Daphne (6 page)

Menabilly, July 1957

Daphne always cherished her isolation at Menabilly, indeed, fell in love with the house for its remoteness from the first time she saw it, as a trespasser, nearly thirty years ago, when it had been derelict and uninhabited, the trees coming close to colonising its abandoned rooms, the rampant ivy strangling everything, creeping into the roof, slithering through the cracked windowpanes. Now, Menabilly was restored, brought to life again by Daphne's love and a great deal of her money; which was as it should be, she thought, given that her fortune was made by Rebecca, a story inspired by Menabilly; no, more than that, she felt, a story that belonged to Menabilly as much as it did to her. All of it was made safe, except for a crumbling, uninhabited wing where none but Daphne dared venture, for its rooms were the most shadowy of places, with no electricity to bring light to dark corners, though this part of the house seemed to possess an occasional crackling humming of its own, on a frequency that only she could hear.

She also took care to preserve Menabilly's secrecy, along with its walls, this house that could not be seen from the road or the sea, its grey stones hidden by the contours of the land and a shroud of impenetrable forest. It was the closest place she could find to a desert island, she told her cousin, Peter Llewelyn Davies, when she moved into Menabilly at the end of 1943. 'But you will adore this house, as I do,' she wrote to Peter. 'You must come to stay, though I'm hoping the bats and rats and ghosts will keep all other visitors away.'

She was true to her word, and kept Menabilly as an island; peaceful in her solitude; the very opposite of her father, who could not bear to be without a great gang of friends and family around him, and who could only tolerate silence when his audience held their breath during a brief, dramatic pause in the theatre, waiting for him, and the action, to move on, until its foregone conclusion, the cheers and thunderous applause . . .

Yet for the last few days, she had been chafing at the seclusion, longing for a message from the outside world; specifically, for the arrival of a reply to her letter to Mr Symington.

This morning, at last, the postman made his slow way up the long, curved drive from the West Lodge, and Daphne was waiting at the front door, having seen the red van from her bedroom window. Much to her relief, the delivery was of a brown paper parcel with a Yorkshire postmark, addressed to her in spidery black capital letters, and as she opened the package, pulling at the knotted string and examining the musty-smelling contents, Daphne experienced a moment of pure pleasure, such that she had not felt for a very long time. For not only did the parcel contain a rare copy of one of Branwell's stories, as well as a privately printed volume of his letters to a friend, Joseph Leyland, Mr Symington had also enclosed a very intriguing handwritten letter, partially obscured by inkblots and heavily crossed out sentences, yet hinting that there might be a mystery associated with Branwell's manuscripts. Daphne scanned the letter rapidly, still standing in the hallway, then went to her chair in the library, where she reread it, several times over, until she could make sense of Mr Symington's elaborate circumlocutions.

And yes, he was guarded, his language as fenced and hedged as the Menabilly estate, forcing Daphne to read between the lines, and those crossings-out and obscuring inkblots were as infuriating as they were intriguing. But even so, Symington's letter suggested that he suspected there had been some previous deception concerning the Brontë manuscripts. If this were true, then she might be on the trail of a most remarkable literary scandal, and the very idea of this was thrilling to her now. Symington did not say who was responsible for the forgeries, though Daphne wondered whether he might have been hinting that his former colleague, T. J. Wise, was the culprit? Why else would Symington have referred to what he called 'the fog and mist' that surrounded Wise? It seemed unlikely - after all, Wise was a widely admired president of the Brontë Society - and Daphne wondered if there was another element to the story; perhaps Symington had some hidden feud with Wise?

But the important thing was that he had replied to her letter in the most tantalising of ways, and as she reread his words, holding them in her hands, an anticipatory sensation seemed to tingle in her fingertips. Symington asked her to keep the information a secret, not that he had given her any hard facts or provable information, not yet . . . But part of Daphne's pleasure was triggered by that request, for he had chosen her to share his secret, and in doing so, perhaps he was extending a tacit invitation to share more with him? She would become his confidante, she was almost certain of that; and there was something intensely exciting to her about the prospect of this being conducted in a manner both intimate -for Symington's handwritten letter seemed to bring him very close to her; she could sense his presence between the lines -and yet also at a safe distance. Daphne was less sure, however, about whether she could reciprocate in kind; she preferred keeping her own secrets, for now, in the safety and security of Menabilly.

As for Branwell himself: well, Daphne wanted to be entirely alone with him, so she took his books with her to the writing hut, telling Tod not to disturb her, she would not be needing lunch, and settled down at her desk there to read his volume of letters. The door to the hut was closed behind her, but the window was open, letting in the soft scent of honeysuckle and the temptations of a clear blue sky. Yet as Daphne worked her way though the volume of letters, it seemed to her as if they summoned up a cloud that was obscuring the sunlight; not constantly, but little mackerel clouds, gathering together and then scurrying apart; and with this came a troubling undercurrent of anxiety, mixed in with her excitement.

The letters appeared to corroborate the story told in Mrs Gaskell's biography, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, suggesting that Branwell's downfall was precipitated by his dismissal, in July 1845, from his position in the Robinson family household at Thorp Green Hall in Yorkshire as tutor to their son, Edmund. Daphne's childhood copy of Mrs Gaskell's book lay open on the desk, covered with her pencilled notes and asterisks, though as she reread it, alongside Branwell's letters, she found herself wishing that his youngest sister, Anne, had provided some form of substantiating evidence. After all, Anne had also been working for the same family as a governess to the Robinsons' two daughters, and left her job just before Branwell's abrupt departure. Mrs Gaskell believed that Branwell was disgraced because of the discovery of his scandalous affair with Mrs Robinson, who was not only married, but fifteen years older than her son's tutor; and certainly, that was the impression Branwell himself gave in his letters to Leyland. But what did Anne believe to be the truth of the matter? And anyway, whispered a small voice in Daphne's head, what gave her the right to uncover the truth over a century afterwards? Who was she to rummage through the indignities of someone else's life, when she protected the fragile dignities of her own?

Still, she could not stop reading, she felt a kind of compulsion to continue, despite a faint nausea that rose in her throat and an odd feeling of weakness, as the day wore on. There was something exhausting about having Branwell so close at hand, his words in her hands, as she turned the pages. For as much as Branwell declared himself to be thwarted in love, his despairing frustration as a writer came spilling out of these letters in equal measure, or thus it seemed to Daphne. His voice, which remained cloaked in the pages of his childhood Angrian legends, was far clearer in the letters; so much so that she began to hear it in her head, drowning out her own thoughts, drowning out her thoughts of Tommy, and his silent presence in the nursing home. Branwell appeared to have no such need of silence; his was an anguished voice, sometimes plaintive, sometimes excitable, that demanded her attention, demanding not to be forgotten. Daphne made copious notes as she read, copying out quotes that seemed particularly relevant, trying to make sense of the tumbled unhappiness, the choked ambition and panicky self-importance. And amidst the confusion of his life, as told in these letters, Daphne began to trace his story, though gaping holes remained within it.

Most intriguing of all, she thought, was the letter that Branwell wrote to his friend Leyland in September 1845, declaring, with a mixture of pride and melancholy, that he had 'devoted my hours of time snatched from downright illness, to the composition of a three-volume Novel - one volume of which is completed - and along with the two forthcoming ones has been really the result of half-a-dozen by-past years of thoughts about, and experience in, this crooked path of Life.' Yet by the following spring, the promised novel remained incomplete, as far as Daphne could tell from the letters, while Branwell was still professing himself to be broken-hearted over Mrs Robinson.

She copied out a sentence from one of his letters, half-hoping that her act of writing Branwell's words might summon up his ghost for her, here in the little hut. 'Literary exertion would seem a resource,' he wrote in May 1846, and Daphne whispered his words out loud, 'but the depression attendant on it, and the almost hopelessness of bursting through the barriers of literary circles, and getting a hearing among publishers, makes me disheartened and indifferent; for I cannot write what would be thrown, unread, into a library fire.' He made no mention of his sisters' first venture into publishing, which presumably coincided with his letter that month, when their poems were printed, at their own expense, under the names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. It was not clear whether he even knew about their book; or did he prefer to pretend not to know, wondered Daphne, given that he had not been asked to contribute to it by his sisters, who were formerly his collaborators and closest friends?

There were so many unanswered questions; indeed, the letters seemed to add to them, rather than provide her with the answers she sought. Only two copies were sold of the Brontë sisters' book of poetry, so where could the others be? And did Branwell actually send a manuscript of his novel to his sisters' publishers, or indeed, to any publisher? Had his novel been rejected, or was it simply never finished? Certainly, if his letters to Leyland were any indication, Branwell appeared more preoccupied by the fact that Mrs Robinson, who had been widowed on 26 May 1846, did not (would not, could not?) marry him, even after a suitable period of mourning.

Daphne kept reading the letters as the afternoon wore on, not stopping for her usual walk down to the beach, or out to the headland; and as she continued, it seemed to her that she was in the middle of a mystery with an unknown ending, rather than moving towards the outcome of a story that she already knew. Branwell informed his friend Leyland that Mrs Robinson had been prevented, under the terms of her husband's will, from remarrying: 'she is left quite powerless'. And then the story became even more dramatic: Branwell claimed to have received a letter from 'a medical gentleman' who had attended Mr Robinson in his last illness, and subsequently witnessed Mrs Robinson's terrible decline. 'When he mentioned my name - she stared at him and fainted. When she recovered she in turn dwelt on her inextinguishable love for me - her horror at having been the first to delude me into wretchedness, and her agony at having been the cause of the death of her husband who, in his last hours, bitterly repented of his treatment of her. Her sensitive mind was totally wrecked. She wandered into talking of entering a nunnery: and the Doctor fairly debars me from hope in the future.'

As Daphne read this letter, and those that followed, she was puzzled by Branwell, and by his endless querulous complaints, but she also found herself wondering if the entire episode with Mrs Robinson was an invention on his part. Somehow, the story didn't ring true to Daphne - the cruel terms of the husband's will, the judicious intervention of the doctor, the talk of nunneries - could these be the twists of a plot lifted out of Branwell's Angrian tales; a gothic adventure for a Byronic hero like Northangerland, rather than a lonely parson's son? But if Branwell's story was real, then it revealed him to be hopelessly weak, intent only on using the end of his affair with Mrs Robinson as a reason for his lack of success as a writer. Perhaps what was most perplexing of all, thought Daphne, was Branwell's apparent assumption that by marrying Mrs Robinson he would share her inheritance, and therefore be able to live at leisure, rather than earn a living. Was it unfair of her, she wondered, for this to remind her of Tommy? After all, he had always worked hard, though of course her income was far greater than his army wages, or his salary from Buckingham Palace, and so it was her money that kept him in the style to which he had become accustomed, her books that paid for his boats and his hand-tailored suits, and was it her money that had underpinned his affair? No, she must stop thinking like this, it was too tormenting, it could serve no purpose, she must make herself purposeful again . . .

She swallowed, and tried to concentrate on Branwell's words; but it was impossible to suppress a small sense of exasperation, for while Branwell wallowed in self-pity in his letters to Leyland, his sisters wrote their masterpieces. As to whether Branwell knew about these novels, published secretly under pseudonyms like their poetry, his letters made no mention of this, though Daphne underlined a line in one of his rambling missives to Leyland: 'I know only that it is time for me to be something when I am nothing.'