“You should learn to better regulate your emotions, Lydia,” he said, without much inflection. “Does Dr. Crosby need to prescribe a sedative?”
“Dr. Crosby?” I said, incredulous, starting up and not caring in that moment that my face was puffy and red. It didn’t matter how I looked. There’d been a time when Edmund had told me every morning that I was beautiful, from my crusted eyes to my ever-expanding or deflating belly. But he never wanted me anymore, even when I was at my most alluring. “I don’t need Dr. Crosby.”
“Then what do you need?” He jerked the curtain across the window where Lydia had been sitting.
Why was he doing that now? He must be worried that someone could see us.
“You, Edmund. I need you.” I rushed toward him, but he rebuffed me, gripping both my wrists in one hand and keeping me at arm’s length.
“I am your husband, Lydia. Isn’t that enough?”
“No,” I whispered, the thought inflaming me. I didn’t want the conventional, the everyday. I wanted the excitement that even a boy as inexperienced as Branwell could choreograph. “No, it is not enough. I want you to need me—to kiss me and hold me.” I went up on the tips of my toes and pressed my wet face against his dry one, but his mouth was impenetrable.
“Lydia, you are unwell,” he said, guiding me toward a chair, where I collapsed, defeated by his coldness.
I shook my head.
“And your behavior is unladylike. I don’t say you mean anything by it—you were always naive—but you spend too much time with the tutor. You look to your own pleasure, keep up flirtations, when you should be setting an example to our daughters and our son.”
“It is you who are unwell,” I countered. He had not even given Branwell the dignity of a name. But he had noticed. And that meant jealousy could still seep, if not course, through him. That meant he still cared. “You are always tired. Your complexion is unhealthy and—” I didn’t know how to word this but I wanted to provoke him. “And, at night, in our bed, you neglect your wife. How can you still think yourself a man when you fail in a husband’s duties?”
He did not engage. He was moving away from me. “Good night, Lydia,” he said.
“Wait!” I cried, in one last-ditch attempt to keep him. There was still one source of power that wasn’t lost to me. “Edmund, please. Give me another child.”
This had worked before, with Georgiana. Her birth had brought my husband back to me. Though perhaps her death had lost him to me forever.
“Another child?” he repeated, slowly, looking down at me with distaste. “Is that really what you want?”
“It is, it is,” I said, although the thought had not come to me until a moment ago. But wouldn’t that be magical? Months of my body blossoming with the surest sign of my youth and my husband’s love for me, and then another unspoiled, loving child, one who, like Georgiana, would gaze up at me as onto a god. “Please, Edmund. For me.” A nail in the floorboards was digging through the carpet and into my knee. A draft was flooding into the room from underneath the door, sending a shiver through me.
“Lydia, you are too old,” Edmund said, a softer note entering his voice.
“No,” I mouthed, shaking my head. “Edmund, please. I can’t bear it.” I had to force the tears from my eyes now. The real ones had stemmed as soon as he’d turned back to talk to me. “Without Georgie—”
This was a misstep. We never spoke of her.
A bolt of amber passed through Edmund’s deep brown eyes. “Do not talk of Georgiana. Do not say another word.”
I stayed on the floor that night, unmoving but unsleeping for a long time as the candles burned low, and staring into the heart of the ceiling rose. And I woke to a clatter and an exclamation of surprise as Ann Ellis dropped the coal scuttle on seeing me there the next morning.
5th March 1844
Allestree Hall
My dearest Lydia,
I am just this hour returned from Staffordshire. And it is with a heavy heart that I must relate the sad condition I found Father in there.
Oh, Lyddy, I fear he is much changed since you saw him last.
Our brothers had written to me—and to you, I’m sure—indicating that there was no cause for alarm and that Father was taking Mother’s death as was to be expected. But I found his mood melancholy and his behavior erratic.
At times he seemed hardly to know me and once he spoke to me in such language, that I, a married woman, blushed. I confess I was quite shocked.
I spoke to faithful Rowley and gave him express instructions to write to us should his master change again for the worse.
As for myself, I returned to an empty house when I arrived home in Derbyshire. Like you, William is in Yorkshire. He is there to meet with another family in the paper mill business. Their name is “Clapham” and they live in the neighborhood of Keighley. Doesn’t your governess come from a town near there? I wonder if she knows of them. My darling Thomas accompanied his father and Allestree Hall feels quite desolate without them.
How lucky you are to have four children and that you have years still when at least some of them will be near you. But you are a young woman, Lyddy, at least when compared to me. I tell my Thomas any time he’ll listen that I ache for grandchildren, but he resists matrimony for now. I’ll have William join my crusade on their return.
Kiss my nieces, and kiss my darling nephew twice, for me. And do let me know how Edmund likes your plan of forgoing Scarborough for Derbyshire this summer. Your mother-in-law has you near her the rest of the year, there is plenty of space at Allestree, and we would all so love to see you.
I remain, your most affectionate sister,
Mary Evans
29th March 1844
Thorp Green Hall
How should I address you? Sweet forest nymph, ever out of reach? Cruel queen, banishing your most faithful servant from your sight? Lydia Gisborne, your true name restored to you once more? I cannot now refer to you by any other.
Why do you torture me with your coldness these last few weeks? We both know it will take more than walls to divide us. Absence will not diminish the intensity of my passion, nor closing your eyes detract from the perfect symmetry of our souls.
The kiss we have never shared hangs over us like Damocles’s sword, inescapable, inevitable.
You claim the sanctity of your marriage vows.
I say we are subject only to the cues of our nature.
You are wasting away before me, my love. You are the very picture of grief. Your eyes reproach me, whether I come close or stay away. I wander through the gardens each night, the cold eating at my hands and face, as I study the solitary light in your window. Yet I am hot—with desire, yes—but also with hatred for the man who neglects you, the husband in name only whom you are true to even yet.
Unfair! Unequal! You will burn this paper, although it is a piece of my heart, while I worship the very ground on which you walk.
Lydia, the power is all yours. Summon me, any time and anywhere, and I swear I will come to you. No task is too small or too great, no hour too late, no service too insignificant.
I yearn for the freedom of the summer months, which must throw us into closer proximity.
Ever at your service and hopeful that Love must triumph, I sign myself,