Emily's Ghost Read online

  Patrick led Weightman upstairs with a candle, saw him settled, and then left him. But sleep, for Weightman, did not come easily. He tossed and turned thinking of the eventful day, his impressions of the village, the church, and most of all of the man he would serve, and his family. He wondered what Emily was doing downstairs, alone, in darkness save for candlelight.

  He drifted to sleep at last but a noise woke him. It came from outside—he had thrown his window open to catch the night air from the moor behind the house. Voices drifted up—a man’s voice, then a woman’s, followed by a low moan.

  Weightman peeped out the window, his vision aided by ample moonlight. The woman stood with her back to him, but Weightman knew it was Emily Brontë. Before her stood a large man bearing up the slumping form of another.

  “Inside,” Emily said. “He’ll not go in the house tonight, for we’ve a visitor in his room.”

  “The laundry, then?” the man said.

  “The mat’s in the corner,” Emily said. “He’s used it before.”

  The large man disappeared into an outbuilding, dragging the other with him. Emily waited. Finally the first man reappeared, alone.

  “Thanks to you, John Brown,” Emily said. “He’s led us another jolly round?”

  “Deed he has,” John Brown replied.

  “Get you to bed, then.”

  Weightman watched as the man disappeared into the darkness. Emily went inside the house. Weightman lay back on his bed, pondering what he had just seen. The insensate man, inebriate, he guessed, was Branwell, whose bed he lay upon. The burden he had sensed whenever the name had come up in Haworth parsonage was now explained.

  The door below opened once again. He sat up and looked out the window. Emily Brontë stood there, the dog Keeper with her. She wore a shawl against the night air. To Weightman’s astonishment, she walked out the back path and disappeared like a ghost into the darkness of the moor.

  Still awake and restless, he heard her return later, heard the door close behind her and her tread, no longer ghostlike, upon the stair.

  2

  Charlotte Brontë was aware, painfully aware, she was not beautiful. When the sisters spoke amongst themselves, she was given to comments of self-disparagement. She lamented the roughness of her complexion and its lack of a pleasing bloom. She criticized her short stature and pointed out that her head seemed too large in proportion to her body. Charlotte was a talented artist and at one time entertained notions of making money with her drawings despite the fact that she was a woman. And yet on the rare occasions when she drew herself, the result was a hideous dwarf of exaggerated disproportion whose gigantic head seemed ready to topple off her body.

  “You portray yourself as something monstrous,” Anne once protested. “You are nothing of the sort.” (Anne, who above all wanted everyone to think well of themselves and be happy.)

  “I am something monstrous,” Charlotte, in an especially foul mood, had retorted.

  The longing for feminine beauty extended beyond herself. Once, while straightening their father’s room, the girls came upon a drawing of their mother hidden in a drawer. Emily wanted to go to her father and ask him if enough time had passed to dull the pain of his wife’s passing, so that they might display the picture. Charlotte would have none of it.

  “It is not well done,” she had declared. “The artist has no sense of proportion, and the portrait does not show our mother in a flattering light. I shall use it to draw another likeness. A more becoming aspect, as I remember she possessed.”

  And so Charlotte drew the same bonnet and dress, the same profile, on a more conventionally pretty, delicate face. When she was done, she presented the new version to her father, who looked bemused but consented that it should be hung. It was the occasion of one of those rare but titanic fights between sisters. Emily accused Charlotte of disfiguring their mother and hanging a stranger upon the wall, and Charlotte claimed Emily could not recall their mother’s true form for she had been too young. Emily in turn wondered if Charlotte, given the chance, would like to perform some macabre surgery upon her sisters, something out of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to render them “beautiful.” She spat the word “beautiful” as though it were a curse. Their fight ended with Charlotte in tears and Emily repentant. But not really repentant.

  When the picture was hung, Emily refused to look at it. She placed the original in her father’s chest and now and then took it out when she wanted to remember her mother. She also began to pay attention when Charlotte shared with her sisters the stories she wrote about her fantasy kingdom of Angria. In Charlotte’s Angria, a hero based upon the Duke of Wellington reigned supreme. The heroines were fetching, the men unable to take their eyes off them. Emily knew it was what Charlotte longed for, an exotic England dominated by a Duke of Wellington who would fall in love with a Charlotte Brontë.

  Charlotte loved men of a certain type, with what she called “dash,” which she judged the duke to possess. Such a man would want a woman of great allure, and such a woman would draw troops of admirers amongst the opposite sex. Charlotte would have loved to be such a woman, to cut a swath through the eligible males in the neighborhood, high and low, to have dozens, scores trailing after her. She wished to be adored by those she deemed worthy and those she did not. She would taunt the latter with her charms, and then send them chastened away. The former, who would naturally be very, very few in number, she would entertain. One alone, one worthy above all, she would submit to. Alas, it had no chance of occurring in reality, and Charlotte felt the want.

  Still she tried. Emily could only love her sister for the effort. There was courage in it, a refusal to give up the unwinnable fight. In a battlefield warrior, it would be the Chanson de Roland, Charlotte raising the horn defiantly to her lips and refusing to retreat in the face of certain death.

  If only the cause was worthy. Emily thought men did not merit such heroic effort. Like Charlotte, she wrote fantastic stories. But Emily, leading Anne, created the land of Gondal in the South Pacific. In Gondal, lovers tormented one another. The heroes were women, and they were defiant above all. Emily read the novels of her favorite, Sir Walter Scott, with their jousts and feuds and adventures. The men of Scott’s novels were larger than life. Emily’s women were as well. In her mind, Emily played the women, and she studied men, looking for one to fit the part of hero. But Emily did not know a man who was not small. Infinitely small.

  Emily thought herself no more a beauty than Charlotte. She did not care. She rarely observed herself in a mirror, and she had no interest in fashionable clothes. When Charlotte was at home, Emily allowed her sister to arrange her hair. The tongs resting in the hearth were long and thin like a giant’s knitting needles. Charlotte pulled them from the hot coals with a pot holder and wielded them awkwardly, crimping Emily’s dark hair into curls that lasted only until the first damp. When Charlotte was away, Emily ignored her hair except now and then to take scissors and whack it off at her shoulders.

  Emily did not understand the games men and women played. Flirting was as incomprehensible as Mandarin. What was it for? she wondered. To win the companionship of a creature who was not half so interesting as the dog Keeper. No. Emily wore what was at hand, and comfortable. She said what she felt, and kept silent otherwise. The men whose companionship she craved existed inside her head.

  So Emily watched with some bemusement as Charlotte fell into an obsessive infatuation with William Weightman.

  “You barely know him,” Emily pointed out.

  “One can tell!” Charlotte said. “He comes with splendid recommendations from his bishop. And what a kind, genial manner. What a pleasant demeanor and friendly smile.” She paused in thought a moment, then added, “One could not hope such a look might be bestowed upon oneself? Could one?”

  Emily was tempted to say, No, one could not. She did not like to be hurtful, would only be so when she felt sorely pressed. So Emily kept her silence.

  Charlotte marshaled her forces with
all the command of her hero the Duke of Wellington. No sooner was Aunt Branwell returned home, scarcely had she set a welcoming cup of tea to her lips, than Charlotte told her of the new curate and begged for an invitation.

  “In time, in time,” Aunt Branwell murmured, and set the cup again to her lips.

  “Soon, soon,” Charlotte begged, matching her aunt repetition for repetition. “He is new, he is alone at the Widow Ogden’s, and he shall want company. But you can be certain that as word of his arrival spreads, every lady in the district shall be clamoring for him and we shall not see him again.”

  Charlotte might have added “every young and eligible lady.” That she skimped in her description of the ladies who might clamor for Mr. Weightman’s attention was not lost on Aunt Branwell. But because it did seem proper to issue Patrick’s new curate an invitation to tea, she offered no objection.

  The guest list was entirely in Charlotte’s hands. Emily was amused to see that it included a few trustees of the parish and their wives, John Brown the sexton and his wife, and several of the neighboring clergy and their wives (but only those who lacked unmarried daughters). In the entire list, not a single eligible young woman was included save Charlotte and Emily.

  “Miss Sugden or Miss Dury?” Emily suggested (provocatively, she knew).

  “No, no, no,” Charlotte said in a breezy manner. “He shall be bored with them soon enough. Let him have mature company first.”

  The guests arrived at the parsonage on a Sunday when the last service was done. Mr. Weightman appeared late, claiming he had been held up on the way by stopping in to see how old Mrs. Dobbs was faring. Charlotte, who had been nervously passing round refreshments, melted with relief (though thinking very ill of old Mrs. Dobbs) and took charge of Mr. Weightman while Emily stood by the door and disappeared for long periods to the more congenial company of Tabby Ackroyd and Keeper in the kitchen.

  But Emily was in earshot when Charlotte, seated next to Mr. Weightman on the sofa, posed the Question. It was the Question she had caught Charlotte practicing the night before, seated at the mirror in Aunt Branwell’s bedroom. Charlotte had refused to be embarrassed or angry, and said mildly, “Wouldn’t you like to know as well?”

  “I don’t care,” Emily had said.

  “You have normal human curiosity, don’t you? Perhaps I am more honest, that’s all.” Charlotte studied her reflection in the mirror. “One must know where to begin.”

  “Or end,” Emily replied, flopping full length on the bed. “I admit to some modest curiosity about why Mr. Weightman has chosen Haworth. Beyond that, I don’t care.”

  “If the young man is engaged, or otherwise spoken for,” Charlotte continued unabashed, “then one might go about being his friend.” She turned and looked at Emily. “Without disappointment.”

  Emily relented, as she usually did. She went to her sister and began to brush her hair.

  “Do not chide me for my dreams,” Charlotte said softly to the mirror. “They are all that I have.”

  Emily, who spent so much time in her own fantasy world, had no heart to chide anyone for dreaming. She merely said, “Your dreams are too based in reality.”

  Charlotte began to laugh. “Sister!” she said. “Do you hear what you say? It makes no sense!”

  Then Emily began to laugh as well.

  But she did not laugh when Charlotte posed the Question. It was carefully placed, as Charlotte had planned, so it was not the first query posed to the new curate. And it was not an inquiry coming from thin air and thus drawing attention to itself. Rather she slipped it in, her voice admirably casual, when Mr. Weightman spoke of his home, as he was wont to do upon inquiry.

  “Ah yes, Appleby,” Charlotte said. “And tell us, Mr. Weightman, is there someone in Appleby of the fair sex who holds your affection, someone we might delight in meeting someday?”

  William Weightman had the good grace to blush, and Charlotte had her answer. Emily sighed for her sister’s sake. Weightman went on to say that, yes, there was a young woman in Appleby he held dear. The ladies in attendance tittered in anticipation while the men sat bored.

  “Engaged?” Charlotte asked, nothing in her voice to signal the crashing of her hopes.

  “Not exactly engaged,” Weightman said. “I have not yet applied to her father, who is rather exacting in that regard. But Miss Walton and I have a mutual understanding.”

  Mrs. John Brown, the sexton’s wife, who was a bit coarse and socially inept, said, “And why do you wait, sir?”

  Weightman hesitated. Emily guessed he agonized over his choice of words, and she wondered why. When he did answer, she understood.

  “I am very taken with Haworth,” he said, “but I am not certain it would suit Miss Walton.”

  He went on, in answer to more questions, to explain Agnes Walton was the daughter of a landowner of some means. Her father’s station was above his own father, who was a brewer, and yet the brewery was quite prosperous. And though their parents’ equality in financial terms meant there might be no impediment, still—

  William Weightman concluded with a shrug and changed the subject. Emily could picture the consternation in a certain landowning Westmorland family when their daughter’s potential husband, despite his father’s prosperity, first chose the Church and then took himself off to serve among the hovels of Haworth’s weavers.

  Charlotte guessed as well, though Weightman’s admirable reticence allowed Mrs. Brown and the others to follow him without being offended. That night as she and Emily lay side by side in bed, she scoffed, “So. Gentle Agnes Walton is far too good to be seen in the muddy alleyways of Haworth. You see, Emily, I am not the only person who finds our clime unsuitable for genteel folk.”

  Emily turned on her side and refused to be drawn into an argument they’d had many times before. She preferred the company of rough folk, when she wanted company at all. The poor of Haworth did not care if she did not keep to a social calendar. Only the better sort, the mill owners and their families, had any expectations, and they had long been disappointed in Emily Brontë. The feeling was mutual, for Emily despised expectations.

  She was relieved when Charlotte dealt with her disappointment (more acute than even Emily had realized) in the way she often employed. Charlotte left on a long trip.

  A few years after the disastrous early attempt at schooling that ended in the deaths of his two oldest daughters, Patrick had tried once again. His three remaining girls would need an employable skill someday, since they had no money with which to attract a husband. Charlotte, he thought, possessed a portion of feminine wiles, though it was difficult for a father to judge. But she was no physical beauty. Some men might find Emily and Anne attractive. Anne was sweet and quiet, with light brown hair and a fine complexion. Emily was exotic, dark, lithe, and mercurial. But both were painfully shy, Anne out of genuine humility, and Emily obstinately so. Patrick feared none of his girls were likely to marry. What would become of them when he was gone? A near-fatal illness had decided him. The girls must make their own way in the world. To do that, distasteful though it was given their earlier experience, they must be schooled.

  Patrick found what he prayed would be a satisfactory place, Miss Wooler’s school at Roe Head. Alas, only Charlotte really took to it. She studied hard, but just as important, she made friends whose continued interest in her was a point of pride. Charlotte saw a bit of the world compared to her sisters, even though it might be a small bit. She had been, to her way of thinking, adventurous. When Emily and Anne lasted only a few months between them at Roe Head (Emily especially upset by the confinement and memories of William Carus Wilson), Charlotte had been pleased. Upon her return to the parsonage, she taught her sisters some of what she had learned herself over the years at Miss Wooler’s. She never let them forget that she was, of all three, the most accomplished and worldly.

  Patrick might have pointed out that though Charlotte possessed the most formal education, she had done little with it. She chafed under the bu
rden of being a governess, and left several positions after only a brief attempt. Meanwhile Anne, quiet but plucky little Anne, had got herself a position with the family at Blake Hall and plugged away at her duties. She often wrote letters home about the difficulty of managing the rambunctious children in her care. None of the Brontës could imagine Anne enforcing discipline with much vehemence, so delicate was her constitution and so gentle her nature. But she did not leave her post.

  Charlotte did not view this as strength. To take the initiative to do new things, to see new places—that was what was most admirable. When, swift upon the initial disappointment with William Weightman, Charlotte announced her intention to spend the autumn with her friends at the seaside, Patrick did not oppose her. The friends were wealthy and Charlotte would travel easily in their company, her expenses taken in hand as a matter of course. Perhaps the exposure might even throw her in the way of some eligible young man, a clergyman perhaps, possessing his own homely qualities and valuing a sharp mind and bold personality over physical beauty or wealth.

  So Charlotte went to Bridlington, and Emily tried not to mind. She did not want to go herself. Not really. It would be fine to see the sea. But perhaps not so fine as what she imagined. She would not like to be away from Keeper or the other animals. Besides, at the seaside it would be more difficult to write. Emily carried the larger world in her head, but the doorway to that world opened most easily atop her familiar moors.

  The world opened also when she made bread on Wednesdays. Tabby knew not to bother her, but took herself on her errands. Patrick would be in his study, Aunt Branwell at her sewing in the parlor and Charlotte beside her aunt, helping to mend. Branwell would be God knew where, though often upstairs in bed after a night out.