‘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 writing Wuthering Heights while Charlotte worked on Jane Eyre and Anne wrote The 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. ‘I love a 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 with Wuthering Heights and 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?’
‘Are you what? No! It’s, well, I hope it’s more amazing than that,’ Noah said hesitantly as if he wasn’t sure how Nina would react to this latest surprise.
She was definitely intrigued and yes, a little nervous, as they headed back down the stairs.
Then Noah led her through to the back of the parsonage and into an exhibition room. Like everywhere else in the Parsonage, at this time on a damp, grey Friday afternoon off-season, it was empty apart from one member of staff who smiled as they entered the room.
‘Noah Harewood?’ she asked with a friendly smile. ‘And Noah’s friend?’
‘This is Nina,’ Noah said, pulling Nina forward. ‘We’re not too late, are we?’
‘And I’m Moira. You’re just in time. We’re closing in fifteen minutes.’ The woman gestured at the table in front of her, then at Nina. ‘Would you like to take a seat?’
Nina was desperate to sit down, mostly because she’d been on her feet for hours. Her curiosity was like a restless beast that couldn’t be caged. ‘What is going on?’ she asked, her voice quite squeaky with suspense.
‘Next year is the bicentennial of Emily Brontë’s birth and to commemorate it, we’re asking visitors to the museum to each write a line from Wuthering Heights in a specially commissioned hand-written book,’ the woman explained.
‘And you get a special pencil to keep,’ Noah added as if Nina might need an incentive, which she didn’t. Her bottom was already in the chair.
‘I’ll do it!’ she yelped, hands in the air, fingers outstretched. ‘Look! I’m limbering up!’
‘Let’s create a little ambience, shall we?’ Moira suggested. She switched off the main lights so that the room was almost in darkness, apart from the desk lamp in front of Nina which cast a warm glow.
Now that she’d calmed down a fraction, Nina could see a huge but neat pile of paper to her left, an old copy of Wuthering Heights open about two thirds of the way through with an old-fashioned slide rule marking the page, and an open wooden box with curved corners filled with black pencils.
Nina dipped her head so she could see that each one was inscribed, Wuthering Heights – A Manuscript.
‘You’ll be needing one of them,’ Moira said, and with great care Nina chose a pencil, even though they were all identical. ‘Now, here’s the manuscript and this is your line: I put on my bonnet and sullied out, thinking nothing more of the matter.’
Never in her life had Nina concentrated so hard on her penmanship as she copied the words in her best, her nicest, joined-up writing. All her muscles were tensed until she was done and found that, oddly, she felt close to tears.
‘It’s quite emotional,’ she said in a husky voice. ‘To sit here, in this house, and write the very same words that Emily Brontë wrote in this same house nearly two hundred years ago. Never knowing that the story she was telling would be read and loved two centuries later. God, it’s doing my head in!’
‘Lots of people have had a similar reaction,’ Moira noted. She looked at Noah. ‘Now, your turn.’
‘Oh yes! Noah! You should!’ Nina exclaimed, but he was backing away, hands held up.
‘No, I don’t want to rain on your parade,’ he said firmly. ‘This is your thing.’
‘But I want to share it with you,’ Nina said just as firmly, pushing the chair back and standing up. ‘This is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of deal. He can write a line too, can’t he?’
‘Of course you can.’ Moira smiled a little at the determined expression on Nina’s face as she tugged at Noah’s arm.
‘Sit!’ she demanded. ‘Go on, sit!’
‘I’m not a dog,’ Noah grumbled, but he was sitting. ‘You know, I have terrible handwriting. I’ll have to write in block capitals, otherwise it will be completely illegible.’
‘No judgement,’ Moira assured him. ‘Take a pencil and this is the line you need to copy out: She bounded before me, and returned to my side, and was off again like a young greyhound.’
Nina wanted to keep a respectful distance while he worked but she was distracted by the way Noah laboured with pencil and paper. He held the pencil as if he were expecting it to suddenly make a break for freedom and he came at the paper like it was a mortal enemy.
‘Oh my God! I’d forgotten about the time you sent me that note and I could barely read it. You really weren’t joking about your handwriting,’ Nina blurted out, then cursed her lack of tact. Even Noah’s block capitals looked like they were having a nervous breakdown across the page.
‘Now, now, Nina. I can’t be good at everything,’ Noah said and Nina waited until he’d finished his last letter, though it looked more like an insect had just died on the page, and dug him in the shoulder.
‘I was going to tell you that you’re amazing at arranging surprise road trips but it would only go to your head,’ she said, as Noah got up from the chair. She turned to Moira. ‘Thank you so much for letting us do this.’
‘Well, you really have your young man to thank but I think that would go to his head too,’ Moira said. She ushered them towards the door, a regretful smile on her face as if she’d have liked nothing more than to stay there and watch them banter back and forth. ‘I’m sorry but we close at five and you’ll be wanting to visit the shop before you go.’
‘Yes!’ they both said in unison and Nina took hold of Noah’s hand and hustled them away. God, she’d packed more exercise into one day than she had in a whole year.
‘We only have fifteen minutes to shop!’ she told Noah with genuine alarm as they reached the shop. ‘Talk about pressure!’
Nina was a very focused shopper. She put it down to all the years of riffling through charity-shop and jumble-sale rails looking for good vintage. Now, she immediately homed in on a pretty print of the Parsonage in autumn, then grabbed a handful of postcards and added Brontë-branded chocolate bars to take into work on Monday (a milk chocolate Charlotte bar for Posy, a milk orange chocolate Branwell for Tom and though Verity was always saying that she was an Austenite and that the Brontës were too dour and histrionic for her liking, she could have an Anne bar and count herself lucky). Nina snatched up five Emily dark chocolate bars for herself. She really wanted to get Noah a gift too. Some small, entirely inadequate way of saying thank you for the day out he’d given her. He seemed to have looked deep inside her soul to plan out the most perfect set of experiences – even that hellish march across the moors to the waterfall had had its highlights – and she’d like to look deep into his soul to decide on the perfect thank-you gift. Though her options were limited, what with being in a gift shop in the Brontë Parsonage. Perhaps she could get him an iPad or mobile-phone case? Nina looked around for inspiration and then came to a halt by a display of gifts featuring quotations from some of the Brontë novels.
She couldn’t help the snort that exploded out of her nostrils at the sight of a ‘Reader, I Married Him’ mug. She’d suggested the famous quote from Jane Eyre as a possible new name for the shop, which had been shot down in flames though Posy had commissioned a ‘Reader, I Married Him’ tote bag and rashly ordered five hundred of them.
‘Oh God, Posy must never find out about all this branded merchandise,’ said Noah, coming up behind her. ‘Verity told me about the tote bags.’
‘We have “Reader, I Married Him” T-shirts too,’ Nina said. ‘They do surprisingly well as gifts for brides-to-be. But we can’t tell Posy about these,’ she added, pointing at oven mitts and an apron both with the quote ‘I Am Heathcliff’ printed on them.
‘You tempted?’
‘Not really, they don’t go with my aesthetic and making toast or heating up a ready meal, which is all I do in the kitchen, doesn’t really need accessories,’ Nina explained. ‘But I will have a mug and you’re having one too! I mean, everyone needs a mug.’
The Emily Brontë mug had the quote ‘No Coward Soul Is Mine’ which seemed appropriate for someone like Noah who had such a love of death-defying activities. A mug that cost seven pounds fifty was a very poor way of saying thank you but it would do for now.
‘Everyone does need a mug,’ Noah solemnly agreed and Nina saw that he’d been doing his fair share of shopping.
‘Nice scarf,’ she said, nodding at the grey-and-lilac scarf adorned with pale-blue dots, which Noah was holding.
‘For my mother, for Mother’s Day,’ Noah said. He frowned. ‘We’re not meant to spend more than ten pounds on gifts and I don’t know if the lamb’s wool comes from ethically sourced, free-range lambs who spend their days happily gambolling about the moors.’
‘I’m sure she’ll love it.’ Nina was sure of no such thing. Noah’s mother, like her own, seemed like a tough crowd. He was also holding several boxes of Bron-Tea. ‘Is the tea for her too?’
‘The Emily, er, Bron-Tea is for my father. He’s on this detox diet since he was diagnosed with MS and this has wild nettles and berries in it, and I got the Branwell one too, which has yerba maté and spice, for my younger brother. He prides himself on being able to drink the most foul-tasting concoctions.’
‘Like green juice? Ugh!’ Nina, Posy and Verity had been on a collective health kick last year that had lasted two days and had involved one yoga class and a green juice that had cost ten pounds and had tasted like pond scum.
‘Green juice is the work of the devil.’ Noah shuddered. ‘When I lived in San Francisco, everyone was on green juice. If you ordered a fully caffeinated coffee, they’d look at you like you’d just asked them to chuck in a couple of rocks of crack and hold the foam.’
‘But isn’t caffeine one of the five major food groups?’ Nina mused as they walked towards the till where a woman was staring at them with the desperate look of someone who wanted to close up the shop and go home.
They paid for their purchases and left the Parsonage. It was quite dark as they walked back to the car park and suddenly, despite her legs aching, actually all of her aching due to all the enforced activity, and being ravenously hungry, Nina felt quite skittish with nerves.
Noah had told her to pack an overnight bag so he obviously wasn’t planning to drive them back to London. They’d be staying somewhere.
Maybe sharing a room. And a bed.
It was their third date and they both knew exactly what that meant.
The shivers were back because Nina wasn’t at all adverse to the idea of finally getting down to some serious funny business. Quite the contrary, especially when he took her hand and asked, ‘Are you cold?’
Nina paused to consider the question. Actually, she was cold, to add to the general achiness and the hunger. ‘A little bit, but I have a few ideas on how I might warm up,’ she said huskily and squeezed Noah’s hand just before he let her go because they were at the car now.
‘A pot of tea and a round of toast?’ he suggested primly. ‘Then an early night with an improving book.’
‘Well, maybe one out of those four,’ Nina agreed.