The Crimes of Charlotte Bronte (20 page)

It was only very much later that I came to think that, somehow, he may have had something to do with
her
illness, which was quite unlike anything else that was going around – especially as she was very ill again after Christmas when most folk were better again.

Christmas had been a very quiet time, with most folk content just to be indoors with no work, either in bed in the warm or huddled around the fire. Of course,
I
had to work, but not for as long as on other days, and I did manage to meet Mr Nicholls once after Evensong.

Thankfully,
all
my troubles had cleared up and so I was feeling much better and looking quite my old self. Certainly Mr Nicholls seemed to think so, for he was very ardent and made me feel quite wanted.

So the New Year of 1852 came, but one person who was not pleased to see it was
her
for, as I have said, she was laid
very
low again. I did not suspect then what was up with her, and the doctor did not seem to know any more than me. Apart from all else, her mouth was in a state such as I have never seen before or since, and it made me feel quite off just to look at it. She could eat nothing at all, and broth and suchlike had to be taken from a feeding cup. We had to do
everything
for her, and her bedclothes sometimes had to be changed twice in one day. I
hated
it; what with her mouth, and the smell and the washing I felt sick at times and like to faint.

In the end, thank goodness, she came to something of her usual self – at the end of January, I think it was – and then, to our great joy, she managed to get over to Miss Nussey's for a couple of weeks. She was quite recovered when she came back, and very much her old self, and that made me think even more about what might be happening to her in the Parsonage. Straightaway she went back to her writing – and to Mr Nicholls – and that did not please me, but I just had to put up with it and try to make the best of things.

Slowly, very slowly it seemed that year, Spring was at last upon us, and after such an awful Winter I could at last begin to think about warm days and sunshine – and evenings with Mr Nicholls. Well the warm days and sunshine came, but I saw Mr Nicholls only on and off, and then it was but for very short times. You may imagine then how cheered I was when, in May, she told me that she would shortly be going to the seaside. Once again I wished that
I
was going, but still it was good news because she would be away and Mr Nicholls and me would be free of her for a while. I could not wait for her to be off.

It was a blissful time for me whilst she was away. There was little work at the Parsonage, weather that I loved, and no
her
. Mind you, I was quite put out, and just could not understand it, when Mr Nicholls suddenly went away for a few days during that time. He warned Mother that he was going, but he did not tell me and when I asked him where he was off to all he would say was that he was going to see a friend of his who was also in the Church. Knowing him as well as I did by then, I thought I sensed something in his manner that told me that he was hiding something – but that may just have been imagining on my part.

Anyway he was only gone for 3 days and then, a week or so later,
she
came back and settled down to her writing again. She seemed very happy, and was very talkative with me, but it was not long before her mood changed.

For a start, Mr Brontë was taken with some kind of fit that left him with one arm very bad, and hanging by his side, and he could talk only out of the side of his mouth. He could not eat properly for a while either, and we had to make beef tea for him in a feeding cup until he got back to a little of his old self.
She
had to do all the feeding, with a tiny spoon, and she would get very cross about the time it took when she thought she ought to have been writing. Once she asked me to do it, but I did not feel it was my place to do something like that and said so. She was not very pleased, but she had, perforce, to take what I said – that I was there only to see to the housework, and was not a nurse.

Then there was some kind of row between her and Miss Nussey. I never got right to the bottom of it; all I know is that Mr Nicholls has told me that she was spreading tales about
her
and him, and so he took steps to put an end to their friendship.

I think, though, that the main thing was that Miss Charlotte was very down about how she was placed with her life. After all, and never mind about all that she had had to say about the men who wanted to wed her, nobody had and she was fast becoming an old maid, and I do not think that the prospect was very pleasing to her. Mr Nicholls has told me that she acted very odd to him at the time. One minute she was all around him, but the next he could scarce get a word out of her.

All I knew at the time though was that something was amiss between them, and that Miss Nussey seemed out of favour. None of that touched me though. I was out and about as much as possible that Summer, and Mr Nicholls was always all right with
me
– although some times more than others. We did not meet
that
often, but when we did it pleased me greatly, especially when he told me of things that were going on in the Parsonage that I should not otherwise have known of.

I never knew what Father or Mother knew or suspected at that time, or indeed later, but I well remember Father saying that I seemed very well informed about certain matters, and he asked me how I knew one particular thing. I cannot recall what it was, but I know I felt myself going red, and wondered whether I had been prattling overmuch. I told him that Miss Charlotte and Mr Brontë talked to me at times, but I do not think that he was deceived because, with a queer little smile, he asked me: ‘And does Mr Nicholls talk to you as well?' In spite of myself, I felt my whole face and neck come afire – which was always my giveaway – but all I answered was ‘Sometimes', and the matter passed off.

Then, yet again, the Summer was gone, and the leaves were blowing every whichway. There was the smell of Winter in the air, and soon we would be busy making plans for Christmas. There was never any reckoning Miss Charlotte though with the way she was, and so I should not have been so surprised when she said that she was off to Miss Nussey's for a week – but I was. It was not that I minded – very much the other way – it was just that it came so sudden.

So off she went, and then Mr Brontë gave me word that she was going on to somewhere else from Miss Nussey's and would not be back for at least another week. That left me in charge for longer than I had expected, and I made the most of it in more ways than one. What I could not understand, though, was why Mr Nicholls was in such a bad mood again, and there was no talking to him when he was like that.

I tried to get round him on the very few times we were alone, but his mind seemed elsewhere and he would have none of it and I really did not know what to think, or what he was talking about when once he snapped that he was not putting up with it any longer. I thought he was getting at me in some way, and I recall the tears filling up in my eyes, but he said that it was
her
that he was on about. He would say no more, but somehow I knew that there was going to be trouble before Christmas. What I never dreamed of, though, was how bad it would be, nor how much
I
would be affected.

[
] The ‘young man' who, Martha tells us, proposed to Charlotte was James Taylor, one of George Smith's employees.

Charlotte had met Taylor first when he called at the Parsonage to collect the manuscript of
Shirley,
back in 1849. She did not trust the post, she said, and had asked if it could be collected. Perhaps she had the notion that George Smith would come in person, but it was obviously a prospect which did not appeal to him. All other considerations apart, a journey from London to the West Riding of Yorkshire was not something to be undertaken lightly. Taylor, therefore, was nominated for the chore, which was to be carried out on his way back to London from holiday.

He could not have been too enamoured with the idea either, and the thought of changing trains, and then having to hire some form of transport for the last four miles to Haworth, must have cast something of a cloud over his vacation. It would have been some consolation, I suppose, had he been able to look forward to a break at Haworth before resuming his journey, but Charlotte made it quite clear that that was out of the question. In her letter to Mr Williams dated 24 August, she told him that she ‘would with pleasure offer him [Taylor] the homely hospitalities of the Parsonage for a few days' – and then went on to make every excuse under the sun for why that would not be possible. So poor Taylor arrived at the house, was given not only the manuscript but a great pile of books to add to his luggage, and was then bundled back on his tracks. It would no doubt have been an entirely different story had it been George Smith, but Charlotte was not having an employee stay at the Parsonage!

In the light of subsequent events, it is apparent that Taylor, an ambitious young man, very quickly summed up what he thought to be the situation. He saw a frustrated female, living in a frightful place miles from anywhere, and lacking congenial male company. Charlotte was Smith's most successful female novelist, unattached, with more money than he was ever likely to make, and the potential for making more. In addition, he was very well aware that she was thirty-three years of age and, if the medical history of the family was anything to go by, unlikely to make old bones. All in all, he decided that she would be a good catch, and he entered into correspondence with her upon his return to London.

I find it rather amusing to note that one of the excuses which Charlotte made for not replying to his letter sooner was that she had ‘been kept more than usually engaged by the presence of a clergyman in the house.' What
had
Arthur been up to?

Now, some two-and-a-half years later, a situation had arisen which caused James Taylor to act. Messrs Smith, Elder and Company had decided to send him to India for five years and apparently he asked Charlotte to marry and accompany him but, as Martha says, she declined. She evidently still had her matrimonial sights set on his employer, and her immediate sexual demands were satisfied by an apparently subservient Nicholls.

In view of this, she was clearly shaken when Nicholls went off to Ireland, because she actually mentioned him in a letter to Ellen, stating that he had asked himself to tea on the eve of his departure! In the normal course of events, one would never have expected her to waste time in writing about a mere curate – we have seen what she thought of the breed. Is it also not a little surprising that her father's assistant could feel so sure of a welcome that he had no misgivings about inviting
himself
? Had there not been something between him and Charlotte he would have received very short shrift from her for his temerity. I find this little slip of hers quite revealing. Normally she kept Nicholls out of her correspondence completely, and misled everyone with her flirtations with Smith and Taylor. Now, however, the thought of Arthur leaving was so traumatic that she allowed the veil to slip a little. She had detected that all was not well with him, and wondered what he had in mind.

Nicholls left Haworth during the last week in July, and spent almost six weeks away. Charlotte continued to be affected by his absence, so much so that she could not prevent herself from telling Ellen when he was due back. It was a lip-gnawing time for her, because she could not be sure about what he was doing in Ireland, nor indeed whether he intended to return. If he did not, she had no idea what she would do, because without him she faced a very bleak future. In her heart of hearts, she feared that George Smith would never marry her – especially as his mother did not think very highly of her – and Taylor was in India for five years. No, without Nicholls all she would have to look forward to was a dreary existence at the Parsonage, enlivened only by holidays and the occasional visitor.

However, and to her great relief, Nicholls did come back, and things continued as before, although if he was discontented when he left he was positively querulous about returning to the old routine. Ireland had made him more unsettled than ever.

During October and November 1851, and just as Martha recorded, the entire household was affected by illness and Charlotte was tied to the Parsonage. She began to write her novel
Villette
, but became quite ill with what the doctor was said to have diagnosed, mysteriously, as a ‘highly sensitive and irritable condition of the liver'. There is good reason to suppose that Nicholls may have been to blame for that – maybe even trying out a poison that he had obtained in Ireland, and was new to him. There are many accounts of habitual poisoners employing this practice in order to discover the effects of different doses of fresh substances.

In the New Year of 1852 she was
very
ill, and told Ellen that she had been ‘brought to a sad state'. She blamed her indisposition on the pills prescribed by the doctor which, she said, contained mercury. Be that as it may, her mouth and tongue were ulcerated. The doctor, a Dr Ruddock, stated that ‘he never in his whole practice knew the same effect produced by the same dose on man – woman or child . . .' – but then he had never had a patient who was receiving additional ‘treatment' from Nicholls!