Such familiarity might have been acceptable in the theater, in Scarborough, but it wouldn’t do here.
“It is considered impolite, Mr. Brontë, to enter without knocking,” I said, staring back at him. I wouldn’t be the first to blink.
“My apologies.” He didn’t play my game but bowed.
Disappointing. I felt something slacken, like when Marshall became distracted while tightening my corset, but this time it was on the inside.
“I came to ask a favor,” he said.
“A favor?” I repeated.
“Yes. But then the door was ajar. I saw you sitting there and you struck me as so mournful, like a painting—or Tennyson’s Mariana in her grange. Forgive me.”
Mariana? I was weary, to my very bones. But she’d had someone and something to look for, wait for. I had nobody and nothing.
“What was your favor, Mr. Brontë?” I asked.
Perhaps he could paint me and reveal the youthful fire I felt inside. Maybe on canvas Edmund would be able to see me clearly. But then Mr. Brontë had failed as an artist; that’s why he was a tutor, after all.
“I hoped I might be permitted to use the library,” he said. “After lessons and on Sundays, when Ned is with his sisters.”
A practical request, then. He’d come to me only to avoid disturbing Edmund.
“The ceilings are low in the Monk’s House and the windows let in little light,” he said. “Now summer is drawing to a close, it would be a great joy to me to have somewhere else to write. Though even at the Monk’s House I have more space than back home, where the four of us sit around one table, squabbling over ink.”
This interested me in spite of myself. “What is it you are writing?” I asked. “More poetry?”
“When I can.” At this limited show of encouragement, Mr. Brontë strode past me and deposited himself at the window where I’d been sitting.
I gaped at him.
“Although Charlotte talks from time to time of the novel as the ‘literary pinnacle of our age.’ ”
“Do you agree with her?” I asked.
Surprising that this female intellect who loomed large behind Mr. Brontë thought highly of novels! I’d always assumed my taste for them was confirmation of my feminine frivolity. Edmund, and all other gentlemen, he assured me, preferred “facts.”
With each new detail I learned of her, Charlotte grew more fascinating to me. She was surprising, multifaceted, not a caricature like romantic Emily or colorless Anne. I took my place on the window seat beside Mr. Brontë, very close to the edge so there was at least a foot between us.
He nodded. “The thing about Charlotte is that she is very often right, for all it pains me to say it.” He was gazing at me, the rosy hue of the late-summer sky shining through his hair. “But to write a novel, one must have a tale to tell—the tragedy, the great love story—and I have not found mine. Not yet.”
I couldn’t assure him he would do so. To prophesy tragedy was morbid and love unthinkable. So I looked away, not trusting myself not to get lost in him if I met his eye. “I read a fair number of novels,” I said at last, fixing my gaze on the French clock, although I wanted nothing less than for Mr. Brontë to go. The birds would be poor company after our conversation. “I go through a box a month from the circulating library.”
Mr. Brontë saw and took his opportunity. “Perhaps you might join me in the library?” he said. “In those quiet hours between lessons and dinner when the children are racing out to the fields? I could write. You could read.”
He paused, but I said nothing. I’d become aware of every sensation in my body: the weight on my head from my hair, how the lace irritated my wrists at the cuffs, the strange dip in the cushion below me now there was a heavier companion at my side.
“Unless of course you have other affairs to attend to.”
He had me there. “No,” I said slowly.
“I thought you might be practicing at the piano. You are a born musician.”
“I only play after dinner,” I said. “Edmund doesn’t like to hear me in the day. He says it’s ‘tedious’ and ‘distracting.’ ”
Mr. Brontë raised one russet eyebrow, his face the picture of Miss Brontë’s at her most judgmental. But here his verdict pleased me.
“Yes, perhaps we might join you—Marshall and I,” I said. “On occasion.”
* * *
“ON OCCASION” BECAME OFTEN.
Did Edmund think it strange that the time I spent in the library increased even as the number of novels I ordered from Mr. Bellerby’s circulating library dwindled? Had he even noticed as he jotted down the amounts that autumn in his treasured leather accounting book?
I was still reading but now also had Mr. Brontë’s scribblings to work my way through—fantastic tales of a country called Angria, which he and Charlotte had dreamed up and peopled with hundreds of characters, and poems he signed “Northangerland.” In the late afternoon, after Ned’s lessons, Mr. Brontë would delight me again with the story of Angria’s inception or turn the force of his pedagogy on me and try to convert me from novels to his favorite poetry. There were volumes of Wordsworth and Byron, marked with his annotations, which we took turns reading aloud from. He’d written a letter to Mr. Wordsworth once, but never received a reply. Mr. Brontë told me I had a natural ear, that I felt the music in the verses that others missed.
I tried to live up to his estimation, although often I’d tease him, chastising him for his flattery, while Marshall did her needlework, head bent low, seeing and hearing nothing.
But she wasn’t here today. We were on the cusp of winter, struggling through a day as gray and dreary as all the others, but today, somehow, Mr. Brontë and I had found ourselves alone.
“So Charlotte dubbed hers Lord Wellington, Emily’s was Parry,” said Mr. Brontë, who was talking again of the toy soldiers he and his sisters had played with when they were younger, which served as inspiration for many of his stories even now. “Anne’s soldier, Ross, was a queer little thing like herself, and I must needs make mine Bonaparte.” He laughed, looking not at me but several yards away toward the cheval screen and the oak sofa table, as if he could see those wooden toys made flesh before him.
Mr. Brontë was a curious specimen. A grown man who retained a passion for playing with dolls. Another living, breathing person with an inner life as varied, complex, and tumultuous as my own, but one who cared nothing for the concerns that dogged me and consumed my waking and dreaming hours.
What others thought of him was of little importance to Mr. Brontë, I’d found in the course of our many talks like this one. It made me wonder if Charlotte was the same. “She doesn’t spend much time on her appearance,” Mr. Brontë had told me once. “She is neat but, I’m afraid, rather plain. Yet, on closer acquaintance, men often find her fascinating. Her conversation. Her opinions. She is truly unique among women.”
The contrast with Charlotte caused me some embarrassment about my vanity and predictability, but Mr. Brontë never accused me of either. He listened to my confidences when Edmund would have lectured, reacted with sympathy when my husband would have schooled me to be better.