Lydia and her husband left two days later, in the same frantic flurry in which they’d arrived.
“I will change my will. Ensure she gets nothing,” said Edmund, as we stood in the doorway, watching Allison guide the horses down the drive.
Our shared contempt for Roxby and his ilk had brought us closer together. It was bad enough for Lydia to marry without our blessing, worse still for her to put on such a show of heedless vulgarity.
“Not a penny,” he added, shutting his eyes to stem the pain. “Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” I whispered. Ironic that now, after all this time, we understood each other.
14th February 1846
The Parsonage, Haworth
My darling Lydia,
The feast of St. Valentine is upon us, my love, and you are still far from my side. Crosby writes that your husband (God, how I hate to write the word) is ill. Forgive me but my wicked heart rejoices at the news.
As he bids farewell to his life, so must you feel yours teeming back into existence.
At the word of your release I will journey to Thorp Green Hall without delay, choosing to ignore your cruel silence.
Months and no letter, weeks and no money (I value this, of course, only for what it means: your remembrance!). Send me some sign, some token, my dear one. Yet even if you do not, cannot, your love will still fly to me on the wind and whisper to me as I sleep.
Dr. Crosby’s missives, with their glimpses of you as a patient ministering angel at that brute’s bedside, sustain me. Charlotte tries to hide them from me, but Emily and Anne are not so fierce.
Ever yours, although weak, nourished as I am by your love alone,
Your Northangerland
25th March 1846
Yoxall Lodge
Mrs. Robinson,
It is with sadness that I write to tell you, and Mrs. Evans by the same post, that your father and my master, Mr. Gisborne, died gently last night in his sleep. I found him in his bed.
Pray forgive me for not writing sooner, madam. Mr. Gisborne hadn’t been himself these three years but there had been no recent symptoms to cause particular alarm. Indeed, no doctor had visited Yoxall Lodge for some days.
I have written also to your brothers and am preparing the Lodge to receive visitors. I have heard, ma’am, that Mr. Robinson is also unwell. I’ll be sure to keep him, and you too, in my prayers if his indisposition precludes you from attending the service for your father.
Yours humbly, with respect,
W. Rowley
24th May 1846
Thorp Green Hall
My dear daughter Lydia,
Your father’s health is failing fast. If you wish to see him before the end, you should come at once. Ned arrived today from Aycliffe. The doctors tell me there is little hope.
Very truly, your ever-forgiving mother,
Lydia Robinson
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“HUSH NOW, HUSH, MY love,” I said, kneeling by the bed and kneading Edmund’s hand.
His breathing had grown more labored in the space of the last hour. The fight was fruitless. It was time for him to go.
Ned’s eyes were red from crying. Mary was sobbing into Bessy’s arms. Edmund’s mother was sleeping fitfully in an armchair closer to the door, one of his nightshirts across her knee.
Only Lydia had not joined us. What might have been a baby had come too soon, and she was confined to bed, according to her husband’s latest letter.
The velvet bed curtain fell against me, brushing my cheek. I gasped. It was almost a caress. How many nights had Edmund and I shared here? Each of our children had been made here. I lowered my forehead to his knuckles and prayed—half-whispering and half-willing him to hear the words I could not say.
If you hold on, your hands will be burned by the rope that ties you to the world and to me. If you fight your way to the surface, another wave will strike you, with more force than before, and another and another.
“Mama?” said Ned, his voice wobbling. “Mama.” He dropped down beside me. I wrapped my other arm around him and he nuzzled into my neck.
But if you slip away, it will be as if into a slow and steady slumber, excepting those jolts of remembrance. You’ll start back from the precipice, but be still now. All is well, my love. We are here.
My heart was on fire with all the words that Edmund and I should have said to each other, with the poetry that had been ours, more real than anything Branwell and I had shared.
We are here. We have fought with you, but now you must leave us.
“Mama,” Ned said again, more panicked now.
Mary’s sobs stopped.
I raised my head as Edmund’s hand slipped from mine.
“God, God, no,” I heard myself say. “It is over. He is gone.”
* * *
“THEY ARE HERE!” I flew from Marshall, who had been trying to make me decent for the first time in a week and teasing the stubborn, minuscule buttons through the stiff hoops of thread to strangle me to my throat.
New mourning. This time we’d had a chance to prepare.
William Allison was hastening to greet the carriage when I emerged into the sun.
I hadn’t been outside for a long time—not since before—and the daylight was blinding, hot.
Allison tipped his hat to his fellow coachman, eyeing the younger man with wary politeness.
The Evanses’ carriage was grander than ours, with a crest on its side, two horses, not one, and a groom who sat to the rear, whistling and spitting to the road behind them no doubt all the way since Derbyshire.
Allison ignored him, speaking instead to the coachman. When had the horses last had food and water? How was traffic on the road?
“Mary,” I whispered, tempted to fling the door of the carriage open myself, as the servants dawdled.
It had been two days since Edmund had died and a yet-unmeasured portion of myself with him. Two days when only the thought of my sister had sustained me. We were both orphans now, deprived of mother and father, but I was also something still stranger: a widow. And only she, who, after all, had known me longest now our parents were both gone, could bring me back to myself.
Metal was cold to my touch, light unbearable. Bessy, Ned, and Mary raised their voices too loud; even the loss of their father couldn’t put a pause to their bickering. The very hours seemed to have passed more slowly since Ellis had stilled the grandfather clock in the hall, the minute hand pointing neatly to the hour. Edmund had never before been so punctual.
His mother, robbed now of a second child and so more pitiable than me, had conducted all. She told us when to eat and where to sit. She was the one who’d set the date for my husband’s interment.
The Hall’s innards had been exposed to a parade of visitors, stabbing me anew. Richard Thompson, our grand neighbor, condescended to set foot in Thorp Green Hall for the first time in our long acquaintance, even though he had lost a daughter recently—the sickly one, Mary Ann. The Reverend Lascelles haunted us every day, urging me to pray. Mrs. Milner turned up uninvited, claiming kinship in our shared widowhood. And my brother-in-law, Charles Thorp, assumed his role as Edmund’s executor with all the pomp and circumstance of an archbishop presiding over a coronation.
I’d feared for my Lydia’s life in the days after Edmund’s death—each tragedy makes the next less unthinkable—but Roxby had written that she was out of danger now. I would be the one to suffer when she heard that her father had left them nothing in his will.