The Brontë Code

By Michele Carter

On the moors of Northern Yorkshire, like some Gothic victim in a Brontë novel, lies Danny Cowan’s corpse inside the ruin of a farmhouse. A bloody gash on his forehead suggests the notorious drunk fell, but Lucy Owens, who found the body, believes he was murdered. The police are bent on discouraging her from investigating further for fear that her snooping will scare away the tourists, whose daily visits to the home of the famous Brontë family keep the economy booming. Lucy, however, continues to search deeper and soon discovers that when the Brontë sisters roamed these same moors, a few corrupt Freemasons were committing fraud against their neighbours. This rogue band of Freemasons exploited their network of brothers to steal and kill with impunity. Unfortunately, for Lucy, the roots of that secret violence extend into the present day, and the odds of her catching the perpetrator seem slim, especially when the local men identify her as the main suspect.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michele Carter
• Release date: Jun 14, 2013
• ISBN: 9780968272862

Michele Carter

I was born and raised in Vancouver Canada. After graduating from the University of British Columbia with a Master of Arts Degree in English I taught English Lit for several years. I love writing, especially historical fiction that has a little humour for my entertainment and yours.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Lucy Owens stood in front of the Haworth parsonage waiting for the museum door to open. Her jet lag made her drowsy at inopportune times, but she stayed alert as she was jostled against a few tourists congregated on the steps. Fortunately, the June day was pleasantly warm, with a mild breeze, which also kept her awake. Her mauve Capri pants, white T-shirt, and striped blouse provided the right amount of comfort in the morning air. She shuffled through her backpack for her water bottle and the museum’s brochure. The British people believed the secret to curing jet lag was to drink plenty of strong tea. She preferred coffee. A few more hours sleep would do the trick.

She read in the brochure that the cost of admission was five pounds, so she quickly and easily converted it into approximately twice that much in American dollars. Only ten dollars to see the inside of the Brontë home. A bargain. As she retrieved a five-pound note from her pack, one of the tourists, a tall woman in her fifties, announced in a Texas drawl, ‘They’re doing a documentary on the Brontës’.

Her companion, a shorter lady in a floral blouse and white slacks spoke to the group with a similar accent. ‘We had breakfast with the film people. Nice folks. Made us feel real welcome.’

The tall woman’s red toenails peeked out from her sandals and matched her long red fingernails. Lucy followed the direction of her pointed finger.

‘The fair-haired one’s the director.’

Three men were on the grounds near the road setting up lights and camera equipment. The fair-haired director had his back to them as he squatted in front of a metal box.

Lucy looked away from the film crew and imagined the stretch of purple moors beyond the parsonage that the Brontës depicted in their novels. The land was lonely and desolate, but grand in its rugged indifference. The ample countryside rose and fell in waves of dreary hills and patches of wild meadows, a perfect setting for the Brontës’ gothic tales. She envisioned a strange form on the edge of a ridge, a dark shape turning to reveal a man standing beneath the vast northern sky. She pictured his cloak blowing open and whipping behind him in a harsh wind. She stared hard, believing for a moment this man was real, but the illusion slipped away and the shape was gone.

She took another sip of water and checked her watch. She had a few more minutes to wait before the tour would start. As the members of the tour group casually spoke around her, she glanced through the brochure.

The Reverend Patrick Brontë had married Maria Branwell in 1812 and moved to the town of Haworth, on England’s Yorkshire moors, with their six children—five girls and one boy. Reverend Brontë was employed as Anglican vicar at the Church of St. Michael and All Angels situated next to the parsonage. The mother died first in 1821, followed in 1825 by the two eldest girls who were only eleven and ten years old. The remaining children, nine-year-old Charlotte, her eight-year-old brother Branwell, seven-year-old Emily, and four-year-old Anne were left to keep each other company. The father survived all his children and died in his eighties. The parsonage remained their home until their deaths, and years later became the official Brontë museum.

Lucy gazed at the two-storied, rectangular structure with its pair of latticed windows on either side of the central doorway and the five similar windows upstairs. The building seemed like the face of a grey beast whose nine eyes never shut. The Georgian styled parsonage was built in 1779 from Yorkshire sandstone for the incumbent at St. Michael’s church. The smoke from decades of industry had darkened the exterior of the building, giving it a melancholy pallor that evoked a generation of sickly confinement.

The cemetery lay beside the parson’s house, where thousands of souls rested in their dark tombs. Out of the solitude and silence, Lucy imagined the sound of chipping as the mason cut gravestones in a shed nearby, or the tolling of the funeral bells in the church tower announcing a spirit’s recent passing. Earlier, she had wound her way among the graves and noticed the names of the dead carved into the paving stones. She had followed these ancient markers as they encroached outside the cemetery where the stones had once freely invaded the parsonage grounds. This irreverent invasion of space gave her the impression that the dead and the living commingled.

She yawned and closed the brochure. She wished her head would clear, so she could appreciate every moment of this adventure. The trip to England had long been a dream of hers ever since her first reading of Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre at the age of twelve. Later her freshman professor at Stanford had explained that when the book was first published in 1847, Brontë had used the male pseudonym of Currer Bell to protect herself from being identified as the female author. Her realistic story of a plain, poor orphan girl who becomes a rich and successful woman proved unique and controversial because it focused on Jane’s hidden, interior life rather than on the intrigues of Victorian society. Most British readers were used to male authors celebrating women’s sacrifice and docile natures, but Brontë revealed how women really felt, depicting Jane as a fighter, unafraid to speak from the deep recesses of her heart, especially when she advocated women’s rights.

Lucy had heard the strength of Charlotte’s voice behind the character of Jane. She felt a kinship with Jane when she declares that women feel the same as men, that they ‘suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom had pronounced necessary for their sex.’ To express those feminist sentiments in the 1840s took courage.

Lucy admired Charlotte for wanting to write about the human heart, that hidden part of us, where blood rushes fast and full through the unseen seat of life. She could understand why Charlotte wrote as Currer Bell, choosing to seal herself off from the harsh male critics of her time.

Journalists, like herself, could also be subjected to the slings and arrows of an angry public. Not that she personally had experienced harsh reviews from annoyed readers, but when she worked at the Leader, one of San Francisco’s smaller newspapers, she had witnessed columnists berated for their opinions. She tried to absorb as much knowledge about her field as she could: at work, she would watch top reporters, hoping to learn their styles; at home, she read books on writing and journalism. Her attempts to get outside and seek news-breaking stories were never successful: the more seasoned reporters had their by-lines typed before she’d even left her desk.

She yearned for that rush of excitement in the newsroom when all eyes were on the reporter that had just grabbed a great scoop. At that moment, no one cared about the vicious threats that might follow the reporter’s revelations. Instead, the staff celebrated the writer’s courage to expose the truth. She secretly wished she could write a book and speak her mind about important issues, risk dissenting hoots and hollers aimed at her lofty words, and become known as a courageous writer like Charlotte Brontë.

Lucy’s father had played an important role in supporting her choice to be gutsy, and chase after newsworthy stories. Initially, he had hoped she would play it safe and enter the family business. She had inherited his analytical brain as well as his hazel eyes and strong chin. Throughout college she worked at his law firm during the summers, where she sat at a desk a few feet from his office learning how to convey real estate transactions. Unfortunately, deeds and mortgages never appealed to her. She had tried to explain their lack of interest to her father.

‘This document tells me nothing of the depth of depravity in the human soul. What’s exciting about per diems and leases? I want to cover stories about the human condition, take a stand against the evils of the world.’

Her father had considered her views. ‘This is only one aspect of legal practice. I just wanted you to get the feel of the place.’

‘I know, but I don’t think it suits me.’

‘You’ve got the brains, honey. You can do a great deal with a law degree.’

‘But would I be happy?’

Her favourite part of the job had occurred away from her desk when she used her creative skills to help her father choose artwork for the office. He remarked on the contrast in her mood as the sales person wrapped their purchase.

‘That’s the most excited I’ve seen you all month.’

‘It’s an exquisite painting.’

He put his hand on her shoulder. ‘No, it’s more than that. You came alive. I’m beginning to understand. I don’t think the office inspires you or interests you the way it does me.’

Lucy hated to disappoint him, but he was right: she yearned for a career that nourished her imagination. She believed she had made the right decision in focusing her studies on journalism.

Her course in Victorian literature had been one of her favourites. She had always loved the Brontë book because she identified with Jane Eyre. Lucy was neither plain nor poor, but shared Jane’s range of uncontrollable feelings and a passion that compelled her to rebel against authority. Lucy, like Jane, had always questioned the narrowness and discontent of some women’s lives and had personally experienced a sense of injustice at the hands of men.

After six years of covering the part of San Francisco’s police beat that consisted of traffic accidents and petty crimes, she felt it time for a change. Outside of work hours, over several months, she had studied the men and women in the robbery and homicide divisions, imagining that one day she would sit among them and write the hard stories. No doubt her frustration over male reporters covering those felonies had led to her dismissal, but she had no regrets for standing up to her editor.

Now at the significant age of thirty, she was reluctantly unemployed and single. Unlike Jane Eyre, Lucy had failed to find her Edward Rochester, even though she had made several attempts to meet his brooding counterpart during her forays into San Francisco’s nightlife. She thought Steven the software engineer showed promise when he admired her for her intelligence rather than for her trim figure and long legs, but his constant jabbing at her ribs for attention every time she curled up with a book finally ended their brief affair.

Another reason she had found herself drawn to the author of Jane Eyre was that Lucy shared a few minor similarities with Charlotte Brontë. Charlotte was born April 21, 1816. Lucy’s grandmother was born on April 21, 1916. Charlotte’s father was called Patrick and was from Ireland. Lucy’s father was born in Ireland, and her mother’s name was Patricia. Charlotte wrote fiction and Lucy always dreamed of writing a gothic novel. Charlotte’s sister Emily had written Wuthering Heights, Lucy’s second favourite book. She loved its bleak winds and bitter, northern storms that suited perfectly the tempestuous love between Heathcliff and Catherine. The youngest sister Anne had written Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Lucy never knew anyone called Heathcliff, but her middle name was Anne, her aunt’s name was Emily, and her best friend in elementary school had been Charlotte Brewer.

Funny little coincidences, but Lucy had found that the incidental details in a person’s life could have the greatest significance. Like many faithful readers, she had decided to extend her limited knowledge of this literary family by making her pilgrimage to Brontë country and, specifically, to the Haworth shrine. She planned to extend her journey to include a visit to Ireland. In a way, Lucy believed Charlotte had been instrumental in providing the impetus to visit her father’s place of birth.

Lucy had another reason for coming to Haworth. Like Charlotte, Lucy lost her mother at a young age. She was twelve when her mother died. She had been the one person in Lucy’s life who had shared her passion for novels. On Lucy’s eleventh birthday, her mother gave her a set of large illustrated editions of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. These were the last gifts she received from her mother. Recently, she had reread both books and believed she had identified the puzzling effect the stories had held over her all these years; she had come to the Brontë home resolved to experience the moor’s enduring mystery.

Certain passages in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights stirred her imagination as if awakening her mind from a deep slumber. She especially responded to the sections describing the land and its turbulent winter winds, those violent storms that rattled over the heath in full fury rolling past bare masses of stone and stunted trees. She imagined the cold, blue November sky lying half hidden by dark grey clouds streaming rapidly from the west and boding abundant rain. She could almost hear the temporary brooks gurgling across frosty paths streaked with drizzle and winding toward great shadowy hills heaving up to the horizon. She wanted to feel the power of threatening wild winds rush into a dark valley beneath an iron sky. She yearned to see through mists as chill as death as they wander to the impulse of an east wind, to run free beside a torrent of water racing through a wood of ash and oak, where the stream’s haunting, raving sound would speak to her soul.

Lucy dreamed of standing where Charlotte had once stood. She would open her heart to that bleak desert, backed by the sullen swell of hills along the moor’s edge, and listen for the night winds that moan in the distance and sweep across wet fields. She had dreamed about this wild scenery shaken out of its complacency by the blowing wind. She believed she was meant to run alongside that wind and to feel its bluster round her head.

She wanted the charm of an adventure to change the quiet flow of her monotonous days. She yearned to break out of her rut and embrace the moors, just as Jane Eyre had done and Charlotte before her. She had grown weary from an existence too passive and needed the shock of a wild wind to shake alive her sleeping soul. Of course, the murmur of fear had nudged her to consider traveling at a less violent time of year. No need to suffer extreme exposure to raw winds in order to enliven her nerves, so she chose to visit Haworth when the chill of morning could just as easily sweeten her sensations of wild abandon as could an icy January storm.

Lucy could not remember ever feeling such a strong pull to visit a particular, foreign land. She sensed the barren moors with its ridges and marshes offered liberty and renewal through its immense natural power, a power that sprang from its very soil. This connection to the dim and misty landscape had inspired three sisters’ fertile minds to create and express from the height of their faculties. Lucy wanted to claim a piece of that power to not only kindle her own creative spirit, but also to grace her life with a lasting connection to the gift of her mother.

The front door of the museum opened, interrupting her musings. A plump lady with short brown hair and reading glasses resting on the tip of her nose ushered the group inside. At the end of the small entrance hall, Lucy noticed a staircase that led to the second floor. The plump woman first took the tourists to the right to see Mr. Brontë’s study where they stood behind a protective cord that blocked entry. A few people wandered on their own to peek over the cord barriers in the other rooms. The guide stood at the doorway, waiting for the two ladies from Texas and an Australian couple in their twenties to make room for Lucy. An elderly man with a military bearing stood next to her.

‘Mr Brontë was a Church of England clergyman,’ began the guide. ‘He founded a Sunday school and campaigned for improvements in sanitation in Haworth. Right here, in his study, he wrote many letters to the newspapers concerning religious and political issues.’

She suddenly spoke softly to portend the solemnity of her next announcement. ‘In this room Charlotte brought a copy of Jane Eyre to show her father. He had no idea what she had been up to.’ The guide’s voice sprang to life. ‘She told him, Papa, I've been writing a book. ’

Her voice deepened. ‘He said, Have you my dear? and kept reading his newspaper.

‘Charlotte persisted, But Papa, I want you to look at it.

‘He replied, I can't be troubled to read your manuscript.

‘She said, But it is printed.

‘Previously, Charlotte and her sisters had paid to publish their own little book of poetry, so he thought she had self-published a novel. He said, I hope you have not been involving yourself in any such silly expense.

‘Charlotte proudly announced, I think I shall gain some money by it.

‘After reading the novel, he told his other children that Charlotte had been writing a book. He said, I think it is a better one than I expected.

‘Mr Brontë was very proud of his daughter’s achievement, and may have attributed her literary talent in part to his own writing ability and to his encouragement that all his children be exposed to great literature.’

‘What’d he think of his other daughters’ books?’ asked the lady with the red nails.

‘There’s no record of their announcements, but I’m sure he was equally proud.’

The Texan woman in the floral blouse asked, ‘Are you saying that Charlotte’s own father never knew she was in the house doing all this writing, right under his nose? How could she do that in such a small house without him getting wise to her?’

The lady with the red nails gave her a friendly nudge with her elbow. ‘Did you know everything Tina was up to when she was a teenager stowed away in her bedroom every night?’

The woman briefly considered this before the guide explained.

‘Mr. Brontë was busy and absorbed in his church duties, looking after his parishioners, and working on his sermons. Charlotte liked to compose her stories at night when she’d finished her chores. Most of those nights her father was already asleep. She had poor eyesight, you see, and had taught herself to write in the dark, so she wouldn’t waste candles or disturb the household.’

Lucy thought she might try writing in the dark when she began work on her novel.

‘In fact,’ continued the guide, ‘Mr Brontë’s eyesight was also bad. He was practically blind. When he was sixty-nine Charlotte took him to a surgeon in Manchester where he underwent a cataract operation without anaesthetic. He still wore spectacles after that and used a magnifying glass when he read. It was while Charlotte was in Manchester looking after her father that she began writing Jane Eyre.’

As the guide turned them toward the dining room across the hall, Lucy asked, ‘They had cataract operations then?’

‘Yes, can you believe it? 1846 and they were successfully doing eye operations.’

‘And Charlotte was with her father?’

The guide nodded.

The elderly soldier glanced at Lucy. ‘Is something wrong, miss?’

‘Before I left for England, I took my grandmother to the hospital to have her cataracts removed.’

CHAPTER TWO

‘Is your grandmother all right?’ asked the elderly man.

‘Yes, she’s fine.’ Lucy smiled. ‘Thank you for asking.’

‘How long you staying in England?’

‘Just a few days. I’m planning to go to Ireland for a week before returning to the States.’

‘Ah, you’ll be home in no time. Your grandmother’s probably missing you, too.’

Lucy was about to explain, but decided to keep her thoughts about cataracts and coincidences to herself.

The guide was pointing to the table in the centre of the dining room. ‘This is where the three sisters did their writing. After their two elder sisters died young, the four remaining children grew closer and abstained from society, preferring the solitude of their home.

‘They submerged their grief in their reading and writing. Branwell had a set of toy soldiers and each sister received one to name as her own. They began inventing characters and stories around these soldiers, and the stories grew into lengthy sagas with conquering heroes and romantic heroines. They wrote in tiny script on small notebooks to replicate the appearance of the magazines in their father’s library. Their tiny size, so hard to read, kept out curious adults, too. I’ll be showing you examples upstairs.

‘Charlotte was now the eldest, and Branwell was a year younger. They began writing stories together. In their private world of Angria, they invented colourful characters in extraordinary settings. They extracted names like Walter Scott and Napoleon Bonaparte from periodicals and books, and drew on recent events dealing with war and politics. The Napoleonic Wars were still fresh in everyone’s minds, so their imaginary characters also became entrenched in violent adventures and political intrigues.

‘Emily and Anne became interested in writing stories as well. As they grew, they withdrew from Angria and created a Pacific island called Gondal whose weather resembled that of our Yorkshire moors. Their island housed kingdoms full of royalty and lovers caught up in the machinations of wars and uprisings. The dramatic saga of Gondal stayed with Emily for her entire life. She continued to describe the escapades of her wilful Queen Augusta Geraldine Almeda whose rule over her people was threatened by prison escapes and palace disturbances. All terribly exciting adventures that fuelled their imaginations.

‘The writing preoccupied the children. Their magnificent descriptions and grand gestures continued to grow from their active and fertile imaginations. All of this inventive writing occurred while they remained in these rooms.’ The guide paused to let the tourists picture the sisters, heads bent over their work, eagerly writing at the table.

‘Charlotte was twenty-three before she abandoned Angria,’ she continued. ‘She called the characters, my friends and my intimate acquaintances, but she felt it was time to turn to more serious matters in the real world, to venture to a cooler region she said, where the dawn breaks grey and sober, and the coming day for a time at least is subdued by clouds. ’

‘In the winter, how’d they see to do all this writing?’ asked the Texan, running her red fingernails through her blonde hair.

‘They used oil lamps and candles. They also dipped the pith of rushes into tallow to make rush lights.’ The plump guide held her hands in front of her chest as if in prayer. ‘In this room when Charlotte was only five years old, she remembered seeing her mother nursing her little brother Branwell. Their poor mother died in 1821 of cancer.’

‘How’d Charlotte die?’ asked the young Australian man. ‘We read on the Internet she murdered her sisters.’

The guide tittered and shook her head. ‘Not at all. There are many conspiracy theories and myths circulating the Brontë name. In fact, we have a lady in town here, Sarah Chadwick who believes—’

‘Didn’t her brother die under mysterious circumstances?’ asked the elderly man.

‘Charlotte murdered him,’ said the Australian couple in unison.

‘Branwell was very sick before he died. He’d had his troubles with the drink,’ explained the guide. ‘It was just a sudden death, that’s all, but he was terribly unwell for some time.’

‘And Charlotte?’ asked the young man. ‘What happened to her?’

‘It’s believed she died from complications due to pregnancy,’ answered the guide.

‘She was pregnant?’ asked Lucy.

‘That’s what we can deduce from a letter she wrote to her friend. She implied that she was with child. Shortly afterward she died.’

‘I didn’t even know she was married,’ admitted Lucy quietly. She was beginning to feel ashamed of her complete lack of knowledge about the woman who had written her favourite book.

‘Yes, it’s very sad,’ said the guide. ‘She had been married for only nine months.’

‘Who’d she marry?’ asked the two women from Texas.

‘Reverend Brontë’s curate. His helper in religious duties. Her husband’s study is the next room.’

‘It’s obvious no one wants to discuss the possibility of murder,’ uttered the young man under his breath.

Lucy and the elderly man remained looking into the dining room as if contemplating a sacred shrine. He stood close enough for her to feel his arm against hers.

‘Kind of puts you back to that time,’ he said quietly. ‘Practically imagine them right here.’

Lucy detected a tone of reverence in the man’s voice. She glanced at the table where great works of literature had been penned, and imagined Charlotte sitting alone at the parlour table while the cinders in the fireplace glowed. She thought of the author, years earlier, while lying in bed without the light from a candle, training herself to write in the dark. Her eyesight had always been poor, so the black of night meant only a small adjustment. The habit carried over into the day when she would close her eyes while guiding her pen. In both cases, she could absorb herself in her fiction without being distracted by the outside world. Lucy imagined herself at the table with Charlotte.

Their papers were neatly arranged in front of them. These private moments provided a reviving pleasure: the quiet and the dark allowed them the space to write uninterrupted.

Their task might seem difficult to some but not to them. The action of picking up a quill indisputably presented them with the loosening of constraints. The fire, heaped high, illuminated their sheets where words landed unfettered from their active minds and the rush of language tapped the sweetness of freedom to speak the truth. No longer restraining their voices, they took pleasure in the pursuit of free expression that had been their necessary master since they both began to write.

Charlotte removed her spectacles and rubbed her temples. Her brain caught the first glimmer of a memory that brought an ambivalent energy. She opened her thought to follow the pebbled path of the very day when, amid storm clouds and steep hills, she struggled to reach the summit and embrace the poet within her. The journey involved struggle and risk, but her faculty of mind conveyed her to a magnificent bridge where she could descend into the depths of her being and reveal the tempest raging in her soul. The release of her thoughts engendered peace, and the disclosing of truth stirred passions.

A gust of wind and a peculiar pressure on her left arm interrupted Lucy’s peace. Someone had entered the hall to join them. She heard the low sound of the guide’s voice coming from a few feet away. She wanted to return to her vision, a picture in her mind that had been surprisingly vivid. The room had even retained the dusky shadow of an overcast sky. She was about to turn to the elderly man, to ask him why the room had grown dim when she felt his arm graze against hers. The cool texture of his skin on her hand caused a shiver to travel down the back of her neck. She took a breath, wondering if she should break the spell or try to step back into the image of Charlotte alone in this room. The pressure on her arm expanded to her back. He was drawing closer, pressing against her. She turned to see if he was all right.

The sunshine filled the room as it had done a few minutes before. The weight against her body vanished. She glanced round, barely moving, her feet seemingly pinned to the floor. The elderly man had gone. No one else had entered the hall. She was alone.

Lucy hurried to join the group standing outside the husband’s study. She shuddered at the thought of that pressure on her arm, but quickly pushed her fear out of her mind. Instead, she wondered about the man Charlotte had married. For some reason, she had thought she had remained single. Once again she scolded herself for being ignorant about this remarkable woman and vowed to keep her ears open to learn as much as she could about Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. In the nineteenth century, when women’s artistic abilities were usually drowned in washtubs or scorched in ovens, to have three literary sisters in one house was bordering on the miraculous. The guide’s information was piquing Lucy’s interest and helping to ward off any discomfort about ghosts haunting the parsonage.

The study was a tiny, cheerful room with a desk and chair. The guide pointed to a portrait hanging on the wall above the fireplace. The man’s name was written underneath.

‘Not too friendly looking,’ said the elderly man.

Lucy squeezed past one of the ladies to study the picture and read the name at the bottom.

‘That’s the curate, Reverend Nicholls,’ began the guide. ‘Arthur Bell Nicholls. He grew up in County Offaly in Ireland with his maternal uncle Alan Bell.’

‘What?’ Lucy’s loud exclamation surprised her.

The others stared at her.

‘I beg your pardon,’ said the guide, removing her glasses.

‘I’m sorry. Did you say Alan Bell?’

‘Yes.’

‘And they lived in County Offaly?’

‘Yes. The Reverend Nicholls’ father was a poor farmer from the north of Ireland, so young Arthur was sent to the south to live with his uncle in County Offaly.’ The guide put her glasses in the pocket of her cotton dress and turned to continue the tour up the stairs.

Lucy remained staring at the picture. She heard the guide’s voice echo in the hall.

‘Every night Mr. Brontë would stop here on the landing and set the clock.’ Her muffled words became indistinct when she reached the second floor.

Lucy lowered her head. She breathed deeply. She had experienced an unusual stirring in her brain upon entering this house and now she was light-headed. This could not be attributed to jet lag. She felt possessed of an odd sensation rising outside of her body and passing through her skin. The dizziness subsided as she completed several deep breaths. She touched her forehead. She wiped away a droplet of sweat. The powerful mood gradually ceased. She stood back, but immediately sensed a presence nearby. She heard a noise behind her and jumped.

‘Sorry to startle you.’

A fair-haired man in his thirties was leaning against the door. His yellow, tousled hair curled over his neck and his blue