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<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
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</p>
<section id="outline-container-org38570f5" class="outline-2">
<h2 id="org38570f5">Emily of Wolkeld</h2>
<div class="outline-text-2" id="text-org38570f5">
</div>
<div id="outline-container-orgee35afe" class="outline-3">
<h3 id="orgee35afe">Preface</h3>
<div class="outline-text-3" id="text-orgee35afe">
<p>
<p class="myindent"><span class="cap3">How did you
come up with Emily of Wolkeld</span>? I dread the question,
simply because there is no great answer. I might say EoW flowed out of
me while in trance states, hence, I was just the scribe. Or this is a
mash-up of all the lovely young people who’ve given me hope for the
next generation. That’s good too.</p>
</p>
<p>
I often peruse the mainly digital/AI artwork on the mainly amateur art
website <a href="https://www.deviantart.com/">DeviantArt.com</a>. If I have the “safe filter” on, I can mostly
be assured not to get any spicy sexy or gory disturbing macabre
horrific content. One thing I’ve noticed is how many of these mainly
teen and twenty-something artists are creating, with the help of AI,
downright angelic saintly, innocent, melancholic, old-soul portraits
of young women. It’s almost as if these are the ghosts of women past
staring at me with their forlorn looks. Here is an example of an
AI-generated girl who could be a model for my Emily Whitmore <br>
<br>
</p>
<a href="https://www.deviantart.com/caravaggioex/art/Wisconsin-1090902938" target="_blank"><img src="./images/EoWinField1.jpg" width="800" alt="Emily in field"></a>
<span class="cap">Art by CaravaggioEx@DeviantArt</span>
<p>
Then of course, How could you, a sixty-eight year-old American man,
possibly think you are qualified to write about an English earl’s and
a German baron’s daughter, both of nineteen years of age? That’s by
far a tougher question, exposing four problems,
</p>
<ul class="org-ul">
<li>I’m not nineteen,</li>
<li>I’m not female,</li>
<li>I’m English and German but not by birth,</li>
<li>and not since the 1500s have we been aristocrats.</li>
</ul>
<p>
Oh but I am <i>forty percent</i> English, <i>forty percent</i> German (the rest
Celtic/Scottish) per AncestryDNA. And yes, I might have a drop or two
of German aristocracy left in me, as my namesake ancestors were some
sort of patrician family who, as early adopters of Luther, were
subsequently chased about Europe by the Catholics for two centuries,
until in 1711 Queen Anne of Great Britain took pity on us and brought
us over to the Colonies. And then from my years as a young man in
Europe—Germany and Switzerland—I did have encounters with German
aristocrats who impressed me with their <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noblesse_oblige">noblesse oblige</a></i>. As you can
imagine, the whole topic of aristocracy was a complete <i>terra
incognita</i> for an American; but over time my exposure to the Old World
fundamentally altered me. Hence, a deep Old World perspective is what
I’m trying to gather together and put forth with EoW. I would also
insist being an older male does not disqualify me from writing about
young females of my species. After all, we have only male and female,
and we study each other constantly incessantly. Good writers have
often written believable characters of both sexes.
</p>
<p>
Why I chose to forego traditional publishing is also a good
question. The first and foremost reason is, quite simply, the
gatekeepers of the trad publishing world apparently don’t want me
around. Countless manuscripts have been sent to them, which received
either nothing or rejections. I won’t (can’t) speculate as to why,
although I have my suspicions. The second reason is rendering EoW in
this lovely <a href="https://www.edwardtufte.com/">Edward Tufte</a> <a href="https://edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-css/">format</a> web page is so much more natural, as
it allows me to place <i>sidenotes</i> exactly beside a point in the text
as needed, which I find handier than having to jump to the end—and
yes, they are often needed with EoW.
</p>
<p>
I can guarantee you’ve never read anything even close to EoW. Many
have written stories about aristocrats, but nothing ever like
this. EoW is definitely an <i>anti-Downton Abbey</i> for sure. And I’ll just
leave it at that. Please get started.
</p>
</div>
</div>
<div id="outline-container-org94dc380" class="outline-3">
<h3 id="org94dc380">Part One: In Seasons of Thy Absence</h3>
<div class="outline-text-3" id="text-org94dc380">
<p>
<p class="myindent"><span class="cap3">Ad Montes
Oculos Levavi</span></p>
</p>
<p>
… I have lifted up mine eyes unto the hills <br>
<br>
</p>
<p>
<p class="myindent"><span class="cap3">Emily Jane
Florence Susanna Catherine Margaret Whitmore</span> wanted to
put on a dress for the cold, sleeting Cumbrian spring morning, though
it had to be something loose and hardy, something in which a person
could work. She had been thinking of the larger-than-life portrait of
her great-great-grandmother up in cold, damp, dark Wolkeld Hall: Lady
Jane Whitmore, Countess of Wolkeld, poised and serene in her sleek
silk dress. “I am a woman, I am feminine, and that is something
special in the universe,” Emily imagined her saying. No room down here
in the lodge for all those paintings, she mused.</p>
</p>
<p>
Yes, feminine. But capable. One of her long frock dresses might cover
the neoprene mucking boots she had brought back from America. But none
were quite that long. The modern floral-icon pattern would still be
visible. Nothing bold, nothing different, no colourful Wellingtons this
morning, she thought to herself.
</p>
<p>
She laid out a dark-olive woollen tunic dress on the bed, then her soft
Swedish woollen tights and a silk polo neck top. From under the bed came
her old hiking boots to which she began applying waterproofing grease.
Why go out in the sleet and rain? She simply would. She was nineteen
years old and knew nothing of sheep, but she would go out all the same.
</p>
<p>
She set aside the boots and grease and went over to the window. Embedded
deep in the stone wall, the casement window offered a view of North Hill
and its ancient wood in the dim dawn light. No green yet on the stocky
oak and beech, the outline of abandoned, derelict Wolkeld Hall just
visible through the universe of black branches.
</p>
<p>
Things crossing, things parallel. Some meandering, some moving quickly
forward. Much holding back. Here was Cumbria again, a place subtler than
America where she had lived for the past seven years. Here was her
childhood, like a dear old cat left behind, and upon returning found
stiff and slow but still alive.
</p>
<p>
To step back from the hectic modern world. To play some part on this
gloomy day in such a remote corner of the world. “Lambs and ewes,” she
whispered, smiling. To go down to the <i>inbye</i> lambing pens, the tracts
of various shapes and sizes separated by ancient dry stone walls all
around tiny Wolkeld village. Or to make the long hike up to the <i>fells,</i>
the high, treeless slopes launching skyward beyond North Hill where ewes
were <i>hefted</i> or bonded to their hereditary spots on the slopes. She
sighed and a smile became a smirk. Either place she would only be an
observer—though ready to help. As would be her father, Stanley
Whitmore, the Thirteenth Earl of Wolkeld. Despite having grown up here,
he probably couldn’t tell a ewe from a ram.
</p>
<p>
The sheep and their Cumbrians, an age-old partnership, together since
the ancient Norsemen brought the hardy Herdwick breed to the high and
lonely Lake District.<label id='fnr.1' for='fnr-in.1.2856921' class='margin-toggle sidenote-number'><sup class='numeral'>1</sup></label><input type='checkbox' id='fnr-in.1.2856921' class='margin-toggle'><span class='sidenote'><sup class='numeral'>1</sup>
Lake District <br>
<img src="images/Lake_District_National_Park_UK_location_map.png" alt="Lake_District_National_Park_UK_location_map.png"> <br>
(From <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lake_District_National_Park_UK_location_map.svg">Wikipedia</a>.)
</span> Wolkeld sheep farmers Thomas Sulley and Todd
Wilson carried two lifetimes of experience up to the slopes and down to
the lambing pens. And those young back-to-the-landers were quite eager
from what she had heard. And the soft-spoken veterinary couple doing
internships out of Penrith. They all spoke Northern. Polite as they
were, the flow always seemed broken whenever they had to include her or
her father. But she simply had to make a contribution. <i>Noblesse
oblige</i>.
</p>
<p>
Emily was twelve when her father moved the family to Manhattan, Kansas,
to take a professorship in the finance department of Kansas State
University. Stanley Whitmore: the laissez-faire capitalist, the
Thatcherite who admired America so much. Lady Catherine Whitmore,
however, saw nothing in the hot, dry Midwestern plains but an alien
land. In public Emily’s cultured mother, daughter of Baron Lucas Holde
of Sussex, played the upbeat English noblewoman, but in private she was
devastated and despondent. Their marriage already in estrangement, the
isolation drove her into a deep and at times catatonic depression.
</p>
<p>
Through it all Emily remained her mother’s daughter. In those supposedly
formative teen years she never acquired an accent, nor seemingly
anything American. A small band of nerd kids from high school included
the exotic girl in their circle; but her one true friend was Annette von
der Surwitz, an exchange student from the Harz Mountains region of
Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, who had come to Manhattan during her junior
year. By amazing coincidence Annette was also a peer. Even more amazing,
her parents, Baron <i>Freiherr</i> Herbert and Baroness <i>Freifrau</i> Sibylle
von der Surwitz, had reacquired the family’s old estate in the former
East Germany after reunification and were managing it as a modern
version of an old-fashioned farming <i>Landgut</i>. Emily smiled. Annette was
arriving from Germany the next day for a visit.
</p>
<p>
The sleet changed to rain and again the window became more transparent.
She could just see her breath in the grey light. Start a fire, write a
letter? No, time was wasting. Get dressed and go down to the kitchen,
she told herself. The day always began in the ancient hall house’s
rustic kitchen.
</p>
<p>
Her mother did not survive Kansas. The official cause of death was
lymphoma. Lady Catherine had refused all treatment, even pain
medication. A rush of intense, hot emotion as Emily thought of her
mother’s suffering. Her father had taken the sensitive, intelligent,
genteel woman from the things she loved and had tried to browbeat her
into accepting a place, a life she could not abide.
</p>
<p>
Sleet, and again the window was more opaque than translucent. A tear,
though in that moment a glimmer of insight: She knew her mother had
sacrificed herself to keep the family together. She now realised how
courageous she had been to simply be hurt and not turn injury into anger
and retaliation. “Brilliant, Mother, brilliant,” she whispered, her
tearing eyes wide with amazement.
</p>
<p>
Emily could hear her father shouting at her mother, calling her useless
and pathetic, badgering her to eat because she had lost so much weight.
She could see her delicate mother taking the abuse stoically. To be
cornered and abused but not strike back was somehow courageous. She knew
this with sudden certainty and clarity. Women like her mother guided the
universe with their suffering.
</p>
<p>
Finally came Andrea Kliewer, the hospice chaplain. In the final weeks of
Lady Catherine’s life, Andrea, with calm and certitude, made progress
towards reconciling husband, wife, and daughter into a family again. And
after Lady Catherine’s death, she remained an integral part of their
lives. She and Emily met weekly for grief counselling, later including
Lord Stanley as well.
</p>
<p>
Though the repentant Stanley Whitmore was too late for reconciliation
with his father. Lord Henry Whitmore, Twelfth Earl of Wolkeld, had died
just a fortnight before his daughter-in-law.
</p>
<p>
The new earl seemed desperate to make up all the wayward years of strife
and alienation overnight. He pestered Sulley and Wilson, pumping them
for information, trying to stamp a role for himself out of his ancestral
ground. His daughter likewise wanted something to do, some role to play.
Noblesse oblige, indeed.
</p>
<p>
Emily envied Annette. Her <i>Freiin</i> led the life of a young German
noblewoman, dutifully following her father and mother to formal events,
then pivoting to play the farmer’s daughter—working in the fields and
gardens, running their raw milk dairy operation. But they were Germans,
and Germans always seemed so logical.
</p>
<p>
Sleet to rain again, crystalline to fluid. Emily felt the cold and
slipped into her Icelandic zip-up. What was out there? Cumbria was out
there. A Cumbrian spring was typically wet and chill. Spring in Kansas,
however, had been a warning of the intolerably hot summer to come. Emily
hated the Kansas summers most of all. Too strange it was to escape the
sweltering heat into artificially cooled spaces. For countless aeons her
people had done just the opposite—escaped cold into heated spaces.
</p>
<p>
College? She had been a straight-A student at her Kansas high school and
had done quite well on her SAT exam, but no, just be here for a time,
just stay low and quiet for a while, allow the coolness of spring to
pass and the inevitable warmth of summer to grow. Through all the
newness, strangeness, and uncertainty, something of the land reached out
and told her to simply watch and experience.
</p>
<p>
Her father was the new earl, but his mother, her grandmother, Lady
Susanna Whitmore, still retained control of much of the properties.
Unusual, done as Emily understood to keep the full inheritance tax from
coming due all at once. Stanley wanted to take an active role, but Gran
seemed to have a tin ear for most of his ideas. She was wary of the son
who had stormed off to America after being so fiercely, so bitingly
critical of his parents. Emily knew he had called their lives as farming
gentry a sham and a farce.
</p>
<p>
The fact that small-scale sheep herding was not really competitive—or
at least only for niche markets—hung over the valley like a curse.
That Cumbrian farmers were dependent upon government subsidies, only
kept up as many said for the tourists. Modern large-scale,
large-holdings agriculture supplying the global commodities markets had
long since overshadowed traditional English manorial system. Beyond a
doubt the region’s main industry was tourism. Nevertheless, Stanley
Whitmore had some vision of gentleman farming in his head and very much
wanted to run with it.
</p>
<p>
Lord Stanley with eight middle names had returned home a believer in
local, traditional farming, as well as other-century manorial monarchism
in general. And he would bend any ear with how genial the whole thing
had been all along—simply put, the best long-term management strategy
for the limited resources of their chilly, rainy British Isles. But what
about market-rewarded innovation and efficiency; what about global trade
and economies of scale; what about the seemingly ceaseless science and
technology revolution? When any astonished (bemused?) friend asked him
what had happened to his pro-business Thatcherite conservatism, he would
energetically explain his new and surely more true conservativism. He
who once stood so firmly for free-market globalist dynamism had
reinvented himself as a fundamentalist High Tory Luddite monarchist.
</p>
<p>
Emily listened closely to the rain on the window. Behind the delicate
patter was silence, the old sort. Not just the chance absence of sound,
narrowly localised in a normally noisy world; rather, a deep, dominant,
timeless creature stretching for miles in all directions. She stood
absolutely still and quiet in the dim light afforded by the
two-foot-diagonal window. She breathed in deeply, took a step back,
swept her gaze across the rough, uneven, lime plaster walls—then
exhaled slow and deliberate.
</p>
<p>
Compared to their suburban Kansas Neo-eclectic “McMansion,” put up in a
few weeks from tree-farm pine, Chinese plasterboard, and vinyl siding,
their stone and timber-frame hall house, supposedly started during the
reign of Edward VI, seemed the mass of a small planet. She felt
completely at peace in this old place, an entirely new feeling after so
many sad and stressful years. She drifted over to the old wooden table
that served as her desk. Among the books and papers was her pocket
edition of Emily Brontë’s poetry. She picked it up and, as she often did
of a morn, read <i>Stars</i>
</p>
<div class='verse'><blockquote>
<p class="verse">
Ah! why, because the dazzling sun<br>
Restored our earth to joy<br>
Have you departed, every one,<br>
And left a desert sky?<br>
<br>
All through the night, your glorious eyes<br>
Were gazing down in mine,<br>
And with a full heart; thankful sighs<br>
I blessed that watch divine!<br>
<br>
I was at peace, and drank your beams<br>
As they were life to me<br>
And revelled in my changeful dreams<br>
Like petrel on the sea.<br>
<br>
Thought followed thought, star followed star<br>
Through boundless regions on,<br>
While one sweet influence, near and far,<br>
Thrilled through and proved us one.<br>
<br>
Why did the morning dawn to break<br>
So great, so pure a spell,<br>
And scorch with fire the tranquil cheek<br>
Where your cool radiance fell?<br>
<br>
Blood-red he rose, and arrow-straight<br>
His fierce beams struck my brow:<br>
The soul of Nature sprang elate,<br>
But mine sank sad and low!<br>
<br>
My lids closed down, yet through their veil<br>
I saw him blazing still;<br>
And steep in gold the misty dale<br>
And flash upon the hill.<br>
<br>
I turned me to the pillow then<br>
To call back Night, and see<br>
Your worlds of solemn light, again<br>
Throb with my heart and me!<br>
<br>
It would not do the pillow glowed<br>
And glowed both roof and floor,<br>
And birds sang loudly in the wood,<br>
And fresh winds shook the door.<br>
<br>
The curtains waved, the wakened flies<br>
Were murmuring round my room,<br>
Imprisoned there, till I should rise<br>
And give them leave to roam.<br>
<br>
O Stars and Dreams and Gentle Night;<br>
O Night and Stars return!<br>
And hide me from the hostile light<br>
That does not warm, but burn<br>
<br>
That drains the blood of suffering men;<br>
Drinks tears, instead of dew:<br>
Let me sleep through his blinding reign,<br>
And only wake with you!<br>
</p>
</blockquote></div>
<p>
Indeed, to only wake with you, stars. She gazed out, letting the book go
slack in her hands. Though very little risk of burning on this morn, she
mused.
</p>
<p>
It was on a Sunday afternoon some three years ago that Annette had
introduced Emily to Romantic Era poetry, to its Dark Romantic core. A
warm glow bordering on euphoria welled up just thinking of the moment
her <i>Freiin</i> had recited <i>Stars</i> from memory. The German baroness had
befriended and comforted the earl’s daughter adrift in her sadness and
loneliness, had brought her to a deeper understanding of what it was to
be of noble birth.
</p>
<p>
Annette’s <i>Dark Muse</i>. Nothing evil, nothing to fear in darkness, she
assured. While the day is dominated by the one single, overbearing star,
the myriad nighttime stars would have us aware of a greater universe, a
greater power. <i>Stars invite long, high sight, while the sun presses
down and blinds any who would look up</i>, Annette’s words. Just
remembering the sudden joy of their fateful meeting gave her a giddy
feeling. Tomorrow she will be here!
</p>
<p>
During their short school year together, she and Annette had pored
over the works of many Romantic poets, but their shared favourite was
Emily Brontë whose poems read like devotional psalms to nature, to a
determined young female will, so thoroughly and deeply honest and
forthright. Early nineteenth-century Haworth, Yorkshire, on the remote,
windswept heath moors … modern Emily could not begin to fathom such
a life as her Christian namesake’s. She could not imagine her suffering
and death. Tiny Haworth lay less than one hundred miles away, and yet so
far away in the fourth dimension of time. To be sure, America had been a
place of only three dimensions. And now she was back in her homeland, a
place with the palpable fourth dimension of time, of history and, thus,
true culture. Emily Jane Brontë—born in eighteen-eighteen, died in
eighteen forty-eight—had known hardly more than rural Yorkshire in her
short thirty years; and yet she expressed in her poems great subtlety
and sublimity, emanating from, steeped in the wild nature of the
treeless, windswept hills. Haworth Emily was Wolkeld Emily’s hero.
</p>
<p>
She went back to the window, set the pocketbook in the stone well, and
read <i>Stars</i> again. How nutritionally deficient was her body when she
wrote this? she wondered. How cold was the room? How hopeless were her
suppressed needs? In general, how fraught was her life? Subdued things,
things concurrent and parallel swirling all around supported well those
lines, all glowing once more inside a young reader’s heart and mind so
many years later. She had anticipated, looked for to such deeper,
subtler feelings back home, and this morning was not disappointing her.
A grace indeed, she thought.
</p>
<p>
She put on the silk polo neck top, the Swedish woollens, the thick
woollen socks and old boots, the dress, finally her blue-and-white
Icelandic again. Gran and Mrs Colby, the cook, would still be in the
kitchen. They would know what her Saul-to-Paul father was up to.
</p>
<p>
On the face of it, all had become tourism of one sort or another—their
ancestral conservation village, Wolkeld, inhabited mainly by well-off
strangers, a large percentage foreigners from the United States, the
Commonwealth, continental Europe, the Far East even. The Sulleys and
the Wilsons, nearing retirement, their children grown and moved away,
were the only full-time traditional herding families left in tiny
Wolkeld. The manor’s properties below North Hill were rented out
short-term to tourists; eight former tenant cottages of various sizes,
once considered lowly and primitive, now modernised and commanding top
rates.
</p>
<p>
Troubling, sad, <i>unnatural</i> how the tourists seemed not to matter, these
supposedly fellow humans. Some made an effort to be more permanent, to
put down roots; but Cumbria measured belonging in generations, centuries
even, not just a few warm seasons. The old approach to relationships and
place meant human connections were precious, timeless, often enough
hard-won, resulting in the commitment to location, to land absolute.
Surely tourists came from somewhere real, places serious, even grim and
harsh perhaps, places where they had soldiered along and hamstered away
enough to afford a piece of rustic Cumbrian bucolic theatre. Mostly
middle-age and older, so many with blinkered urban eyes and hard-set
mouths. And so they remained transitory in-betweens, a shadowy migratory
species, mostly not letting go their cool, detached, impersonal urban
ways.
</p>
<p>
The “lodge,” as they called it, stood at the foot of North Hill and its
meniscus-shaped seventy-acre wood. Wolkeld Hall, however, had not seen
inhabitants since the interbellum—though Lord Stanley was keen to
renovate and re-inhabit. What he once sarcastically dismissed as
“proto-Bauhaus” was indeed plain and boxy, like an old factory put
together from rough, now smut- and lichen-encrusted limestone blocks,
sprinkled with neo-Gothic details seemingly as an afterthought, the
whole affair hidden behind a forbidding old forest. Gran, however, was
not interested, “I’m too old for camping trips.” But as Emily
understood, something had to be done since it was a listed historic
building. Lord Stanley had inherited Wolkeld Hall, the surrounding
grounds, as well as Wolkeld Wood, making him liable for potentially
millions in taxes.
</p>
<p>
For repatriated Emily, walking the tree-canopied lane, exploring the
wilded grounds and deteriorating mansion was like stepping into some
surreal period film. Again, she felt herself unfolding and expanding out
into the fourth dimension. So strange it had been to watch films of her
homeland whilst in Kansas, knowing all along she was a part of that
world and would eventually return. She and Annette had consumed period
film after period film, Annette constantly complaining about all the
“modernist triumphalist anachronisms,” as she called them. Her German
bluntness ranged between droll and shocking, but eventually Emily
learned to enjoy the German national sport of <i>meckern</i>, or serious,
free-range, no-holding-back complaining.
</p>
<p>
Slowly some true daylight, though disproportionally little entering the
room. The rain had changed to an insistent drizzle. Emily’s mood was an
odd admixture of melancholy and expectation as she had never felt
before. She could not take her eyes off the hill. After so many years
smaller than she remembered, but for an expectant young adult all the
more compelling, <i>ominous</i> for it. When her father had announced the
previous Christmas to her and Andrea that he would return to England in
the spring, she felt a strange but guarded relief. At last! After seven
hard, bitter years of estrangement from family and land! It would be
both a new life in a new place as well as a resumption of her old life
in her true home.
</p>
<p>
London—where her father had been an investment banker, her mother a
publisher, and she a student at the French immersion <i>L’Ecole</i>—had
only ever been a backdrop to her epic, magical weekends and summers at
Wolkeld. She so cherished her Wolkeld memories, the land, the people.
The Sulleys and Wilsons had been the jolliest aunts and uncles, their
children, their nieces and nephews like big cousins. Now the cousins
were scattered, the aunts and uncles initially shy and quiet around her.
Yes, they were showing respect in the age-old fashion—possible too
they were nervous and cautious due to her father’s erratic behaviour.
She would just have to take the initiative if she wanted them back as
aunts and uncles.
</p>
<p>
Not yet, nothing just yet. Another Brontë. She sat down at the table,
lit the curious three-candle camper’s lantern she had brought from
America, adjusted the shiny metal rectangular sheet behind it to reflect
as much light as possible onto her desk, and began reading from her copy
of <i>Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell</i>, Anne’s <i>A Reminiscence</i>:
</p>
<div class='verse'><blockquote>
<p class="verse">
Yes, thou art gone! and never more<br>
Thy sunny smile shall gladden me;<br>
But I may pass the old church door,<br>
And pace the floor that covers thee.<br>
<br>
May stand upon the cold, damp stone,<br>
And think that, frozen, lies below<br>
The lightest heart that I have known,<br>
The kindest I shall ever know.<br>
<br>
Yet though I cannot see thee more,<br>
’Tis still a comfort to have seen;<br>
And though thy transient life is o’er,<br>
’Tis sweet to think that thou hast been;<br>
<br>
To think a soul so near divine,<br>
Within a form so angel fair,<br>
United to a heart like thine,<br>
Has gladdened once our humble sphere.<br>
</p>
</blockquote></div>
<p>
She might have meant her mother who died after her birth, or one of her
older sisters, Maria or Elizabeth, they having died from deprivations
suffered at their infamous boarding school for poor vicars’ daughters.
But as with any elegy, Emily was reminded of her own mother, who had
died from modern deprivations and was now finally interred in the parish
graveyard. Another tear.
</p>
<p>
More light through the window. In less than two months, at the peak of
the Cumbrian summer, dawn would arrive at four-thirty a.m.! Kansas to
Cumbria: The ninety degree longitudinal change had brought her to the
older hemisphere, but the seventeen-degree latitudinal change would take
getting used to as well. She stared at the tongues of flame of the
beeswax candles. She blew out each one and closed the book. The white,
heavy, beeswax-perfumed smoke from the wicks took over the room.
</p>
<p>
She rose and went to the window once more, resting her elbows on the
hard, bumpy plaster of the window well. Craning her neck, she could just
see a small patch of blue sky. The wind had increased, whipping the
branches of Wolkeld Wood about. Glimpses of the dark manor flashed in
and out of sight.
</p>
<p>
Gazing intently at the hall, she again mused over all the British film
and television she had consumed: the popular <i>Downton Abbey</i>, the very
many period films. She had tried hard to balance staring with reading,
but the screen versions were so alluring, so <i>addictive</i>. She and
Annette had felt great affinity to Jane Campion’s 2009 <i>Bright Star</i>
and especially the Cary Fukunaga version <i>Jane Eyre</i> from
twenty-eleven. They were a new sort of British period
depiction. Rather than inviting the modern viewer to feel
superior---<i>triumphalist</i> as Annette called it—they drew the viewer
in as an equal to the characters, subordinate to their thought
patterns and mores. Still, the modern artistic liberties would have
confused if not shocked any audience from those times. Of this Annette
was grimly certain. Emily gave a small laugh.
</p>
<p>
Fantasy was another amazing offering of modern Britain: Rowling,
Tolkien, Neil Gaiman, Susanna Clarke’s overwhelming <i>Jonathan Strange &
Mr Norrell</i>. British fantasy writers enjoyed popularity worldwide. And
yet from her colonial vantage point, these books and their film versions
had made her home seem less real, more magical, her people like fairies,
elves, and hobbits.
</p>
<p>
Now she was back in the real England—surely a relief after those long,
confusing years—where she keenly sensed another topic she and Annette
often discussed, namely, the tension between Old World <i>stasis</i> and New
World <i>dynamism</i>. America, Americans were always about progress, change,
dynamism. But what chance did any sort of traditionalism have even here?
Emily’s father, now chasing his imaginary <i>Retropia</i>, was making a pest
of himself. Gran and the local farmers were guarded and non-committal.
</p>
<p>
Whither dynamic America? Whither this mad modern rush? Except in the
oldest places, the typical American town or city felt hardly more
permanent than refugee settlements of tents and makeshift sheds. True
enough, she had walled herself off mentally and emotionally and had
never really unpacked, rarely explored her surroundings.
</p>
<p>
Though the New World did have some scraps of the Old World left. For
their first Halloween, she and her mother visited Chris Coolidge, her
mother’s old friend and Emily’s godmother, in Boston. Lady Catherine had
known Chris from her time as a publisher living in London. The wealthy
Brahmin heiress, Christine Florence Coolidge, was witty and direct,
always ready with a pithy remark, and completely devoted to her
goddaughter… Again, a wave of emotion as she remembered her mother
in better times, happy and laughing with her best friend.
</p>
<p>
Chris’s townhouse in the Beacon Hill quarter had been like an Old World
oasis in the middle of all the new and strange. They hit the streets of
colonial Salem to witness a sort of Halloween <i>Carnival</i>. The Americans
had definitely expanded the ancient Celtic new year’s celebration beyond
what it was back in Scotland and Ireland. According to Chris, America’s
Halloween was second only to Christmas commercially—apparently a
significant measurement.
</p>
<p>
They also visited Chris’ farm in New Hampshire. Again, parts of the
countryside looked and felt like the Old World, and yet always with such
tasteless intrusions, as if no one could ever say “Stop! Don’t do that!”
to someone making ugliness. The highlight, as Emily now believed, was
their trip high up into the White Mountains. Here was something unique
about America, namely, real wilds—the seemingly untouched New World
forests, grand and expansive to all horizons. To be sure, the American
wilderness felt primordial and mysterious to a girl from England.
</p>
<p>
She gazed once more at the broken outline of Wolkeld Hall through the
trees, letting her concentration slip and her eyes glaze. She listened
after that strange place in her mind where bits and pieces of scenes
played beyond her comprehension, where shadows of thoughts never quite
became clear … though at times some glimpse of something would
suddenly flash by demanding her best attempt at a poetisation.
</p>
<p>
Since Kansas, since puberty, she would occasionally find herself
slipping into some further space beyond the secret compartments. But
again, she could only sense, partially comprehend this expansive, twilit
region, fleeting, but long dominating her heart and mind. At first she
considered such flights just intense day-dreaming, but over time they
became less imagined, more a definite communion with a distinctly
separate realm. It was a dusky world, steeped in sublime melancholic
loneliness, often large and panoramic. At first she found it
worrisome—not some clear and obvious religious transport of light and
ecstasy. And yet she came to believe good was speaking, not evil, nor
for that matter any sort of lurking mental illness. She wished it to be
something of her soul’s true home, perhaps some special, deeper view of
Cumbria—at least that was the place to which she always mapped it, for
which she yearned immediately thereafter.
</p>
<p>
Her first distinct episode had been at a freshman class party held by
one of her Kansas friends, Mary Schrag, at her family’s rural Flint
Hills ranch. She remembered wandering up to the first storey of the old
limestone house—ostensibly to escape the excitement and people—and
being drawn into a north-facing bedroom. The entire ranch was like a
museum to the Schrags’ nineteenth-century ancestors, hardly anything
modern to be seen, and indeed in that room everything was antique. She
recalled a powerful feeling of déjà vu, as if she had entered some ghost
remembrance of the space on a past winter day of profound snowy
isolation and loneliness. Later that night—after deciding it had not
been just a fanciful impression—she wrote in her journal: <i>A strange
world opened up before me, inviting me to come explore. Initially
frightened at its power. All the more curious now.</i>
</p>
<p>
It was in her sophomore high school year that her mother had begun to
seriously deteriorate, and the confused, frightened girl often found
refuge on this mysterious plane. Sadness and anxiety would fade as the
magic came on like a new facet of a gem turned slightly on its own. At
first these reveries overlapped reality. But a year later on a hike in
the Konza Prairie Reserve just outside of Manhattan, she experienced an
episode that could only be called a true blackout. She had been with
Mary, Annette, and another American friend, the tall, waifish Irene
Neufeld—who so mysteriously seemed to be a fellow traveller. Emily
recalled coming out of the vision and glancing over at the <i>knowingly</i>
grinning, but, as was her habit, maddeningly Sphinx-like Irene. Annette
had picked up on all this and fell in close beside her new friend for
the remainder of the hike.
</p>
<p>
The next day Emily and Annette attended Sunday service at the Episcopal
Church in Manhattan, and afterwards they sat outside the imposing stone
structure in the garden grove under the giant elm trees. Emily shared a
poem she had written the previous evening. She said it was an attempt to
capture, to describe something of the place and the feeling of her
visionspace
</p>
<div class='verse'><blockquote>
<p class="verse">
Burgundy roses, pallid lilies, cobalt irises<br>
Delivered for the night’s performance,<br>
To the theatre in the hollow, le théâtre de la combe.<br>
Village-bound now, once a fairy circle,<br>
Long since fairy dream haunted.<br>
<br>
Down from the grove, now the square.<br>
Recall the one attendance as a child:<br>
Visions of darker, older nights since.<br>
<br>
Escape to the countryside;<br>
Great sunlight to dispel dark rumour,<br>
Though pale blue sky the thinnest canopy,<br>
Indigo veil waving, grey clouds and fog billowing.<br>
Incessant winds to lift and shred the scrim<br>
Till starless void revealed. . . .<br>
<br>
Evening, and the chill wind rising up<br>
The cobblestone ruelle from the hollow.<br>
On this night of nights rapture,<br>
Dark clouds streak a moon red-orange,<br>
Now just above le théâtre de la combe.<br>
</p>
</blockquote></div>
<p>
Annette said nothing but stared ahead, her jaw tensed, her lips
narrowed. She suddenly grabbed her old German school satchel took out a
small pocket book of Emily Brontë poems, but then proceeded to recite
most of <i>Stars</i> from memory.
</p>
<p>
Emily opened her eyes to see Annette once more digging through her
satchel, finally producing a thick, squarish book. This she opened to
a bookmarked page and began reading Anna Letitia Barbauld’s long and
unrelenting <i>A Summer Evening’s Meditation</i>:
</p>
<div class='verse'><blockquote>
<p class="verse">
’Tis past! The sultry tyrant of the south<br>
Has spent his short-liv’d rage; more grateful hours<br>
Move silent on; the skies no more repel<br>
The dazzled sight, but with mild maiden beams<br>
Of temper’d lustre, court the cherish’d eye<br>
To wander o’er their sphere; where hung aloft<br>
Dian’s bright crescent, like a silver bow<br>
New strung in heaven, lifts high its beamy horns<br>
Impatient for the night, and seems to push<br>
Her brother down the sky. Fair Venus shines<br>
E’en in the eye of day; with sweetest beam<br>
Propitious shines, and shakes a trembling flood<br>
Of soften’d radiance from her dewy locks.<br>
The shadows spread apace; while meeken’d Eve<br>
Her cheek yet warm with blushes, slow retires<br>
Thro’ the Hesperian gardens of the west,<br>
And shuts the gates of day. ’Tis now the hour<br>
When Contemplation, from her sunless haunts,<br>
The cool damp grotto, or the lonely depth<br>
Of unpierc’d woods, where wrapt in solid shade<br>
She mused away the gaudy hours of noon,<br>
And fed on thoughts unripen’d by the sun,<br>
Moves forward; and with radiant finger points<br>
To yon blue concave swell’d by breath divine,<br>
Where, one by one, the living eyes of heaven<br>
Awake, quick kindling o’er the face of ether<br>
One boundless blaze; ten thousand trembling fires,<br>
And dancing lustres, where th’ unsteady eye<br>
Restless, and dazzled wanders unconfin’d<br>
O’er all this field of glories: spacious field;<br>
And worthy of the Master: he, whose hand<br>
With hieroglyphics elder than the Nile,<br>
Inscrib’d the mystic tablet; hung on high<br>
To public gaze, and said, adore, O man!<br>
The finger of thy God. From what pure wells<br>
Of milky light, what soft o’erflowing urn,<br>
Are all these lamps so fill’d? these friendly lamps,<br>
For ever streaming o’er the azure deep<br>
To point our path, and light us to our home.<br>
How soft they slide along their lucid spheres!<br>
And silent as the foot of time, fulfil<br>
Their destin’d courses: Nature’s self is hush’d,<br>
And, but a scatter’d leaf, which rustles thro’<br>
The thick-wove foliage, not a sound is heard<br>
To break the midnight air; tho’ the rais’d ear,<br>
Intensely listening, drinks in every breath.<br>
How deep the silence yet how loud the praise!<br>
But are they silent all? or is there not<br>
A tongue in every star that talks with man,<br>
And wooes him to be wise; nor wooes in vain:<br>
This dead of midnight is the noon of thought,<br>
And wisdom mounts her zenith with the stars.<br>
At this still hour the self-collected soul<br>
Turns inward, and beholds a stranger there<br>
Of high descent, and more than mortal rank;<br>
An embryo God; a spark of fire divine,<br>
Which must burn on for ages, when the sun,<br>
(Fair transitory creature of a day!)<br>
Has clos’d his golden eye, and wrap’d in shades<br>
Forgets his wonted journey thro’ the east.<br>
<br>
Ye citadels of light, and seats of Gods!<br>
Perhaps my future home, from whence the soul<br>
Revolving periods past, may oft look back<br>
With recollected tenderness, on all<br>
The various busy scenes she left below,<br>
Its deep laid projects and its strange events,<br>
As on some fond and doting tale that sooth’d<br>
Her infant hours; O be it lawful now<br>
To tread the hallow’d circle of your courts,<br>
And with mute wonder and delighted awe<br>
Approach your burning confines. Seiz’d in thought<br>
On fancy’s wild and roving wing I sail,<br>
From the green borders of the peopled earth,<br>
And the pale moon, her duteous fair attendant;<br>
From solitary Mars; from the vast orb<br>
Of Jupiter, whose huge gigantic bulk<br>
Dances in ether like the lightest leaf;<br>
To the dim verge, the suburbs of the system,<br>
Where cheerless Saturn ’midst his wat’ry moons<br>
Girt with a lucid zone, in gloomy pomp,<br>
Sits like an exil’d monarch: fearless thence<br>
I launch into the trackless deeps of space,<br>
Where, burning round, ten thousand suns appear,<br>
Of elder beam; which ask no leave to shine<br>
Of our terrestrial star, nor borrow light<br>
From the proud regent of our scanty day;<br>
Sons of the morning, first-born of creation,<br>
And only less than Him who marks their track,<br>
And guides their fiery wheels. Here must I stop,<br>
Or is there aught beyond? What hand unseen<br>
Impels me onward thro’ the glowing orbs<br>
Of habitable nature, far remote,<br>
To the dread confines of eternal night,<br>
To solitudes of vast unpeopled space,<br>
The deserts of creation, wide and wild;<br>
Where embryo systems and unkindled suns<br>
Sleep in the tomb of chaos? fancy droops,<br>
And thought astonish’d stops her bold career.<br>
But oh thou mighty mind! whose powerful word<br>
Said, thus let all things be, and thus they were,<br>
Where shall I seek thy presence? how unblam’d<br>
Invoke thy dread persecution?<br>
Have the broad eye-lids of the morn beheld thee?<br>
Or does the beamy shoulder of Orion<br>
Support thy throne? O look with pity down<br>
On erring guilty man; not in thy names<br>
Of terror clad; not with those thunders arm’d<br>
That conscious Sinai felt, when fear appal’d<br>
The scatter’d tribes; thou hast a gentler voice,<br>
That whispers comfort to the swelling heart,<br>