Page 64 of Crazy in Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop
‘She caught a bad cold at Branwell’s funeral, which turned into TB and she refused all medical treatment until it was too late, and then she died. In Haworth Parsonage,’ Nina added and a little chill did run through her at the thought of poor headstrong Emily finally asking Charlotte to send for the doctor, then dying a couple of hours after that. ‘But I’m not about to keel over during our tour. I’ll take off my coat though, because it smells like wet dog, and anyway since the mid-nineteenth century they’ve invented Lemsip and Day Nurse and all sorts of over-the-counter medicines for cold and flu.’
‘Are you sure?’ Noah took one of Nina’s hands, which made her shiver again, but not because she was thinking of untimely death. ‘You’re freezing.’
‘I’m going to swap my damp coat for a jumper,’ Nina said. They were at the car now. ‘Um, do you have a jumper I can borrow?’
There was no way that Nina and her breasts could fit into one of Noah’s navy-blue jumpers – unlike Emily Brontë and her infamous coffin that had measured only sixteen inches wide – so she had to make do with a zip-up fleece that didn’t go with her black fifties dress with its novelty print of sleek white pussycats.
‘You should never go out with a man skinnier, shorter or younger than you,’ had been one of Alison’s life lessons when Nina had hit her teens and her words came back to taunt Nina as she tried, and failed, to heave up the zip on the fleece.
‘That fleece looks much better on you than it does on me,’ Noah said appreciatively even if Nina was sure that he was lying.
Then he took her hand again and not because he was helping her over wet quarry slabs or checking that she hadn’t developed tuberculosis. Just taking her hand for the pleasure of taking her hand. Like he enjoyed touching her.
Nina squeezed Noah’s fingers gently and he instantly returned the pressure. The fleece smelt faintly of the clean, zesty scent of his aftershave so it felt a lot like she was wrapped up in him. She shivered for the third time, glanced up to see Noah looking at her with that thoughtful expression on his face as if he wished he had his iPad on him so he could make some detailed notes.
Finally, she looked away and then her breath caught in her throat and she gasped as she saw the neat garden in front of them and the neat house beyond them.
The Brontë Parsonage.
‘Any relic of the dead is precious, if they were valued living.’
Stepping through the white door into the parsonage, a journey that Emily Brontë and her sisters had made hundreds, even thousands of times, was quite something.
Nina paused to look around her at the dove-grey walls, to soak it all in, but was interrupted by a small group of middle-aged ladies who were coming down the stairs in front of them and chattering loudly.
‘So much cleaner than I thought it would be,’ one of them announced in a soft American accent. ‘And much smaller too.’
‘Well, people were smaller back then. What with the poor sanitation and the lack of fresh vegetables,’ another lady commented and they all hmm’ed in agreement.
‘I would have thought that one thing they weren’t lacking were fresh vegetables,’ Noah murmured in her ear, but Nina was still standing rooted to the spot and could hardly concentrate on anything but where she was. Emily Brontë wasn’t just a figure from history, an entry on Wikipedia, but had been made of flesh and blood and living within these four walls.
Nina looked through the open doorway to her left into a small room with a small table next to the fireplace, four chairs arranged around it, papers and pens and an inkwell on its polished surface. She stood there with a moony expression on her face, hardly noticing that she’d created a bottleneck for the American ladies who wanted to leave.
‘Sorry,’ Nina said and moved closer to the red rope that barred her from entering the dining room to rub her hands over every available surface. ‘Noah.’ She reached behind her to tug him closer. ‘This … this is the room where the Brontës wrote their novels. Can you even imagine it? Emily writingWuthering Heightswhile Charlotte worked onJane Eyreand Anne wroteThe Tenant Of Wildfell Hall. It would be like Posy, Verity and I all writing novels at the shop that went on to become bestsellers.’ Nina shook her head. ‘What would the odds of that be?’
‘Worth putting a tenner on each way,’ Noah decided and he stood there patiently while Nina strained against the rope, desperate not to miss any small detail of the room where so much bookish greatness had occurred.
They wandered the house, peering in at Mr Brontë’s study and the kitchen with its old-fashioned range, then up the stairs to look in at the children’s study and Charlotte’s room. Emily and Anne didn’t seem to have had their own rooms but as the information cards explained, a Reverend Wade, who’d moved in after the Brontës were dead and gone, had added a new wing to the house and some of the old rooms had been converted into a corridor.
‘Not only did their mother, Maria, die in this room, so did Charlotte herself,’ Nina said in shocked but quiet tones as they peered into Charlotte’s room. It wasn’t the kind of information you said at a normal volume. In the middle of the room was a glass display case with one of Charlotte’s dresses in it. Despite its voluminous skirts and huge sleeves, it was obvious that its original wearer had been tiny. ‘God, I couldn’t even get one of my legs in it,’ Nina exclaimed. ‘Also when I die, I hope no one displays my stockings for public viewing.’
She turned her head to see what Noah thought but he wasn’t looking at Charlotte Brontë’s white stockings pinned up behind her dress but at his watch. He’d been quite restless all the way through their tour, though Nina could hardly blame him. It had to be a quite dull way to spend an hour if you weren’t a mad Brontë fangirl.
‘I’m sorry,’ Nina said. ‘I don’t think there’s much more to see. I thought, and this isn’t a criticism, that it would be much bigger. It seemed bigger when I looked at it on the internet. Is this very boring for you?’
‘Oh no, it’s great. Very interesting,’ Noah said without much conviction.
‘’Cause I don’t think there can be that much more to see, then we can visit the gift shop.’ Nina cracked her knuckles in anticipation. ‘Ilovea gift shop.’
‘Who doesn’t?’ Noah agreed rather vaguely and then, as if he couldn’t help himself, he checked his watch again. ‘Sorry. Are you mad at me?’
‘Not at all,’ Nina decided, because it would be weird if Noah were as obsessed withWuthering Heightsand Emily Brontë as she was. He didn’t expect Nina to embrace kayaking through white-water rapids or ziplining, thank God. ‘And I can’t be mad at you when you’ve arranged this amazing surprise for me. You’ve set the bar pretty high for all other dates.’
It felt presumptuous to assume that there might be other dates but this third date was so spectacular that Nina wanted a fourth date, a fifth date, maybe so many subsequent dates that it stopped being dating and became a relationship, and it had been so long since she’d had one of them, that the idea of it made her insides flutter like a lorry load of butterflies had taken up residence in her stomach. Perhaps if she explained about Paul, about the accident and how it had changed him, Noah would be all right with it. Maybe …
‘Talking of surprises,’ he was saying, so Nina was forced to stop imagining what might be and focus on what was. ‘It’s why I keep looking at my watch. I have you booked in at quarter past four.’
‘Booked in for what?’ Nina wondered. She cast a doubtful eye at Charlotte’s dress. ‘Am I going to get kitted out in old-timey gear and have my picture taken?’
