You mustn’t forget me in favor of your new friends or enjoy yourself too much at concerts and the theater, or all of us in the Ouseburns will seem dull to you. Did you ever contrive to meet the company at the playhouse? I should so like to see the world in the wings, even though actors are an unscrupulous sort.
My sisters and I have convinced Papa that Grandmama is dead long enough that we might have a picnic. Only after you return, but I don’t know when that is! I say my sisters but mean only three of us. Henrietta is too confirmed a spinster to care for such things and Mary Ann is indisposed again, which is such a bore.
But at least that means Dr. Crosby attends us often, bringing all manner of gossip from Great Ouseburn and drawing Papa out of his study.
He—the doctor—is full of praise for your brother’s tutor. His name escapes me. I know you said he was too short to be handsome but we face such a dearth of unmarried male company. I wonder if your mama would countenance him joining our party? Otherwise we’ll have to invite the Milner brothers and then we must invite the sisters too.
Do write, Lydia, and tell me when I may set the date.
Your most sincere friend,
Amelia Thompson
P.S. One last piece of news. The date for my brother Harry’s nuptials is set. He is to marry a Miss Croft in August, but never fear, the wedding is in Kent and my sisters and I aren’t to go so it shouldn’t interfere with our picnic. Harry doesn’t plan to bring home his bride until the winter. I hope she is ugly. It wouldn’t do for her to be beautiful and rich.
I held my mouth still while I read, afraid that my emotions would tell on my face, which Edmund had told me once was as reactive as a weather vane.
“It is a good thing, Lydia!” he’d protested as I pulled away, my lip quivering as if to prove his point. “Who wouldn’t want a wife incapable of deception?”
He must have regretted that assessment since. Now, each time my anger threatened to overflow, I’d detect the surge deep inside me and see everything that would happen were I to give voice to it. How the waves would envelop me and break over him, the brief calm that would follow before my torrential tears, and when they were all spent, how I’d beg forgiveness crouched beside him or, on the worst occasions, outside his locked study door. That’s how it had been in the early years—passionate arguments followed by fevered reconciliations, even when our disagreements were minor. But since then, petty bickering had become the stuff of daily conversation, and when it mattered, I’d learned to quash my rage and walk away. At least sometimes.
But on the inside, even silly Amelia Thompson still had an effect on me. Her letter set off a chain of emotions as varied as those I’d suffered the only time I’d joined the hunt, anticipation giving way to fear and ecstasy, triumph and disaster hanging in the air as we jumped a hedgerow, when I didn’t know if we would clear the ditch. That must be why the others liked riding—Ned, Bessy, and Edmund when he was younger and fitter—but I had no need to seek out such thrills when I lived through them every day.
Lydia was a manipulative, conniving girl to be planning to meet the actors, even prior to Miss Brontë’s unfortunate dizzy spell. And Mr. Brontë too short to be handsome? What did a girl know of such things?
At the postscript, my anger mingled with a strange mix of righteousness and pity. It determined my course.
“I will go and speak with her,” I said, as if Bessy had made her request only seconds ago.
Quitting the room was a relief. I hadn’t realized how close the fire had made the air or that my face was flushed. I paused in front of the hallway mirror, so that the color could subside. There were slight circles below my eyes, but Marshall had done better with my hair today—not that anyone who cared would see me, unless Mr. Brontë joined us for dinner.
I opened the door to Lydia’s room without knocking. With a rustle of skirts, she stood in front of me before I could determine how she’d been using her solitary hours.
“Mama,” she said as dully as the servants when they called me “madam.”
“I bring a letter for you, Lydia.”
I didn’t offer her an explanation as to why the seal was broken, and she didn’t ask when she took it from me.
Infuriating. Her hands were clasped in front of her, the letter between them. Her long-lashed eyes were downcast.
“Aren’t you going to read it?” I asked, breaking the silence first.
“Very well, Mama.” She sat on the end of her unmade bed.
Her beautiful face was motionless as a sculpture. Was she making an effort to hold herself just so to elude me? Yet I could tell when she reached the final paragraph. She let out a little gasp and her eyes met mine before darting back to the page.
“Thank you, Mama,” she said, her voice wobbling, as if she couldn’t trust herself to say more.
“Harry Thompson is to be married, then?” I asked, casually, lifting her discarded nightdress from the floor and folding it.
“Yes.” A single tear spilled out of one violet eye and tumbled down her cheek.
“Oh, Lydia,” I said, tossing the lace-edged dress aside and sitting beside her. “My love.” Her hair ran like liquid silk through my fingers as I stroked her, soothed her. “Harry Thompson is a handsome man, I know, and heir to Kirby Hall, but there will be others.”
She broke into sobs, wrenched away from me, and threw herself prostrate on the bed.
I hovered over her, unsure what else to say.
Instead of Lydia, I seemed to see the ghost of my former self, crying just so when I’d learned that Edward Scott would marry my cousin Catherine Bateman. I had been so sure when I was Lydia’s age that I was destined for more, for someone better than Edmund, for somebody who would lift me higher. But my ascent into adulthood had been littered with disappointments, as hers would be too.
Motherhood was about offering truth, not comfort. For all it still tugged at my heartstrings to hear her cry so, Lydia needed to leave behind her childish notions. And I must be the one to disabuse her.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“MRS. ROBINSON?”
I jumped. I hadn’t heard Mr. Brontë knock or come in, but there he was, standing in the center of my dressing room at Thorp Green as if I’d conjured him.
How dare he? His sudden apparition took my breath away. And he could have interrupted me doing anything! But really, of course, there was nothing for me to do at all. That was why I’d been sitting in the window seat, staring across the lawn and delineating the intermittent bursts of birdsong.
Wren, blackbird, thrush.
Love, possession, warning.
“Mr. Brontë.” I stood.
Our eyes were level, and that made me uncomfortable. There was no way to escape Mr. Brontë’s deep blue stare. With Edmund, I was accustomed to addressing his cravat, or the back of his head, or the pages of his newspaper.
Mr. Brontë would be here about Ned, but it was funny he should come to me. Edmund was the one with opinions on the correct way to educate boys, and though Ned was at a clumsy age, it was Marshall who pressed herbs on bruises and kissed scraped knees.
“Is anything the matter?” I asked when he did not speak.
“No,” Mr. Brontë said, frowning, “although I might have asked you the same. You appeared pensive just now.”