CHAPTER TWELVE
Branwell simply stayed in bed all the next day, and on the following day Charlotte and their father arrived back home at the parsonage. Old Patrick was clearly delighted with his restored ability to see and read, and pleased to hear that Emily had faithfully fired his pistol over the churchyard every morning; but he was troubled by his son’s wasted appearance. It baffled him to hear that Branwell had not spent more than a couple of evenings at the Black Bull in his absence, and he concluded that Branwell must be suffering from consumption, which in fact had taken his eldest daughters Elizabeth and Maria twenty years earlier.
Charlotte was overjoyed to be with her sisters again, and she soon told them that she had written half of another novel while sequestered with their father in Manchester. On her first evening home she read several chapters to Emily and Anne, and though they thought that her main character, “Jane Eyre,” ought to be beautiful, Charlotte was adamant that the character should be “as plain and small as myself, and who shall be as interesting as any of yours.”
The kitchen had of course been thoroughly cleaned and straightened, and it was evident that, in spite of accounts from Emily and Anne and Tabby, Charlotte couldn’t make herself believe that the apparition of the Welsh boy had been a physical presence in the house—much less that two werewolves had got into a fight in the kitchen. Her sisters told her that Branwell’s left hand was still limp and numb, corresponding to the missing hand of the Welsh apparition, but she didn’t want to concern herself with her brother any more than family routine called for, and she dismissed any disability of his as a consequence of perpetual drunkenness.
And it was clear that she didn’t entirely approve of the expensive gift their father had brought back from Manchester for Emily: an Osborn Gunby flintlock pistol and loading kit.
The following morning the village was buzzing with the news that a woman had been found murdered on the moors—the body had reportedly been nearly naked, and stabbed in the neck. A magistrate from Bradford had been called in, and concluded that the woman must have seriously injured her attacker, for the remains of her chemise were stained with much more blood than the wound in her neck could account for—but Charlotte reproached her sisters for speculating that the poor soul might have been one of the werewolves who had fought in the kitchen.
Emily knew that it must have been a dioscuri knife that had killed Mrs. Flensing—and she let herself hope that the woman’s plans had died with her. And three days had now passed since Welsh’s appearance in Branwell’s bedroom, and Branwell gave every indication of being entirely and exclusively himself again. Emily had soaked the talismanic dead crow in aromatic spirits of ammonia and, over Tabby’s protests, dried it in the stove and sternly told her brother that he was to keep it near him, and never to leave the house without it.
Living with their brother nevertheless continued to be an ordeal.
Charlotte’s contempt for him only increased a couple of weeks later, when he set his bed on fire one evening in a drunken stupor. Emily had rushed in and doused the flames with one of the buckets of holy water, and had single-handedly dragged him from the smoldering bedclothes and into the hall.
Their father had fortunately been out that evening, and Emily and Anne and Charlotte had gathered in the kitchen once the scorched blankets and sheets had been disposed of and the bed remade and the still-groggy Branwell helped into it.
“He says he fell asleep,” said Emily, “and must have knocked over the candle.”
“Did he have the dead crow on the table?” asked Anne.
“In the drawer. He doesn’t want to have to explain it to Papa.”
Charlotte’s face was expressionless.
“He couldn’t have done it with that left hand of his, I suppose?” ventured Anne.
“I thought that hand was paralyzed,” said Charlotte.
To Anne, Emily said, “I don’t think so. He was lying on his back, and the candle was on the bedside table to his right.” Emily shrugged. “Welsh wouldn’t have wanted to burn him up anyway. Even if Welsh is recovered, and could get in again, he’d want Branwell’s body . . . intact.”
Anne glanced at Emily and quickly looked away; but Emily knew her thought: Branwell’s been bitten—any injury would heal very fast.
Their father had of course smelled the smoke when he came home, and from then on Branwell was made to sleep in Patrick’s room, where their elderly father would have to deal with any further crises involving his son.
Emily kept custody of Branwell’s ordinary spectacles, and now let him have them only when he wanted to read something, or write. He made a show of his consequent bad vision, bumping into furniture and doorframes when his sisters were nearby.
He was more agitated at night, and the sisters pitied their father having to put up with Branwell’s insomniac pacing and moaning and threats of suicide.
He occasionally rallied enough to dress and go to the Black Bull, and when the days grew cooler in the autumn he even, with their father’s permission and over Emily’s objections, managed to take a couple of overnight trips to visit old friends in Halifax, eight miles away. The only consequence was that he spent the next few days in bed, lamenting his wasted life.
Altogether it seemed to Emily that Branwell had, with the intermittent help of alcohol, managed to forget the night Welsh had been in his room. She even allowed herself, sometimes, to hope that Welsh had been effectively banished on that night.
She saw the sheepherder Adam Wright once in church, and he seemed wary of her—possibly imagining that it was Emily who had killed Mrs. Flensing. He didn’t meet Emily’s eye, nor presumed to call on Branwell at the parsonage, but Emily noted that he sat in a pew near the grooved ledger stone.
Emily and Anne and Keeper maintained a cautious vigilance. Throughout the autumn, until an early and especially severe winter made it virtually impossible to leave the house, Emily continued to load and fire her new pistol several times a day, hiking out to fire one shot at Ponden Kirk; Anne and Keeper always accompanied her on that hike, and Charlotte often joined them, outwardly skeptical but attentive. Anne got a friend to send her bottles of Catholic holy water, and she surreptitiously added it to the buckets throughout the house. And Keeper was always with Emily, watching all corners of a room or all points of the compass on a moorland horizon.
Recalling Tabby’s advice, Emily continued sleeping with a bright copper penny under her pillow—though in the morning it never proved to have turned black, and in any case her dreams were always obviously her own: of cooking, of loading and firing the pistol, of fording moorland streams or climbing hills with Keeper.
That winter was the coldest anyone could recall, and no one in the family ventured farther than the church once a week, not even to buy paper at Mr. Greenwood’s shop twenty steps down the street. Anne suffered from asthma, Charlotte could hardly sleep because of a toothache, and Emily and Keeper were restless at the confinement within close familiar walls. Their father had taken back his pistol and resumed firing it over the churchyard every morning, opening his bedroom window just wide enough for the pistol’s barrel to fit through.
The family’s celebration of Christmas Day was muted. The village poulterer made the short hike up the street to deliver a goose, and while it was cooking in the range, Tabby and Emily prepared smoked bacon and haddock soup and a pot of mashed potatoes with onions, and Patrick brought out a bottle of brandy he had been hiding from Branwell—but all of them had colds, and the parlor with its fireplace and the kitchen with the big iron range were the only rooms that were really warm.
Emily took comfort from the fact that there had been no supernatural intrusions for more than three months, and to Anne she quoted the lines from Hamlet:
“Some say that ever ’gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long;
And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad,
The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallow’d and so gracious is the time.”
“Pray the bird of dawning singeth through the coming year!” Anne said.
Emily shook her head. “Pray that the dead bird in Branwell’s drawer keeps his nights wholesome. Our brother may still be a contested property.”
In his more convivial days Branwell used to impress his friends with his ability to simultaneously write in Greek with one hand and Latin with the other. Emily didn’t believe he had done it in quite a while, and of course he couldn’t do the trick now, with his useless left hand; but one morning in March of the new year Keeper pawed at Emily until she followed him upstairs—and found Branwell hunched over an inkwell and a sheet of paper, writing furiously with his left hand.
Emily tried for a shocked moment to believe that Charlotte had been right—that the paralysis had been had been some consequence of his drinking, from which he had now recovered; but when he looked up in guilty surprise, his hand dropped the pen and began rapidly crawling across the table toward her like a spider.
With his right hand he seized it and pulled it across his chest, where its fingers clawed at his shirt.
“Greek?” Emily asked brightly, walking past him to the window. “Latin?”
With his elbow Branwell slid the sheet of paper into his lap, but Emily had glanced down as she passed him and had seen that it was three long lines irregularly crosshatched by short ones. Ogham, her father had called that kind of writing, the ancient Celtic tree-alphabet. It was the language incised on the ledger stone in the church.
“My last will and testament,” Branwell said lightly. He was sweating, but forced a smile. “You’re not to sneak a look at it.”
With her back to the gray light outside the window so that he would see only her silhouette, she asked, “Where’s your crows?”
He choked and then grunted out two syllables in a harsh voice, and his left hand pushed free of his right and scuttled down his shirt to the leg of his trousers; it pulled his arm out nearly straight and paused on his knee, flexing up and down like a panting animal, with two fingers extended stiffly toward Emily.
A moment later his right hand had snatched it up and clutched it again to his chest.
In his own strained voice, Branwell said, “What did you say?”
“I said ‘Where’s your crow?’ I told you to keep it by you.”
“I—oh yes, the dead bird. Honestly, it was starting to smell so bad!—that I took it outside and buried it.” He nodded, approving his story. “I was afraid Keeper would eat it,” he added, “and die of that sal volatile you soaked it in.”
Emily pushed away from the window and walked to the door. Over he shoulder she said, bleakly, “I hope I don’t have to get you another.”
The next morning at dawn she had got out of bed and put on her robe and started toward the door, when she remembered the penny under her pillow. For a week or so after the battle in the kitchen she had checked it every morning, but the coin had always remained bright copper, and she had laid it in place when she made the bed every morning without paying particular attention to it.
This morning she struck a match to the bedside candle and lifted the pillow. The penny was a black spot on the white sheet.
And all at once she remembered her dream.
She had been standing in the churchyard in intermittent moonlight among the flat and standing stones, swaying like a reed in the night wind. Between a couple of leafless trees she could see the two-story bulk of the parsonage—the windows were all so dark that she knew there was no glass in the frames, and she could see the paler gray sky through angular gaps in the roof.
A figure had been standing at the parsonage door, and, palpably aware of her even at this distance, had begun walking down the steps. The dream had ended before she had been able to see the figure’s face, if indeed it had had a face.
If the penny’s gone black in the morning, Tabby had said, you know your dream was an omen.
Emily laid the pillow back down, and a moment later jumped at the familiar boom of her father’s dawn gunshot. She looked around her narrow bedroom at the dimly visible drawings on the walls, then thoughtfully descended the stairs to begin making breakfast.
Branwell didn’t come down, of course, and conversation over the bowls of hot oatmeal porridge was sparse. Their father, who joined them for breakfast these days, only remarked that for once Branwell had slept through the night.
Charlotte complained of her toothache and went upstairs to her room to lie down. Emily and Anne volunteered to help old Tabby wash the pot and bowls, and in the kitchen Emily told the other two about Branwell’s hand and her dream and the black penny.
Tabby was troubled by the dream. She acknowledged that the parsonage must one day be a ruin, but objected to the way Emily had seen it. “You were your ghost, there,” she said, “but that shouldn’t ever be wandering abroad. Your ghost is to lie quiet in the vault, confined with your mother and sisters.”
Emily knew that she had been a ghost in the dream, and remembered Branwell saying that he and Emily and Anne had ceded control when they had left their blood at Ponden Kirk so long ago—ceded control even, and especially, after their deaths.
I will die before I permit that, she thought; oh, and I won’t permit it afterward, either! But she just said, “I’ll go where I please, in the flesh or not.”
Anne looked up from the sink and said, “Papa told us the ogham writing cut into the ledger stone is the name of the monster under it—with a branch of lines that contradict the name.”
Emily nodded and completed her sister’s thought. “Branwell might have been—that is, his hand, which is Welsh’s, might have been—composing a contradiction to the contradiction.”
“Mrs. Flensing’s body was found,” said Anne, “but that satchel she carried—the young man who came in with her took it.”
Emily shuddered at the mention of the satchel.
“Do you reckon,” said Tabby as she set about making tea, “it was that young man who put a knife into her neck?”
“I’m sure of it,” said Emily. “And I think if he had not, she’d have put a knife into his neck—since she hadn’t succeeded in killing me.” And putting my soul into the monster head that had surely been in that satchel, she thought.
That head is out there somewhere, she thought, probably with Mrs. Flensing’s ghost in it now. And Welsh—his hand, at any rate—is active in our very house.
“Papa,” she said slowly, “has a friend, of sorts, who might tell us how to free our family from these . . . adhesions.”
Anne was frowning doubtfully. “Mr. Brown? I suppose he could cut more marks into the stone . . .”
“No.”
Emily thought of a wicker figure in a timeless stone temple.
“Minerva,” she said.
The name clearly meant nothing to Tabby, but Anne looked unhappy. “What, again?” she said. “A pagan goddess! You’ll put your immortal soul in peril! Surely a priest, a Catholic priest—”
“—Would not be a pagan,” Emily finished, “in spite of what Charlotte would say. But it’s pagan forces preying on us. Fight fire with fire.”
“Could you even find that temple again?”
Emily looked at the floor, where she was sure some werewolf blood must still lie between the stones. Anne repeated her question.
“No,” Emily said. “No, the way to it had to be opened.”
She and Keeper had several times hiked out to that remembered hill a mile south of the River Aire, but no temple had been visible on the heath below it, nor manifested itself when they leaped over the inert lines of stones in the grass. The patches where the holes and fissures had opened up and then filled were hard to detect, overgrown now with grass and heather.
She got to her feet and walked down the hall to the parlor. When she came back she was carrying her folding wooden desk, and she sat down at the table and opened the hinged lid.
“I need to send a letter in the next post,” she said, pulling a card out from under a sheaf of manuscript pages. On it was scrawled a London address, but no name.
Anne recognized the card. “You,” she said flatly, “a curate’s daughter, will solicit help from a pagan goddess, through the offices of a werewolf.”
Emily thought of a woman who had reportedly leaped to her death from a turret balcony in Allerton in early March of last year, and of herself stabbing an unnatural murderous beast in this very kitchen six months ago; but she said, with affected lightness, “At least he’s a Catholic werewolf.”
Tabby muttered, “Worse and worse.”
Emily slid a blank sheet of paper free, and lifted out the ink bottle and uncapped it.
Tabby leaned on the counter, drying her hands with a towel and shaking her head mournfully. “You do dive awful deep,” she said, “to find a way to come up for air.”