, madam,” said Miss Brontë, measuring every word and plucking at a loose thread on her shawl. “But she shows determination, a quiet resolve. It is hard for her, I think, to follow in her older sisters’ footsteps.”

  This was more forthcoming than I usually found Miss Brontë. For years I’d longed for her to voice the opinions she was so ready with in her correspondence. To while away my tedium, yes, but also so I’d know I wasn’t the only woman in the house with a feeling heart and a fiery soul. But now it came to the rub, I wasn’t sure I liked it.

  “Oh?” I said, tracing an “L” in the condensation.

  “She hasn’t told me as much, but I feel it in her. I too am the youngest daughter—”

  “Mary was not the youngest,” I cut Miss Brontë off and stood. How could she forget so soon? She who, with Marshall, had taken shifts at my darling’s bedside when I could no longer nurse her without rest.

  “Of course not, Mrs. Robinson. I didn’t mean—I also lost—”

  “Enough,” I said, choosing not to entertain her apologies.

  There was judgment in her eyes. For her, my wealth, my grace, and my once handsome face spoke against me as surely as they had pled my case before all other courts. It was easy to paint herself as the victim—poor and young and plain—but life is rarely so simple.

  Throughout the whole interview, I had steeled myself to ask her one question, yet now I could not bring myself to ask it. I walked to the polished wood table that served as my desk and flicked through condolence letters.

  She started to leave, thinking she was dismissed.

  “Miss Brontë?” I called after her.

  “Mrs. Robinson?” she said, with something between a jump and a curtsy.

  “Can you tell Mr. Brontë I wish to speak with him?”

  A small crease appeared across her forehead, but she said, “Of course.”

  “Very good.”

  I sat, pretended to read, and listened for the rustle of her skirts and the familiar click of the door, but instead there was only her breath, always audible, irregular, and rattling, like a window only just holding out against the wind.

  “You wish to see him now, Mrs. Robinson?” she asked, her emphasis on the “now.”

  “At Mr. Brontë’s earliest convenience.” I met her eye with as convincing a smile as I could muster. “Thank you, Miss Brontë.”

  She nodded and left.

  Strange that Miss Brontë was so partial to Mary.

  Your first child is a miracle. A man and you have met and married and made a person, with nostrils and eyelashes and toes. Every breath she takes seems to swell your heart. You didn’t know what love was until today.

  Your second, if another girl, is a disappointment. You feel the low, aching guilt of that as you gaze down on her. Crescent nails and downy hair. She is perfect in every way, except for the most important.

  Still, no need to worry. You are young. You have years to mate and make a boy.

  With the third, though, the tide turns—or it did with my poor Mary. Your husband’s face falls when he hears the news from the midwife. You can hardly look when you place the baby in the third-hand cradle. Your body is in ruins, another year of your life has faded away, and there is still no son to set the world to rejoicing, no boy to grant the tenant farmers an unearned holiday.

  Worse yet, when the heir comes at last, he is not yours at all, but everyone else’s. You have made what you could never be. You have fulfilled your function and are useless, spent.

  “Only think, Lydia, you need never have another baby,” Mother had said, dandling Ned on her knee.

  I had burned then with desire for another child. I had begged, and at last Edmund had given her to me. She would be the child who fixed us, who brought back the love that we had lost. My dearest, sweetest Georgiana. The child I had wanted in spite of reason, almost to defy logic, the daughter born only to love and be loved. And she was the only child taken from us, as if in confirmation of the world’s perverse cruelty.

  A tap at the door. Mr. Brontë. My insides contorted.

  “Come in,” I called, but I had spoken too quietly and was forced to repeat myself twice before he entered.

  “Mrs. Robinson,” Mr. Brontë said, bowing. He didn’t even look at me. His eyes swept my dressing room, taking in the feminine trappings—chintz floral curtains, a few engravings, a deep pink rug one of my brothers had sworn was from India when he gave it to me—but also Edmund’s gun case, which was positioned above the chimney glass and looked strangely out of place.

  My life was laid out before him, in stacks of library books, letters tied with ribbons, half-finished pieces of embroidery. These were the baubles with which women must entertain themselves. Ours were pursuits, not passions, taken up in a quiet moment, and just as easily set aside. Everything was just so—neat and in its proper place. Was Mr. Brontë thinking how different the room was from Edmund’s haphazard study?

  “Thank you for coming, Mr. Brontë,” I said. “Pray, take a seat.”

  I had risen at his entrance half unconsciously, and now, as he came toward me, I could see that he was shorter than I’d thought when I saw him from the window, not much taller than me.

  His face, though, was full of character. Sharp jaw, imperial nose, and abundant chestnut hair, much darker and redder in color than his sister’s and so curly it gave him the appearance of a child despite the beard that covered his chin.

  Mr. Brontë cleared his throat as he waited for me to stop staring, hovering by the painted chair opposite me.

  “I trust your first few weeks at Thorp Green have been comfortable, Mr. Brontë,” I said, retaking my seat and fidgeting my hands below the table, hidden from him.

  “Very comfortable, Mrs. Robinson. I owe you thanks for trusting Anne’s recommendation,” he said, flicking up the tails of his coat to sit.

  Oh, yes. Miss Brontë was another “Anne.” Like Marshall and our hapless housemaid, Ellis. Perhaps, for him, the name “Miss Brontë” conjured the other one, “Charlotte.” And
wasn’t there a third sister too?

  “All my husband’s doing, I assure you,” I said quickly. “Ned is only ten and might have stayed longer with the girls, I think. He would have learned enough Latin from your sister to prepare him for Cambridge, but what do I know of such things?”

  He did not reply. His silence struck me as insulting rather than deferential.

  Miss Brontë, too, had been quiet at our first interview, but she had quaked in anticipation. Her eyes had skated across the floor as if watching a mouse, and she’d answered me in monosyllables or with a tactless innocence about the ways of the world.

  “Why did you leave your last employers, the Inghams, Miss Brontë?” I’d asked, smiling to try to reassure her.

  “They were unkind to me,” she’d answered.

  Unkindness. I had been indifferent toward her, yes, once I’d discovered what she really thought of me, but at least she couldn’t accuse me of that.

  I tried once more to engage the brother, to play the lady of the manor, although the household had run just as smoothly during my absence at Yoxall Lodge, and now even this young man was more necessary to its operation than I was.

  “You have met all my children, I think?” I ventured.

  “Yes. Ned is a good-natured boy, and your daughters are charming.” Mr. Brontë’s face broke into a smile.

  I swallowed my annoyance. “Yes, Mr. Brontë,” I said, clasping my hands on the desk. “That is why I wished to speak with you.”

  The smile faded. He looked troubled. His eyes wandered from mine to my cheek to my hands, making me flush at his impertinence. He was taking me apart and putting me back together, puzzling me out. “Indeed?”

  “My daughters, Mr. Brontë, they are young and—how was it you put it?—charming. Miss Robinson, Lydia, my eldest, in particular is considered something of a beauty.” As I was once, I nearly added, but I couldn’t risk being met by a look of disbelief or patronizing indulgence.

  “Mrs. Robinson, I hope you don’t think— I was commenting only on their sweet dispositions,” Mr. Brontë said, leaning across the table, his palms upturned for emphasis, his words spilling over each other in his desire for me to understand.