‘I think I like you a lot too. And I don’t know what to do about it either.’
That turned out to be untrue, because she did, in fact, know what to do about it. She slowly tilted her head upwards and, looking into my eyes all the while, moved her head closer to mine until our lips touched. To say that I saw fireworks would have been an exaggeration, but to say that I felt fireworks in my entire network of blood vessels would have been one hundred per cent accurate. I bent my head and kissed her as though it was the first time I had ever kissed anyone. It felt brand-new. We fit perfectly together. Her fingertips skated from my chest up along my jawline and then through my hair. I pulled her hips closer to mine and heard her sigh.
I stopped for a moment and spoke, my own voice hardly recognisable as it had dropped to the husky octave of Barry White. ‘Is this okay?’
She nodded and then her lips were back on mine. I don’t know how long we stood there, it could have been twenty minutes or twenty seconds, before a customer came in and cleared his throat loudly. While silently vowing to murder him in his sleep, I found Martha’s hand and curled mine around it.
‘Do you want to come back to mine?’
‘There’s something I have to do first,’ she said and she dragged me out of the shop, making a run for it.
‘Where are we going?’
‘Trinity. I have five minutes left to register for my course!’
Chapter Twenty-Two
OPALINE
England, 1922
My trip began as planned, with a visit to the Bront? Society. Merely to stand where the Bront? sisters had stood, to look out at the moors that inspired Emily’s writing, was such a touching experience. The house itself stood like a fortress, its grey brick tempered by the large sash windows. I tried to imagine what it would have been like to live there, daughters of a fervently religious man, pressed up against the wilds of such an unyielding landscape. Young women, spinsters like myself, ignored by the world of men and literature, pouring their heart and passion into their writing and taking on the male pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. I stood there in Mr Fitzpatrick’s trousers and a long overcoat, similarly at odds with the constraints of our gender. It was also a disguise, in case Lyndon had his spies out.
After Patrick Bront?’s death, the entire contents of the house were either auctioned off or gifted to those who worked at Haworth. The Society was fortunate enough to have acquired much of these effects and their archives were quite impressive. I came across poems by Emily, annotated by elder sister Charlotte, immediately giving me the impression of a sibling power struggle, albeit a loving one. It was common knowledge that Charlotte was critical of her younger sister’s masterpiece. In the preface to the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights, where Emily’s authorship was finally recognised, Charlotte wrote:
Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is. Wuthering Heights was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials.
Charlotte was the only one of the sisters to marry. She married Arthur Bell Nicholls, a curate who worked with her father and was not particularly liked in the village. I read that he inherited all of her belongings after her death, just nine months after their marriage. Perhaps marriage didn’t suit her after all. He later moved back to his native Ireland and married his cousin. The Honresfield library acquired many of the manuscripts and effects in his possession, so that gave me a spark of hope that I might find some clue there on my visit the following day.
I decided to dine at the inn, which was only a short walk from my lodgings. I ordered a hearty shepherd’s pie and sat by the window, drinking a small glass of gin as an aperitif. I spoke briefly to the landlord, who seemed well versed on all things Bront?. They were starting to make quite a bit of money out of visitors to the parsonage and saw it as their civic duty to fill tourists in on whatever the museum’s curator left out. I sat there, reading Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Bront?. Unfortunately all that was known about Emily could scarcely fill a page. There was, however, mention of a Martha Brown – the maid who worked at the parsonage. As the landlord’s son cleared my dish and wiped down the table, I ordered another drink and asked if he knew anything about her family, being from the area.
‘Oh aye, the sexton’s daughter. She never married,’ he said, in a way that sounded so desperately forlorn.
I gulped a mouthful of gin. Why was marriage always seen as the key to happiness?
‘So there was no family to look after her when she got sick.’ He continued in his relentless character assassination of the unmarried woman. ‘I think she died alone in a small cottage.’
I took another gulp of gin. My future suddenly looked quite grim.
‘It says here in my book that she inherited quite a bit of the Bront? family memorabilia. I wonder if she had any other relatives she might have passed it on to?’
‘My uncle John went to school with one of her nephews, as it happens.’
I clapped my hands. It felt like I was on a trail.
‘Can I speak with him, your uncle?’
‘He died this past year.’
‘Oh, I am very sorry to hear that,’ I said, keeping my hands clasped as though in prayer for his soul.
‘I do remember him saying that the two brothers had a bookshop down in London. One of them still lives there. Maybe you could enquire there?’
‘Oh, wonderful, do you have the name?’
He looked heavenward for inspiration.
‘Brown’s bookshop?’
‘Quite,’ I said, handing him some coins for my meal before walking back to my accommodation.
My appointment was at 9 a.m. to study the collection at Honresfield. Mr Law was away on business, so his assistant, a very diligent young woman by the name of Miss Pritchett, welcomed me. While the estate was vast and his wealth evident, the house retained a practical atmosphere. One wing was entirely devoted to their remarkable collection of British literature, with manuscripts by Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen.
‘Your letter stated that you have an interest in the Bront? collection?’ Miss Pritchett said, opening the large wooden doors to a smaller anteroom. ‘I believe you’ll find everything you need here,’ she said, handing me a catalogue of the library and a pair of soft white gloves. ‘Mr Law asks that every visitor wear these. We must preserve the integrity of the paper.’
‘Of course,’ I agreed, my eyes darting round the walls of shelves containing all sorts of riches, waiting to be discovered. First editions of Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey, no doubt with a fascinating provenance, yet I had to pull my focus to the task at hand. With great care, I eased a first edition of Wuthering Heights from the shelf. I brought it to the table, which had a kind of easel to rest the book on. In its original cloth cover, it was in pristine condition. On the first page, I was intrigued to discover that it was inscribed by the Rev. Patrick Bront? to none other than Martha Brown, the family housekeeper and arguably a much-valued member of the household. My senses were fizzing with connections – what else might she have been bequeathed and where might it have ended up, if not sold at auction?
There were many boxes containing entertaining yet inconsequential letters between the sisters and Ellen Nussey, along with more interesting correspondence between Charlotte and her erstwhile biographer Elizabeth Gaskell. Then things became more interesting. I found a letter from Charlotte to her own publishers, complaining about Thomas Cautley Newby, the man who published Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey. He was a bit of a scoundrel by all accounts, demanding the sisters pay ￡50 upfront and capitalising on the confusion surrounding the Bell name. The theory at the time was that all three books were authored by one man. Of course, it could not have been further from the truth, as Charlotte and Anne travelled to London to confirm: We are three sisters. Yet Emily remained at home and seemed to prefer the anonymity of a nom de plume. Unlike her sisters, she did not seek recognition from the London literary set, nor did she seem perturbed by Cautley’s greedy character. Perhaps she understood that he was true to his nature, as she was to hers.