Brontës (118 page)

Repeating the words she had once spoken of Branwell, she confessed, ‘God only knows how all this is to terminate.' In her heart, however, she was all too well aware: ‘More than once I have been forced boldly to regard the terrible event of her loss as possible and even probable. But Nature shrinks from such thoughts.' As Emily marched inexorably towards death, Charlotte clung to her with even greater desperation: ‘I think Emily seems the nearest thing to my heart in this world', she declared to Ellen.
¹⁰

Charlotte's closest friends did all they could to assist her. Ellen offered to come and stay, but Emily could not contemplate the upset and refused to have her. Williams sent a book on homoeopathy in a further attempt to persuade Emily to accept some treatment; she read it but remained intractable. Williams and George Smith together offered to seek medical
advice anonymously on Emily's behalf from ‘an eminent London physician', Dr Epps; Charlotte prepared a statement of her sister's symptoms and sent it to him through them; the reply, when it came, was too late and too obscurely worded to be of use and, in any case, Emily refused to take the medicine he sent.
¹¹

Observing even the smallest change in her sister's condition, Charlotte alternated between despair and self-deluding hope. Unlike his volatile daughter, Patrick could not be sanguine. ‘My Father is very despondent about her', Charlotte reported to Williams. ‘Anne and I cherish hope as well as we can … but my father shakes his head and speaks of others of our family once similarly afflicted, for whom he likewise persisted in hoping against hope, and who are now removed where hope and fear fluctuate no more.' If Patrick had thought to prepare his daughters for Emily's death, he failed. Charlotte clutched at the ‘important differences' between their case and Emily's: ‘I must cling to the expectation of her recovery; I cannot renounce it', she cried, as if, in repeating this mantra, she could ward off the inevitable.
¹²

Unable to prevent or halt Emily's decline, Charlotte could think of little else but her sister. Distractions only added to the bitterness which was threatening to overwhelm her. Throughout the year Anne had continued to hear almost daily from her former pupils, Elizabeth and Mary Robinson. In the summer they had both announced that they were engaged to be married – not for the first time, as Charlotte cynically noted.

Not one spark of love does either of them profess for her future husband – One of them openly declares that interest alone guides her – and the other, poor thing! is acting according to her mother's wish, and is utterly indifferent herself to the man chosen for her. The lightest-headed of the two sisters takes a pleasure in the spectacle of her fine wedding-dresses and costly bridal presents – the more thoughtful can derive no gratification from these things and is much depressed at the contemplation of her future lot – Anne does her best to cheer and counsel \her/ – and she seems to cling to her quiet, former governess as her only true friend.
¹³

What was to be increasingly distressing, however, was the news they reported of their mother. ‘Of Mrs R— I have not patience to speak', Charlotte informed Ellen,‘– a worse mother a worse woman, I may say, I believe hardly exists – the more I hear of her the more deeply she revolts
me.' Apparently quoting the Robinsons' letters to Anne, Charlotte revealed that the girls expected to be ‘sacrificed' in the course of a few months.

the unhappy Lady Scott is dead – after long suffering both mental and physical, I imagine; she expired two or three weeks ago. The Misses R— say that their mother does not care in the least what becomes of them; she is only anxious to get them husbands of any kind that they may be off her hands, and that she may be free to marry Sir. E. Scott – whose infatuated slave, it would appear, she is. They assert that she does not appear to have the least affection for them now – formerly she professed a great deal, and was even servilely submissive to them – but now she treats them quite harshly – and they are often afraid to speak to her.
^l4

On 8 November, a mere six weeks after Branwell's death – an event of which she was almost certainly as ignorant as she was careless – Mrs Robinson achieved her ambition and married Sir Edward Scott. All Charlotte could bring herself to say on the subject was ‘She is now Lady Scott – her daughters say she is in the highest spirits.'
¹⁵

That there was some justification in the daughters' complaints is suggested by the fact that shortly before her mother's remarriage, Mary Robinson had been married off to Clapham, even though both the young people were still legally minors. Henry Clapham was a manufacturer, residing at Aireworth House just outside Keighley, and a relative of both the Sugdens and the Greenwoods of Haworth. ‘A low match for her –', Charlotte declared to Ellen, ‘she feels it so'; Mary later complained to Anne that her husband had deceived them with his account of his fortune, establishment and connections.
¹⁶
The new Mrs Clapham, not even professing to be happy in her letters to Anne, had evidently decided to respond by cutting ‘a prodigious dash' in Keighley and was infuriating the local gentry by her pride and assumption of superiority.

She & her sister threaten to pay us a visit – they have written to ask if they can bring the carriage up to the house – we have told them ‘yes', as we think if they bring it once through those breakneck turnings – they will not be in a hurry to try the experiment \again/ –
¹⁷

In the end the visit turned out better than expected, despite the fact that the Brontës were in no mood for such guests. The Robinsons came at the
beginning of December and Charlotte reported back to Ellen that they were ‘attractive and stylish looking girls'. To their hosts' evident bemusement ‘they seemed overjoyed to see Anne; when I went into the room they were clinging round her like two children – she, meantime, looking perfectly quiet and passive. Their manners evinced more levity and giddiness than pretension or pomposity.'
¹⁸

This unwelcome intimacy with the Robinsons was a continual and painful reminder of Branwell's sufferings. Another irritant, even more hurtful because it reflected on Charlotte and her sisters, was the increasingly disparaging tone of the reviews. The appearance of
The Tenant of Wild fell Hall
, so soon after
Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights
and
Agnes Grey
, had only confirmed the critics in their belief that the Bells were obsessed with the coarse and brutal. The reviewer in
Sharpe's London Magazine
, for instance, declared his intention of noticing
The Tenant of Wild fell Hall
simply to warn his readers, especially his lady readers, against being tempted to peruse it. Preferring to believe that this was the work of a man, rather than a woman, he lambasted the ‘profane expressions, inconceivably coarse language, and revolting scenes and descriptions by which its pages are disfigured'.
¹⁹
Most reviewers seized the opportunity of Acton Bell's new publication to return to the attack on
Jane Eyre
and
Wuthering Heights
. The critic in the
Rambler
was typical: describing the religious sentiments of Acton's characters as either false or bad, he prefaced his remarks by declaring that
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall shared
the same faults
as Jane Eyre
, ‘one of the coarsest books which we ever perused', and condemning the author's ‘perpetual
tendency
to relapse into that class of ideas, expressions, and circumstances, which is most connected with the grosser and more animal portion of our nature'.
²⁰
The
North American Review
described Ellis Bell as a ‘spendthrift of malice and profanity', Heathcliff as the ‘epitome of brutality' and concluded by saying that the power evinced in
Wuthering Heights
was power thrown away – ‘Nightmares and dreams, through which devils dance and wolves howl, make bad novels.' It was this review that Charlotte read to her sisters late in November, hoping to amuse them.

As I sat between them at our quiet but now somewhat melancholy fireside, I studied the two ferocious authors. Ellis the ‘man of uncommon talents but dogged, brutal and morose,' sat leaning back in his easy chair drawing his impeded breath as he best could, and looking, alas! piteously pale and wasted – it is not his wont to laugh – but he smiled half-amused and half in scorn as he
listened – Acton was sewing, no emotion ever stirs him to loquacity, so he only smiled too, dropping at the same time a single word of calm amazement to hear his character so darkly pourtrayed. I wonder what the Reviewer would have thought of his own sagacity, could he have beheld the pair, as I did. Vainly too might he have looked round for the masculine partner in the firm of ‘Bell & Co.' How I laugh in my sleeve when I read the solemn assertions that ‘Jane Eyre' was written in partnership, and that it ‘bears the marks of more than one mind, and one sex'.
²¹

Sitting together at home, it was comparatively easy for the sisters to overlook the more barbed comments of their critics and find amusement in their wilder speculations about the identity and sex of the ‘Bells'. The fact that their authorship was such a close-guarded secret was a form of empowerment, just as it had been in the long-gone days of childhood ‘scribblemania': it was the three of them against the world. Once her sisters were gone, however, and there was no one to share the conspiracy of silence, Charlotte found that the secret lost all its zest. Not only could she no longer take pleasure in wrong-footing the critics but also, brooding alone on the severer reviews, she came to see their attacks on her sisters as a defilement of their memory. The injustice of the fact that these hostile reviews were to be the last that her sisters would read, and that no one recognized their talents as she thought they ought to be recognized, was to be an increasingly bitter pill for Charlotte.

Emily was now in the final stages of consumption, though neither she nor her family apparently suspected how close she was to death. Though the pain in her side and chest had improved, her cough, shortness of breath and extreme emaciation had not; to add to her troubles, she began to suffer from diarrhoea, though she remained adamant that ‘no poisoning doctor' should come near her.
²²
‘Never in all her life had she lingered over any task that lay before her, and she did not linger now', Charlotte later wrote of her sister.

She sank rapidly. She made haste to leave us. Yet, while physically she perished, mentally, she grew stronger than we had yet known her. Day by day, when I saw with what a front she met suffering, I looked on her with an anguish of wonder and love. I have seen nothing like it; but, indeed, I have never seen her parallel in anything. Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone. The awful point was, that, while full of ruth for others, on herself she had no pity; the spirit was inexorable to the flesh; from the trembling hand, the
unnerved limbs, the faded eyes, the same service was exacted as they had rendered in health. To stand by and witness this, and not dare to remonstrate, was a pain no words can render.
²³

The evening before her death, she insisted on feeding the dogs, Keeper and Flossy, as she had always done. As she stepped from the warmth of the kitchen into the cold air of the damp, stone-flagged passage, she staggered and almost fell against the wall. Charlotte and Anne, rushing to help her, were brushed aside and, recovering herself, she went on to give the dogs their dinner. Mrs Gaskell reported how Charlotte shivered recalling the pang she had felt when, having searched over the bleak December moors for a single sprig of heather to take in to Emily, she realized that her sister had not even recognized her favourite flower.
²⁴
On the morning of Tuesday, 19 December 1848, she insisted on rising at seven as was her habit. Combing her hair before the fire, the comb slipped from her fingers and fell into the hearth: she was too weak to pick it up, and before Martha Brown arrived and retrieved it for her, a large part of it had been burnt away by the flames.
²⁵
Neither Martha nor Charlotte dared to offer assistance as Emily slowly dressed herself and made her way downstairs. Still struggling to keep up an appearance of normality, she even attempted to pick up her sewing. Watching her laboured breathing, Charlotte scribbled a brief note to Ellen: ‘I should have written to you before if I had had one word of hope to say – but I have not – She grows daily weaker … Moments so dark as these I have never known – I pray for God's support to us all. Hitherto he has granted it.'
²⁶

By midday, Emily was worse. Her unbending spirit finally broken, she whispered between gasps for breath, ‘If you will send for a doctor, I will see him now.' Dr Wheelhouse was summoned immediately but, of course, it was too late: there was nothing he could do.
²⁷
Tradition has it that Emily refused to the last to retire to bed, dying, as unconventionally as she had lived, on the sofa in the parsonage dining room. This seems unlikely, as there is no contemporary source for the story and Charlotte later movingly described how Emily's dog, Keeper, ‘lay at the side of her dying-bed'. In all probability, therefore, Emily was carried upstairs to her own bedroom, overlooking the moors she had always loved. Unlike Branwell, she fought death to the end. And it was a bitter end. There was no time for consolatory words or acceptance of the inevitable. After ‘a hard, short conflict', Emily was torn from the world, ‘turning her dying eyes reluctantly from the pleasant sun'.
At two o'clock in the afternoon, aged thirty, she died: the relentless conflict between strangely strong spirit and fragile frame was over.
²⁸