The Madwoman Upstairs (5 page)

I slung my bag over my shoulder, and slipped out of the room unnoticed.

CHAPTER 3

A
few weeks later, when I was en route to my first dinner in the Great Dining Hall, I discovered that I had made the front page of the
Hornbeam
, Old College’s student newspaper.

LAST LIVING BRONTË DESCENDANT ARRIVES AT OLD COLLEGE

It was printed in heavy, self-righteous black ink. The paper had infected all of the Old College arcades, and now, discarded copies were flying in the brisk wind like English tumbleweeds. There I was, on the cover page of every paper—too tall, with straight, American teeth. Brown hair, brown eyes, no makeup. The author of the article, an H. Pierpont, must have found my high school yearbook photo floating around the internet. I looked a lot like myself and a little like a man. I snatched a copy off the ground and read:

The only surviving descendant of the family of Patrick Brontë (father of the illustrious Brontë trio) is Miss Samantha E. Whipple
,
a first-year English Literature candidate at Old College, and the orphaned daughter of the late Tristan Whipple (best-selling author of
Convenient Fiction, Tortillas on a Mantel,
and
This Is a Book!).
According to Sir John Booker, former Cambridge University don and present curator of the Brontë Parsonage and Museum, Miss Whipple is heiress to the Vast Brontë Estate.

A small squeeze of breath escaped me, as though I had developed a slow leak. I silently welcomed Pierpont to my shit list. I was not an
orphan
, thank you very much. I did have a mother, even if we didn’t speak often, and she was a real live mother—red-cheeked and frizzy-haired. And where, exactly, had he dug up “the Vast Brontë Estate”?

“Oi!”

I looked around. The voice came from behind me. In my anger, I had marched to the front steps without seeing the queue that had begun to form. I apologized to no one in particular and fell into line. In their black capes, my classmates reminded me of very small children, or very old men. Everyone else seemed to know to wear college dress robes. It was raining, so I had worn a yellow poncho.

Once I was in line, my eyes fell upon a girl with dyed blonde hair who was standing directly in front of me. She had also missed the dress robe memo, and was wearing a shirt advertising
Thor the Hammer.
The guy next to her was a tall redhead sporting a brave attempt at facial hair. I could tell the two of them would be dating soon; her body was leaning toward his and he seemed ready to inhale her.

“I hear she’s loaded,” the girl was saying with a bat of her eyes. She had a copy of the
Hornbeam
clutched in her hands.

“I’m reading her dad’s books for my next tutorial,” said the boy.

“They’re a bit overrated, yeah?”

“Do you know how he died?”

“Wasn’t it an accident?”

“He was a drunk.”

“Oh, was he?”

“I’m Thomas.”

“Ellen.”

They shook hands. Samantha Whipple, having served her purpose as Conversation Filler, became irrelevant.

I glanced down once again at the
Hornbeam
, which was wilting from the sweat on my fingers.
The Vast Brontë Estate
. I hadn’t heard the phrase in years. It was a term coined many years ago by a well-known Cambridge professor, Sir John Booker, when he penned a hostile and inane op-ed of the same name. At least, “inane” was how my father described it. Sir John had accused Dad of hoarding an enormous wealth of primary sources, denying the academic world the joy of their analysis. I remembered the article mostly through my father’s reaction to it. The morning after the piece appeared in the London
Times
, I recalled coming downstairs to find him frying bacon, something he only did when he was angry. Dad was actually a vegetarian, but he enjoyed the way bacon self-destructed in the pan by stewing in its own grease—like all liars, cowards, and idiots, he used to say. When I approached him, Dad turned, brandished his spatula at me, and explained that Sir John was a perfect example of a man who a) didn’t know how to read and b) didn’t know how to think. I remember nodding and adjusting the bow on his apron. We both had an unspoken understanding of what was coming: a slew of inquiries from reporters, fans, and critics, and yet another departure from the makeshift privacy we had slowly built together. As the years passed, all I came to know of Sir John was that he was “the son and heir of a mongrel bitch,” to quote my father—and, I suppose,
King Lear
.

I glanced down at my phone. No new messages. Earlier this evening, I had finally summoned up the courage to call B. Howard, hoping that she and I might be able to square away everything on the phone and never need to talk again. Her voice had been crisp and surgeon-like as she explained that she was sorry, but an in-person meeting was necessary, and as soon as possible.

“Your father’s will was exceptionally confusing,” she explained in a way that let me know she had already spent far too much time thinking about it.

“Haven’t you had five years to go through it?”

“That’s not quite enough time.”

I told her that I would have to get back to her regarding a meeting date, as I had a large volume of homework, thanks to my tyrannical professor, who belonged in an evil German fairy tale. Now, however, as I looked down at the
Hornbeam
, I wished we had set up an appointment and met already. Blanche Howard would have told me what I already suspected—that my father had left me nothing—and then I could have gone to the press and kindly explained what should never have required outside confirmation: I was nobody.

A small breath of wind hit my shins, the only part of my body not covered by my yellow power-poncho. Thor the Hammer and her new boyfriend were laughing about something as the rain fell quietly around us. Her giggle sounded like a bottle of champagne popping. The line began to move. I envied Thor for such seamless flirting. It was as if she had taken some special class that I had missed in high school, where you learn how to be social. What had I been doing all those years, anyway? I scooted closer to my soggy, chattering classmates, aware of the acute loneliness you feel when surrounded by so many other people. The line moved quickly, and soon I dropped the
Hornbeam
on the ground, leaving it to crumple into the puddles.

At dinner, I sat next to a Swedish third-year who looked like an underwear model. Thick neck, small waist, jutting jaw. He had a watered-down face, pale like the inside of someone’s arm. This is how our conversation went:

“I haven’t seen you before,” he said. The accent was strong.

I said, “ ‘To be omnipotent but friendless is to reign.’ ”

“What?”

“Shelley,” I said.

He extended a hand sideways. “Hans.”

“No, Percy Shelley,” I said, taking his hand. “Said that quote. Sorry.”

“All right, yeah.”

“I’m English.”

“You sound American.”

“I study English.”

“Ah,” he said. “I’m math.”

I hated meeting people. Being homeschooled for a decade had not granted me social graces. My father never corrected the expressions I had learned incorrectly, because he thought miscommunication was funny, and as a result, I went to high school thinking that it was
trivilous
instead of
frivolous
,
exasperate
instead of
exacerbate
. I lived in a world in which people still said “jolly.” I spent high school saying things like “if urged.”

I glanced around. The Great Dining Hall was four hundred and seventy-two years old, begun by Old College Master John Stuart VIII during his second year in office. The stone was blackened and it looked like the building had been smoking the same cigar for centuries and had dribbled ash all over itself. Tonight, the six long tables inside the hall were bathed in a sickly, yellow light, and students crammed around them like too many animals at a trough. The only empty tables, reserved for faculty, were at the front of the room, facing horizontally.

On all the walls around us were paintings of English kings and Old College presidents, whose portraits filled up every bit of space like uneven, mismatched graves. The collection looked like a Tetris game that Michelangelo had started as a kid and, frustrated, left spackled onto the wall. The table I chose faced the north wall, which meant that Richard III was glaring down at me, a chicken leg in his hand. I glanced at the sour men in the portraits next to him, and couldn’t help but feel that we had walked into a loud argument between them that had suddenly been silenced.

Across from me were two girls, one of whom had a name that I believe began with an
A
, and the other of whom had a field of study that was abbreviated
PPE
. PPE had introduced herself as Marissa, though it might have been Melissa. Melinda. Abigail. Horace? Hans, meanwhile, gave me a quick debriefing regarding his life. I learned that he liked Chinese rum, had three middle names (all beginning with
E
), and ended more than one thought with a loud grunt. His father was English, his mother was in the bottled-water business, and all of their friends were undertakers.

“Where do you live in college?” he asked.

“In a tower.”

“Hah.”

“It has no windows and it smells like venison.”

He paused, and the smile faded. “You mean
the
tower? You live in the
tower
?”

I nodded.

“You’re the Brontë then.”

Again, I nodded.

He gave a slow smile. “No one’s lived there in years. The tower, I mean. People call it the Tower of Extinction.”

“Because people die in there?”

“No, because you’re so isolated that you never procreate.”

“I see.”

“
I
could visit you if you wanted.”

“What?”

“What?”

We stopped talking because the room had fallen silent. The faculty had arrived. I looked behind me to find a solemn procession of middle-aged men and women. One woman—short and squat—was leading the way inside. She looked like a Geraldine, or perhaps a Thomasina, and all in all resembled a bathrobed granny. It took several minutes for all of them to reach the front tables. When they did, I noticed that half the seats were empty. Had the faculty caught the plague? The squat professor, Geraldine, gave a toast in Latin, and then we began to eat.

“Why do they look so serious?” I asked Hans.

“You are looking at the most brilliant minds in the Western world.”

“They don’t look very friendly.”

“Anyone who teaches here has fought his way to the top. The entire process is rather vulgar. Don’t think this is a pleasant group of people.”

I squinted back at the tables. In a room filled with bland black gowns, the empty seats stood out like missing teeth.

“There appear to be quite a few people gone,” I said. “Were they all killed off?”

He followed my gaze. “Eating in hall is a privilege. Sometimes people lose that privilege.”

It sounded like a phrase he had repeated several times before. I wondered how many times he had been scolded as a child.

“What’d they do?” I said. “Walk on the lawns?”

No response. I wasn’t sure if he’d heard me. Surely the Greatest Minds in the Western World were exempt from mortal punishments? I noticed that my own professor was conspicuously absent. I thought of the
Old College Book of Disciplinary Procedures
, a thick green volume I had found tucked inside my mailbox a week ago, and which, according to the letter attached to it, I was “encouraged to examine” before term began. Nowhere had I found any restrictions regarding eating in the dining hall, an observation I shared with Hans.

He laughed. “You actually read the whole rulebook?”

“No.”

I had tried to make it all the way through, but I failed. For one thing, half of it was still in Olde English. For another, the print was comically small, as if the author had been concerned that two hundred pages weren’t quite enough to squeeze in all the creative and arbitrary punishments available to students and professors. According to the rules I
did
read (and remembered), students who jumped the queue were to be sent back to their dorms immediately; professors and students were supposed to sit a prescribed distance away from each other at all times; professors and students were never to spend more than an hour alone under any circumstances. Most crimes, I noticed, ended in “timely expulsion.” It seemed to me that the college had dealt with a number of infractions in the past and was now trying to send a clear message to its lawyers: “See? We tried.”

Hans and I fell into a patch of silence. He was very good-looking (did I mention?), and as a result, I found it difficult to think of something to say. Politics? Religion? Witty banter? What did good-looking people talk about, anyway? Somewhere during the second course, he broke the silence for me. He was a student of mathematics, he explained, but his true passion was writing. I told him I hated writing; he didn’t ask me why. I learned that he worked three jobs and cooked twice a week, and that, if I wanted, I could visit him in the Porters’ Lodge (affectionately called the Plodge), where he worked part-time. There was no central heating there, however, and the place had small holes in the roof, and in the snow it was impossible to walk there, so I should dress warmly and be prepared. I nodded. This is what I was learning about Old College: it was miserable and perfect. Everyone had a morbid fascination with its obsolete customs, even—and most particularly—those who pretended to hate them.