“Ned, you are too heavy for that.” At a pause in the music, I pushed him off me, shifting my weight from one foot to the other and trying and failing to find a stance that was more comfortable for my back.
Another pair of suited and sweating men had materialized onstage. Their bald heads bobbed above the crowd, disappearing between bows. The hall had erupted into a cacophony of coughing and chatter between performers, and the silence was not absolute when the first man raised his flute to his mouth and played. It must hurt, the disinterest. Or maybe this musician, like the mediocre players who had preceded him, was here only for his meager pay.
Where was Branwell? Shouldn’t he be here by now?
But the second player brought his instrument to his lips and my chest swelled with the lower, richer note, long and mournful below the bright birdsong of the melody. In spite of myself, I leaned forward, craning my neck as if by making out the man’s features, I could understand.
Around me, gentlemen still cleared their throats, Mary frowned, and Ned fidgeted, but I was spiraling above them, pulled in by the flutist, whose pace increased and notes quavered higher, weaving above and below his partner’s tune, like the pied piper dancing round the bend in the road, ever out of sight. The concert was no longer just an escape and a pretense. Here was passion, here was music.
I dropped my chin, closed my eyes, and focused on my breathing, drinking in the beautiful confusion now that it was impossible to know whose was the first line and whose the second. Would they—could they—reach the end of the piece and divide? Shake hands at the close of the concert and walk home alone? Or would that be an insult, a denial of what they had shared, as it was each time I dismissed Branwell Brontë, ignoring, as he would put it, the “cues of our nature”?
A tug on my hand, a tether binding me to earth, lest I floated away and never came back. Branwell. His face flickered into focus between my lashes.
“Are you well?” he whispered, our closeness going unnoticed in the crush. “Lydia, are you faint?”
“Tonight,” I said, smiling at his concern and clasping and unclasping his hand.
Music. This was my religion, a faith distinct from that of John Eade or Edmund’s mother. The sermon on Sunday had only confirmed it. Their hell didn’t hold as much fear for me as their heaven, for it was cold and sexless, sanitized and chaste.
Branwell’s brow furrowed. He could not read me.
“I will come to you,” I said, just under my breath, pulling him closer. “It would be a sin not to. To resist.” I inhaled him.
His lips parted. He was trembling.
“Do not ask me if I am certain,” I said. In his desire for affirmation, he might make me retreat.
I dropped Branwell’s hand and turned toward the stage, then ran my fingers through Ned’s soft hair.
The music washed over us in wave after cleansing wave. I knew—hoped—that Branwell heard in the music what I heard, that his soul was vibrating at the same frequency as mine. The thought stilled the ache in my back and left me dripping with happiness.
At the final applause, the crowd pulsated and swirled like boiling broth. Our party was among the first to emerge into the balmy air, although Mary and Ned weighed me down, clinging on to each of my arms as if they’d been years younger.
The children were tired, and I should have been too, but my feet hardly seemed to carry me. Mary whined and Ned stomped, but I floated, not glancing at Branwell but staring straight ahead. The notes inside me soared even higher, sustaining me through the slow, tedious walk home.
* * *
PARTING WITH BRANWELL DID not hurt tonight. Rather, it was a relief.
I couldn’t meet his eye as we waited before the door of Number 7 at the Cliff Lodgings for the man to admit us, so stared instead at the sky. The servants had forgotten to light the lamps around the door, and there was barely a moon. But the stars shone back at me, constant, unmoved by our human dramas.
Branwell played the jester, shaking Ned’s hand and making Mary an elaborate bow. He even managed to draw a giggle from her after an evening when she’d been more sullen than grateful.
“Good night, Mr. Brontë,” I said.
“Good night,” he repeated, flashing ten fingers.
Ten minutes.
I nodded and sailed past the footman, not glancing back.
Inside I was spinning, like a spider descending from her web. In moments, Branwell and I would be in each other’s arms. We had come close before, snatching at each other, engaged in an elaborate and futile tug-of-war, without quite crossing into the territory that would damn us. But it would be different now. Tonight our actions would be slow, deliberate. We would be prostrate, exposed, vulnerable to attack.
The excitement of it dried my mouth and turned my arms to goose-flesh, but still, something inside me twisted in rebellion as the children kissed my cheek good night. I pulled Mary closer and tried to embrace her (it wasn’t her fault, after all, that she was at a miserable age) but she was hard and angular. I kissed her hair, released her, and shooed her away.
Marshall brought a jug of water to my room, and I splashed my face, more to remove the lingering sensation of Ned and Mary’s lips than to prepare myself for Branwell.
“Mr. Robinson and my elder daughters?” I asked, not bothering to complete the sentence, as Marshall unlaced me.
“They went to bed an hour ago, madam,” she said. “Will that be all?”
“Yes, Marshall. Good night.”
There was no need for any special preparation. I’d done enough of that for Edmund, arranging and plucking myself before bed like a fowl being readied for the oven.
Tonight, for the first time, I would go to a man as I was—without caring what he thought of me—and go to him as a lover rather than a wife.
I could not risk bringing a candle into the hallway, and it was difficult to navigate in the dark. How much easier would it have been at Thorp Green Hall, where I knew the outline of every piece of furniture, the pitch of every creaking floorboard. But then again, there would have been an even deeper depravity in that, in going to Branwell in the place I had entered as a triumphant bride.
My hip, unprotected by my flimsy summer nightgown, struck a table and I cursed. I froze and listened hard for any movement. I couldn’t be caught sneaking out dressed like this. But there was silence. I rubbed my side so the stinging would subside, following the edges of the bone and wishing the lines of my body were softer and more curved, as they had been in my youth, pillowed by plump and malleable flesh. My body seemed alien without my crinoline. For so long its outline might as well have been the shape of me. I had become as useless as a doll or a puppet without legs.
Our plan hadn’t been precise, but Branwell should have the sense to linger outside. I didn’t wish to be out there alone. And then—well, we had nowhere to go. Branwell’s room shared a wall with the one where William Allison and Bob Pottage were sleeping, and smuggling him into the family’s apartments was unthinkable. I’d have to lie down in the stables like a dairymaid, with my shift around my waist and hay clinging to my hair.
A beam of light. The front door was open?
I smiled. Branwell. Silly, impatient. He would grab me the second I stepped outside, push me against the wall, and burrow his face in my neck and hair, not caring that the newly lit lamps by the doorway illuminated us, in plain line of sight from the other apartments. Seeing Elizabeth Robinson’s horrified face pushed up against the glass, with John Eade aghast beside her, would almost be worth it.