The wind stirred, buffeting the grass and forcing the sunflowers into graceful and sweeping bows.
“Oh, Ann Marshall,” I said, overflowing with a sudden rush of tenderness toward her. “You are the best servant that a lady could ask for.”
Her cratered face flushed crimson in patches, but her expression registered only alarm. Servants hate nothing more than when their masters act out of character. “But whatever’s to be done with Mr. Brontë, madam?” she asked. “Will you see him?”
My heart was tied to a spiraling anchor. “I suppose I must,” I said.
She led the way past the buildings that made up the holidaymakers’ homes, around the stable where I’d found Lydia with the acting boy—was that only a year ago?—and along a path that snaked down the side of the Cliff itself, a path I’d chided Ned for using once. It was rocky and steep with no railing. One misstep and you’d tumble like an acrobat to the crowded beach below.
“Where on earth are we going?” I called after Marshall, struggling to keep my footing for the third or fourth time. My ankles were weak. On terrain like this, it was tricky to keep to my pattern. Left, right; left, right. I didn’t like to stop on an uneven number.
“We servants call it ‘the boathouse,’ madam.” She turned to face me so her voice wouldn’t fly from us on the wind. Strands of her hair had come loose from her exertions in the last hour. They streamed around her like a mousy gray mane.
“A boathouse? Up here?”
I didn’t think she could hear me, but she understood the sentiment.
“It’s more of a shed, ma’am. You’ll see.”
Clinging to the promontory was a shack, scarcely six feet high and only a little broader, with an ill-fitting door and holes in the roof. No one would think to lug a boat up here unless it was in pieces.
Marshall fought with the door to hold it open for me. Mr. Brontë didn’t come to her aid. There was just a gaping void where light and warmth would have welcomed me had this been a home. Had the tutor been capable of giving one to me.
“Go!” I cried to Marshall, when we were at last opposite each other, the door threatening to whack into me were she to lose her grip. “Leave me!”
“But—” At least I thought she called “but,” but the wind was even louder now and pelting sand at us, as if for ignoring its angry roar.
“Go!” I screamed again.
This time she obeyed.
I’d just fallen inside when the door closed behind me, shaking the building to its seams.
Darkness and dust, the distinctive tang of men’s urine and the taste of tobacco.
“Branwell?” I ventured, with the same softness I’d adopted for Ned after nightmares. “Branwell, it is me. Don’t be frightened.”
“There, there, she’s come for me. I told you!” I made out Branwell, delirious, crouched in a corner, talking to the walls of the dingy hut. He looked bad, even worse than that day long ago in the Monk’s House. His face was pale, his shirt was untucked, and he seemed to have misplaced his coat.
“Branwell.” I dropped to my knees beside him, entangling my skirts in the cobwebs. What would Edmund’s mother say were she to see me now? “Branwell,” I said again. “Why are you here?”
“Why am I—?” he repeated, but the sentence trailed off. His pupils were so wide that his eyes had lost their blue. Had he only been drinking or had he tasted something stronger? “Why, to save you, Lydia. Crosby—”
“What of Dr. Crosby?”
“He delivered the death blow. Is it true, Lydia?” He grabbed my arms and shook me. “Am I to be banished forever from your sight?”
“Things cannot go on as they are,” I said, slow and measured, wishing I’d bidden Marshall stay so that I had a protector here beside me. “You need to go home. To your father. To Emily and Anne. And to Charlotte.”
“But, Lydia, I love you.”
Branwell had told me that a thousand times, but this one hit me, strong and true as an arrow with a poisoned tip. I nearly called out in surprise at how it conjured Edmund before me, young and shy at confessing the mundane secret of his heart to mine for the first time. We’d been in the library of Yoxall Lodge, while our elders, who’d seen it all before, waited a few rooms away, hushed and mock-reverent as you are with children, counting the interminable days and hours until Christmas.
But Branwell was young, behind. He did not know. He felt each cut as if it were the first. I had been subject to vivisection upon vivisection, in public and in private, had had men peer at my most private parts, examine my soul with judging eyes, prescribe me drugs and rest and prayer to fix me.
“I am sorry,” I said, kissing his crown. My tenderness surprised me. By God, I missed Georgiana, the smell of her, the soft wisps of her newly curling hair.
I felt hope stir in Branwell at this act of compassion on my part, but for me, the end was definite. There was no way back now that he was not just a boy but an infant to me, bare of armor, yesterday’s fool.
A cough.
The far wall moved.
And—
No, it wasn’t a wall at all. The gardener, Bob Pottage, appeared through the gloom. He’d been here the whole time. He’d seen everything. His eyes were wide, transfixed at the scene before him, and he was deathly white.
“Bob—Mr. Pottage—” I started.
It was not one of the Sewells, at least, or William Allison, who’d always thought so well of me. Just soulless, stupid Bob Pottage, who spent his days thinking about cabbages and rosebushes, who understood that steady, predictable propagation, not the intricate irregularities of the human heart.
“I didn’t believe it, madam,” Pottage stuttered. “Though Mr. Sewell and his sister said—I didn’t believe it, e’en when Mr. Brontë spoke of you so.” He pointed an accusing finger at Branwell. “I just came in here for a smoke. The other missus, the master’s mother, hates the smell of it about the garden and stables. But I found him layin’ here. The way he spoke of you! I’d have gi’en him a good braying had he been himself and not in the drink.”
Clumsy, stammering man. And now he held my heart like a quavering nestling in his rough, unready hand.
“Bob!” I crawled forward and grabbed him by the ankle. Lydia had done that to me at two or three years old when she’d screeched so loud I thought the house would fall around us. “Keep our secret, my secret. I’ll do anything.”
“I’m an honest family man, madam. I’ve got six bairns.” Pottage jerked his foot away from me, disgusted.
I hadn’t meant what he thought. But give yourself to one man, and they’ll all think you’d just as easily give yourself to them, or, perhaps, that you have nothing else to offer.
“You have to help me.” My tears fell unheeded to the damp and uneven stone. “At the very least, take him away.” I gestured toward Branwell, who was hiccupping beside me.
“That, ma’am, I can do,” Pottage said. He grasped Branwell’s collar between his calloused workman’s hands and hauled him toward the door.
* * *
FOR NINE DAYS I waited, breathless, for the death knell. The railway between Scarborough and York had opened a dangerous portal between my world and Branwell’s, a gaping wound that cut through fields and hills, obliterating paths trodden by peasants for centuries, revealing England’s murky insides, perhaps even disrupting time itself.