The Crimes of Charlotte Bronte (3 page)

All along, though, I knew that to him it was but a bit of play with a servant girl, especially as I had noticed that he had been trying very hard to get into Miss Charlotte's good books right from the very start. He would take any chance to talk to her, putting on all his charm as he did so. I just could not understand this, because even her best friends – such as she had – would not have called her anything like pretty, or even handsome. In truth, to me she looked very much like an old pug-dog that Father once had. That being so, you would have thought that she would have been more welcoming of his attentions, but she was not and sometimes she was really quite rude to him. Not only that – I heard her pass nasty remarks about him to Miss Emily, and I know from seeing some of her unfinished letters to her friends that she was quite down on him to them as well.

It seemed to me that the only man she had any time for then was one that she used to write to in Belgium.

[
] Here, I think, we should pause for a closer look at Charlotte who, to my mind, is the key figure in the Brontë puzzle.

I have explained how, when I started upon the research for this book, I knew practically nothing about the Brontë family, and had read none of the sisters' works. Therefore I had no preconceived ideas but, as I became more and more involved with my research, I was able to put some flesh on the bare bones of my knowledge.

Most of the recognized information about the Brontës comes from Charlotte. Her letters – and those from her friends – form the basis of most research, together with the first biography of her, written by another famous novelist, Mrs Gaskell.

Mrs Gaskell presents a sometimes inaccurate, almost always biased, and frequently over-sentimental picture of her subject. The letters, however, are invaluable because they tell us about Charlotte's true character. Fortunately, when they wrote them she and her friends had no way of foreseeing that successive generations would read them, and be able to compare them, one with another, thus allowing them to place what they wrote in context.

Let us make a start with her appearance.

Most people who know anything about Charlotte prefer to think of her as she was presented in the portrait by George Richmond. That, however, is a very flattering likeness, to say the least. It should be borne in mind that Richmond would have wanted to please the successful authoress, who was by then in a position to recommend him to the rich and famous. For something nearer the truth we should listen to those who knew her well, her two lifelong friends, Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor.

Talking about Charlotte at the age of fifteen, Mary Taylor said: ‘She was very ugly.' Ellen Nussey said: ‘Certainly she was at this time anything but
pretty
.' Her ‘screwed up' hair revealed ‘features that were all the plainer from her exceeding thinness and want of complexion'. She looked ‘dried in'.

Even Mrs Gaskell was not flattering. Listen to her description of Charlotte, when she first met her in 1850: ‘She is (as she calls herself)
undeveloped;
thin and more than half a head shorter than I, soft brown hair, not so dark as mine; eyes (very good and expressive, looking straight and open at you) of the same colour, a reddish face; large mouth and many teeth gone; altogether
plain;
the forehead square, broad and
rather
overhanging.'

In the same year, G.H. Lewes, a well-known writer of the day, described her as ‘a little, plain, provincial, sickly-looking old maid'. She was only thirty-four!

Let me not be misunderstood. Nobody can be held responsible for what Nature bestows upon them, only for what they do with, or to, it. It was not Charlotte's fault that she was short, thin and plain; all I am trying to do is peel away some of the layers of myth which have been built up around her.

Now that we know how she looked, let us examine her character.

Basically she was a domineering and ambitious child who became a domineering and ambitious woman. I attribute that to the fact that she had a poverty-stricken upbringing in a bare and poorly furnished parsonage which left her with mental scars from which she never recovered.

She was the plain daughter of an eccentric – to put it mildly – Irish parson, who herself spoke with an Irish brogue. Very early in her life she developed an inferiority complex which never left her. She went to Roe Head School where most of the other girls were from better-off families. They were better dressed than she, had better homes, more influential parents and more money. The only ways in which she could offset her feelings of shame and inferiority were to tell herself that she was intellectually superior to them, and to attempt to dominate them and become the centre of attention.

As she grew older she became determined to acquire money. In that she was encouraged by her father, who also thought that life owed him more than he had achieved. For a woman in those days, the usual way to a comfortable life was by making a ‘good' marriage, and upon that Mr Brontë pinned his hopes for his daughters. In reality, however, there was little hope of his dreams coming to fruition – the sisters being who they were and living where they did. The only young men whom they were likely to meet, and who were remotely acceptable socially, were curates, and Mr Brontë wanted something better.

Charlotte also wanted something better but, as Martha observed, ‘the only man she had any time for then was one she used to write to in Belgium'. This was M. Constantin Héger, at whose school in Brussels both Charlotte and Emily had been teachers in 1842 and 1843. Charlotte was passionately in love with him.

M. Héger was only seven years older than Charlotte. Already embarked upon his second marriage, he was sexually experienced and had awakened in Charlotte that latent sensuality which, once aroused, was to increase until it tended to dominate her whole being. Martha realized what had happened only too well, even though Charlotte always concealed her passions beneath a demure, and apparently rather prudish, facade.

Although, of course, we can never be absolutely certain how far that affaire finally went, all the indications are that Charlotte and M. Héger eventually became lovers in every sense of the word.

One of those signs is contained in a letter which Charlotte wrote to Emily on 2 September 1843. She told of how she had gone into the Catholic cathedral in Brussels and asked if she might make confession. At first the priest refused, because she was a Protestant, ‘but I was determined to confess'. He finally agreed that she could do so, but only in the hope that it would be a first step ‘towards returning to the true church. I actually did confess – a real confession.'

Now what on earth could have affected Charlotte so much that she just
had
to confess to a Roman Catholic priest? Her father would have been furious to think that a daughter of his had done such a thing. I submit that the reason was that she was so weighed down with guilt about her adultery with M. Héger that she was desperate to unburden herself.

Charlotte promised the priest ‘faithfully' that she would go to his house every morning, in order that he might do his best to convert her to Roman Catholicism but, of course, she did nothing of the sort. She could not risk having M. Héger identified as her lover.

Unfortunately for Charlotte, Madame Héger eventually became suspicious, and Charlotte had no alternative but to leave the Pensionnat.

Charlotte came back to England early in January 1844. In July 1844, she wrote to M. Héger complaining about his ‘long silence', but his failure to write can hardly be wondered at. Clearly he had been ‘warned off' by his wife in no uncertain terms, and had finally come to his senses once the physical temptations offered by his tiny admirer had been removed.

Charlotte ended her letter: ‘Once more good-bye, Monsieur; it hurts to say good-bye even in a letter. Oh, it is certain that I shall see you again one day – it must be so . . .'

When October arrived she wrote again, asking if he had received her two previous letters, but there was no reply.

The year 1845 dawned and, still having heard nothing, in January Charlotte once again put pen to paper. ‘Day and night I find neither rest nor peace. If I sleep I am disturbed by tormenting dreams in which I see you . . .' She asked him to be frank with her, to tell her if he no longer had any interest in her and had forgotten her, and went on to tell him of ‘the torments which I have suffered for eight months'.

It was passionate stuff indeed, and by then M. Héger must have been praying that Charlotte would stop writing altogether. In an attempt to lessen his problems, he proposed that she should send any future letters to the academy, the Royal Athénée, where he was Professor of Literature, but that did not suit Charlotte at all. Whether she had hoped to profit from any dissent which her letters were causing between husband and wife, or whether she simply felt humiliated by the suggestion, we can but conjecture. However, she had finally got the message and, to M. Héger's undoubted relief, she never wrote again. Some idea of what he thought of her, in the latter days at least, may be gained from the fact that he used her letters for laundry and shopping lists.

‘What is this that thou hast done?'

Genesis 3:13

M
r Nicholls came to the Parsonage in May of 1845, and Miss Anne came home the next month. I hardly knew her because all the time I had been at the Parsonage she had been working as a governess for a family at Thorp Green Hall in Little Ouseburn, not too far from York, and I had seen her only when she came home for a few short visits. She was a quiet little woman, and something of a mixture of Miss Charlotte and Miss Emily. Miss Aykroyd told me that she had been in love with a curate before Mr Nicholls – a Mr Weightman. I had not known him as well as I knew Mr Nicholls, but he had been a handsome man and I know we were all upset when he died for he was only 26. Miss Anne would have been 23 then, and I well remember how sad she was when she came back for his funeral. After that it was said that she took no further interest in men.

All in all, that must have been quite a bad time for her because her aunt, Miss Branwell, died but a few weeks after Mr Weightman and so she was soon back at the Church where he was buried for the funeral of the woman who had really been mother to her. Oddly enough, though, her death hardly bothered
me
at all because we never really had much to do with each other, although she was good enough to me in her way and never put on me as Miss Charlotte did.

On the other hand, Miss Anne was always very kind to me. She never went out of her way to speak to me, but when our paths crossed I always felt as if I was talking to someone more of my own age and ways, and I was never as uneasy as I was with Miss Charlotte. Even so, she was nearly always sad and serious, and there were certain things that not even Miss Aykroyd would mention in her company.

One of them was why she had left the family at Thorp Green Hall after being with them for 5 years. There was such a mystery about it that we were all agog to know what was behind it, but the family never talked about it in front of the servants, and there was many a time when, quite out of keeping, they would stop talking if one of us came within earshot. It was only when Master Branwell came home without warning in July that a little of what had passed began to leak out.

Seemingly he had been working for the same family as Miss Anne – Robinson their name was – for just over 2 years, as tutor to the young son there. From what Father said – and Master Branwell told him nearly everything – he had been doing very well there, and so it came as a bit of a shock to find out that he had been told to leave.

He told Father that it was because Mr Robinson had found out that he was carrying on with Mrs Robinson, but Father took that with a pinch of salt for he knew Master Branwell's nature and said to us that he had never even been
seen
with a woman other than his sisters.

I never did know how Father found out the truth. He had Freemason friends all over, and so it may have come from one of them but, on the other hand, Master Branwell often told him secrets when they were drinking together. All I
do
know is that I heard Father telling Mother that Master Branwell had been sacked because of something to do with the Robinson boy, and that Miss Anne had resigned from her job because of what had been going on.