“Northangerland”
15th April 1844
Green Hammerton Hall
Lydia,
What is this nonsense I hear about you and Edmund not visiting Scarborough this summer? It is too ridiculous. I tried to be forgiving when you did not come to my luncheon on Easter Sunday last week. Why, your husband himself has called it a “highlight of the season”! You claimed indisposition and I chose to believe you, although your “illness” robbed me of a chance to see my grandchildren and my only son.
But to disrupt my holiday plans!? And talk of going to Allestree Hall to your sister and that political husband of hers (I mean it in the worst possible sense)? Lydia, what is the use of Derbyshire? The waters at the spa in Scarborough are the very thing to settle your nerves or cure whatever it is that is wrong with you. Your capriciousness is too much for an old woman to bear.
I write to Edmund by the same post telling him that this just won’t do.
The Reverend Eade has already promised to join us this year (dear John, the only reminder I have of my dead daughter, Jane). You must not think to pass up on such edifying company. Spiritual succor is as necessary to your health as adequate medical supervision, something I doubt that upstart gossip John Crosby is providing.
I also include information regarding two alternative and well-regarded physicians, a Dr. Simpson and a Dr. Ryott, whom I’ve been suggesting Edmund consult on his own behalf. Dr. Simpson is a York man. Fancy, he was even president of the Medical Society for a time. And Dr. Ryott comes with the highest recommendations. If they cannot “cure” you, only G-d can.
How is it that I, who was born a Metcalfe, a woman still in possession of all her faculties at five and seventy, is connected to such a family of invalids, I don’t know, but I cannot have you go on so on my watch.
It is high time you thought of getting those girls married (I said the same thing to my daughter Mary of the Thorp girls). Lydia will be nineteen before long and we both know her looks will decline from then. She has a pretty face, yes, but unfortunately she has inherited her figure from you and a larger bosom does have a tendency to sag with age. Bessy is as wild today as she was at ten, and Mary—well, at least that girl is biddable.
I will visit Thorp Green Hall next week to put things to rights. Do see to it that I don’t have to converse with the insolent tutor or his plain and pious sister, and that you keep that ugly lady’s maid of yours out of my way.
I remain your caring and long-suffering mother-in-law,
Elizabeth Robinson
CHAPTER EIGHT
IT WAS HOT OUTSIDE, and some of the poorer worshippers had failed to secure a pew, so busy was church on a sunny Sunday in Scarborough. But the building, with its imposing tower, was cavernous enough that the air still circulated.
We were a strange party.
John Eade, who was on my left, was in fine form. He had an innate distrust of hymns, deeming singing too Catholic, and perhaps even too pagan, a practice to introduce it into the religious services that he himself conducted. But when he was in the congregation? That was another matter. He’d been blessed with a rich baritone and was chanting the familiar encomium about the “wondrous cross” as my mother-in-law nodded across me, making her displeasure at my silence known.
Edmund, who was beside his mother, had that glazed look in his eyes that haunted him often now, as if he were staring without seeing. But I could feel other eyes on me from behind—Branwell’s, Miss Brontë’s, the children’s—even if my husband ignored me. They were witnesses to my humiliation. I had fought hard for a chance to summer with my sister at Allestree Hall, or at the very least to travel to Yoxall to see my father, with words and tears and week-long silences, and yet here we were in Scarborough at my mother-in-law’s behest, playing out the roles required of us.
The motley choir reached the final bars, though the organ, which the inhabitants of Little Ouseburn would have thought a wonder, droned on for at least half a minute. The overconfident singers, John Eade amongst them, held the final “aaa” for as long as they could, if not a second longer, before spitting out the last consonant. The rest of us had already slumped back, anticipating a sleepy sermon.
John Eade and the rest of them, did they really believe that there was some all-powerful being who cared about the choices we made and the pain we felt, even if He made no effort to relieve it?
This was something Branwell and I had talked about more recently. When we were together, which was nearly every day now, he never gave full force to the passion that burst through the floodgates in the letters he sent by Marshall. Perhaps because he didn’t have “Northangerland” to hide behind, or perhaps because he knew I would reject him. Instead he railed against convention, society, religion, talking about us but not about us, redirecting his fire toward the legal and spiritual strictures that kept us apart.
He said I understood in a way that others, even Charlotte, did not, and so I joined him, dancing closer and closer to the precipice and uncovering aspects of my nature I’d never thought to expose to the light, delighting in our shared, secret, impotent rage.
Branwell’s anger, though, was fiercer. I had never believed in God as he had in those years before his eldest sister, Maria, the girl who had taught him to think and dream and pray, had died. Or at least I had never had his fervor. When I was a child, being a Christian had only ever been an act I had rehearsed and refined, like smiling sweetly at the grown-up visitors, eating without setting my elbows on the table, and crossing my ankles when I sat. And now I was too surrounded by clergy to take them or their doctrine seriously. There was John Eade, prating, Reverend Lascelles, dull, the curate Greenhow, meek. And then of course there was Edmund, who was ordained himself, although he rarely practiced. He’d preached at each of our children’s baptisms, but refused to preside over Georgiana’s funeral.
“What then are we to do with the woman taken in adultery?” the Scarborough minister asked, the sudden increase in his volume jolting me back to myself. “We have heard that we are not to stone her, that we must first ponder our own sins, our failings, our manifold faults. But—” He paused.
Here it came—the stone throwing.
Edmund ran his hand over his forehead.
John Eade bit his bottom lip.
Old Mrs. Robinson leaned forward, her breath bated.
“But a woman who commits adultery is committing a sin that drags many down to Hell. Not only herself or the man whom she has tempted away from the path of virtue. She infects her husband, her house, all who come near her, with her wanton deception. She sacrifices her home for a fleeting pleasure, and the best that can be said of her is to question her sanity.”
I brought my handkerchief to my mouth to stifle my angry laugh with a cough.
And what if her husband is the one infecting them? I wanted to ask. Or, worse yet, what if their house was rotten from the very start?
But the thing was that ours hadn’t been. The change had been creeping, almost imperceptible, and my realization that it had all gone wrong had been too. There hadn’t been one day when Edmund’s kisses had stopped or when we no longer had anything to say to each other. I hadn’t treasured the last time he slipped in beside me as I slept, just to dream away the night together, or the last look of understanding that had passed between us over the children’s fair heads. All that had simply faded and wasted away. Maybe because I was older, or he was, or we both were. Maybe because we had been wrong to think what we had to be love at all.