The little purchase I had made from Mrs Brown was so plain and uninteresting that I had never given it more than a cursory look. And since I also suspected it had never truly been a part of the Bront? household, I had carelessly dropped it in the bottom drawer of my bureau, untouched.
I leaned down and took it out, placing it in front of me on the desk. I let my fingers run across the surface and closed my eyes as if I could somehow divine its provenance. It wasn’t even a proper sewing box, but an old tin cash box. Inside was a collection of bobbins, needles, thimbles and thread. I removed them all, one by one, as I had done the first time on the boat back from Liverpool. Perhaps I had missed something – a name scratched in the metal or a clue of some sort. Nothing.
I could hear thunder rumbling in the distance and when I looked up, fat drops of rain began to hit the windowpane. I stroked my belly. ‘Don’t worry, little one, the gods are playing games in the clouds,’ I said gently. Normally I hated storms, but I was determined not to pass this on. Besides, there was a magical feel to the air, as though something exciting might happen.
I got up to close the shutters on the windows and wrapped a woollen shawl around my shoulders. I took the sewing box into my hands and again tried to feel the past somehow. I had read of people who could touch an object and have a vision of the previous owner. Silly, of course, but I closed my eyes and as I turned it over in my hands, I found something. I hardly dared to open my eyes, reluctant to prove my sense of touch incorrect, but there it was – an almost invisible groove at the base of the box. If anyone passing by the shop could see my face, I’m sure that I resembled a treasure hunter at the entrance to an ancient Egyptian tomb!
Slowly, I slid the outer cover back and out slipped a tiny black notebook, the size of a playing card. I gasped. What had I discovered? How long had it been secreted in this hidden compartment and who had put it there? All of the possibilities crashed into one another and for quite some time I was frozen into inaction. I hadn’t even realised how my hand pressed hard over my beating heart while my head bent low to the desk, as if the notebook would somehow speak to me.
While I savoured that delicious moment just before the unknown becomes known, I could delay no longer. My curiosity was at its peak. I reached tentatively for the cover and began to carefully open it. It released a dry, woody smell. Immediately I imagined a young woman scribbling notes by the fireside – as though its fragrance was still imbued with the environment in which it was created.
1846
I have devoted an entire lifetime to escaping the confines of this wretched place, only to find myself further entangled in its gnarled roots and oppressed by its looming towers. I am now satisfied that no one born on this land can wipe the dust of it from one’s heels.
I held my flushed cheeks with the palm of my hands. Was this it? What I had been searching for all of these years?
Wrenville Hall is a spectre that haunts us all from one generation to the next …
I was almost too afraid to touch the paper – I had some irrational fear that, having survived all these years, it might somehow crumble in my hands. I searched the drawer for a magnifying glass, as the script was so small and squashed on the page, it was difficult to make out. I brought my desk lamp closer and leaned over the little booklet. The black ink was messy and words were crossed out with new ones pushed out into what remained of the margins. Having viewed some of the sisters’ original diary entries at Haworth, I felt sure that this was the penmanship of Emily, but I would need to have it authenticated. Unless …
That was when I spotted it – a minuscule signature. EJB.
It felt like fireworks exploding in my veins. The baby kicked, the air crackled and a whooshing sound went through my ears. Was this the second novel, or at least the drafting of it? My head felt light and my feet tapped a jig on the floorboards. I closed my eyes and traced the joy on my face with my fingertips and tried to commit it to memory. My heart was beating against my ribcage like a bird at the window. I read on.
With the death of my father and the forced liquidation of my debts to my creditors in London, I was now returning to the estate in Ireland. … an impervious gloom haunted every corner of its cursed country and a week of driving rain had soaked the ground and reduced it to mud. Famine ravaged the land …
The text became unreadable at this point and the next paragraph seemed to jump ahead of sequence.
This would be my penance, my banishment to this hellish place. I passed through two great pillars and entered the avenue that swept up to Wrenville Hall. Lined with towering yews, it held a singular tranquillity that was tinged with terror. On my one and only sojourn in this place as a child, I recalled the old house servant speaking of spectres and ghouls that lived in the woods beyond. The house stood strongly defined against the dark sky. The gargoyles that came into view at the front-facing aspect of the grey fortress of a house stared down through the afternoon mist in delightful horror …
‘It was night and the candles were lit as I dined alone on a passable meal of turbot in the dining room. A ferocious storm raged outside, driving the rain in sheets against the window, when all of a sudden, lightning flashed and I saw her face at the window. I ran to it and loosened the latch. A flame-haired girl, soaked to the skin, wearing a plain white dress that clung to her fragile frame like a winding sheet. She was deathly pale and did not struggle when I pulled her through the window and we landed on the floor like two drowned pups. Her skin was translucent, white as a ghoul or a vampire, and yet her beauty was like nothing upon the face of God’s creation.
Furious barking of a mastiff; my father’s old dog bounded into the room and had her pinned to the floor, his eyes glowing and his fangs protruding.
‘Helsig!’
The hound stood down at my command, but continued to bark fiercely at the girl.
‘Who are you?’ I asked. ‘You are trespassing on private land.’
The remark served to inflame her passion more brightly. She spoke to me then in the native tongue, a curiously expressive and fierce-sounding speech that left me in no doubt as to the message, if not the exact meaning. She folded her arms then and with a haughtiness hardly warranted by her station in life, she took a seat by the fire.
Her cheeks grew red by the glow of the fire and weak as she was, she fell into a soft slumber. I sat there for a time, studying her features while she slept. For the first time since my exile from Paris, I ached to draw, to paint. Being tormented by a love of art but not possessing the talent to succeed at it, had yielded nothing more than a reduction in my pecuniary resources. Yet here, now, it felt as though her spirit was at work within me, challenging me to capture it on the page. In sleep, she surrendered her wild beauty, which, like the landscape that bore her, could be both heaven and hell. I grew frenzied in my attempts to capture her likeness more faithfully still. Every draft seemed to bring me closer to something I had been lacking in all my years at the easel. I was bewitched by her.
Harnessing my passion, the bristles of my brush scratched feverishly against the linen canvas. I decided that no matter how long it took, I would create my masterpiece while this longing to possess her tore at me. My body ached, the night turned to morning and night again until finally, I stood back and saw. I had my Rose, all in bloom on the canvas. It was then I saw that she was still as the grave. Running to her, not believing the horrible truth, I touched her face. Cold as marble. She was dead.