The Madwoman Upstairs (17 page)

There was one particular part of his book, however, that piqued my interest. All of the Brontë objects that my father supposedly owned had been painted, written, worn, or used by Anne during her stint at Thorp Green. On paper, Thorp Green was simply the name of the estate where Anne Brontë had spent five years working as a governess. In reality, it represented the most turbulent and transformative period of Anne’s life. She had left the parsonage as a normal woman, and returned home five years later as a disgruntled writer. That same year, she, Emily, and Charlotte began their literary careers in earnest. Coincidence? Not likely. Something happened at Thorp Green to inspire three of the most important novels of their time.

That Sunday, I stepped inside the Old College Library. It consisted of dimly lit corridors and small study rooms lined with old books. I found the one I was looking for—
The Big Book of Brontës—
and took it with me to the Catherine Howard Room. There was only one other student inside. He had
Irrepressible Boils of the Sixteenth Century
in front of him but was gazing into the distance, immobile, as though something was happening to his spleen and he couldn’t quite decide what it was. I took a seat. All I could hear was the mysterious sounds of a toilet flushing—mysterious because I had never once found a restroom in this building. I opened
The Big Book of Brontës.
If I remembered correctly, chapter ten would be dedicated to the Thorp Green Years: 1840–1845.

For better or for worse, thanks to my months of infatuated study as a teenager, Thorp Green was as real to me as anything I knew in this world. I could still see the old plants I had envisioned in the dusty foyer; I could hear the doors opening onto the toes of eavesdropping servants. I knew Thorp Green’s inhabitants like my own friends. Mr. Robinson, the head of the house, would have been a portly, bad-breathed ex-crook with a pinky ring and a closely cropped mustache. His name was Edmund but he would really look like Vinny from Staten Island. His wife, Lydia, would have been a frail creature with eyes like a bat’s who believed most things were très middle-class. The two of them—Edmund and the bat—would have four, angular-faced children.

What the world knew was this: Anne Brontë arrived in May of 1840. She left in 1845, leaving an unsettling radio silence in between. The only thing anyone knew was that the entire experience left Anne “sick of mankind and their disgusting ways.” One hypothesis for What Happened At Thorp Green was easy to find in history books, and it concerned Branwell Brontë. In 1842, Anne persuaded her employers to hire her brother as an art teacher to young Edmund Robinson. (Really, I had a feeling that Anne just wanted to rein in her brother’s sexual carte blanche—and what better way to induce celibacy than to become a male governess?) The results of Anne’s act of charity were catastrophic. Branwell quickly set his eyes upon Mrs. Robinson—twenty years his senior, and the wife of mafia-man Edmund. One thing led to another, and before long, Branwell Brontë initiated a nineteenth-century version of
The Graduate.

It was high scandal. Mrs. Robinson was the wife of a wealthy landowner; Branwell was a blossoming alcoholic with a dead-end job, massive debt, and no friends. The affair ruined the promise of a smooth career for his poor sister; Anne was now forced to confront, as she put it, the “very unpleasant and undreamt of experience of human nature.” In 1845, Edmund Robinson discovered the affair, kicked Branwell out of the house, and threatened to shoot him. The lovesick puppy returned home, flopped on his bed, and eventually drank himself to death at the ripe age of thirty-one.

At least, that’s how the story went. If it were true, it must have indeed been upsetting for Anne. But was one badly thought-through affair enough to account for her complete transformation? There was nothing extraordinary about this particular seduction except that it involved an older woman, and the whole affair was très middle class. Anne would have witnessed Branwell’s womanizing too often to be shocked. No, something else must have been going on in the shadows of that manor—something that would drive a shy nineteenth-century woman to sacrifice her good name and write not only one but two novels.

Here, I turned to the world of the servants. Thorp Green had an entire soap opera’s worth of maids, butlers, cooks, cleaners, and gardeners. There was one member of the staff whom I found unusually intriguing: Ann Marshall, with whom Anne Brontë became reasonably close. Ann was the personal maid and confidante of Mrs. Robinson, and a strange, reclusive person. Much like Anne Brontë, she had arrived as a wide-eyed girl in her twenties, years before. By the time she died, alone, in 1847, Ann Marshall was a frail spinster who never spoke more than two words at one time to anyone. What accounted for the dramatic change? And what was it about Thorp Green that took in young women, then spat them out as pale versions of their former selves?

I picked up the book in front of me and did a quick search for Ann Marshall’s portrait. Relegated to a tertiary character in the Brontë lives, she usually only made it into the footnotes. And yet, she was the only servant whom Anne Brontë had ever taken the trouble to paint. I found her portrait on page four hundred and twenty. She was plain and aging, with turned-down lips and a rounded nose the size of a small umbrella. She was wearing an ugly brown frock and an old bonnet. It was the same portrait I had seen in the Ashmolean. I stared at her sour face, as I had so often done before.

My lip curled. Ann Marshall was the spitting image of Grace Poole, my least favorite character from
Jane Eyre
(and, apparently, Orville’s favorite). “There she sat,” Jane Eyre remarked of Grace, “staid and taciturn-looking, as usual, in her brown stuff gown, her check apron, white handkerchief, and cap.” In
Jane Eyre
, Grace Poole was the personal caretaker of the madwoman and the bearer of a terrible household secret. I would have wagered anything that Ann Marshall’s story was similar. And Anne’s?

At this thought, I closed the book, feeling a resentment that I hadn’t felt in years. There was no denying the parallels between Anne Brontë’s time at Thorp Green and Jane Eyre’s time at Thornfield Hall.
Jane Eyre
told the story of a lonely woman who becomes a governess at a lonely manor, uncovers a horrible mystery, and then runs away without telling anyone what really happened to her. If it sounded like Anne Brontë’s life, it was because it
was
Anne Brontë’s life.

It left me with one nagging question. How, exactly, had Charlotte Brontë gotten away with stealing her sister’s story?

CHAPTER 8

T
he week of Christmas brought in the biggest storm of the season. The papers—the real papers, not the
Hornbeam
—had already speculated that it would be the worst we’d seen all year, so bundle up and stay safe, advised the perky notice in the
Telegraph.
I didn’t read much else about it because reading the newspaper was a thing I no longer did. All it did was remind me of all the unread e-mails I had from English journalists inquiring about Sir John’s new book.
Is it true? Would you care to comment? Would you be open to an interview? Would you kindly respond?

I didn’t think much of the approaching storm until Thursday evening, when Marvin asked if I needed candles. I was checking my mailbox (the “pidge”) in the Plodge, and he was packing up for the holidays. Hilary term wouldn’t begin for another month.

“Candles?” I asked. “Why would I need candles?”

“In case there is a power outage,” he said. In his mud-colored bowler hat and matching trench coat, he looked as if he were going out for a walk in the 1920s.

“Does that happen a lot around here?” I asked.

He gave a shrug of a smile. “Your tower isn’t known for its electricity.”

“It’s not known for its central heating, either.”

Marvin looked somewhat sheepish. He held out the candles, like I had instead said, “Checkmate,” and he was handing me his king. I still carried residual anger toward him, and I believe he was aware of it. I had come here several times in the last month, demanding to see the list of people who had been inside my tower the day that
Jane Eyre
appeared on my desk. But Marvin insisted it was out of his power and outside the university’s privacy policy to divulge names. I decided that he and I were no longer friends.

“No,” I told Marvin, finally. “No candles.”

“You’d prefer the dark?”

I let out a violent sneeze before I left, and said: “I hate the dark. I just dislike fire more.”

By Christmas Eve I was in bed with a bad fever. My head seemed to have gained twenty pounds, and I half expected it to sway and plunge to the ground like a wounded bull. All I could do was lie back in bed and listen as the thuggish wind pounded on my roof.

Everyone I knew was home for the holidays. I had considered going to Boston for Christmas, but since my old house was now inhabited by two men named Schwartz, I would have had to stay with my old friend Sven the Tennis Pro. My mother had tried to insist that I spend the week with her in Paris, but that seemed like an even lonelier option. The more time we spent together, the more we would have to acknowledge how little we had in common. Besides, I would be visiting her at the end of January and that seemed like enough.

Now, of course, I wished I had somewhere to go. It was the one time of year when it was impossible not to compare yourself to fat, happy families. I hadn’t seen anyone in three days and I was so alone that being alone had lost its meaning entirely. Three-dimensional people seemed to be a thing of a distant and cartoonish past. I began to talk to myself. Normally, at first, then abnormally. I re-created conversations I’d had—with my mother, with my father, with my old friend Sally, who ate with her hands. I invented conversations that never happened, sometimes with the Governess and sometimes with James Timothy Orville III. I was becoming somewhat unhinged.

Time passed slowly, like an old horse wandering through the Moors, trying to find a quiet place to die. At some point in the evening—was it nine? ten?—I left my tower to brush my teeth. Thanks to the flooding caused by the storm, the bathroom on the ground floor of the tower was out of commission. I would have to use the restroom in the main building, which meant a long (and cold) walk down a connecting corridor. It was a dimly lit hallway, punctuated with custodial closets and the occasional grotesque carving on the walls. I walked slowly at first. I was wearing a coat and my oversize
I Love Lucy
pajamas. The shirt was ripped at the neck and hung off one shoulder like a dislocated joint. A primordial death draft seeped out from the building’s pores, and I wrapped my coat tighter around myself. I don’t think even my father could have imagined a place more removed from the stir of society—a perfect misanthrope’s heaven.

Suddenly, when I was halfway down the corridor, the lights went out, silently and cleanly. I stopped. I tried not to panic. I waited for my eyes to adjust but they did not. In the black void, I reached out a hand and grasped for something—anything. I found nothing. My arm was suspended in soupy shadows. I pulled out the mini flashlight on my key chain, but its light was weak. Slowly, I turned and tried to retrace my steps to the tower. I found the wall—yes?—and the door that had been marked
Esphestus.
The air was wolfishly cold.

I felt very uneasy. An imagination left alone in the dark can be a terrible thing. The sound of raindrops now echoed like footsteps in the shallow night. Was there someone else in this corridor with me? I paused, and listened. For the first time since I arrived at Oxford, I wasn’t quite as alone as I wanted to be.

“Hello?” I called.

No response. In a moment, my toes collided with the damp, clammy stone of my tower’s staircase. I let out a breath of relief, and started climbing. Five flights of stairs were still hard on my barely recovered ankle, and it took me twice as long as I wanted. I was panting when I arrived at my landing. The air was spiked with an unusual odor—clover? I hesitated only for a moment, then reached for my doorknob. I stopped. No, I was right—it was most definitely clover. A scent I recognized from long ago. I turned around. I wrinkled my nose and took another sniff. Perhaps my temporary blindness had heightened my sense of smell. Or else—

I blinked. “Hello?”

No sound, no movement—only the silent shifting of air, the slow trickle of heat along my forehead, and the distinct sense that if eyes could glow red, there would be two of them, staring at me from across the dark expanse.

I stopped where I was. “Who’s there?”

No response.

My breathing was labored. I took a step forward and reached out my arm. After a few strides, my fingers gently collided with the opposite wall. I let out a breath, embarrassed. It had been nothing. I took a few steps back toward my door and let my mini flashlight shine its frail beam on the doorknob.

And that’s when I saw it. Lying on the doormat, like a sleeping tiger, was
Wuthering Heights
.

I whirled around, too late. “Who’s there?”

Suddenly, a great many things happened all at once: a swath of cloth swept past my right side; I let out a healthy scream; a gust of wind slammed against the side of the tower; a figure hurtled toward the stairs. In the weak beam of my key chain flashlight, I caught only one image: a white hand gripping at the handrail. I shrieked and backed up—unfortunately, right to the edge of the staircase, where I lost my footing. I let out a loud cry. My ankle gave way, and I found myself splayed out on the stairs. I clutched the handrail and tried to pull myself up. The uneven clacking of my visitor’s footsteps had grown soft. Whoever it was was already halfway down the tower.

I stayed where I was, paralyzed by fear. We all have visions of bravery, but it often materializes only after the moment has passed. I wish I could say that I ran after the intruder and hunted him down, but instead I lay there, sprawled against the stairs, loath to make any noise at all. I was conscious of nothing but the cold stone beneath the palm of my hand and the searing pain in my reinjured foot. I touched the spot on my arm where the intruder had brushed past me.