“A few months,” he tried to tell me, but his body was wracked by a wrenching cough halfway through, giving me enough time to rush over and crouch beside him, touching his chair with the tenderness I wished I could have shown him.
“Will you let me nurse you?” I asked, once the spasm had subsided. We both knew I meant, “Will you let me love you?”
Edmund stood and pulled the bell cord. “I will need your assistance in making all ready, Lydia. I will teach you what you must do with the house, the farms, and with Ned.”
I would not be a nurse, then, but a secretary, a bookkeeper, anything that would keep me by his elbow until the end.
“That way, all will be in order should you choose to remarry.”
“No!” I interjected.
Never, never. He still thought I would install Branwell, a mere boy, in the house where we had lived, for better and, oh yes, for worse, as man and wife? Where we had loved, had hurt, had seen our dear Georgiana die?
“I will not—” I grabbed his cold and unresponsive hand. “Edmund, I never wished to marry him.”
“Very well,” he said, as if we had been discussing the removal of the furniture. “No matter. As I told you, my will makes provisions for you, regardless of the future on which you decide.”
He was too good. Better than I deserved.
“Edmund—” I started, but there was a tap on the door.
“Come in,” he called.
Our interview was over.
* * *
THE BRIDAL PAIR WAS to go to Edmund first, for a consultation. He and I had agreed. Would Lydia notice the mortal shadow that hung over her father and the house? Bessy and Mary had, I was sure of it, although for the last month, we’d taken care to close all doors and speak in whispers.
The crunch of the gravel and thump of the carriage door. Lydia’s laugh floated to me, but I didn’t go to the window. Was it my imagination, or was there a forced note in there? Her laughter was the flirt’s, the liar’s, the gambler’s show of carefree gaiety.
“Very good, William,” she said.
The front door was open, or I wouldn’t have heard her. The chill dusk air flooded under the library door. Ellis was letting a draft in.
“Thank you kindly,” said William Allison. “But you mustn’t, miss. I mean ‘madam.’ ”
Foolish girl. She was trying to force money on my servants when she had hardly a penny to her name. Lydia should be grateful I’d sent the carriage to pick her and her actor husband up from the station in York at all, and that William Allison had been happy to go.
I’d been thankful when his face hadn’t registered surprise at the request. “Collect Mr. and Mrs. Roxby from the new station? Very good, ma’am,” he’d said, giving me a small, encouraging smile.
The voices crescendoed but then faded as Lydia and her husband took the stairs to Edmund’s study. I stared at the pages of my book as if into a crystal ball, picturing how the scene would play out between them. At times in my vision, Lydia was contrite. At others, she was defiant. She dropped to her knees, lamenting her father’s poor health, or she gazed, distracted, at her own reflection in the mirror, not noticing the change. She hid behind her husband’s protective arm, or she shrank from him like a dog that understands only a kick.
When the grandfather clock in the hallway chimed the quarter hour, I rose and ascended to the schoolroom, where our girls—our two other girls—spent their idle days together now, without studying and with only Marshall as their lax custodian.
Today, though, they were quiet, reverent, almost scared, as children are when Death is in the house.
“Come,” I said. “Your sister has arrived.”
Mary took my arm and Bessy followed behind. Their stiff new dresses rustled.
“Mama!” Never one for awkwardness or reserve, Lydia fluttered over to me as soon as we entered the dining room, planting a kiss on my cheek and moving on to her sisters before I’d had time to react. She was dressed in her favorite shade of powder blue, and although I scanned her belly for those symptoms of being a young wife, she was still slight as ever, maybe even smaller.
“Have you missed me terribly?” she asked nobody in particular. “Oh, don’t pout so, Bessy. I know you have! Henry, Henry, aren’t they all just as I said they were?”
The acting boy—Henry Roxby—bowed in my direction with a sheepish smile and tried to say something, but Lydia was already rattling on. “They’re not a bit like me, are they? Well, some say Mary’s hair and mine are a similar shade, but hers isn’t so brilliant and simply refuses to hold a curl. Why, Bessy, I swear you’ve grown even taller! Tell me, how does Ned get on with those dreadful Eades? And what is the news in Little Ouseburn? I heard that Harry Thompson’s wife has given him his son at last!”
“Shall we?” said Edmund, who was standing at the head of the table, holding on to his chair.
“Oh, I will sit at your right hand, Papa, as a married lady now! Move down, Bessy.” Lydia was everywhere, arranging us all. “Henry, you may take Mama.”
I had anticipated silence, but there wasn’t a moment to think between Lydia’s descriptions of the theater in Manchester, the city where they’d apparently rented a set of rooms (“magical”), Scotland (“Fancy it, just like England!”), and married life (“Really, Bessy, you must marry Will Milner now the oldest is wed. Surely he has grieved the death of his father long enough by now”). An absence of taste, a total lack of refinement.
Mary’s eyes grew wider and wider. Bessy looked as if she might slap her older sister. And when I glanced toward Edmund for help, all I found written across his face was pain. The very effort of raising his fork to his mouth overwhelmed him. At intervals, he clutched his side and grimaced. And our firstborn didn’t bat one well-combed eyelash, but gossiped on about musicians, players, and ne’er-do-wells.
“Lydia,” I said, interrupting her at last. “I think we’re all eager to hear more from your husband. About your family, perhaps, Mr. Roxby?”
The boy’s face turned vermillion. “I—I—” he stuttered.
“Oh, the Roxbys are all so talented!” cried Lydia. “The theater is much maligned, I think. I say it is the highest art form of our age.”
“Well, I don’t know about that, Lydia, dear,” Henry Roxby said, head twisting between her and me in turn. “But you could say that the theater is in the Roxby blood. You met my father and my uncle once before, I remember, Mrs. Robinson?”
“You did?” I hadn’t thought he’d been listening, but Edmund turned to me, his question descending like a dark gauze between us.
“No. That is, yes. You see, Miss—” But I didn’t wish to speak the name “Brontë.” I paused in indecision. “They were actors, I think?” I asked, addressing Roxby again.
“Harry Beverley, my new father, isn’t just an actor. He’s a star! And his brother, Henry’s uncle, is the manager of the Scarborough theater,” Lydia corrected me. “Really, Mama, I’m surprised by you.”
And I of you, Lydia, I would have said, but she was gushing over the kindness of “Mrs. Beverley,” who I hoped was the father’s wife, and bragging about the accomplishments of another “new uncle,” some paltry scene painter.