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CHAPTER SIX

Branwell’s room, his “studio,” was at the back of the parsonage, with a big window overlooking the moors, and Charlotte and Anne slept in what used to be their aunt’s room; but Emily still slept on the narrow camp bed in the small room they had all shared as children. The window overlooked the churchyard and the church steeple beyond, but when she awoke this morning and peered out, dawn was just a red streak in the sky and she saw only deep shadow below.

The room was of course too dark for her to see the pencil sketches that she knew covered the whitewashed walls, but as she lay in bed she called up in memory all those drawings of birds and faces and flowers, and the children who had busily drawn them there. The higher drawings showed more skill, being done as the children had grown taller, but Emily’s thoughts were of the lowest, the clumsy rabbits and dogs done by the smallest hands.

In this predawn dimness the big old house seemed timeless, its various tragedies and joys all equally present, but paused. Wondering what had awakened her, she got out of bed and put on a robe and silently descended the stairs. Keeper followed her, and when she heard faint fumbling at the kitchen door, she knew who it must be because the dog didn’t even growl.

She opened the door, and Branwell brought a gust of cold clay-scented air with him as he came stumbling into the dark kitchen. “Sit down and be quiet,” she said softly as she bolted the door. “Papa hasn’t fired his pistol yet. I’ll make tea.”

By touch she unerringly found matches and glass paper to strike them on, and soon had a fire going in the big black-iron range and an oil lamp lit on the table. Keeper stood on the other side of the table, near Branwell, and Emily thought the dog’s attitude was both protective and cautious.

She put the kettle on the range and sat down across the table from her brother, as a few hours ago she had sat here with her sisters. Branwell looked as if he’d been waylaid and robbed—his face was scratched, his clothes were muddy and disheveled, and he wasn’t wearing his spectacles—but he had walked in without limping, and he wasn’t obviously injured.

He pulled his spectacles out of his coat pocket, and she could see that they weren’t broken.

“Could you,” he said, “wash these?”

She took them from him, with a wry smile at the idea that it was his spectacles that particularly needed a wash, but stood up and rinsed them in the pot she had cleaned the teacups in. She dried them on a towel, and noted some sort of brown oil that still clung to the lenses; another dip in the pot, and rubbing with her thumbs, got them clean, and she dried them again and handed them back to him.

He fitted them on over his ears and blinked nervously around the high-ceilinged room, then sighed deeply and looked at her. He cleared his throat and said, hoarsely, “I’ve been through Hell tonight.”

She took the kettle off the range and poured a splash of hot water into their aunt’s teapot—with Grimshaw’s statement painted on it in gold: To Me to live is Christ, to Die is Gain—swirled it around and poured it out, then filled it with hot water.

Ever since coming home after his acrimonious dismissal from his tutorial position, and the end of his claimed affair with Mrs. Robinson, his employer’s wife, he had declared every day that he was suffering the tortures of the damned; but Emily respected suffering even when it was deserved, or based on delusion.

She put the teapot on the table and spooned some tea leaves into the pot, then set two cups on the table and sat down. “Tell me.”

“I was—” he began. “It has to do with something that happened to me in London. I—” He stopped, clearly reconsidering what he had been about to say. “I walked out to Ponden Kirk tonight. I got lost on the way home—thought I’d die out there.” He waved one hand in a gesture that took in the state of his hair and clothing.

Emily nodded. “And,” she said, “London?” She wondered if he even still remembered his story of having been waylaid by robbers before getting to London, eleven years ago.

“Well—that was earlier. There was a woman at the Black Bull today, a woman I met when I was in London. She remembered me. She—she has connections, uh, employment—I think you’d—like to—”

Then his mouth twisted and he lowered his head, and he was silently crying. Emily thought of the boy who had done so many of the drawings, down near the floor or higher up, in the room they had once all shared.

She stood up and fetched the bottle labeled Emetic, and poured a liberal splash of whisky into one of the cups, then filled both cups from the teapot. As tea, it would be little more than hot water, but she pushed the fortified one toward him. “That’ll cool it off for you. Drink it and go to bed, before people start getting up—tell me about it all tomorrow.”

He took a sip of the tea, then looked with surprise at the jar of whisky. “Where do you keep that?”

“On the roof. Go to bed.”

“Yes,” he said, “bed. Sleep, that knits up the ravel’d sleave of care, and—oh, God help us, Emily.”

“God can help us tomorrow.”

The whisky must have cooled the tea, for he drained the cup in three big swallows, then pushed his chair back and got to his feet. Keeper watched him shuffle out to the hallway, and didn’t sit down beside Emily until Branwell’s steps had faded to silence on the stairs.

The north wind had died down during the night, and the whole house was silent. It was too early to sweep the kitchen and begin cooking oatmeal porridge for her father and her sisters, and Emily sat and sipped her watery tea. Keeper was sitting on the floor beside her chair, and the big mastiff’s eyes were nearly level with her own.

“I think he did meet a woman,” she said softly to the dog, “and go out to Ponden Kirk. But he’s ashamed of something, and frightened.” Perhaps understanding her, Keeper raised a massive paw and laid it on her thigh. “Of course,” she said, “but we’re all as God made us, and he’s my brother.”

The kitchen window gradually brightened, and after a while she heard her father’s dawn gunshot. Ringing Welsh’s funeral bell, she thought, reminding him that he’s dead. She sighed, got to her feet, and put on her apron.


Patrick usually took all his meals alone in his room upstairs, but this morning he came down and sat in the dining room, where his daughters joined him for breakfast while Tabby was in the kitchen peeling potatoes for dinner. He had brought down from his room a wooden case like a flat toolbox with a leather strap handle, and laid it on the table. He didn’t speak as he ate; his blind gaze seemed to be fixed on the far wall.

His daughters exchanged questioning looks over their bowls of porridge. They had talked in whispers in the kitchen; Anne was for getting another Catholic priest out to do an exorcism, while Charlotte sternly advised consulting an Anglican bishop for advice. Emily had no suggestions, wanting to talk further with Branwell before deciding on anything.

Here at the dining room table Emily imagined her sisters felt, as she did, that any remark now would be either presumptuous or unbearably inane.

“Emily,” Patrick said at last when he set down his spoon and napkin beside the wooden case, “would you join me in the churchyard?”

“Not soon, I hope,” she answered with a smile. “And why in the churchyard, when we’ve got our own vault in the church?” Her father winced, and she regretted her flippancy. “Certainly Papa,” she said.

He pushed back his chair and stood up, lifting the wooden case, which swung heavily in his hand. He walked to the hall and the front door, and Emily stepped past him and drew the bolt; when she swung the door open the morning air was cold, and smelled of dew-damp paving stones.

Today was a Thursday, but Patrick left the house every Sunday for the short walk to the church, and this morning he tapped down the front steps as unerringly as if he could see. He made his way less steadily down the path through Emily and Anne’s garden, and set the case on the low churchyard wall and opened it.

Standing beside him, Emily saw that the case contained a long-barreled flintlock pistol with a curved wooden grip, and a couple of small tin boxes.

“We’ll get you a pistol of your own,” he said as he lifted the gun and slid a rod out of a slot below the barrel. “It’s time you learned to shoot.” He blinked in the direction of the clustered graves and said, “Sometimes the Greenwoods lay a plank beside their family’s markers, so as not to sink in the mud when they lay flowers on them. Is it there?”

Emily stepped up onto the mossy stone wall and peered. “Yes.”

“Would you set it upright against a tree or headstone about . . . twenty feet away?”

She hopped down and scuffed through dead leaves to the plank, pried it up and leaned it against one of the standing stones. Back over the wall beside her father, she watched him open the tin boxes and, clearly working by memory and touch, shake black powder from a jar into a little brass cylinder; when it was full he tipped it into the raised barrel of the gun. Next he picked up a two-inch-square patch of cloth and licked it, then laid it over the pistol’s muzzle and pressed a lead ball the size of a blueberry into the center of it.

“Now to ram it down,” he said, picking up the rod. A little brass cup was mounted on one end of the rod, and he used it to push the ball and the patch down into the barrel. “All the way down to sit on the powder,” he said, “with no air gap. Air might blow the whole works up in your hand.”

He thumbed up the pan cover and laid a couple of pinches of powder in the pan, nudging them toward the touchhole at the rear of the barrel, then closed the cover. The hammer was a curled piece of steel with a little vise at the top, in which a chip of flint was wedged, and he pulled the hammer back until it clicked and stayed up.

He handed the pistol to Emily, who held it carefully, with her finger away from the trigger.

“Extend it well out,” Patrick told her, “and aim along the top of the barrel—and when you’ve got it pointed at the middle of the plank, pull the trigger.”

She did as she was told, and a moment later the familiar crack shook the air; peering through the cloud of acrid white smoke, she saw that the plank had flopped forward and was lying across another gravestone.

“I heard it fall,” said her father approvingly. He reached out a hand. “Let me load it again, and you watch closely how I do it.”

From one of the boxes he lifted a brush, which he screwed onto the other end of the rod. “Scrub it out thoroughly between shots,” he said as he thrust the brush down the barrel and twisted it. “You don’t want a stray spark still in there when you pour in the fresh powder.”

“What am I to shoot?”

“Set up the plank again—if you split it, the Greenwoods can get another.”

“I mean . . . the church tower? Planks?”

“Oh.” Patrick tugged the brush out of the barrel and paused, holding it. “Charlotte can’t see well enough, and Anne’s frail . . . you must shoot anything that menaces the family, you understand? Carry it with you during the day, until we get you one of your own.”

Emily noted that he hadn’t mentioned Branwell.

“Yes,” she said. “I’ll want a good deal of practice. Here, let me have it—I saw how you did it.”

She deftly loaded the gun again, then laid it in the case and vaulted over the wall to set up the plank again.


“A word, Emily,” said Branwell quietly, trying to sound casual.

He hadn’t come downstairs until after the rest of the family had eaten their noon dinner; Emily had cut up some cheese and cold mutton for him and served him in the kitchen. He only nibbled bits of the food, but drank several cups of tea.

She sat down across the table from him. Her chestnut hair was shining in the sunlight through the window behind her, and Branwell thought she looked almost repulsively healthy and fit and alert.

“So?” she said.

He squinted at her. “So . . . what?”

“You walked out to Ponden Kirk last night,” she prompted, “after meeting a woman at the Black Bull.” Her tone was simply interested, curious.

“Oh. Yes, that’s right.”

“Did you do that because of something she said?”

“No, no—well, yes. I wanted to think clearly, in the night air.” Guessing at her thoughts, he added, “I wasn’t drunk.” After a pause, he shrugged. “Very well, not remarkably drunk.”

“This morning when you came in, all disheveled, you said you’d been through Hell.”

Branwell stared into his empty teacup and forced himself not to think of the ghosts he had marched and danced with under the moon, and the burning body on the slope below the ancient monument, and the furred giant whose hand he had shaken—and the boy who had seemed for a moment to switch identities with him.

Without looking up, he said, “Well yes, I got lost out there! Stumbling into marshes, freezing in the wind—! I really thought I was going to die! Hell enough, I’d call it.”

“With some kind of grease on your spectacles, too.”

He shook his head, wishing she would drop the subject. “Some sort of marsh oil, I suppose. But—”

She cocked her head. “I think something frightened you at Ponden Kirk. You must have run home, to get into such a state as you were in last night.”

He forced a laugh, hoping she might not recognize it as forced. “Well, all alone by m-moonlight below that terrible stone! You’d have imagined a gytrash or two yourself.”

She sat back. “What did this woman say?”

“Well, as I think I mentioned, she has connections—”

“Employment, you said.”

Branwell passionately wished he had said nothing at all to her this morning. “I meant income, money.” Branwell wondered unhappily what Mrs. Flensing was going to say, in a few hours. He should prepare Emily, smooth the way as much as possible. “She wants us to do her a favor. A trifle—just a matter of reverence, really.”

“Reverence?” said Emily, raising her eyebrows.

“It’s a . . . I believe it must be a Catholic thing. She has a relic that she wants kept in the church, that being a holy place and all. Nonsense, of course, but her family owns a publishing company . . .”

He knew that his sisters had kept up their silly writing, and surely the idea of an amenable publisher would interest her.

But Emily pursued the wrong topic. “What kind of relic?”

“It’s apparently a—what does it matter?”

“These are strange days, and we should watch our thresholds. A hand, a tooth?”

“A—” He considered several lies, but Mrs. Flensing might very well show his sister the loathsome thing. “Well, it’s a skull, actually, but very old, clean—”

“And she’s from London?” Emily’s smile was skeptical. “Were there no churches in London, that she had to bring this skull to Yorkshire?”

Anne and Charlotte were doing embroidery in the parlor down the hall, and Branwell made a flattening gesture with one hand to get her to talk more quietly.

“It’s mostly already here,” he said, hoping his face wasn’t reddening, “the rest of the body, I mean, the skeleton—it already rests in our church, you see. So it’s not as if—”

“In our church?” Emily frowned, doubtless wondering where in that building an undiscovered headless skeleton might be. “Where?”

“It’s very old,” he repeated, “it’s under that ledger stone with the lines cut in it, in the main aisle, but the—this relic of hers could be placed anywhere in the church. And in exchange for doing her this favor—this trivial favor!—she could favorably consider manuscripts—”

Emily’s face had lost all expression, and Branwell was afraid that she considered the publishing idea just another of his fantasies.

“I didn’t imagine all this.” He was hurt, even though the story she apparently doubted was in fact mostly a lie. “I told her about you, and I said I’d introduce you to her at the Black Bull this evening. It could,” he added, having to adopt his amoral Northangerland persona to go on, “benefit the whole family, financially.”

He knew that his sisters had inherited some money when their aunt died four years earlier—her will had been written when his own prospects had been bright, so that he himself had been left only trinkets—and that Emily had prevailed on Anne and Charlotte to invest it all in shares in the York and North Midland Railway Company; and he had heard Charlotte express doubts about the wisdom of the investment.

The mention of finances seemed to have worked. Emily’s jaw was set, and she nodded. “I think I had better meet this woman.”

“Good, good,” said Branwell, draining his tea and getting up. Leave before she can ask any more questions, he told himself.


Branwell couldn’t relax for the rest of the day. He spent an hour in his room trying to work on his translation of Horace’s Odes, but his fingers trembled too much to grip a pen, and his thoughts kept reverting to Emily’s imminent meeting with Mrs. Flensing. He could still call it off—oh yes, and lose, no doubt forever this time, the entrée into a secret, magical world; and be left as he was, to die in shabby obscurity, his talents abandoned.

In the midafternoon he sent a note to John Brown, the stonecutter and church sexton, asking him to bring five pence worth of gin to the lane by the churchyard, and Branwell managed to put on a coat and totter out to take it from him. He carried the mug up to his room without any of his sisters noticing, and after downing the fiery liquor in one gulp, he lay down on his bed and closed his eyes.

But sleep wouldn’t come. When he closed his eyes he saw what he had seen for a moment last night, below Ponden Kirk—his own body standing a few yards farther down the slope, staring knowingly into his eyes; and the hand, a child’s hand, that Branwell had raised to block the intolerable gaze.

Mrs. Flensing had said that the “regent lord of the tribe” was killed yesterday by the “one-eyed Catholic.” Had that spectacle last night had to do with that? How could it not? But the dead body that had been ceremonially set afire had been some sort of enormous malformed dog.

Regent lord of the tribe?

And the terrible little boy in tattered clothing—Branwell had seen him in dreams since childhood, and once in the churchyard, barefoot in the snow—and perhaps yesterday in the churchyard, fragmenting into a flock of crows before Branwell could see the figure clearly. Always in the form of a child.

He recalled again the conversation with Mrs. Flensing last night:

What place is there for me in this company of ours?

A high one, perhaps.

A high place . . . in a company of devils.

A secret company that conducted funeral rites at Ponden Kirk, the primordial Ponden Church; among whom was a man who seemed half beast, and a child who never grew old and could switch identities with a man; a company into which he himself had been baptized by a dioscuri knife eleven years ago.

Walking away from this now might conceivably get him killed! But if he cooperated, and if Emily’s imagination were such that she could grasp the admittedly dark power and glamor of it all . . . 

And even if she should draw back from the opened possibilities, for his sake she must submit to the—minor!—ordeal of having her palm pricked by the dioscuri. After that, she’d surely be free afterward to dismiss it all as one of his delusions, and go back to her placid life of cleaning and cooking and scribbling inconsequential stories.

He thought back to the lie he had told Emily—that Mrs. Flensing had some connection to a publisher. The woman did have connections in London, at least.

As far as he knew, all three of his sisters were wasting what small literary skills they might have on short melodramatic tales—fragments, really—set in the imaginary lands they’d all dreamed up in childhood.

Branwell, though, had embarked on a real novel, which he had titled And the Weary Are At Rest. It was not easy to get much of it written down in the periods when he wasn’t too drunk or too depressed—he had found that writing a novel required more work than, as he had once described it to a friend, “the smoking of a cigar and the humming of a tune”—but he had managed to get a fair stack of pages written, and if Mrs. Flensing wouldn’t object to him spurning this haunted village and moving to London, he was sure that with her help he actually could find a publisher who would gratefully accept his novel.

He got up and pulled his manuscript out of his desk drawer and slumped into the chair. Wearily he shuffled through the manuscript to the last page. The top half of the page was filled with blotted words that he was sure would be legible if he puzzled over them, but he dipped his pen in the inkwell and simply began writing new sentences without thinking.

A cramp in his hand eventually made him stop, and he saw that at some point the pen nib had broken, and scratched through the paper; he estimated that for at least ten minutes he had simply been indecipherably scoring the surface of the desk.

He tried to remember what marvelous scenes, what fanciful worlds, were lost in the scratches in the wood—but they had all drained from his brain through his uselessly scribbling hand, leaving not a wrack behind.

He slowly lowered his head until his forehead rested on the torn paper. “Resurrect me, Mrs. Flensing,” he whispered.


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Framed