Miss Sewell rolled her eyes and plucked the newspaper from the table.
“Leave it,” I said, my vehemence surprising me. It wasn’t as if Edmund were likely to peruse the literary section.
Bessy paused mid-bite into her toast and glanced at her sister.
“I thought Mr. Robinson might like to read in bed.” The paper hovered in midair in Miss Sewell’s hand as she chose whether to indulge my caprice. “But you know best, madam.” She threw it down rather than setting it, so that the borders no longer ran parallel to the table edge. Her skirts rustled as she left the room, like leaves detecting the first stirrings of a storm.
“Any news from the village, Ellis?” I asked. Of my three companions, she was sure to be the most agreeable.
A look of panic spread across her small, irregular features. “The Reverend’s wife had her baby, madam. A son,” she said at last, her relief palpable at having settled on a suitable subject.
“Reverend Lascelles must be delighted,” I said without an ounce of joy. I imagined him holding up his son, enraptured, as his poor wife languished in her distant bedchamber, his daughters banished to the nursery, and the prayers of thanksgiving we’d all be forced to endure for the next rash of Sundays.
“Indeed, ma’am,” she said.
“Well, are you going to clear the table?” I asked, my desire for conversation evaporating. “Bessy, you have had enough.” I slapped her hand away from the butter. “Run on, now.”
Lydia and Bessy swung their legs round in unison and linked arms before exiting the room. They were hurrying off somewhere to complain about me, no doubt. I was the evil witch, without whom they’d be glutting themselves to their hearts’ content, penning scandalous notes to the neighbors, and rolling around with actors in the stables. Give them twenty years, until they had their own daughters to worry about. Then they’d understand.
Ellis struggled under a tower of crockery, weaving her unsteady way to the door—anything so that she didn’t have to return to me.
Was Edmund really ill, or was he too avoiding me? Was it possible that he had sensed the change in me? The sleepy, not-quite-happiness that settled over me in the days after my more recent encounters with Branwell? It wasn’t the happiness I’d had once with Edmund. Not the steady, sure warmth you feel when you slip to sleep beside a man who loves you and wake to his breath, his arms, his half-remembered dreams come dawn. With Branwell, things were never safe and rarely so simple. His flights of fancy were unappetizing as often as they were enticing. The more poetry I read, the more I concluded that his verses didn’t have the power of Wordsworth’s or Southey’s. Perhaps he’d overstated his skill as a painter too and given too flattering an account of his dismissal from the railway.
Sometimes after our passion was over and I lay alone, not suffering Branwell to touch me, I was reminded of how Edmund had described those youthful encounters of his, with women in Cambridge, before we were married. He’d “confessed” these to me in an Italian inn, with his head in my lap, contrasting his weakness with my purity. A few moments of mania, he’d said, after too much wine and at the urging of friends. And then shame and disgust—at her, the room, the damp and dirty bed—unclouding his judgment and calling him home. Was Branwell the same—an object of lust only if you dimmed the lights and trusted the make-believe of powder and rouge?
“Mrs. Robinson.”
I blinked. Not only had Miss Sewell reentered the room, but, unbidden, she had taken the seat opposite me. Her hands were stacked before her on the table.
“Miss Sewell,” I said, trying to sound more horrified than shocked.
She thought too highly of herself, although in truth she was doing well, with a housekeeper’s salary at her age, along with an indulgent and unattached older brother to spoil her. Her dress was modest but cut in the latest style, and her sandy hair was coiffed and curled. It was her hands that gave her away. Red and coarse, with close-clipped nails, they weren’t the hands of a lady.
“You know perhaps there is a gentleman farmer sometimes brings news from Great Ouseburn, madam?” she asked. “And that he always makes it his business to speak with me?”
“I do not, Miss Sewell, make a practice of observing my servants’ social habits,” I said, fixating on her nails and trying to catch the drift of her questioning.
“Funny that.” She let out a sharp, shrill laugh. “We observe yours.”
I stiffened. “Miss Sewell?” I met her glittering black eyes and willed my breath to stay even.
“Well, my Robert—his name is Robert, madam—would like to call on me, walk me to church sometimes, take me to dances and the like in his gig, if you’d be so good as to give us your blessing, madam.” From her condescending smile, you’d have thought that I was the one petitioning her.
But if she had observed me, us, if she knew— I stood. It was impossible to sit. “I don’t know what has come over you, Miss Sewell,” I said, pushing in my chair. “You’ll do well not to mention this again. I know you are young, but to have gentlemen come courting our housekeeper? What kind of example is that for you to set to Ellis and the others?”
“I look to my betters for an example, Mrs. Robinson,” she said, the left-hand corner of her upper lip curling further.
How dare she remain sitting while I stood?
“And I know my brother, Tom, does too,” she continued. “Such strange comings and goings he sees out there at the Monk’s House, madam. Mr. Brontë is always ranging the grounds, walking here, there, and everywhere, and talking when he’s in the drink, which is on most nights. I don’t say my brother’s not partial to the whiskey as well, madam, but he takes one only on occasion. With such a pattern to follow, whom are we to look to for our examples, if I might be so bold?”
“Hold your tongue.” The table was between us, or I would have struck her.
“Then there is the matter of my pay.” Her confidence was growing. She started to flex her wrists, roll her shoulders, and relax. “All it would take is a word from you, and Mr. Robinson’d be sure to reward my brother and me for our continued service. And, of course, for our discretion.”
I tried to speak but only a splutter came out.
Miss Sewell’s eyes were roaming all over me, as if taking an inventory of my dress, rings, the locket around my neck, and all she would try to sweat from me. “Maybe you need a few weeks to think on it, madam?” she said, hopping to her feet. “I’m a reasonable woman. Did Ellis take the newspaper? The master asked for it in particular.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
WEEKS OF WHISPERING BEHIND doorways, pacing my dressing room at night, pressing coins every other day into the scheming housekeeper’s hands.
And yet life went on as ever. Nobody knew. Edmund haunted his study. The servants’ gossip was benign, self-centered, mundane. And the children wished away their lives in anticipation of summer. They gazed like augurs to discern snatches of blue sky between the rainstorms. Lydia spoke only of Scarborough.
In public, I treated Miss Sewell with condescension, perhaps more harshly than before. I disguised my new expenses as brooches and shawls in Edmund’s account book. It wasn’t like he noticed what I wore anyway. But still the upstart woman asked for more, threatening dire consequences if I didn’t indulge her.