Miraculous. He did not heed my practical warnings, but fixated instead on his self-pity. I’d thought him so sympathetic, but he was envious of the sisters who’d done nothing but support him. He no longer cared for my tears, but had dissolved into his own. Branwell rocked backwards and forwards, lost in himself, not moved by my unhappiness.
A surge of jealousy flooded through me. He should try being a woman for a day. I’d never enjoyed the luxury of drinking alone. I’d only ever delighted in wine that appeared at its appointed time, matched to each course and spirited away just as soon, excluded as I was from the room when the men pored over their brandies or eyed the dining table and the world through the golden haze of their cognac glasses. Men had liquor, tobacco, horses, and whores. But there was no poison I was permitted to administer to myself. Instead I relied on Branwell for the release he found for himself in drink.
Still, whoever had summoned whom, and whatever force had drawn us there, there was a vacuum in my heart, an ache that could be quieted but never silenced. My body was calling out for distraction and for him, however briefly, to make me whole again.
“Branwell.” I kissed his forehead and his eyebrows, avoiding the salt of his tears and the stench of his breath. His arms were sure and strong through his shirtsleeves, proffering protection and certainty. I need only stroke faster, breathe harder, and he would respond as surely as the ivories under my practiced fingertips.
“Mhmm.” He smiled, although dewdrop tears still clung to his lashes. Whiskey, with that edge that makes your eyes sting and your throat burn, surrounded him like a halo, a fog of eau de toilette.
I slipped off my pelisse and threw it to the side with my shawl.
Freedom. Air.
I pulled one of Branwell’s hands to my breast.
His other found my face.
I jerked away, positioning my head so he could only kiss my neck.
Move. No, don’t press so hard.
Muddled as his mind was, he still used my smiles and winces as a barometer. The promise of me—velvet, dark, deep—sobered him, even if the world still spun around him.
“Oh.” A gasp, not from Branwell, not from me, but from somewhere behind us, followed by a lung-rattling cough.
I leapt from Branwell’s embrace and from the bed and twisted toward the door.
There was Miss Brontë, blocking the light in the doorway, a slender silhouette against the sky. She seemed taller than she was and held herself as rigid as St. Joan at the stake.
“Miss Sewell told me George Walker had returned and needed me,” she said, more to the room than to me or to her brother. Then, with a moan of almost-pain, she added, “Oh, Branwell.”
“Anne,” he said, but he was slurring again, now that there was another witness to his drunkenness. “Lydia, help me rise.”
I didn’t. I let him flounder there before us—the chaste sister and the bad wife—as he struggled to his feet to go to her, to make things right.
“Please, Anne,” I said, her name sticking in my throat.
The plea shook Miss Brontë from her reverie. She turned, left, fled.
“Lydia—” Branwell called after me as I began to follow her, but he was a broken wreck of a man, and there was nothing here to keep me.
Miss Sewell had raised the stakes and made good her threat, hoping to sap still more from me. She’d used Joey and her brother (still ignorant, surely?) to catch me in her trap. But I had fight in me yet.
I scooped up my discarded clothes and ran from the cottage, after Miss Brontë, my hair streaming in the wind, as fleet as if I had been on horseback, bare-armed like a savage, desperate and true as the bitch tracking the bloodied hare.
* * *
I GAVE UP ONCE I’d lost sight of Miss Brontë, which was soon, despite the coughing that usually overwhelmed her at even the slightest of exertions. It was best to stop and fix myself. I’d give credence to her tale if I returned to Thorp Green undressed. Where would she go? To Edmund? The girls?
But when I entered my rooms, she was waiting for me.
She was standing with her back to the door, gazing out across the driveway as I had the day when I first saw her brother. My old gray muslin, fraying at the hem, hung loose around her childlike frame, so that she looked for all the world like my emaciated ghost come back to haunt me with the things that I had done or thought, and those I had not—the things I was not woman or wife or mother enough to feel.
My entrance did not startle her and it was several seconds before she turned to face me, her expression calm, her breathing steady, excepting that little catch in her throat that had always irritated me.
“Mrs. Robinson,” she said, clasping her hands in front of her waist, “I have come to tender my resignation.”
“Your resig—? No, Miss Brontë—Anne—you mustn’t.” I took a step toward her, but she recoiled, hitting her calf against the window seat in her haste to get away from me.
I would rather she had slapped me.
“I don’t know what you saw, or thought you saw—” I paused but she gave me nothing. “But it isn’t as you think. You are young and inexperienced, and know nothing of the world or of men, but you must understand how persuasive your brother can be, how easy it is to be caught up, swept away to the kingdoms and castles he builds in thin air.”
No one believes in me as my sisters do, Branwell had told me time and again. This was the line I would take to try to win Miss Brontë over.
“There is nothing you can tell me of my brother, Mrs. Robinson.” Miss Brontë’s voice was flat, expressionless. “I know him as I know my sisters. Better than I know myself. You must step aside. I can no longer work here.”
“Nonsense,” I said, dropping my skirts, which I’d been holding since climbing the stairs, and relaxing my hands, seeking to reassure her that I was not afraid. “Your family needs you to work. And you simply do not know—cannot appreciate, I think—Branwell’s genius.”
No response. She might have been a woman made of stone, silent and stubborn, as impossible as Edmund. I needed to draw a reaction, any reaction, from her.
“Ask Charlotte,” I went on. “She has some understanding of what Branwell is and of the great writer he could become. Your brother tells me she has his spirit, a twin flame burning red inside her. That same light he saw smoldering in me.”
Miss Brontë raised one eyebrow. How dare she stand in judgment over me? I had a mind and a soul as much as the Miss Brontës. What had any of them ever achieved to hold themselves so high?
I lashed out. “But you don’t have it in you. That is why you will always be in your siblings’ shadows.”
Was that a tear, hovering in her eye? If it was, she willed it not to fall. Miss Brontë held every muscle in her body tense as if steeling herself for a physical blow.
“Strength of passion should not be judged by its outward manifestations, Mrs. Robinson,” she said, as if delivering a lesson in the schoolroom or a sermon from a pulpit. “Just as a quiet, steady faith is as precious as martyrdom to Him, who watches over us all. And while it is true my experience of men may be limited, I can tell you that affections are felt no less deeply when they remain unspoken. You think perhaps you love him?”
If this was a question, she gave me no chance to reply.