Bronte's Mistress Page 3

  I laughed.

  I could accept, even boast, that Lydia was beautiful, with her gold ringlets and periwinkle-blue eyes, and it was true that she could be charming. But a sweet disposition? If only young men could see the girls who dominate their imaginations when the door is closed or the dance is done. All too often, I had suffered the sting of Lydia’s slaps and stood in the tidal waves of her anger. And as for Bessy, my second daughter was ever gallivanting around the property, falling from horses, scraping her knees, and eating with the appetite of a boy. She would have been a stable lad if left to follow the cues of her own nature.

  “This is not an admonishment, Mr. Brontë,” I said, after leaving him to sweat for a moment. “I only wish to rely on you as a gentleman and a friend.”

  And then I did something extraordinary. Without making the decision to do so, I placed my hand on top of his.

  Mr. Brontë looked down at my fingers but did not pull away. His hand was large and soft, his fingers stained with ink.

  “Good.” I drew back, surer now in my control. He had thought me one way and I had surprised him. “Lydia is young and impressionable,” I continued, reveling now in the years I had on him, the years that made him closer in age to Lydia than to me. “And she sees little of the world here. Even the two villages—Great and Little Ouseburn—are at least half an hour’s walk away. The advent of a young and handsome man might unsettle her.”

  The tutor’s face reddened when I called him handsome. “Of course,” he said, nodding. “I understand.”

  “I knew you would.” I smiled wide and gracious, bringing my hands closer to my chest and circling my wrists, thrilling to see that his gaze followed the movement. “After all, you have a sister.”

  “I have three. I had five,” he said, his tone different—sharp, raw. “But that was a long time ago.”

  The correction threw me. “Oh, yes,” I said, with a nervous laugh.

  Three years Miss Brontë had lived in my house, and now her brother knew I had never discovered much about her family, though I’d often wondered what else she wrote of me to Charlotte. My father had had some connection to hers at Cambridge, and that had been enough of a reference to satisfy me. She’d rebuffed my early questions about her home with short answers until I’d given up asking. I hadn’t even known she had a brother until Edmund, or rather, Edmund’s mother, decided that Ned was now old enough to require a tutor.

  “So you know what young ladies can be like. Fanciful,” I said as lightly as I could, although I was imagining these other Brontë sisters, the ones who had died. In my mind they were twins, Georgiana’s age, with her button nose but Mr. Brontë’s curls. Their baby lips rested on their pillows when the coughing subsided and they at last found rest, but soon after, their perfect, pale skin would turn purple as they gasped for air.

  “I wouldn’t describe my sisters as fanciful, Mrs. Robinson. My sister Charlotte is the cleverest woman I know.”

  I don’t know why—we had only just met—but this seemed like a rebuke. His words confirmed everything I’d feared, that this Charlotte Brontë was just like our Miss Brontë, thinking herself better than other women for having read a few more books.

  I stood and stalked to the window, forcing Mr. Brontë to stand too. I imagined him dithering behind me, wishing I would touch him again, and resisted the urge to turn.

  Outside, the steward Tom Sewell was berating our stable hand, Joey Dickinson, pointing at Patroclus’s front left hoof, which the poor horse was raising and replacing on the ice-coated gravel in turn. Joey bowed his head in submission. I pictured the quiver of his smooth upper lip.

  Was I clever? I’d never really considered it. Mother had praised me for being “beautiful,” “neat,” and “well mannered,” but never “clever.”

  “Tell me more about her, about Charlotte.” The words left my mouth before I had judged them prudent.

  The old French clock, a wedding gift, ticked behind me. My corset creaked as I inhaled hard.

  Joey led Patroclus back to the stable, burrowing his face in his sleeve for a second as if to wipe away a tear. Tom Sewell turned his attention to Ned, who had hopscotched into view, glad no doubt that Mr. Brontë had released him early from his studies.

  The compulsion to turn was strong, but I held out, daydreaming that when Mr. Brontë next spoke, his breath would blow against my neck.

  “Perhaps another time,” he said, as far away as ever.

  I glanced back, ready to do battle, but almost gasped at the intensity of his stare. No one had looked at me and really seen me for months—years, maybe—but this boy, his red-rimmed eyes, bore into my soul. I was afraid to know what he found there.

  “Good day, Mr. Brontë,” I whispered.

  With a slight inclination of his head, he left me.

  * * *

  “I THOUGHT YOU WERE dying of boredom, Lydia,” I said. “Desperate for something to do.”

  “I was. I am!” cried my eldest, tossing her bonnet on the schoolroom floor. “But this is worse than nothing. I won’t go! It is beneath me. Why can’t Miss Brontë go alone as she always does?”

  “Miss Brontë, will you excuse us, please?” I asked, holding out my hand for Lydia’s bonnet, which the governess had rescued from imminent destruction.

  She gave it to me, bobbed, and left, silent as a shadow.

  “Lydia, this behavior is uncalled for and unseemly,” I tried again. “It is our duty to visit the poor, the sick—”

  “You haven’t been in months!” Lydia shot back at me, her eyes burning like a demon’s, framed by her angelic curls.

  Bessy let out a snort from the corner.

  “I am going today,” I said, as calmly as I could, as if to prove that Lydia had not inherited her petulant humor from me. “I cannot force you to join us, but only imagine what Mother—your grandmother—would have thought.”

  “Grandmama is dead!” Lydia shrieked. “And I wish our other one was too.” She grabbed her bonnet from me and flew from the room.

  I shut my eyes, calculating the likelihood of the onset of one of my headaches.

  “We’re ready, Mama,” said Mary, slipping her arm through mine and bringing me back to myself.

  “Good. Very good,” I said.

  Bessy rolled her eyes at her sister but walked over to me too.

  The three of us trudged along Thorp Green Lane in silence. It was muddy underfoot from the last few days’ rain, which had washed away the children’s hopes of snow. At times it was difficult to navigate around the puddles that had gathered in the ditches, reflecting the canopy of gray clouds above, so my dress grew heavier with each step. And the basket of gifts I carried—old linens, freshly baked pies, jams from the pantry—weighed down the crook of my arm, cutting into my flesh.

  But I had determined to do something other than wait. I ignored all this and Mary, who was wrinkling her nose at the stinging odor of manure. If Mr. Brontë was as pious as his sister, my Christian gesture was sure to impress him when he heard of our outing from Ned. Though I had a lingering suspicion that Miss Brontë went visiting so often less due to her Godliness than to her desire to escape our house and spend more time with the curate, Reverend Greenhow.

  The Stripe Houses were a row of dirty, mismatched cottages, a few inhabited by the most destitute in the vicinity of the Ouseburns but the majority abandoned. The first was home to Mrs. Thirkill and Mrs. Tompkins, widowed sisters who were already half-deaf in their sixties. They nodded with hungry eyes at the gifts bestowed upon them and curtsied to the girls and me in turn, which was gratifying. All too often the poor give you only suspicious glances when you bring them aid.

  We did not go into the next cottage. Beth Bradley stood at her threshold with a baby on her hip, a toddler clinging to her ankle, and an expression of exhaustion on her face. Benjamin, their eldest boy, had fallen ill, she told us, and Dr. Crosby said it might be the scarlet fever.

  I ushered Bessy and Mary away from her and from the remaining Stri
pe Houses. Yet I glanced back at the upper windows of the two-story shack as we continued toward Little Ouseburn, almost hoping I would catch a glimpse of the sickroom, barer than Georgiana’s but with the same unmistakable scent of vomit, iodine, and sweat.

  The rain was starting up again, but it was only spotting. It wasn’t hard enough to excuse us from the rest of our visits.

  “My feet are wet,” said Mary. She stood on one leg to show me the hole in the toe of her left boot.

  “Honestly, Mary, you are growing as big as your sister,” I said, gesturing at Bessy, who was stomping ahead of us through the puddles. “God knows what Miss Sewell is having Cook feed you.”

  When I was Lydia’s age, they’d laced me so tight that my waist was eighteen inches. Mother had been proud of that, and so was I. I’d told Lydia once, and she hadn’t eaten for days just so she could say the same. She’d succeeded but given up an hour after Marshall had encaged her in one of my corsets. She’d been defeated, pale and short of breath, screaming at us to “get this cursed thing off her.”

  But Bessy, for all her hair was dark like mine, might have been a different species from us. She was broader, taller, more athletic. It was hard to imagine the giant of a man who might consider her dainty.

  “Whatever is the matter with Lydia today, Mary? Do you know?” I asked, transferring my basket to the other arm and lowering my voice so that her sister could not hear us.

  Bessy and Lydia were so unlike each other. Yet what I said to one was always made known to the other, to the exclusion of Mary, who, at fourteen, they thought of as a baby.

  “She is upset that no one has sent her a valentine,” said Mary without a second’s hesitation, looking up at me, unabashed, little traitor that she was.

  A valentine? In the first years of our marriage, Edmund had left posies on my pillow, but today I hadn’t even noted the date. I nearly smiled at the girls’ naivety but then I remembered Mr. Brontë, the curve of his lip, the smile in his eyes and how he had called Lydia “charming.”

  “From whom was she expecting a valentine, Mary?” I asked, walking a little faster now that Bessy had disappeared around a bend in the hedgerow-lined lane.

  “No one in particular, Mama. Although if she had her pick, she says she’d take Harry Thompson,” said Mary, hopping along to keep her foot dry.

  My shoulders relaxed. My pace slackened. The heir to Kirby Hall was double Lydia’s age, and it was doubtful he even knew her name. Besides, Edmund had told me a profitable marriage was brewing between Harry Thompson and the daughter of some merchant’s son turned baronet in Kent.

  “She was upset, as Bessy was sent one by Will Milner,” Mary continued, her eyes widening. “It didn’t strike Lydia as fair, since she is the oldest and prettiest, but now, since Grandmama died and we all must avoid company, she sees no gentlemen at all, so when is she to have her chance? At church? Reverend Lascelles is so dull she says he’d kill any hope of romance. And she claims she’ll be old and haggard before we’re out of mourning, especially as our other grandmama will also die sometime, putting us back to the beginning. Oh, will I be pretty like Lydia, when I am seventeen? I know I shouldn’t care so much, but I do. It is wicked, and yet I cannot help it.” Childish confession tumbled out after childish confession. There was mud on Mary’s cheek and a look of terrible sincerity in her eyes.

  “There is no harm in praying for beauty, Mary,” I said, reaching over to wipe away the dirt with my handkerchief, “although it should not be the first virtue you desire.”

  Maybe there was no need to teach Bessy better manners or limit her dinner portions when young Will Milner was so devoted to her. It was a strange thing for a youthful attachment born out of a shared love of horses to have survived into the boy’s adulthood. It would have irked me too had I been Lydia. Her younger sister would have everything a girl could wish for—money, a husband only a few years older than her, and a property a short ride from ours. And Bessy hadn’t even done anything to earn it, while Lydia wasted her coquetry on her bedroom looking glass or, perhaps, on Mr. Brontë.

  “Why, there are Mama and Mary now,” cried Bessy, as we rounded the corner. She was swinging on a wooden cow-gate beside the next house and conducting a shouted conversation with Eliza Walker.

  Eliza was standing in the cottage doorframe, cowering from the thickening rain. She was daughter-in-law to George Walker, a rustic who’d been on his deathbed since I’d first come to Thorp Green Hall as mistress nearly twenty years earlier. The townspeople claimed he would soon be one hundred years old. Each day, Eliza made her thankless pilgrimage from Little Ouseburn, the smaller of the two villages, to tend to him since the obstinate old man refused to leave this rundown shack where he’d lived with his late wife for decades.

  There was a flash of lightning, followed by a thunderclap in quick succession. The rain beat down so hard it rebounded from the ground. The three of us ran toward the house, seeking shelter before Eliza had worked up the courage to invite us in.

  It took a few minutes to adjust to the dimness. The only room in the hovel was thick with peat smoke that clouded my eyes and coated the inside of my throat.

  Mary, forgetting all her breeding, had dropped down to one knee to remove and examine her offending boot. Bessy stood at the door, watching the storm and delighting in the shocks of lightning and percussive thunder.

  I didn’t have the energy to chide either of them. At least they’d come. And they hadn’t pointed out to me what a terrible failure this had been as Lydia would have, had she been of an age when I could have boxed her ears and dragged her along. What was I doing, traipsing round the countryside to impress a mere boy? Had I been so long alone that attention from any man could delight me?

  Eliza untied my cloak and hung it over one of the two roughly hewn wooden chairs by the fire. In the other, her father-in-law slept, his breathing labored.

  “We brought you…” I trailed off in embarrassment but passed her the soggy basket.

  She curtsied in thanks and scurried off to unpack it.

  I walked toward the fire to dry myself, but the heat was so fierce against my cheek that I had to hang back. It was a miracle that old George Walker hadn’t been mummified in the years he’d sat there, waiting for death.

  There was a stool beside his chair I hadn’t made out before. I dragged it back from the fire and sat next to him. I gazed up at his face, took his ancient and withered hand in mine, and tried not to gag at the smell of feces and tooth decay. I should set an example to my daughters, although one of them was entranced by a worn shoe, another by the elements, my oldest would not come with me, and my youngest girl was dead.

  “Mr. Walker,” I said, shouting toward his ear. “We have come to visit you.”

  His hand stroked mine in response. I could have kissed him. There was someone in the world who thought me young and good, who took joy from my presence.

  “You are in our prayers,” I said, my confidence growing. “You and your family.”

  I could not make out her expression in the gloom, but Eliza was watching me.

  George tried to speak but only a cough came out.

  “Mary, fetch Mr. Walker some water,” I said, but she gestured toward her unshod foot and Eliza had passed me a mug before I could call to Bessy.

  “Here.” I raised it to the old man’s lips with the reverence of a vicar doling out the Communion wine.

  He gulped down what he could, although at least half the water ran down his bearded chin, the droplets hanging like dew from the scraggly gray hairs.

  “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.

&nb
sp; “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?”