Solsbury Hill A Novel (21 page)

Eleanor sank back on her heels, leaned against the big chair, and was flooded with locked-away memories of her parents at home: how good they were to each other, how easily they laughed together—watching films, sharing stories, the flush of joy in their faces when they dressed for nights on the town with her mother in a mink jacket, high heels, and blushed cheeks and lips, her father in a tuxedo.

Small things crashed against each other in Eleanor’s mind. Here to find letters Emily Brontë insisted on her finding, deep down she had hoped she’d find something to make sense of her own life, her mother leaving home and never returning. Or the way her father had changed so drastically. She remembered how patiently she’d waited for him to return to himself again, but something was broken irreparably inside him and he never did. Still Eleanor had made the best of things. Alone at eighteen she got through his funeral, packed up the apartment where they’d lived, made a home of her own, and got busy washing old wool and making quirky clothing.

Now, she peered into the last empty cupboard. Country air had made her keenly aware of the rhythms of vigor, appetite, and exhaustion. She started to pack things up again and put them in their place. She lifted the wood box and the base of it unhinged. Kneeling, she turned it upside down and saw
that the bottom slid out and there was a hidden compartment with a small knob she could take hold of, and her breath caught in her chest as she slid that piece to the side. Inside was a thick package of papers tied with a black satin ribbon.

Eleanor hurriedly put everything back the way she’d found it. With the strange package of papers in hand, she felt an urge to escape the room. She’d found the treasure from this scavenger hunt with clues from a ghost on the moors.

In the hall, Gwen’s voice startled her. “Is that you, Eleanor? Are you busy up there?”

The fine, common sound of Gwen in the hall at the base of the stairs.

“I thought you were gone somewhere,” Eleanor said as she stepped into the light on the landing.

“I’m just back and just going again. Is everything all right?”

“Perfect.” She headed down the stairs. “I was looking to see if I could see the abbey from that last room at the end of the hall.”

“My word, that room must be dusty.”

“Not really.” Her voice too high.

“And there’s no light in that hallway.” Their sentences crossed each other’s.

“I opened windows. Was that my mother’s old room?”

“It was, indeed. It was sort of the children’s playroom.” Gwen had started up the stairs, to meet Eleanor halfway, then turned and joined her and they walked back down.

“Which room was Mead’s room?” Eleanor asked.

Now Mead had an apartment in the carriage house. Though Eleanor had never been in it, she’d heard it had an upstairs with two bedrooms and a living room, kitchen, and dining room downstairs. Gwen had moved out of the bedroom she and Alice had shared when they stayed at Trent Hall and was in the old gardener’s cottage.

“When I get back I’ll show you. You would have gone right past it up there, but all the furniture’s in a muddle. I’ll be sure to show you.” Gwen had a suitcase by the front door. “I filled the fridge, so have at it, won’t you?” Gwen’s genuinely pleasant smile. “Everything’s gone by so fast,” she said, shaking her head and looking around at the half-emptied rooms. “You must think this would make a dreadful home, but it’s not hard to make cozy. In other times, it has been.” She kissed her cheek. “I’ve got to be off. Do take care of yourself, and promise not to be gone when I get back.”

“I think I can promise that . . . ,” Eleanor said.

Eleanor walked her to the door and waved and watched and kept waving until the car passed through the gate in the wall.

Standing on the stones outside the front door, Eleanor saw the lights on in the barn where Mead was working with Tilda and Granley. Gwen was gone and would come back soon. The house and all that came with it seemed light and bearable. The winter holidays were coming and Eleanor had an image of the house alive with holly strung on the banister
and a Christmas tree near the window in the large living room. Standing alone on the doorstep, it seemed possible that the house could be hers.

The letters gripped in one hand, she went into the living room and sank into a chair. She flicked on a light. As if they were letters from a lover, she wanted to savor whatever lay hidden inside the bundle of papers. She began.

Between two sheets of fragile paper, there was a drawing folded in four. It was a pencil sketch of a woman sitting against the base of a tree and beneath the picture an inscription read,
Here, where courage and passion reigned over the most commonsense and agreed-upon virtues, here where I loved thee, where I found what is truest in my soul and held in thine eyes, myself replete. Know now and for all eternity, I am yours, my sweet Emily.

The drawing was not perfect, but it was clearly a portrait of the woman Eleanor had come to know on the moors. Right down to the wool dress Emily wore. The dark pencil lines were shaded with blushes of watercolor, which accented the tree’s broad canopy, the heather in the distance, a hint of yellow earth, and the flush of joy in Emily’s cheeks.

It was a pile of letters. The paper was thin and dry and some were rumpled as if they’d been tossed away. There were no envelopes, but they were ordered by date, and it seemed someone had arranged them, taken good care of them. They were letters from a man named Robert Macaulay.

Dear Sudden Surprise,
the first one began.
Just days before I set upon the journey which brought me to find you, I heard a whispering. I knew not whence the whispers came, believed, at first, it to be the wind whistling in the way it can; or whales in the deep distant ocean off the coast of our land speaking to one another in that high-pitched unheard language they have; but the longer I listened the more I was sure that the whisper was meant for me; whether the wind, or the whales, or God himself (though I am not a man God speaks to commonly), the whisper spoke to me and told me, plainly, to begin a walking holiday, a pilgrimage toward I knew not what, but I would walk until I knew I’d found that which I’d set out to find, to discover, to be led toward, a kind of oasis in this world of doubt and fear, an answer to my soul’s longing . . .

Taken aback with feeling, Eleanor dropped the letter to the table. Her heart beat fiercely and her breath was held in abeyance as she picked up the next note and read.

My Fearless Beloved
, it began. The bold strokes of his handwriting suggested urgency and zeal.
I shall not be leaving. Have arranged with the inn to stay on in these two rooms for as long as I might, and believe that there is no greater pleasure for me than to spend the rest of my lifetime waiting for the sound of you, then the fragrance you carry all about you, then the feel of your lips on mine, and so we will begin again, tomorrow. I have only to make it through this night.

You speak of these moors as your one great companion, and I dare to hope, then even to believe, that I have become a part of these moors which you see and touch and allow to flow inside your being, so deeply.

It takes courage, you say, courage and then something more than courage to withstand the passion this land can inspire; and I am a convert, converted by the vigor inside you, by the sublime spirit in the tenderness of your corporality. You are the most courageous being and I the most fortunate man this earth can ever have known. I rush to sleep now, to hasten the dawn.

Tucked between the letters was a tiny book written in an immaculate hand. It was a diary, some thirty pages long and just a few inches square, with handwriting so precise it was like a printed manuscript in miniature. In the first pages of the diary, written months before the notes from Robert began, Emily wrote,
My brother Branwell storms, drunk and sick with love turned rancid; it is all I can do to keep my face above the drowning water of passion he feels and the way he pulls at me, pulling me down like a child fallen from overboard in this wild river raging beneath the placidity of our quiet home, with Father merely watching.

Some few pages later, the writer wrote,
It is Queen Victoria’s birthday and in celebration I have arranged for a respite away from here where I can write in peace on the other side of the Pennines, at dear Julia Enswell’s home.

Eleanor was well through the looking glass.

Eleanor took another and then another deep breath and went back to read the diary. Emily wrote about the moors,
about coming to trust and know herself, and then about a man she met while walking up the hill to her favorite tree with, as she put it,
mangled branches so full of leaves that to sit beneath it was like sitting in the shade of a kind mother’s watchful gaze.

Emily described the man named Robert Macaulay.

Come this warm summer, Robert set off on a walking tour as was Wordsworth’s wont, but Robert is a gentleman farmer, no poet, he, no thoughts of fancy and love in his head, till the late evening when he found me. We sat together for hours and he managed to bring laughter from inside, this strange new man I feel I have known since before I was born, this strapping man with dark curled hair and deep blue eyes.

He left his home in the Outer Hebrides, for a whisper that maybe spoke my own name before he knew enough to recognize it; perhaps God had a plan we are too mired in sleep to know, but I feel called awake now and though I have asked my heath and the cliffs above the sea for guidance and some word clearly spoken to affirm what I feel, I feel carried. I believe I have been carried toward my destiny and am compelled to accept it willingly.

And on the next page Emily wrote,

Heartbreak! I am called home to Haworth, to care, as I am accustomed to care, for my brother Branwell as he twists and turns in a nightmare of many agonies. Robert will head home. I cannot go with him. I ran fleeing from my responsibilities and here in the Enswells’ home I am resolved to choose what I believe is right, to heal my brother, and if God sees fit, once he is healed, to find my way home to where I know I belong. The Enswells have kept this room for me and now also my secret.

Eleanor’s eyes hurt and she was overwrought from the transport to another time. There was not enough light in the room in the afternoon and even that light was fading. She closed the diary and began to tie the letters together, then picked up the last letter from Robert, a short note that read,

The breathtaking sight of you I shall ne’er forget but always carry. Your lovely head bowed in prayer to your earth as you walked slowly toward me until that first instant, when you glanced up and I could see you could not see me, quite, but I saw you for the low sun on your face and also in your bright eyes. You saw the silhouette of me, you say, and were terrified, believing you might be seeing God, my precious and credulous love. I will wait in the Hebrides and will ever be yours, Robert Macaulay.

It was the summer of 1845, just months before Brontë started to write her one novel,
Wuthering Heights
.

Eleanor pushed away from the table and gathered the drawing, the tiny diary, and the letters into a pile, grabbed
the ribbon, and went into the hall. The bank of French windows had a view into the courtyard and she saw Mead shaking out his raincoat and heading toward the house.

Her intestines were twisted like a fist till she thought she’d die of the weight of it, and she found herself unable to catch her breath. She tiptoed down the hall, ran up the front stairs, around the landing, and down the hall to her bedroom.

Her tears tasted like salt and her bones felt cold even under the covers. The tree was scraping the window and she picked up
Wuthering Heights
and started to read from the beginning again.

Reading it was different this time. Again, she recognized the room in which she was living. She recognized the cadence of the Emily she’d known, in the writing. She got to the scene where Catherine is dying and cried as she read Heathcliff and Catherine’s words.

“I have not one word of comfort. You deserve this. You have killed yourself. Yes, you may kiss me, and cry; and wring out my kisses and tears: they’ll blight you—they’ll damn you. You loved me—then what
right
had you to leave me? . . .”

“Let me alone. Let me alone,” sobbed Catherine. “If I’ve done wrong, I’m dying for it. It is enough! You left me too: but I won’t upbraid you! I forgive you. Forgive me!”

“It is hard to forgive, and to look at those eyes, and feel those wasted hands,” he answered. “Kiss me again; and
don’t let me see your eyes! I forgive what you have done to me. I love
my
murderer—but
yours
! How can I?”

Emily was an unmarried woman who’d never been in love, so it said, in so many words, in the introduction to Emily’s novel,
Wuthering Heights
. The passion in Emily’s novel, the scholar wrote, was based on her inviolable love of God, and readers of the time, it went on to say, were shocked by the cruel and the malicious in
Wuthering Heights
, couldn’t fathom how a virgin spinster could be behind such writing.

They hadn’t read what Eleanor had read. Emily had been in love. Robert was her promise and life, but her conscience had pulled at her, pulled her home to Haworth to care for Branwell. Torn between two men.

Like a faint sense of the sun before it would rise, it dawned on Eleanor what kind of difference the right and wrong choice might make, in loving.

Branwell died in September and Emily in December 1848. But Robert . . . Eleanor wondered if Emily had ever gone to find him.