CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Curzon did not reply to the letter Emily sent him, and one midnight in April an echoing boom from inside the church led to the discovery that the ledger stone had cracked from end to end.
Emily had pulled on her boots and a coat, and she and Keeper followed Patrick down the moonlit walk to the church. They entered cautiously, and when the lantern Patrick was carrying showed the inch-wide split in the stone, they hurried across the street and Patrick pounded on John Brown’s door.
The alarmed sexton quickly mixed up a wheelbarrow full of mortar in his stoneyard, and when the three of them had made their way back into the church, Emily held the lantern while she and her father and Keeper watched the sexton trowel mortar into the length of the crack. None of them needed to ask if the others heard the muffled shifting and grinding under the stone, and Keeper, possibly sniffing some exhalation from below, growled until the last trowel-full was scraped into place.
Patrick was softly saying the Pater Noster, but he raised his voice so that it rang in the high ceiling beams as he pronounced breagh gan ainm—the Old Celtic phrase that meant Lie nameless.
When John Brown had smoothed the mortar flush with the broken edges of the stone, Patrick crouched and used his church key to trace lines in the fresh mortar, connecting the old incised lines that were now interrupted by the crack.
“That won’t do,” Patrick said as he stood up. “John, you’ve got to cut a fresh stone—duplicate those original lines—before sunset.”
John Brown was wiping his hands on a scrap of cloth. “I hope,” he said, “it will do to just lay the new stone over the broken one. I don’t fancy lifting that one.”
“I—don’t know,” said Emily’s father. In the lantern glow he looked very old.
Emily and Keeper walked him back to the parsonage. Charlotte and Anne were peering out from either side of the opened front door, shivering in their nightgowns, and when Emily and their father had got inside and he had carefully re-bolted the door, they all walked back to the kitchen and Charlotte put a pot of water on the range to boil. Tabby called down from upstairs to ask if all was well, and Patrick told her to go back to sleep.
After Emily and their father had described the cracked stone and John Brown sealing it with mortar, Charlotte cocked her head judiciously and began, “It could be that shifts in temperature—”
But Emily interrupted her. “No. We heard the twin moving around underneath.”
“What can we do?” whispered Anne.
“There’ve been no overtures from its twin, the Welsh ghost,” said Patrick. “In years past you have seen the ragged boy manifestation out on the moors, but my gunshots—” He paused and nodded to Emily. “Our gunshots have apparently kept him away from the church and this house since the death of your mother. You children are safe from him. I—”
“He was in this house!” Anne burst out. “Last September, when you and Charlotte were in Manchester! And Emily and Branwell and I saw him on the moors that day, spoke to him! And long before that we apparently wrote promissory notes—”
To Emily’s alarm, Patrick rocked back in his chair, gripping the edge of the table and suddenly pale. “In the house! Visible?”
Emily laid her hand over one of his cold hands. “We banished him. Yes, visible—he takes crows to make up the mass of a body. But Keeper injured him, drove him away.”
“God help me,” said Patrick softly, “I thought the Catholic exorcism in 1821 revoked her invitation.”
Anne cocked her head. “Her invitation?”
“Whose?” asked Emily.
“Ah—your mother didn’t know any better. She saw a barefoot boy in the snow, in the churchyard—it was natural, humane, to invite him in, across the threshold.”
For several seconds none of them spoke.
“The exorcism may have worked,” Emily said, “at least for keeping the thing out of the house. Branwell too saw the boy in the snow, when he was fourteen. And—” She spread the fingers of her free hand.
“How soon,” asked Anne timidly, “do you suppose we could get another Catholic priest out here?”
Charlotte poured tea into four cups and glared at her father. “I really think an Anglican priest—such as yourself!—would be more qualified.”
“I’m afraid I disqualified myself, praying to Minerva all those years ago.” Patrick picked up his teacup and blew across the top of it. “We should pack for a trip to France.”
“What,” said Charlotte, “all of us? Can we even afford passage?”
“No,” Patrick admitted.
“And you can’t abandon your parish,” put in Anne.
“I’m not leaving,” said Emily. “No devils are going to drive me away from where I live.”
Patrick gave her a distracted smile. “You shoot them all, child.” He blinked and turned to Anne. “What promissory notes?”
“That was nothing,” spoke up a new voice from the hall, and Branwell stepped into the kitchen. The loud boom from the church must have awakened him, and he seemed alert. Keeper stood up beside Emily’s chair. Branwell went on, “I’m sure Welsh was only trying to frighten you with that phrase.” To his father he said, distinctly, “When we were children—I was thirteen!—I proposed a game. We hiked to Ponden Kirk and cut our fingers to dab a few drops of blood in the fairy cave at its base. It had no significance.”
“Good God!” exclaimed their father. “Of all the . . . foolhardy . . . !” He shook his head unhappily, and Emily noted his thinning white hair and recalled that he was seventy years old. “I really think we need to cross the sea.”
“Nothing came of it,” Branwell assured him. “Certes the blood is long since washed away.”
“That’s not what you said in September,” ventured Anne.
In the last few seconds Emily’s face had gone cold, and now the backs of her hands tingled. That’s not what Branwell said, she mentally corrected her sister.
“I expect I was trying to frighten you too,” Branwell said with a smile.
Tabby had poured another cup, and Branwell picked up the cup with his right hand. Keeper was staring at him, and when Emily stroked the dog’s thick neck she could feel the vibration of an uncertain growl.
Patrick blinked up at his son. “It was a monstrously foolish thing to do.”
Branwell shrugged and with his left hand patted his father on the shoulder, his fingers flexing. Emily shuddered at the sight of the touch.
“Nothing came of it,” Branwell assured him.
Emily kept her breathing even, and held her own cup with a steady hand. He hasn’t asked what the loud noise was, she thought; or, if he somehow didn’t hear it, why we’re all awake down here.
She met Anne’s eye, and when Branwell was looking at their father she shook her head. We must not discuss these things in front of him, she thought. We’ve said too much here already.
She hoped that Branwell had not heard their father mention having prayed to Minerva.
“It’s late,” she said.
“Far too early to be getting up, at least,” said Charlotte.
“There’s nothing more to be done tonight,” conceded Patrick, sliding his chair back. “I’d relish another couple of hours’ sleep.” He gave Branwell a weary look, no doubt thinking of the two of them going back upstairs to his bedroom, where Branwell still slept on a cot. “Will you lie quiet, and not complain about your insomnia?”
“I’ll be asleep before you are,” said Branwell.
“Papa,” said Emily suddenly, “stay up with me. I—” She racked her mind for a plausible reason to keep her father from being alone with the thing in Branwell’s body. “I want to pray.”
Charlotte gave her a surprised look, but Anne nodded. “It’s what we can do,” she said.
“Of course,” said their father.
Emily thought she saw Branwell repress a shudder. “I’m to my cot,” he said, stepping to the hall doorway. “It’s likely to be a busy day.”
When his son’s footsteps had receded away up the stairs, Patrick rubbed both hands over his face, then let them drop to the table. He peered at Emily.
“Was that Branwell?”
“No,” she said, setting down her cup.
Anne nodded and, to Emily’s surprise, Charlotte said, “I wondered.”
Thunder cracked and rolled out over the dark moors, as if a late echo of the splitting stone, and Emily was reminded of her father’s account of asking Minerva for the armor of the cyclopes. They also made thunderbolts, as Anne had recalled then.
“Where,” asked Patrick in a voice tight with control, “is my son?”
“He’s there,” said Emily quickly, “and these moments of dislocation are uncommon—he can usually resist them. Tomorrow he won’t remember that he came downstairs just now.”
“What . . . personality was that which spoke to us? Am I unhappily correct in my guess?”
“You are,” Emily admitted. “But Welsh was diminished when both Keepers mauled him in September, and until just now I’ve only been able to guess at Welsh’s presence in Branwell—when he’s lost track of a conversation for a few moments.” And once or twice, she thought, given me a momentary and instantly forgotten look of fury.
“Or pretends to understand something Branwell does understand,” said Anne sadly. “Like our old Glass Town stories.”
“That which I greatly feared hath come upon me,” Patrick muttered hollowly. “I hope an exorcism won’t kill my boy.”
Emily quickly walked to the hall and looked up the stairs, and she exhaled in relief to see that the figure of Branwell was not crouched in the shadows, wide-eyed and listening.
She walked back into the kitchen, and shook her head in answer to the alarmed looks the other three gave her.
“Our brother will be back up in the morning, I’m sure,” she said. “I don’t believe Welsh suspects that we’ve seen through his moments of imposture—”
“Or cares,” said Charlotte.
“—and,” Emily went on, “they’re brief. Shorter than they were last year, when Welsh did things like walk in Branwell’s body to the church. We dealt him a setback in September.”
“He might regain his lost ground,” said Anne, “if the twin under the stone gets up. It might force full completion of the pair—full possession of Branwell.”
“Dig out the fresh mortar,” said Charlotte, “pour oil down the crack, and ignite it.”
Emily shook her head. “The Flensing woman was going to awaken it by restoring its bare skull. Fire wouldn’t destroy its bones.”
“Though it would certainly destroy the church,” said Patrick. He turned to Emily. “Both Keepers?”
“One is a ghost,” Emily said. “It attacked Welsh’s ghost, as our Keeper attacked the form he had assembled.”
“Really!” Patrick’s eyebrows were raised. “Yes, that would have to be the ghost of our Keeper’s namesake—the mastiff that killed Welsh in 1771. Of course. It’s a mercy he followed Welsh’s ghost here.” He pushed his chair back from the table. “Is the floor too hard to kneel on? I think prayer is our best recourse tonight.”
Branwell came stumbling down the stairs just as dinner was being served in the parlor at noon, and he grumpily refused anything more than a cup of tea. Emily and her sisters stole glances at him, and found opportunities to nod reassuringly at one another.
Catching a couple of their looks, he ran the fingers of his right hand through his ginger hair, clearly to find out if it was sticking up in an odd way. “I heard an awful boom in the middle of the night,” he said. “Has anyone checked to see if the church tower fell over?”
His tone was uncertain and defensive.
Emily looked at him speculatively. “The ledger stone in the church floor split, from end to end.”
“Oh no,” he whispered, and by his evident dismay Emily knew this was her brother.
Tabby had been told about it as soon as she had come downstairs, and had grumbled at not being told last night. Now as she bustled in to take their aunt’s teapot, she just recited under her breath the second line painted on it: “To die is gain.”
“Amen,” whispered Anne.
Their father had as usual taken his dinner in his room, and when Charlotte and Anne went out front to look at the sparse garden, Branwell took hold of his left wrist and laid that hand limp on the table. “Did I come downstairs last night?” he asked Emily; and when she nodded, he said, “That wasn’t me.”
“I know,” Emily said. We all knew, she thought.
“I wasn’t drunk, that night I set my bed on fire.”
Emily raised her eyebrows.
“I woke up, and I could feel him crowding me out of my self! It was as if a glacier were to push a house off its foundations, but fast. While I still had some flicker of agency, I reached across with the hand I still possess and pulled the candle into the bed.”
He sat back and closed his eyes. His wasted face under his disordered hair looked to Emily like the face of a corpse.
“It worked, that night,” he said hoarsely. “I lost hold of my consciousness, but he recoiled from the sudden pain. I’m sorry you got burned pulling me out of the bed.”
Emily took his right hand and said fiercely, “Keeper and I will kill him before he can take you.”
“How?” He opened his eyes. “Kill the crows he assembles? In September he told me he could gather up grass to show a form.”
“We’ll do it.” She thought of the two Keepers, and wondered if Welsh were eavesdropping. “I don’t know how, but I’ll keep you from him.”
“I think if I were to be freed from him now, from his sustenance, I’d die.”
“I think that’s not unlikely. But you’ll enter eternity as yourself.”
He laughed softly. “Papa should let you preach a sermon.”
She gave him a grudging smile. “I’m half pagan.”
“I like that half.”
She stood up. “The other half is Christian. Pray to God like a madman while you can.”
“How else?” He got to his feet. “I believe my parasite must always be terribly tense—I feel as if I walked a mile last night. Can I have my spectacles? I’d like to read in my room. Maybe even write a bit.” He caught her wary look and added, “In English.”
Word had quickly spread through the village that the ogham-chiseled ledger stone had cracked, and by late afternoon the stone was hardly visible under a drift of wooden and iron crosses and upright lit candles and papers with handwritten prayers on them. After putting out several small fires, Patrick told his daughters that the church might well burn down even without Charlotte’s proposed remedy.
Emily and Keeper set out on their usual hike across the hills and becks and sheep-paths, and she carried the pistol in its case so that she could fire across the haunted landscape and reload several times during the long trek. The two of them walked along the north ridge above the valley where the rain-widened Ponden Clough Beck tumbled along its course, and when the black old monument came in view in the distance, Emily sat down in the heather and reloaded the pistol once again. Before she stood up she automatically tapped the dioscuri knife in its homemade cardboard sheath on her calf.
She and Keeper were level with the plateau, and could have walked around by the north path and stood at the top of Ponden Kirk, but they approached it only to a point from which Emily estimated that the sound of the gunshot would carry to the ancient edifice. She fired the pistol in its direction, then turned back toward home. Heavy clouds were massing on the northern horizon, and she was glad they’d be in before the approaching storm swept over Haworth.
By the time they had walked back to the parsonage the lowering sun was casting vales of shadow between the hills, and as soon as Emily had taken off her coat and exchanged her boots for shoes, Tabby put her to work peeling potatoes for tomorrow’s dinner.
When the daylight faded from the windows, Anne and Charlotte walked back from the parlor with a new issue of Blackwood’s, and Anne noted that Liverpool had lately appointed a Medical Officer of Health for the city.
Emily set a pot of water on the range and said, “I wish the General Board of Health in London would act on Papa’s petitions.”
“Haworth is probably not a priority,” observed Charlotte.
Emily was wondering if this were a night on which Branwell would have succeeded in borrowing a few shillings from their father, and make his way to the Black Bull, when she heard his boots descend the stairs to the hall.
But instead of hurrying down the hall to the front door, Branwell stepped past where Emily sat and pulled open the back door.
“Bad guts,” he muttered, and stepped outside.
Emily understood that he was going to the privy in the back yard, and she was again reminded of the unsanitary arrangements in Haworth.
“It can’t be healthy,” she remarked as she stood up to pour hot water into the teapot, “that our well is level with the churchyard, and the whole village is downhill, downstream, from it.”
She swirled the hot water in the teapot, poured it back into the kettle, and then filled the teapot and measured several spoonfuls of tea leaves into it.
Keeper came in from the hall and nudged her leg.
“What is it, boy?” she asked him.
Anne said suddenly, “What hand did Branwell open the door with?”
Emily’s face went cold even as she replayed it in her mind.
“His left,” she said. And then she was on her feet, kicking off her shoes and snatching her boots and coat. A few moments later she was in the moonlit back yard, with Keeper right beside her.
The privy was empty, its door ajar.
She whispered, “Where are you taking him, damn you?” And then she began running down the path west, toward the open fields and hills.
She was scarcely a hundred feet away from the parsonage when the damp wind carried a reverberating howl from no more than a mile in the distance. Keeper growled but loped along close beside Emily.
She could see the flailing figure of Branwell far ahead, but he was running at a headlong pace she didn’t dare to match on the intermittently moonlit track. Before long she lost sight of him altogether, but she ran on, panting now.
She glimpsed him again as she crested a low rise, but only for a moment—he had stopped beside the tall, solitary Boggarts Green stone, and he stepped to the far side of it, out of her sight.
She reminded herself that it was Welsh that she was pursuing, and she let her pace slow as she approached the standing stone. She hadn’t seen Branwell again since he had disappeared behind it. At last she walked up to the stone and rested one hand against its irregular cold surface. Keeper walked to the far side, then stepped back, cocking his head.
Emily took a deep breath and walked wide around the stone to stand beside him.
And she gasped. She had walked past the Boggarts Green stone countless times over many years, and because it was supposed to be haunted she had always eyed it warily as she passed it—and so she knew as well as she knew anything that it stood in a wide field of low gorse.
But tonight there was a grove of clustered willow trees on this far side of it, and a path that wound out of sight between overhanging branches that did not shake in the night wind that was tossing her hair. The scene seemed to be lit by diffused moonlight.
She was certain that if she stepped back and walked around the other side of the stone, she would see only the ordinary familiar field—but she stared ahead, shivering in fascination.
A moving figure briefly separated itself from the tree silhouettes at the farthest visible extent of the impossible path, and she recognized it as Branwell.
From the corner of her eye she saw Keeper move forward; and at the same time she could see that he remained standing beside her. She looked down and saw that it was the second bullmastiff—the ghost of her Keeper’s namesake—that was walking into the grove.
It’s a ghost road, she thought. But poor Branwell and I have ghost guides tonight.
She ran her fingers through her damp and windblown hair, and then she and her living Keeper followed the ghost dog.
She stepped carefully, staying in the center of the path, for she heard things chittering and slithering back among the curtains of willow branches, and a smell like stagnant water hung in the still air.
It occurred to her to look back—but behind her the path dwindled away between clustered boughs in the spotty moonlight, with no gap opening onto the moor road they had left. She wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. The way out, she thought, if there is one, is forward.
“I’m coming,” she said softly to Keeper, who had paused and now started forward again with Emily following.
Soon reflected firelight glittered on the long willow leaves ahead, and when Emily passed a cluster of trees she was looking through a screen of leaves into a wide, spirally rippled clearing that was dominated by an enormous oak tree in the center. Flaring torches stuck upright in the ground around the border of the clearing showed her many arched openings in the tree’s wide trunk, and expanses where the bark had been cut away to make room for serpentine bas relief carvings, and, on the massive trunk stretching away overhead, balconies shadowed and half-hidden by thick branches.
Branwell stood beside one of the arches at the base of the trunk, beside a man and what appeared to be several children decked in multicolored ribbons, but for a few breaths Emily simply stared in astonishment at the entire scene—the broad clearing in the willow grove, the perimeter torches, the gigantic tree in the center of it all. She didn’t see the ghost dog now, and she clung to the fact that her Keeper was still beside her, as reassurance that she had not somehow lost a big segment of time.
Branwell and his companion—she saw now that it was the sheepherder Adam Wright—were arguing. Emily slowly bent down and drew her dioscuri from the sheath on her calf.
Wright said loudly, “The villagers will kill that body you’re in, if you do it. They love the old curate—”
“They can try,” said Branwell’s voice. “But I will have honor’s due.”
Small creatures nipped at Emily’s boots and crept silently out of her way as she moved across the marshy ground to her left, circling the clearing behind the overhanging boughs. Her boots in the mud seemed to stir up the sulfurous smell. Keeper padded behind her, and though he shook his paws and snapped at the creatures in the mud, he knew better than to growl.
Pausing to peer through the willow fronds, Emily saw now that the childlike figures standing around the two men were in fact wrinkled and bald, shrunken and hunched as if with unimaginable age.
“I saw a sturdy oak that spun the gyre,” piped one of them, and another replied, “I saw a tower big as the moon and higher.” Emily believed they were lines from an old nursery rhyme.
“Without some bones we can’t crawl off to bed,” said a third, and the first speaker added, “Nothing’s been killed! Aren’t we to be fed?”
Emily touched Keeper’s collar; those lines had not been from any nursery rhyme. Only now did she notice the knives in knitted sheaths that swung on ribbons around the little people’s necks.
Wright ignored the little figures and went on, “Last night the stone broke! And you’re here, in a body! It’s happening, finally. This morning you sent for the head—it will be here in two days, three at most.” Wright waved his hands in the air. “Kill the old preacher after you and your twin are restored and reunited! Then you’ll rule, extend this leapfrog grove to the Lancashire border, Manchester, Lincolnshire—England entire!”
In the torchlight Branwell’s face kinked in an unfamiliar smile. “How our London allies would strive to prevent that! They’ve flourished this century and a half, warming themselves over our banked fire.” He shook his head. “But after my twin and I are united in one will, I won’t care about honor.”
“Aye, because you’ll be wiser then! Three days—”
“On this boy,” Branwell said, slapping his own chest, “I fulfil honor by taking his body and shackling him powerless in it forever. But his father is the son of the Brunty that killed me.”
“Not long ago you wanted to let him live.”
“Yes, I hoped to see him live on in disgraced blind solitude after his children had been possessed like this one, as they promised to me with their blood, or killed—him withering alone, his line ended in defeat.”
“And that’s still—” began Wright.
“But his daughters yet live, free! I told his daughter Emily that his life would be spared if she would willingly fulfil her blood-pledge and surrender to me—but she refused me, diminished me, with a gunshot, in reply! And now the stone is split, and I can’t put off honor’s demands. The father must simply be killed.”
“I saw two dogs, a woman hiding too,” spoke up one of the withered figures, and it pointed a twig-like finger directly at Emily and went on, “Blood for the roots and bones for us to chew!”
Branwell’s body and Wright had not paid attention to the little man’s last singsong declaration, but Emily knew that the creature would momentarily succeed in making her presence known to them.
She dug the toes of her boots into the mud and then sprang forward through the curtain of willow fronds into the clearing, and she had taken two long, running steps toward the tree before Branwell’s head turned toward her.
Not wanting to kill her suppressed brother, she feinted with her knife toward his belly—and at the last moment, as Branwell’s hands moved to block the thrust, she swung her arm up and drove the two points of her knife at his forehead.
As the blades rebounded from his skull, she spun to face Wright, and with a lunge she speared his defensively outstretched palm.
Keeper had bounded into the clearing with Emily, and now he shuddered and was again two dogs. The bigger mastiff, Emily’s, leaped at Wright and bore him to the ground, while the ghost dog sprang at Branwell. The dwarfish figures hopped and tumbled away.
Bright blood ran down Branwell’s face from Emily’s strike at his head. He blindly lashed out with a fist that collided hard with Emily’s shoulder, sending her rolling to the mossy ground.
A piercing three-note whistle blew a spray of blood from Branwell’s mouth, and Emily was thrown onto her back when the ground under her shifted. She clutched at the soil as it rocked and continued to move.
She sat up dizzily when it stopped, and blinked at the figures of Branwell and Wright and the dogs that leaped at them, all now twenty feet away, separated from her by a ragged-edged chasm. An upwelling of very cold air behind her made her look over her shoulder, and she saw that another wide fissure had opened close at her back.
Keeper had stepped away from Wright and now stood at the edge of the first chasm, bracing his legs and lowering his great head, clearly ready to try to jump across to her.
“No!” she screamed at him, and he stood back, obedient but clearly unhappy.
Branwell was sitting with his arms crossed over his head, and the ghost Keeper turned away from him. The ghost dog ran to the edge of the wide hole and jumped—
—just as the ground gave way beneath Emily and she rolled into the chasm at her back. Her clutching hands tore up fistfuls of damp soil, but she was falling. The ghost Keeper’s paws touched the edge receding above her, and then he was plunging down into darkness with her.