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CHAPTER TWO

Back at the parsonage, Emily found that Anne had saved a plate of mutton, mashed potatoes, and preserved cucumbers for her, and the mutton bone for Keeper.

Branwell had looked up from an issue of Blackwood’s Magazine when Emily came into the kitchen after hanging up her coat, and the chaotic state of his red hair and skimpy chin-beard showed that he had got out of bed only recently.

It was a new issue of the magazine. Blackwood’s editors consistently ignored Branwell’s letters offering to write articles—which he assured them would far outshine the ones they published—but he still read every issue that the family borrowed from their father’s sexton, and he probably still hoped to be featured in the magazine’s pages one day as a great writer . . . or painter . . . or perhaps politician.

Charlotte stepped in from the hall holding a dress she’d been stitching.

“Papa was asking where you’d got to.”

Branwell peered at Emily through his little round spectacles. “Are you in trouble? Have you been drying clothes on the gravestones again?”

Emily sat down across the table from him. He would doubtless spend the afternoon slouching around the house in an irritable daze, and at dusk walk down to the Black Bull. She gave her sisters a wide-eyed look that promised more later, and for now just said to Charlotte, “West and then east again.”

Charlotte nodded, then snapped at Branwell, “We’ve found your coat out there on more than a few mornings.”

Anne caught Emily’s eye and touched her own wrist. Emily looked down and saw a spot of blood on her sleeve. Quickly she folded the cuff under.

Branwell blinked at Charlotte. “On these cold nights,” he drawled, “I sometimes leave my coat there in case some poor ghost might need it.”

Tabby the housekeeper had bustled in from the yard in time to hear him, and snorted derisively. “Careful they don’t want your trousers too.”

Emily made quick work of her late dinner and stood up; and Alcuin’s knife tumbled out of the pocket of her dress and clinked on the stone floor.

Branwell leaned over and picked it up. The twin blades, at least, were clean, for Emily had plunged it into the ground several times to get the traces of blood off before pocketing it. The leather grip had already been dry when she had picked it up.

“I found that,” she said.

“This hasn’t been out in the weather,” Branwell noted. His hand trembled as he brushed his thumb across the tips of the blades—but his shakiness wasn’t unusual. He cleared his throat. “I think I saw one like it in London.”

“In London?” said Emily, intrigued by this careless admission that he had, after all, traveled to London eleven years ago, and not been halted on the way by a robbery. “Where in London?”

Branwell glanced around quickly, then laid the knife down on the table. “I don’t recall.”

None of the others had apparently noticed his slip. Charlotte muttered something to the effect that most things eluded her brother’s memory these days.

“It was just . . . lying on a path,” Emily said. “Is Papa in his study?”

Anne nodded, her eyebrows raised in obvious anticipation of hearing how Emily had got blood on her blouse, and how she had actually come across the knife. Emily picked it up as she pushed her chair back and got to her feet.

Her father’s study was down the entry hall, and she rapped on the door and then opened it and stepped in.

Old Patrick Brontë was seated at his desk with a bright oil lamp at his elbow, squinting and tilting his head as he peered through a magnifying glass at his sermons notebook. His chin was buried in the many layers of the yards-long silk cravat that he wrapped around and around his neck every morning—always clockwise from Christmas to midsummer, and then counterclockwise till Christmas Eve.

When he looked up over his nearly useless spectacles, she said, “I found a wounded man on the moors this morning, by Ponden Kirk.”

“Oh?” Her father frowned and laid his notebook aside. “Badly wounded?”

“I thought so, at the time. There was a serious-looking gash in his side,” she said; and added with a shrug, “which didn’t stop him walking off while I was fetching the Sunderlands. I talked to him, a bit, and he seemed to know our name, though he pronounced it Brunty.”

Her father’s mouth opened, but he didn’t speak; so Emily continued, “He asked—I don’t know what he meant—if you were aware of Welsh.” Still her father simply stared at her, in evident dawning alarm. Quickly she added, “Perhaps he simply wanted to know if you spoke the language. He looked Welsh, actually—dark.”

Her father gripped the corners of his desk and scuffed his shoes on the carpet, as if to stand up—or, it occurred to Emily, as if to reassure himself of the solidity of his room, his house.

“He was rude,” she said, to break the silence. “Abrupt, at least.” She rocked her head. “Understandable, I suppose.”

“By Ponden Kirk, you said.”

“At the bottom of the slope below it.”

“Close the door.” She passed in front of the window, and he said, “You’re carrying something.”

The door’s hinges were silent, but at the click of the latch he leaned back in his chair. Emily walked to the desk and laid the knife on the blotter. “He dropped this. It’s a knife. There was blood on it.”

He groped for it, and slowly slid his fingers along the length of it from the pommel to the paired blades, not touching the tips, and lifted his hand away. He stood up and walked across to the window, which overlooked the churchyard.

Facing the glass, he asked, “Did he—have both of his eyes?”

Emily was startled by the question. “Yes. But he wore an eyepatch anyway. He called it a formality. You know about this?”

“What else did he say?”

“He decided he was wrong in his guess at our name, because, he said, I wouldn’t be here if he’d been right.”

Old Patrick turned to face her, his white hair backlit in the afternoon sunlight. “I expect Branwell will be going to the Black Bull this evening. When he’s gone, I will—it seems!—have some things to tell you and Charlotte and Anne. But for now,” he said softly as he returned to his chair, “bide you girls in the parlor or the kitchen, and,” he added with a sigh and an unhappy smile, “leave the world to darkness and to me.”

Emily recognized the line from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard.” The remembered view from the window was probably what had prompted it, but as she opened the door and stepped out into the entry hall, she was a good deal more apprehensive than she had been when she’d gone in.

As she walked back toward the kitchen, she took a deep breath and let it out, and she raised her eyebrows to smooth any furrow between them.


Branwell’s eyes were still on the pages of Blackwood’s, but in his mind was the image of that double-bladed knife.

It was in a church sacristy, he thought, ten years ago, that I saw a knife like that, Emily.

But why would one like it be found on these moors? And whose blood is that on your sleeve, Emily?

When she walked back into the kitchen, she wasn’t carrying the knife, and in spite of her expressionless face Branwell recognized alarm in her tense, empty hands and the set of her shoulders. Of course Anne and Charlotte could see it too—but none of his sisters talked about important things with him anymore.

He stood up and stepped past Emily into the hall—embarrassed that he had to brace himself against the doorframe—and hurried past his father’s study to the front door. When he pulled it open he flinched at the cold outside air that buffeted his face and found its way down his collar, but he couldn’t go back now to get a coat. He tucked his hands in his trouser pockets and hurried down the steps to the paved walk. He crossed Emily and Anne’s sparse garden to the low churchyard wall and swung one leg and then the other over it.

The view of the churchyard made him aware of the almost constant sound of hammer on chisel from John Brown’s stonecutting yard, where the sexton seemed always to be cutting letters and numbers into fresh gravestones.

Branwell let his melancholy gaze play over the old gravestones in front of him. Interspersed among the standing markers, many of the graves were covered with raised, rectangular slabs laid flat, and he kicked through drifts of last year’s fallen leaves and sat down on one of the farthest of the cold, table-like markers.

He looked at the palm of his trembling right hand and thought, Can my perverse baptism have followed me here from London?

When he had set out on that two-day trip to London he had been eighteen, and his mind had been alight with fantasies: of astonishing the instructors at the Royal Academy of Arts with his portfolio of drawings, immediately getting commissions to paint portraits of lords and admirals, and very soon living as splendid a life as “Northangerland,” his fictional alter ego in the stories he had then still been writing with Charlotte.

But by the time the coach had got as far as Bradford, the fantasies had begun to seem like mirages. Even the ordinary men waiting for the London coach at the White Swan Hotel had been too clearly engaged with the real world—purposeful and responsible and competent—for Branwell to imagine the contrived figure of Northangerland among them.

And, the next day, the gross reality of big London had dwarfed him: the immensity of St. Paul’s Cathedral on Ludgate Hill; the imposing Neoclassical Somerset House, where in fact the Academy Schools were located; the endless broad boulevards crowded with noisy cabs and carriages and busy pedestrians.

He’d had letters of introduction to a number of influential painters and the secretary of the Royal Academy—and he had approached none of them. His father and aunt and several family friends had managed to come up with money for his first month of food and lodging and books—and in three days he had spent virtually all of it on rum and roast beef and cigars at the Castle Tavern in High Holborn.

The Castle Tavern had proven to be a warm, sociable refuge. It was licensed to a onetime champion pugilist, and its patrons were a mix of journalists, boxing enthusiasts, and visitors from the country like himself. And in this undemanding company he had been able to shine.

He was a charming and witty addition to any group of drinkers, always ready with a joke or an apposite literary quote, and from his wide reading he could talk intelligently about any subject, from history to sports to politics. Among several anecdotes on the wilds of Yorkshire, he told the story of how he had been bitten by a malformed and apparently rabid dog ten years earlier. He noted that he had suffered no ill effects from it; though he didn’t mention the month of nightmares that had followed.

The story caught the attention of one well-dressed man who had been watching him from across the room, and who had hurried out when the story was finished.

Before closing time the man returned, in the company of a fair-haired, youthful-looking clergyman in a black cassock and clerical collar; and after pointing out Branwell, the man quickly left the premises.

The clergyman joined the group of Branwell’s new friends, and asked him for more details about his life in Yorkshire; and he soon separated Branwell from the crowd beside the bar and led him to a corner table.

He introduced himself as Reverend Farfleece, and Branwell, drunkenly cautious, had used the name Northangerland.

Farfleece had wanted to know all about the peculiar dog that had bitten Branwell. He asked about aftereffects, infection . . . disturbing dreams? . . . and smiled at Branwell’s awkward insistence that there hadn’t been any.

You were marked, that day, Farfleece had told him, by an inhuman power.

Branwell had tried to shift the conversation to another topic, but Farfleece’s next question was, Have you seen the dark boy by Ponden Kirk?

It had taken Branwell several seconds to answer: In dreams. Mentally he had added, And once in the churchyard, barefoot in the snow.

Farfleece had sat back. You’re a kinsman, Mr. Northangerland. Will you have power over men, be feared by them? Come with me and be baptized.

I’ve been baptized.

Not to this lord. Come.

If the conversation had not so perfectly fitted in with his forlorn, melodramatic fantasies about Northangerland in the imaginary land of Angria—anger upon anger!—Branwell might have bidden the man good night.

Farfleece had a hired carriage waiting on the street, and Branwell had obediently followed him out and got into it. The cold night air somewhat dispelled the drink fumes in his head, and he assured himself that he had not yet committed himself to anything.

Their destination had been only ten minutes away—a narrow, apparently abandoned faux gothic church in St. Andrew Street. After dismissing the carriage, Farfleece had led Branwell through a broken wrought-iron gate and around the side of the building, in deep shadow, to the sacristy door. Branwell had been increasingly uneasy during the carriage ride, and had now been on the verge of running back out to the street in search of a cab—but after Farfleece knocked on the door, it had been opened by a dark-haired young woman wearing a white silk robe and carrying a lantern; she smiled at Branwell and stepped aside, and he found himself following the young clergyman into a high-ceilinged room. The scent of mimosa mingled with the smells of lamp oil and old wood.

The woman’s lantern was the only light, and she set it down on a long table that stretched away into shadows. At least a dozen chairs stood alongside the table, and it took Branwell several seconds of peering to see that they were all unoccupied. Bookshelves lined one wall, and ornately framed, age-darkened paintings were hung edge-to-edge on the opposite wall. Altogether the room appeared to be in use, in spite of the church’s neglected exterior, but he could still see the steam of his breath.

The woman drew a curious knife from within the folds of her robe, and Branwell took a step back toward the door, where Farfleece was standing; but she just laid it on the table beside a little unlidded glass jar. Branwell noted that the knife had two narrow, parallel blades, with an inch gap between them, and that the grip was just scored steel.

She sat down in one of the chairs and waved at the one next to it; and after a few seconds Branwell shuffled over and lowered himself into the indicated chair.

Farfleece moved to the other side of the table and spoke guardedly of his religious order, which he called the Obliques. He spoke of a “biune” god, which Branwell took to mean a god in two persons, as the Christian Trinity was described as “triune.” Farfleece said that the two persons of this god were presently separated, and it was the long-standing goal of his order to reunite them and bring all of England under the restored god’s power; though Branwell got the idea that this was not something Farfleece expected—or even wanted, really—to happen soon.

In the meantime the order’s mission was to support certain “extra-natural saints” in northern England and parts of Europe, who together constituted something “comparable to the electrical battery of the American Benjamin Franklin.” The “aggressive missionary activities” of these saints generated an influence, or field, or spiritual shadow, within which members of the Oblique order could extend their lifetimes and even perform certain sorts of miracles.

You have been chosen, Farfleece had told Branwell, to be among those who conjure those ancient and powerful forces. Your years will be numberless, and even kings will fear you.

Branwell understood that in spite of this church and the young man’s cassock and circular collar, this enterprise had nothing to do with any recognizable religion. He knew the kind of things his sisters would say about it all—and his father!—but he had long since seen through the repressive Christian mythology of his youth, and this disappointing trip to London had shown him that he was not a man to waste his best years in subjection to wearisome practice and instruction and intermediate measures.

And—your years will be numberless, and even kings will fear you.

The words resonated in the part of him that was Northangerland.

Farfleece pulled some musty old books down from a shelf, and showed him a 1592 printing of the suppressed original text of Christopher Marlowe’s Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, and a manuscript that he claimed was John Wesley’s account of apparent demonic possessions in Yorkshire . . . then, catching a look from the woman beside Branwell, he hastily put the books back and said that Branwell must be baptized before he could progress further.

The woman took Branwell’s right hand and turned it palm-up on the table, and Reverend Farfleece picked up the double-bladed knife. Branwell flinched, but the woman’s grip was unexpectedly strong, and Farfleece assured him that he would administer only the slightest of pinpricks: A token wound, a spiritual scar, a sign to those who have eyes to see. Branwell bit his lip to stop it from trembling, but relaxed—and the young clergyman tapped his palm with the twin blade points.

The light punctures had not stung, precisely; they had sent a tingling sensation all the way up his arm, and seemed to make him even more light-headed than he had been already.

Reverend Farfleece bowed and left the room through an inner door then, taking the knife with him.

Branwell turned a questioning look on the woman, and she dipped her forefinger into the little jar and began speaking to him, slowly. It was a language he didn’t recognize, but every series of words ended on a rising note, as if it had been a question, and each time when Branwell shrugged or mumbled in baffled response, she poked his forehead with her finger. Her fingertip gleamed in the lamplight, and Branwell could feel a slickness of oil between his eyebrows.

Suddenly it occurred to him that this was very similar to the Catholic sacrament of Extreme Unction—the Anointing of the Sick, customarily administered to someone on the brink of death; and he shoved his chair back and leaped toward the door he’d come in through. As he yanked it open and blundered through the doorway into the cold night, he heard the woman laughing softly in the room behind him.

He ran through the midnight London streets all the way back to his room at the Chapter Coffee House in Paternoster Row, and the next morning he boarded the first of the coaches that would carry him back home to the Haworth parsonage.


Now he scraped his fingernails across the rough surface of the gravestone under him, closing his fists on nothing. Behind him was the parsonage, in which his sisters were engaged in some literary compositions they imagined he didn’t know about. In front of him, past the far churchyard wall and a few steps down the hill, was the Black Bull, where he could probably find someone to stand him to a glass or two of all-forgiving gin.

He knew that plain cowardice had prevented him from taking the opportunity to become a professional artist, and had also made him run away from a darkly glamorous chance—and he now believed it had been a chance, at least—at . . . power, dominance, respect!

He opened his right hand and looked closely at his palm. The twin pinpricks of Reverend Farfleece’s knife had left no mark even at the time, but the clergyman had called them A token wound, a spiritual scar, a sign to those who have eyes to see. Perhaps his hand was not empty after all.

He held it up against the already fading sky.

A very short, dark figure moved against the trees on the other side of the churchyard, but when Branwell whipped his head around, he saw that it had only been several crows perched on one of the upright marble gravestones, and they had begun flapping away even as he’d turned.

He frowned. In any case it had been crows after he looked.

The crows—there must have been at least half a dozen, to so eerily resemble a short person or child standing over there—came arrowing this way, and flew closely around Branwell’s head; he quickly threw his arms across his face to block them, but a moment later they went cawing away between the treetops.

Branwell’s heart was still thumping in his narrow chest. When the crows had for a half-glimpsed moment appeared to be the dark little boy he had seen in his dreams—and once while awake, here in the churchyard!—had the apparition been beckoning?

The black birds had disappeared from sight now, fortuitously in the direction of the Black Bull.

Call it a summons, he thought with wry, self-conscious excitement.

Branwell hiked himself down from the flat gravestone.


One vigilant pair of eyes watched Branwell’s hunched figure hobble away to the street.

Emily’s big bullmastiff, Keeper, had padded outside through the kitchen door, and around by the peat room and the windowless south side of the house, and he stood now sniffing the cold wind from out over the endless moors. He had seen the crows flying away, and Branwell following them.

Keeper knew the sounds that identified the members of his household, and that retreating figure was Branwell. In Keeper’s mind Emily was a tall divinity, loved and worshipped; and Emily accepted and even loved Branwell, though Keeper sometimes caught a troubling non-family muskiness in the changing presentation of his smells. It was one of the many things for which no reason was evident.

And that elusive scent of Branwell’s was related to the strong, threatening smell that had clung to the wounded stranger this morning. Keeper had soon understood that it was the blood on the weapon, and not the stranger himself, that had caused his nostrils to flare and his lips to curl back from his teeth in unreasoned urgency to attack. The stranger had only been wounded by whatever had left blood on the weapon, and Emily had indicated at least conditional approval of the man by helping him stand up and walk.

Out there by the plateau and the black stone tower, Keeper had sniffed the wind, and flexed his ears and swung his great head to look in all directions, then allowed himself to relax into his customary caution: whatever had attacked the man had been beyond the reach of his canine senses.

Emily had cleaned most of the affronting blood from the weapon, and the incident had happened far from the house—but the smell of it, and the syllable Welsh, uttered while the smell was fresh in the air, had awakened far-off memories in Keeper.

Try as he might, he wasn’t able to place them—they were memories so remote that they seemed to belong to another dog altogether.

Emily’s father worked a tool that made a sharp noise every morning at dawn, and Keeper understood that the effect of it was to intimidate something, to keep some bad thing away. And on most evenings at sunset Keeper had a self-imposed job too—he stood by the churchyard wall and barked ferociously at the frail things that looked something like humans but weren’t. And his bark then had a particular depth and resonance, as if it roared out of more than one dog’s throat. At the noise, the frail figures generally fled.

The daylight was still bright now—it wasn’t time yet for those spiderwebby false humans to come drifting in from the moors or rise from the stones in the churchyard.

Keeper lay down in the short grass and rested his chin on his big front paws.


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