The Madwoman Upstairs (41 page)

“Orville,” I muttered.

“We need to get you inside,” he said.

“I d-didn’t find anything.”

“Of course you didn’t. This was an imbecilic project.”

I didn’t move. I was clinging to him. He tried to pull me off but I didn’t let go.

“I didn’t find anything,” I gulped.

“Yes, you said that.”

“I really thought it’d be there.”

Orville fell silent. The wind came over the lawn. “We need to go. This is not a good place to be found.”

“No, it’s here. It has to be here. Just help me find it. Please. Please help me find it.”

My lips were thick and heavy. I looked up at my professor and he looked back at me with an expression he might reserve for a sick child.

“Your father would never have left you a book in
water.
It would be destroyed. Didn’t you think of that?”

I muttered, “Not if he put it in a waterproof box.”

We didn’t say anything, and the absurdity of the statement lingered in the air. He tried to steer me away from the well, but I stayed where I was. Courage. I had finally found courage, and where had it brought me?

Orville shook his head. “Look at you. You look like that infernal woman on your wall.”

I frowned. “Pardon?”

“Come. We’re leaving.”

“Oh, God,” I said.

“What is it?” Orville snapped.

I thought of that old friend, the Governess, in her wild-eyed, drowning disappointment. I said, “You’re right. I picked the wrong well.”

“I can see that.”

“No,” I said. “I did. I picked the wrong well. There’s another woman who fell into the water, and she had a book in her hands. Remember?”

“If you don’t get a move on I will carry you.”

I was shaking. Orville’s coat, which had been wrapped loosely around me, slid cleanly off my back and landed on the grass. I tried to bend and reach for it, but my fingers felt as though they might crumple into frozen ash. I swayed and almost fell. Orville put a steadying hand on my waist.

“We need to get you inside, Samantha,” he breathed.

“Where do insane people go at Oxford?”

“They jump into a well,” he said. “Come. Walk.” Once again, he tried to urge me forward, but I leaned against him and pushed back. The wind came down at us, sharp and senseless.

“No,” I said. “Insane people go to my tower. They always have.”

“Move, or I will carry you.”

“Much madness is divinest sense. . . . Assent—and you are sane. Demur—you’re straightway dangerous—and handled with a Chain.”

“You’re babbling.”

“Don’t you see? The book has been home all this time and I haven’t seen it. It’s just like Dorothy.”

“Dorothy who?”

A blinding flash of light brought me back to reality. Was it lightning? Eternity? Orville and I turned around in time to see that it was neither—it was the flash of a camera. There it went again, another burst of light.

“Who’s there?”

I thought I had said it—at least, my mouth was open, ready to speak, but it was Orville who had shouted. Ahead of us, not ten feet away, was a shadow. The figure stepped into the light, and I gave a small start.

“Hans?”

Yes, I do believe it was Hans, standing there like a pale fish. There was a fancy camera draped around his neck and he was looking between Orville and me as though he couldn’t believe his good fortune. He looked so blond and Nordic that I almost saluted.

“Why are you here?” I asked.

“Why are you wet?” he replied.

Orville said, “There is no story here.”

Story? I glanced at Hans’s perfect face. I was trembling. I glanced from my professor to my so-called friend, and at the professional-looking camera draped so comfortably around the latter’s neck. A truth dawned on me, the sort of truth that later gets written in capital letters on tombstones.

“
You’re
H.
fucking
Pierpont?” I said. “You’re the one who’s been writing about me all
fucking
year?”

“Samantha,” Orville warned.

I lurched, but Orville caught me around the waist and pulled me back. I shouted to Hans: “Go away. I’m just on a walk.”

Another photo. Snap, snap.

Hans grinned. “Dressed like that?”

“We can continue this conversation inside,” Orville said. “She’s not well.”

I knew it then: Orville and I would both die here, by this old well, and in front of the entire world. Die, or else be disgraced. The pictures would be all over the news, with incriminating headlines. I saw the rumors multiplying; I saw my mother reading about it secondhand in a salon. Hans started firing pointed questions at Orville, but Orville just stared silently back at him, which meant Hans Fucking Pierpont was getting a better story than he could have possibly expected. Why wasn’t Orville saying anything? It was highly uncharacteristic. But I realized that he was not looking at Hans at all. He was looking directly past Hans.

My eyes adjusted. We were not, in fact, as alone as I thought. There were two more people behind H. Pierpont. One, I realized, was Ellery Flannery. Another was Rebecca Smith. The light from the faculty offices gave the contours of her waistless body a precise definition.

“Are we interrupting something important?” my old math tutor said, coming forward. I hoped she looked at me and saw a face filled with disappointment, the kind that haunts people forever. She was a small, small woman. She had picked the ending to her story: revenge. I remembered something she had said about my father’s death.
It was a well-crafted ending to an otherwise structureless life.

My glance darted back to Hans. What would I say—was I out for a romantic walk with my professor, or was I out to dig for Brontë gold? Would I choose to be Samantha the Strumpet, or Samantha the Last Living Brontë? Judging from the look on her face, Rebecca already knew which one I would pick. She was doing to me what my father had done to her. She was bequeathing me her story.

There was some commotion on the path, and two more spectators approached. Students? Didn’t this university have a curfew? One student was whispering to the other. No one, I realized, was looking at me. They were instead gawking at Orville, who looked like a wounded leopard cornered by a pack of hyenas. My heart thudded. Flannery came to stand in front of him, kicking aside the coat at his feet. Orville did not look at me, he just began spinning his glorious British sentences. Yes, Samantha had wanted to take a swim, what of it? He did not mention my midnight project or the Brontës. He just kept talking and talking, and I’m afraid I stopped listening. There were hooded figures coming out of the Faculty Wing. Were they hooded, or were my eyes simply closing? Golden bubbles appeared in the distance—flashlights?

All of a sudden, I was swaying, or was everyone else swaying? No, no, something was very wrong. I was neither as young nor as invincible as I thought. My body was trembling. All I could think of was sudden fainting syndrome and how Victorians had used it to great effect. I was only vaguely conscious of falling. Before I knew it, I had collapsed to the muddy lawn and Orville’s body was looming over mine as a small crowd gathered, and someone was asking someone to fetch something, or do something, or get someone.
Samantha? Samantha!

CHAPTER 16

A
nne Brontë died on May 28, 1849, at the age of twenty-nine. It was pulmonary tuberculosis that killed her, after a sudden and hopeless illness. Hers was an unfair departure, and she seemed to know it. “I wish it would please God to spare me, not only for papa’s and Charlotte’s sakes, but because I long to do some good in the world before I leave it,” she commented. “I have many schemes in my head for future practice—humble and limited indeed—but still I should not like them all to come to nothing, and myself to have lived to so little purpose. But God’s will be done.”

God’s will was indeed done. Anne left this world peacefully, at 2 p.m. in the afternoon, somewhere in Scarborough. Only Charlotte was by her side, a grieving eldest sister splayed out next to her youngest until the end. Emily and Branwell were both dead, and now it was just Charlotte, alone against the world. For all of the pair’s rivalries and petty competitions, this was surely not the ending Charlotte had in mind. What was her writing, without its inspiration? What was fame, without her family?

To this day, no one knows the words that were spoken between Charlotte and Anne, or the sentiments that were exchanged. It was a distraught Charlotte Brontë, to be sure, whose later lines of poetry spoke for themselves:
There’s little joy in life for me / And little terror in the grave; / I’ve lived the parting hour to see / Of one I would have died to save.

It seemed like an appropriately sad little ditty, but I had to wonder what Charlotte meant by “save.” Was she referring to Anne’s life, or Anne’s soul? I sincerely hoped it was the latter. I hoped that Anne’s spirit was so wild that it would severely complicate her afterlife, and I hoped that everyone who had ever been close to her knew it. It was my one great hope that after her death, little Anne Brontë took wing and blossomed in a way she didn’t while alive. I wished this to be true so fervently, and with so much of myself, that I think I put a bit of myself into Anne, or maybe it was the other way around. My youngest cousin was suddenly very much alive to me. Imagination can be a terrifying and precise thing, when you want it to be.

Anne’s final words to her sister were brief and resolute:

“Take courage, Charlotte,”
she said
. “Take courage.”

“What I don’t understand,” said my mother, days later, “is why you felt the need to take off your clothes.”

It was a very warm day outside, or so I was told. I was in bed in my tower. Several bandages enclosed my right foot and the whole thing stuck out of the covers like a seal surfacing for air. My room smelled of fever and salt.

“I told you,” I said. “To avoid getting sick.”

“Right,” she said. “Well, you
are
sick, so I see that it didn’t help.”

“I took off my jacket because I wanted to wear it afterward.”

“Oh?”

I gave her a look. She had obviously been reading the papers. I said, “Who are you going to believe—me, or H. Fucking Pierpont?”

“Don’t swear. It’s very American.”

Mom had arrived from Paris only an hour before, and was now sitting at the foot of my bed, stroking my leg. She insisted that there was nowhere else in the world she would rather be. The
Hornbeam
rested on her lap, her daughter’s frozen face plastered over the front page. I looked like a wet-T-shirt-contest winner standing next to her Smoking Hot Professor. The latter was staring into the camera with such broiling rage that it seemed uncontainable by any two-dimensional news form.
Rendezvous at Well Reignites Old Tradition.
Mom had read the article twice already. Once out loud. “I told you you’d crack one day,” she said the moment she arrived.

I recalled little about the rest of that damp and frosty evening except coming to full consciousness in the blasting heat of a taxicab, which was rushing a professor I didn’t recognize to the hospital. Why was this professor going to the hospital? Then I realized—it was I who was going, and this was my escort. Where was Orville?

As it turned out, there was nothing wrong with me except for a mild case of hypothermia and a badly scraped foot. As soon as I was released, at 7:17 the next morning, I returned to campus. It was a cold, crisp morning. I bought a ham and cheese sandwich (with sprouts) and went straight to my tower, after which I helped myself to a glass of water, got dressed, and then found my inheritance.

It was a smooth and easy discovery, as easy as if I had been taking dictation. When I removed
The Governess
from its perch on the wall, I found
The Warnings of Experience
casually strapped to the back of the canvas. It was a worn, thin, insignificant book, the width of my thumb. It had been here all along. And there, between the last page and the back cover, was Emily Dickinson. My father’s bookmark. I had held the book in my hands for several moments, feeling the soft old leather and the flimsy, battered pages. I opened it up to find faded black ink sinking into every page in small, slanted, intimate handwriting. Here, in the palm of my hand, was Anne Brontë. The real Anne Brontë.

Something else slipped out of the book, as well—a ripped scrap of printer paper, where my father had scrawled his own note in bright red ink.

Men have called me mad, but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence—whether much that is glorious—whether all that is profound—does not spring from disease of thought—from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.

All my love, Dad

It was Edgar Allan Poe. One of Dad’s favorites. I was overcome by an incurable sadness. Dad used to tell me that the journey was the important part of anything. He also knew that you only realized you’d had one when it was over. I had called my mother right away, for no reason except that I was crying and I never cried. I didn’t explain what had happened. It didn’t matter. She sounded as though I had just given her the greatest gift in the world. She boarded the train a day later, and now here she was, sitting on my bed and patting my scraped foot among the mess of newspapers.