Work Text:
1826
The roar of bare feet pounding down the uncovered hallway echoed throughout Haworth parsonage. When the door was flung open, it slammed into the wall and banged back, hitting the small boy who held a red paisley box in both hands. But he was far too excited to care.
“Wake up, wake up, sleepy heads!”
His elder sister, Charlotte, squinted at him in the grey light. His tousled nightshirt and frizzy red hair made him look like some sort of short, fiery spectre. “Why are you making so much noise, Brannie?” She mumbled.
Before he could answer, a second head, this one with dark tangled curls, appeared between the slats of the bedstead. “Ooh, he has something. Not for us though, I expect.” Emily, junior to her brother by a year, rolled out of bed and plopped onto her dressing gown and crawled over to the box that clashed horribly with Branwell’s hair. “What is it?”
“I was trying to show”—
“Oh! A present! Is it a present?” The third sister, Anne, who was but six appeared at the doorway. She slept with the children’s aunt in a second bedroom, but no noise could escape her keen ears. If there was any whispering or giggling coming from her sisters’ room, she would appear at their door, not able to bear being excluded simply because she had the misfortune of being born a few years too late.
“Don’t wake Auntie if you wish to avoid her pit full of fire,” said Charlotte. Anne giggled, picturing the heavily shawed woman clattering through the house with flames coming off her wooden overshoes. She always had a chill and kept every fire in the house piled high.
Branwell sighed and flipped the lid of the box open. “It’s soldiers, you sillies, which I would have said if a fellow could get a word in. Real wooden soldiers.”
Charlotte clasped her hands together. “Soldiers!” She climbed out of bed, her quilt wrapped around her thin shoulders. “How beautiful they are.”
“I want one! Please, Brannie, may I have one! Just one!” Anne could barely contain her glee.
“But they aren’t yours,” Emily commented witheringly.
“Papa brought them from Leeds.” He pulled one out from the tissue paper they were wrapped in and held it up. Its red uniform gleamed in the silver cracks of light from the window. The young man’s arms swung to and fro in a quite military fashion and his boots were polished to match midnight. To the young Brontës, he was not exactly a false god, but something still to aspire to. Perhaps not to worship but to act as a canvas for all of their hopes and dreams. Even when those differed from what was expected of them. It was something each realised immediately upon seeing them, though they could not and did not try to express it to the others.
Charlotte carefully picked one, taking it between two fingers as if it were made of the thinnest glass. She held it in front of her near-sighted eyes and grinned widely. “This one is the Duke of Wellington,” she said, more to herself than her younger siblings. “He is perfect.”
Just then, a single gunshot cracked into the still colourless morning. Charlotte jumped, dropping the Duke to the floor. Branwell flinched and Anne grabbed her sister’s shoulder. Although they knew full well there father discharged his gun every morning out of the window, it was a noise no-one could ever anticipate.
Only Emily did not jump. She carefully picked up a second soldier from the box and said in her gravest voice, “I say, sirs, are we gun shy pups? Do we not serve the greatest nation in the world? Are we not soldiers of England?” She rose to her feet as if she were the most seasoned orator in Parliament. “Remember, my friends—cowards die many times before their deaths.” Her face was of the most serious of dispositions though the others could see the smile playing on her lips.
“I know what,” Branwell exclaimed, his gray eyes growing with excitement. “We’ll all take one. And we’ll do a story of them”—
“Or a play!” Charlotte let the quilt fall to the floor. “I would so love to perform a drama of Wellington.”
“Both of them. A story, maybe an entire serial.”
Anne grabbed into the box, choosing a young man slightly smaller than the rest of the battalion. “This one is mine. He shall be my waiting boy.”
“Waiting boy?” Branwell laughed.
“Mine is so grave looking, he must be Gravey.” Emily didn’t like when her brother laughed at one of Anne’s ‘queer notions’ as he was apt to say.
“Mine is Bonaparte, of course.” Branwell looked at Charlotte. “We’ll have some battles.”
“Well, Em and I will also,” said Anne.
“With a Waiting Boy serving gravy no doubt.” Charlotte laughed. “Sounds more like a dinner.”
Emily ran her fingers through her dark curls until she looked a bit feral. “Come, sister.” She took little Anne’s hand. “Our young men feel as though they want a little breakfast after morning prayers. They must prepare for a hard day of jeers and jabs from those smaller than them.” She looked pointedly at her brother and elder sister, both of whom were shorter than she. Anne giggled and dropped Waiting Boy into the pocket of her night dress. “O Lord, thou knowest, remember me and revenge me of my persecutors,” she quoted.
Branwell’s ears matched his hair and normally he would have called something saucy after them, but today his mind was too full of plans and preparations to be spiteful. He tucked the box of the remaining troop under his arm. “We must rule over them, you know. As God rules over us. Perhaps we will be gods in our stories.”
Charlotte shook her head. “If Papa or Auntie heard, they would be cross, saying we are breaking the commandment. No, we will be...like in the Thousand Nights...jinns, I mean genies.”
“Four genii.” Branwell’s eyes glowed. “We will be...we will be...more powerful...than...”
“Wellington, himself.”
“The King himself!”
“Oh, bother! He will not live out the year, if the papers are to be believed. But never mind,” she sensed that her brother would argue the point, any point related to politics and did not wish to. “I think maybe we could have an entire country...”
“A country! Yes! We can design the lands and the people...” The two voices gradually became nearly soundless as they disappeared down the stairs.
*
1855
Patrick Brontë was 78 years old. Too old, he thought most days, to still draw breath. His lungs were not strong, but they had proven more hardy than those of five daughters and his only son. How many had he buried—how many of his parishioners? How many since coming to Haworth 35 years ago? 35 years. A longer amount of time than all but one of his children had spent on Earth.
His eyes no longer saw much of what was before them, but his mind was not so fortunate. The colours of death: pale white, bile green and black, of course still shone clearly enough. The last death, the last that was of any importance to him, had occurred just six months ago. Now he was alone—save for one son-in-law. A poor substitute for six children and a wife still cherished, though he had difficulty remembering her face some days. How many years since she’d left him? 30? 35? When does one stop counting? When should one?
It was the son-in-law that found the box. It was pinkish, red, may have once had a design to it and nearly in two pieces. The dust that poured off when Arthur Nicholls picked it up made him sneeze so violently that he dropped it to the floor. After the death of his wife, he had spent any free moment going through old documents, clearing away rubbish and old papers, sorting clothing and old odds and ends. There wasn’t much. Brontë had been a simple man although not ungenerous with his children. Many scraps or pieces of this and that had gone to friends or admirers who had written or to the poor of the parish (which nearly was all of it).
And now there remained but a few shelves and drawers to explore. Nicholls was determined to finish the job, and soon, for there was no certainty how much longer his patron would be of this world.
The soldiers surprised him. He had found a few toys—two or three rag dolls, their faces blanked out by time, part of a Noah’s Ark that now would not have survived one day of rain let alone thirty days and thirty nights and a rather disturbing looking puppet that a child no doubt had sewn.
He could tell that once that had been a fine set, these soldiers, though they were made of wood and not tin or lead. He had owned a similar troop himself as a lad and wondered briefly what had become of them. No doubt left behind the day he chose to put away childish things.
He had mentioned it to Brontë that night as he read to him by the fire. It had not seemed particularly important, just a curiosity. He had heard something about Charlotte and her siblings making up children’s stories when they were young, some involving soldiers. She had always been fond of Wellington and his sons.
“Soldiers?” Patrick had said, though his hearing was far better than his vision. “By God, are they still about? I would have thought them destroyed years ago.”
“Most were chipped or damaged and a few seemed missing,” said Nicholls. “But they were there, still wrapped in a pasteboard box.”
“Branwell,” Patrick mumbled.
“Sir?”
“I gave them to him, after I lost the two eldest. He and his sisters would march them all over the moors. Wrote tiny little books, too small for me to read. Probably what they intended, eh?”
Nicholls nodded, smiling politely through the sadness. He picked up the newspaper to continue, but was cut off by Brontë.
“How tiny they were. And how clever. Marching...marching...in and out. I never thought I would miss the sound of the door slamming. I never thought...You never do, do you? Until you’re the last. Until the thunder is gone. The silence has a sound, sir. Perhaps you are too young to realise it. Certainly I never thought...” he sighed, his eyes closing.
“Would you prefer I stop, sir?”
“Stop? Oh, no...continue...we must march on after all.”
Nicholls drew the paper close to the flame and cleared his throat. In a few seconds, he felt composed enough to continue. He knew that Brontë and he would never be friends, that he could never look upon him as a son. But he respected him, nonetheless, for he knew that his beloved Charlotte would want him to care for him in his loneliness. He moved to the next article and read on, though it was quite clear his audience, if he had one, were no longer of this world.
*