The Bronte Sisters by Catherine Reef Read Free Book Online Page B

about King Harold, who died defending England from Norman invaders in 1066. She breathed life into this ancient king who was transformed into a hero by war:
     
He is inwardly convincedthat a mortal power will not fell him. The hand of Death, alone, can bear the victory away from his arms, and Harold is ready to succumb before it, because the touch of that hand is, to the hero, what the stroke that gave him liberty was to the slave.
     
    Monsieur Heger gave Emily more freedom in her studies than he allowed the other students, because he saw that she had an extraordinary mind. She possessed “a head for logic,and a capability of argument” that were “rare indeed in a woman,” he said. He knew only one way to make sense of Emily’s intelligence: “She should have been a man.” Emily had come to the school knowing very little French, so she had to study hard at first to keep up with Charlotte and the others, but she made rapid progress. “Emily works like a horse,”Charlotte noted.
    In the past, leaving home had caused Emily’s health to break down, and Charlotte worried that this might happen again in Brussels. In fact, it looked for a while as though Emily might be sinking. Charlotte felt relieved, before long, to see that “this time she rallied through the mere force of resolution.”
    Emily insisted on wearing the old-fashioned hand-sewn clothes that she brought from home. They were as good as anything else, she thought. Her dresses had full, puffy sleeves that had been out of style for a decade or more. She hated petticoats, so her skirts clung strangely to her long legs. Clearly, Emily gave little thought to her appearance. “I wish to beas God made me,” she simply said. Charlotte, more willing to conform, learned from the Belgian girls at school to wear embroidered collars and tailor her dresses to flatter her small frame.
    By July 1842, as the sisters’ six months in Brussels neared their end, Madame Heger invited them to stay for another half year. There was no need to worry about tuition, because they could earn their keep by teaching, she said; Charlotte could teach English, and Emily, who had musical talent, might give piano lessons. Mary Taylor thought they were quite right to accept Madame’s offer. She remarked that Charlotte and Emily looked well, “not only in healthbut in mind & hope. They are content with their present position & even gay.”
    Emily’s first pupils were English girls, three young sisters from a family named Wheelwright. She made enemies of these girls right away by insisting they have lessons during their playtime. She needed the other hours in the day for her own studies, she claimed. “I simply disliked herfrom the first,” said the girls’ older sister Laetitia. The Wheelwrights liked Charlotte and would have invited her to their home—if not for Emily. “Charlotte was so devotedly attached to her, and thought so highly of her talents, that it would only have caused offence to exclude her sister,” Laetitia Wheelwright said.
    Emily thought that friendship wasted her time. At the Hegers’ school she made only one friend, a sixteen-year-old Belgian girl named Louise de Bassompierre. Unlike everyone else at the school, Louise found Emily easier to approach than Charlotte. Emily gave Louise a pencil drawing that she had done of a weather-torn pine tree, and Louise treasured this gift for years.
    Charlotte was friendlier to most people than Emily was, but not much. She looked down on her Belgian classmates, believing them duller than English girls. She enjoyed visiting the Taylor sisters at their school, yet she appeared shy and strange to the other English people she met in Brussels. For a while a Reverend and Mrs. Jenkins of the British embassy invited Emily and Charlotte for Sunday and holiday visits, but the sisters seemed uneasy in their home. Charlotte turned away and hid her face if anyone spoke to her. Emily, even more aloof, barely said a word. “We are