The Madwoman Upstairs (33 page)

“Samantha—”

When he took a step even closer, I gave a small yelp and pushed myself past him to the other end of the room.

“If you only have a few minutes, I’d like to ask you something,” I blurted, short of breath. “Do you see that painting over there?”

If Orville noticed my awkwardness, he didn’t comment. He followed me to
The Governess
, as instructed. He stood staring at it for quite some time. I didn’t know how to make a proper introduction.
Governess, this is James, James this is Governess. The Governess and I are fellow inmates; James and I are low-level friends. Have a scone.
But I realized an introduction was not exactly necessary. There was an odd expression on Orville’s face. He moved closer to the painting. He did not seem pleased.

“She’s still here,” he said. He sounded as though he had run across a particularly vicious ex.

I said, “She? Do you two know each other?”

“It’s foolish to leave valuable belongings around your apartment.”

I waited. “I think this might be an original Brontë painting.”

“Yes, I can see that,” said Orville. “It’s an Anne. I knew the first time I saw it.”

“You
knew
?”

“Look at the brushstrokes.”

I glanced back at the painting. “What?”

“And look at the date scribbled so hastily in the right-hand corner—there, see it? Look closer. Eighteen forty-three. Do you not recognize this scene?”

“No.”

“I thought you’d read
Jane Eyre
.”

“Pardon?”

He took off his gloves and threw them in the corner. “Book,” he said. “Hand me the book.” He was holding out his hand, as if to say,
Scalpel.

When I didn’t move fast enough, Orville strutted past me to my desk, where
Jane Eyre
was resting. He picked up the novel and flipped through its pages very quickly. I had a feeling he had done this many times before. It was like watching a master violinist perform scales.

“How many people know that this painting is in here, Samantha?” he asked, distracted.

“Just you, me, my father, Marvin, and some unsuspecting tourists.”

“Your father?” His voice was sharp.

“Yes. He was the one who left it in this room.”

“I was sure that you had put it here,” he said. “I assumed that this was your inheritance, which you were trying to keep a secret from the world. I was trying to be polite and not mention it.”

“You give me too much credit.”

“Let’s keep this matter between us, shall we?”

I looked around. “Who else am I going to tell?”

He didn’t answer. He returned to the book. Focused men are painfully attractive. I asked him what he was looking for, but my voice seemed lost on him. He did not look up again until he had his finger on a specific page. Then he passed me the text.

“There,” he said, urgently. “Read.”

I took the book from him. My father had underlined and highlighted the entire page, as he had done with several other sections of this book. It was the moment when Jane shows Rochester three of her original watercolors. I read the description of the first, as I was told.

The first represented clouds low and livid . . . there was no land. One gleam of light lifted into relief a half-submerged mast, on which sat a cormorant, dark and large, with wings flecked with foam; its beak held a gold bracelet, set with gems . . . Sinking below the bird and the mast, a drowned corpse glanced through the green water; a fair arm was the only limb clearly visible, whence the bracelet had been washed or torn.

I glanced up at Orville, eyes wide.

“Do you see the problem now?” he asked.

I looked up at the painting, then back at the book, then back at the painting. “Problem?” I echoed. “This is great news.”

I felt like a child in one of those implausible Christmas movies, when she wishes for something hard enough, and suddenly there it comes, barreling down the chimney. This was a literary magic trick. There they were, the book and the painting, connected by an invisible string. The words had materialized into a solid reality in front of us.

“Please remove that possessed expression from your face,” said Orville.

I didn’t respond. I was finding it difficult to concentrate. Fictional Jane Eyre had painted a painting, and there it was, in front of me. That
exact
painting. Immediately, I looked at the other books on the shelf.
Agnes Grey
.
Wuthering Heights
.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
. They were no longer books but eager soldiers who were waiting to be called to the front lines. They were looking at me with an expression that said,
What took you so long?

Would all of Jane Eyre’s watercolors erupt from the page? And Helen Graham’s paintings, too—would they tumble out of the book, in one giant burst of smoke? Was I also to find the baby bird from
Agnes Grey
? Bertha’s scarf from
Jane Eyre
? The tombstone from
Wuthering Heights
? The possibilities were endless. Somewhere in the distance, I could almost see my father clapping his hands.

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” Orville demanded.

“I’m thinking of what Anne’s painting is doing in Charlotte’s book.”

“Pardon?”

“I was right. Charlotte was a thief.”

“Don’t jump to irrational conclusions,” said Orville. “This is just a painting.”

“Why aren’t you more excited?” I said. “Do you think this is the Warnings of Experience?”

“I’d prefer it if you forgot all about this and went to bed.”

“It’s seven.”

“I need to go out of town.” Orville gathered his gloves and hat. He moved to the door.

“Why are you angry?” I asked.

“I would just prefer not to see you . . . in this way.”

“What way is that?”

He lifted his overnight bag onto his shoulder. “Would you promise me not to do anything foolish? This is only a painting. Remember that. Say it to yourself over and over again. ‘It’s just a painting.’ ”

I raised my eyebrows. One of Orville’s hands was on the doorknob; the other was dangling awkwardly by his side. He looked like a father whose child was about to enter the 1970s.

When I didn’t respond, he said: “Well. I suppose I have said sufficient.”

The door clicked shut on his way out.

CHAPTER 14

“A
frankenstorm,” as it was being called, hit England that weekend. The London
Times
called it the storm of the year, even more so than the storm of the year we had experienced earlier that year. Meteorologists from every major station were dishing out advice regarding flood safety; local stores ran out of flashlights; bottled water became more expensive than my college tuition.

I caught the last train north to Haworth, the hometown of the Brontës. It was a stupid idea, given the headlines, but I was desperate to escape. The last two days had not been kind to me. Old College had rapidly turned into my father’s complicated tomb. After my chat with Orville, I’d spent the rest of the week scouring the campus for any other paintings, initials, or wall carvings I had missed in the past few months. I sought deserted corridors of the library; I rummaged through book collections in damp dormitory basements; I studied campus maps, monuments, mugs, drawings, doodles, scribbles, globes, ashtrays, chairs, tables, rugs, bathroom signs, carpet stains. Nothing seemed interesting, or even old, and certainly none of it screamed, “Warnings of Experience.” In desperation, I called Hans, who was normally a wealth of useless college history, but this time, he asked too many questions in return.
I don’t understand. Why are you doing this? What are you looking for? What is going on?
I didn’t answer. As the days passed and it became clear that Oxford held no more clues for me, I found myself dwelling more and more on the Brontë Parsonage. My father had once promised me that we would go there someday. Maybe he’d had a special reason in mind—like he had buried something in one of the old graves, or stashed something underneath a conveniently overlooked carpet. Both were equally unlikely, but I had run out of options. It was Haworth or Bust.

The thinning, bleak landscape suggested that we were approaching the north of England. I folded up the newspaper, which told tales of dying bookstores and accused war criminals. The train was not crowded, and at the other end of the car, a British woman was barking instructions to her son, demanding that he fill his bathtub with drinking water.
You remember what happened last year, right? Henry, are you even listening to me? Henry!

The three-hour train ride to Leeds dropped me off in time to board the old and crumbling Keighley & Worth Valley Railway. The woman on the loudspeaker told us that we were riding on a historic, restored railway, which I might recognize had I ever seen
Sherlock Holmes
,
Sons and Lovers
, or
Poirot
. I wondered if the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway had also been the setting for
Dawn of the Dead, Daughters of Darkness
, or
The Omen
. Outside the windows, a skeletal forest stretched for miles, limbs entangled like some terrible battle had erupted but had been frozen in place. Eventually the forest thinned, and in its place appeared a vast, desolate countryside. The white sheets of land had a grasping enormity to them, the kind that had been killing people silently for centuries. We had, at last, arrived at the moors.

When the train stopped thirty minutes later, I followed the few lone passengers outside. Haworth was a dump. Old, lonely houses pressed against each other, shoulder to shoulder. In anticipation of the storm, shop windows were already bolted shut, and piles of sandbags had appeared on every sidewalk. There must have been no more flashlights for sale, because a stringy brunette walked past clutching a lantern.

My phone was dead, which meant my GPS was dead too. My hotel was to the east, I believed, but where were the taxis? Didn’t train stations come with taxis?
Taxi? Taxi?
I walked along the silent streets, searching for a helpful local. I found a park, but no people. A closed coffee shop, but no people. The residents of Haworth must have already retreated into the safe havens of their tidy English homes. The only thing moving was a single page of a newspaper drifting past like a used tissue.

Were the Brontës shitting me? There was nothing charming or romantic about this prehistoric hellhole. I walked until I found myself on the top of a small hill overlooking the moors. The earth was blue and cold, the sky a suffocating gray. I looked out at the empty vastness. The rolling land stared back at me with cruel ambivalence.

Then, right there, when I turned around—a taxi. It was rolling down the street like an old cowboy. I raised a hand. When the car reached me, the window lowered to reveal a pirate-eyed man with a square jaw and an expression that seemed to say,
Laura? She’s been dead for years
.

I said, “The Brontë Parsonage, please.”

“Might be that the roads are closed, love.”

Actually, I have no idea what he said. His accent was nearly impossible to understand. Northern.

I said: “How fast can you get there?”

He looked me over. “Get in.”

I did as I was told. The cab grumbled into motion. I gave him the address and we crept down the old streets, passing the occasional loose-leaf advert for the Haworth West Lane Baptist Amateur Operatic Society. We passed small British houses, small British cars, and a bleak, gray park. A light snow had started to fall, which stuck to the ground and looked like the coarse, matted-down hair of a very sick dog. After only a few minutes, the car lurched to a halt, and the driver told me he could take me no farther due to flooding. We were close, he said. I paid the man his unreasonable sum and quitted the cab. My driver reversed down the old road until he was out of sight.

I wrapped my scarf tighter around myself. I didn’t see anything but a decrepit cobblestone street spotted with puddles. I walked up the small path, past an old church whose low, broad tower was a gray beam against a grayer sky. It seemed familiar for reasons I could not place. I turned a corner, and there—suddenly, in front of me—was the Brontë Parsonage.

I would have recognized it anywhere: my ancestral home. Dad used to have a framed pen-and-ink sketch of it hanging above his bed, drawn by his great-grandfather Ernie. The building itself was gray and boxlike, with cookie-cutter, asylum windows. A gust hit me from the side, and a quiet female voice burst unannounced into my mind:

The house is old, the trees are bare,

Moonless above bends twilight’s dome;

But what on earth is half so dear—

So longed for—as the hearth of home?

Up close, the house was strangely small and quiet, as though it had been biding its time for centuries. I walked up the old, forgotten path and tried to imagine the Brontës doing the same.
This
is what Emily did—and
this
, and
this
. Yet the effort of resuscitating my relatives was exhausting. I had a feeling that Emily did not want to be awakened. Somewhere, I just knew, she was giving me the finger.

I knocked on the front door. No response. The wind behind me was sharp and opinionated. I knocked again, and again. Would I have to break into another building? Twice more, and to my relief, the door flew open. On the other side was Sir John Booker. In a Quakerish black coat and a red scarf tied around his neck, he looked like he had walked here straight from
The Red Badge of Courage.

“Are you out of your mind?” he snapped.

“I’m the new governess.”

“There’s a storm, Miss Whipple. I wasn’t expecting you’d actually travel all this way.”

“Well, I’m here.”

“Have you ever experienced real weather?”