CHAPTER FOUR
A visitor had called on their father shortly after Emily and Anne had carried the dishes and cups and teapot back to the kitchen. Emily had heard Tabby open the front door and talk to a man, and then heard her father’s voice; the men’s voices had withdrawn into her father’s study and Tabby clumped back up the hall to the kitchen.
“A gentleman to see your father,” she said, settling onto her stool by the black iron range, “talking idolatry, if you ask me. But he must be an acquaintance, as Keeper didn’t bark at him.”
Now old Patrick’s voice sounded from down the hall. “Girls,” he called, “I think you’d be interested in this gentleman’s errand.”
Emily and Anne looked at each other. “Idolatry!” said Anne, suppressing a giggle as they walked out of the kitchen.
Their father was standing in the hall by his study door, and Charlotte stepped into the hall from the parlor. Keeper stood by the front door now, alert but not growling.
At a wave from their father, the three sisters approached and walked past him into his study. A man stood by the window, and Emily, always shy of strangers, first looked only at the visitor’s obviously expensive but travel-worn boots.
And a chill swept over her, for she had seen those boots only a few hours ago, stumbling and dragging across grass and mud beside her own.
“Mr. Curzon,” came her father’s voice, “my daughters: Charlotte the eldest, and Emily and Anne.”
The sisters curtsied, and Emily looked up as the stranger bowed and straightened. And she kept her face immobile.
A lamp had been lit on the desk, and by its amber light she could clearly see the black mane and the dark, craggy features of Alcuin, the man she had tried to help this morning. The black eyepatch again covered his left eye, and he was now wearing gray corduroy trousers and a white shirt under a black frock coat.
His single exposed eye had widened for one startled moment, but now his face too was expressionless.
Emily wondered that he was able to stand up, much less walk even the short distance from the village. Did some medicine exist that could have restored him to this extent?
“Ladies,” he said. For a moment it seemed that he was about to say more, but his lips closed firmly.
“Mr. Curzon,” said their father, “has heard that as curate of Haworth I supported the Catholic Emancipation Act twenty years ago, and consults me now about the feasibility of establishing Catholic parishes in Yorkshire.”
Emily had told Charlotte and Anne about her morning’s adventure, including the detail of Curzon’s superfluous eyepatch; and peripherally she caught Anne’s questioning glance, and nodded.
“Are there Catholics in Yorkshire?” asked Charlotte drily.
Curzon looked from Emily to Charlotte, and his face creased in a bleak, resigned smile. “Enough to fill a church or two, I suppose.” His voice had lost the hoarse, pained rasp Emily recalled, but it was still deep, and still seemed to carry a trace of French accent.
“Possibly in Leeds or Bradford,” Patrick went on, blinking at nothing, “but certainly not many out here by the Lancashire border. I’m sorry you should have come all this way, sir, to no avail!”
“I’m traveling,” said Curzon, “and I was nearby.” He exhaled and scowled at Emily.
And she knew it was high time that she spoke up. “I’m glad to see that you’ve recovered from your wound this morning, Mr. Curzon,” she said. She turned to her father. “Papa, this is the gentleman I told you about.”
For several seconds old Patrick Brontë stood motionless. Then he groped for his desk and pulled open a drawer; and when he raised his hand he was holding the twin-bladed knife.
“Emily,” he said, “catch.” And he tossed it in the direction of her voice.
She caught it by the grip, and with her free hand waved her sisters back toward the door.
“Is our visitor,” asked their father carefully, “wearing an eyepatch?”
“Yes—though this morning you said it was only a formality, didn’t you, Mr. Curzon?”
Curzon just clenched his fists by his sides.
Their father peered blindly toward Curzon. “My daughter,” he said slowly, “tells me there was blood on that knife, when she found you. I think you may be more ally than adversary.”
Curzon rolled his head to look at all of them, and his voice was cold. “I’m no ally of fools. Yes, it was the blood of a lycanthrope.” Speaking directly toward Patrick, he went on, “And you!—after revitalizing their kind, you have brought your family to live out here where the things thrive!”
A nudge at her thigh let Emily know, without looking down, that Keeper had joined them. She felt the vibration of a growl too low to hear.
“Catholic parishes, was it?” said Patrick scornfully. “Something else, I think!” He raised his head. “My daughter tells me you mentioned Welsh this morning; it’s true that I brought him—it—back to England. Inadvertently. But my children are safe from him when they’re here, with me.”
“Here?” demanded Curzon. “What protections do you imagine you provide, Mr. Brunty? Blind, shooting a gun over graves every morning? I heard about that in the village shops. Keeping buckets of holy water around the house? Their weak radiance avails little.”
Emily was watching Curzon, but peripherally she saw her father’s face redden above the endlessly overlapped silk cravat. Holy water? she thought. Not in an Anglican house! The buckets of water . . . in every room and hallway of the house . . . are kept filled in case of fire, and have no other value, surely.
Keeper was looking directly at Curzon, and his growl was audible now.
“It’s clear,” said her father stiffly, his Irish accent more pronounced now, “that your ostensible purpose in this visit was a sham. I certainly don’t care to participate, especially through deceit, in any scheme of the Huberti, and—and so I note your opinions and bid you good day.”
Curzon bent to pick up a tweed cap from a chair by the window. He hesitated, and Emily wondered how his conversation with her father might have developed if she had not been present.
As it was, Curzon just said, “I pray I may never one day need to kill your children,” and walked to the door, pushing rudely between Emily and Charlotte. Keeper snapped at him, and Emily heard cloth tear. Curzon grunted but didn’t look back as he strode to the front door and left the house.
Her father sat down heavily in the chair behind the desk.
“A lycanthrope?” said Charlotte breathlessly.
“Holy water?” said Anne.
“A drop,” said her father, waving that subject away, “in each bucket. Yes, lycanthropes—call them werewolves if you like, or gytrashes, as the locals do. Emily—would you see which way he goes? Down to the village or out to the moors?”
“Who are the Huberti?” asked Anne, but Emily was already in the hall, with Keeper trotting close at her heels.
When she stepped outside into the cold wind and closed the door behind her, she saw the tall figure of Alcuin Curzon striding down the lane beside the churchyard—not even limping! Clearly he was going to the village, and probably to some transportation away from Haworth.
On an impulse, she began running after him. Keeper trotted easily at her side, not pulling ahead.
She soon caught up with Curzon on the paving stones beside the church. “Mr. Curzon,” she called when she was a few yards behind him.
He stopped and turned, frowning, and Emily noticed a rip in the knee of his new trousers. Keeper tensed, and she didn’t have to stoop to catch his steel-studded leather collar with her left hand.
“Evidently,” she said, “your wound this morning was not as dire as I imagined.”
“Restrain your dog,” he said. “I’d not hurt him.”
Emily realized that she was still holding the peculiar knife in her right hand. “He and I defend each other,” she said, not at all out of breath from running. “And he won’t ever let you kill me, as you said you might try to do.”
“Yes, if you were to change. But”—he bared his teeth in what might have been a smile—“you helped me today, so I’d try to see that you were shriven first.”
“Catholic magnanimity!” She shook her head. “You do know something about this business—”
He didn’t move, but just stared down at her with his exposed right eye. Emily wished it were covered too.
She went on in a rush, “Have you seen the dark boy who becomes a flock of crows?”
Curzon’s eye widened at that, and he stepped back. “My God, girl—Miss Emily!—are you already marked as his?”
He took another step backward when she extended the hand that held the knife, but she tossed it clattering onto the pavement at his feet.
“Take it—you left it behind this morning. I meant to indicate my hand.”
His eye held her gaze for a moment, then looked down. And he nodded. “As I guessed this morning, it’s a scar from teeth as well as a burn—you cauterized the bite. If you were quick about it—and I expect you were—then you haven’t seen Welsh’s spirit; someone has told you about that apparition. Your idiot father? One of your luckless sisters?” He raised his eye from her hand to her face. “Someone is lethally marked.”
Lethally marked? Emily wished now that she hadn’t dropped the knife; but Keeper was with her, quivering under her fingers gripping his collar. She pressed on, “The boy is Welsh’s spirit? I have seen it a couple of times, far off, out on the moors.” She took a deep breath. “Tell me about Ponden Kirk.”
He cocked his head, and his eye narrowed now in what might have been pity.
His cold gaze was steady, but she just stared back at him.
It was Curzon who looked away—past her, back toward the parsonage. He rubbed his hand across his mouth. “You’re not lost to him, necessarily. Damn! You present a heartily unwelcome interruption and inconvenience, and likely you have no more intelligence than your demented father . . . but I think in all good conscience I must take you with me. Come now, this minute—don’t go back to that house of doomed souls.”
Emily quickly crouched and straightened, and she was again holding the knife.
“God, not you, will judge their souls,” she said, “and whatever their state, I’m one of them.”
The wind shook the bare branches of the trees in the churchyard. Emily shivered and wished she’d grabbed her coat, but held the knife steady. For several seconds the only sound was the clinking of new gravestones being chiseled in the stonecutting yard behind her.
“I think you are, at that,” Curzon said, almost in a whisper. “Keep the knife, and I pray you find the grace to use it on your own throat one day.”
He turned on his heel and strode away.
Emily started to turn back toward he parsonage, but Keeper stood immovable until Curzon had disappeared around the corner of her father’s church.
Night had fallen by the time Branwell stumbled out of the Black Bull, though it was much earlier than his usual hour of returning home; but when he clambered over the churchyard wall to take the shortcut among the gravestones, a long, menacing howl from Emily’s dog made him stop and look up from watching the cautious placement of his boots in the moonlight that filtered through the tree branches.
And so he stumbled against the base of one of the flat gravestones and, trying to catch his balance, sat down on it. The stone was cold, and he shivered and slid his hands into his pockets. His fingers closed on the vial Mrs. Flensing had given him, and he pulled it out.
The dog was barking furiously now, up by the parsonage door, and though each roar seemed to vibrate in Branwell’s bones, he tried to ignore the noise and focus on the vial.
In the darkness, its contents seemed to be faintly luminescent. Several glasses of gin had dispelled the intimidation Mrs. Flensing had imposed on him, and now he laughed softly in embarrassment to recall how he had stammered and stumbled when answering her questions.
“Quiet!” he shouted at the dog, across the scarcely seen gravestones. He looked down at the vial again. “Devil’s tears!” he muttered. “Let’s see how devils weep.”
He thumbed the cork out of the vial, and then hesitated with one finger poised over the narrow rim. But what has Northangerland to lose? he asked himself with giddy bravado, and dipped his finger into the cold liquid.
It stung, and he quickly recorked the vial and pulled off his spectacles to wipe his finger on the lenses and then on his coat.
He peered irritably in the direction of the jarringly barking dog, but the trees and gravestones around him were just dim, blurred shapes. He tucked the vial into his pocket and fitted his spectacles back over his ears.
He found that his vision through the lenses was clearer than before he had rubbed the oil on them; contrasts between moonlight and shadow were more distinct, and the shapes of the trees and the standing stones were more perceptibly three-dimensional solids.
And now he could see that there were other things visible in the intermittent moonlight.
Shapes like unmoored shadows shifted among the headstones. Their outlines were difficult to distinguish from the tree branches beyond them, but they seemed to move with volition.
Branwell froze, staring at the things.
He could see that they were all moving between the tombstones, out of the churchyard toward the open moors, and when they shivered at each booming call from the dog, Branwell realized that they were fleeing from the sound.
The dog’s baying was shaking Branwell too, like blows to his spine, and to escape it he followed the vaguely human figures—over the low west wall and along a path that curved across a moonlit field, away from the parsonage and the churchyard and the village.
Branwell was shivering with both fear and excitement. The upright shapes were more distinct in the open moonlight, and in spite of their blurred outlines he could make out flexing limbs swinging from shoulders and hips, and heads like big mushrooms loosely rolling. When the breeze blew across them he caught a sulfury scent, like marsh gas.
The manlike shapes were aware of him as they hobbled and hopped along. Their bag heads frequently swiveled toward him, and the things moved aside to clear his way. Several of them extended diaphanous arms with smoke-tendril fingers waving at the ends, and, sensing respect and deference, Branwell giddily stretched out his own arms. His palms felt a faint tingling as the indistinct fingers swept across them.
As the dog’s barking faded behind them, Branwell was able to feel a pulse that was not his own, through the earpieces of his spectacles; and when the shapes around him began bobbing to the same rhythm, and opening and closing holes in their heads in counterpoint to it, he realized that they were, after a fashion, singing.
It became clear to Branwell that the things were no longer fleeing the barking of Emily’s dog, but taking a deliberate course. The moon was high now in the starry sky, and it seemed to renew the alcohol in his bloodstream and give him boundless energy. When the misshapen figures began spinning as they moved along the path, and awkwardly waving their rippling upper limbs at the sky, Branwell found it fitting to spin too, laughing, and to leap around and among the things.
His increasingly frenzied activity didn’t tire him at all, and his breathing was no faster than it would be if he were simply walking rapidly. He was aware of the very cold wind tossing his hair, but he wasn’t shivering; and the air was laced with the scents of heather and damp soil and the smell of the figures around him.
Their way led up hillsides where Branwell was able to leap over projecting rocks that slowed his more awkward companions, and they all skirted the bank of Dean Beck for at least a mile to reach an ancient stone bridge, though in many places stepping stones were set only a few feet apart across the rushing water.
After some unconsidered length of time the ungainly company stopped, and when Branwell glanced around at his frail companions he saw that they were all folded and shorter—kneeling—and facing the same direction. They swayed in the wind like tall grass, and it occurred to him that he had not seen them raise dust in their steps and gyrations, nor cast any perceptible moon shadows on the paths.
Branwell’s spurious energy had at some point left him. He was panting now, shivering in the cold wind and the sudden awareness of being many dark miles from home.
All he could see ahead was a tall, roughly rectangular escarpment, black against a gray slope in the moonlight, and he sagged in dismay when he recognized it. He seldom ventured out on the moors anymore, even by daylight, and he hadn’t been this close to Ponden Kirk since that day sixteen years ago when he had enticed two of his sisters to join him in leaving blood in the cave at its base.
Now he could see that the body of a big animal lay halfway up the stony slope.
He turned away from it and took a step back—but the wispy figures, the wraiths that had accompanied and led him here, clustered together now to block him. He began to push his way through them, and it was like pushing through twigs and cobwebs . . . but the openings in their bag heads gaped like muddy drains, and they were audibly sucking air, though they had nothing like lungs. Branwell felt a corresponding tug at his own breath; he was able to keep his throat closed against it, but he dreaded getting into the middle of them, and he retreated and reluctantly faced Ponden Kirk.
And there was motion at the base of the monument. Out from the shadows now stepped a tall figure, imposingly solid in contrast to the figures behind Branwell.
The figure walked forward, down the slope, and heather crunched under its bare, blocky toes. It was a man—naked except for a belt with a cartridge box attached to it, but so thickly covered with coarse hair that Branwell knew its sex because of the bushy beard and broad shoulders. The man’s eyes glittered in the moonlight as they stared into Branwell’s.
Branwell was dismayingly sober, and trembling. His legs tensed for a headlong, thrashing flight through the things that swayed behind him, but he made himself call up all the failures of his life, all the opportunities that had frightened him into retreat, and he whispered, “Northangerland” and stood his ground. And when the big man had walked down to where Branwell stood and extended a hand, Branwell didn’t let himself flinch at the sight of the short fingers and long, thick nails. He reached out his own hand and clasped it.
For several long moments Branwell’s soft palm was pressed against rough pads; then the man released him and waved up the slope, toward the dead animal.
The man rocked his furry head back and opened his mouth, and the high, droning wail that issued from his throat rocked Branwell back on his heels. Out here on the moors at night, at the foot of Ponden Kirk, the piercing sound was nothing at all like the crying of an infant—it was high-pitched, but expressive of subhuman grief and rage.
Branwell was sure that the very wind halted until the terrible sound stopped. And then the wail was echoed distantly by other such voices, from widely separated points far away in the night.
The man stepped back and waved toward the Kirk. Branwell took a deep, dizzy breath, and picked his way up the uneven slope until he stood a few yards short of where the animal’s body lay.
Even in the shadows, with his new vision Branwell was able to see the thing clearly. It was something like a huge dog, with a short snout and long, muscular legs. Its fur was wet, and stood up in long tufts like pine needles, not everywhere covering dark patches on the skin beneath, and he could see a gash in the corded neck. The cold air was sharp with the smell of linseed oil, familiar to him from the days when he had hoped to be a portrait painter.
The tall naked man stepped past Branwell, dwarfing him, and from the cartridge box his blunt fingers extracted a stone and a short steel bar curled at one end; and when he crouched—his head level now with Branwell’s—and struck the stone against the steel, a cascade of bright sparks fell onto the dead animal’s fur.
A moment later the body was engulfed in glaring flames and the man stepped back. The sudden heat stung Branwell’s face and hands, and the air was sharp with the reek of burning oil and fur.
Now someone else was stepping down the slope from the Kirk, a small barefoot figure in tattered clothing—short in stature but throwing a giant firelight-shadow onto the black stone edifice behind it.
Branwell recognized the dark boy who had haunted his dreams, and whom he had once met in the snow-blanketed churchyard, many years ago. In the firelight Branwell saw him smile—
And then, without having moved, Branwell was looking down the slope—past the burning body of the animal, at the tall man and a slender young man in a woolen coat, with bushy red hair and crooked spectacles.
He met the gaze of the bespectacled young man, and realized dizzily that it was himself; and he knew that the person staring at him out of his own eyes was a stranger.
Branwell cringed and raised a hand to block the sight, and it was not his own hand; it was grimy, and small—the hand of a child. He tensed, and bare toes curled against gravelly dirt.
His mind convulsed away in shock, and he sat down and fell backward across weeds and stones; but he could feel his own coat tight around his shoulders, and his own boots on his feet.
He completed his involuntary backward somersault and got up in a crouch, facing the fire and the Kirk but not looking at the dark boy; for several seconds he just huddled there, gasping, his hands pressed against the dirt. Then his nerve broke and he was up and heedlessly clawing his way right through the cluster of bag-headed wraiths and past them, running away into darkness. He heard no pursuit, and after a hundred yards he realized that the full moon was lighting the familiar paths and hills brightly enough for him to snatch the polluted spectacles from his face and tuck them into his pocket.