My Brother's Keeper, page 3
“I heal fast.”
“Not from something like this.” He really didn’t seem to be in immediate danger of dying, and she gave him a curious frown. “Though I’d judge your eye, at least, is well enough that you could get rid of the patch.”
“It’s a—formality.”
She had spread his unbuttoned coat to see if he had other wounds, and he caught her hand. Keeper’s big front paws were instantly on his chest, and Emily could feel the vibration of the dog’s growl through Alcuin’s hand.
He released her hand and slowly lowered his own, blinking up at Keeper’s teeth. When the dog stepped back, he turned his head toward Emily and said, “That scar on your hand—a burn?”
She nodded. “On an iron.”
“As for ironing shirts?” He peered again at the irregular white scar on her knuckles. “You must have leaned on it.”
“I must have.”
His face and hands showed scratches, but the gash in his side seemed to be his only serious injury. She unfastened the last buttons of his waistcoat to get a better look at the wound, but the blood-soaked tatters of his shirt prevented a clear view. This time he didn’t risk pushing her hand away but groaned, “Oh, let it be, damn you!”
She ignored the profanity; but clearly he would accept no help from her, and in any case his wound would need more expert attention than she could provide. She stood up and brushed dirt and fern fragments off her dress. “I’ll be back with the Sunderlands.”
He grimaced and shook his head. “I suppose I must beg your pardon . . . Miss Emily! But—” He sat up experimentally. “Ah! Save your trouble—I won’t be here.” He winced and grabbed his side, but didn’t lie back down. “Irish?”
“My father is.” She stepped up the bank, closely followed by Keeper. “He came over forty years ago.”
“Forty . . . wait.” Alcuin turned to look up at her, evidently careless of his wound. “The scar on your hand—would your father’s name be Brunty?” In fact her family name was Brontë, and she was startled at the near-accuracy of his guess, but kept her face expressionless. He went on, “Is he aware of Welsh?” Still getting no response, he slumped back down. “No, never mind, child. You wouldn’t be here. Run along to your sheep.”
For a moment Emily was on the point of asking this Alcuin person whether he actually knew something about her family, and what he meant by Is he aware of Welsh—but that would lead to questions and answers: to some unpredictable and certainly unwelcome degree of intimacy with this stranger.
“We may be well over an hour,” she said. “Press your hands on the wound to slow the bleeding.”
His eyes were closed, but he waved at her. “It’s stopped bleeding. Go away, for God’s sake.”
Emily stepped up onto the level ground and scanned the horizons. The bleak landscape still showed no motion except for the heather shaking in waves along the hillsides in the cold wind, and with Keeper at her heels she began walking south with a ground-covering stride.
For twenty minutes she and the dog hurried south, following a path along the east slope of the Middlemoor Clough, and when the path ascended to the highland and eventually to the base of the hill at the crest of which sat Top Withens farmhouse, she paused and looked back across the miles of tan-and-green hills. Ponden Kirk wasn’t visible from here.
Keeper had loped on ahead, and now came trotting back and licked her hand encouragingly.
“A moment, boy,” she told him. She raised her hand and looked at the scar on the back of it. Anyone could guess that it was from a burn—but were the old tooth punctures perceptible too?
One twilight seven years ago a strange dog had got into a fight with Keeper in the churchyard out in front of the parsonage; the animal had resembled Dogues de Bordeau she had later seen in Brussels—a muscular, short-snouted mahogany mastiff—but with a bigger head, and longer legs and toes. In fact it had resembled the dog that had bitten Branwell fourteen years before that.
She bared her teeth now, remembering how she had broken up that fight between Keeper and the other dog. Armed only with a hastily-snatched-up pepper pot, Emily had abandoned her ironing and run down the front steps of the parsonage and vaulted the low churchyard wall, and she had dashed the black powder into the strange mastiff’s face. The creature had retreated, and galloped off across the moors, but not before clamping its jaws on the back of Emily’s hand. She had hurried back to the kitchen, where she washed the wound; and then she had picked up the iron, filled with live coals, and pressed it against the wound for five agonizing seconds.
Remembering it now, she flexed her hand; then looked more closely. She spat on her thumb and bent to rub off a spot of Alcuin’s dried blood on a clump of grass.
“Do you think he’s dying?” she asked Keeper. “He didn’t think he was.”
She straightened and looked at both sides of her hand to be sure no spot of his blood remained; then started up the hill toward Top Withens.
When she led Mr. Sunderland and two of his sons to the beck below the standing stones, Alcuin was gone, as he had told her he would be—though traces of blood on the grass and the prints of his boots bore out Emily’s story. Mr. Sunderland invited her to have midday dinner with his family, but they were all virtually strangers to her, and she dreaded the thought of sitting among them while they tried to engage her in social conversation. It had been a fair ordeal even to approach their gate.
She declined the invitation with reserved politeness, and declined too the subsequent offer that one of Sunderland’s sons should escort her back home.
She and Keeper retraced their long route back to Ponden Kirk, and then across the well-known trails and fields and becks that would take them back at last to the parsonage—though on the way she did stop at the spot where she had first seen Alcuin, and, in spite of Keeper’s evident disapproval, retrieved his peculiar knife.
CHAPTER TWO
Back at the parsonage, Emily found that Anne had saved a plate of mutton, mashed potatoes, and preserved cucumbers for her, and the mutton bone for Keeper.
Branwell had looked up from an issue of Blackwood’s Magazine when Emily came into the kitchen after hanging up her coat, and the chaotic state of his red hair and skimpy chin-beard showed that he had got out of bed only recently.
It was a new issue of the magazine. Blackwood’s editors consistently ignored Branwell’s letters offering to write articles—which he assured them would far outshine the ones they published—but he still read every issue that the family borrowed from their father’s sexton, and he probably still hoped to be featured in the magazine’s pages one day as a great writer . . . or painter . . . or perhaps politician.
Charlotte stepped in from the hall holding a dress she’d been stitching.
“Papa was asking where you’d got to.”
Branwell peered at Emily through his little round spectacles. “Are you in trouble? Have you been drying clothes on the gravestones again?”
Emily sat down across the table from him. He would doubtless spend the afternoon slouching around the house in an irritable daze, and at dusk walk down to the Black Bull. She gave her sisters a wide-eyed look that promised more later, and for now just said to Charlotte, “West and then east again.”
Charlotte nodded, then snapped at Branwell, “We’ve found your coat out there on more than a few mornings.”
Anne caught Emily’s eye and touched her own wrist. Emily looked down and saw a spot of blood on her sleeve. Quickly she folded the cuff under.
Branwell blinked at Charlotte. “On these cold nights,” he drawled, “I sometimes leave my coat there in case some poor ghost might need it.”
Tabby the housekeeper had bustled in from the yard in time to hear him, and snorted derisively. “Careful they don’t want your trousers too.”
Emily made quick work of her late dinner and stood up; and Alcuin’s knife tumbled out of the pocket of her dress and clinked on the stone floor.
Branwell leaned over and picked it up. The twin blades, at least, were clean, for Emily had plunged it into the ground several times to get the traces of blood off before pocketing it. The leather grip had already been dry when she had picked it up.
“I found that,” she said.
“This hasn’t been out in the weather,” Branwell noted. His hand trembled as he brushed his thumb across the tips of the blades—but his shakiness wasn’t unusual. He cleared his throat. “I think I saw one like it in London.”
“In London?” said Emily, intrigued by this careless admission that he had, after all, traveled to London eleven years ago, and not been halted on the way by a robbery. “Where in London?”
Branwell glanced around quickly, then laid the knife down on the table. “I don’t recall.”
None of the others had apparently noticed his slip. Charlotte muttered something to the effect that most things eluded her brother’s memory these days.
“It was just . . . lying on a path,” Emily said. “Is Papa in his study?”
Anne nodded, her eyebrows raised in obvious anticipation of hearing how Emily had got blood on her blouse, and how she had actually come across the knife. Emily picked it up as she pushed her chair back and got to her feet.
Her father’s study was down the entry hall, and she rapped on the door and then opened it and stepped in.
Old Patrick Brontë was seated at his desk with a bright oil lamp at his elbow, squinting and tilting his head as he peered through a magnifying glass at his sermons notebook. His chin was buried in the many layers of the yards-long silk cravat that he wrapped around and around his neck every morning—always clockwise from Christmas to midsummer, and then counterclockwise till Christmas Eve.
When he looked up over his nearly useless spectacles, she said, “I found a wounded man on the moors this morning, by Ponden Kirk.”
“Oh?” Her father frowned and laid his notebook aside. “Badly wounded?”
“I thought so, at the time. There was a serious-looking gash in his side,” she said; and added with a shrug, “which didn’t stop him walking off while I was fetching the Sunderlands. I talked to him, a bit, and he seemed to know our name, though he pronounced it Brunty.”
Her father’s mouth opened, but he didn’t speak; so Emily continued, “He asked—I don’t know what he meant—if you were aware of Welsh.” Still her father simply stared at her, in evident dawning alarm. Quickly she added, “Perhaps he simply wanted to know if you spoke the language. He looked Welsh, actually—dark.”
Her father gripped the corners of his desk and scuffed his shoes on the carpet, as if to stand up—or, it occurred to Emily, as if to reassure himself of the solidity of his room, his house.
“He was rude,” she said, to break the silence. “Abrupt, at least.” She rocked her head. “Understandable, I suppose.”
“By Ponden Kirk, you said.”
“At the bottom of the slope below it.”
“Close the door.” She passed in front of the window, and he said, “You’re carrying something.”
The door’s hinges were silent, but at the click of the latch he leaned back in his chair. Emily walked to the desk and laid the knife on the blotter. “He dropped this. It’s a knife. There was blood on it.”
He groped for it, and slowly slid his fingers along the length of it from the pommel to the paired blades, not touching the tips, and lifted his hand away. He stood up and walked across to the window, which overlooked the churchyard.
Facing the glass, he asked, “Did he—have both of his eyes?”
Emily was startled by the question. “Yes. But he wore an eyepatch anyway. He called it a formality. You know about this?”
“What else did he say?”
“He decided he was wrong in his guess at our name, because, he said, I wouldn’t be here if he’d been right.”
Old Patrick turned to face her, his white hair backlit in the afternoon sunlight. “I expect Branwell will be going to the Black Bull this evening. When he’s gone, I will—it seems!—have some things to tell you and Charlotte and Anne. But for now,” he said softly as he returned to his chair, “bide you girls in the parlor or the kitchen, and,” he added with a sigh and an unhappy smile, “leave the world to darkness and to me.”
Emily recognized the line from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard.” The remembered view from the window was probably what had prompted it, but as she opened the door and stepped out into the entry hall, she was a good deal more apprehensive than she had been when she’d gone in.
As she walked back toward the kitchen, she took a deep breath and let it out, and she raised her eyebrows to smooth any furrow between them.
Branwell’s eyes were still on the pages of Blackwood’s, but in his mind was the image of that double-bladed knife.
It was in a church sacristy, he thought, ten years ago, that I saw a knife like that, Emily.
But why would one like it be found on these moors? And whose blood is that on your sleeve, Emily?
When she walked back into the kitchen, she wasn’t carrying the knife, and in spite of her expressionless face Branwell recognized alarm in her tense, empty hands and the set of her shoulders. Of course Anne and Charlotte could see it too—but none of his sisters talked about important things with him anymore.
He stood up and stepped past Emily into the hall—embarrassed that he had to brace himself against the doorframe—and hurried past his father’s study to the front door. When he pulled it open he flinched at the cold outside air that buffeted his face and found its way down his collar, but he couldn’t go back now to get a coat. He tucked his hands in his trouser pockets and hurried down the steps to the paved walk. He crossed Emily and Anne’s sparse garden to the low churchyard wall and swung one leg and then the other over it.
The view of the churchyard made him aware of the almost constant sound of hammer on chisel from John Brown’s stonecutting yard, where the sexton seemed always to be cutting letters and numbers into fresh gravestones.
Branwell let his melancholy gaze play over the old gravestones in front of him. Interspersed among the standing markers, many of the graves were covered with raised, rectangular slabs laid flat, and he kicked through drifts of last year’s fallen leaves and sat down on one of the farthest of the cold, table-like markers.
He looked at the palm of his trembling right hand and thought, Can my perverse baptism have followed me here from London?
When he had set out on that two-day trip to London he had been eighteen, and his mind had been alight with fantasies: of astonishing the instructors at the Royal Academy of Arts with his portfolio of drawings, immediately getting commissions to paint portraits of lords and admirals, and very soon living as splendid a life as “Northangerland,” his fictional alter ego in the stories he had then still been writing with Charlotte.
But by the time the coach had got as far as Bradford, the fantasies had begun to seem like mirages. Even the ordinary men waiting for the London coach at the White Swan Hotel had been too clearly engaged with the real world—purposeful and responsible and competent—for Branwell to imagine the contrived figure of Northangerland among them.
And, the next day, the gross reality of big London had dwarfed him: the immensity of St. Paul’s Cathedral on Ludgate Hill; the imposing Neoclassical Somerset House, where in fact the Academy Schools were located; the endless broad boulevards crowded with noisy cabs and carriages and busy pedestrians.
He’d had letters of introduction to a number of influential painters and the secretary of the Royal Academy—and he had approached none of them. His father and aunt and several family friends had managed to come up with money for his first month of food and lodging and books—and in three days he had spent virtually all of it on rum and roast beef and cigars at the Castle Tavern in High Holborn.
The Castle Tavern had proven to be a warm, sociable refuge. It was licensed to a onetime champion pugilist, and its patrons were a mix of journalists, boxing enthusiasts, and visitors from the country like himself. And in this undemanding company he had been able to shine.
He was a charming and witty addition to any group of drinkers, always ready with a joke or an apposite literary quote, and from his wide reading he could talk intelligently about any subject, from history to sports to politics. Among several anecdotes on the wilds of Yorkshire, he told the story of how he had been bitten by a malformed and apparently rabid dog ten years earlier. He noted that he had suffered no ill effects from it; though he didn’t mention the month of nightmares that had followed.
The story caught the attention of one well-dressed man who had been watching him from across the room, and who had hurried out when the story was finished.
Before closing time the man returned, in the company of a fair-haired, youthful-looking clergyman in a black cassock and clerical collar; and after pointing out Branwell, the man quickly left the premises.
The clergyman joined the group of Branwell’s new friends, and asked him for more details about his life in Yorkshire; and he soon separated Branwell from the crowd beside the bar and led him to a corner table.
He introduced himself as Reverend Farfleece, and Branwell, drunkenly cautious, had used the name Northangerland.
Farfleece had wanted to know all about the peculiar dog that had bitten Branwell. He asked about aftereffects, infection . . . disturbing dreams? . . . and smiled at Branwell’s awkward insistence that there hadn’t been any.
You were marked, that day, Farfleece had told him, by an inhuman power.
Branwell had tried to shift the conversation to another topic, but Farfleece’s next question was, Have you seen the dark boy by Ponden Kirk?
It had taken Branwell several seconds to answer: In dreams. Mentally he had added, And once in the churchyard, barefoot in the snow.
