“To love, Mrs. Robinson, is to treasure your beloved’s soul and protect it even above your own. But you! You have corrupted a soul too gentle for this world and unsuited to its harshness.”
Gentle? Branwell as I had seen him on that Easter night more than two years ago flashed before me, his eyes roving independently of each other, vomit on his shirt, the discarded bottles rolling across his bedroom floor.
“A gentle soul?” I laughed. “Anne, please! You are being naive. You are mistaken in what you think you saw. I take some small, patronizing interest in my son’s tutor. That is all. Your brother is emotional. A writer. I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”
Her face folded into a small, sad smile. I couldn’t imagine why.
“You can’t tell me you know nothing of illicit passion,” I pressed on. “I see the way you look at the curate Greenhow when he preaches. I know how wounded you were when he married another.”
I couldn’t tell if my shot had been true. As I spoke, she didn’t move, her expression didn’t change. “Good-bye, Mrs. Robinson,” she said, walking past me toward the door.
“Wait!” I called.
She did.
“The girls. They will miss you,” I said in one final attempt to keep her.
Lydia without a governess was a daunting prospect, for all that Miss Brontë had utterly failed to police her thus far.
“And I will them,” she said. Her hand was on the doorknob.
“My husband?” I could barely frame the question.
Would she tell him? Or was she too loyal to Branwell even now? It had come to this, then. To me, acting as Miss Brontë’s supplicant. Indignity after indignity, eating me from the inside.
“Pass on my apologies and thanks to Mr. Robinson,” she said, as she left the room. “He has been very kind to me.”
Mercy comes easily when you believe that condemnation is inescapable, although no doubt Miss Brontë thought herself very virtuous.
I stood for at least a minute, hearing her coughing her way down the landing and staring at the patch of carpet where she had stood. Then I reached out my hand to pull the bell cord.
Seconds later, Ellis quaked before me.
“Did you call, madam?” she asked.
“Tell Mr. Allison to prepare the carriage, Ellis. Miss Brontë is leaving us.”
“Very good, ma’am.” Her face didn’t betray a response. “I’m to tell you, madam,” she went on, “that Miss Sewell wishes to have an audience with you.”
“You may inform Miss Sewell that I am indisposed.”
A nod, a tremble, and a hasty retreat.
“And, Ellis?”
She tripped over herself, twisting back toward me. “Yes’m?”
“Ensure Miss Brontë leaves those old gowns of mine she wears. You are welcome to them.”
“Thank you, madam. You are too good, you—” She tried to wring my hand.
“Do not touch me, Ellis.” If anyone showed me tenderness now, even her, I would buckle. “Only leave me.”
* * *
AS IT WAS, MISS Brontë did not leave that day, or the next, or the next, although she kept to her room and to the schoolroom, out of my sight. She was to depart with Branwell, as planned previously, for their usual summer trip. But this time, after five years of service at Thorp Green, she would not return from Haworth. She would instead quit our lives forever.
I waited until the girls’ wailing good-byes were done and the carriage door had slammed before peeking around the curtain, resting my knee on the dressing room window seat and trying to stay out of view. I couldn’t see Miss Brontë, or Branwell for that matter, only Flossy’s furry face pressed against the carriage window, as if the little mutt was doing her best to make Mary’s misery complete.
The three girls were holding on to each other. For all the world, you would have thought they were penniless orphans, huddling against the cold. Even Ned looked dejected, staring at an unmoving whirligig between his feet as he sat on the steps of the Hall.
William Allison said something in a jovial tone, but none of the children laughed in response. A crack of his whip, a loud “That’s a boy, Pat,” invoking his favored moniker for Patroclus, and the Brontës were on their way, the carriage lurching down the driveway.
Relief flooded through me, stemmed only by the thought that in one short week, Branwell would return. And days after that, we’d all be in Scarborough where the holiday spirit and our close quarters would make enforcing distance even harder.
I’d avoided Branwell for the last few days as Anne had me, without incident so far, but he wouldn’t give up that easily. He wouldn’t have the sense of an older man to know when love—or something like it—had run its course, and was best treasured only as a memory for those nights when the moonlight makes romantics, and loneliness fools, of us.
“Lydia.” The door opened as Edmund said my name. He stepped inside and closed it.
“Ed—”
“No.” He raised his hand and walked toward me. “Do not speak.”
There was something new in his eyes. Was it anger or the passion I could scarcely remember?
“It has been a taxing week,” he said. “First, our daughters’ governess quits her post with little by way of warning or explanation. And today I have the pleasure of receiving a visit from another disgruntled servant, the housekeeper, Miss Sewell.” He took another stride.
Miss Sewell, the shadow at my steps and the constant rap-a-tap-tap at my door. In the last few days, she’d become more insistent, even once forcing herself into my presence and naming a lump sum in addition to her previous requests. I’d been unable to parry her thrusts, had placated her with weak promises that mustn’t have been enough.
“That woman—” I started now.
“No,” said Edmund.
“But—”
He grabbed me by the throat and pushed me against the wall.
The power of his body knocked the breath out of me, as did the control he was exerting over me more than the strength of his grip, which was loose (he was, after all, still unwell). In it was the promise that he could squeeze with ease were he to want to, were I deserving of his hatred, and were he the bully I had painted him to Branwell.
I pressed the pads of my fingers against the embossed wallpaper in a halfhearted attempt to free myself.
“Miss Sewell came to my study,” he continued, softening his grip but not moving away. “It appears our housekeeper is suffering under some”—here he paused—“misconceptions regarding your relationship with the tutor, Mr. Brontë.”
He released my neck, and I gave an exaggerated gasp. Would it mark? If it did, I would wear the bruise like a medallion, proof that somewhere, deep down, my husband still cared.
“I have, of course, corrected her,” Edmund said, staring at the intricate pattern in the Indian rug rather than at me. “And I gave her some money to thank her for her concern. But it is necessary—no, crucial—that you never give our staff cause for speculation again.”
“Then send Mr. Brontë away!” I cried, the opportunity opening like a gate before me. I lurched for Edmund’s hand but caught only his wrist. Maybe he would overpower me, strike me, force himself on me. Maybe, at last, I would goad him into acting like a man. “We could be rid of both of them—the Brontës,” I said. “We need only send the tutor’s things after them to Haworth.”