Allison opened the carriage door with a bow. “Welcome to Thorp Green Hall, sir. I’ll have Joey see to your bags,” he said.
William Evans, my sister Mary’s husband, nodded toward him, but did not take his hand to quit the carriage. William was a large man and one who hardly knew his own strength. With a jump, he crunched onto the gravel and closed the door himself.
She wasn’t here.
“Mary?” I repeated, questioning this time. I walked toward my sister’s husband with my hands outstretched, still staring at the empty carriage behind him.
“Lydia, you don’t look well.” He took me by the shoulder, his grip powerful, sure.
“She isn’t here?” I asked, blankly, hating him for not being her.
“No,” he said kindly, weaving his arm through mine. “I’m afraid my wife is convalescent with a cold. It has, after all, been a busy few weeks.”
“Busy?” I echoed.
I’d endured months of the sickroom and doctors, of servants complaining about overdue wages. At night, Edmund had sweated and moaned as I watched over him, but he still struggled to lord over his account book, propped up against his pillows, in the day. It had been months of fear—fear that I would prove unworthy of the task that falls to half the married, as I had been deficient in all my other duties as a wife; fear that everyone would find me out and know that I was just an ignorant child, hiding behind an older woman’s face and a married woman’s name; fear that the money and Dr. Crosby’s letters would not be enough to keep Branwell Brontë away.
And yet my sister, Mary, was the one who was busy? Too busy to come to me?
“Our son Thomas was just married,” William Evans said, talking to me slowly as if I were a child.
“Yes, yes.” I shook my head to unfog my mind.
“Your dress.” He gestured to the exposed skin at my neck. “Perhaps you had better go to your rooms, to your maid?”
“Yes. No. That is, then, what will you do?” I said, grasping his arm, overcome with the panic that I was failing as a hostess somehow, that Edmund or his mother or somebody would be angry if I left him outside in the driveway.
But Charles Thorp, a man who towered over even William Evans, had appeared on the front steps, his greeting booming out toward us.
“Charles!” William Evans said, untangling his arm from mine. “It has been too long.”
“Quite, quite. Terrible circumstance, of course,” said Thorp, jerking his head in my direction. I wasn’t sure if the tragedy he referred to was Edmund’s death or the sorry state it had reduced me to. “A lot to tell you. Edmund made me his executor, you know. But first, a brandy?”
William Evans strode away from me and up the steps, then followed Charles Thorp through my front door.
The breeze was biting for all that the day was mild. I attempted to close the fastenings of my dress, but my fingers wouldn’t work. My body shook with something between a hiccup and a sob.
“Madam,” William Allison said softly, placing his rough hand with infinite gentleness where William Evans’s had been.
“Yes, William?” I said, looking him square in his rosy and wind-worn face.
“We are all so sorry, madam, about the master. If there’s anything I can do to help, you tell me. Anything, ma’am. I’d do it without question.”
“Would you, William?” I grasped his other hand in mine. “There might be something. Wait here.”
* * *
CHARLES THORP AND WILLIAM Evans’s voices emanated from the library, cut off now and then by my mother-in-law’s strained questions. Hopefully, there would be enough time to go to the study and do what needed to be done before the men went back to deciphering the paperwork, totaling up what I, and my remaining children, had to live on.
Edmund’s study was as quiet as a mausoleum. It had been months since he’d last spent time here.
I’d been a little in awe of the place when he’d first taken to his bed. I would only enter for practical reasons, such as issuing the servants’ salaries or recording the collected rents. I hadn’t followed Edmund’s notes blindly, at least where the servants were concerned, but had made adjustments. A little less for that upstart Miss Sewell and the hapless Ellis, a little more for Marshall and Allison.
When Bob Pottage stood before me, cap in his hands and eyes downcast, I could tell he was expecting the worst. “I’ve six bairns, ma’am,” he muttered, as if I didn’t remember him telling me that before, in Scarborough. Then he added, raising his chin, “And I’m a good worker.”
“I know you are, Mr. Pottage,” I said, dignifying him with a “Mr.” and opening my own coin purse. “Which is why I’d like to give you this.” I pressed a ten-pound note into his hand.
His eyes grew wide as serving plates. It was doubtful he’d possessed such a sum before. “Ma’am,” he said, more as an exhale than with his voice.
“I think the time has come for you to leave us,” I said, retying the bag.
Pottage nodded.
“Is there somewhere—at some remove from here, perhaps—that you can go?”
“We’ve some family in Dringhouses, ma’am,” he said after a pause.
I suppressed a smile. Dringhouses wasn’t much above ten miles away, but that was far beyond the limit of our servants’ worlds.
“That should do nicely. You’ll depart tomorrow, shall we say?” I made a point of glancing toward the door. “You may go.”
After that encounter, I’d come into the study more regularly and often for no reason at all. I would creep into the room in the middle of the bitter winter nights, when my shift in the sickroom was done, just to sit opposite Edmund’s empty chair and watch my breath in the light of a candle. Once I’d even smoked one of his cigars, gagging at the smell and choking on the smoke, but struggling through to the end.
Charles Thorp had been working his way through the papers methodically, judging from the piles of yellowing manuscript spread across the desk. It had never looked as organized as this in Edmund’s day. But I didn’t care to look at these. I sat in the desk chair, opened three drawers before I found clean writing paper, and then wet the discarded nib pen.
Mr. Brontë, I wrote.
I crossed it out and began again on a new page.
Branwell,
I send this letter by William Allison. See to it that he has beer and victuals after his journey and, if you can, keep him from Anne so that no one in Haworth will know whence he hails.
There is no need for you to send a reply. I would rather indeed that you did not.
I write only to say—
I balled the discarded paper in my left hand, crumpling the well-formed letters of Brontë between my fingers and fighting back tears.
My head swam with memories of Edmund signing his correspondence with a flourish, as sure of his convictions and decisions as I was uncertain, unshaken in his authority, while I was like that poplar beyond his window, still standing but swayed by the slightest breeze.
I write only to say that my husband is dead.
I had never sat in his chair before.
And that, when it comes to you and me, all connection must be severed between us.
My hand juddered, making the full stop into more of a comma.