The Vanished Bride Read online

  BERKLEY

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  1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019

  Copyright © 2019 by Rowan Coleman

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Ellis, Bella, author.

  Title: The vanished bride / Bella Ellis.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Berkley, 2019. | Series: A Brontë sisters mystery; 1

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019015852 | ISBN 9780593099056 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593099063 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Missing persons—England—Fiction. | Brontë, Charlotte, 1816–1855—Fiction. | Brontë, Emily, 1818–1848—Fiction. | Brontë, Anne, 1820–1849—Fiction. | Women authors, English—19th century—Fiction. |

  GSAFD: Mystery fiction | Biographical fiction | Historical fiction

  Classification: LCC PR6103.O4426 V36 2019 | DDC 823/.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019015852

  First Edition: September 2019

  Cover art: Artwork adapted from The Ticket by Auguste Toulmouche / © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource; top and middle face in dress © Aleksey Tugolukov / Alamy Stock Photo; bottom face in dress © Rekha Garton / Alamy Stock Photo

  Cover design by Emily Osborne

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For my mother, Dawn Coleman, giver of books, teller of tales and lover of literature.

  Acknowledgments

  With thanks to my agent Lizzy Kremer, Maddalena Cavaciuti, and everyone at David Higham. Thank you to my brilliant editor Michelle Vega and the Berkley team—I’m so proud to be published by you. Thank you to everyone at Brontë Parsonage, Haworth, especially Sarah Laycock, Lauren Livesey and Ann Dinsdale. And to my dear friend Julie Akehurst, who I can talk Brontë to for hours on end. Also to expert historians who were so helpful and generous with their time, especially Steven Wood and Chris Nickson. And thank you to my family, who let me disappear to Yorkshire every few weeks in search of mystery and adventure on the moors.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Haworth Parsonage, December 1851

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  The human heart has hidden treasures,

  In secret kept, in silence sealed;—

  The thoughts, the hopes, the dreams, the pleasures,

  Whose charms were broken if revealed.

  —“Evening Solace” by Charlotte Brontë

  Haworth Parsonage, December 1851

  Drawing her shawl a little closer around her, Charlotte adjusted her writing slope once more and dipped the nib of her pen back into the ink, her head bent low, nose just above the paper. Yet, just as so many times before, her hand hovered over the blank page, and it seemed impossible to put pen to paper in a house so empty of anything but the ghosts of those she loved.

  All was very quiet now: even the fire in the grate seemed muffled and muted, and it felt near impossible to draw any warmth from the brightly dancing flames, almost as if she were already a ghost herself.

  Papa was in his study, as he always seemed to be these days. Tabby and Martha were in the kitchen locking up for the night, even though, according to the clock that stood on the staircase, it was only a little after seven. Outside, the night leaned in against the little house, the weight of it creaking against the window glass. But even as the wind howled down the chimney breast, all that Charlotte heard was silence. All she felt was absence. All she knew was loss.

  Not even Emily’s beloved dog, Keeper, was here anymore to keep her company with his snuffles and barks, playfully dragging at the hems of her skirts with his teeth. At least now that the dog too was gone, Charlotte didn’t have to witness his hopeful eyes searching for his mistress when the back door was opened, nor feel her own spirits rise every time the cold air blew in, bringing with it the promise of Emily back from a march across the moor. Oh, how she craved the companionship that had once seemed as commonplace as her own breath.

  It had been such a short time, and yet a thousand years ago, that she had shared this table, this house, her entire life, with her siblings. Here, with what felt like the whole world at their backs, the three of them had talked, written, maddened, known and loved one another with such steadfast strength that it had been all sustaining.

  Here they had laughed and argued as she had written Jane Eyre, and her sisters their own great works, not one of them guessing at the whirlwind they were inviting into their small, humble lives. Now Emily, Anne and Branwell were all gone to a better place, and for the sister left behind, this mortal existence was almost unbearably lonely.

  And yet . . .

  Charlotte’s mouth curled into a small echo of a smile as she remembered what adventures they had forged together, the dangers they had faced, the shocking revelations they had uncovered and the secrets they had kept.

  From the fashionable drawing rooms of London to the soirées of New York, the world had talked about “those Brontë women,” who had wrought such passion and pride on the page. At first some doubted they were men, then others refused to believe they could be women.

  A
nd it made Charlotte smile to think how very little of the truth those people knew. How very little of what she and her sisters truly were.

  Now her sisters and her brother, Branwell, were all dead. Not another living soul on this earth knew everything. Not one memory of the wonders and the horrors that they had discovered for themselves had ever been committed to paper, and any correspondence that might have revealed them had been meticulously burned by Charlotte herself.

  When one day it would become Charlotte’s turn to join her siblings in God’s grace, all that had happened in those few glorious, thrilling years—the last years that they would be together—would die with her. No one would ever know of their adventures. Outside that very pane of glass that shook and trembled in its frame as she sat alone at the table, a universe of humanity gusted as hard as the wind in a ceaseless vortex of life and death. And all you needed in order to uncover its darkest secrets was to know exactly where to look.

  It might even be said, Charlotte thought to herself with a smile, as her nib finally joined with paper and she began to forge worlds out of ink, that none had ever lived such adventurous, dangerous and exciting lives as those three women who grew up in a village no one had ever heard of, on the edge of the windswept and desolate moor.

  Those were secrets that would never be told, but, oh, what wonderful secrets they were.

  Prologue

  The first thing Matilda French saw was the blood. There was such a quantity of it that for several moments she couldn’t make sense of the blackish pool of liquid that was spreading slowly under the closed door, not until the iron scent hit her, and she was reminded at once of the day her mother died, and the smell of her blood mingled with freshly cut violets.

  Only then did the inevitable violence of what she was looking at begin to make sense of itself, the realisation that something dreadful had happened creeping through her veins like an infection.

  And yet, it was so unexpected, so strange to make such a discovery in the perfect quiet of a pre-dawn house, that at first she did not scream, she did not faint. Shock held her captive and, as if mesmerised into a trance-like state, body separated from mind, she did what she always did, not knowing what else to do: she knocked twice on the door.

  “Madam?” The boards were sticky underfoot, the room still dark and full of shadows. Dawn had yet to lighten the sky outside. Her voice was barely more than a whisper; her next words made little sense in the face of such horror. “Mrs. Chester, are you well?”

  When she pushed the door open, she found the room silent and empty of its occupant and covered in so much blood that she felt she might drown simply by inhaling.

  As her eyes adjusted to the light, she could make out that her mistress’s bed was empty, though from the head to the foot it was covered in what looked like one great ink stain spreading outwards from the centre like a monstrous butterfly.

  Trembling, breath held, Mattie crossed to the window, where she dragged open the heavy curtains and loosened the window latch to let some of the damp, cold air in, sucking it in desperately. The first thin light of morning cast its veil over the room, and when finally she turned back to the bed, Mattie understood the terrible truth of what she was seeing.

  Murder.

  1

  Haworth, 1845

  Charlotte

  “You cannot just stop, Emily,” Charlotte half chided, half laughed as she stumbled into the back of her taller sister. “There is neither the room nor the time for stopping.”

  It had become the sisters’ ritual in recent weeks, this circular walk about the dining room table, talking out their ideas, spinning them into thin air until they could see the words forming over their heads, lit by firelight and shaped by smoke.

  It was not a grand dining room: if anything it was rather cramped, almost entirely filled with the pretty table and a rather worn, black sofa. Charlotte had chosen the wallpaper, in dusky shades of pink and grey, as modest and muted as the plumage of a pigeon. On the wall hung a portrait of Lord Horatio Nelson, national hero and military genius, still adored in the parsonage forty years after his glorious death in battle. Charlotte liked to think of him looking down his splendid nose at them, keeping watch on all their comings and goings; she found it comforting.

  “I had a thought, Charlotte.” Emily turned slightly to look at her sister over her shoulder with her enviable grey-blue eyes. “Yes, and a good one too, so good that I must write it down at once before it escapes me. Move.”

  Charlotte watched in horror as Emily scribbled her nib furiously on a sheet of blotting paper placed directly on the polished surface of the table.

  “Really, Emily,” she said. “Have you not vandalised this table enough? Poor Aunt Branwell would be turning in her grave if she could see how easily you disregard half a lifetime’s worth of beeswax and elbow grease.”

  “Charlotte, it is many years since the ‘E’ incident, and I was only a child,” Emily replied, obligingly moving the blotting paper onto her writing slope nevertheless. Charlotte watched as her sister’s thumb searched out the initial, scratched crudely into the surface with a fruit knife many years ago, giving it a rub as if for good luck. “Some might say that carving my initial into the table was a form of ornamentation . . .”

  “Aunt Branwell wouldn’t,” Anne said mildly, not looking up from the newspaper that she was engrossed in. “Do you remember, Charlotte? Emily did her best to hide the transgression by refusing to move her hand for an entire morning? How Aunt Branwell howled when she saw what she had done!”

  “I seem to recall that Papa was quite impressed with me,” Emily muttered, already half-lost to her writing.

  “We may count ourselves most fortunate that we have a father so devoted to our enlightenment that a scratched tabletop is not nearly so important to him as his daughter learning to make her letters,” Charlotte said fondly. “Another papa would have beaten you soundly, as our aunt surely would have liked to, don’t you think, Anne?”

  Desperate for distraction, Charlotte did her best to catch Anne’s eye, but her youngest sister was not to be moved from her reading. With only Anne’s little dog, Flossy, joining in the parade, Charlotte, sighing heavily, walked on alone, jealously observing as Emily scored her letters into her paper with the same furious energy and impatience with which she greeted much of life. If only Charlotte could find the same kind of inspiration to turn her mind away from the great unhappiness that preoccupied it; if only she could tempt her sisters to distract her with talk.

  She should be content, happy even. For it had been many years since all of them lived under the same beloved roof. The fire burnt merrily in the grate, casting a warm dancing light on the walls, the snug and slightly smoky little room illuminated only a little further by the single oil lamp. Outside, the rain came hard, flung against the rectory windows like handfuls of pebbles. Below them, Haworth huddled against the cruel wind.

  It was a typical Yorkshire summer.

  “Nothing comes this evening.” Charlotte sighed in frustration, stopping to look at the crowd of gravestones that tumbled headlong down the hillside towards the church and town beyond, as if the dead were in a hurry to return home. “My head is as empty as a blank page, and just as useless. There is far too much . . . feeling getting in the way of thinking. To even compose two good lines seems impossible to me.”

  “Then perhaps you should try thinking in feelings,” Emily said unhelpfully as the words poured from the nib of her quill in the chaotic and ink-spattered scrawl that drove neat Charlotte to despair. Page after effortless page of jealously guarded verse filled Emily’s notebooks.

  “You may still find endless inspiration in childish fantasy, Emily,” Charlotte snapped back before she could stop herself. “But I have grown out of our fantasy worlds of Gondal and Angria. Mine is a life burdened with more mature concerns.”

  “‘Mature concerns’ is a very novel way of describing
‘lovesick,’” Emily muttered without looking up. “And I care not what you think of me, Charlotte, for the Gondals are in the midst of the First Wars, and I must bring them to victory or many will perish.”

  “You are impossible, Emily,” Charlotte said, but with little venom. In truth she longed for the days when she was more like her sister, for wherever Emily walked, wherever she looked, Gondal formed all about her, its people meaning as much to her, if not more, than those made of flesh and blood with beating hearts. Her imagination was her freedom, Charlotte thought enviously, wishing that she too were able to leave behind the ceaseless hurt of this mundane, earthly existence for a world where all turned on her command. In that world, her heart would never be broken.

  “Stop and rest, dear Charlotte,” Anne said, as she set her paper down at last, regarding Charlotte with such sympathy that it felt almost unbearable to be pitied so. Charlotte knew that Anne would never mention that name, and Charlotte made a point never to speak it aloud. Even so, it resounded constantly within her.

  “Come sit with me, and read The Times of London, it is only a few days old and there is much of interest. Brunel’s steamship the SS Great Britain has begun its journey across the Atlantic to New York, expecting to complete the voyage in only two weeks! Can you imagine, the other side of the world in less than two weeks?” Anne paused for a moment, her pretty eyes shining at the thought of adventure, before turning the page. “And see here, it seems that for three years now in London there have been eight specially trained and educated policemen engaged entirely in the exclusive profession of ‘detecting’ to solve crimes, using their wit and intellect to search out the guilty. Their success has been so great that The Times is calling for a fleet of such individuals across the nation, though others say that a free country should remain free from the tyranny of policing. One has to wonder if those people have crimes they’d rather remain undiscovered. I’ll find it for you, see here?”