Becoming Jane Eyre (13 page)

Her sisters, too, are writing their second novels, though the first ones have still not been accepted. All three volumes have been sent out and rejected again. They continue to send out the same brown paper parcel, after crossing out the name of the previous publisher. Their poems have not sold, though they have been favorably reviewed. Yet all three of them have gone on writing and discussing their work among themselves, despite the lack of success. They have even paid to advertise the poems, using the words of one of the favorable reviews.

What determination, sturdiness, and self-reliance—or is it folly? Charlotte wonders, as she looks at her sisters at work, the youngest with her desk on her knees. She is as convinced of the merit of their work as of their diligence. Pale, grave, thoughtful, almost severe in their dark dresses, Emily and Anne look distinguished and intelligent. She can see that they have passed through something that has formed and linked them indissolubly. It is in the gravity of the way they sit and talk and in their laughter. It is in them even when they are not looking at each other.

Their father’s eyesight has continued to improve, and he has been able to take back some of his duties from his kind Irish curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, who has relieved him during his blindness. Still, the problem of money remains, as their brother spends anything he can come by on drink or opiates, and none of the girls has any employment. They no longer speak of the school they had once dreamed of establishing in the parsonage. With the brother at home, a shiftless, dissipated wreck, an albatross around their necks, such a project is unthinkable. They dare not even invite their friends to visit.

Charlotte sips from her cup of tea, now cold. She sighs and says, “My life is passing me by. Here I am thirty, and yet I have achieved nothing, nothing! Am I being punished for going back to Brussels so recklessly after Aunt’s death?”

“Nonsense,” Emily says in her abrupt and practical way. Their gazes meet, and Charlotte feels suddenly younger, more hopeful, looking into her sister’s beautiful, tired eyes. “We have our work—no one can take that away from us. No matter how exhausted or sad I feel, we have our writing, and that changes everything. And we have one another, after all.”

The servant nods and smiles approvingly at these three young women she thinks of as her own bairns. “Indeed, you do,” she says. Since her arrival in the family, these girls have been close. They have kept one another alive with their affection for one another and for their brother. She can still see them as young things, holding hands and running out together along the broad, sunny walk. They would scamper across the moors, the brother, small as he was, running on ahead, the red head catching the sunlight. He would shout, “Catch me if you can!” and the girls would go after him, picking up the younger ones when they tripped, thrust out of the house in flannel dresses even in bad weather. “Exercise is good for them,” the grim parson would say if she protested, pleading to keep them indoors on bitterly cold days.

She remembers them sitting huddled close by the fireside in the evening and listening to some old tale she would tell of the fairies and wee folk, tiny phantoms who frequented the leaves of foxgloves in the hollow, emerging out of ferny dells in the moors and frolicking in the beck on moonlit nights. How they would beg her for one story after another—the more violent, the more mysterious and magical, the better. She told them of the days before the mills had come in, when all the wool spinning was done by hand in the houses. She repeated all the folklore her grandmother had told her: stories of the Gytrash, the malevolent spirit who takes the form of a large dog or horse and leads people astray. She has gossiped freely about the notables of the area: the Heatons ousted from Ponden Hall for a while, the rightful heir left shamefully uneducated, a rough boy; the heiress, Elizabeth Heaton, dying young and her baby girl perishing rapidly after her; Elizabeth’s misalliance with her delivery boy, tales of grand places that are no more.

Now she listens to them as best she can, though her hearing is diminishing, as the three girls read their work to one another, once their father has retired to bed. They walk up and down, arm in arm, making up plots, wild stories, laughing, encouraging one another, commenting, criticizing. Sometimes she recognizes details: a place or an object. Indeed, they have even used her in various ways, though she herself has not much book learning. There are housekeepers in several of the books, sensible women who know much of the family’s stories—and what wild stories they are! One housekeeper tells the family’s story to a tenant who comes to stay in the house. She sits with her sewing or knitting—as she is doing now—and tells most of the tale. Another, in Charlotte’s new book, receives the governess who mistakes her for the lady of the house and treats her with kindness and courtesy, even though she opposes the girl’s marriage to the master of the house.

Of course, the three girls often disagree and sometimes dispute, but they are never unkind or petty in their comments.

They have often stepped in to take her place, indeed to nurse her, when she has been ill or injured, slipping on the ice in the dark and breaking her leg one evening and left alone in the street until her groans alerted a passerby.

Miss Emily has taken over the bread making, kneading the dough with her German grammar open at her side—perhaps the reason for the hard, crusty bread. She does the ironing, too, in the upstairs room, banging the iron down on the shirts with energy. They have brought in a young, gormless girl to help her. They have often insisted on taking over all her work, keeping her on in the house despite the efforts of the aunt, who once banished her to live with her sister for several years.

The housekeeper rises slowly now, thankful to be among her beloved girls. Her left leg still hurts and the knee swells when she stands on it for any length of time, though she does not like to speak of it. Ah! How her old body fails her. It makes her furious not to be able to do the things she once could. She frets and fumes. “Now where have I put my glasses? I had them a second ago,” she asks her girls, shaking her head at her stupidity.

“On your head,” Miss Emily says, laughing at her. She claps her hand to her head and finds them perched there! She spends her time hunting for lost objects, while these girls spend theirs hunting for the right words. Yet in her heart she still feels young. When she sees her face in a mirror, it shocks her.
Who is this old, wrinkled woman?

She feels no one knows quite as well as she does how to do the housework. Besides, she would so like to help and protect these poor girls.
God give me the strength to continue, the courage to go on.

She lays her knitting in its basket, wraps her shawl around her shoulders, tells them all, as she would when they were young, to go to bed. They stare up at her with reddened, haggard eyes and shake their heads. Their household hours have always been early ones, thanks be to God, and the parson is already in his bed sleeping soundly and not worrying his poor old head over his boy.

She knows, though, that Miss Emily, particularly, likes the quiet hours of the night. She hears her moving about sometimes, muttering to herself, or even striding out into the moonlight with her big, stupid dog. She hears her whistling out there to him, striding around the garden, hands behind her back, like a boy. She seems afraid of nothing in the natural world and has separated fighting dogs, branded herself with a red hot poker when bitten by a rabid one, and even punched her own in the face for disobedience. She is the only one strong enough to drag her brother up the stairs when he returns besotted from the Black Bull, laying him down on his bed and pulling off his boots, covering him over tenderly. What would they do without her?

She wonders how Miss Emily has endured watching her brother slowly disintegrate, with only brief moments of reprieve. How has she continued helping so cheerfully and competently with the household tasks, her large dog, her self-absorbed father, her besotted brother, and managed to go on scribbling into the wee hours of the night? She seems to delight in her own company. This summer, when her morning chores were done, she spent whole afternoons lying motionless on the green grass at the foot of some old tree with nothing before her but the blue of the sky, a cloud drifting by.

Since the parson’s return from Manchester, things have become even worse. The boy spends all day in bed. He has managed to set his bedclothes on fire, and without Miss Emily’s intervention they would all have been burned in their beds. It was Miss Anne who happened to pass by his door and spot the flames, but she had not succeeded in rousing her brother. It was Miss Emily who had had the presence of mind to rush down to the kitchen for a ewer of water, drenching the bedding, pulling down the bed hangings, and throwing her brother unceremoniously into a heap in a corner of the room. She can still see the bedclothes alight, Master Branwell lying on his back, unconscious in all the hullabaloo. How much longer will these girls wait up for him tonight?

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

S
itting up with her sisters at her side, waiting for their brother, Charlotte remembers it all so clearly: the six small frightened children, five pale girls and one flame-headed boy, shut up alone in the small, dark room. They huddled together for warmth in the chilly house, haunted by unnamed fears. Outside the sole window was the waiting graveyard, the rain and wind beating against the pane, and beyond the cold village with its angular shadows and steep, slippery cobblestoned streets. She remembers their desolation, their expectation of catastrophe, their helpless longing for their dying mother, their concern for their grieving father, shut up alone in his room.

Unnaturally quiet children, they waited in the next room for their mother to die, for their father to emerge from his study, for the servant girls to call them for their supper, for the rain to stop. The eldest, seven-year-old Maria, sat in their midst, her tangled, light hair on her shoulders. In her stained gray pinafore and dark dress she swung her damp, black boots back and forth, the laces trailing. She held the baby’s bare, cold feet in her hand to warm them as she rocked her on her lap like a doll. The baby was Anne, who rested her head against Maria’s pinafore, her thumb in her mouth, drool on her chin, her cheeks flushed and feverish. All the children had colds and they alternated coughing. The boy, too, cuddled up at Maria’s side. Charlotte, five years old, sat sniffing, close beside him, only a year older than he. He squirmed beside her, his nose running, poking her in the ribs, tickling her. He could not keep still. She wiped his nose and her own with her gray handkerchief, hushed him, put her arm around him, and settled him close.

The four of them clustered together on the bed against the wall, while the other two girls, Elizabeth and Emily Jane, sat side by side on the mat, jam around their mouths, holding their scratched knees, looking up at the eldest adoringly, listening as she told them the story, one of their favorites, of Joseph, the youngest boy, with his coat of many colors, cast by his jealous brothers into a pit and sold into slavery. In her gentle, expressive voice, she told of hope, reversal, and redemption.

Charlotte can still see the bright stripes, the deep pit covered with sticks, the caravan disappearing into the desert distance. Joseph interprets the pharaoh’s dreams, becomes his guide, and saves all Egypt from famine.

Aunt had stepped into the room one evening, looking large, an uncompromising stranger in a gigantic, old-f ashioned cap, silk black dress, and false curls on her forehead. It was quite clear she was as loath to be with them as they were with her. She dreaded drafts, complained of the cold, stone floors, the curtainless windows, the barren, soggy moors—“Not a tree, a flower, in this desolate place!” she muttered, pulling her gray shawl around her shoulders.

“What about the lilac and the currant bushes in the garden? What about the cherry tree?” Charlotte dared to ask.

“You ask too many questions, child. If you have nothing pleasant to say, be silent,” Aunt told them, shutting her door on them.

This sudden avalanche of six motherless children and a grim parson father stunned with grief might have been too much for anyone. Aunt grudgingly did her duty but complained constantly of the noise: the lazy, wasteful servant girls, the everlasting rain, the dark skies, the dreadful odors, and the bitter wind. “Does the sun never shine in this place?” Aunt moaned despairingly.

When Charlotte dared to ask for her mother, Aunt responded, “Indeed, I wish she were here and not I.” Aunt said little to the children and demanded quiet. She took her meals alone, as did their suffering father. She favored the boy, who could do no wrong, and the youngest, Anne.

Though Charlotte was his elder by more than a year, Branwell, the boy, was the little king, always the center of the family’s attention, even her mother’s. Charlotte sees her now, a beautiful shadow standing against the window at twilight in the parlor of the parsonage, her head thrown back, smiling up at him, lifting him high with delight. The lingering sunlight plays on his small, delicate head and his laughing eyes, which resemble his mother’s, though he has his father’s flaming Irish coloring.