Wrenville Hall is a spectre that haunts us all from one generation to the next …
I was almost too afraid to touch the paper – I had some irrational fear that, having survived all these years, it might somehow crumble in my hands. I searched the drawer for a magnifying glass, as the script was so small and squashed on the page, it was difficult to make out. I brought my desk lamp closer and leaned over the little booklet. The black ink was messy and words were crossed out with new ones pushed out into what remained of the margins. Having viewed some of the sisters’ original diary entries at Haworth, I felt sure that this was the penmanship of Emily, but I would need to have it authenticated. Unless …
That was when I spotted it – a minuscule signature. EJB.
It felt like fireworks exploding in my veins. The baby kicked, the air crackled and a whooshing sound went through my ears. Was this the second novel, or at least the drafting of it? My head felt light and my feet tapped a jig on the floorboards. I closed my eyes and traced the joy on my face with my fingertips and tried to commit it to memory. My heart was beating against my ribcage like a bird at the window. I read on.
With the death of my father and the forced liquidation of my debts to my creditors in London, I was now returning to the estate in Ireland. … an impervious gloom haunted every corner of its cursed country and a week of driving rain had soaked the ground and reduced it to mud. Famine ravaged the land …
The text became unreadable at this point and the next paragraph seemed to jump ahead of sequence.
This would be my penance, my banishment to this hellish place. I passed through two great pillars and entered the avenue that swept up to Wrenville Hall. Lined with towering yews, it held a singular tranquillity that was tinged with terror. On my one and only sojourn in this place as a child, I recalled the old house servant speaking of spectres and ghouls that lived in the woods beyond. The house stood strongly defined against the dark sky. The gargoyles that came into view at the front-facing aspect of the grey fortress of a house stared down through the afternoon mist in delightful horror …
‘It was night and the candles were lit as I dined alone on a passable meal of turbot in the dining room. A ferocious storm raged outside, driving the rain in sheets against the window, when all of a sudden, lightning flashed and I saw her face at the window. I ran to it and loosened the latch. A flame-haired girl, soaked to the skin, wearing a plain white dress that clung to her fragile frame like a winding sheet. She was deathly pale and did not struggle when I pulled her through the window and we landed on the floor like two drowned pups. Her skin was translucent, white as a ghoul or a vampire, and yet her beauty was like nothing upon the face of God’s creation.
Furious barking of a mastiff; my father’s old dog bounded into the room and had her pinned to the floor, his eyes glowing and his fangs protruding.
‘Helsig!’
The hound stood down at my command, but continued to bark fiercely at the girl.
‘Who are you?’ I asked. ‘You are trespassing on private land.’
The remark served to inflame her passion more brightly. She spoke to me then in the native tongue, a curiously expressive and fierce-sounding speech that left me in no doubt as to the message, if not the exact meaning. She folded her arms then and with a haughtiness hardly warranted by her station in life, she took a seat by the fire.
Her cheeks grew red by the glow of the fire and weak as she was, she fell into a soft slumber. I sat there for a time, studying her features while she slept. For the first time since my exile from Paris, I ached to draw, to paint. Being tormented by a love of art but not possessing the talent to succeed at it, had yielded nothing more than a reduction in my pecuniary resources. Yet here, now, it felt as though her spirit was at work within me, challenging me to capture it on the page. In sleep, she surrendered her wild beauty, which, like the landscape that bore her, could be both heaven and hell. I grew frenzied in my attempts to capture her likeness more faithfully still. Every draft seemed to bring me closer to something I had been lacking in all my years at the easel. I was bewitched by her.
Harnessing my passion, the bristles of my brush scratched feverishly against the linen canvas. I decided that no matter how long it took, I would create my masterpiece while this longing to possess her tore at me. My body ached, the night turned to morning and night again until finally, I stood back and saw. I had my Rose, all in bloom on the canvas. It was then I saw that she was still as the grave. Running to her, not believing the horrible truth, I touched her face. Cold as marble. She was dead.
I realised I had been clutching my blouse tightly at my chest. It was real. I had found it. I jumped up from my seat and then sat down again. I let out a shriek, then immediately wondered if it could possibly be true. Was this an excerpt from Emily’s novel? My heart felt as though it were a balloon about to burst! I clapped my hands over my mouth, breathing excitedly into them. It couldn’t be, could it? Was I still in my little shop, reading what would be the greatest literary discovery of modern times? I placed one hand on my heart and tried to steady its beat before reading it again.
It was a rough outline of a story about an Anglo-Irish landowner, Egerton Talbot, who had fallen in love with one of his tenants, Rose, set against the backdrop of the Irish Famine. She was described as a ‘malevolent, devious creature with all the malignancy of Satan’ by the land agent and that she had put his lordship under some kind of spell. ‘Even in the act of the appalling, she enchants!’
I was fascinated and beguiled and utterly stunned. I was still half-afraid to touch the paper in case I damaged it.
What had inspired Emily’s tale? I knew her brother Branwell was something of a tortured artist; perhaps he provided the raw materials for this Egerton character? It was also he who around that time had visited Liverpool, which was thronged with starving victims fleeing the Famine. Their images, depicted in the Illustrated London News, starving scarecrows with a few rags on them, would have been known to Emily. Some scholars even argued that Heathcliff himself, ‘a dirty, ragged, black-haired child’, who spoke a kind of ‘gibberish’ was Irish and labelled a savage and a demon.
My head swam with images of Millais’ Ophelia and how his muse, Elizabeth Siddall, almost perished while sitting for the portrait in a cold bath. Or Oscar Wilde’s painting, which seemed to be a doorway between two worlds, death and youth. It seemed to me that the slightly deranged Egerton could not see that his muse was dying, just as the English aristocrats refused to see that Ireland was starving from the Famine.