I strode back and sat on the chaise beside Marshall, studying her expressionless face. She saw me, the real me, more than anyone else, yet wouldn’t give up this playacting. She was the servant, and I was the mistress. We had our parts and, with them, our corresponding lines and silences.
“Is that right, ma’am?” she said, after a long pause. “Well, mightn’t you have gone with them?”
“Yes, yes,” I snapped. “But that isn’t the point.”
She didn’t ask me to elucidate what the point was, but only because she knew that I would tell her anyway.
“Marshall?” I said, drawing so close to her that I blocked the light.
She dropped her needlework into her lap and looked up at me.
“Not one of them was anxious that I join them. Not one of them. It was all the same, either way. And isn’t that a slight? There was a time when I had invitations and friends, when parties weren’t complete without me. But now it’s ‘Bring your daughters, Mrs. Robinson,’ if anyone thinks to ask me anywhere at all. And not an ounce of gratitude from any of them, no respect for where they came from.”
There was only sympathy in Marshall’s eyes, although even to my own ears, my speech sounded petty. I laid my head on her shoulder and let her stroke my temple, feeling all the sorrier for myself that Ann Marshall was the only one who cared for me.
There was a knock at the door, and I sprang away from her, as if we were a young couple who’d been caught kissing.
“Come in,” I called, expecting William Allison or maybe Bob Pottage, our gardener who’d also come with us to Scarborough in the guise of a groom.
But it was Mr. Brontë.
“Mrs. Robinson.” Brontë addressed me for the first time in months and walked into the center of the room without waiting to be summoned closer. There was a confidence in his manner I hadn’t seen recently, a directness in his stare that made me think there had been a crisis.
“The theater—? Is all well?” I asked, drawing my hand to my chest. My breathing was shallow.
“All is well. We were one too many for our tickets, and I volunteered to step aside.”
I nodded, though my heart was still racing. “But why are you here?”
“I knew that Mr. Robinson—that you were also without company tonight. Both of you.” He added the caveat, with a nod toward Marshall, pulling us back from the brink of impropriety.
She resumed her sewing, gaze downcast.
I had no reason to doubt her absolute loyalty. My struggle was with my emotions regarding Mr. Brontë. The disgust I had felt that night at the Monk’s House fought against my joy that he had appeared and at that juncture when I had most longed for succor.
“I thought you might be in need of amusement,” he said. “Are you?”
But that wasn’t the question. The question was, Can you forgive me? And, Can we be as we were?
I swallowed my pride. Hadn’t I wanted to be sought out above others? And to learn more of Mr. Brontë and his dangerous, different mind?
“I am,” I whispered.
Mr. Brontë walked to the bookcase on the far wall and strained his arm to reach the upper shelf. I could see the muscles of his shoulder rippling, even through his shirt.
“I doubt they have much of a collection here,” I said. I had to say something, or they’d both hear how my caged heart rattled against my ribs.
“I think we should have some Shakespeare of our own. Don’t you, Mrs. Robinson?” he asked. He was already leafing through the pages, seeking out the play he had chosen.
What a refined and romantic form of entertainment! Was this how the Brontës spent their evenings, reading and debating great literature with each other? And Mr. Brontë thought me capable of this too.
“Marshall and I would be very grateful,” I said.
My maid bent even lower, as if trying to blend in with the furniture.
“Go on,” I whispered.
Mr. Brontë dragged an armchair from across the room to read by our solitary lamp. He sat, pushed back his curls, which had grown long enough to fall into his eyes, and positioned his feet so they were nearly touching mine.
“If music be the food of love, play on; / Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, / The appetite may sicken, and so die.” He barely looked at the page, focusing instead on me.
I closed my eyes to avoid his gaze, picturing the characters, and letting his liquid words wash over me—rhythmic, warm, and inescapably earnest. My Illyria bore a striking resemblance to Scarborough, but the beaches there were clean and empty and the sea a dazzling turquoise, as still as a looking glass in the peace that followed the great storm.
At the end of the second scene, between Viola and the Captain, Mr. Brontë paused for breath.
Marshall poured the tea, which one of the local servants had brought in for us.
“I forget how visceral he is, how immediate,” said Mr. Brontë, turning back one of the almost translucent pages to study an earlier line. “My desires, like fell and cruel hounds, / E’er since pursue me. It is incredible to be pulled into the humanity of it, leaping off the page although centuries have passed.”
“You forget, I think, Mr. Brontë,” I said, my lip curling slightly, “that the Duke knows nothing of love. He is suffering under an infatuation, a boyish delusion.”
“What!” Mr. Brontë cried, with mock derision. “Who could question Orsino’s choice before he met his match in Viola? Would you deny that Rosaline was fair just because Juliet was fairer? You are a harsh critic of men, Mrs. Robinson, to demand their first affections, as well as their deepest.”
I opened my mouth to say something through my smile but my joy mingled with longing. The toe of his boot was now pressing against my slipper but I wanted him closer, and my hand in his yet again. Perhaps I could send Marshall away on some pretense, to bring sugar? But the door flew open, sending a vibration through the room that spilled tea from the cup I was holding into my saucer.
“Here she is, Edmund!” my mother-in-law cried. “Taking tea with the tutor.”
“And Marshall,” I protested, but my maid was already scuttling toward the side door.
“You didn’t go to the theater?” Edmund asked, undoing his cravat to dab at the perspiration that had gathered on his forehead from the walk up to our buildings.
His mother, damn her, looked unaffected from the exertion.
“I took one of my headaches,” I said, not trusting myself to glance in the direction of Mr. Brontë, who was standing to attention beside me, still holding the Works. “And Mr. Brontë was so good as to read to us. He was just leaving.”
“Leaving, nonsense!” Elizabeth Robinson boomed, taking the spot that Marshall had just vacated and spreading out her skirts so wide that I was wedged against the scroll at the foot of the bench. “Read on, Mr. Brent. I am sure this will be most educational.”
An expression of distaste passed over Mr. Brontë’s face as she butchered his name, but he nodded and reopened the volume on a random page.
“Go thy ways, Kate: / That man i’ the world who shall report he has / A better wife, let him in nought be trusted, / For speaking false in that,” he began to drone.
Old Mrs. Robinson stared at the tutor.