CHAPTER THREE
“I expect Emily has told you about her adventure today by Ponden Kirk.”
Patrick had joined his daughters in the parlor, where the windows also faced the churchyard. Emily was reclining on the green leather couch against the far wall, and Charlotte and Anne sat in two of the chairs at the table. Old Patrick stood by the entrance hall doorway.
“You know I was born in Ireland,” he said, “but you know little more than that. There has seemed no need to trouble you with the reasons why I left there.”
He touched Anne’s head as he walked past her, and stopped in front of the windows and took a deep breath. “Brontë is not an Irish name.”
“It was Brunty,” said Emily with sudden conviction, “before.”
He smiled faintly in her direction. “Yes. When I arrived in Liverpool I was twenty-five, and I’d been admitted to St. John’s College at Cambridge as a sizar: a student so poor that the college would cover his fees. Homespun clothes, thick Irish accent, I—” His blind gaze was directed over the heads of his daughters, as if seeing the unprepossessing young man he had been then. “And I . . . had reason to be frightened.”
Charlotte and Anne shifted in their chairs.
“Brunty sounds like some Papist subsisting on nothing but beer and potatoes,” said Charlotte. “I’m glad the Brontë name was in the papers at the time, to suggest it.”
“And the umlaut is nice,” put in Anne. “Otherwise everybody would pronounce it as Brawnt.”
Patrick shook his head. “It really had nothing to do with Lord Nelson. It was the old name.”
The old name? thought Emily. She recalled that Brontë was the town in Sicily of which Nelson had been made honorary Duke, but that didn’t seem relevant.
Patrick went on, “When I landed in Liverpool I went directly to Chester, a few miles to the south. It’s at the end of one of the old Roman roads, and—God help me!—there’s an ancient shrine to Minerva there.”
Anne looked at him sharply, though of course he couldn’t see it; and it was Charlotte who cleared her throat and asked, with forced lightness, “What’s Minerva to you, or you to Minerva?”
Emily felt only a liberating sort of excitement. Throughout her life, their father had displayed eccentricities, superstitions unique to him—like the long cravat that he had his daughters cut up and reassemble several times a year, and firing his pistol over the churchyard every morning at dawn!—and even as a child she had suspected them to be precautions against unearthly misfortunes.
“I was . . . pursued, from Ireland!” Patrick said. “I thought I had left it behind, but it . . . rode across the Irish Sea on me, in me, in my blood!”
Emily sat up. Her father might conceivably have been talking about a disease, but that wouldn’t have sent him running to a pagan shrine.
“It?” said Anne.
Patrick raised his head and went on more quietly. “Our faith admits the existence of demons.”
“And,” Anne went on hesitantly, “Minerva?”
Patrick took a deep breath and let it out. “It was, in plain fact, an old pagan demon that I had inadvertently brought with me, and it—wanted revenge. On every Brunty son. So when I should have put my trust in our Lord, in my fright I sought armor from a pagan goddess. I was young, alone in a foreign land!” He waved a hand out in front of him. “Emily?”
Emily shifted on the couch. “Yes, Papa?”
“Do you remember who made Minerva’s impregnable armor?”
Charlotte slapped the table. “What do you mean, an old pagan demon? Revenge? For what? What—do you mean?”
“Of course, forgive me.” Patrick pulled out a chair and sat down. “In 1710,” he said, “my great-grandfather, Hugh Brunty, was on a cattle-boat from Liverpool to Warrenpoint in County Down.” It was clear that he was unburdening himself of a story he had long kept from them, and he raised a shaky, spotted hand to stave off inevitable impatience.
“Halfway across the Irish Sea,” he went on, “a stowaway child was found aboard—a dark little boy in rags, and some of the passengers guessed he must be Welsh. The crew said it was a devil, and wanted to throw the child overboard—but my great-grandfather, in his perilous compassion, intervened, and, for lack of anything else to do with the boy, adopted him. Through general carelessness and procrastination, the boy’s name became simply Welsh.”
Emily shivered, remembering what wounded Alcuin had asked her this morning: Is he aware of Welsh?
“As Welsh grew up, he came to control old Hugh,” Patrick went on, “and after Hugh’s death he became legal owner of the Brunty farm. His foster brothers resented it and tried to kill him, and they were convicted of attempted murder and transported to the colonies. Then Welsh married Hugh’s daughter, and, by nature unable to father children himself, adopted one of his now-fatherless nephews-in-law. That nephew was my father, also named Hugh Brunty.”
Not far outside the window, Keeper voiced an uncharacteristic howel, and they all jumped. Emily stood up and hurried to the window; her great mastiff was standing in the walkway between the house and her garden, facing out over the churchyard. As she watched, Keeper turned around twice clockwise and sat down, though even through the window she could see that the fur was bristling on his back.
Emily stood for several more seconds by the window, but there were no sounds of commotion from down the street, and Keeper didn’t stir.
She walked back to the couch, and when she sat down she shrugged. “Spirits abroad.”
“My father had a dog named Keeper,” said Patrick. “You recall I suggested the same name for yours. Welsh killed that one. Welsh had begun to . . . take over my father, as he had done—”
“Possess,” corrected Charlotte, grudgingly.
“Yes. By this time Welsh’s human body was old and had begun to fail, and my father was just sixteen—but he resisted possession. He and his Keeper managed to kill Welsh’s body, though in the fight Keeper perished, valiantly. Young Hugh Brunty fled, and five years later married my mother.”
For several seconds none of them spoke. Then Anne asked, “Did he fire a gun over a churchyard every morning?”
Patrick glanced toward her voice. “We lived in a one-room thatched cottage, and he could no more afford a gun than a . . . a gold watch. What he had was a kiln for drying corn; people there in Ballynaskeagh grew their own corn, and so many of them came to our cottage to have it dried that his kiln was roaring night and day. I’m certain he had consulted a local witch-woman, or even a priest, for devil-repelling herbs and incenses to add to the fire.”
He lapsed into silence, staring at nothing.
“But you left Ireland,” prompted Emily.
Her father nodded. “I was a teacher at a village school near our cottage. My students were poor—the fee was a penny a week, and a turf of peat every Monday for heating the schoolroom. I enjoyed it, I was doing the students good . . . but one morning there was a new face at the back of the room. A little dark boy, in rags. When I met his eye, he smiled and hurried outside . . . I followed him out, and he—”
“—Was an optical illusion,” supplied Emily with a shiver. He fragmented and dispersed as a flock of crows, she thought.
Her father looked up at her. “Yes, I suppose that’s what he was.” He pushed his chair back and stood up, and went on more strongly, “I saw him several more times, standing outside our house at dusk, but the corn-kiln was reliably throwing its charmed smoke. And sometimes it was a big ungainly dog out there . . .”
“So you crossed the sea,” said Charlotte, clearly more than half believing that her father was delusional, “here to England—but it came with you.”
“Yes. It returned here—I inadvertently brought it back. The demonic child was found on the boat from Liverpool, remember. And, God help me, back to Liverpool I delivered it—I saw it, him, on the dock when I disembarked, and he met my eye and smiled.” Patrick spread his hands. “And I knew there was an old Roman shrine to Minerva nearby. I was terrified. It seemed foolish to hope that some Anglican priest could provide much protection, but a pagan goddess . . . !” He dropped his hands. “So, Emily—do you remember who made Minerva’s impregnable armor?”
“In Vergil’s Aeneid it was the cyclopes—let’s see, Steropes was one, and Pyracmon, and—” She stopped.
“And Brontes,” finished Charlotte. “The third cyclops was named Brontes! You sought protection of, took the name of—gave us the name of!—a pagan monster?”
“I’m afraid I prayed to all three, but yes, I adapted our name to the name of that one. I dropped the S when I signed the registry at the college, and the old Brunty name was dismissed as a transcription error.”
“And,” asked Charlotte, her voice tight with the effort of maintaining a respectful tone to her father, “have the cyclopes provided you with their armor?”
“No. All I took away was the name.”
“They also made thunderbolts,” ventured Anne. “And when we were children watching thunderstorms you used to point to where lightning would strike next.”
Patrick smiled and shook his head. “Hah. When I was right, it was sheer chance; though I recall it impressed you children.”
Emily cocked an eyebrow. She knew the particular kink of that smile—her father’s statement had not been entirely honest.
“But you did exorcise the Welsh thing,” said Anne, “somehow?”
“Emily’s wounded man today didn’t seem to think so,” said Charlotte, “if Emily didn’t dream the whole encounter—a man who could barely crawl one moment hurrying beyond sight in the next!”
Emily knew Charlotte believed her story and was trying to convince herself otherwise. Emily smiled at her.
“I did,” said their father. His forehead was dewed with sweat, and Emily thought he would like to unwind the long cravat that hid his throat and supported his chin. “Exorcise it. Finally. Imposed restraints, at least—”
“That winter when Mama was dying,” interrupted Charlotte, “you dragged the chairs from her room and sawed them to pieces out in the yard. And you burned her hearth-rug.”
“You were three years old,” protested Patrick, as if it was unfair that she should remember it. He groped his way back to the table and leaned forward, pressing his palms on it. “I had no reason to believe that—” He straightened and moved away, and Emily saw the faint outlines of his hands in steam on the polished table surface. “Those were precautions, against the remote possibility . . .”
“That something had been in her room and sat in the chairs,” finished Anne mournfully, “and stood on the rug.”
Their father shook his head, then reluctantly nodded. “I thought I had been doing enough to keep him restrained, but after your mother’s death I actually went to the extreme of getting a Catholic priest out here to do a formal Papist exorcism, in the churchyard! And for an instant the priest and I both saw the figure of the boy appear, standing on the wall! It seemed to convulse as the priest intoned his Latin prayers, and then it fell on the other side of the wall, and was gone when we went to look. And, in the years since, there has been no sign of him.”
“A Papist!” said Charlotte. “You’re an Anglican priest. Why didn’t you do it yourself?”
“I did, I did!—with no result. The Papists have had more practice.” He turned in Emily’s direction. “Your wounded man by Ponden Kirk clearly knew something of our family history, but it’s all moot now, you see.”
Except perhaps that our sisters Elizabeth and Maria both died of “consumption” four years later, thought Emily, at the ages of eleven and nine; and that several times in the years since, I’ve seen the figure of the dark boy, which breaks up into a flock of crows; and you don’t know about Branwell and Anne and me leaving our blood in the fairy cave at the foot of Ponden Kirk.
And I believe you know something about that double-bladed knife.
She would ask him about that in private. Now she stood up from the couch and said, “And teatime is upon us. Anne, I could use your help in the kitchen.”
Anne and Charlotte both stood up, and Patrick started toward the hallway door. “I’ll have mine in my study,” he said.
As always, thought Emily.
+ + +
Branwell sat on the upholstered bench that ran along the wall adjacent to the fireplace, staring into the low blue flames dancing over the coals. He was for the moment alone in this alcove off the main room of the Black Bull, and he sighed, catching the warm smells of beer and tobacco smoke and lamp oil. Mr. Sugden, the landlord, would not ask him to leave, but neither would he advance Branwell any more credit, and among the few Haworth citizens in the tavern at this early hour there was no one likely to buy him a drink.
Every few minutes there came the creak of the front door opening, followed by a sweep of chilly early-spring air. A few minutes ago he had heard a carriage or wagon stop outside, and when the tavern door had been opened the breeze had carried the distant howl of a dog along with the swampy smell of the mid-street gutter.
Branwell heard one pair of boots enter, then muted conversation from the front room. Now a woman in a tweed coat and a long dark skirt stepped around the corner and crossed to the fire, drawing a woolen scarf from around her narrow shoulders; and he dismissed his vague impression that he recognized her. She was carrying a big brown leather valise like a doctor’s bag, and set it on the table against the opposite wall. A scent of mimosa curled in the air around her.
She looked directly at him, and he pushed his spectacles up on his nose to see her more clearly.
Her face was leaner than the half-remembered image in his mind, though her bound-up hair was correspondingly dark, but it wasn’t until she walked up to where he sat, and poked his forehead with a finger, that his chest chilled in excited recollection. His right palm sent a tingle through his arm to the shoulder.
She lowered her hand, and Branwell bobbed his head vigorously to show that he remembered.
“You,” she said quietly. “I’ve wondered when we’d see you again. I assume you too are here because of the one-eyed Catholic.”
“Yes,” said Branwell instantly, not having any idea of what she was talking about; for here seemed to be a chance to retrieve one of his great missed opportunities: his cowardly flight, ten years ago, from this woman and the Reverend Farfleece and . . . power, dominance . . . personal importance!
He had been a member of the local Masonic lodge for nine years now, and it occurred to him that her enigmatic statement might be the first part of a recognition exchange, in which case his reply couldn’t have been the right one—but her expression hadn’t changed. Evidently it had been a genuine question. He must bluff, figure out what she meant.
She sat down beside him, and in spite of everything he sat up straighter and stroked his scanty chin-beard and wondered if she found him attractive.
She snapped her fingers. “Northangerland.”
“That’s right.” It warmed Branwell to acknowledge the name. He looked at her and raised his eyebrows.
She cleared her throat. “I am Mrs. Flensing.” She went on, in an accent Branwell thought was vaguely Continental, “Of course really he had two eyes, like all of them these days. I think he was at Ponden Kirk to die by his own hand and defile the place, but when the regent lord of the tribe attacked him, he changed his mind—defended himself with a dioscuri.”
Branwell’s mind leaped from dioscuri, which he knew was a Greek term for the mythological twins Castor and Pollux, to twins to the double-bladed knife Emily had dropped. Defended himself—“The knife,” he said, trying to sound confident.
“Yes. You knew that the regent—chief among the saints!—was killed in that affray?”
“No,” ventured Branwell. Remembering Emily’s return to the parsonage a couple of hours ago, he asked, “What became of the, er, dioscuri?”
“The murderer took it away with him, I suppose. Are you so afraid? He must have been sorely wounded himself.”
“No no, of course not, it’s just—knives like that are uncommon. Worth noting, when you come across one of them.”
“True. Only one purpose, conflicted wound response. This man has long been perceived as a possible threat, and I had followed him from London to an estate outside Allerton.” She exhaled in evident frustration,“But he killed two people there last night, and eluded me in the ensuing confusion. What do you know about him?”
Branwell felt a drop of sweat roll down his ribs under his shirt. Emily had been evasive—tellingly evasive!—in front of him. She’d said that she and Keeper walked west, and east again, and found the dioscuri knife on a path. This woman had said that the “one-eyed Catholic” meant to “defile the place” with his suicide.
“Just that a man with a knife like that was seen on the moors west of the parsonage here,” Branwell said. “Today. Uh, in the area of Ponden Kirk, as you say.” His face was hot. “I assume it was the . . . the one-eyed Catholic.” He ground his teeth—this was pathetic.
Mrs. Flensing frowned at him and stood up. “I gather you know nothing.”
“My sister,” Branwell burst out, “went walking on the moors this morning, and came back with a dioscuri, and blood on her shirt. She didn’t say where she’d been or what she’d seen.”
Mrs. Flensing sat down again. “Was she injured? Bitten?”
“Bitten? No. It didn’t seem to be her own blood.”
Mrs. Flensing gripped his wrist tightly. “You must learn from her what she saw, what she did, how she got the knife. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, certainly,” Branwell assured her, though he wondered how much of the old intimacy with any of his sisters still endured.
“I assume she has not been baptized.”
“Of course she has. Our—Oh! No, not with a—” He poked his right palm with two fingers. Racking his mind for anything else that might hold Mrs. Flensing’s precious attention, he added, “She was bitten once, by a—a sort of dog.” Though she cauterized the bite, he added mentally.
Mrs. Flensing stiffened. “Ah? Out on these moors . . .” She gave him a fierce look. “Do you mean what you appear to tell me? What sort of dog?”
Emily hadn’t described the dog that had bitten her, so Branwell cast his mind back to the day he himself had been bitten by a strangely acting and perhaps mad dog.
He had been about nine years old, and to impress his sisters he had approached the misshapen animal and extended his hand to it; and its blunt head had darted out and cut his wrist with its teeth. The creature had immediately gone loping away over a hill, and Branwell had bound up his wrist himself and told his sisters to say nothing about it. The wound had been slight and had healed within a day, but the invasive fright of the encounter had so interfered with his sleep for the next month that his father had allowed him to stop attending the local village school.
“Big, bigger than a bullmastiff,” he told Mrs. Flensing, suppressing a shiver even now, “with a short, flat black face, and long legs and toes. Coarse sparse hair, like a pig . . . and,” he recalled, “its growl, she said its growl was like a baby crying. An enormous baby, you understand.”
Mrs. Flensing was breathing deeply. “I meant to act alone, tonight, but three aligned souls will assure success. We must have your sister too. Where does she live?”
“At the—right here in the village.”
“Excellent. I imagine there’s a room at this establishment for private meetings?” When he nodded, she reached into her coat pocket and handed him half a dozen shillings. “Reserve it for tomorrow night. I’ll meet you then, an hour after sunset. You will bring your sister with you. Before anything else, she must be baptized. You must help me persuade her.” And she said again, “Do you understand me?”
Suddenly Branwell was afraid that assenting to the woman’s questions carried some actual consequence, like signing a contract. But Mrs. Flensing was staring into his eyes, and he did his best to assume the character of Northangerland, the boldly amoral hero of his stories. Northangerland can do this, he told himself.
He managed to pronounce the word “Yes.” He cleared his throat. “And what place,” he went on more steadily, “is there for me in this company of . . . ours?”
She gave him a speculative look. “A high one, perhaps. Do you know this village?”
“I live here too,” Branwell admitted.
“I see. Well, you can advise me. Attend now, as you value your future, and believe.” She stood up and crossed to the table against the opposite wall, and her hand lightly touched the big leather bag. “There is a grave here,” she said softly, “and the body under the stone suffered an amputation long ago. It must remain . . . not fully whole, for now. But the tribe, the shadow they cast, was made weaker by the murder today, and so the body’s integrity must be more nearly restored, in order that our . . . wellsprings here in the north may not falter irreparably.”
Seeing his blank incomprehension, she went on, “The body under the stone is not precisely dead. When its head is brought near to its body, its identity will to some extent respond, arc across the gap between them, restore the potency that the regent’s death compromised.”
Branwell wondered why Mrs. Flensing didn’t want the thing fully restored; and he remembered Reverend Farfleece’s talk of their “biune” god, the two persons of which were presently separated. The young clergyman had said that the goal of his order was the reuniting of them, but he hadn’t seemed eager to see it happen any time soon. Could the thing under the stone be one half of their two-person god?
Mrs. Flensing glanced at the doorway to the bar, then unbuckled the bag and spread it open. She beckoned to Branwell, and he stood up unsteadily and crossed to where she stood. He looked down into the bag.
Only after she had closed the bag and he had tottered back to the bench was he able to make sense of what he had seen. The rippled ivory oval was the top of a big misshapen skull, and the wide opening below one end was where a nose or snout might once have been. He had only been able to see the outward curves of long teeth.
Branwell was dizzy and afraid he might vomit, but in this moment he didn’t doubt what Mrs. Flensing was saying. This was magic, sorcery, necromancy—forbidden secrets!—and he, negligible onetime railway clerk and tutor, was an initiate!
Mrs. Flensing rejoined him on the bench. “The body,” she said, “is under the floor of the church in this village, under a ledger stone marked with certain grooves. You must show me a place, ideally in the church itself, where that bag can bide undiscovered. Do you know the interior of the building?”
“Yes. Thoroughly.”
“Good. And your sister’s baptized presence and cooperation will be enormously beneficial.”
Branwell tried to imagine Emily cooperating in anything she didn’t want to do—but Mrs. Flensing bent to peer into his face, and he forced himself not to flinch.
After several seconds she nodded and reached into an inner pocket of her coat, and pulled out a flat leather case. She pressed the catch to open it, and Branwell saw six small glass vials held down by segments of a black ribbon. She pushed one free and held it out to him.
He took it. It was cold, unsurprisingly; and it seemed to contain some black fluid that had coated the inside of the glass.
“Do you have a spare pair of spectacles?” she asked.
There was the pair he had worn as a boy, long outgrown, its hinges rusted from having once been left out overnight. He was fairly sure he knew where they were in his room.
“Yes.”
“Tomorrow,” she told him, “when the sun is up, rub a film of this on the lenses; walk around for half an hour wearing them—but stay in the village, don’t go out onto the moors. Wear them a bit more every day.”
“What, uh—” He hesitated, unsure if he should admit to not knowing what the stuff was.
She cocked an eyebrow. “Dragon’s blood, devil’s tears, Gehenna mud, what do you care?”
“Uh, not,” Branwell admitted.
“And you will be here tomorrow, with your sister, an hour after sunset.”
“Yes.”
Mrs. Flensing stood up in one smooth motion. She draped the scarf around her shoulders, picked up the leather bag, and strode out of the room. He heard the tavern door open and close. A few moments later there was the rattle of a coach getting under way.
Branwell turned to look again into the fire.
And what place is there for me in this company of ours?
A high one, perhaps.
A week ago he had heard that a village girl named Agatha, one of Charlotte’s Sunday School students, was being treated for cholera, and on impulse he had decided to visit her. He had stayed with the girl for half an hour, and read to her from the Psalms . . . and when he returned to the parsonage, Charlotte had asked him why he seemed sad.
He had told her about his visit to little Agatha—and Charlotte had given him a look that had hurt him profoundly: the sister who had always been his closest friend and confidant, his onetime collaborator in writing stories of the imaginary land of Angria, stories which they had often signed WT or UT for “we two” or “us two”—had looked at him with an expression of scornful skepticism. It had been woundingly apparent that she didn’t believe he was any longer a person who would bestir himself to comfort a sick child.
He looked away from the fire now and stood up, clenching his fists. What do I owe any of them, anymore? he thought—Northangerland doesn’t need any of them.
The tavern’s door squeaked open again, and in the entryway he heard the hearty voice of John Brown, his father’s sexton. Northangerland or not, Branwell was too frightened of Mrs. Flensing to spend one of her shillings on drink for himself, but John Brown would certainly be willing to buy him a glass of gin. Or two.