The Secret Adventures of Charlotte Brontë (2 page)

W
ITH A TALE SPINNER’S SLEIGHT OF HAND I ADVANCE THE calendar—the date is now Friday, 7 July 1848. I rotate the globe and sight upon my home village of Haworth, in the North of England. Reader, I present for you a picture of Haworth on the morning of that fateful day when my adventures began. The sun, glinting from between cloud masses in the vast, cerulean Yorkshire sky, illuminates the ancient stone houses that line the steep, stone-paved main street. Shopkeepers scrub their doorsteps, a farmer herds a flock of sheep, and village women carry baskets past a horse-drawn cart piled high with raw wool. At the top of Church Lane, isolated at the highest point in the village, stands the parsonage, a two-storied house built of grey-brick, roofed with stone flags, and flanked by graveyards. Beyond the parsonage lie the moors—undulating hills cloaked in grey-green heather, shading into the far horizon.

Inside the parsonage, I was sweeping the hall when I heard a thud outside. Puzzled, I set aside the broom and opened the door. My younger brother Branwell toppled towards me and crashed at my feet, sprawling across the threshold.

“Branwell,” I said, peering with consternation at him through my spectacles.

He pushed himself to his knees and smiled jauntily up at me. “Ah, my dear sister Charlotte,” he said, slurring the words. “How convenient that you should be here just in time to welcome me home.”

I regarded his bleary eyes and lurid complexion, his disheveled clothes and shaggy auburn hair. Rank fumes of whisky rose from his person. “You have been drinking again.” I felt the anger, disgust, and helplessness that Branwell’s inebriation always occasioned in me.

“It was just a little tipple down at the Black Bull Inn,” Branwell protested, clambering to his feet. “Life gets unbearably dull hereabouts, and surely you wouldn’t deny me a bit of amusement now and then?”

“Except that it isn’t only now and then.” I shut the door more firmly than was necessary. “And it’s not just the drink. You’ve taken laudanum, haven’t you?” Branwell had, alas, degenerated into a habitual user of that tincture of opium dissolved in spirits.

“I’m sorry, Charlotte,” Branwell said, “but I was so in need of comfort.” A coughing fit wracked his thin body. “Can you not see how miserable I am? Please forgive me.”

Reluctant compassion quenched my anger as I observed my brother. He was only thirty-one but looked a decade older, his once handsome features haggard. Still, I could see in him a vestige of the robust, bright-eyed boy who had been my favorite childhood companion.

“You had better go upstairs before Papa sees you like this,” I said.

The door of the study opened, and out stepped our father. Though in his seventies, Papa was still an imposing figure—over six feet tall, whitehaired, stern-featured, and proud of posture. Beneath his black clerical garb he wore a voluminous white silk cravat wound high around his neck to protect him from Yorkshire drafts and guard against bronchitis. He squinted at Branwell through the spectacles perched on his prominent nose, and a look of anxious confusion came over his face.

“I thought you were asleep upstairs,” he said to Branwell. “Have you been gone all night?”

Branwell hung his head; his coughs subsided into wheezes. “Not all night. I just slipped out for a few hours. That’s God’s honest truth.”

“It is a sin to deceive,” Papa said, frowning in reproach, “and shameful of you to invoke God as your accomplice.”

My younger sisters, Emily and Anne, appeared in the parlor doorway. Anne, neat and unobtrusive as always, held a cloth with which she’d been dusting furniture; when she saw Branwell, distress clouded her violet eyes and gentle features. “Oh, dear,” she murmured.

Emily, tall and lanky, pushed up her leg-of-mutton sleeves. Always indifferent to her appearance, she stubbornly clung to that outmoded style of dress. She had been canning blackberry preserves, and purple stains blotched her apron. Heat had frizzed her brown hair and flushed her long face, and that day she looked even more wild and singular than usual. She glared at our brother. She had lost all tolerance for the sickness, the convulsive fits, and the unpredictable moods that Branwell inflicted upon our household.

“Well, have you all gotten a proper look at me?” Branwell said with sudden belligerence. “Then I believe I shall go to bed. I’m all done in.”

Reeling towards the stairs, he stumbled. Emily grudgingly helped me assist him up the stairs. I couldn’t help but regard with some sadness the family portrait in the stairwell. Branwell had painted that portrait. He had, when he was younger, possessed artistic talent, and Papa had sacrificed much in order to pay for painting lessons. All of us had hoped Branwell would attend the Royal Academy, but his ambitions and our dreams had come to naught. Now, awkwardly climbing the stairs, Branwell began to weep.

Emily and I dragged him into the bedroom he shared with Papa. Anne turned down the coverlet of his bed and pulled out the pillows he had rearranged to trick our father. Emily and I heaved Branwell onto the bed.

“Lydia, my distant, darling Lydia,” he keened. “My love for you has ruined me!”

Six years ago, Branwell had become a tutor to the son of the Reverend and Mrs. Robinson at Thorpe Green Hall, near York. Lydia Robinson, a wanton woman of forty, had seduced Branwell. He had fallen madly in love with her, and they’d conducted a torrid affair until her husband had discovered it and dismissed Branwell. Ever since then, Branwell had pined for Lydia, drowning his woes in liquor. What a sorry waste he had allowed that terrible woman to make of his life!

“None of you understand how I suffer,” he moaned as Emily tugged off his shoes. “You have never loved and lost as I have!”

With great self-restraint, I forbore to remind him that our father had many years ago lost his beloved wife, and we our mother. Emily, stern and unrelenting, went downstairs without a word, but Anne tenderly arranged the coverlet over Branwell.

“Oh, Anne, don’t fuss so,” Branwell cried. “Lord, I wish you would all go away!”

Chastened, Anne crept out of the room. Papa sat beside Branwell. “We must pray for God to forgive your sins and give you the strength to reform.”

“I cannot bear another sermon now,” Branwell said in a tone of rising hysteria, “and besides, there’s no use moralizing, Father. It’s too late; it’s all over with me.”

Stifling a sigh, I left the room. I knew I ought to finish sweeping and set out for my afternoon visits to parishioners suffering from the hard times that had fallen upon the country. Yet the tedious routine of my days oppressed me so that I succumbed to the powerful urge to escape to my other life, the secret existence known to but three other people besides myself.

Furtively, I slipped into the small room above the front hall. Near its window stood a battered desk. I took from my pocket a key, then unlocked and opened the desk drawer. I lifted out a book whose cover read “
Agnes Grey
, a novel by Acton Bell.” Opening it to the title page, I read the handwritten inscription: “To my dear sister Charlotte, with much love, Anne Brontë.”

In another book, “
Wuthering Heights
, by Ellis Bell,” Emily had simply penned her signature. I then took up my own book, and pride swelled within me as I caressed the gilt lettering that read “
Jane Eyre
, by Currer Bell.” Almost ten months had passed since its publication, but I felt the same ecstatic thrill as when I first held it in my hands. I could still hardly believe that Emily, Anne, and I had accomplished our dream of becoming authors. But the drawer contained further proof of this miracle. I perused book reviews cut out of newspapers. The one from the
Westminster Review
read, “Decidedly the best novel of the season.”

There were also letters from my publisher, informing me that the first edition of my work had sold out, and notices of two subsequent editions. I smiled at a handbill for a play,
Jane Eyre, The Secrets of Thornfield Manor
, produced in London. Finally, I turned to the account book where I had recorded my income—one hundred pounds for the copyright of the novel, and an additional hundred pounds in royalties. This was no great fortune, but it represented ten times more than the annual salary I had earned in my former occupation as a governess. Yet uncertainty about the future and a nagging dissatisfaction with the present worsened as I paged through the notebooks that contained the manuscript of my next, as yet unfinished, novel,
Shirley
.

I had developed serious doubts about this novel and its reception by my publisher and, ultimately, my readers. I feared their high expectations of Currer Bell, whose identity was a subject of intense speculation among the literati. And I mourned that my present success had failed to bring me everything I craved.

As a young girl, scribbling stories and dreaming of a future as an author, I believed that publication would gain me passage into a world of art galleries, concerts, and the theatre, where people conversed brilliantly. I’d hoped to travel and to win the friendship of writers, artists, and intellectuals. Yet here I remained, hidden behind a nom de plume, my life as a parson’s spinster daughter virtually unchanged. A wistful melancholy stole over me as I looked out the window and down the hill upon the grey rooftops of Haworth and the grey smoke from the textile mills in the wooded valley. Beyond these familiar environs lay the world of my dreams. I was thirty-two years old and, it seemed, destined to spend the rest of my days in torpid retirement.

Then I spied the postman coming up the road, and my spirits lifted. The post was a source of light and life to me. I carefully locked the desk drawer, because although Papa had been told the secret of Acton, Currer, and Ellis Bell, no one else must know—not even Branwell, who could not be trusted with the secret. I tucked the key in my pocket, hurried downstairs, and eagerly accepted a letter from the postman. I read the sender’s address on the envelope: “Smith, Elder & Company, 65 Cornhill, London.”

This was the letter that would launch me on a dangerous path through worlds beyond my imagination, but all I then understood was that the letter came from my publisher. As I scanned the two sheets, my anticipation of good news turned to dismay. I rushed downstairs and found Emily stirring a cauldron of preserves on the stove. Her bulldog, Keeper, lay beneath the table where Anne and our servant, Martha Brown, sealed jars. The kitchen was humid with fruity steam and hot from the coal fire.

“Emily. Anne,” I said, “we must talk.”

My face must have revealed my agitation, for they immediately followed me through the back door to the yard, out of Martha’s hearing. Above and away from us spread the moors, their hilly expanses broken only by a few stunted trees and the distant black lines of stone walls. Blustering wind whipped our skirts.

“Currer Bell has just received a disturbing communication,” I explained, then read aloud:

Emily and Anne stared in astonishment. I cried, “Anne, my publisher believes your book to be mine. He suggests that I’ve cheated him!”

“There must be a mistake,” Anne said hesitantly. “My publisher knows that Acton Bell and Currer Bell are two separate individuals. Surely Mr. Newby would not claim otherwise.”

“But he has,” I said, holding out the paper that had accompanied George Smith’s letter. “This is an extract from a letter written by Mr. Newby to the American publisher: ‘To the best of my belief,
Jane Eyre
,
Wuthering Heights
,
Agnes Grey
, and
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
are all the production of one writer.’”

Emily shook her head, frowning. Anne, looking bewildered, ventured, “I cannot believe that Mr. Newby would intentionally misrepresent me.”

“I can,” I said, “because he has already treated you both in a shabby fashion. Remember that he charged the printing expenses for
Agnes Grey
and
Wuthering Heights
to you. Then he delayed publication of your books. And he hasn’t yet sent you the royalties he owes you. Mr. Newby is an unscrupulous man who would do anything to profit himself.”

“And he is doing so by capitalizing on the success of Currer Bell,” Emily said. Her large, luminous eyes, ever a magical mixture of fire and ocean, were of a hue that changed with her moods; now anger darkened them to slate blue. “He seeks to elevate little known authors by confusing them with a celebrated one.”

I winced: Emily was a person of few words, and those often too blunt for comfort. The differing degrees of success achieved by Currer, Acton, and Ellis Bell represented a sensitive issue that we avoided discussing. Though Emily and Anne were genuinely pleased by my good fortune, I knew that if our positions were reversed, I would envy them, in spite of our affection for one another. I also knew how badly they must feel about the reviews of their books.

“There is not in the entire
dramatis personae
a single character which is not utterly hateful or thoroughly contemptible,” the
Atlas
had said of
Wuthering Heights
.
Agnes Grey
had fared no better. “It leaves no painful impression on the mind—some may think it leaves no impression at all.” Worse, both Emily and Anne had suffered from comparison to me when the
Athenaeum
had proclaimed of
Jane Eyre
,
Wuthering Heights
, and
Agnes Grey
: “All three might be the work of one hand, but the first issued remains the best.”