CHAPTER ONE
On the spring morning when she found the wounded man below Ponden Kirk, Emily Brontë was thinking of that afternoon, long ago now, when she and Branwell and Anne had climbed up there and left blood in the narrow fairy cave.
In the ensuing years the four Brontë siblings had sometimes been separated, when one or another of them was at school or employed, but those periods had been brief, and now they were all again living at the parsonage with their elderly near-blind father. Four years ago Emily had spent ten months with Charlotte at a school for young ladies in Brussels, but she had come home when their aunt died, and now at the age of twenty-seven Emily had no intention of ever again leaving the village of Haworth and the parsonage and her lonely, beloved Yorkshire moors.
Anne and Charlotte had both held positions as governesses of children in affluent families, but had eventually been dismissed—little Anne because she had tied her unruly charges to a table leg so that she could get her work done.
For a long time they had all hoped that Branwell would achieve success as a portrait painter, but those hopes had proved vain.
He had always shown some innate skill at drawing and painting—among other projects, he had done a portrait in oils of himself and his three sisters that had effectively caught their likenesses, though his own face in it wasn’t recognizable—and it had been decided that he would apply for professional instruction at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.
And so in the early autumn of his eighteenth year he had set off on the first part of the two-day, two-hundred-mile journey, carrying cash and letters of introduction . . . but a week later he had come back home to Haworth, penniless and claiming to have been robbed by “sharpers” before he had even got to the metropolis. He had been evasive about details, and Emily had come to suspect that he had got to London, and done something there that he was ashamed of, though she knew better than to try asking him about it.
He had tried various employments to support himself after that. He had been a tutor briefly six years ago, but had been let go because of drunkenness, and then he had worked at the new railway station in Halifax, but lost the job when the entries in his account books proved to consist mostly of poetry and drawings.
Branwell and Charlotte had always been close, even through these temporary separations. They had for a while collaborated on stories set in their fictional land of Angria, and they had signed their work UT or WT, for Us Two or We Two.
But last year he had been abruptly dismissed from a position in Thorpe Green, twenty miles northeast of Haworth, and had come home in disgrace. He had been employed by a Mr. and Mrs. Robinson as tutor to their young son, but had, he claimed, fallen in love with his employer’s wife, and been driven from the house by Mr. Robinson. In the nine months since then, he had simply devoted himself to strong drink, and these days Charlotte could hardly bear the sight of him.
Privately, Emily wondered about the exact circumstances of his termination—Mr. Robinson’s angry dismissal letter had threatened to “expose” some unspecified action of Branwell’s, implying something more heinous, much more ungodly, than simply making advances to a married woman.
Casting about for some way to make money without the ordeal of leaving home, the three sisters had spent thirty-one pounds to have a thousand copies of a book of their poetry printed, pseudonymously, as Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. The book was scheduled to be published two months from now. And though as a boy Branwell had joined them in writing their verses and stories, they had kept him ignorant of this new literary effort—which was not difficult, since lately he slept till noon and spent his evenings at the Black Bull, an inn that sat a hundred yards downhill from the parsonage front door, just past the Haworth churchyard. It was a short walk, but he often needed help getting back home.
On most days, in any weather, Emily left the parsonage to go for sometimes daylong walks, always with her dog, a big bullmastiff named Keeper; but she nearly never ventured down to the village. She walked west, away from the church and the parsonage and the churchyard, out across the moors; and today she had followed familiar ways along paths and across wind-scoured hills to Ponden Kirk.
She had often wondered what she and Anne and Branwell had actually done on that day sixteen years ago when they had left streaks of their blood there. Twice in the years since then, both times just at sunset when she’d been hurrying home to the parsonage, she had glimpsed what appeared to be a little boy standing at the top of Ponden Kirk; both times she had paused to peer more closely, and both times the shape had proved to be a momentary illusion, for it had fragmented and dispersed as a flock of crows.
Shortly after dawn on this bright, sunny day, she had as usual been awakened by the pistol shot that her father fired over the churchyard every morning. A glance at the window had shown her that it was a day to be outdoors, and she had put on a long wool dress and hurried downstairs.
She had put on her boots shortly after making oatmeal porridge for herself and her sisters, and promising Tabby that she would wash the pot and dishes when she got back. Sometimes the wind that shook the parsonage windows seemed to carry the strains of a wild, remote music—repetitive and atonal, as if older than humanity’s ordered keys and scales—and as Emily hastily put on a coat and stepped outside she had felt that today she could almost dance to it. Keeper was trotting right beside her as she crossed the yard to the wall-bordered road, raising his great head and sniffing energetically, as if he too found something exciting in the wind.
The two of them had hurried along the road and soon left it to follow a curving sheep path. Only a few weeks ago these moors had been white with snow, and the black lines of stone walls had made broad geometric figures across the far-off hills, but this morning the path curled between acres of waving green grass. Emily’s dress billowed behind her and her loose chestnut hair was tossed back over her shoulders. She was the tallest of her family, with a rangy, athletic figure, her plain, strong face tanned by endless days spent outdoors.
They were soon out of sight of the parsonage, and from habit Emily watched the hilltops, and called cautions to hares bounding where hawks might see them beside the rushing waters of Sladen Beck, and walked wide around the ancient standing stone known, for no remembered reason, as Boggarts Green. When they had hiked a couple of miles across the hills, the wind had shifted to the north, and was colder. Keeper had paused on a wet stone halfway across the rushing water of a creek where the wind was turbulent between the hills, and cocked his head and snarled.
It was a sound he sometimes made when the two of them had stayed out past dark, and at those times Emily had thought of boggarts and gytrashes and barguests, the legendary devils that, according to local folklore, roamed the moorland hills and dales at night; though right now the rippling heather at the crests of the hills shone pale purple in morning sunlight.
But she trusted the dog, and when the path on the far side of the creek mounted to an elevation higher than most, she glanced around at the uneven horizon behind her and the long rising ground ahead, and she could make out a figure at the foot of the ascent to Ponden Kirk, apparently crawling on all fours in the bracken. It was too clumsy to be an animal.
She clicked her tongue to tell Keeper to stay by her and not go running ahead, and she carefully picked her way around projecting stones down to the valley floor. The figure wasn’t visible now among the lowland marsh ferns, and it wasn’t until she was only a dozen yards away that she got a good look at the wounded man.
He was slowly and laboriously crawling south, moving left across Emily’s view. The visible sleeve of his broadcloth coat was torn free at the shoulder, and the left leg of his woolen trousers was dark with blotted blood. Any hat he might have had was gone, but his face was hidden down to the jawline by a mane of disordered black hair.
Keeper snarled again, and the man rocked over onto his right side, facing Emily and the dog. With his free left hand he pried a knife from his bloodstained right fist and raised it. Emily noticed that it had two narrow blades, in parallel.
Keeper tensed his massive shoulders and hindquarters for a lunge, but Emily had already clicked her tongue again to keep him still; he froze, quivering.
Emily frowned and bit her lip, staring at the man. He was probably taller than she was, solidly built, and his now-visible face was swarthy—he might be Welsh, if not a Spaniard or a Portuguese. She guessed that a black cloth disk on a ribbon across his lined cheek was a displaced eyepatch, though in fact both of his brown eyes were glaring at her. There were streaks of bright blood on the blades of the knife.
Keeper stood rigid, the fur on his neck bristling.
Emily looked around again, but saw no sign of who or what might have attacked the man; there might be murderers up on the plateau, but she had Keeper.
“How badly are you hurt?” she asked. “You need a doctor.”
“I need,” the man said through gritted teeth, “to get out of view.” His voice was a deep rumble, and his accent wasn’t local; it sounded vaguely French to her. He dragged his left leg up and pressed his right palm against the dirt. “I can stand—I can walk.”
Emily had often rescued injured birds that she found on the moors, even hawks; she certainly couldn’t leave a man in this state.
“You can’t walk,” she said. “Put away the knife.”
He exhaled. “Is there anyone visible on the Kirk?”
Emily quickly looked up at the massive black stone edifice, and left and right along the edge of the plateau. The empty blue sky made every detail of rock and tree branch along the edge starkly visible, and there was no spot of animation.
“No,” she said; and she recalled, not for the first time, that the word kirk was commonly used in Scotland to mean church, and it had been used the same way here in northern England, long ago. The black monument did appear to be a construction, not a natural stone outcrop—a church to what sort of god?
“You were attacked?” she asked. She got no answer.
He raised himself back up on his straightened right arm and one knee, and was struggling to get his other leg under himself. Sweat gleamed on his knotted face.
His arm folded and he fell back onto his right shoulder.
Panting harshly, he extended his left hand to the side, palm up; and after a few seconds Emily stepped forward and took the knife. Its leather-wrapped grip was sticky with blood, and she just dropped it on the ground.
To Emily’s surprise, Keeper turned away from her and the wounded man to growl and bare his teeth at the knife.
The man had got up in a swaying crouch; Emily raised a restraining hand to Keeper, then crouched beside the man’s left side and slid her right arm under his. “Get out of view how quickly?”
“Ah—quickly.”
She gripped his side and draped his left arm over her shoulders; then she took a deep breath and straightened her legs. He was heavy, but she was able to stand, holding him up.
He pressed his boots against the ground, taking some of his weight off her, and the two of them began hitching their way forward. Keeper padded close beside the man, growling deep in his throat and, every few steps, turning his head to glance back.
“Assist with your feet,” Emily said breathlessly, “all you can. There’s a—” She tossed her head to get her windblown hair out of her eyes. “There’s a beck among rocks down to our right.”
He took a deep breath and pronounced, “A beck.”
“A stream. Water. Place your feet and flex your legs! I can bathe your wounds—perhaps bandage them—and get help.” The narrow stream lay a couple of hundred feet downhill, and she wished she could just roll him to it.
“I’ll—have no help,” he said.
“Obviously.”
He was walking, slowly and haltingly, though it seemed that she still bore most of his considerable weight.
“Aside from yours,” he conceded, “until we reach your beck.” He inhaled sharply between his teeth and halted, his eyes clenched shut, then resolutely lurched forward another step. “And then you—go back to your sheep. I won’t—” He blinked sweat out of his eyes and peered blearily ahead. “I won’t be here if you come back.”
Emily had the breath to say, “We shall see.” She was sweating herself now, in her long wool dress and coat, in spite of the chilly wind that tossed her damp hair.
In a few minutes they reached the bank of the narrow creek bed. Several great granite stones stood up at angles among the luxuriant reeds that grew along the edge, and Emily followed Keeper between two of them and carefully lowered herself and her burden until they were both sitting on the grassy bank. Only a few feet below them, clear water rushed over gravel and trailing weeds. The creek was narrow enough that Emily could have jumped over it.
She freed herself from under his arm, and stood up and stretched. Keeper nudged her thigh with his great jowly head, crowding her back as if to say that their task here was finished.
Emily patted the dog’s head. To the wounded stranger, she said, “Can you slide down?”
He gripped the bank with both hands and pushed backward, and slid down until his boots were in the stream.
The abrupt movement made him arch his back and pound one fist into the mud; he relaxed slowly.
“There,” he said, panting. “Now go home, girl.”
She certainly didn’t want to establish an acquaintance with him, but she wasn’t going to leave him yet—and girl wouldn’t do. Recalling that he had taken her for a rural shepherdess, she just gave him, “Emily.”
She stepped down beside him on his left while Keeper scrambled down and stood watchfully at his right. For a moment she stood on tiptoe to scan the nearby sunlit hills and the rim of the plateau; no motion was visible, so she crouched beside the wounded man.
He seemed alarmed that she had not left him. He pulled the eyepatch back into place over his left eye, though he could obviously see well enough out of it, and said, “Right—Alcuin, yes? Be on your way now, will you?” When she cocked her head he added, “It’s a name, my name.”
“How do you do.” She began unbuttoning his coat, and when he tried to prevent her she pushed his bloodstained hand away. “I know who Alcuin was. Advisor to Charlemagne.”
The man was breathing more normally now, and he turned his head to see her with his right eye, looking closely at her for the first time.
“Yes.” Reluctantly, for he clearly wished she would go away, he asked, “Are you Irish? Your vowels aren’t all that far from County Down.”
Emily had now begun unbuttoning his blood-sodden waistcoat, and she could already see a broad gash in his side through the torn fabric. At least it wasn’t bleeding energetically. “Top Withens is a mile south of here,” she said. Seeing his baffled look, she explained, “That’s a farmhouse. I’ll get Mr. Sunderland and his sons to carry you there. You’ll need a doctor to prevent this from mortifying, and to do some stitching up.”
“I heal fast.”
“Not from something like this.” He really didn’t seem to be in immediate danger of dying, and she gave him a curious frown. “Though I’d judge your eye, at least, is well enough that you could get rid of the patch.”
“It’s a—formality.”
She had spread his unbuttoned coat to see if he had other wounds, and he caught her hand. Keeper’s big front paws were instantly on his chest, and Emily could feel the vibration of the dog’s growl through Alcuin’s hand.
He released her hand and slowly lowered his own, blinking up at Keeper’s teeth. When the dog stepped back, he turned his head toward Emily and said, “That scar on your hand—a burn?”
She nodded. “On an iron.”
“As for ironing shirts?” He peered again at the irregular white scar on her knuckles. “You must have leaned on it.”
“I must have.”
His face and hands showed scratches, but the gash in his side seemed to be his only serious injury. She unfastened the last buttons of his waistcoat to get a better look at the wound, but the blood-soaked tatters of his shirt prevented a clear view. This time he didn’t risk pushing her hand away but groaned, “Oh, let it be, damn you!”
She ignored the profanity; but clearly he would accept no help from her, and in any case his wound would need more expert attention than she could provide. She stood up and brushed dirt and fern fragments off her dress. “I’ll be back with the Sunderlands.”
He grimaced and shook his head. “I suppose I must beg your pardon . . . Miss Emily! But—” He sat up experimentally. “Ah! Save your trouble—I won’t be here.” He winced and grabbed his side, but didn’t lie back down. “Irish?”
“My father is.” She stepped up the bank, closely followed by Keeper. “He came over forty years ago.”
“Forty . . . wait.” Alcuin turned to look up at her, evidently careless of his wound. “The scar on your hand—would your father’s name be Brunty?” In fact her family name was Brontë, and she was startled at the near-accuracy of his guess, but kept her face expressionless. He went on, “Is he aware of Welsh?” Still getting no response, he slumped back down. “No, never mind, child. You wouldn’t be here. Run along to your sheep.”
For a moment Emily was on the point of asking this Alcuin person whether he actually knew something about her family, and what he meant by Is he aware of Welsh—but that would lead to questions and answers: to some unpredictable and certainly unwelcome degree of intimacy with this stranger.
“We may be well over an hour,” she said. “Press your hands on the wound to slow the bleeding.”
His eyes were closed, but he waved at her. “It’s stopped bleeding. Go away, for God’s sake.”
Emily stepped up onto the level ground and scanned the horizons. The bleak landscape still showed no motion except for the heather shaking in waves along the hillsides in the cold wind, and with Keeper at her heels she began walking south with a ground-covering stride.
For twenty minutes she and the dog hurried south, following a path along the east slope of the Middlemoor Clough, and when the path ascended to the highland and eventually to the base of the hill at the crest of which sat Top Withens farmhouse, she paused and looked back across the miles of tan-and-green hills. Ponden Kirk wasn’t visible from here.
Keeper had loped on ahead, and now came trotting back and licked her hand encouragingly.
“A moment, boy,” she told him. She raised her hand and looked at the scar on the back of it. Anyone could guess that it was from a burn—but were the old tooth punctures perceptible too?
One twilight seven years ago a strange dog had got into a fight with Keeper in the churchyard out in front of the parsonage; the animal had resembled Dogues de Bordeau she had later seen in Brussels—a muscular, short-snouted mahogany mastiff—but with a bigger head, and longer legs and toes. In fact it had resembled the dog that had bitten Branwell fourteen years before that.
She bared her teeth now, remembering how she had broken up that fight between Keeper and the other dog. Armed only with a hastily-snatched-up pepper pot, Emily had abandoned her ironing and run down the front steps of the parsonage and vaulted the low churchyard wall, and she had dashed the black powder into the strange mastiff’s face. The creature had retreated, and galloped off across the moors, but not before clamping its jaws on the back of Emily’s hand. She had hurried back to the kitchen, where she washed the wound; and then she had picked up the iron, filled with live coals, and pressed it against the wound for five agonizing seconds.
Remembering it now, she flexed her hand; then looked more closely. She spat on her thumb and bent to rub off a spot of Alcuin’s dried blood on a clump of grass.
“Do you think he’s dying?” she asked Keeper. “He didn’t think he was.”
She straightened and looked at both sides of her hand to be sure no spot of his blood remained; then started up the hill toward Top Withens.
When she led Mr. Sunderland and two of his sons to the beck below the standing stones, Alcuin was gone, as he had told her he would be—though traces of blood on the grass and the prints of his boots bore out Emily’s story. Mr. Sunderland invited her to have midday dinner with his family, but they were all virtually strangers to her, and she dreaded the thought of sitting among them while they tried to engage her in social conversation. It had been a fair ordeal even to approach their gate.
She declined the invitation with reserved politeness, and declined too the subsequent offer that one of Sunderland’s sons should escort her back home.
She and Keeper retraced their long route back to Ponden Kirk, and then across the well-known trails and fields and becks that would take them back at last to the parsonage—though on the way she did stop at the spot where she had first seen Alcuin, and, in spite of Keeper’s evident disapproval, retrieved his peculiar knife.