The Case of the Missing Bronte (2 page)

‘It was my cousin, you see, Rose Carbury, who died in February. She was a schoolmistress too — deputy head of a very nice little private school in Scarborough. We were distant cousins, but we were friends as well, and we used to meet when we could. Now and then we'd have a weekend in London — for a play, and the museums. We were typical schoolteachers, as you can see. Now, Rose retired last year, and she was already sick, poor thing. She had a cottage the other side of Leeds, and I went up there as often as I could, stayed with her, tried to cheer her up. There were nearer relatives in the area, but they — well, let's just say that they weren't close. So when she died, Rose left all the family valuables to this nephew and niece — she thought that was only right — but she left her library (so valuable to someone in retirement) and all her papers to me. Much of it was old stuff that she'd had packed away in her attic.'

‘I love old papers,' said Jan.

‘Yes, indeed. This was mostly family stuff: letters and wills and so on. And of course it is my family as well. But that's why I've felt the need for a historian's training — to know what is valuable and what isn't. It cost a mint of money to get the stuff here, I can tell you, and I don't want to throw out anything that might be useful or valuable. It's been fascinating going through it, as you can imagine.'

‘I'm sure it has,' said Jan. ‘You should take care of it all, if you have the space. Libraries are keen on that kind of stuff for their archives.'

‘Of course they are. And I'm sure that's what Rose would have wanted. The family, you know, made a fuss
about my having it, but . . . well, they're funny people. But the fact is that now I've come upon something that's quite different.'

She said it with a queer air of excitement, and she snapped open her handbag and took from it, enclosed in a folder, a yellowing sheet of paper. It was a large sheet, folded twice, and cut roughly along the edges. Each of the small pages thus produced was covered from top to bottom with tiny writing — almost a child's writing, for each letter was separate from the other. But no child could have written such a tiny script, one would have thought. And when I looked closely I found that new paragraphs were marked off with a stroke, and there were frequent speech marks. This was certainly no child's essay.

‘It looks like part of a story of some kind,' I said. Jan took it and pored over it, but kept silent.

‘It does, doesn't it?' said Miss Edith Wing. ‘But I think it must be more than that. Because there are pages and pages of it — at least two hundred, I should say, and probably more.'

‘A novel,' I said. And then it struck me, and I looked at Jan. ‘But — that handwriting . . .'

‘You are slow, Perry,' said Jan. ‘And you're supposed to be so literary. It's
just
like the Brontës. Like those little poems and diaries we saw at Haworth last year.'

‘And those childish booklets,' said Miss Wing. ‘You know, that's what I've been thinking. Naturally I've been to Haworth now and then, with the girls. But I feel so foolish, so unqualified. Of course I've read
Jane Eyre
and the other things, but
so
many years ago!'

I took the page back, and tried to decipher it.

‘I don't recognize it,' I said. ‘But then, I wouldn't necessarily. But these names here — Thomas Blackmore, Marian Thornley . . . Lingdale Manor. I don't remember any of them.'

‘Neither do I,' said Jan. I refrained from pointing out that this was probably due to the fact that she had not read any of the Brontë novels.

‘I feel so uncertain,' said Edith Wing. ‘It could be anything, couldn't it? Perhaps lots of people had handwriting like that in those days. Awfully paper-saving it must have been. On the other hand, it could be an early draft of one of the Brontë novels. Or even an unpublished one — '

‘Another novel by Emily Brontë!' I said.

‘Because you see, long, long ago our family did have some connections with them. Not with Emily, though. With Anne and Branwell. Mrs Robinson, who employed them as governess and tutor to her children, was my five-times great-grandmother. Or is it six? Anyway, it's not something we usually tell people about, because there was a scandal at the time . . .'

‘I remember,' I said. ‘She seduced Branwell, or he seduced her, or something.'

‘We don't admit that in the family,' said Miss Wing, primly. ‘But it's what most people thought. So you see — there
is
a connection.'

‘How absolutely extraordinary,' I said.

‘What are you going to do?' asked Jan.

‘That's what I wondered,' said Miss Wing, looking very perplexed. ‘Of course, it could be some kind of forgery . . .'

‘Then why keep it secret all these years?' I said. ‘All that effort, just to hide it away? That's more unbelievable than the idea that it could be a genuine Brontë novel. Forgeries are made to be sold, believe me. Obviously you are going to have to get in touch with an expert. I think the best thing to do would be to take it to Haworth.'

‘I thought of that,' said Edith Wing. ‘But it's more than forty miles away, and such a difficult place to get to, if like me you have no car. First to Leeds, then the train to
Keighley, then bus. And that hill! Perhaps later in the summer I could manage it.'

‘I really shouldn't leave something like that lying around in your cottage. Isn't Milltown fairly near here?'

‘About thirteen miles.'

‘Well, they've got one of those newish universities there, haven't they? There's bound to be someone or other there who would know something about it. If I were you I'd get in contact with them.'

The awful thing is, that with those words I very nearly sent her to her death.

The next week, as you can imagine, was devoted to Brontë research. We had been left, after all, on a knife edge. On the journey back to London Jan talked about practically nothing else, and as soon as we got into the flat she took down
Wuthering Heights
and stayed up half the night with it. The next day we went to the local library and fetched home a formidable pile of books.

I suppose you thought, when I said in the last chapter that Jan had never read anything by the Brontës, that this was just a piece of husbandly snide. Actually it is quite true. Jan went to one of those schools built in London in the late 'fifties: plate glass, unlimited equipment, variable teaching and a surfeit of new ideas. In Jan's school any books they read had to be ‘relevant' (by implication ‘to the contemporary situation'), and since she was at school in the late 'sixties, you can imagine what that meant. She has read lots of Brecht, novels by David Storey and Sillitoe, and she's performed in plays by
Edward Bond and such like. I have this reactionary notion that one can be educated without any knowledge of the works of Edward Bond, but not without any knowledge of the works of Emily Brontë. Anyway, except for a dreadful film from some years back in which all the characters seemed to be epileptics (an odd idea — it wasn't even the year of the handicapped), Jan had had no contact with
Wuthering Heights.
Naturally it bowled her over.

Poring over the various books from the library, we came quite early to the conclusion that the handwriting on the page we saw most resembled Emily's — for example, her handwriting in those oddly childish diary fragments she and Anne wrote. Probably Emily had other handwritings too: Charlotte had a flowing script for the fair copies of her novels — quite rightly, because no publisher even then would have consented to read the tiny script she had used for the childhood booklets. Presumably Emily had the same. But this was her private script — for drafts, poems, personal things.

Then we got down to the biographies. These, especially in the case of Emily and Anne, were really quite odd, as practically nothing is known of them, and the books were exercises in strawless brick-making. Some pretty peculiar bricks they came up with, too. All sorts of things, to change the metaphor, which would not have stood up for a moment in a court of law. The odd thing was, too, that for quite long periods the biographers didn't really know where Emily and Anne were — at school, governessing, or at Haworth? Though Charlotte conducted regular and frequent exchanges of letters with her friends, she hardly ever mentioned them. No doubt she was too wrapped up in her own adolescent emotional and spiritual crises. Until 1845, when they all gathered at the Parsonage after the debacle of Branwell's affair with Mrs Robinson, there are great gaps in our knowledge of their lives.

After that, as the tragedy sped to its conclusion, the biographies were full, and more securely based. But I was immediately struck with one thing. In 1845 the sisters began collecting together their poems, which were published in 1846. In 1846, too,
Wuthering Heights
was finished, to be published (after frustrating delays) in 1847. But from Spring 1846 to the time she died at the end of 1848, Emily wrote virtually nothing. She wrote a torrid narrative poem, and began revising it. As far as her literary life was concerned there was, according to all the biographers, a two and a half year blank.

The funny thing was, this didn't seem to worry those biographers at all. They had constructed in their minds a picture of a moody, lonely, recalcitrant genius — touchy, unapproachable, careless of literary success. You rather wondered that such a creature should ever care to send her work to a publisher in the first place. But, by their account, when the poems failed and
Wuthering Heights
was misunderstood, she simply withdrew into her shell and wrote no more.

A lot of this may have been true, of course, though precious little was the evidence they had for it, I must say. I was willing to believe that Emily was a difficult creature; not the sort of girl one would take along to the Annual Police Ball. What I was sceptical about was the ‘careless of literary fame' line. I've known a few authors, mainly in my childhood, and one thing I know about them is that nary a one is careless of literary fame. And another thing I know is that as soon as a novelist has a novel accepted, he sits down and writes another one. It's a sort of nervous tic. No doubt the facts that the poems sold only four copies, and the publisher of
Wuthering Heights,
a Mr Newby, turned out to be a crook, were depressing. But how much literature would there be if everyone gave up writing because their publisher was crooked? I refused to
believe that during those more than two years, until she fell ill in the autumn of 1848, Emily was for the first time in her adult life idle — idle, that is, in a literary sense.

‘I know I'd be scribbling away like mad,' said Jan.

‘You're hardly the Emily Brontë type,' I said. ‘But yes — I bet she was too.'

Two more things struck us very forcibly. The first was that after Charlotte's death a note was found in Emily's desk, in an envelope addressed to Ellis Bell (her pseudonym). It was from Newby, her scamp publisher — but it was a perfectly sensible letter, expressing interest in a ‘second work' which had clearly been mentioned to him, but advising her to take time and care, since second novels were a difficult hurdle. Here was first-rate, police-court evidence of a second novel. But what did the biographers do? Most of them assumed it was a letter to Anne about
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,
and that it had somehow got pushed into the wrong envelope.

The second thing that struck me was the chaotic state of Brontë manuscripts. Charlotte's husband, at the end of a long life, and in what one can only take to have been a state of senility, let them fall into the hands of a rogue and a forger. This man, Thomas J. Wise, had played fast and loose with the manuscripts, to increase their value to avid British and American collectors. For example, he had taken them apart and had sewn up little bits of Charlotte's manuscripts (valuable) with great wadges of Branwell's manuscripts (not very valuable). Lots of important material had simply disappeared from sight. Only a few years before an American scholar had put together two manuscript fragments widely separated in two learned libraries and had come up with four chapters of what was apparently Charlotte Brontë's first attempt at a proper novel. Before then, those pieces had been virtually unknown. If Thomas J. Wise's reputation as a forger was rather discouraging, this story was a real pick-me-up,
proving that even today discoveries were still waiting to be made.

As you can imagine, all this research took most of our spare time, and though Jan had a fair bit of this, having just finished her degree at Newcastle, and being in a state of suspended animation waiting for the results, still Daniel got mildly neglected all the next week. He proved his nice nature by reading a lot, running as wild as a boy can do in the streets of Maida Vale, and fixing a lot of his own food. Jan and I, meanwhile, were mulling over the whole thing incessantly.

‘What I can't believe,' said Jan, ‘is this notion that when she finished
Wuthering Heights,
and when it was accepted, she just sat around like a gawbie for well over two years. It's not as though Haworth offered an infinite variety of other occupations, seeing it was at that time the original back of beyond. As far as I can see she didn't even go to church. It was Charlotte who taught Sunday school and all that kind of thing. Emily had been writing for fifteen years, and then suddenly she stopped. I don't believe a word of it.'

‘There was Branwell,' I said, forcing myself against the grain to fill the position of Devil's Advocate and damper of Jan's hopes. ‘She seems to have been the only one to have any time for him.'

‘Branwell must have been a trial, but he can hardly have been a full-time occupation. In those months Anne wrote another novel, Charlotte wrote most of
Jane Eyre
and half of
Shirley
— and Emily, nothing at all.'