Read The Secret Adventures of Charlotte Brontë Online

Authors: Laura Joh Rowland

Tags: #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Fiction, #Mystery Fiction, #Biographical, #Murder, #Murder - Investigation, #Crime, #Historical, #Biographical Fiction, #Investigation, #Women Sleuths, #London (England), #Bront'e; Charlotte, #Authors; English, #Women Authors; English, #19th Century, #Bront'e; Anne, #Bront'e; Emily

The Secret Adventures of Charlotte Brontë (42 page)

Before the Prince Consort could react, the captain of the royal guard hurried to my aid. Captain Innes was a soldierly man some fifty years of age, resplendent in uniform. He grabbed Bertie, hauled him up, and set him on his feet on the deck.
“There, Your Highness,” he said. “Safe and sound.”
His bright blue eyes twinkled at me from beneath his bushy grey eyebrows. His bushy grey mustache didn’t quite hide a sympathetic smile as I murmured my thanks and the assembly breathed a collective sigh of relief. “No harm done,” he assured the Queen.
Bertie, overwhelmed by all the attention he was getting, began to cry. The Queen hugged him. “Come along, my darling,” she said, and held out her hand to her daughter. “We’ll have some cake.” She shot me a look so acid that it could have dissolved steel. “Take better care of them in the future, Miss Brontë.”
She, the Prince Consort, and both children went into the cabin. The crew returned to their duties, and the entourage to whatever their business. I sensed everyone’s unspoken disapproval. I had almost let England’s future monarch drown. Standing at the rail, gazing at the sun-dappled waves and coastline, I felt a gloomy amusement that such twists of fate had landed me in a profession at which I had always been incompetent. I had disgraced myself in front of employers more exalted than any others I had served. To them I must seem an unlikely person to save the kingdom from evil, when I could not even control a seven-year-old boy.
The Queen’s chief lady-in-waiting came beside me. She was the Duchess of Norfolk, a woman whose elegant dress and poise intimidated me. Now she smiled at me in a friendly, conspiratorial fashion.
“Don’t feel that you’re to blame, Miss Brontë,” she said. “The fault is Her Majesty’s. She is prone to spoiling Bertie. How can anyone expect him to learn good behavior when she constantly rewards him for bad?” The Duchess shook her head, which was crowned by an upswept mass of yellow hair and a wide-brimmed hat laden with flowers. “I fear he will grow up to be the worst tyrant that England has ever known.”
“You are too kind, Your Grace,” I murmured.
“Oh, there’s no need for such formality between traveling companions,” she said. “Please call me Mathilda. May I call you Charlotte?”
“Certainly,” I said.
She chatted with me, attempting to put me at ease and make me feel welcome. I was grateful to her and to Captain Innes, who had saved Bertie and spared me the ruin that would have followed had any harm come to the boy. Yet I remembered that someone among the royal household was Kuan’s accomplice. Until I knew who, I dared trust no one.
While on this exhilarating journey, I had not forgotten those dear to me whom I’d left behind. I often wondered how Papa, Anne, Emily, and Branwell were faring in my absence. I judged that my pretense of cooperating with Kuan would protect them from him, and that I was the only one in danger. I remembered the parsonage as a haven of tranquillity.
How wrong was I!
I present my sister Emily’s account of events at home during the night I spent aboard the royal yacht:
The Journal of Emily Brontë
I dreamed I was chasing a golden book which flew on golden wings and gave off a splendid, unearthly golden light. It was the book I longed to write, and unless I caught it, I never would write it. Down a dark, winding tunnel I ran, while the book flitted just out of my reach. It disappeared around a curve, and suddenly a loud, rapping noise startled me. I awakened standing in the front hall at home: I had sleep-walked from my bed. The noise was a knocking at the door.
Anne came down the stairs, saying, “It’s after midnight. Who could be calling so late?” Fear resounded in her voice as she answered her own question: “No one who can mean us any good.”
But I was so drowsy that I forgot the dangers that threatened the household. I could still see the golden book; I heard its wings fluttering outside. I started towards the door. I heard Anne call Papa, and both of them hastening after me. Before they could stop me, I unlocked the door and opened it. Three men burst across the threshold. Anne gave an alarmed cry.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Papa demanded of the men. “Who are you?”
The tallest of the three held a pistol, which he aimed at Papa. “Raise your hands,” he said. “Don’t move, or I’ll shoot you.”
His speech told me he hailed from the upper social strata of England, but I was too confused to observe more about him. I could neither speak nor move.
Papa stood frozen for a moment; then his hands crept skyward. The man pointed the gun at Anne, who also lifted her hands as she edged close beside Papa.
“If it’s money you want, we haven’t much,” Papa said, “but I’ll give it to you if you’ll only go and leave us unharmed.”
“Be quiet,” ordered the man with the gun.
My dream dissipated like mist in the wind. Shocked alert, I realized that I had let evil into our house. “No!” I screamed. “Get out!”
One of the other men was near me, and I flew at him in outrage. He grabbed my arms. As I howled and kicked his shins and we struggled together, horrified exclamations came from Anne and Papa. Hysteria filled me: I fought harder. The third man leapt to his comrade’s assistance. Together they pinned my arms behind my back. The man with the gun seized Anne and jammed its barrel against her throat.
“Be still, or she dies,” he told me.
Anne’s mouth gaped with silent terror. Papa said, “Emily, please. Do as he says.”
My mind at last absorbed the idea that the man would kill Anne unless I obeyed him. Fear drained the resistance from my muscles.
The man with the gun ordered Anne: “Light a lamp.” She obeyed, her hands trembling. The lamp illuminated the men, who were all dressed in dark clothes, their hats shading vicious faces. One kept hold of me; the other bolted the door. He then snatched the lamp and roved around the house, while the man with the gun held us paralyzed. Soon he returned and said, “There’s nobody else here.”
Branwell must have sneaked out to the Black Bull Inn while we slept. Luck had favored him for once in his miserable life.
“These three will do.” The gunman told Papa, “Show us to the cellar.”
Papa reluctantly unbarred and opened the cellar door, beyond which a dark staircase led beneath the house.
“All of you go down,” ordered the gunman.
We went in single file, Papa first, Anne next, then the man with the lamp. My captor propelled me after them. The gunman followed close behind. None of us called for help; the village was too far away for anyone there to hear us. As we descended, the narrow stairwell enclosed me. I breathed the dank odor of earth and experienced the suffocating sensation that the very idea of captivity provokes in me. I suppressed an urge to fight my way back above ground. We reached the cellar, a room whose walls are made of stone and earth, in which my family rarely sets foot. The intruders flung Papa, Anne, and me on the floor amidst the odds and ends that had accumulated there over the years. They backed up the stairs.
Papa said, “Please have mercy.” His voice wavered. Anne and I huddled together; she moaned, and my terror choked me. “Please let us go.”
“Keep still,” said the gunman.
He and his comrades vanished through the door and banged it shut. The cellar was immersed in darkness. I heard the bar drop into place. Then there was silence, except for our breathing.
“This must be another in the same series of troubles that have plagued us,” said Papa.
“There can be no doubt. I sense the hand of the same villain at work,” Anne said mournfully. “I had hoped that the danger from him was past; but alas, it seems that it is not.”
“But why would he have us imprisoned in our own home?” Papa said. “And for how long do these men intend to keep us here?”
Anne made no reply. The suffocating sensation constricted my chest. Trapped in the subterranean darkness, I gasped for air.
“They can’t lock us up forever,” Papa said, as if trying to reassure himself as well as Anne and me. “People in the village will notice our absence. They’ll come to investigate. They’ll rescue us.”
The cold, damp gloom seethed with our horrified thoughts of what might happen to us in the meantime. I heard muffled voices from above: The intruders were still in the house.
Anne said, “Branwell is bound to come home eventually.”
We knew better than to expect deliverance from that drunken, hapless, opium-besotted wreck. My heart thudded with my craving to be free. I hurtled blindly up the stairs, tripping on them and falling on my hands and knees, crawling until I reached the top. I beat my fists against the door.
“Let me out!” I screamed.
No one answered; the door remained shut. I fought until my hands were bloody, screamed until my throat was raw. Finally, in a state of despair and exhaustion, I slid down the stairs. Anne held me and murmured soothing words as I wept. I wept for my lost liberty, for the book I would never write.
“If this is happening to us,” Papa said in a voice of dawning dread, “then what has become of Charlotte?”
35
T
HE REMAINDER OF THE VOYAGE TO SCOTLAND PASSED WITHOUT incident. The Queen and Prince Consort kept Bertie by them, relieving me of his irksome care; I had only the well behaved Princess to amuse. If there was danger on the royal yacht, I saw no sign of it. Indeed, I felt safer than I had since before Isabel White’s murder. Thirty-seven peaceful hours after setting sail, we arrived at Aberdeen on 7 September. Carriages and horses that had been shipped to Scotland ahead of time conveyed us to the new royal estate at Balmoral.
The Queen was as popular in Scotland as at home. Along our way, the Scots turned out to greet her. The Queen, Prince Consort, and their two elder children rode in an open carriage at the head of our procession. Crowds cheered them uproariously. The entrance to each village was decorated in the Queen’s honor with a triumphal arch made of barley or wheat sheaves, flowers, evergreens, or stags’ heads. The day was a whirlwind of happy faces, voices shouting greetings in a strange dialect, music from bagpipes, speeches by local gentry, and guns firing salutes. Riding in a carriage with the Queen’s other attendants, through a landscape of farms and distant, snow-capped peaks, I felt myself part of a grand, historic spectacle. In the joy of our reception, I was temporarily distracted from the horrific events that had brought me to this very place.
We reached Balmoral to find a Scottish Regiment’s Guard of Honor waiting at attention. Balmoral, located on the River Dee, on the eastern side of the lofty Cairngorm Mountains, comprised ten thousand acres of fields, woods of towering birch and pine trees, and meadow. The Forest of Ballochbuie abutted its northern border; on the south rose the dark crags of Loch-na-gar. The pretty white castle had many turrets and gables, gingerbread trim, an ancient square tower surmounted by a battlemented parapet, and a glass conservatory. It was surrounded by expansive gardens that sloped towards the river in a series of natural terraces.
Inside the castle was a hall paved with Dutch tiles; a broad staircase led to the upper floors. The rooms were furnished like a grand country house, with chintz upholstery and curtains; they were fewer and smaller than I’d expected, insufficient for the royal family and entourage. The servants and attendants—Mr. Slade, Lord Unwin, and other Foreign Office agents among them—were quartered in neighboring cottages. I had a tiny chamber upstairs in the castle, near the children’s nursery and the Queen’s chambers. The gentlemen of the household had rooms above us; the ladies-in-waiting below. After lunch in the crowded dining room, I walked behind the royal family on an inspection of the estate. Not until that evening did I have a chance to speak with Slade.
Local citizens staged a celebration for the royal family. A huge bonfire was lit upon Craig Linne. Fireworks spangled the sky above Balmoral. We gathered on the terrace to watch. Bertie and Vicky jumped up and down, squealing with excitement at the glowing streamers, rosettes, and exploding bursts of colored stars. Rockets boomed, echoing off the mountains. Guards, courtiers, and ladies-in-waiting cheered. The Queen and Prince Consort smiled happily. I stood apart from the others, an interloper. My presence could only remind the Queen of the threat that haunted her and spoil her enjoyment. Presently, Mr. Slade appeared at my side.

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