My shoulders slackened, my panic subsided. She wasn’t here to talk of Branwell at all.
“Miss Brontë, I must ask that you be direct,” I told her, recovering my poise and examining the half-moons and the flecks of white in my fingernails.
She gulped air and launched into the longest speech I had ever heard from her.
“Bessy came to me last night—late, it must have been after midnight—and insisted on slipping into bed beside me. When she appeared at my door, my heart nearly stopped, for she looked like a ghost in her nightgown. And it took some time before I could glean from her what on earth was the matter. She wept but would not speak until I mentioned rousing other members of the household and fetching Dr. Crosby. Then she told me the truth, in fits and bursts, and through more tears.
“It appears she, for some years, has been exchanging letters with Will Milner of Nun Monkton. Their early missives were innocent enough. They talked of hunts and horses, anticipated the Thompsons’ picnics, and, I’m afraid, mocked the good Reverend Lascelles’s sermons. The stablehand, Joey Dickinson, acted as their messenger. Do not blame him either, Mrs. Robinson. He is a child too. He cannot read and is simple about the ways of the world!
“But, of late, Will Milner would talk of marriage and the like, and Bessy did not know how to answer him. She deferred to her sister—I mean Lydia—who fed her lines from novels and encouraged her to write all species of nonsense. I blushed when I heard what the girls had written. I am sure Bessy, at least, did not understand the import of the words.
“And now Bessy says she is not sure she wishes to marry Will Milner after all, and thinks of him as she does Ned rather than as a husband. The young man, Mr. Milner, plans to petition Mr. Robinson for her hand and asks Bessy to name a date. Oh, and Lydia is angry too. She threatened her sister with exposure should she even think of marrying first, despite being the younger. And so poor Bessy came to me. Take pity on her, Mrs. Robinson, do. And, believe me, I knew nothing of this—had not seen a sign—until last night.”
A pretty monologue, but I saw now why she quaked. Miss Brontë was afraid lest I choose to dismiss her. That was a governess’s primary purpose, after all—not to impart knowledge into heads pretty enough to be petted and docile enough to be yoked, but to protect her charges’ flimsy, if incontrovertible, virginities. And she had failed.
Learned Miss Brontë might be—although not half as clever as her sister Charlotte—but two of her pupils had erred at the first feeble overtures men had made them. Plain women held themselves so high, but given the chance, she, and maybe Charlotte too, would crumple.
“Miss Brontë, I must say I am disappointed,” I said, the power I had felt seep out of me in the hours after my encounter with Branwell returning full force when faced by her timidity.
“Be kind to Bessy, madam!” she cried.
“No, Miss Brontë, I am disappointed in you.”
She didn’t flinch this time but raised her eyes to heaven, as collected as a queen waiting for the guillotine to fall.
But we could never be rid of each other now. She did not know it, but she was protected by the very crimes she abhorred. Bessy’s indiscretions were but a pale imitation of Branwell’s and my own. What were a few harmless letters to what he and I had done?
“A match between the Robinsons and the Milners is most desirable,” I said, relishing each syllable and stressing the “most” as if I’d been gossiping at a party and striking John Crosby with my fan. “I cannot approve of the execution, of course, or of the secrecy surrounding it, but it seems to me that a correspondence between Mr. Milner and our Bessy is not so terrible a thing.”
“Not so terrible—” Miss Brontë let her mouth hang open.
I suppressed my desire to slam it shut from under her chin.
“Miss Brontë, I know your life has been somewhat sheltered, but I’m sure it can’t have escaped your attention that Bessy, in addition to being a second daughter, isn’t the most eligible of girls. She is boisterous and ill-mannered and spends most of her time talking of dogs and horses, despite the money my husband and I have invested in her education.”
“I think Bessy is a fine girl,” Miss Brontë whispered, ignoring the references to her salary and ineffective teaching.
“Oh, it is all very well for you to say so. To be forgiving and kind, to never say a cross word.” I could contain myself no longer and stood, my yearning for the exercise that I’d avoided for days returning. “But, Miss Brontë, you are not their mother. It is not a mother’s job to coo and coddle, to flatter with falsehoods or coat with sugar. There is one way for a woman to flourish, or, for that matter, to survive at all in this world, and that is to marry, and marry well.”
My own mother had told me so when she’d explained what it was that husbands took from you. She’d counseled me to be “ever on my guard,” to act “always above suspicion” as a maiden and once I was a wife. And what had I done with her advice? The least I could do was protect my daughters’ interests, as she had mine.
Miss Brontë flinched at the invocation of my motherhood, a trump card in every argument. Branwell had told me Anne had no memories of their poor mother. She, Charlotte, and Emily had suffered from the absence of a seasoned, pragmatic woman like me. So this was a moment to teach her, not to scold.
“I pity you, Miss Brontë,” I said, holding both hands out toward her. “You might not believe me, but I do. You never had your chance. You never had a mother to show you the way. And, now, look at the life you are forced to lead—you and your sisters. You must choose between being a drudge or a burden, and suffer for years with the knowledge that with death, you will slide into an only marginally more acute obscurity.”
But Miss Brontë did not take this as an olive branch. She stood too, ignoring my outstretched hands. “Bessy does not wish to marry Will Milner, Mrs. Robinson. And she should not part with her hand and heart without reason. She will have other chances.”
“She will have none as good as this.” I snatched the letter from where she had left it on the chair and walked past her to the door.
“Mrs. Robin—”
I was already halfway down the landing, making for the schoolroom. And Miss Brontë hadn’t followed me.
“Lydia, you have rejoined the world of the living.” There was Edmund, pausing on the final step on his way upstairs. His cheeks were blotchy from the strain of climbing, and his eyes weren’t so difficult to meet, for all I’d thought I could never face him again after what had happened with Branwell.
“Not now, Edmund.” I surprised myself with my surety. “I am needed in the schoolroom.”
I opened the door. The three of them were arranged as in a painting—Lydia reading a novel, Bessy staring out the window, Mary petting Flossy by the fire. They did not look like girls, but little women who’d outgrown the furniture around them and that childish way of wearing their long, loose hair. But they were my girls just the same.
“Lydia, Bessy, Mary,” I said.
Looks of confusion and fear passed between them at my entrance.
“This morning Miss Brontë brought me a letter—”
“She wouldn’t!” gasped Bessy.