Romancing Miss Bronte (11 page)

In Silverdale they were herded into a school with makeshift cots, but by then they were fewer than a dozen. The next afternoon their father arrived. They saw him marching toward them over a sandy dune, his black coat whipped by the wind, his features frozen with anger and fear so that it appeared he was wearing a mask. Emily thought they had done something wrong to anger him, but Charlotte knew he had come to save them. She flew into his arms.

On the way home their father told them that Maria had died of consumption. Elizabeth survived only ten more days, and then the family vault in the church was opened again and they lowered the tiny casket down into the gloom until it came to rest beside that of her mother and Maria.

After the burial service, as Charlotte walked back home behind her father, up the path through the cemetery with the icy wind flaying her cheeks, she realized that she was no longer concealed, tucked obscurely within the folds of the clan. God had thrust her into the forefront at the head of the dwindling band of children. He had done it intentionally. It had fallen to her, the puny one of the brood, to set an example at all times.

When at last Charlotte settled down with her stub of a pencil and small squares of paper and began Jane Eyre’s story, she could barely keep up with her thoughts. She wrote in a white heat, stopping only to dash out to the butcher for a few chops and to boil some potatoes or butter some bread for their tea. Her father, ever the good patient, lay in silence. The nurse applied leeches to his temples, and then she knitted or dozed in her chair by his bed. No one asked Charlotte what she was doing with the empty, silent hours in the darkness.

After several weeks the bandages were removed, but there were another
two weeks of confinement in a sunless and quiet room. Finally the time came to pack up and go home. Patrick’s sight had been restored. By that time, Jane Eyre had fled her lover and Thornfield Hall. She had taken a carriage as far as her money had allowed her to go, and now she was on a strange road and Charlotte had no idea what would become of her.

Charlotte packed the manuscript pages into her trunk; at the train station in Manchester she consigned it to the porter, then took a seat next to her father in the crowded compartment. On the journey home, while her father gazed out the window, Charlotte realized she had not even had the time to read what she had written. She would return home and stash it away on a shelf in her closet with other unfinished stories and pick up the monotonous activities of her busy life.

It would be nearly a year before she would complete the novel, and she would never fully understand that, in an attempt to capture her love for a man, she had created a myth. Jane’s lover would have Constantin Heger’s weakness for chocolate and cigars, his dark features, and an athletic physique that had the power to arouse her, but there would also be symbols of the father—powerful, distant, sightless—(she would say to him, “I shall keep out of your way all day, as I have been accustomed to do: you may send for me in the evening, when you feel disposed to see me, and I’ll come then; but at no other time”). There would be hints of the noble Zamorna of her childhood stories, her oldest and dearest hero, a tortured, complex man. With this rough material mined from memory and the subconscious she created Edward Rochester, a man of intelligence and sensitivities equal to her own, a man entirely beyond her social reach. He would be blinded at the end, but she would restore his sight; plain, small, and insignificant though she might seem, he would find that she could fascinate a man like him and win his heart.

Her subconscious had understood—if she did not—that the obstacles to happiness were not merely external; it would take more than a slyly manipulative wife to thwart their union. Jane would be foiled by a
violent, horrific creature, a madwoman, barely human at all. Although scarcely articulate, Mrs. Rochester would embody all the darkness of Charlotte’s psyche: fire, fear, blood, sensuality, the foreign and the exotic—all these things trapped and enclosed in a room in an attic in the past.

T
here was little at home that winter to excite Charlotte’s enthusiasm. She wrote frequent letters to Ellen, commenting with wry humor on the dreary events of life in Haworth. Mr. Nicholls had returned from Ireland without a wife and seemed to have no prospects of obtaining one. Although he had been fully ordained that year and could have sought a living of his own, he appeared to be quite content to tend to the business of his church school and play second fiddle to her father. Patrick secretly scorned his curate’s lack of ambition, but as Arthur was by all accounts conscientious and hardworking, Patrick refrained from voicing such cynical opinions and counted himself fortunate to keep Arthur in Haworth.

Branwell could be thanked for what little excitement enlivened their days—although it was generally of the unpleasant kind. His drinking debts continued to mount, and their father was getting unpleasant letters from the proprietors of taverns demanding settlement of Branwell’s bills and threatening court action if he did not pay.

Branwell’s letters to Lydia Robinson always came back unopened, but on occasion the lady would send him money through the mediator of her family physician. Branwell would fly off to Halifax for a bout of drinking with his friends and come home broke and ill, threatening to take his life. On occasion he would sober up and send off a few letters seeking employment as a tutor on the Continent, but these efforts were halfhearted and short-lived. He had always been of slight build, and they were so concerned with the state of his mind that they paid
scant attention to his wasting body. He went days without eating and nights without sleeping, and after a while the opium gained ascendancy over whiskey and gin. For the price of a few pence he could find days of relief from his misery. Under the influence of its pleasurable effects, he would sometimes rise from his stupor and scribble out a few lines of poetry, thinking he had produced something brilliant that would make his fame. He would lie sprawled on the sofa in a trance and remain there for hours, until his father picked him up and carried him to bed.

Meanwhile, the manuscripts of
Wuthering Heights, The Professor
, and
Agnes Grey
slowly made their way around the London publishing houses. After a month or two, they would land back in Haworth, returned with a curt letter of rejection, whereupon Charlotte would tie them all up again in fresh wrapping paper, address the parcel to the next publisher on her list, bind it with the same knotted string, and trot down to the village to post it off again.

Their volume of poetry sank without a trace, having peaked at total sales of two. When Charlotte requested several of the unsold copies, Aylott & Jones was only too happy to unburden itself of the little book. Charlotte had the idea of sending copies to their favorite authors, to Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Thomas De Quincey; it was better than leaving them around the house. It was just one more thing they would have to hide.

Anne was sitting on a stool in the shade of the cherry tree, shelling peas, when Charlotte came through the back gate. She set down the bowl and hurried to meet her.

“Where have you been, Tally? We were ever so worried.”

Charlotte offered up a weak smile. “I’m quite all right. I’ve been for a walk.”

“Tabby said you had a letter. She said it upset you.” Then, in a quiet voice, she added, “Was it from Brussels?”

“No, dearest. I never hear from my Brussels friends anymore.”

Emily came out of the house, dusting the flour from her hands. “What happened?”

Charlotte reached into her pocket and pulled out the letter. “It’s from a publisher.”

Anne said, “If it’s from a publisher, how bad can it be? We’ve already been rejected by nearly every publisher in London.”

“Not by this one.” She passed the letter to Anne with a forced smile. “Thomas Newby will publish you, but you must bear the costs, as before.”

Emily leaned over Anne’s shoulder and the two of them read the letter together. After a moment, Emily’s face clouded with a look of consternation.

“It doesn’t say anything about your book.”

“No,” Charlotte said. “They returned it to me. It does not interest them. They find that
Wuthering Heights
is sufficiently long to take up two volumes of the proposed three-volume set.
Agnes Grey
will make up the third volume.”

A deep pink spread over Emily’s face. This was an outcome they would never have predicted, that Charlotte’s book would be refused and theirs would be published.

“They say here they want fifty pounds,” Anne said. She looked to Emily. “We would have to sell more of our railway shares. Do we have that much?”

“I think we do. But do we want to?”

“Yes,” Charlotte said firmly. “Yes, you do. We’ve tried nearly every publisher in London. We’ve been trying for a year. If this is what it takes, then you should do it.”

As she untied her straw bonnet, the wind caught it. It sailed out of her hands, rolling across the dusty yard. Emily sprinted after it, but Keeper got there first and snatched it up in his mouth, giving it a fierce shake.

“Drop it, Keeper,” Emily commanded. When he gave the bonnet another playful shake, she stunned him with an angry blow across the head. He dropped the bonnet and sat cowering at her feet, gazing up at her with dark, sorrowful eyes.

Emily dusted off the bonnet and brought it back to her sister.

The dog had slobbered on the ribbon and there were tooth marks in the straw brim. Charlotte wiped it off and then quietly turned and went inside.

The manuscript Newby had returned lay unopened in Charlotte’s room for several days. When she finally decided to send it out again, she was in a defiant mood; she scratched through Newby’s name in bold, inky strokes and wrote to the side of it: “Smith, Elder & Co., 65 Cornhill, London.” Charlotte disliked untidiness in all its forms, and such carelessness was against her nature; but it seemed to her, disheartened as she was, that her Professor was not good for much more.

Mr. Williams’s desk was situated in a cramped and close little corner of the London publishing house of Smith, Elder & Co., removed from the clerks and at some distance from the stove, making it hot in the summer and cold in the winter, but this seemingly inferior situation was in no way an indication of his status in the firm. His appearance was equally deceptive: stooped and gray before his years, with an air of shabby neglect about his dress, he shuffled around the tables of manuscripts and books with a hangdog look, as though the solemn and sober work of literature had somehow exerted a gravitational pull on his body so that every aspect of his person dragged, sagged, or drooped. In reality, he was an intellectually lively and remarkably sensitive man, with keen commercial and literary judgment—which was why he sat in his cramped little corner just outside George Smith’s door, and why every manuscript came across his desk, and why every book they published required his stamp of approval.

It was a sluggish August day, and there were only a few clerks in the office. London had fairly emptied itself. Parliament was out of session, the upper classes had gone off to their Continental watering holes, and only the most industrious men of trade labored on. George Smith was one of these, and by virtue of his responsibilities as general manager, so was Mr. Williams. Mr. Williams had just finished reading a very intriguing
manuscript, and he was still formulating his thoughts about it when George swung open his door and stepped out.

“Williams, are you still here?”

“Indeed sir, and I shall be for some time to come.”

“Egods, man, it’s hot out here. Why don’t you open your window?”

“I’m quite comfortable, sir.”

“You could take off your coat, you know.”

“That would be unseemly, sir.” Then, noticing that George Smith was standing there without his coat, he added, “I would not like to set a poor example for the young clerks, sir.”

“Well, can you come in here? I need your advice.”

“Certainly, sir.”

George Smith’s office was small but had the advantage of a skylight, and the brightness of the room caused Williams to blink, so that he didn’t notice the bolts of silks and satins stacked high on a pair of chairs.

“Here,” George said, reaching for a bolt of midnight blue silk and unfurling it beneath Williams’s eyes. “What do you think of this one?”

Williams peered at him over the rims of his spectacles. George Smith was a dashingly handsome young man. He had been blessed with one of those little whimsies of nature—a deeply dimpled smile—as well as lively eyes and a muscular build.

“For a waistcoat, sir?”

“Yes. The family’s out of mourning now, Williams, and all of a sudden my mother finds that my wardrobe needs refurbishing.”

“Has it been a year already, sir?”

“Hard to believe, isn’t it?”

“Indeed, sir.”

George had taken over the small publishing house after his father’s death the year before. He had inherited some dishonest partners and crushing debt, but he was a hard worker and was proving to be a keen businessman.

“Sir,” Williams said, with a twist of a smile, “do you really think I’m
the one you should be asking? Perhaps you might wish to consult your mother or sisters?”

“They are the last ones I should wish to consult. They can never agree on anything. Come now, man, I trust you.”

Williams eyed the bolts of cloth, unfurled a gray satin and held it up to the light.

George said, “My tailor tells me it’s all in the reds now.”

Williams replied thoughtfully, “Does he, now?” Then, after having briefly unrolled a few more bolts and inspected them with the same close scrutiny, he chose four from the batch and with a decisive air laid them aside.

“There, sir. That should do it.”

George gave a momentary glance at the selection. With a smile of gratitude and relief he said, “Yes. That will do nicely. Thank you, Williams.”

“On another matter, sir. A manuscript just came across my desk. A writer I know absolutely nothing about, but I thought I might bring it to your attention.”