CHAPTER FIVE
Usually at eight o’clock Patrick joined his daughters in the parlor for evening prayers, after which he would bar the front door, advise the girls not to stay up late, and then ascend the stairs to his room, pausing at the landing to wind the clock; and before getting into bed, he would load and prime his pistol for the morning’s shot over the churchyard.
And on most nights after prayers, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne retired to the kitchen, where they would propose and elaborate and write down stories, one or another of them sitting down to write while the other two walked in circles around the table. When they’d been younger, the stories had been set in their imaginary lands of Glass Town and Gondal and Angria, and Branwell had been a lively participant. It was different now.
Having paid for the publication of a book of their poems, they had ambitions of an audience beyond just themselves, and Branwell had found broader and coarser companionship at the Black Bull. He seldom made his way home until after his sisters had put out the candles and gone to bed, leaving the kitchen door unlocked for him.
Tonight, though, when the prayers were finished and their father got up from kneeling, he didn’t walk into the hall to see to the front door. Instead he sat down at the dining table and swung his head back and forth as if he could see his daughters, who glanced at one another and pulled out chairs for themselves. A wind from the west rattled the curtainless windows, and the flames of the candles on the table wavered. Keeper had come in an hour ago, and now lay under the table, grunting from time to time.
“Anne,” Patrick said, “you asked who the Huberti are. I’m afraid I wasn’t—”
“I missed your answer entirely,” interrupted Emily. “I was out chatting with Mr. Curzon.”
“Yes,” said Anne, “tell Papa what he said to you.”
Their father pursed his lips, then turned toward Emily’s voice.
“He was alarmed,” said Emily, “to hear that I had seen the dark boy who can become a flock of crows.”
Patrick inhaled sharply and opened his mouth, but Emily went on, “And he said that since I helped him this morning, he would see that I’m given the benefit of Catholic absolution, before the day comes when he shall have to kill me.” Her tone was resolutely light. “Then he changed his mind and decided I might be saved after all, and insisted that I go away with him—that instant.”
Patrick stared in Emily’s direction. “You can’t have seen the boy, not seen him, surely! The exorcism the Catholic priest did—”
“I’ve seen him a couple of times,” Emily said, “out on the moors, far off.”
“I have too,” said Anne, almost too quietly to be heard.
“A boy can’t turn into crows,” muttered Charlotte.
“A dead boy can,” said their father hollowly, “if he wasn’t precisely a boy in the first place. He can gather mass to temporarily show a physical form.” He sat back and closed his nearly useless eyes. “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” he said, and Emily mentally supplied phrases from the same monologue of Hamlet’s that her father was quoting: Am I a coward? Who calls me villain?
Anne had also recognized the quote. “We don’t call you villain,” she said. “You did what you thought was sufficient.”
“Mr. Curzon told me the boy is Welsh’s spirit,” said Emily. “Meaning ghost?”
Her father nodded unhappily. “It takes the form in which it was banished across the Irish Sea—open wild water—in 1710: the dark little boy in ragged clothes, whom the sailors wished to throw overboard.” In a whisper he added, “And may my great-grandfather be cursed, for preventing them.”
Anne looked shocked, and Charlotte was frowning, evidently dismayed by the idea that this story might after all be true. And Emily recalled Charlotte’s response, sixteen years ago, when Branwell had proposed that memorable hike out to Ponden Kirk to see their dead sister Maria “made alive again”: overcoming evident reluctance, Charlotte had said, You three go and have your game.
Charlotte glanced at the darkness outside the windows and stood up to tilt the wick of a new candle into one of the candle flames. She fitted it into a brass candleholder and resumed her seat. The buttery smell of the freshly ignited wick wafted across the table.
Anne caught Emily’s eye and, with a questioning look, held up her left forefinger, on which surely no scar remained. Charlotte was looking again toward the window, and Emily shook her head at Anne. Let’s not trouble him with that, she thought, yet.
“I should have let Curzon speak,” said Patrick. “Though he considers me a fool and I consider him a dangerous charlatan, he might know of some protections. Emily, did he give you any way to reach him?”
“No. I suppose I can ask in the village, in case he left information.” She took a deep breath. “So who are the Huberti?”
“A French Catholic cult,” said Patrick, “which pretends to date back to a seventh-century Belgian saint, Hubertus. He was bishop of Liege, and this cult claims that he was a great scourge of . . . werewolves.”
Anne spoke up, “Saint Hubert of Liege! He’s the one who was hunting a stag, and when it turned to face him he had a vision of the cross, between its antlers.”
“That’s genuine Papist folklore,” agreed her father. “This werewolf business was certainly cooked up somewhat more recently. Half a dozen of the Huberti approached me in a tavern in London, in 1807, very excitedly, when I was in town to be ordained. They took me back to a private room. One of them knew me from Cambridge, and knew that I had come over from Ireland five years earlier. They addressed me as Brunty, and I let it stand.” He sat back and made a sour face. “Oh, they’re a weird crew—they all wear eyepatches! It’s only a formality now, they see perfectly well with both eyes, but I gathered that in previous centuries they would actually, each of them, put out one of his own eyes!”
Anne shuddered, and Charlotte gave Emily a revolted look; but Emily was thinking of the cyclopes.
Caught up in his memories, Patrick went on, “They wanted to recruit me—compel me!” He laughed without humor. “I really thought they meant—never mind formalities!—to cut out one of my eyes, right there in the tavern! Their goal, they said, was to stop the predations of devils in the north country, which had been increasing in recent years. They knew I had inadvertently brought one there from Ireland, an important one, and they wanted me to work with them. They showed me a knife—double-bladed, like the one the Curzon fellow had—and they said it was efficacious in the killing of werewolves.”
“And,” said Anne breathlessly, “then?”
Patrick spread his hands. “I kept them talking until a steward looked in on us, and I pushed past him and ran away!” He sighed and rubbed his brow. “I was already a joint curate in Wethersfield then, in Essex. I was engaged to be married to a girl there . . . but the things those mad Huberti had said troubled me. I went back to Ireland for a week—preached at the old church at Ballyroney—and spoke to my father.”
The three sisters were listening closely. Their father spoke so seldom of his family, or his life before ordination, that today’s scanty revelations on those subjects were as arresting as the fantastic and not-quite-plausible talk of werewolves.
“He told me much of what I told you girls earlier, about Welsh’s origin and his—provisional, God help us!—death. And my father directed me to an old peasant woman named Meg, who . . . well, I’m not sure she wasn’t an outright pagan witch, to be honest. But in exchange for sweets and tobacco she told me of one way that I might impede Welsh’s spirit. It sounds foolish—” He cleared his throat and frowned defensively. “She told me to take rust scrapings from the church bell that was rung at Welsh’s funeral in 1771—cast iron, like an inverted Dutch oven—and mix them with lead, and cast bullets from the result.”
“You,” said Emily, forcing down an incredulous laugh, “must have taken a lot of scrapings.”
“I took the whole bell,” he admitted. “It’s in a bucket of water in a locked closet in the church sacristy. Every few days I scrape rust off of it and dry the powder to stir into the melted lead. The gunshot, the old woman told me, would be a way to ‘ring Welsh’s funeral bell’ again.”
“And remind him that he’s dead,” said Charlotte tonelessly.
Patrick cocked his head, apparently unsure if her remark was sarcastic. “After your mother died,” he said slowly, “I got that Catholic priest to do the exorcism.” He nodded, retrospectively justifying his action. “That was twenty-five years ago—and until hearing from Emily and Anne just now, I’ve believed that ritual finally banished the Welsh devil to Hell.”
“Though you’ve still rung his funeral bell every morning,” observed Emily.
“Against,” said their father softly, “the remote . . .” His voice trailed off.
For several seconds none of them spoke. Wind battered at the window, and Keeper growled from under the table.
“Did you marry the girl?” asked Anne at last.
Patrick raised his head and sighed. “No, child. Her family had money, and they strongly disapproved of her engagement to a penniless Irish clergyman. In any case I had been studying Wesley’s accounts of devils in Yorkshire, and I knew I had to come here, to put a stop to the illness I had revived in the land.”
They all jumped then, for a loud, shuddering wail sounded from somewhere far out in the dark night—it was joined by another, and then still another, and the sounds wove together in barbaric harmony for many long seconds before fading.
None of the people at the table had moved, but from the corner of her eye Emily saw that Keeper was now standing in the hall, swinging his great head from the front of the house to the rear and back, and he seemed bigger, more solidly real than the wall behind him or the stone floor under his massive paws. His black lips were drawn back, and from one of his breaths to the next she could see all his teeth.
At last, as if it had been proposed and agreed on, Patrick and his daughters all stood up at once and filed out of the parlor and down the hall to the warm kitchen, Keeper crowding so closely beside Emily on one side that her shoulder brushed the wall on the other. Each of the sisters carried one of the candles, and Emily crossed to a lamp on a shelf by the black-iron range and lit it with her candle. Keeper stood by the back door.
“What was—” began Anne, then just shook her head.
Their father had found a chair at the table and sat down. He shook his head, then turned toward Keeper’s deep-throated growl. “Never mind, boy,” he said, “there are buckets of holy water by every door.”
Charlotte clicked her tongue.
Emily realized that she was listening for the awful sound to come again out of the night, and that the others were too.
When perhaps a minute had passed with no repetition of it, Anne and Charlotte pulled out chairs on either side of Patrick and settled into them.
Patrick cleared his throat. “I’ve heard that sound before—in Ireland, on the evening after a village priest claimed to have killed a faoladh, which is the Irish term for a werewolf; no one believed him until that wailing came on the same night. Emily, I think Mr. Curzon killed one today.”
And those were the voices of its mourners, thought Emily. Beside her, Anne shivered.
“You came here,” Emily prompted, “to cure the illness in the land.”
“I didn’t know to come directly here,” her father said. “For full many a year I was a sort of itinerant curate, at churches all over Yorkshire, searching for indications of Welsh’s sort of devil. Anne, my dear, is it possible you could give your poor father a glass of whisky?”
Anne raised her eyebrows but said, “Yes, Papa.” She moved a stool and stood on it to reach a high shelf, and when she stepped down she was carrying a heavy jar. She unscrewed the lid and carefully poured amber liquor into a teacup. She screwed the lid back on and got up on the stool again to put the jar away, then resumed her seat.
Her father took a solid sip, exhaled, and went on, “In each parish I took care to talk to the people, and hear their tales of what they called gytrashes, barguests, boggarts—monsters in the night. I was curate in . . . Dewsbury, Hartshead, Liversedge, Thornton . . .”
“Closer and closer to here,” observed Emily.
Patrick held up his teacup. “How do you keep this from Branwell?”
“The jar is labeled ‘Emetic,’ ” said Charlotte. “Go on.”
“Yes. In Thornton I heard that John Wesley had preached a memorable sermon here in Haworth, and William Grimshaw had been rector here for twenty years in the last century. I already knew that Wesley was aware of . . . lycanthropy on the moors, and when I read Grimshaw’s sermons it was clear to me that he too was concerned about it.” He finished the whisky, hesitated, then set the cup down. “And at Ponden Hall the Heatons were kind enough to let me study in their library.”
Emily had felt Anne start at the word Ponden, and then relax a moment later. Ponden Hall was the two-hundred-year-old estate of the wealthy Heaton family, three miles west of Haworth and well northeast of the desolate Ponden Kirk monument. The Brontë children had been playmates of the Heaton children.
“I found some documents on local history—journals, letters—there was a copy there of The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, published in 1613, which fairly indicated Haworth as the center of the supernatural whirlpool—and a disturbing Gaelic manuscript by one Uilliam Luaith Beannaigh.”
No one spoke, and in the moments when the wind paused, Emily could hear the ticking of the clock on the stair landing. Keeper was sitting beside her now, and licked her hand.
“If a good deal of what you’ve heard and read is true,” said Charlotte, “why do we stay here? Why not move back to Thornton?”
Patrick stirred, and went on slowly, “That ledger stone in the floor of the church, a few yards closer to the door than the stone over our family vault.”
“The one with the grooves cut in it,” said Charlotte with a nod. “You once said that the grooves were to keep people from slipping, if the floor were wet. I asked you why there weren’t grooves over the whole floor in that case, and you said it proved to be too costly.”
“Did I? I’m afraid I lied to you. The grooves are ogham, the ancient Celtic tree-alphabet. In that crude alphabet some of those grooves spell out the name of a creature that lies beneath that ledger stone. It’s what I was searching for, through all those years—and, having found it, it’s why I’ve kept my family here. You’re . . . not precisely safe, but safer, here, where I can keep it down and—and, God willing, keep the Welsh spirit away from it.”
“Keep it down?” said Emily. “It’s not dead?”
“Not . . . irretrievably, I’m afraid. Frozen halfway there, say, like a stalemated king in a chess game.”
“What is it?”
“According to the Luaith Beannaigh manuscript, it is Welsh’s inhuman twin. Someone at some point killed it, mostly, more than a hundred years ago, and had its ogham name incised in the ledger stone laid over it, along with a negating branch of lines which . . . contradict the name. The Reverend Grimshaw made sure to keep the grooves cleared of dust and mud, and added a repressive Latin phrase to the Pater Noster in his Sunday service. My fool predecessor here stopped using the Latin entirely—he insisted, reasonably enough anywhere else, that the Pater Noster should be said in the King’s good English—and he even proposed filling in the grooves in the stone with mortar.” Patrick shook his head. “The congregation knew better. They came near hanging him, and might have done, if I hadn’t replaced him.”
Emily recalled hearing how the congregation had expressed its displeasure. A donkey had been led into the church in the middle of a service, and on its back, facing the donkey’s tail, was a man wearing a stack of twenty hats. It had effectively disrupted the curate’s reading of a lesson, and when Emily first heard the story she had thought it was merely a grotesque clown show.
Now she said, “Facing backward on the donkey? Twenty hats?”
“The man on the donkey was not simply ridiculing the ignorant rector,” her father said. “After the donkey promenade, the people dragged the poor rector outside and rolled him in a pile of ashes. The people didn’t remember what it was, but in fact they were enacting an ancient pagan Celtic ritual of banishment—the man on the donkey facing away, wearing a lot of hats to represent the entire community, and ashes to show a vacated space.” Charlotte had huffed as he spoke, and he added, “It’s true, my dear. All that world is still not far below the surface, out here.”
“Brachiun enim,” said Emily softly, quoting the odd Latin phrase that her father inserted into his recital of the Pater Noster, always striking a string-suspended iron triangle as he voiced the enigmatic words. “You mispronounce brachium, but that’s ‘arm for,’ ” more or less. What does it signify?”
“In Latin,” her father said, “inserted before voluntas tua, it’s a needless reference to God’s arm. But in a dialect of old Celtic, those syllables—breagh gan ainm—mean ‘Lie nameless.’ Spoken while ringing that triangle, which I chiseled and hammered from the rim of Welsh’s funeral bell, it emphasizes the contradiction of the twin’s name inscribed on the ledger stone, and—by the grace of God—has kept the twin down.”
The clock on the stairs struck nine, and he sighed and got laboriously to his feet. “That’s enough,” he said, “there’s nothing anyone can do tonight. I’m for bed. Don’t . . . stay up too late.” He yawned, as much from tension as from weariness, and turned toward the hall. “And don’t let Branwell get into the emetic,” he added over his shoulder.
When their father’s slow steps had ascended past the stair landing, Emily told her sisters, “Later. Tomorrow.”
Anne and Charlotte nodded with evident relief at postponing discussion of the things their father had said, and the three sisters pushed back their chairs and walked down the hall to fetch their folding wooden writing desks. It was reassuring to resume their usual nightly routine and open the desks on the kitchen table and set out ink bottles, pens, and sheets of paper. Even Keeper, recognizing the familiar homely ritual, consented to lie down at Emily’s feet.
Charlotte allowed herself to say, “Celtic tree-alphabet! God help us!” before sighing and bending over a manuscript page.
“Tomorrow,” said Emily firmly.
“Amen,” agreed Anne, smoothing a page of her own.
Emily uncapped her ink bottle and dipped the nib of her pen.
Soon the kitchen was silent except for the scratching of pens. Anne had already begun writing a novel while working as a governess last year, and it was about the vicissitudes of a governess’s life. Charlotte had decided to abandon the old tales of Angria and write a novel herself, drawing on her two years as a student in Brussels. Emily felt ready to begin a novel of her own, but she was resolved not to base it on her own life—her vision was of the wild, windswept moors and the isolated souls to be found in that that wilderness.