Bronte's Mistress

by Finola Austin

Genres: Biographical; Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

“[A] meticulously researched debut novel…In a word? Juicy.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

The scandalous historical love affair between Lydia Robinson and Branwell Brontë, brother to novelists Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, gives voice to the woman who allegedly brought down one of literature’s most famous families.

Yorkshire, 1843: Lydia Robinson has tragically lost her precious young daughter and her mother within the same year. She returns to her bleak home, grief-stricken and unmoored. With her teenage daughters rebelling, her testy mother-in-law scrutinizing her every move, and her marriage grown cold, Lydia is restless and yearning for something more.

All of that changes with the arrival of her son’s tutor, Branwell Brontë, brother of her daughters’ governess, Miss Anne Brontë and those other writerly sisters, Charlotte and Emily. Branwell has his own demons to contend with—including living up to the ideals of his intelligent family—but his presence is a breath of fresh air for Lydia. Handsome, passionate, and uninhibited by social conventions, he’s also twenty-five to her forty-three. A love of poetry, music, and theatre bring mistress and tutor together, and Branwell’s colorful tales of his sisters’ imaginative worlds form the backdrop for seduction.

But their new passion comes with consequences. As Branwell’s inner turmoil rises to the surface, his behavior grows erratic, and whispers of their romantic relationship spout from Lydia’s servants’ lips, reaching all three Brontë sisters. Soon, it falls on Mrs. Robinson to save not just her reputation, but her way of life, before those clever girls reveal all her secrets in their novels. Unfortunately, she might be too late.

Release date: August 4, 2020

Publisher: Atria Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

Chapter One

CHAPTER ONE
January 1843

ALREADY A WIDOW IN all but name. Fitting that I must, yet again, wear black.

Nobody had greeted me on my return, but Marshall at least had thought of me. She’d lit a feeble fire in my dressing room and laid out fresh mourning in the bedroom, spectral against the white sheets. I smoothed out a pleat, fingered a hole in the veil. Just a year since I’d last set these clothes aside, and now Death had returned—like an expected, if unwanted, visitor this time, not a violent thief in the night.

What a homecoming. No husband at the door, no children running down the drive.

I’d sat alone in the carriage, huddled under blankets, through hours of abject silence, with only the bleak Yorkshire countryside for company, but I didn’t have the patience to ring for Marshall now. I tugged, laced, and hooked myself, racing against the cold. I had to contort to close the last fixture. My toe caught in the hem.

The landing outside my rooms was empty. The carpet’s pattern assaulted my eyes, as if I’d been gone for weeks, not days. Home was always strange after an absence, like returning to the setting of a dream.

But it wasn’t just that.

Thorp Green Hall was unusually still. Silence seeped through the house, except for the ticking of the grandfather clock that carried from the hall. Each home has its music, and ours? It was my eldest daughter banging doors; the younger girls bickering; Ned, my son, charging down the stairs; and the servants dropping pails and pans and plates with clatter upon clatter. But not today. Where was everyone?

I halted before the closed study door and gave a light rap, but my husband did not respond, much less emerge to greet me. Edmund would be in there, though. He was always hiding in there. I could picture him—taking off his glasses and squinting toward the window at the crunch of the carriage wheels on the gravel, shaking his head and returning to his account book when he realized it was only me.

I shouldn’t have expected anything else. After all, I hadn’t bid him good-bye on my departure, just turned on my heel and exited the room when he’d told me he wouldn’t come with me to Yoxall.

“Your mother’s death was hardly unexpected,” he’d said with a shrug, and something about how she’d lived a good life.

He was right, of course. Or, at least, the world’s opinion was closer to Edmund’s than to mine. Mother had been old and ill. Her life had been happy and her children were many. Few thought it fit to weep, as I did, at her funeral.

But something had come over me after the service when the splintered crowd stood around her open grave, although I wasn’t sure it was grief for Mother at all. The wind howled. The sleet smacked against us. My brothers flanked our fading father, their faces uniform as soldiers’. My sister was solemn, with her eyes downcast, as her husband thanked the vicar. But I had been angry, with an anger that leaked out in pathetic, rain-mingled tears and made me angrier still.

I didn’t knock again but went instead to the schoolroom—to the children. I needed them, anyone, to embrace me, touch me, so I could feel alive.

I could not suppress my disappointment when I reached the threshold. “Oh, Miss Brontë,” I said, my voice flat. “I didn’t know you’d returned.”

Our governess was alone. She’d been retrieving a book from below the Pembroke table but at my entrance, she stood to attention. “I arrived back yesterday, Mrs. Robinson,” she said. “I hope you’ll accept my condolences.”

Was it the ill-fitting mourning dress, or was she even thinner than when I had seen her last? Her gown gaped at the cuffs and hung loose around her waist.

“And you mine,” I said, avoiding her eye.

I’d taken to bed with a headache that day a few months ago when a letter had summoned Miss Brontë home to her dying aunt. I had meant to write to her, but somehow there had never been time, what with the house and Christmas. Or perhaps the empty words would not flow from my pen now that I’d been forced to endure so many.

“Where are my daughters?” I asked, anxious to end our tête-à-tête.

Miss Brontë gestured toward the clock on the mantel, half-obscured behind a volume of Rapin’s History of England. It was five minutes past four. “We have just concluded today’s lessons with an hour of arithmetic,” she said, failing to answer my question.

I sighed and sat, slumping onto the low and book-strewn couch and staring into the last of the spluttering fire.

It had never appeared to bother Miss Brontë, the lack of common ground between us, but it stung me as yet another rejection. She had been little more than a child when she’d joined us nearly three years ago. Pale, mousy-haired, unable to meet my eye. I had thought she might look up to me. I could have acted as her patroness, bestowed on her my attention and all I could have taught her of the world. But time and again, she’d snubbed me, preferring the solitude of her books and sketching.

I’d persisted with my overtures until, one day, I’d come across a half-completed letter of hers, addressed to a sister, Charlotte. I shouldn’t have opened it—wouldn’t have if Miss Brontë hadn’t evaded me until now. But I couldn’t help myself when I saw the discarded page in the schoolroom, the impossibly regular handwriting broken off mid-word. In it she described me as “condescending” and “self-complacent,” anxious only to render my daughters as “superficially attractive and showily accomplished” as I was. It was a vicious caricature but one I could not scold her for, since I should never have seen it. That’s how I’d learned that our innocent Miss Brontë wasn’t so innocent at all.

“So where are they?” I asked her again, more sharply.

“I believe the girls went to join Ned in the stables.”

Those children had run riot for months during Miss Brontë’s absence. The least she could do was teach them now that she was here.

“And why is my son and heir spending his days in the stables?” I asked, although young Ned, bless him, had always been too slight and simple a boy to deserve the title bestowed on him. He wouldn’t be dressed properly. He’d catch a chill. The children might be fond of Miss Brontë, but she didn’t watch them with a mother’s care.

“I believe, madam—that is, I know—Mr. Brontë found him more attentive there,” she answered, without flinching.

Mr. Brontë. Of course. I’d forgotten that her brother would be returning with her. He was to be Ned’s new tutor, and so Edmund had managed everything.

As if on cue, a quick pitter-patter struck against the window and despite everything—my tiredness, my loneliness, my desire to join my mother in her grave—it pulled me to my feet. Miss Brontë and I stood as far apart as we could, looking through the checkered panes at the party gathered below.

There was Ned, without a coat. He was laughing, his waistcoat unbuttoned and his face grubby.

Beside him was Lydia, my eldest and namesake. She’d been running, which was unlike her. She’d bundled her dress and cape in her hands, revealing her boots and stockings, and her perfect ringlets had come unpinned, creating a bright halo around her face.

A few steps behind the others, my younger daughters, Bessy and Mary, giggled to each other.

And in the center of them all, his arm drawn back to fling another handful of gravel, was a man who couldn’t have been more than five and twenty, with a smile that reached to the corners of his face and hair that rich almost-red Edmund’s had been once.

He beamed back at Lydia before calling something unintelligible toward the schoolroom. His eyes were a deeper blue than Miss Brontë’s, his whole being drawn in more vibrant ink.

But when his eyes slid to meet mine, when they moved on from his sister and from Lydia—that reflection of what I had once been—his smile melted away. His arm fell. The stones ran through his fingers like dust. It was as if I could hear them scatter, although the schoolroom was deathly silent.

Mr. Brontë mouthed an apology, his gaze subordinate. Lydia dropped her skirts and smoothed her hair. Even Ned buttoned one fastening of his waistcoat, although the sides were uneven and the result comical.

“I apologize on Branwell’s—”

“You apologize for what, Miss Brontë?” I said, dragging her back from the window by her spindly arm. “You think I don’t appreciate high spirits? Or care for my son’s happiness?”

“I—”

“I fear to imagine what you say of me to others—strangers—when you think me such a dragon.” I did not wait to hear her response, but left, slamming the door behind me.

As I passed the study, I paused, panting hard.

I could go in, throw myself into Edmund’s arms, and cry, as I had to Mother when I was a girl. But when you are forty-three, you must not complain that the world is unfair, that your beauty is going to seed, and that those you love, or, worse, your love itself, is dead.

I did not go to Edmund, and alone in my rooms that night, I did not weep.

With my dark hair loose and my shoulders bare, I struggled not to shiver. I sat at my dressing table for a long time, staring into the glass and imagining the young tutor’s eyes gleaming back at me through the gloom. Branwell, Miss Brontë had called him. What sort of a name was that?

THERE’D BEEN A TIME when we’d all gather in the library or the anteroom after dinner. I would play the pianoforte. The girls would turn the pages. Sometimes they’d sing. And Edmund would quiz Ned, pointing to far-off climes on the spinning globe and asking him to name each port, kingdom, colony.

But we hadn’t done that in a long time. Not since before.

Instead Edmund would retreat to his study while I played from memory to an empty room. And our daughters would stitch and sketch in the schoolroom, supervised by Miss Brontë, long after their brother had been sent to bed. The four of them probably spent their evenings complaining about me, but I couldn’t know for sure.

Yet they were silent tonight when I ventured there for the first time in the three evenings since my return.

Miss Brontë was bending over a letter scribed in a minuscule hand.

Lydia lounged with her legs askew in a floral-covered chair by the fire.

“Good evening, Mama,” Bessy and Mary chorused with the vestiges of childish affection from the window seat, where they’d been poring over a novel.

Lydia flicked her hand at me but continued to gaze toward the hearth.

“Could you excuse us, Miss Brontë?” I asked.

She nodded and plowed past me, face still buried in the letter. It was probably from “Charlotte.” And Miss Brontë would reply to her, chronicling my family’s private moments and making a mockery of our woes.

I surveyed my girls—seventeen, sixteen, fourteen. Hard to conceive of it when their younger sister would forever be two.

Time should have halted in the year since she’d been taken from us, but instead it had marched on regardless, with the regular pattern of meals, seasons, holidays. In the course of eleven short months, my three girls had blossomed before my eyes without me even noticing. But then I had survived too. I was the same, inch for inch, pound for pound, for all I felt I should have wasted away.

“How have you been?” I asked them stiffly. The words sounded ridiculous.

Lydia and Bessy exchanged a glance across the room at the strangeness of my question.

“I am well, Mama. We missed you when you were gone,” said Mary, blinking at me through her pale lashes. Timid as she was, she’d always been the most affectionate, saying what she thought would be best received rather than speaking the truth.

I looked to the older two in turn. Lydia was blonde and beautiful even when yawning. Bessy was dark like me, but there the resemblance ended. Compared to the rest of us, she was a veritable hoyden—large and ruddy, like a fertile, oversized shepherdess. Beside them, Mary wasn’t fair or dark enough to stand out. She had neither one type of beauty nor another.

“Well, I have been bored,” said Lydia, swinging her legs to the floor. “But now here is something at last.” She was waving a letter of her own, a short note in a large and looping cursive. The writer hadn’t tried to conserve paper.

“Well?” I asked when her theatrical pause became unbearable.

“Can’t you guess?” Lydia said, performing to all of us. Clearly Bessy and Mary weren’t in on her secret either. “It is from Amelia. The Thompsons are to hold a dinner party at Kirby Hall, and we are all invited. Well, not you, Mary—you are too young and of no consequence. I do hope Papa doesn’t have us leave early as he did at the Christmas feast, when we missed the caroling. If he’d wanted to go to bed, he could have sent William Allison back with the carriage. What else is a coachman for? But then I’ve nothing to wear. Black doesn’t suit me, and this dress is an inch too short. And—”

“Lydia.” I spoke sternly enough that she fell silent. “Don’t be unkind to Mary. And give me that.”

Lydia looked at my outstretched hand. For a heartbeat, I wasn’t sure she’d obey, but at last she surrendered the letter. As I read, she skipped away to scrutinize her reflection in the mirror above the fireplace, pouting at her high black collar.

“Are we to go?” asked Bessy, jumping up from the window seat. Unlike Lydia, she hadn’t mastered the art of affected nonchalance.

Mary was staring at the discarded novel in her lap, feeling sorry for herself.

“No,” I said.

Mary’s chin jerked up. Her expression brightened.

“No?” repeated Lydia, spinning back to face me, all pretense of indifference forgotten.

“You may write to Miss Thompson thanking her, or rather her father, for the invitation. But we are in a period of mourning and won’t be making social calls.” I kept my voice level, trying to remember what I had been like at the age when selfishness was natural. My mother had merely been their grandmother. They’d hardly feel her loss the same.

“But—” Bessy started.

“I won’t have discussion or arguments.”

Lydia ignored me. “But, Mama!” she cried. “We haven’t seen any gentlemen for months, except the Milner brothers—”

“Will Milner don’t count!” said Bessy, rounding on her sister and turning even pinker than usual.

“Grammar, please.” I sighed. Why pay a governess at all when Bessy still spoke like a groom?

For some reason, she’d found Lydia’s comment objectionable and was listing everything that made the eldest Milner boy a poor gentleman and horseman—from his manners to his seat.

“And now we still shan’t see any gentlemen at all,” continued Lydia, shouting over her sister. “It isn’t fair.”

I folded the page smaller and smaller until I could no longer crease it down the middle, letting their voices wash over me.

“I suppose we’ll have to content ourselves with Mr. Brontë,” said Lydia, when Bessy paused for breath. “I’ll pay calls to the Monk’s House and have him read Byron to me.”

“You’ll do nothing of the sort,” I snapped, trying to create one more bend in the paper.

So Mr. Brontë liked poetry.

The fold wouldn’t stay. I flicked the page into the fire, where it flared for a second before crumbling.

“My letter!” cried Lydia, as if it had been precious. “How could you?”

“Oh, please!” I’d discarded it without thinking, but that hardly merited an apology. I couldn’t deal with any more of Lydia’s histrionics. “It’s time we were all abed.”

“Couldn’t you stay with us a little longer, Mama?” whispered Mary from the corner.

Her sisters glared at her.

“Not tonight,” I said. Yet I gestured for her to come to me.

She ran over and planted a fleeting, wet kiss on my cheek, as she had countless nights before.

Lydia and Bessy stood still, united in their act of small rebellion.

I UNDRESSED QUICKLY, WITHOUT Marshall’s help, and discarded my petticoats like a second skin on my dressing room floor.

There was a romance in walking the corridors barefoot and dressed only in my nightgown, even though this was my house and I could wander where I wished. I tiptoed down the landing, dancing to avoid the floorboards that creaked, my body lighter without the swathes of fabric that weighed me down in the day.

“Edmund?” I opened his bedroom door just wide enough to peer in and shielded the candle I was carrying in case he was already asleep.

“Lydia?” my husband called out, the confusion that comes with being pulled back from the precipice of slumber evident in the haste and volume of his reply.

In the days since I’d returned from Yoxall Lodge, our communications had only been of the most perfunctory kind. Each morning Edmund had asked me what was for dinner from behind the Times. And each night I had lain in my bed, flat on my back and hands rigid by my sides, waiting for his tread outside my door.

But tonight, prompted perhaps by the warm relief of Mary’s lips pressed against my face, I had softened and come to him.

“Is anything the matter?” he asked.

“The matter? No, not at all.” I hurried in, shutting the door behind me.

Edmund half closed his eyes, shrinking from the light, but then clambered onto his elbows and propped himself up against the bolster behind him.

I set the candle on the mahogany washstand and twitched the hangings of the four-poster bed over a few inches, protecting him from the glare.

“I am very tired, Lydia. It has been a taxing day,” Edmund said, stifling a yawn. But he moved over to accommodate me, lifting the sheets so I could slide under the heavy scarlet blankets, faded from years of use.

My legs were cold beneath my nightgown. He flinched when our limbs made contact, flinched and then tensed as I wrapped myself around him like a limpet and rested my head on his chest.

“You haven’t asked me about Staffordshire,” I said after a minute or two of enjoying the familiar waves of his breath, like an aged sailor who can now only find his legs at sea.

“What is there to ask?” he said. “It was difficult?”

I nodded as much as I could, held fast as I was against him. He didn’t want me to move. He wanted only to sleep, exhausted by a day of— what? Account books and reading the sporting pages? I wanted to run a mile, release the horses from the stables, and gallop beside them, crying, No more! No more needlework and smiling through stunted arpeggios for me.

“Your father must know it’s for the best,” he said. “She had suffered—”

“And what if it were your mother?” I bit my tongue too late, knowing how he hated being interrupted.

“Lydia,” Edmund warned. Eviction would follow if I continued in this strain.

Somehow it was even colder under the covers. The hairs along my legs stood up against the sheet.

“People rarely call me that now,” I said, snuggling close against his hard, ungiving chest. “It is like I lost my name to our daughter.”

Down here, I could pretend Edmund was the boy I had loved, a boy with chubby cheeks and a full head of hair, the boy I had won into wooing me, despite his shyness and that endearing stutter he’d had when conversing with the opposite sex.

How proudly I had sat, watching him give one of his first sermons, thinking, That is my husband, the father of my sons, whether the thought had crossed his mind yet or not. Less than three months later, he was mine.

“We must speak of the children,” I said. My hand burrowed under his crisp nightshirt to play with the wisps of hair that led from his heart to his belly. “Lydia thinks I am a tyrant for refusing a dinner invitation from the Thompsons so soon after her grandmother’s death.”

“Lydia is bored,” Edmund said. “We should send her away. To your sister, Mary, perhaps, or to Lady Scott at Great Barr Hall. The Scotts see more society than us.”

“I doubt it,” I said, stiffening. “My cousin Catherine is an invalid.”

“But she is married to a baronet.”

All these years later and that still stung. It was Valentine’s Day 1815 in Bath, and I was my cousin Catherine’s bridesmaid. I’d held the train of her dress as she married Edward Scott, heir to his father’s baronetcy, a minor member of the nobility, but to me, the hero of a fairy tale.

He would have been mine had I only been older, I’d wept, wishing for a few more years on top of my fifteen. And now? Now I wished I could be Lydia Gisborne once more, uncrease the lines in my forehead, shrug off my worries and turn back the years as easily as I could wind back the clock on the mantelpiece.

“And then there’s Ned,” I said.

“Ned?”

“The new tutor, Mr. Brontë,” I said. “Ned seems to like him.”

My hand circled lower, scuttling spider-like across Edmund’s paunch.

“Lydia, that tickles,” he said, levering me off him as he sat up to blow out the candle. He rearranged the pillows and lay back, pulling my hand higher to rest on his chest.

This was it, then. Our conversation was at an end.

The darkness enveloped me. I imagined the trail of smoke snaking its way to the ceiling but couldn’t even discern the shape of Edmund’s chin. From the pattern of his breathing, I knew he was slipping away from me.

“Has Mr. Sewell said anything about him?” I asked, tapping Edmund like piano keys to bring him back to me.

“Hmm?”

“I wondered if Sewell had any complaints about his new companion.”

Mr. Brontë wasn’t sleeping in the Hall, but in the Monk’s House, where our steward, Tom Sewell, lived. I’d insisted, for the girls’ sake, that the young man’s sleeping quarters be far away rather than in the main house. And that was probably just as well, since his brooding brow and love of poetry marked Mr. Brontë out as a romantic.

It’s a strange little property, the Monk’s House. It dates from the 1600s, Edmund would tell visitors. Not nearly as old as the Hall, of course. It could have housed Henry the Eighth himself. And his chest would swell with pride.

The cottage was too grand for servants, to my mind, if you wanted the staff to know their place. No wonder Tom Sewell’s sister, our housekeeper, gave herself such airs. Miss Sewell was a flighty thing, too young to manage a household, and yet she thought herself mistress of two, whiling away evenings with her brother at the Monk’s House. No doubt she’d be there even more frequently now there was an unmarried gentleman to toy with.

I hadn’t even seen the new addition to the household since Mr. Brontë had hurled stones at the window. The schoolroom was the girls’ domain, and Ned was taking his lessons at the Monk’s House. The weather had proved too inclement for wandering outside or hunkering down in the stables.

“No, no complaints.” Edmund’s voice was just louder than a whisper.

To others, he was the stern father and the generous landowner, above all a man of morals and convictions. But to me, he was as vulnerable as a child, my partner through the years, my companion in the dark. Driven by an unexpected impulse, I kissed his neck, his cheek, his nose, like an explorer in the desert who has finally happened upon water.

He grunted.

“Edmund,” I said, lips skirting across his collarbone, hand reaching through the thicket of hair between his legs.

“Lydia,” he said, very much awake. He grabbed my hand and pushed it aside. “There’ll be none of that.” He turned onto his side, his face away from me, pitching up the sheets so a draft flew across my body.

I’d been a fool to attempt when it had been so long. That was a second cruelty—how our marriage had died along with our daughter. But I should have accepted it by now. Being with Edmund was like being in my own bed but lonelier. Having someone, but someone who did not want you, was worse than having nobody at all.

Edmund was asleep by the time I had conquered myself enough to excuse him. I wrapped my arm around him and he did not stir, brought my mouth close enough to his back to drink in his smell without risking a kiss.

All through the night, I stayed there on the brink of sleep, terrified to wake him, the cold playing across the goose bumps on my arm.