“Oh no, my agent will see to all that,” I said. How bizarre the word felt—not “our” or “my husband’s” but “my” agent. “The Sewells, Ellis, Joey—they will all stay on at Thorp Green Hall for now. And Marshall of course must come with me. My only concern is for William Allison. It will hardly be necessary for us to keep our own carriage and coachman in addition to the Evanses’. But I will think of something there.” I said it breezily, though the thought had kept me up at night. Allison, discreet though he’d proved himself to be until now, had, after all, been my emissary to Haworth. He knew so much and had always been kind. For that, I owed him something.
I paused as we neared the church. Over there lay Edmund, just feet away from our pew. Yet the stone wall of the building divided him from us when the girls and I trooped in for Sunday service. The patch where the ground had been disturbed was still just about discernible, but, come spring, flowers would obscure my husband’s grave. And I wouldn’t be here to see them.
My throat tightened.
I couldn’t look anymore, so glanced instead toward Fish Pond Bridge and the winding road to Great Ouseburn beyond.
It wouldn’t do for me to be so morbid when I wouldn’t see the doctor for who knew how many months. I opened my mouth to ask him some question about the gossip in the larger village but realized he was pensive too, staring back toward the domed mausoleum, with a fixed and faraway expression in his eyes.
“Is something the matter, Doctor? John?” I asked.
“Well, for one, I will miss you, Lydia,” he said. “The Ouseburns won’t be the same for me when you are gone. You are, after all, the only one who understands my—”
“Enough.” I cut him off. He’d shared the shameful secrets of his heart once, but that didn’t mean they required repetition. I started back toward the Thompsons’ vault, hearing the squelch of the doctor’s steps behind me. “I will write. I promise.”
“But that is the thing, Lydia. Didn’t you promise Mr. Brontë that too?”
The squelching stopped, and I turned.
“I fear you will not,” he went on. “That you will leave my letters unanswered like Branwell’s when you are with your grander friends.”
“Is that what he said—that I promised him?” I demanded.
For the last month, Dr. Crosby had been returning Mr. Brontë’s letters unopened, on my instruction, although they still arrived with almost the same regularity as the checks I made out to him were deposited.
“You did not?” asked Dr. Crosby, head bowed.
He had never questioned me before.
“I did not,” I echoed.
“Then I apologize. Only—”
“Only what?” I snapped.
Raindrops were misting the air between us.
“Forgive me,” he said. “Only, when one has gone so long without love, it seems to me it would be impossible to turn it away.”
There was a time when I would have thought that too.
The rain was falling harder, so I ran up the bank and into the unlocked mausoleum. There was just about room for my dress and me to fit into one of the eight marble alcoves. The doctor perched in the one beside me.
“There was a time when I longed only to be loved, ideally to madness,” I said, a low laugh creeping into my voice. “And, for a while, the adoration, the idolatry—for that is what it is—was enough. But then—”
“Then?”
“Then the loneliness returned, only more acute. I want more than to be loved, John. Any handsome woman can win a fool into loving her. I want to be seen clearly and loved for what another soul sees there. I want love to be a perfect mirror that reflects me, flaws and all, and still meets me with a smile.”
“Lydia, I see you,” John Crosby said.
My heart nearly burst with it. I reached out, took his hand, and gave it a short, sharp squeeze. “And I see you, Doctor,” I said.
“Do you know, Lydia, what the villagers think?” he asked after we’d sat in silence for some minutes.
“What’s that?”
“When they see me visiting the Hall each week? Attending church at Holy Trinity, rather than St. Mary’s, just in order to be near you? Giving you my arm on our walks? Well, they whisper that I am in love with you.” The doctor smiled.
I laughed loud and true this time and imagined old Mary Thompson, in the crypt below us, seething in her coffin at our disrespect.
“Ah, Dr. John Crosby, another naive man enraptured by the dazzling Mrs. Robinson,” I cried. The rain drummed harder on the lead roof. “It makes for a fine story, it’s true. If only they knew the truth. That would be much more scandalous.”
* * *
BUOYED BY THE KINSHIP I had found in Dr. Crosby and the revelation that love was sometimes sweeter for being platonic, I practically ran home once the rain lightened.
I would quit Thorp Green Hall within weeks, although it had never been so dear to me as in the last months. But at least Marshall, that second loyal friend, would be with me wherever we went, always present, ever patient, and making each grand house we visited feel like home.
Thorp Green now ran to my rhythms. Breakfast was when I rose, dinner whenever I was hungry. I had even torn down those awful faded floral curtains in my dressing room, although I wouldn’t enjoy for long the heavy dark velvet I’d chosen to replace them, an almost indefensible extravagance given our current situation.
I’d missed the children on occasion since the girls had gone visiting, but it was in that fleeting way, where I hoped Ned and Mary were eating enough and Bessy not too much, otherwise enjoying the silence. Or enjoying that I was the only one who could interrupt it.
Today, although my boots were wet and my hair was ruined, I rushed straight to the anteroom when I entered the Hall, lobbing my sodden shawl at Miss Sewell en route.
I threw back the lid of the pianoforte and struck a chord, rich, harmonious, and unapologetically loud. I could play what I liked, without trying and failing to please Edmund. There was something magical in the way my body remembered, in how my fingers flew just as fast over the keys as they had in my girlhood, and in how the music thrilled me, just the same. It was as if the melodies wove a fine, taut, invisible thread between my earlier self and me, as if I could give voice to what I felt inside without the necessary translation and obfuscation of speech.
“Madam?” By the time I heard her, she was so close I jumped, so maybe Marshall had been calling to me for some time.
I swiveled to face her, although I knew her from her voice. “Yes?”
“May I— I should like to talk with you,” she said.
“You are talking to me now,” I replied, my earlier affection toward her evaporating at her unexpected, almost insolent, interruption.
She began to answer but broke into a cough. It was too shallow at first, and it took her several attempts before she was able to break through the phlegm. She struck her chest with the heel of one hand as if the gesture would clear it, raising the other to me in apology.
“Honestly, Marshall, it is as bad as having Miss Brontë here again,” I said, closing the piano.
I’d done it. I’d said the name “Brontë” and without so much as hesitating.