Me:Ok
Henry:You’re not going to tell me where you’re going to?
Me:No
As if on cue, Mirabel texts me.
I’m suing the goddamn pants off you and your lawyer, Elizabeth.
I inhale. Exhale.
Then I block her.
After buying my train tickets the next morning, I wander around crowded Platform 9¾. I scan the glossy hardback books and Hogwarts scarves and pins. I purchase far too many Bertie Bott’s jelly beans. (Heathcliff will be delighted.) Philip and I read the series out loud during our first year of marriage. We’d lie on the couch, taking turns reading each chapter. Even now, I can feel the warm weight of his feet tangled up in mine under our colorful granny-square afghan.
By the time I board, a strange peace settles over me. I have knots to unravel, and there’s one place I need to be. But amid it all I feel hopeful and even happy. For a few minutes, I see clearly the journey before me and the ongoing one that stretches beyond this trip. I see that I can miss Philip always and allow myself to still feel happy.
26
Blocked text from AugustDansworth:
Elizabeth, first let me apologize again for my ghastly behavior. To be honest, I’ve never been out with a widow, and you’re a rather rare bird. Not to be crass, but you’d still be married to the chap if he hadn’t died. To know there’s someone (even eternally) out there that you love madly, deeply, more than anyone else—well, it’s a lot for a guy like me to take. Anyway, please do return my call.
After my train reaches Keighley, I take a bus to Haworth and arrive toward evening. As I walk through the quaint town, I pause at a high point where I can look out over the surrounding countryside. A bronze glow settles over the lakes and rolling hills. Long green swaths of farmland and rustling thick summer foliage cover the land. Creeks ramble through clusters of forest, and a hawk circles the skies above. I remember seeing EmilyBrontë’s watercolor of her rescued hawk, Nero, displayed in the Brontë Parsonage on my last visit. With her brush, she painted the bird’s speckled breast, the cream-and-chestnut plumage, the curved beak in startling detail. The sisters had years to explore the nooks and crannies of this beautiful landscape, and I envy how they plucked its secrets.
I think of my other two times here. I remember that first ill-fated trip after my grad school friends and I found cheap plane tickets and a dodgy, drafty eighteenth-century cottage on the edge of town where we could all stay for almost nothing. Of our group, I was the one most taken by this place. While the others pub-crawled through Haworth, I spent my days wandering through the Brontë Parsonage, absorbing each room’s details and reading every exhibit description in the museum collection. I could stare all day at the sisters’ carefully embroidered dresses, visualizing them as living, breathing women. Charlotte, particularly, was tiny, less than five feet.
I’ve always thought it was somehow significant that my first real heartbreak happened in Haworth. Although the well-behaved daughter of an Anglican priest, Charlotte Brontë struggled to keep her heart in check. For me, one of her most interesting biographical gems was her unrequited passion for her married teacher Constantin Héger. She wrote to him, and when he didn’t respond, she wrote yet again—this time about waiting in vain for his letters:Day and night I find neither rest nor peace—if IsleepI have tormenting dreams. We know now Héger threw the letters away until his wife pasted them back together, preserving Charlotte’s mad infatuation for the world to see. It comforts me to know that even a Brontë sister could lose herself in lust and heartache, slipping from the straight-and-narrow path.
My second journey here, when I was with Philip and expecting Heathcliff, had been better than the first. I was no longerchasing after an insouciant ass. I was happily married, and life felt wonderful. It had been a few months before Christmas, the last time my doctor would allow me to fly when pregnant; the streetlamps were wrapped with garlands and red ribbons. Candles and sprayed frost decorated the dripping glass panes of shop windows. We took things pretty slow that holiday and would sit for long periods in the Black Bull, the infamous pub where Branwell Brontë drank away his afternoons. Philip and I would talk about the impending birth of our son:You do know my vagina will never look the same... I love your dad, but we can’t use Gaylord, even as a middle name...Sometimes we’d just quietly read. I’d nurse my apple cider as Philip sipped stout beer.
I always loved it when lawyer-Philip entered my literary world, and after two pints one afternoon, Philip said we should name our son after one of the sisters’ characters. He pulled out the copy ofWuthering Heightshe’d bought from the Brontë museum gift shop that afternoon. “Batshit crazy” is what he called it. After several healthy debates where Philip vetoed St. John, Fairfax and Crimsworth, we decided on Heathcliff. Although I loved the name, I wondered if it was all right to name our baby after such a broody rat-bastard. Philip just laughed and said,He’ll have edge.
On this journey now, I’m here alone.
No man-slut boyfriend.
No Philip.
It’s only me.
I walk the steep cobbled streets to my Airbnb. The place is small and cute—a cozy bedroom, kitchenette and sitting area. The floors are uneven after the centuries, but it’s perfect. There’s a little ivy-lined balcony looking out over the village. The owner left a warm note and a bottle of brandy on the table. I pour a snifter, wrap myself in an afghan, and sit on the littlerusted chair on the balcony. I take a deep breath and plan my next day.
In the morning, I make myself a big breakfast. I always loved cooking and eating, and Ms. Fernsby certainly has revived my interest in big breakfasts. As I sizzle the bacon crispy and put the big sourdough slices in the toaster while frying three eggs, I think sadly of my unused stove at home. I remember how happy cooking those weekend breakfasts with Philip made me. I slather butter and blueberry preserves on my toast slice and pour an enormous mug of coffee. After breakfast, I put on my black leggings and oversize black windbreaker, strap on my duffel bag, lock the door, and walk down the narrow fire escape steps.
Little has changed in Haworth since my last two trips. A bittersweet déjà vu seeps through me as I walk by familiar pubs, tearooms, antiques stores, and bookshops. The quirky, uneven ivy-draped brick buildings rise around me, window boxes blooming with rainbow coleus leaves, thyme, lavender, and bright salvias. On my last visit, these same boxes displayed small fir branches, the painted wood draped in festive wreaths and garlands. Frost speckled the needles.
The Brontë Parsonage isn’t crowded. This week, there’s a festival in nearby Keighley, draining much of the tourist crowd. It’s nice to find myself mostly alone in the rooms. I walk through the small kitchen, with white-painted cabinets, little tea towels hanging from a wooden rod affixed to the ceiling. I picture Emily, the most elusive of the sisters, kneading bread on these countertops while brainstorming windswept scenes for her novel. Although I’ve been through these rooms before, for the first time, I experience these women as a woman and not as a scholar. I stand for a long time in front of the table where thesisters wrote their books. Patterned wallpaper covers the walls above the painted white trim and wainscoting. George Richmond’s drawing of Charlotte hangs above the fireplace mantel. I’ve always loved this image. She wears fashionable lace and ribbon about her throat, and her hair modestly conceals her ears. Yet I’ve always thought Charlotte’s expression seems dark and edgy—a far cry from the proper demure Victorian woman.
When I continue to Charlotte’s bedroom, I’m fascinated by her displayed dress, particularly the bell sleeves and faded violet material. Like her Jane Eyre, Charlotte was petite. One of Anne’s necklaces drapes over the dress, and Anne’s monogrammed ivory stockings hang nearby. I walk through Branwell’s rooms, nightshirt on the bed, papers, feather pens, and inkwells displayed in an intentionally disheveled manner. Branwell. The family always thought he would be the celebrated artist. A portrait painter by training, his life spiraled out of control before the age of thirty. With his unwise love affairs and addictions, he was a tender headache to the sisters.
Light rain pelts the windows.
All of them died young here amid these windy moors and the gothic parsonage graveyard. Perhaps because of this, everyone thinks the sisters lived sad, gloomy lives. I touch the glass above a pair of spectacles on display. The family suffered. The siblings lost their mother to cancer and their older sisters to illness when they were young. Charlotte outlived all the siblings before dying at my age; she lost Branwell, Emily, and Anne within a year.
When I lost Mom to breast cancer, it was devastating. But you do expect, difficult as it may be, to lose your parent at some point. Other deaths, like Philip’s, are more startling. I feel Charlotte’s stinging loss at seeing her sisters and brother die in the prime of life. I see Charlotte wearing spectacles as she writes one of her more raw letters, admitting about her deceased sister:I could hardly let Emily go—I wanted to hold her back then—and I want her back hourly now.
In spite of losing their mother and sisters, the siblings wrote about magical worlds with battles, women rulers, and searing love affairs. Charlotte and Branwell created Angria, and Anne and Emily, Gondal. The siblings bickered and drew and painted and wrote. They showed compassion to their servants, caring for their beloved housekeeper, Tabby, after she broke her leg. Even after losing Branwell, Emily, and Anne, Charlotte still went on holidays in the Lake District. She held her own in the London literary scene, sparring with indomitable male writers such as William Thackeray. She attended art exhibitions and wrote letters drenched in sarcasm and wicked humor to fellow female writers like Elizabeth Gaskell. I walk back to the gown and imaginatively reach through the display glass to feel the texture of the dress’s patterns. I feel another world where others grieved and yet lived on creatively and warmly and deeply. There could still be humor and delightful fabric patterns and friendships.
