American professor Alex Hightower isn’t looking for love when he travels to the small English village of Haworth, once home of the legendary Brontë sisters. An Emily Brontë scholar, Alex is troubled by her tragic early death, and determined to investigate his theory that she may have taken her own life following a turbulent affair.
Alex’s research leads him not only to an old letter and a rumored family curse, but to the beautiful, mysterious artist Selena Wood. Selena has her own ties to the author’s legacy . . . and awakens a desire in Alex that he can’t deny. In this enchanting debut novel, “the history of Emily’s secret romance becomes entwined with that of Alex and [Selena]” (Publishers Weekly).
American professor Alex Hightower isn’t looking for love when he travels to the small English village of Haworth, once home of the legendary Brontë sisters. An Emily Brontë scholar, Alex is troubled by her tragic early death, and determined to investigate his theory that she may have taken her own life following a turbulent affair.
Alex’s research leads him not only to an old letter and a rumored family curse, but to the beautiful, mysterious artist Selena Wood. Selena has her own ties to the author’s legacy . . . and awakens a desire in Alex that he can’t deny. In this enchanting debut novel, “the history of Emily’s secret romance becomes entwined with that of Alex and [Selena]” (Publishers Weekly).
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Overview
American professor Alex Hightower isn’t looking for love when he travels to the small English village of Haworth, once home of the legendary Brontë sisters. An Emily Brontë scholar, Alex is troubled by her tragic early death, and determined to investigate his theory that she may have taken her own life following a turbulent affair.
Alex’s research leads him not only to an old letter and a rumored family curse, but to the beautiful, mysterious artist Selena Wood. Selena has her own ties to the author’s legacy . . . and awakens a desire in Alex that he can’t deny. In this enchanting debut novel, “the history of Emily’s secret romance becomes entwined with that of Alex and [Selena]” (Publishers Weekly).
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781626814622 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Diversion Books |
| Publication date: | 02/06/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 319 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Thunder shook the sodden skies over London as Alexander Hightower topped the stairs of the Underground, exhausted to his bones. Across the traffic-choked avenue the chimes from Big Ben somehow managed to overpower the street noise below, where red buses roared and taxicabs honked, competing with private cars and commercial trucks in the muddy, endless race of commerce.
One o'clock.
Alex drew the black mackintosh closer around him and moved under the protection of a nearby archway. Above him pigeons clucked and cooed in the shelter of windowsills and alcoves, the rain sending their residue like so much whitewash to the pavement below.
He spotted a display of umbrellas in the window of a nearby souvenir shop and decided immediately on his first purchase on British soil.
"I'll take that one." Alex indicated the largest black one in the lot. He paid the vendor with soggy pound notes, opened the umbrella with a snap, then ventured into the heavy traffic, making his way across the circle and past the park.
One o'clock.
He had exactly two hours. Two brief hours until he had to face Maggie Flynn. And into those two hours he had to cram what under more leisurely circumstances could easily take him several days.
Damn!
He walked briskly, dodging puddles, wishing he hadn't agreed to this afternoon's meeting. He was in no shape to spar with Maggie Flynn. His clothes were rumpled, travel-worn from the long night spent cramped in the coach class seat on the flight from New York. He was in need of a shower, a shave, and a nap. But as it was, he'd barely had time to check into his hotel and sling his bags into the room before starting off again.
Maggie Flynn, it would seem, had bested him again.
Alex reached the ancient shrine of Westminster Abbey, where a service was in progress inside the magnificent Gothic structure. Organ music swelled to the tops of the intricate arches and reverberated off the smooth stone walls, loud enough to shake the crumbling bones that lay beneath the floors and in the tombs and vaults. Lightning flashed fiercely through the majestic stained-glass windows, and moments later thunder echoed throughout the cavernous cathedral.
Alex felt the hair on his arms stand on end, and he shivered. He was not a religious man, but if there was a God, he thought it likely He might call this place Home.
But it wasn't God he had come here to see. He waited until the music died, the aisles emptied, and a tall man in a red coat indicated that the Royal Chapels would be reopened. Then Alex made his way through the gate among the throngs of other sightseers, paid the entry fee, and entered a time warp.
Tread softly past the long, long sleep of kings ...
They were all there, virtually every monarch who had held power over Britain since there was a Britain. Edward the Confessor, who established the Abbey, followed by a parade of Henries, Richards, and Jameses along with their wives and consorts and various and sundry relatives. He paid his respects to Queen Elizabeth I, whose carefully carved marble effigy slept peacefully atop her tomb. In the room opposite, given almost equal space, the bones of that throne-usurper, Mary Queen of Scots, reposed restlessly for eternity. Lightning flashed, eerily illuminating the sepulcher.
Alex moved on, filing past the ancient coronation chair and the legendary Stone of Scone. Most of Britain's monarchs had been crowned on this chair, and he was duly awed by the sheer weight of the history that surrounded him.
But it was another kind of hero he'd come to honor today. Royalty of a different sort from whom he sought a silent blessing for his improbable quest.
He stepped into the South Trancept, better known as the Poet's Corner, and allowed the moment to envelop him. Here his true heroes were either buried or memorialized. The giants of English literature. Those whose works he had studied and taught and loved most of his life. Dryden. Dickens. Johnson. Kipling. Hardy. They were all buried right here, beneath his feet. The walls, columns, and floors were filled with memorials, tributes to the likes of Milton, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Tennyson, Coleridge, and many more.
And then, there to the right, Alex spied an inconspicuous, inornate square framing three names, engraved in plain letters:
Charlotte Brontë
1816–1855
Emily Jane Brontë
1818–1848
Anne Brontë
1820–1849
With courage to endure
Another streak of lightning pierced the afternoon gloom.
Alex stood for a long moment, gazing at the memorial, wondering what these three strange and provincial women would think about having been enshrined here. Charlotte, who sought fame and fortune, would be ecstatic, he felt certain. Anne, in her own quiet way, would be pleased. And Emily, at the very least, would approve of the plainness of the memorial.
Alex allowed himself a small smile. As a scholar of early Victorian literature, he had studied the lives and works of these three writers so long and so intensely he felt as if he knew them intimately. He knew what clothes they wore and what food they ate. He knew much of their suffering, as well as their victories. At times he felt almost a part of the family.
His eye was drawn to the middle name on the memorial — Emily Jane Brontë. Of them all, she was his favorite. Perhaps because she was the most elusive. Little work remained from which to try to piece together the personal and literary puzzle she presented. Less than two hundred of her poems existed, many only fragments, along with one strange and darkly fascinating novel, Wuthering Heights. She had lived only thirty years and died after a short illness. It was her death Alex found most inexplicable about Emily Brontë. A young woman. A strong will. A premature death. She died, he theorized, if not by her own hand, then certainly by her own design.
O for the day when I shall rest, And never suffer more!
His theory, that Emily's death was, in essence, a suicide, was not popular among Brontë devotees.
Although many concurred that in those final months she seemed to have lost the will to live, most attributed it to her grief over her brother Branwell's death, while others offered more complex psychological explanations, including anorexia nervosa.
Alex alone among his contemporaries in the world of academe had dared mention suicide. Emily Brontë was, after all, something of a sainted literary figure. A scholar's monarch. One was not welcome to loosely question tradition.
But Alex sensed there was something that had driven this intensely private woman to take her own life, not with a gunshot or a dram of poison, but rather in a way that would not raise the suspicion of others, based on her past behavior.
Through willful neglect.
What else but a deep and unyielding desire for death would cause her to refuse, totally and absolutely, all medical help when she became so gravely ill? Something devastating must have happened to her in those last few months, something so frightful and traumatic that death had seemed the only escape.
Something she had successfully hidden from snooping biographers like himself.
Alex had been vocal about his opinion, both to his students and among his colleagues, and the latter had called his hand. The academic world, like science, scorns conjecture. His peers, Maggie Flynn foremost among them, demanded proof.
Put up or shut up.
The showdown was to be a formal debate that loomed like a menacing storm at the end of the summer.
Having a gut-level feeling was one thing. Finding solid evidence to back it up was quite another. Alex had studied every available Brontë resource in the United States, but still had nothing stronger than a hunch to present, based on his interpretation of some of Emily's work. The only element of her life he had so far been unable to examine was her environment — the wild and haunting moors of northern England which she had loved deeply and which had influenced virtually everything she wrote.
So tomorrow he would travel to Haworth, the small West Yorkshire village that had been her home. He planned to review the material available at the Brontë Parsonage Museum Library there. But more than that, he wanted to walk the rugged countryside she trod, breathe the air she breathed. It wasn't in a library, he felt, that he would find an answer. If he found one at all, it would come from insight gained by personally experiencing the forces that had touched her and molded her life.
It wasn't much to build his seditious suicide theory on, but it was the only strategy remaining. He must uncover Emily's secret, for unless he found arguable proof, in late August, in front of many of the world's preeminent scholars of English literature, he would be torn to shreds over the issue by another expert in the field, Dr. Maggie Flynn.
Maggie.
His colleague.
His former lover.
Alex stared at the letters carved in the cold marble memorial. "Why?" he murmured. "Why did you choose to die?" He ran his fingers across the engraved name.
"Emily," he entreated softly. "Answer me."
Rain, driven by a sharp easterly wind, pelted against Selena's cheeks as she dashed from the old farmhouse. The gale whipped a long strand of dark hair from beneath the knitted cap she wore, lashing it with a sting into one eye. Unsure of her footing on the slippery, sandy mud, she made a careful run for the old Land Rover parked in the drive.
Overhead, gray clouds scudded across the tops of the moors like large sheep in need of shearing. On the verdant squares of pasture below, real sheep huddled for shelter behind drystone walls that formed uneven geometric quilts over the landscape for miles in every direction. The world was cold and wet from four straight days of rain.
Selena got into the dilapidated vehicle and turned the ignition, concerned whether the square-backed wagon would make it all the way to London and return. The ancient engine bucked and snorted. She ground the starter again. Nothing. She beat her palm against the steering wheel and pumped the accelerator furiously. "Come on!"
At last the car rumbled to life, and after letting it warm up, Selena slipped it into gear and backed carefully up the steep drive into the lane. She allowed herself one last glance toward the house, where a bedraggled black and white border collie sat on the stoop, staring at her with sad, accusing eyes.
"Damn it, Domino. Why don't you have the good sense to stay out of the rain? And don't look at me like that. I'll be back tomorrow. By noon. I promise."
She was apprehensive about the long drive to London and hoped the rain would let up once she was out of storm-riddled Yorkshire. Glancing at her watch, she regretted having committed to visiting Matka en route. Selena had to be at the gallery in London by five.
But she'd promised, and she knew her grandmother would be watching the clock.
The nursing home where Matka lived was new and modern. The receptionist greeted her with friendly efficiency. Matka had reported the food was good and the place clean.
But it hurt to see the woman who, through sheer tenacity of spirit had somehow managed to hold the fragile pieces of Selena's childhood together, confined to a wheelchair, her body rendered mostly immobile by rheumatoid arthritis. Matka's manner was always gruffly cheerful whenever Selena visited, but her granddaughter suspected the brightness was a front, a show put on for her benefit, like the old Gypsy used to do for her customers in the fortune-telling booth.
Selena found her grandmother in her favorite spot beside the fireplace in the Community Room, a small package of a woman sitting in a wheelchair, hidden behind the wall of the daily newspaper she was reading. "Hey, Gran!" She poked her face over the papers and kissed the wrinkled forehead.
"Stars in heaven, child! You like t' a taken my breath. Where't y' come from, appearin' like tha' out o' nowhere?"
"You knew I was coming," she reminded the wizened woman. "I'm on my way to London."
Matka squinted, her clouded dark eyes focusing on the young woman. "London, eh? What'd y'be doin' in London?"
Selena picked up the paper and folded it noisily, impatient at the game her grandmother seemed to play with increasing frequency, the one called I Don't Remember. "You know that, too, Gran. Those paintings of mine I told you about. They've been on exhibit in a gallery there. The show's over, and I'm on my way to pick them up. It's been on a month. Got a lot of good reviews, too. I even sold a few."
Matka snorted and chewed her toothless gums. "Paintin's! An artist, y' want t' be? Wha' kind o' life would tha' be for a girl like you?" Like a locomotive, she was building steam, getting set to roll into her favorite subject. "You ought t' find a nice man and settle down, have children. You'll soon be turnin' thirty, you know ..."
Her voice trailed off, and Selena said nothing. She found it difficult to defend her choice of lifestyle to her Romany (and sometimes surprisingly traditional) grandmother. She pulled an ottoman close to the old woman's chair and took the gnarled, aged hands in her own.
"We've gone over this before, Gran," she said, summoning patience. "Think about it. Do you really believe that getting married and having a family would be the best thing for me?"
The old woman looked at her with eyes that saw more than what was in front of her. Neither said a word for a long while, each remembering Selena's violent childhood, the stormy parents who had deserted her at different times, in different ways. They both knew it was only after Matka had come to live with them that Selena had known any security or happiness.
Selena didn't like to think about those days. In fact, there was much she had carefully buried deeply inside her so she would no longer remember the horror. But she remembered when the old woman's brightly-colored Gypsy van was parked for good in the shed behind her parents' small home. She recalled how sad Matka had been to leave her wandering life on the road, but how glad she herself had been to find one loving soul in her life. The young girl and the old woman had clung to each other as the terror and turmoil of her parents' lives raged around them.
"It's the curse," Matka would swear, wringing her hands.
"No, Gran," Selena would reply under her breath. "It's the whiskey."
Witnessing her parents' unhappiness, Selena doubted she would ever marry, but her grandmother never gave up hope that she would change her mind. Because, in spite of the old woman's superstitious belief that an ancient curse hung over the family, Matka prayed that one day, by some miracle, the hex would be dispelled and one of her line would at last be free to love without pain.
That one had to be Selena. Because her raven-haired, olive-skinned granddaughter was the only one left, the last descendant of this branch of the ancient line of fabled Abram Wd, King of the Welsh Gypsies.
Selena did not believe in any such curse. Her parents' problems had been caused by nothing more mysterious than financial stress and alcoholism. Matka's story about the curse, Selena felt, was just a Gypsy superstition.
And Selena refused to let her Gypsy ancestry control her life.
Sure, she loved the romantic stories Matka had woven for her as a child as they sat together by the fire on cold nights, tales of the old woman's vagabond life. But Selena knew it was their Gypsy heritage that drove her father's anger, her mother's despair. Her father had left his own caravan behind when he was only a boy, seeking his fortune in wartime England. He had been too young to fight, so he'd gone to work in a munitions factory.
But life for a young Gypsy wasn't easy in the Gorgio world. When anything went wrong, he was blamed. When anything was stolen, the Gypsy did it. In his first job, and in every other job, it happened again and again, until he simply gave up. That's when the drinking began, and the fights. And his misery didn't end until he pulled the trigger one dark, rainy night, sending his body to the bottom of a cliff outside of town. In spite of no longer being brutalized by her husband, her mother never recovered from his suicide, and Selena found her one morning, dead of alcohol poisoning.
Matka patted Selena's hands and shook her head sadly. "The curse has a strong hold on our family. No one's escaped it in a hundred and fifty years. Perhaps it has touched y' already, makin' y' lonely, afraid of love." She sighed heavily.
Selena wanted to shake her grandmother and cry out, "There is no curse!" For intellectually, she didn't believe in such nonsense. That stuff belonged in fairy tales.
She would have pressed the point, if it hadn't been for the paintings.
Selena hadn't shown Matka any of her recent work, even though it was the old, woman's money that had paid for her education at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, because Matka would have spotted the letter in an instant.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Emily's Secret"
by .
Copyright © 1995 Jill Jones.
Excerpted by permission of Diversion Publishing Corp..
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