My Brother's Keeper, page 22
A figure had been standing at the parsonage door, and, palpably aware of her even at this distance, had begun walking down the steps. The dream had ended before she had been able to see the figure’s face, if indeed it had had a face.
If the penny’s gone black in the morning, Tabby had said, you know your dream was an omen.
Emily laid the pillow back down, and a moment later jumped at the familiar boom of her father’s dawn gunshot. She looked around her narrow bedroom at the dimly visible drawings on the walls, then thoughtfully descended the stairs to begin making breakfast.
Branwell didn’t come down, of course, and conversation over the bowls of hot oatmeal porridge was sparse. Their father, who joined them for breakfast these days, only remarked that for once Branwell had slept through the night.
Charlotte complained of her toothache and went upstairs to her room to lie down. Emily and Anne volunteered to help old Tabby wash the pot and bowls, and in the kitchen Emily told the other two about Branwell’s hand and her dream and the black penny.
Tabby was troubled by the dream. She acknowledged that the parsonage must one day be a ruin, but objected to the way Emily had seen it. “You were your ghost, there,” she said, “but that shouldn’t ever be wandering abroad. Your ghost is to lie quiet in the vault, confined with your mother and sisters.”
Emily knew that she had been a ghost in the dream, and remembered Branwell saying that he and Emily and Anne had ceded control when they had left their blood at Ponden Kirk so long ago—ceded control even, and especially, after their deaths.
I will die before I permit that, she thought; oh, and I won’t permit it afterward, either! But she just said, “I’ll go where I please, in the flesh or not.”
Anne looked up from the sink and said, “Papa told us the ogham writing cut into the ledger stone is the name of the monster under it—with a branch of lines that contradict the name.”
Emily nodded and completed her sister’s thought. “Branwell might have been—that is, his hand, which is Welsh’s, might have been—composing a contradiction to the contradiction.”
“Mrs. Flensing’s body was found,” said Anne, “but that satchel she carried—the young man who came in with her took it.”
Emily shuddered at the mention of the satchel.
“Do you reckon,” said Tabby as she set about making tea, “it was that young man who put a knife into her neck?”
“I’m sure of it,” said Emily. “And I think if he had not, she’d have put a knife into his neck—since she hadn’t succeeded in killing me.” And putting my soul into the monster head that had surely been in that satchel, she thought.
That head is out there somewhere, she thought, probably with Mrs. Flensing’s ghost in it now. And Welsh—his hand, at any rate—is active in our very house.
“Papa,” she said slowly, “has a friend, of sorts, who might tell us how to free our family from these . . . adhesions.”
Anne was frowning doubtfully. “Mr. Brown? I suppose he could cut more marks into the stone . . .”
“No.”
Emily thought of a wicker figure in a timeless stone temple.
“Minerva,” she said.
The name clearly meant nothing to Tabby, but Anne looked unhappy. “What, again?” she said. “A pagan goddess! You’ll put your immortal soul in peril! Surely a priest, a Catholic priest—”
“—Would not be a pagan,” Emily finished, “in spite of what Charlotte would say. But it’s pagan forces preying on us. Fight fire with fire.”
“Could you even find that temple again?”
Emily looked at the floor, where she was sure some werewolf blood must still lie between the stones. Anne repeated her question.
“No,” Emily said. “No, the way to it had to be opened.”
She and Keeper had several times hiked out to that remembered hill a mile south of the River Aire, but no temple had been visible on the heath below it, nor manifested itself when they leaped over the inert lines of stones in the grass. The patches where the holes and fissures had opened up and then filled were hard to detect, overgrown now with grass and heather.
She got to her feet and walked down the hall to the parlor. When she came back she was carrying her folding wooden desk, and she sat down at the table and opened the hinged lid.
“I need to send a letter in the next post,” she said, pulling a card out from under a sheaf of manuscript pages. On it was scrawled a London address, but no name.
Anne recognized the card. “You,” she said flatly, “a curate’s daughter, will solicit help from a pagan goddess, through the offices of a werewolf.”
Emily thought of a woman who had reportedly leaped to her death from a turret balcony in Allerton in early March of last year, and of herself stabbing an unnatural murderous beast in this very kitchen six months ago; but she said, with affected lightness, “At least he’s a Catholic werewolf.”
Tabby muttered, “Worse and worse.”
Emily slid a blank sheet of paper free, and lifted out the ink bottle and uncapped it.
Tabby leaned on the counter, drying her hands with a towel and shaking her head mournfully. “You do dive awful deep,” she said, “to find a way to come up for air.”
PART THREE:
APRIL 1847
The starry night shall tidings bring
Go out upon the breezy moor
Watch for a bird with sable wing
And beak and talons dripping gore . . .
—Emily Brontë
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Curzon did not reply to the letter Emily sent him, and one midnight in April an echoing boom from inside the church led to the discovery that the ledger stone had cracked from end to end.
Emily had pulled on her boots and a coat, and she and Keeper followed Patrick down the moonlit walk to the church. They entered cautiously, and when the lantern Patrick was carrying showed the inch-wide split in the stone, they hurried across the street and Patrick pounded on John Brown’s door.
The alarmed sexton quickly mixed up a wheelbarrow full of mortar in his stoneyard, and when the three of them had made their way back into the church, Emily held the lantern while she and her father and Keeper watched the sexton trowel mortar into the length of the crack. None of them needed to ask if the others heard the muffled shifting and grinding under the stone, and Keeper, possibly sniffing some exhalation from below, growled until the last trowel-full was scraped into place.
Patrick was softly saying the Pater Noster, but he raised his voice so that it rang in the high ceiling beams as he pronounced breagh gan ainm—the Old Celtic phrase that meant Lie nameless.
When John Brown had smoothed the mortar flush with the broken edges of the stone, Patrick crouched and used his church key to trace lines in the fresh mortar, connecting the old incised lines that were now interrupted by the crack.
“That won’t do,” Patrick said as he stood up. “John, you’ve got to cut a fresh stone—duplicate those original lines—before sunset.”
John Brown was wiping his hands on a scrap of cloth. “I hope,” he said, “it will do to just lay the new stone over the broken one. I don’t fancy lifting that one.”
“I—don’t know,” said Emily’s father. In the lantern glow he looked very old.
Emily and Keeper walked him back to the parsonage. Charlotte and Anne were peering out from either side of the opened front door, shivering in their nightgowns, and when Emily and their father had got inside and he had carefully re-bolted the door, they all walked back to the kitchen and Charlotte put a pot of water on the range to boil. Tabby called down from upstairs to ask if all was well, and Patrick told her to go back to sleep.
After Emily and their father had described the cracked stone and John Brown sealing it with mortar, Charlotte cocked her head judiciously and began, “It could be that shifts in temperature—”
But Emily interrupted her. “No. We heard the twin moving around underneath.”
“What can we do?” whispered Anne.
“There’ve been no overtures from its twin, the Welsh ghost,” said Patrick. “In years past you have seen the ragged boy manifestation out on the moors, but my gunshots—” He paused and nodded to Emily. “Our gunshots have apparently kept him away from the church and this house since the death of your mother. You children are safe from him. I—”
“He was in this house!” Anne burst out. “Last September, when you and Charlotte were in Manchester! And Emily and Branwell and I saw him on the moors that day, spoke to him! And long before that we apparently wrote promissory notes—”
To Emily’s alarm, Patrick rocked back in his chair, gripping the edge of the table and suddenly pale. “In the house! Visible?”
Emily laid her hand over one of his cold hands. “We banished him. Yes, visible—he takes crows to make up the mass of a body. But Keeper injured him, drove him away.”
“God help me,” said Patrick softly, “I thought the Catholic exorcism in 1821 revoked her invitation.”
Anne cocked her head. “Her invitation?”
“Whose?” asked Emily.
“Ah—your mother didn’t know any better. She saw a barefoot boy in the snow, in the churchyard—it was natural, humane, to invite him in, across the threshold.”
For several seconds none of them spoke.
“The exorcism may have worked,” Emily said, “at least for keeping the thing out of the house. Branwell too saw the boy in the snow, when he was fourteen. And—” She spread the fingers of her free hand.
“How soon,” asked Anne timidly, “do you suppose we could get another Catholic priest out here?”
Charlotte poured tea into four cups and glared at her father. “I really think an Anglican priest—such as yourself!—would be more qualified.”
“I’m afraid I disqualified myself, praying to Minerva all those years ago.” Patrick picked up his teacup and blew across the top of it. “We should pack for a trip to France.”
“What,” said Charlotte, “all of us? Can we even afford passage?”
“No,” Patrick admitted.
“And you can’t abandon your parish,” put in Anne.
“I’m not leaving,” said Emily. “No devils are going to drive me away from where I live.”
Patrick gave her a distracted smile. “You shoot them all, child.” He blinked and turned to Anne. “What promissory notes?”
“That was nothing,” spoke up a new voice from the hall, and Branwell stepped into the kitchen. The loud boom from the church must have awakened him, and he seemed alert. Keeper stood up beside Emily’s chair. Branwell went on, “I’m sure Welsh was only trying to frighten you with that phrase.” To his father he said, distinctly, “When we were children—I was thirteen!—I proposed a game. We hiked to Ponden Kirk and cut our fingers to dab a few drops of blood in the fairy cave at its base. It had no significance.”
“Good God!” exclaimed their father. “Of all the . . . foolhardy . . . !” He shook his head unhappily, and Emily noted his thinning white hair and recalled that he was seventy years old. “I really think we need to cross the sea.”
“Nothing came of it,” Branwell assured him. “Certes the blood is long since washed away.”
“That’s not what you said in September,” ventured Anne.
In the last few seconds Emily’s face had gone cold, and now the backs of her hands tingled. That’s not what Branwell said, she mentally corrected her sister.
“I expect I was trying to frighten you too,” Branwell said with a smile.
Tabby had poured another cup, and Branwell picked up the cup with his right hand. Keeper was staring at him, and when Emily stroked the dog’s thick neck she could feel the vibration of an uncertain growl.
Patrick blinked up at his son. “It was a monstrously foolish thing to do.”
Branwell shrugged and with his left hand patted his father on the shoulder, his fingers flexing. Emily shuddered at the sight of the touch.
“Nothing came of it,” Branwell assured him.
Emily kept her breathing even, and held her own cup with a steady hand. He hasn’t asked what the loud noise was, she thought; or, if he somehow didn’t hear it, why we’re all awake down here.
She met Anne’s eye, and when Branwell was looking at their father she shook her head. We must not discuss these things in front of him, she thought. We’ve said too much here already.
She hoped that Branwell had not heard their father mention having prayed to Minerva.
“It’s late,” she said.
“Far too early to be getting up, at least,” said Charlotte.
“There’s nothing more to be done tonight,” conceded Patrick, sliding his chair back. “I’d relish another couple of hours’ sleep.” He gave Branwell a weary look, no doubt thinking of the two of them going back upstairs to his bedroom, where Branwell still slept on a cot. “Will you lie quiet, and not complain about your insomnia?”
“I’ll be asleep before you are,” said Branwell.
“Papa,” said Emily suddenly, “stay up with me. I—” She racked her mind for a plausible reason to keep her father from being alone with the thing in Branwell’s body. “I want to pray.”
Charlotte gave her a surprised look, but Anne nodded. “It’s what we can do,” she said.
“Of course,” said their father.
Emily thought she saw Branwell repress a shudder. “I’m to my cot,” he said, stepping to the hall doorway. “It’s likely to be a busy day.”
When his son’s footsteps had receded away up the stairs, Patrick rubbed both hands over his face, then let them drop to the table. He peered at Emily.
“Was that Branwell?”
“No,” she said, setting down her cup.
Anne nodded and, to Emily’s surprise, Charlotte said, “I wondered.”
Thunder cracked and rolled out over the dark moors, as if a late echo of the splitting stone, and Emily was reminded of her father’s account of asking Minerva for the armor of the cyclopes. They also made thunderbolts, as Anne had recalled then.
“Where,” asked Patrick in a voice tight with control, “is my son?”
“He’s there,” said Emily quickly, “and these moments of dislocation are uncommon—he can usually resist them. Tomorrow he won’t remember that he came downstairs just now.”
“What . . . personality was that which spoke to us? Am I unhappily correct in my guess?”
“You are,” Emily admitted. “But Welsh was diminished when both Keepers mauled him in September, and until just now I’ve only been able to guess at Welsh’s presence in Branwell—when he’s lost track of a conversation for a few moments.” And once or twice, she thought, given me a momentary and instantly forgotten look of fury.
“Or pretends to understand something Branwell does understand,” said Anne sadly. “Like our old Glass Town stories.”
“That which I greatly feared hath come upon me,” Patrick muttered hollowly. “I hope an exorcism won’t kill my boy.”
Emily quickly walked to the hall and looked up the stairs, and she exhaled in relief to see that the figure of Branwell was not crouched in the shadows, wide-eyed and listening.
She walked back into the kitchen, and shook her head in answer to the alarmed looks the other three gave her.
“Our brother will be back up in the morning, I’m sure,” she said. “I don’t believe Welsh suspects that we’ve seen through his moments of imposture—”
“Or cares,” said Charlotte.
“—and,” Emily went on, “they’re brief. Shorter than they were last year, when Welsh did things like walk in Branwell’s body to the church. We dealt him a setback in September.”
“He might regain his lost ground,” said Anne, “if the twin under the stone gets up. It might force full completion of the pair—full possession of Branwell.”
“Dig out the fresh mortar,” said Charlotte, “pour oil down the crack, and ignite it.”
Emily shook her head. “The Flensing woman was going to awaken it by restoring its bare skull. Fire wouldn’t destroy its bones.”
“Though it would certainly destroy the church,” said Patrick. He turned to Emily. “Both Keepers?”
“One is a ghost,” Emily said. “It attacked Welsh’s ghost, as our Keeper attacked the form he had assembled.”
“Really!” Patrick’s eyebrows were raised. “Yes, that would have to be the ghost of our Keeper’s namesake—the mastiff that killed Welsh in 1771. Of course. It’s a mercy he followed Welsh’s ghost here.” He pushed his chair back from the table. “Is the floor too hard to kneel on? I think prayer is our best recourse tonight.”
Branwell came stumbling down the stairs just as dinner was being served in the parlor at noon, and he grumpily refused anything more than a cup of tea. Emily and her sisters stole glances at him, and found opportunities to nod reassuringly at one another.
Catching a couple of their looks, he ran the fingers of his right hand through his ginger hair, clearly to find out if it was sticking up in an odd way. “I heard an awful boom in the middle of the night,” he said. “Has anyone checked to see if the church tower fell over?”
His tone was uncertain and defensive.
Emily looked at him speculatively. “The ledger stone in the church floor split, from end to end.”
“Oh no,” he whispered, and by his evident dismay Emily knew this was her brother.
Tabby had been told about it as soon as she had come downstairs, and had grumbled at not being told last night. Now as she bustled in to take their aunt’s teapot, she just recited under her breath the second line painted on it: “To die is gain.”
“Amen,” whispered Anne.
Their father had as usual taken his dinner in his room, and when Charlotte and Anne went out front to look at the sparse garden, Branwell took hold of his left wrist and laid that hand limp on the table. “Did I come downstairs last night?” he asked Emily; and when she nodded, he said, “That wasn’t me.”
“I know,” Emily said. We all knew, she thought.
“I wasn’t drunk, that night I set my bed on fire.”
