The shelves of books around us muffled the outside world. Wisps of blond hair fell about her face and her red cheeks glowed with the turmoil of emotion.
She bit her lip and leaned back against a bookshelf, considering her words. ‘Love is scary.’
‘Someone should write that book.’
She smiled and looked directly into my eyes as though trying to decide something. ‘Are you in love?’
Such a simple question, but coming from her, in this context, I didn’t know what the answer was. Did I know what love was supposed to feel like? Had I ever been in love? There was the initial attraction, then a kind of comfortableness followed by a sense of … what? Unease. Like I knew all along that I had chosen the most sensible path and now resented every step I took upon it. As though I’d signed up for the wrong course in university and with each passing day was feeling more and more trapped. Looking over my shoulder for the life I should have had and never really being present in my own life.
She gave up waiting for an answer.
‘I’m starting to think maybe love isn’t supposed to be scary. Maybe I didn’t love Shane at all. I thought I did, but that’s the trap, isn’t it? Fooling yourself into believing that it’s your fault for not doing it right. But if I’d known it wasn’t really love, I would have left sooner.’
She wasn’t talking to me any more, although her words rang true for me. It sounded like a conversation she’d had many times with herself.
‘I thought that’s what love was – sticking by someone, no matter what. Waiting for the person I’d fallen in love with at the start to come back.’
I wanted to reach out to her, hold her, but I wasn’t sure if it was the right thing to do.
‘How could he hurt you?’ I whispered, seeing the little girl inside of her that just wanted to be loved. Not beaten black and blue. She looked up at me with an expression that was completely unguarded. I didn’t overthink this time and reached out to touch her cheek, brushing the tears away. She let her face be held and I could feel her melting into me. Before I knew it, she was in my arms, her head buried in the space between my shoulder and my chest. We didn’t speak any more words. It felt as though the books were protecting us and I hoped the moment would go on forever, my fingers lost in tangles of her hair as I caressed the back of her neck.
‘Christ,’ I said eventually, unsure if I had spoken aloud or not, until she pulled back and looked up at me.
‘What is it?’
I searched for words that wouldn’t scare her off or make me sound like an idiot. ‘I really like you. Like, a lot. And I don’t know what to do about it.’
Her solemn expression slowly broke into a smile and then she laughed.
‘Oh, thanks. Thanks for that,’ I said sarcastically, still with my arms around her.
‘I think I like you a lot too. And I don’t know what to do about it either.’
That turned out to be untrue, because she did, in fact, know what to do about it. She slowly tilted her head upwards and, looking into my eyes all the while, moved her head closer to mine until our lips touched. To say that I saw fireworks would have been an exaggeration, but to say that I felt fireworks in my entire network of blood vessels would have been one hundred per cent accurate. I bent my head and kissed her as though it was the first time I had ever kissed anyone. It felt brand-new. We fit perfectly together. Her fingertips skated from my chest up along my jawline and then through my hair. I pulled her hips closer to mine and heard her sigh.
I stopped for a moment and spoke, my own voice hardly recognisable as it had dropped to the husky octave of Barry White. ‘Is this okay?’
She nodded and then her lips were back on mine. I don’t know how long we stood there, it could have been twenty minutes or twenty seconds, before a customer came in and cleared his throat loudly. While silently vowing to murder him in his sleep, I found Martha’s hand and curled mine around it.
‘Do you want to come back to mine?’
‘There’s something I have to do first,’ she said and she dragged me out of the shop, making a run for it.
‘Where are we going?’
‘Trinity. I have five minutes left to register for my course!’
Chapter Twenty-Two
OPALINE
England, 1922
My trip began as planned, with a visit to the Bront? Society. Merely to stand where the Bront? sisters had stood, to look out at the moors that inspired Emily’s writing, was such a touching experience. The house itself stood like a fortress, its grey brick tempered by the large sash windows. I tried to imagine what it would have been like to live there, daughters of a fervently religious man, pressed up against the wilds of such an unyielding landscape. Young women, spinsters like myself, ignored by the world of men and literature, pouring their heart and passion into their writing and taking on the male pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. I stood there in Mr Fitzpatrick’s trousers and a long overcoat, similarly at odds with the constraints of our gender. It was also a disguise, in case Lyndon had his spies out.
After Patrick Bront?’s death, the entire contents of the house were either auctioned off or gifted to those who worked at Haworth. The Society was fortunate enough to have acquired much of these effects and their archives were quite impressive. I came across poems by Emily, annotated by elder sister Charlotte, immediately giving me the impression of a sibling power struggle, albeit a loving one. It was common knowledge that Charlotte was critical of her younger sister’s masterpiece. In the preface to the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights, where Emily’s authorship was finally recognised, Charlotte wrote:
Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is. Wuthering Heights was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials.