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CHAPTER SEVEN

Emily was waiting in the parlor for the sound of Branwell’s clumping steps on the stairs. She was snapping her fingers and reminding herself to breathe deeply. God only knew when she had last been inside the Black Bull—her uneasiness with anyone besides the family and Tabby was such that she seldom walked the three hundred feet downhill to the village at all, and she didn’t even like to meet the postman when he approached the parsonage. When she ventured out from under its roof it was always west, across the lonely open moors, with no company but Anne, often, and Keeper, always.

And this evening she was to go out and meet this damned woman—no doubt literally damned!—who clearly wanted to somehow augment the thing under the ledger stone in the church! The thing which her father had said was the halfway-dead twin of the Welsh ghost, which itself was hardly all the way dead.

Branwell hadn’t heard their father’s story, so he didn’t know the significance of the woman’s request to have that unholy skull placed in the church. But he had evidently had some uncanny encounter out at Ponden Kirk last night, after his conversation with her; and it had scared him so badly that he was willing to cajole his own sister into getting involved.

I told her about you, and I said I’d introduce you.

At the age of twenty-nine, Branwell was a broken man. But he was broken because he had tested himself against the outside world—as art student, portrait painter, tutor, even railway clerk—and had proved himself to be weak, insufficient. Emily too had tried dealing with the outside world, in short stints as student and teacher, and she too had retreated at last to home. The difference between them, Emily knew, was that Branwell tormented himself with his lost opportunities, while she was entirely content with the life of housework and her writing and the seasonal changes in the infinite countryside.

Of course Branwell couldn’t have helped but fall under the woman’s spell.

This all seemed to have started yesterday morning, with Alcuin Curzon apparently killing a werewolf out by Ponden Kirk. Emily wished she had never found him out there, and at the same time wished he had not left.

Now she heard Branwell on the stairs. She stood up and pulled her wool coat over her white silk blouse; the blouse’s sleeves were snug on her forearms and baggy by her shoulders, and she knew from reading the Leeds Intelligencer that it was long out of style, but she liked it. Her long skirt reached down to her boot tops, and the cuffs of the woolen gloves she pulled on overlapped the coat cuffs. She picked up her knitted handbag, and she held the fabric bunched in her fist instead of letting the bag swing by its cord, for it was very heavy.

Branwell came down the stairs at last, and Emily stepped into the hall. Her brother was wearing a frock coat of their father’s that was too long in the sleeves, and gray wool trousers and his good pair of black boots. She reflected that in any sophisticated company the two of them would be a laughable spectacle, and she wondered how this skull-toting woman would appraise them.

When she opened the front door, Keeper came padding up to them from the kitchen. His muscular bulk seemed to take up a third of the width of the hall, and Emily knuckled his head affectionately.

Keeper followed them out into the cold evening wind on the front steps, and Branwell said, “Good lord, he can’t come along!”

“He goes or I don’t,” said Emily. “Men bring their dogs into the tavern with them, don’t they?”

“Not—so big.” When she didn’t move, he spread his arms and bobbed his head. “Very well! Just see that he doesn’t bite anybody.”

“Only if there’s a necessity.” Emily and Keeper stepped down to the pavement, and after more exasperated gesturing Branwell followed.

On the walk to Main Street, Branwell shivered and glanced anxiously at the dark churchyard, several times pulling off his spectacles to rub them with his scarf, but Emily walked along briskly, taking confidence from the bracing cold air. Her right hand was on Keeper’s collar, and the dog growled at the churchyard as they passed it.

Abruptly Branwell asked, “Oh—I meant to ask—how did you get that knife? The one you dropped in the kitchen yesterday.”

Emily suspected that the mysterious woman had told him to ask her that question. She kept the sadness out of her voice as she answered, “I found it on a path, as I said.”

“But—and there was blood on your shirt sleeve. What happened out there?”

She laughed. “I found an injured hawk. I tried to help it, but it wasn’t as badly hurt as it seemed, and flew away.” True enough, she thought, after a fashion.

Branwell just shook his head and kept walking.

The Black Bull was a two-story brick building that had been a coaching inn in the sixteenth century. Emily had never before seen it by night; the lanterns that hung by the entryway threw a golden light across the street’s paving stones, and when Branwell pulled open the door and held it while she stepped inside, the air was warm, lively with loud conversation and the smells of roast beef and tobacco smoke. The lamplit room was wide, and crowded with men at tables or standing by the bar, and many of them waved and called to Branwell—it was all hopelessly foreign to her, but she found herself sympathizing with Branwell’s nightly retreat to this place.

At least one voice was raised in protest against a big dog coming in, but several others called, “Nah, it’s just old Keeper,” and the objection was overruled.

Branwell’s face was red, and he was already sweating. He shrugged out of his coat and hung it on one of the few open hooks along the left-side wall, and Emily stuffed her gloves into her pocket and hung her coat over his.

“I’ve reserved the snug,” Branwell said into her ear, and he pushed her forward into the noisy main room. “All the way at the back.”

He stepped ahead, and she and Keeper followed him in a winding course between tables and groups of men. Emily nodded civilly to several of them whom she recognized from her father’s Sunday services; they nodded back, in some evident surprise to see the curate’s reclusive daughter here. Branwell greeted nearly everyone they passed, with a joviality that surprised Emily; clearly her brother was a different person here than at home. Keeper stayed by Emily’s side as they moved through the room, forcing some patrons to move their chairs, and paid no attention to any of them.

Branwell slid open a door in the far wall and stepped though, and when Emily and Keeper had followed him he slid the door closed, effectively shutting out the racket of conversations.

This chamber was much smaller than the main room, but two oil lamps on the long polished table threw an amber radiance across six comfortably spaced armchairs and a tall, glass-fronted cabinet displaying a variety of bottles and glasses. Emily was peripherally aware of wainscotted walls and framed prints, but her attention was fixed on the woman standing behind one of the chairs.

A coat and scarf and a big brown leather valise on the table clearly belonged to her. She was as tall as Emily, several inches taller than Branwell, and her snuff-colored skirt and blouse emphasized her dark hair. A scent of mimosa prevailed over old smells of cigars and furniture polish.

Her glittering brown eyes were fixed on Emily’s. Emily made herself stare back with no expression. Keeper stood rigid by her waist, and she curled her fingers more tightly around his collar.

“Mrs. Flensing,” said Branwell with nervous formality, “may I present my sister, Miss Emily Brontë; Emily, Mrs. Flensing.”

Emily might have reflexively curtseyed, but Mrs. Flensing’s eyes had widened, and Emily hesitated, standing straight.

The woman stared at her for several seconds, then turned to Branwell. “Brunty?” she asked.

“Brontë,” spoke up Emily, rolling the R slightly. “It’s Italian.” She didn’t glance at Branwell.

“That’s right,” he said, waving their remarks aside, perhaps not having heard them. “I was telling Emily,” he said quickly, “that your family owns a publishing company—Emily writes,” he added, turning to his sister, “don’t you?” After a moment he added, “Could we all sit?”

Mrs. Flensing hadn’t taken her eyes off Emily. “Take,” she said, “the dog out of here.”

“We’re away, then,” said Emily. “It was nice meeting you, Mrs. Flensing.”

Branwell threw himself down in one of the chairs. He looked at his boots and waved a hand over his head. “I’m sorry! It’s both of them or neither!”

Mrs. Flensing nodded slowly, looking from Emily to Keeper and back. “You’ll pardon me then,” she said, “if I take a precaution which is, I’m sure, unnecessary.”

From a pocket in her skirt she drew a knife; Emily recognized it as a duplicate of Curzon’s.

“Now,” the woman went on, sinking carefully into the chair next to Branwell’s, “as your brother says, my family does own a London publishing company, and we would certainly give serious consideration to any production of yours. From what your brother has said, I’m confident that we have a future together.”

Emily nodded, doubting it and wondering what the woman’s accent was. She hung her handbag on the back of a chair across the table from the other two, and slowly sat down. With her left hand she held Keeper’s collar to keep him from standing up with his paws on the table.

“But first of all,” said Mrs. Flensing, with a tight smile, “I must note that we regard our writers as members of our publishing family, and we indulge in an old custom, dating back to the days when Swift and Addison were among our clients. No doubt it will strike you as silly.” She raised the knife. “A prick to the palm.”

“It doesn’t hurt,” said Branwell.

Emily was sure now that the woman had no connection at all with any publishing company.

“And a relic to be deposited at our church,” Emily said, with a wave toward the leather bag on the table.

“Oh,” said Mrs. Flensing. “Yes. A small thing. Your brother needn’t have mentioned it.” From the corner of her eye Emily saw Branwell flinch and open his mouth; but Mrs. Flensing went on, “As you say, it’s a relic, and my family would like it deposited in a church.”

“May I see it?”

“No, my dear. It’s . . . a sacred object, and we prefer—”

“It’s the skull of a monster,” said Emily.

“Emily!” wailed Branwell. “I never—”

Emily felt Keeper tense under her hand. Mrs. Flensing stared at her blankly for a few seconds, then laughed softly. “Your brother chooses to see what he fears. There are no monsters.”

As she spoke she reached into the pocket of her coat on the table, and pulled out a flat case. Branwell stiffened, but when the woman opened it Emily saw that it contained a row of narrow green cigars. Mrs. Flensing lifted one out, sniffed it, and then tucked it between her lips.

She pulled one of the lamps closer. “What you have to consider,” she said as she lifted the glass chimney and leaned forward to puff the cigar alight from the lamp flame, “is”—and the syllable was a twist of smoke—“extension of perspective, and vitality. Ah, what can the woman mean, eh?” The glass chimney clinked back into place and she leaned back. “Something frightening? Well, yes, if you choose to be frightened by wider horizons.”

She exhaled a plume of smoke, and the aroma was not that of burning tobacco. The smell reminded Emily of heather and clay and wet stone; sharp in her nostrils, even astringent, but as invigorating as a cold spring breeze at dawn.

Mrs. Flensing went on, “But your path is not the path of the herd, narrow and short. Through no fault or virtue of your own, yours is no beaten path at all, for it stretches to the horizon in all directions—yourself everywhere inviolate, untouched—your name kept safe, never pared down to letters chiseled on a stone to erode away to nonentity.”

The sharp smoke was making Emily dizzy, and the woman’s talk of horizons brought up visions of endless windswept moors under gray skies . . . hills and unexplored valleys and cold becks, the landscape marked for eternity with the old standing stones . . . 

Mrs. Flensing was speaking again: “Why would a knife need two points? Wouldn’t one do?” She exhaled a curling cloud. “No. Not for us. A double-pricking to confuse location, each of us apart.”

Branwell clenched his right hand into a fist and then opened it again.

“Encroaching order,” said Mrs. Flensing, “encroaching time, are pushed back.” She lowered her hand and reached out to touch the leather bag on the table. “New freedom always strikes us as wrong, monstrous, at first. But what I propose is simply restoring a relic to its proper, honorable place.” Her smile was welcoming. “You are already set apart, you know. Give me your hand, and never need to take anyone’s hand again.”

The woman reached again into the pocket of the coat, and this time set on the table a small glass jar that seemed to contain clear oil.

Emily thought of the ways in which she was indeed already set apart. The idea of marriage and children had never held any attraction for her, and conviviality of the sort going on in the bigger room beyond the door at her back was unfathomable: dissipation, in every sense. The people of the village, and of the remote busy world, were ciphers—their motives, if any, only to be guessed at. Her strength and firm identity thrived in solitude.

Emily’s right hand crept forward almost involuntarily—but, below the table, her left hand on Keeper’s collar was pulled downward as the dog lowered his heavy head. Keeper’s jaws closed firmly on her ankle, not puncturing her stocking but pressing hard enough to hurt; and she felt the vibration of his inaudible growl.

And the dog’s insistent presence called to her mind the real moors over which the two of them ranged nearly every day; a land that was expansive and wild, but in fact bounded by towns and roads and the cycles of, for her and Keeper, finite numbers of seasons.

Emily and her dog lived and thrived in the uncompromising natural world, snow and wool and springtime and potatoes to be peeled; and what this woman offered was a rejection of that—no doubt to gain something else, but it would be something else. Emily flexed her legs and shifted her feet on the stone floor.

From the corner of her eye she saw Branwell squinting anxiously at her. For all his weakness and delusion, he was inextricably a member of her solitude; as were Anne and Charlotte and their father, and Tabby, and Keeper himself. What good did Branwell imagine this diabolical woman offered him?

Emily smiled and withdrew her hand, and reached across to slide it into her handbag. She pushed her chair back from the table, and when she stood up and shook the handbag off to fall on the floor, she was holding her father’s pistol.

Mrs. Flensing was on her feet too, facing Emily with her hands at her sides. Her face was rigidly set, and she whispered, “Prove it if you must.”

But Emily swung the barrel to the side, toward the leather bag on the table, and pulled the trigger. The gun’s pan cover flipped up and powder sizzled in the pan, and even as Mrs. Flensing shouted and vaulted across the table the gun flared and the air in the room shook to the confined bang of the gunshot. Sparks flew in all directions.

Mrs. Flensing howled, and through the churning smoke Emily was able to see the woman slide off this side of the table; she landed crouching, furiously knuckling at her eyes with her free hand, and Emily scrambled back as the woman lunged blindly at her with the knife—

And then the woman was flung backward by the impact of Keeper and, somehow, another big mastiff, and both dogs were snarling loudly and leaping at her.

The knife in the woman’s hand flashed toward Keeper’s shoulder; but neither mastiff fell back, and the woman was now bent over the table while the dogs tore at her arms and clothing.

The woman howled again, in pain as much as frustrated rage this time, and a moment later she had grabbed the holed leather bag and used it to batter her way past the two lunging dogs. Covering her head with one bloody hand, she wrenched open the sliding door and plunged through the group beyond that had obviously leaped to their feet in alarm at the gunshot and screams.

Keeper moved back beside Emily, who quickly picked up her fallen handbag and shoved the still-smoking gun into it. Blood drops were spattered across the floor, but when she glanced at Keeper she saw only a small cut on his shoulder where the woman’s knife had caught him, and it wasn’t perceptibly bleeding.

She collapsed back into her chair just as half a dozen men came crowding into the room, blinking in the gunpowder smoke. The second dog was nowhere to be seen; could it have run out through the crowd? Emily had not been able to get a clear look at it in the violent confusion, but it had been darker than Keeper, and not quite as massive.

“What the hell happened?” yelled one big man in an apron, who Emily took to be Mr. Sugden, the landlord.

“The woman who just ran out of here,” she said, “fired a gun at my brother. My dog spoiled her aim.” Keeper was standing beside her, watchful but no longer tense.

Branwell’s face was in his hands, his fingers clutching his curly red hair. “Oh,” he almost sobbed, “true, yes, that’s what she did. Oh God.”

“Damn me!” exclaimed Sugden. He looked over his shoulder toward the front door. “Is she gone? Some of you catch her, or fetch the magistrate or something.” He turned back to look around the still-smoky room. “Is Keeper hurt? There’s blood there!”

“No,” said Emily. “She cut her hand when the gun went off.”

“Recoil,” muttered one man.

“Can’t have been holding it properly,” agreed another.

The men in the doorway shuffled back toward the bar, talking loudly among themselves.

“She was in yesterday,” Sugden said. “You spoke with her, Branwell. Who is she?”

Branwell lifted his face. “A . . . Catholic agitator.”

Emily thought this lie was unfair to Mr. Curzon, who apparently really was a Catholic, but this was no time to muddy the story.

“My brother refused her enticements,” she said.

Branwell groaned.

Two men blundered up behind Sugden and breathlessly announced that the woman had run out to the street and disappeared.

“Did you look for her?” Sugden demanded.

“We looked up and down the street from the doorway,” one of the men said, adding defensively, “Who’s to say she hadn’t another gun?”

“I’ll fetch a mop,” muttered Sugden, turning away.

Emily stood up and stepped to the table. Her pistol ball had dug a splintery groove in the polished wood, and scraps of leather and bone fragments were scattered on the table and the floor.

Branwell stood up at last. His voice was squeaky with shock. “You ruined it,” he said. “Emily. My chance—our chance.”

Keeper lowered his head and dropped a couple of pale, two-inch long objects at Emily’s feet. She caught her breath—but glanced toward the doorway, then quickly crouched, picked them up, and tucked them into her handbag. She was glad Branwell hadn’t seen—it would do him no good to know that Keeper had bitten off two of Mrs. Flensing’s fingers.

She wiped her hand on her skirt and reached across the table to take Branwell’s arm. “Home,” she said gently.

Branwell stepped around the table and stood unsteadily beside her. “I . . . need a drink. God, several drinks.”

“There’s whisky in the kitchen.”

He nodded several times, and let her escort him through the main room, moving from a haze of gunsmoke into one of tobacco smoke. People shifted out of their way, and a couple of men called offers to buy drinks for the two of them, but Branwell seemed not to hear, and Emily shook her head. Keeper walked ahead of them, sniffing the tangle of smells in the air.

Branwell’s hands were shaking so badly that Emily had to help him into his coat before putting on her own.

She looked around at the street as they stepped outside, but there was no sign of Mrs. Flensing. The men who had looked out the door for her had not mentioned horses or a coach—was the woman crouched in some recessed doorway, out of the moonlight?—still holding the knife? Keeper was pacing vigilantly beside her, and she reached down to touch his head as she tried to hurry Branwell along the pavement.

Branwell took off his spectacles as they approached the churchyard. He was panting deeply and rapidly; clouds of his breath whisked away on the night wind.

“Where in Hell,” he said, “did that other dog come from?”

“I can’t imagine,” said Emily. “Could it have been under the table all along?”

Branwell sniffed and shook his head. “There was blood on the floor! My God! How badly did they maul her?”

Emily thought of the two severed fingers in her handbag, but shrugged. “She ran out fleetly enough, even with smoke in her eyes. She poked your palm with that knife, didn’t she?”

“What? Oh—yes, years ago, when I was in London. It’s done me no harm! Why did you have to ruin . . . it would have been . . .”

“What did I ruin?”

“Besides . . . everything?”

The razory wind was much colder now than it had been when they had left the parsonage less than an hour ago, too cold even to carry smells, and it found every gap between Emily’s coat buttons. She rubbed Keeper’s bristly back.

Branwell faltered to a stop, eyeing the churchyard ahead of them.

“Mrs. Flensing,” he went on through clenched teeth, clearly trying hard to speak coherently, “gets a bit mystical, it’s true. All that talk of . . . paths and horizons and being set apart is just a lot of cant about spiritual awakening that she got from reading Swedenborg. But she’s a member of a . . . an old aristocratic family, and their position, their influence was crippled yesterday when some kind of one-eyed Catholic killed their, er, patriarch.”

They resumed walking, past the church belltower that their father shot at every morning, and Emily glanced ahead at the lighted windows of the parsonage. “And that skull?” she asked.

Branwell spread his hands and bared his teeth at the dark sky. “They need assistance in restoring their position—and placing that relic in our church would have gone a long way toward accomplishing that.” He gave her a sidelong glance. “Socially, you understand! Politically! And she probably could have got your damned stories published! But you had to—” He shoved his hands into his pockets and hunched along more quickly, so that Emily and Keeper had to hurry to keep up. “Oh, what’s the use of anything anymore.”

“Did she let you look at it? The skull?”

“No,” said Branwell curtly, and Emily knew he was lying. Reviewing his pathetically adapted account—socially, politically!—she was disappointed to realize that Branwell had in fact known that he was aiding devils, and had tried to get her to do the same; but she was impressed to hear it confirmed that Alcuin Curzon had killed one of the things.

She heard faint noises from the darkness beyond the low churchyard wall—twigs snapping, and a swishing as if someone were sweeping up last year’s dead leaves in the dark. Branwell blinked in that direction and looked away, but Keeper kept looking back toward the church. Emily breathed in and out strongly, for the bad air in the churchyard sometimes made breathing difficult.

At last they reached the foot of the steps up to the parsonage front door, and Emily put her hand on her brother’s shoulder. “It was the skull of a monster, you know,” she told him quietly.

“How do you know?” He sniffed and wiped his nose on his coat sleeve. “You didn’t even see it, you just blew it up.”

“I know what the rest of its body is. It’s under that ledger stone in the church, the one with the grooves cut in it.”

He stepped away from her, shivering. “Wha—how do you know about this? Can’t we go inside? I caught a devilish chill last night, and this wind—”

“What that woman offered was a place in Hell.”

Branwell wailed and swept his hand in a wide gesture that took in the parsonage and all of Haworth. “Better to serve in Hell than rot in Purgatory.”

A flicker of light behind him, beyond the churchyard, caught Emily’s eye. Now it was gone, but she was sure it had been in one of the church windows.

She caught Branwell’s arm. “There’s someone in the church.”

Branwell turned to look in that direction, and after a moment of blinking uselessly he fitted his spectacles back onto his face—and flinched.

“Somebody praying,” he said shortly. “Let’s get inside.”

“It’s her. She’ll hide what’s left of the skull there somewhere—and even a stray tooth might accomplish some part of her purpose.” She took his arm again. “Come on.”

“I won’t. There’s things among the graves.”

“Nothing that will come near my dog.”

She hurried back the way they had come, clutching Keeper’s collar to keep him from running ahead, and in fact the dog did seem to sense something in the churchyard to their right. Certainly the trees were creaking. But Emily hurried past it, tugging him along the walk that slanted away from the street toward the church. Branwell’s footsteps scuffed close behind her.

She strode up to the church’s side entrance; one of the pair of tall ironbound doors was ajar, and she leaned to peer in. The long nave was in complete darkness, and only in her memory was she aware of the rows of pews, and the altar and raised pulpit at the far end to her right. She let Keeper sniff around in the doorway before she stepped through.

The still air inside the church was slightly warmer, but over the usual smells of old wood and candlewax she caught a taint of mimosa; and she heard a thump that seemed to shake the stone floor. After a few seconds she heard it again. She shivered, and felt the muscles of Keeper’s massive neck flex under her hand.

Then there was light—up by the altar to her right, a point of yellow light resolved itself into the bullseye lens of a dark lantern with the shutter now retracted, and by its glow Emily saw Mrs. Flensing bending over what appeared to be a bloody severed head on the altar. The woman hadn’t shed her coat, but the sleeves were pulled back to the elbows.

Emily hurried along the side aisle toward the altar, and she thrust her hand into her handbag and fumbled past the pistol to clutch the two severed fingers she had picked up from the floor at the Black Bull. Keeper trotted ahead of her, weaving from side to side to prevent her from passing him.

Mrs. Flensing had set the lantern on the altar and had both hands, one now missing two fingers, on the red-streaked object that sat on the flat surface. Her disordered hair hung in strings over her face, which gleamed with sweat. Emily could now see that the object on the altar was the deformed skull of a big animal, with the rim of one eye socket missing and a gap at the temple. Clearly Mrs. Flensing had reassembled many of the pieces of the skull Emily had shot, apparently using her own blood as glue.

Emily couldn’t imagine what species the skull came from. The top of it was a high dome, and its canine teeth extended down past the jawbone.

She caught up with Keeper and again took hold of his collar. In her handbag, the two cold fingers in her hand twitched, and she nearly let go of them.

She heard a grating sound from the central aisle, and then the massive thump sounded again, echoing among the high crossbeams of the church ceiling; and Emily’s chest went cold when she realized that they were the sounds of the ledger stone lifting slightly and dropping back into place.

The woman looked up, blinking and squinting at the sound of Emily’s footsteps on the stone floor, and she quickly extended her left arm, pointing along the central aisle; and she turned her bloody palm up and raised her maimed hand. There was nothing on her palm, but she grimaced as if her hand were meeting strong resistance.

Again Emily caught the sound of stone grating on stone . . . but this time it was not followed by the heavy impact of the stone falling back.

Emily’s face tingled in alarm. It seemed Mrs. Flensing had decided to fully revive the thing.

The severed fingers in Emily’s hand were bending and straightening more energetically. Gripping them in her fist, she pulled them free of her handbag and held them out in front of her, and she rotated her fist so that the fingers were pointing downward.

The floor shook to a resounding slam.

And Keeper’s collar was wrenched out of Emily’s hand as the dog bounded forward.

Mrs. Flensing retreated to the back wall, and the double-bladed knife was in her unwounded hand—but Keeper leaped past her, up onto the altar, and closed his jaws in the nasal cavity and the broken eye socket of the big skull. He shook his head violently, as if with revulsion, and pieces of the blood-smeared skull flew in all directions.

For one full second the ledger stone in the aisle chattered in its bed, and Mrs. Flensing fell back against the wall, gasping.

Behind Emily, Branwell had howled in the same second, and when she turned to him he had fallen to his knees, with one hand braced on the floor and the other thumping furiously against his temple; his lungs emptied to wheezing silence, and then he was panting as if he’d just finished running a race.

Emily looked back toward the altar in time to see the sacristy door slam shut. Mrs. Flensing wasn’t visible, and Keeper had jumped down from the altar and was peering around in the reflected light of the abandoned lantern.

In four long running strides Emily was up on the raised floor beside the altar, but when she wrenched open the sacristy door she was met with a gust of cold night air, for the exterior door at the far end of the dark room was swinging back and forth in the wind. She dropped the severed fingers into her handbag.

She turned back to the obliquely lit nave and ran down the side aisle to where Branwell was slowly getting to his feet.

Scared by his fit moments ago, she shook him by the shoulders till his eyes focused on her. She said loudly, “Do you know me, Branwell?”

“I—wish I didn’t.”

“Who am I?”

“Emily.” His panting had slowed to normal breathing, and he yawned. “I’m sick.”

She let go of him and stepped back. “Be sick later. We’ve got some cleaning up to do here.”

“In the morning—”

“In the morning you’ll be even less use than you are now. Take that lantern and walk over the floor, down every pew and looking under it, and pick up every piece of bone.”

“I’m sick, I tell you. That cigar of hers reeked of London—factory smokes, unwashed crowds, vomit—”

Emily reached into her handbag. Mrs. Flensing’s fingers were inert now, limp. And with a shiver she wondered what the cigar smoke had smelled like to Keeper.

“Find every scrap of bone,” she said. Keeper had trotted back to where they stood, and she ran her fingers through the fur on his big shoulder. “Keeper will help you find them, and he’ll know if you shirk.” She felt a matted tuft at one point among the fur, and pulled the dog forward so that a reflection of the lantern beam lit the spot. Parting his fur carefully she saw that there was only the one small puncture in the dog’s skin that she had noticed earlier.

But how could that double-bladed knife have inflicted only one puncture? Suddenly dizzy, she thought: Well, there were two dogs.

She shoved Branwell toward the altar. “Every piece, as you may still value your soul. I’ll find a collection basket to hold it all.”

“What will you do with them?”

Emily just stared at him, and he waved his arms over his head and then shambled toward the altar, peering at the floor. I’ll bury them, Emily thought, at widely separated spots far out on the moors. The thing under the ledger stone can go headless for eternity.


Their father had gone upstairs to bed by the time Emily and Branwell and Keeper returned to the parsonage, and Anne opened the kitchen door when Emily knocked. Branwell blundered past Anne and Charlotte without a word and stumbled away up the stairs. Keeper stood by the back door until Anne closed it, then lay down by the big iron range.

Emily pulled a chair out from the table and sat down. She laid her handbag on the table and exhaled, and after a moment looked from Charlotte to Anne.

“I believe,” she said, “that the sickness in the land is cured.” Charlotte slid a cup of tea in front of Emily’s right hand, and Emily lifted it and took a sip. She was very tired, but her hand was steady. “Or at least,” she amended, setting the cup down, “restored to the sort of remission Papa has strived to maintain.”

“Oh?” said Charlotte, raising an eyebrow. “When? How?”

“Can he stop shooting his gun at the church every morning?” asked Anne.

“Not quite.” To Charlotte, Emily said, “An hour or so ago”—and she reached into her handbag and pulled out their father’s heavy gun—“this played a part,” she said. “So did poor Branwell, in spite of himself. The real heroes, though—”

Anne sat down beside Emily. “Did you shoot the . . . the Welsh thing?”

“No. I—no.” Emily smiled tiredly. “I shot a werewolf’s skull.”

Anne nodded uncertainly. “That’s always a good thing to do, I imagine.”

“The real heroes?” prompted Charlotte, taking the chair across the table.

“That Curzon fellow, for one,” said Emily. “In spite of his abominable manner. It seems that the werewolf he killed yesterday morning was a sort of king of the species, and with its loss the whole species is severely weakened. The other hero was Keeper.”

She reached again into her handbag. “This is unpleasant,” she warned Anne, then pulled out Mrs. Flensing’s two fingers and laid them on the table. It was the first time Emily had been able to look closely at them, and she shuddered at the ragged blood-clotted ends and the long nails.

Anne had sat back, and she darted an alarmed look at Emily’s hands before meeting her eyes. “Keeper did that?” she whispered.

“Are you in some trouble now?” asked Charlotte, fastidiously looking away from the gruesome exhibit. “Bury those things!”

“I think I’ll keep them,” said Emily, “though I might get rid of this bag. Yes, Keeper did it, God bless him. And I might be in some trouble, but nothing to do with the laws of England.”

She stood up, looking around the kitchen. “I don’t want them in my room—I’d imagine them crawling around like caterpillars.” On a high cupboard shelf stood a row of dusty glass jars containing old iron nails and chisels and brushes; one jar was empty, and she stood on tiptoe to fetch it down. She dropped Mrs. Flensing’s fingers into it and then reached up to slide it back onto the shelf. “They can’t get out of that.”

She resumed her chair. “Tomorrow if you like you can go to the Black Bull and look at the table in the snug. It all started there, with Branwell and a woman.”


Curtains glowed in the houses that closely fronted the steep, narrow main street of Haworth, but no one opened a door to question the solitary figure trudging carefully downhill in the dark. Tonight Mrs. Flensing’s hired carriage and driver waited at the bottom of the street.

Yesterday the two horses had labored to pull the carriage up the street to the level area by the inn and the church, in spite of the paving stones laid crossways to give hooves some purchase, and today the driver had refused to try it again. The three-mile trip had been all uphill from the town of Keighley, and he had told her that if the horses slipped on the Haworth street the carriage would probably roll all the way back there.

It had been no use for her to argue that he must frequently be called on to carry passengers from the hotel in Keighley to Haworth, and she suspected that he was familiar with local legends and had at some point yesterday managed to sneak a look into her bag—now lying somewhere on the church floor back there, torn and empty.

Her hand was throbbing under the handkerchief she had wrapped around it, and she wondered bleakly if the fingers would grow back separately or as one ungainly semi-thumb, which sort of thing she had seen happen with others in the tribe.

Alone on the dark, slanted pavement, she bared her teeth in a snarl. She had finally blinked and rubbed the stinging gunpowder dust out of her eyes, and they seemed to be undamaged.

If only Curzon had succeeded in killing himself, as she was fairly sure he’d meant to do. The sanctimonious Huberti were so proud of their abstinence—it must have undone him to learn that rage could provoke the old, vainly renounced change in him.

Mrs. Flensing spat on the street.

But he would try to marry outside his clan! Vain folly—as was no doubt impressed upon him when he saw the broken meat of his precious fiancée on the steps of her family home.

And then he had not killed himself; instead at Ponden Kirk he had been confronted by the regent of the moorland kindred—and had managed to kill him! And the sustaining supernatural field generated by the wild kindred, whom Reverend Farfleece likened to an electric battery, had suddenly been depleted all across these northern moors.

Even miles away, Mrs. Flensing had felt that death as a blurring of her vision, an ache in her joints—and she knew that the Obliques in London too must be alarmed at finding the early signs of age and infirmity intruding on their artificially maintained youthfulness.

Farfleece’s “battery” needed a strong renewal.

But it was more like a whirlpool than a battery, really—a hyper-natural distortion of ordinary natural possibilities, and the greater the number of conscious entities that participated in its deviant spin like children dancing around a maypole, amplifying the distorting momentum, the deeper and more powerful the “whirlpool” became. The druids had long ago deduced the implicit counter-nature impulse in ordinary reality, and set it in motion by using its initially small potential to cure mild illnesses or blight the crops of rival tribes. Gradually they had deepened and accelerated it until it could encompass effects like shape-changing, earth-rending, the liberation of ghosts . . . and, at a comfortable distance, wealth and extended life and immunity to injury and disease.

But this morning the “whirlpool” had, as it were, become turbulent, and lost much of its depth.

When Mrs. Flensing learned of the killing yesterday, she had hired a horse and ridden far out across the moors to the top of Crow Hill, and had retrieved the twin’s skull, hidden away for more than a hundred years.

It had been all she could think of to do. The twin’s skull had been kept separate from its body under the church floor because the twin was one half of the Obliques’ biune god, the other half being the boy Welsh, who had been exiled across the Irish Sea—and in truth none of the Oblique order were very eager to have the two persons of their god actually revived and reunited. Though they would never say so outright, it was felt to be an apotheosis that was better anticipated than achieved. Whatever the result, it would be tumultuous, and would certainly upset their reasonably augmented lives.

And getting the skull had not been easy. Originally a cairn had stood at the top of the hill, marking the burial site of the skull, but in 1824 the hill had erupted and sent a massive flood down into the valley. The cairn was gone, but the skull had still been there, above the gullied and already overgrown east face of the hill. Mrs. Flensing had had to cut her hand and leave baptized blood in the dirt even to be able to see the skull, which would otherwise have eluded focus and been securely lost in the overall view of the rocky landscape. And then the ungainly thing had resisted being tugged free of the ground, as if it had grown invisible roots.

When she had finally got it into her bag, she should have ridden straight to the Haworth church and hidden it wherever she could. It had been a mistake to ride back to Keighley to wash her face and hands and change her clothing and hire the carriage. And it had been a disastrous mistake then to delay so that the poseur Northangerland could fetch his vandal sister.

Mrs. Flensing didn’t want to think of the twin’s skull, shot to pieces—and then, after painful and partial reconstruction, flung in fragments all over a church floor by that giant dog . . . which had seemed to become two dogs, when it had attacked her earlier!

Emily Brontë. Emily Brunty, without a doubt. Northangerland had said that she had been bitten by what was clearly a kindred animal—the girl would have to be brought into line, baptized, before she could do even further harm.

When Mrs. Flensing reached the bottom of the steep street at last, the moonlight was bright enough for her to see that the carriage was gone. The driver had probably worked himself into a state, imagining boggarts and gytrashes rolling and hopping along the road, and fled.

She looked back up the steep street, but it was impossible to guess what story the Brunty siblings might have told about her.

It would be many more hours before dawn. She began walking north, toward Keighley.


In the dark upstairs hallway, Keeper sat in front of the door to Emily’s little bedroom. He was aware of Charlotte and Anne in the room to his left, Tabby’s room the next door past that, and the girls’ father in the room to his right. The next door down the hall on that side was Branwell’s.

Keeper had lapped up some water from the bucket beside Emily’s door, but he remembered the elusive sourness of the woman’s blood. It was familiar, but from long ago, calling up just a few seconds of traumatic memory: the man called Welsh attacking the dog’s young master, Hugh, and Keeper leaping and driving his teeth into Welsh’s face. That blood had had the same bitter taint.

But that had been the other dog, whose name was also Keeper, the dog whose eyes and muzzle he sometimes saw instead of his own in still, sunlit pools; the dog who had joined him in protecting Emily from the woman with the sharp weapon tonight.

Later, in the darker building, the woman had brandished the weapon again, but Keeper had lunged past her and shaken to pieces the bones of . . . something that was both an animal and a man, which had in the moment seemed to be the greater threat. The woman had fled then, but Keeper hadn’t pursued her because that would have meant leaving Emily alone with the one called Branwell.

Branwell was a troubling figure. He was a member of Keeper’s family, and Emily loved him, but there was the tendency toward unanticipated rage, even a quality of interloper, in the young man.

As if summoned by Keeper’s mental image, the door to Branwell’s room now opened and Branwell stepped out into the hall, carrying a lit candle. He was still draped and sheathed in the clothes he’d been wearing earlier.

Keeper stood up, staring at him. Branwell’s feet were bare now, and he had padded past Tabby’s door before he saw Keeper. For a full ten breaths the man and the dog stood staring at each other. At last Branwell exhaled hoarsely and turned away.

When Branwell had gone back into his room and the door had closed and clicked, Keeper hooked one big paw into the bucket and pulled it over; its rim clanked on the floorboards, and the water spread out silently across the floor all the way to Branwell’s door.

Keeper sat down. Emily would scold him for having spilled the bucket, but he would remain by her door, alert, until she woke up in the morning.


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Framed