Romancing Miss Bronte (25 page)

“Ah, capital, Miss Anne! A well-deserved treat after a long, dreary winter. I expect to see you back in greatly improved health.”

“Yes, I do intend to return, Mr. Nicholls, if it would please God to spare me. I long to do some good in the world before I leave it. I have many schemes in my head for the future.”

“Schemes?” Arthur said with interest. “What kinds of schemes?”

Anne replied shyly, “Oh, nothing that would ever come to your attention. They are humble plans, but still I should not like them all to come to nothing, and myself to have lived to so little purpose.”

“You should never say that, Miss Anne,” he told her in his soft Irish voice. “You have lived the life that God has given you.” He paused and then added in a gently reassuring tone, one that Charlotte had never heard him use before, “It is a sign of wisdom to recognize those things we cannot change about ourselves and our fate. You, Miss Anne, you have lived your life in devotion and constancy in His love, and He asks no more than that.”

“And how would you know this about me, sir?”

“I am not as unobservant as you may think.”

Anne smiled. “Then I need not tell you why I have asked you to call.”

Arthur leaned back in his chair and stroked his side whiskers in a pretense of deep divination. “Might it have to do with a certain black-and-white spaniel?”

“It might.”

“The same little spaniel that comes daily to my rooms and accompanies me on my visits in the parish? I believe he goes by the name of Flossy, is that right?”

Anne smiled. “You will continue your attentions in my absence, will you not?”

“I assure you that you will return to find him lacking nothing except your own irreplaceable affection.”

Charlotte had been biting her tongue all throughout this exchange; she had never seen Anne speak more than a few words to Arthur Nicholls, but it occurred to her that there existed between the two of them an unspoken sympathy. For these few minutes, Charlotte had been made to feel quite disposable, and it stirred a curious emotion in her heart, something she could not recognize.

In a gracious gesture, Anne held out her skeletal hand. “Thank you so much for coming.”

Arthur rose, took her hand, and shook it.

“Good-bye,” he said warmly. “God grant you a safe journey and a speedy recovery.”

Charlotte accompanied him into the passageway. He settled his hat on his head and opened the door without addressing a word to her. Out of politeness, Charlotte spoke up.

“Thank you for calling,” she said.

When he turned, she saw that his face had completely softened. It was not the Mr. Nicholls she knew; he wore an expression of utter vulnerability, and his eyes were swimming with tears.

“You have my deepest sympathy,” he muttered. Without waiting for a reply, he hurried outside.

When Charlotte returned to the dining room she found Anne prettily flushed, with a book in her hands.

Charlotte sat down with her mending basket on her knees and pulled out one of her father’s socks. She stretched the wool tight to examine it for holes and gave a melancholy sigh. “There’s so little to do anymore. We were always making for Branwell. He went through his shirts so
quickly.” Then she laid down the sock and looked up at her sister. “What schemes?”

Anne lifted her eyes from her book with a baffled look on her face.

“The schemes you were talking about to Mr. Nicholls.”

Anne said, “Novels, of course, Charlotte. What else would it be?”

“Oh,” Charlotte said, and she picked up the sock again.

Anne smiled quietly to herself. Of all those close to her, it had been Arthur who had offered some small tribute to her worth. Nothing grand had ever been expected of her, and there was nothing to disappoint where there were so few expectations. But Anne had finally come to recognize her own qualities: she had learned how to grow, to allow experience, good and bad, to shape her intelligence and her writing. She had succeeded as a governess and a novelist, but Emily really hadn’t cared, and Charlotte had unfairly measured her little sister’s accomplishments against her own genius and prejudices, and found them unworthy of recognition.

In York they wheeled her around town in a bath chair, and with her own earnings she bought two bonnets and a new dress in a pale sprigged muslin. Ellen declared it the prettiest dress Anne had ever owned. Watching her admire her reflection in the mirror and shake out the softly flounced skirt, Charlotte brightened a little, imagining a day when Anne had recovered, and would wear her white dresses again.

Everywhere they turned they found strong arms willing to lift her out of a carriage or carry her across the railway lines, and her joy seemed to cast a sweetness on every inconvenience, great or small. Scarborough was Anne’s favorite place in all the world; the town cheered her immensely. She drove a donkey cart on the beach and took the baths; she walked the bridge and sat on a bench at sunset, watching the sea.

On Monday morning, just a few days after their arrival, as she sat in her armchair looking out over the bay, she felt death coming on—a “change,” she called it. She wanted to spare Charlotte the trauma of transporting her body back to Haworth for burial, and she wondered if
there might be time to make it home if they left that very morning. A doctor was summoned, but he only confirmed what Anne knew.

They eased her onto the sofa, and Charlotte hovered over her, tears running down her face, nervously fidgeting first with the lap blanket and then the pillow under Anne’s head, in an effort to make her sister comfortable.

“Take courage, Charlotte,” Anne said. “You will not be alone. Ellen will be a sister to you, and God will not abandon you.” She quieted her sister’s busy hands and whispered, “Thank you for bringing me here. I am happy, and God has blessed me with a gentle death.”

At that moment, the clock in the parlor chimed the hour and the chambermaid called to them through the half-open door that dinner was being served in the dining room. When Charlotte turned back to Anne, she was dead.

She was buried at Scarborough in St. Mary’s churchyard on a cliff overlooking the bay, wearing the pretty green-sprigged dress she had purchased a few days before. Only Charlotte and Ellen were there to mourn, along with Miss Wooler, their old schoolmistress from Roe Head, who was summering in her house in North Bay.

Charlotte’s father wrote, urging Charlotte to remain with Ellen in Scarborough for the sake of her own health, but the town was far too gay to suit her mood. They moved farther down the coast, to a quiet fishing village where the waves crashed and thundered against the cliffs and seagulls haunted the empty beach.

From there, far away from the throng, Charlotte resumed her correspondence with Mr. Williams in London:

Then, with her emotions still raw, she picked up the pen again and returned to
Shirley
.

C
harlotte tilted the tall looking glass to catch her full reflection. The black silk dress trimmed in velvet had seemed smart enough back in Haworth, but here in London none of her clothes seemed quite right. She had poured over patterns with Ellen and gone through two dressmakers, worrying herself sick over fashions and fittings, always questioning her own judgment and never fully trusting that of anyone else. Every attempt at a more fashionable style would eventually send her scurrying back to safety behind the familiar neat and tidy look.

Whatever she did, she always felt herself lacking.

She stepped back from the mirror and turned to the side. The folds of the full skirt swung gracefully with her step, and the close-fitting corsage showed off her tiny waist to advantage. The high bodice was cut slightly loose, to give the illusion of breasts; other women padded their bosoms, but Charlotte would not. In a nervous gesture of which she was unaware, her hand crept to her neck, to the jet mourning brooch, her sole adornment. To anyone who met her, it served as a solemn reminder of the events that had shaped her life during the past year.

Returning home from Scarborough that summer had proved to be a test of bravery in the face of intolerable pain. In the past, home had been a haven. Now there were too many empty rooms. Every evening after Martha and Tabby had retired upstairs to their room at the back of the house, and Arthur had come and gone, with the dogs settled down before the fire, a profound silence filled the parsonage. She would try to imagine them sitting with her, Emily on her stool before the fire, Anne
in her chair, but all she could see was the deep vault and the dark earth where they now lay. Her only prop was a faith that seemed miserably inadequate to her grief. “I cannot avoid this,” she would say to herself as she squinted through her spectacles at some trivial piece of handiwork, her vision often blurred by tears. “I must endure it,” she would say, and then suddenly, with no provocation, the guilt and pain would start to rise.

She found escape in her characters, Shirley and Caroline. At the beginning they bore traces of Ellen and, especially, Mary; with Emily and Anne gone, they became a way to give life to companions now in the grave. Motherless herself, she created a mother for Caroline—albeit clumsily. Against a background of political change and social struggle, she explored the complex psychological landscape of Woman’s needs, her impotence and powerlessness.

In
Shirley
, she probed the injustices that enraged and embittered her. She exposed the silliness of men of the church, the pathetic alienation of spinsters—a future she feared would be her own. Throughout the novel ran a current of hostility and alienation between men and women, an image of her own painful relationships. Nothing was resolved at the end. There were no proposals for radical change because Charlotte had no solutions, not for her own life nor anyone else’s. In the end, she simply married off Caroline and Shirley to imperfect men, leaving them to struggle on in an imperfect society.

With the publication of
Shirley
, her fame only grew brighter. Charlotte thought the book somewhat sad and bitter, but her publisher had expressed himself satisfied, and now the reviewers had taken hold of the work. If they found less to excite, they also found less to condemn.

George Smith and his mother had quickly written to invite her to their home in Bayswater. Charlotte had preferred to face her critics in London rather than rattle around in an empty parsonage in the dead of winter. She told herself that her father was accustomed to solitude. Certainly he grieved, but for all he knew, they were still there, all three sisters, marching around the table so quietly that he never heard them,
solemnly whispering their stories, no more intrusive on his life than a shadow.

Mrs. Smith and her daughters had been let in on the secret that the timid country clergyman’s daughter was the notorious author of
Jane Eyre
, and they had been scrupulously attentive since her arrival. They put her up in an elegantly appointed room with richly colored chintz curtains and upholstered chairs, where she awoke in the dark of morning to the sound of a maid scratching around in the grate starting a fire. A fire in the morning! A warm room in which to dress! Each evening, she returned to find costly wax candles lighted beside her tester bed and on the washstand—such luxuries! There were extravagant dishes of venison, turbot with asparagus, and
meringues à la crème
, although Charlotte ate like a bird. Theater, exhibitions, and sightseeing excursions were planned for her entertainment, but the excitement wore her down. They gave a dinner party for her to meet her idol, the great Thackeray, and she trembled in his presence and dared not speak a word.

Charlotte stepped up closer to the mirror to check her delicate silver-and-jet earrings, and a pale, haggard face stared back. The whirl of events had left her unable to sleep at night, and now she felt a headache coming on. With nervous hands she tidied up the dressing table, neatly arranging her brush and comb, her tortoiseshell jewelry box, making sure that everything was in its proper place before she went down.

The morning room always bore a faint trace of rosewater mingled with smoke from the crackling wood fire. The city seemed remote, emitting only a low, sustained note, as though from a distant organ. It was a pleasant, peaceful room, with the furniture comfortably arranged, and Charlotte had hoped to have a few moments alone before breakfast, but George’s mother was already at her desk. Charlotte had found her to be faultlessly even-tempered, rather stern perhaps, but by no means unkind. She possessed the serenity and self-assurance Charlotte had observed in women who had borne many children by men they loved, and who loved them in return. She had observed this serenity in Monsieur Heger’s wife. It was a nature Charlotte envied and grudgingly admired.

“Good morning, Miss Brontë,” Mrs. Smith said brightly, with a
quick glance at the dark circles under Charlotte’s eyes. “Did you sleep well?”

“Quite well, thank you,” Charlotte said with a forced smile.

“Last night was bitterly cold. I do hope your room was warm enough.”