Branwell ran his hand along the wall. Didn’t he desire me?
I stared, desperate with sadness and longing, urging him to come back.
When he saw my eyes, he understood. Branwell leaned toward me, paused to see if I would pull back, and when I did not, he kissed me—strong, selfish, and deep.
It was a good kiss, breath-stealing, knee-trembling, but I didn’t respond as I should.
I wanted to cry—for Georgiana, the pigeon, Edmund. To mourn the vows I was breaking. Yet I had no intention of stopping the inevitable.
Branwell kissed me again, and this second time I gave in to the feeling, the waves of pleasure that ran through me, drowning out all else.
Branwell was rushing and already fumbling with the fastenings of my dress.
I’d imagined it so many times, how he would unfurl me, like a corpse being freed from her shroud. The air would bite at me, but his kisses—reverent, methodical—would dispel the cold and beat back the encroaching minutes, hours, and seasons. He would marvel at each inch of me, like the tenant who has purchased a poor scrap of land, to turn and till as he has for years, but now—miracle of miracles!—every square inch of it is his.
But Branwell did not delay.
He tore my bodice, half freeing my breasts. He hitched my skirts up around my waist. His hands were everywhere, probing at me, as if he were searching a servant who’d made off with her lady’s rings.
I made some noise of protest but this only inflamed him further.
He lowered me onto the cold, filthy, feather-strewn ground, clawed at me, nibbled my nipples, sucked on my neck.
At other moments I might have been horrified, but the danger electrified me. Still, he mustn’t leave a mark.
“Branwell—” I ventured. The shape of his name was strange in my mouth. “Be careful.”
He seemed far away, even as he burrowed into the hollow between my breasts, ran his hand up, around, and up my thigh again.
Instead there was Edmund, the only man who had ever seen me like this. He’d been patient on our wedding night and even more scared than me. “Can you take any more?” my new husband had asked, his tone almost coy. And his eyes had grown wide when I’d pulled him deeper, when I’d gasped at how close we were, and rocked him like the babies we dreamed we’d make.
Panic rose inside me. I’d gone too far to turn back.
Yet wasn’t this what I’d wanted? I needed to escape my own head, to enjoy the sensations of Branwell’s skin against mine, marvel in the feeling of being wanted.
I turned my mouth aside to avoid Branwell’s almost medicinal breath and—I hadn’t noticed him pull his shirt off, but—there he was, ready and naked, the hair bearding his crotch as fiery as the strands on his head and even more unruly.
This was enough to shock me back to myself. My body responded to the cue. Oh, it had been so long, and even before our love had cooled, Edmund had grown too familiar and too changed by age. From my navel down, I had turned to water.
Branwell cried like a girl when he pushed inside me, arching his back and turning his face to the domed roof as if he were saluting the hidden moon.
My dress, bunched up as it was, acted as a sort of pillow beneath me but the ground was still hard. Each thrust slammed the small of my back into the stone.
“Lydia, you’re an angel, a goddess, a—” Branwell’s stream of incoherent compliments was torrential, making up for my silence. “Oh, God, oh, God!” he called, screwing up his face like a prisoner praying at the scaffold.
“There now,” I soothed. “There.”
But Branwell was alone, riding the waves of his ecstasy, thrashing so far out that I had no hope of reaching him.
“Lydia, I love you,” he breathed with the final shock. He rolled off me, his expression as blissful as if we’d been lying on a cloud-soft bed. “One day, my darling, I swear we’ll be together.”
Wetness seeped out of me and pooled in a puddle between my legs.
CHAPTER TEN
“MISS BRONTË, MADAM. SHE insisted,” said Miss Sewell with a sniff from the doorway. She must have thought such introductions beneath her.
I’d been sequestered in my rooms for a week since my argument with Edmund and what had followed. For once, I hadn’t even claimed indisposition but instead simply issued an edict that all of them stay away. All of them except Marshall, my steady, unobtrusive companion. She didn’t remark on my chin—red and flaking, scratched raw by Branwell’s whiskers—or the bruises that dotted both sides of my neck. She brought me tray upon tray of food, emptied my chamber pot without complaint, and sat for hours at a time holding my hand as I watched summer decay into autumn through the ornate bars of my dressing room window.
“I hope—” began Miss Brontë, stopping just inside the threshold.
I raised an eyebrow in the direction of Miss Sewell, who was still standing beside her. She withdrew with a saccharine smile, shutting the door too hard.
“I hope you’ll forgive the intrusion, Mrs. Robinson.” Miss Brontë stepped forward and halted again. “But I can stand aside no longer. I simply must speak with you.”
Anxiety suited her. It brought a little color into her pallid, almost corpse-like face.
“Indeed,” I said, pushing my half-finished letter to my sister, Mary, to the edge of my desk and dismissing Marshall, who’d been darning at the window seat, with a wave of my hand.
Could Branwell have told Anne? Anything was possible in his strange family. Branwell seemed closer to his sisters than any grown man I knew, although his deepest secrets he shared only with Charlotte. If I were to beg Miss Brontë’s forgiveness, fall on my knees before her and plead weakness, could she understand? I imagined Miss Brontë’s wheezing breaths made even shallower, her eyes rolling back in delicious agony as Branwell’s had.
“Won’t you sit, Miss Brontë—Anne? And stop fraying your cuff. You are testing my nerves.”
She jumped when I said her forename as if I’d pinched her, but Miss Brontë did as I’d asked. The chair opposite me—the chair Branwell had sat in during our first tête-à-tête—seemed to swallow her whole. She was clutching a letter in her left hand.
Could she be Branwell’s go-between? I strained to see the script and signature, the distinctive loops of the name “Northangerland,” but my sight, as ever, failed me.
“Go on,” I said.
“Mrs. Robinson, it has come to my attention that—”
If only she would spit it out.
“That a correspondence of an illicit nature has been conducted from this house.”
Sweat gathered between the sleeves and bodice of my gown. The silk was a dark green, so at least it wouldn’t stain. Perhaps Branwell’s letter spoke only of his own infatuation, sparing me from blame. I started to frame an excuse.
“Bessy came to me—” There were tears in Miss Brontë’s eyes.
“Bessy?” I repeated. Vicious Lydia, yes, or Mary and Ned in their naivety, but Bessy?
“She was in great distress, Mrs. Robinson. She is only a child and, what is more, she chose to confess. Do not be harsh on her.” Miss Brontë dropped the letter onto her lap and clasped her hands together as if in prayer.