My Brother's Keeper, page 8
“If a good deal of what you’ve heard and read is true,” said Charlotte, “why do we stay here? Why not move back to Thornton?”
Patrick stirred, and went on slowly, “That ledger stone in the floor of the church, a few yards closer to the door than the stone over our family vault.”
“The one with the grooves cut in it,” said Charlotte with a nod. “You once said that the grooves were to keep people from slipping, if the floor were wet. I asked you why there weren’t grooves over the whole floor in that case, and you said it proved to be too costly.”
“Did I? I’m afraid I lied to you. The grooves are ogham, the ancient Celtic tree-alphabet. In that crude alphabet some of those grooves spell out the name of a creature that lies beneath that ledger stone. It’s what I was searching for, through all those years—and, having found it, it’s why I’ve kept my family here. You’re . . . not precisely safe, but safer, here, where I can keep it down and—and, God willing, keep the Welsh spirit away from it.”
“Keep it down?” said Emily. “It’s not dead?”
“Not . . . irretrievably, I’m afraid. Frozen halfway there, say, like a stalemated king in a chess game.”
“What is it?”
“According to the Luaith Beannaigh manuscript, it is Welsh’s inhuman twin. Someone at some point killed it, mostly, more than a hundred years ago, and had its ogham name incised in the ledger stone laid over it, along with a negating branch of lines which . . . contradict the name. The Reverend Grimshaw made sure to keep the grooves cleared of dust and mud, and added a repressive Latin phrase to the Pater Noster in his Sunday service. My fool predecessor here stopped using the Latin entirely—he insisted, reasonably enough anywhere else, that the Pater Noster should be said in the King’s good English—and he even proposed filling in the grooves in the stone with mortar.” Patrick shook his head. “The congregation knew better. They came near hanging him, and might have done, if I hadn’t replaced him.”
Emily recalled hearing how the congregation had expressed its displeasure. A donkey had been led into the church in the middle of a service, and on its back, facing the donkey’s tail, was a man wearing a stack of twenty hats. It had effectively disrupted the curate’s reading of a lesson, and when Emily first heard the story she had thought it was merely a grotesque clown show.
Now she said, “Facing backward on the donkey? Twenty hats?”
“The man on the donkey was not simply ridiculing the ignorant rector,” her father said. “After the donkey promenade, the people dragged the poor rector outside and rolled him in a pile of ashes. The people didn’t remember what it was, but in fact they were enacting an ancient pagan Celtic ritual of banishment—the man on the donkey facing away, wearing a lot of hats to represent the entire community, and ashes to show a vacated space.” Charlotte had huffed as he spoke, and he added, “It’s true, my dear. All that world is still not far below the surface, out here.”
“Brachiun enim,” said Emily softly, quoting the odd Latin phrase that her father inserted into his recital of the Pater Noster, always striking a string-suspended iron triangle as he voiced the enigmatic words. “You mispronounce brachium, but that’s ‘arm for,’ ” more or less. What does it signify?”
“In Latin,” her father said, “inserted before voluntas tua, it’s a needless reference to God’s arm. But in a dialect of old Celtic, those syllables—breagh gan ainm—mean ‘Lie nameless.’ Spoken while ringing that triangle, which I chiseled and hammered from the rim of Welsh’s funeral bell, it emphasizes the contradiction of the twin’s name inscribed on the ledger stone, and—by the grace of God—has kept the twin down.”
The clock on the stairs struck nine, and he sighed and got laboriously to his feet. “That’s enough,” he said, “there’s nothing anyone can do tonight. I’m for bed. Don’t . . . stay up too late.” He yawned, as much from tension as from weariness, and turned toward the hall. “And don’t let Branwell get into the emetic,” he added over his shoulder.
When their father’s slow steps had ascended past the stair landing, Emily told her sisters, “Later. Tomorrow.”
Anne and Charlotte nodded with evident relief at postponing discussion of the things their father had said, and the three sisters pushed back their chairs and walked down the hall to fetch their folding wooden writing desks. It was reassuring to resume their usual nightly routine and open the desks on the kitchen table and set out ink bottles, pens, and sheets of paper. Even Keeper, recognizing the familiar homely ritual, consented to lie down at Emily’s feet.
Charlotte allowed herself to say, “Celtic tree-alphabet! God help us!” before sighing and bending over a manuscript page.
“Tomorrow,” said Emily firmly.
“Amen,” agreed Anne, smoothing a page of her own.
Emily uncapped her ink bottle and dipped the nib of her pen.
Soon the kitchen was silent except for the scratching of pens. Anne had already begun writing a novel while working as a governess last year, and it was about the vicissitudes of a governess’s life. Charlotte had decided to abandon the old tales of Angria and write a novel herself, drawing on her two years as a student in Brussels. Emily felt ready to begin a novel of her own, but she was resolved not to base it on her own life—her vision was of the wild, windswept moors and the isolated souls to be found in that that wilderness.
CHAPTER SIX
Branwell’s room, his “studio,” was at the back of the parsonage, with a big window overlooking the moors, and Charlotte and Anne slept in what used to be their aunt’s room; but Emily still slept on the narrow camp bed in the small room they had all shared as children. The window overlooked the churchyard and the church steeple beyond, but when she awoke this morning and peered out, dawn was just a red streak in the sky and she saw only deep shadow below.
The room was of course too dark for her to see the pencil sketches that she knew covered the whitewashed walls, but as she lay in bed she called up in memory all those drawings of birds and faces and flowers, and the children who had busily drawn them there. The higher drawings showed more skill, being done as the children had grown taller, but Emily’s thoughts were of the lowest, the clumsy rabbits and dogs done by the smallest hands.
In this predawn dimness the big old house seemed timeless, its various tragedies and joys all equally present, but paused. Wondering what had awakened her, she got out of bed and put on a robe and silently descended the stairs. Keeper followed her, and when she heard faint fumbling at the kitchen door, she knew who it must be because the dog didn’t even growl.
She opened the door, and Branwell brought a gust of cold clay-scented air with him as he came stumbling into the dark kitchen. “Sit down and be quiet,” she said softly as she bolted the door. “Papa hasn’t fired his pistol yet. I’ll make tea.”
By touch she unerringly found matches and glass paper to strike them on, and soon had a fire going in the big black-iron range and an oil lamp lit on the table. Keeper stood on the other side of the table, near Branwell, and Emily thought the dog’s attitude was both protective and cautious.
She put the kettle on the range and sat down across the table from her brother, as a few hours ago she had sat here with her sisters. Branwell looked as if he’d been waylaid and robbed—his face was scratched, his clothes were muddy and disheveled, and he wasn’t wearing his spectacles—but he had walked in without limping, and he wasn’t obviously injured.
He pulled his spectacles out of his coat pocket, and she could see that they weren’t broken.
“Could you,” he said, “wash these?”
She took them from him, with a wry smile at the idea that it was his spectacles that particularly needed a wash, but stood up and rinsed them in the pot she had cleaned the teacups in. She dried them on a towel, and noted some sort of brown oil that still clung to the lenses; another dip in the pot, and rubbing with her thumbs, got them clean, and she dried them again and handed them back to him.
He fitted them on over his ears and blinked nervously around the high-ceilinged room, then sighed deeply and looked at her. He cleared his throat and said, hoarsely, “I’ve been through Hell tonight.”
She took the kettle off the range and poured a splash of hot water into their aunt’s teapot—with Grimshaw’s statement painted on it in gold: To Me to live is Christ, to Die is Gain—swirled it around and poured it out, then filled it with hot water.
Ever since coming home after his acrimonious dismissal from his tutorial position, and the end of his claimed affair with Mrs. Robinson, his employer’s wife, he had declared every day that he was suffering the tortures of the damned; but Emily respected suffering even when it was deserved, or based on delusion.
She put the teapot on the table and spooned some tea leaves into the pot, then set two cups on the table and sat down. “Tell me.”
“I was—” he began. “It has to do with something that happened to me in London. I—” He stopped, clearly reconsidering what he had been about to say. “I walked out to Ponden Kirk tonight. I got lost on the way home—thought I’d die out there.” He waved one hand in a gesture that took in the state of his hair and clothing.
Emily nodded. “And,” she said, “London?” She wondered if he even still remembered his story of having been waylaid by robbers before getting to London, eleven years ago.
“Well—that was earlier. There was a woman at the Black Bull today, a woman I met when I was in London. She remembered me. She—she has connections, uh, employment—I think you’d—like to—”
Then his mouth twisted and he lowered his head, and he was silently crying. Emily thought of the boy who had done so many of the drawings, down near the floor or higher up, in the room they had once all shared.
She stood up and fetched the bottle labeled Emetic, and poured a liberal splash of whisky into one of the cups, then filled both cups from the teapot. As tea, it would be little more than hot water, but she pushed the fortified one toward him. “That’ll cool it off for you. Drink it and go to bed, before people start getting up—tell me about it all tomorrow.”
He took a sip of the tea, then looked with surprise at the jar of whisky. “Where do you keep that?”
“On the roof. Go to bed.”
“Yes,” he said, “bed. Sleep, that knits up the ravel’d sleave of care, and—oh, God help us, Emily.”
“God can help us tomorrow.”
The whisky must have cooled the tea, for he drained the cup in three big swallows, then pushed his chair back and got to his feet. Keeper watched him shuffle out to the hallway, and didn’t sit down beside Emily until Branwell’s steps had faded to silence on the stairs.
The north wind had died down during the night, and the whole house was silent. It was too early to sweep the kitchen and begin cooking oatmeal porridge for her father and her sisters, and Emily sat and sipped her watery tea. Keeper was sitting on the floor beside her chair, and the big mastiff’s eyes were nearly level with her own.
“I think he did meet a woman,” she said softly to the dog, “and go out to Ponden Kirk. But he’s ashamed of something, and frightened.” Perhaps understanding her, Keeper raised a massive paw and laid it on her thigh. “Of course,” she said, “but we’re all as God made us, and he’s my brother.”
The kitchen window gradually brightened, and after a while she heard her father’s dawn gunshot. Ringing Welsh’s funeral bell, she thought, reminding him that he’s dead. She sighed, got to her feet, and put on her apron.
Patrick usually took all his meals alone in his room upstairs, but this morning he came down and sat in the dining room, where his daughters joined him for breakfast while Tabby was in the kitchen peeling potatoes for dinner. He had brought down from his room a wooden case like a flat toolbox with a leather strap handle, and laid it on the table. He didn’t speak as he ate; his blind gaze seemed to be fixed on the far wall.
His daughters exchanged questioning looks over their bowls of porridge. They had talked in whispers in the kitchen; Anne was for getting another Catholic priest out to do an exorcism, while Charlotte sternly advised consulting an Anglican bishop for advice. Emily had no suggestions, wanting to talk further with Branwell before deciding on anything.
Here at the dining room table Emily imagined her sisters felt, as she did, that any remark now would be either presumptuous or unbearably inane.
“Emily,” Patrick said at last when he set down his spoon and napkin beside the wooden case, “would you join me in the churchyard?”
“Not soon, I hope,” she answered with a smile. “And why in the churchyard, when we’ve got our own vault in the church?” Her father winced, and she regretted her flippancy. “Certainly Papa,” she said.
He pushed back his chair and stood up, lifting the wooden case, which swung heavily in his hand. He walked to the hall and the front door, and Emily stepped past him and drew the bolt; when she swung the door open the morning air was cold, and smelled of dew-damp paving stones.
Today was a Thursday, but Patrick left the house every Sunday for the short walk to the church, and this morning he tapped down the front steps as unerringly as if he could see. He made his way less steadily down the path through Emily and Anne’s garden, and set the case on the low churchyard wall and opened it.
Standing beside him, Emily saw that the case contained a long-barreled flintlock pistol with a curved wooden grip, and a couple of small tin boxes.
“We’ll get you a pistol of your own,” he said as he lifted the gun and slid a rod out of a slot below the barrel. “It’s time you learned to shoot.” He blinked in the direction of the clustered graves and said, “Sometimes the Greenwoods lay a plank beside their family’s markers, so as not to sink in the mud when they lay flowers on them. Is it there?”
Emily stepped up onto the mossy stone wall and peered. “Yes.”
“Would you set it upright against a tree or headstone about . . . twenty feet away?”
She hopped down and scuffed through dead leaves to the plank, pried it up and leaned it against one of the standing stones. Back over the wall beside her father, she watched him open the tin boxes and, clearly working by memory and touch, shake black powder from a jar into a little brass cylinder; when it was full he tipped it into the raised barrel of the gun. Next he picked up a two-inch-square patch of cloth and licked it, then laid it over the pistol’s muzzle and pressed a lead ball the size of a blueberry into the center of it.
“Now to ram it down,” he said, picking up the rod. A little brass cup was mounted on one end of the rod, and he used it to push the ball and the patch down into the barrel. “All the way down to sit on the powder,” he said, “with no air gap. Air might blow the whole works up in your hand.”
He thumbed up the pan cover and laid a couple of pinches of powder in the pan, nudging them toward the touchhole at the rear of the barrel, then closed the cover. The hammer was a curled piece of steel with a little vise at the top, in which a chip of flint was wedged, and he pulled the hammer back until it clicked and stayed up.
He handed the pistol to Emily, who held it carefully, with her finger away from the trigger.
“Extend it well out,” Patrick told her, “and aim along the top of the barrel—and when you’ve got it pointed at the middle of the plank, pull the trigger.”
She did as she was told, and a moment later the familiar crack shook the air; peering through the cloud of acrid white smoke, she saw that the plank had flopped forward and was lying across another gravestone.
“I heard it fall,” said her father approvingly. He reached out a hand. “Let me load it again, and you watch closely how I do it.”
From one of the boxes he lifted a brush, which he screwed onto the other end of the rod. “Scrub it out thoroughly between shots,” he said as he thrust the brush down the barrel and twisted it. “You don’t want a stray spark still in there when you pour in the fresh powder.”
“What am I to shoot?”
“Set up the plank again—if you split it, the Greenwoods can get another.”
“I mean . . . the church tower? Planks?”
“Oh.” Patrick tugged the brush out of the barrel and paused, holding it. “Charlotte can’t see well enough, and Anne’s frail . . . you must shoot anything that menaces the family, you understand? Carry it with you during the day, until we get you one of your own.”
Emily noted that he hadn’t mentioned Branwell.
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll want a good deal of practice. Here, let me have it—I saw how you did it.”
She deftly loaded the gun again, then laid it in the case and vaulted over the wall to set up the plank again.
“A word, Emily,” said Branwell quietly, trying to sound casual.
He hadn’t come downstairs until after the rest of the family had eaten their noon dinner; Emily had cut up some cheese and cold mutton for him and served him in the kitchen. He only nibbled bits of the food, but drank several cups of tea.
She sat down across the table from him. Her chestnut hair was shining in the sunlight through the window behind her, and Branwell thought she looked almost repulsively healthy and fit and alert.
“So?” she said.
He squinted at her. “So . . . what?”
“You walked out to Ponden Kirk last night,” she prompted, “after meeting a woman at the Black Bull.” Her tone was simply interested, curious.
“Oh. Yes, that’s right.”
“Did you do that because of something she said?”
“No, no—well, yes. I wanted to think clearly, in the night air.” Guessing at her thoughts, he added, “I wasn’t drunk.” After a pause, he shrugged. “Very well, not remarkably drunk.”
“This morning when you came in, all disheveled, you said you’d been through Hell.”
Branwell stared into his empty teacup and forced himself not to think of the ghosts he had marched and danced with under the moon, and the burning body on the slope below the ancient monument, and the furred giant whose hand he had shaken—and the boy who had seemed for a moment to switch identities with him.
