A Blog Tour and Book Excerpt for "The Man in the Stone Cottage"

BOOK EXCERPT

Branwell, the only brother of the family and now thirty years old, has become an alcoholic and drug addict, in spite of the sister’s hopes that he would save the family.

Despite that conversation, bills from the Black Bull were once more presented weekly at the parsonage door. Over the next months, Branwell pawned some of the silver spoons for money for opium and drink; she and Martha went stone-faced to the pawnbroker in the poorest streets of the town and redeemed them. A month later, they found their brother collapsed in an alley.

Then all talk of his writing ceased.

He was well for a day, perhaps two. He was calm that night, they later said. No, he was not. Anyone can tip a candle; anyone too tired can fall asleep with one burning and a wind through the open summer window.

Charlotte sat up in bed at the sharp, piercing cry of Anne from the hall and hurried from her door. Emily in her nightdress was rushing toward Branwell, who was hardly dressed. Behind him, flames leaped and consumed the bed hangings up to the poles.

He waited unmoving. “Bedroom candle! Knocked it over.”

“How, by God?”

“I don’t know.”

“Stand away!” Emily had seized the full bucket of water they kept on the landing. Anne followed with a second. Charlotte ran down for more and struggled to carry it, back aching, bare feet leaving marks on the wet floor. In her brother’s room, water flooded every crack in the floorboard. By then, their father had come with his own bucket.

“Why was the candle lit?”

“Fell asleep reading… Very sorry…” Branwell muttered.

The clock struck four in the morning by the time the flames were out. Branwell was naked to the waist, his thin ribs pressed against his strained skin, blotched with soot and some kind of crawling rash.

“You must believe me,” he said.

As their father took his son back to share his own bed, the sisters remained shivering, white bare feet wet, hair wet. The sodden bed hangings from his room drooped down.

“Sorry.” They heard the fragment of their brother’s voice from behind their father’s bedroom door and their father’s voice sounding like it did so many years ago when they were very small. “Shh… God was watching… All’s well.”

Emily was silent. Then the words burst from her. “I wish he were dead,” she said. Everything poured out then. With her fist, she struck the doorjamb again and again. She shouted and yelled. Her fierce brown mastiff rushed up and down the stairs again, barking and howling as if he could not stop.

In the floor below, water dripped through the ceiling, seeping into the crate of copies of gift books sent from Charlotte’s publisher, dampening the pages, staining the cloth covers of the first few.

From that time on, their father made Branwell sleep on a cot at the foot of the paternal bed. Emily, now calmer, waited in darkness in the hall before her room. “Heal him,” she whispered. Deep within her body, she felt the old power that would let her stop a storm. “Heal him and I will be Yours only again, you elusive God to whom my father has dedicated his life. That is the price of my returning to You.”

Charlotte came from her room and held her. They stood together, clinging to each other.

Anne joined them; she had come softly, like a ghost.