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PART I
1
TOMORROW THE BUSHES WOULDbe stripped of their berries, but today they were abundant and blooming. From where Bron stood, naked at the window ledge of the dormitory’s topmost story, he could spy on the gardener clipping away at the stems of a tree. He’d been observing the man’s labored reach toward every branch—the length of his torso, the nod of his head with every snip—inadvertently mirroring this man’s posture as his own fingers dug into the sill’s grooves. Bron held himself out for one last glimpse of his surroundings: the woods on the left, the hills on the right, the pipes trailing the crumbling walls of the school’s east court. All the while he was doing sums in his head.
Below, the gardener descended the ladder and raised his sleeves to gather the foliage that had fallen into a heap at the base of the trunk. But captured by birdsong, he looked up to the building’s eaves. What did he see there? What did he make of the lone figure framed by the square lattice window, shoulders bare and pearlescent, with hair loose and coiling down sharp, rung-like collarbones, a flat chest exposed? An androgynous statue or a careless young woman trapped in an all-boys boarding school? A school teacher, perhaps, there through the holidays.
The gardener moved to get a better look, when—“Ah, Christ!”—he tripped on a branch, falling to his knees. Abovethis scene, Bron stepped back and drew the window shut, having finally decided.
Upon arriving in Cambridge, he would take a taxi from the train station to the address on the envelope, a certain Greenwood Manor, which sounded very grand. Google Maps estimated a near two-hour walk to the manor, marked by a red pinpoint, and the weather forecast threatened the usual early September drizzle, so there was no chance of walking. He couldn’t show up to his new place of employment drenched and smelling of sweat. What would his employer and new pupil think of him, then? He had to make a good first impression.
The television flickered scenes from Merchant Ivory as he dressed. The boys with whom he used to share these quarters had long since returned home for the summer holidays and were due back in the coming days. The place stood barren, no trace of character or belongings left behind except his own, most of which had already been packed away. He could only carry so much, and the remaining boxes would come to him at a later date, set aside and taped as they were, in the furthermost corner of the room. Inside them were an assortment of clothes alongside his most prized possessions—sets of books by the Brontë sisters; a collection of Austen novels; those of Hardy, Forster, Woolf, and Shelley—all of them collected, over the course of his life, from the high-street’s secondhand bookstore, accompanying him through his years like a friend. He opened them up again and again for comfort. He’d highlighted his favorite passages, written notes to himself in the margins, and learned to turn his favorite quotes (“Reader, I married him”) into a digital scrawl of black calligraphy which he and thousands of others would post and share across their social media channels. His most cherished book, a hardback edition ofJane Eyre, with foiled spine, lithograph illustrations, and a ribbon to mark his progress, was comfortably tucked away in the bag he’d be taking with him.
He fixed his hair, a bobby pin stuck between his teeth as he angled another in before applying a little bit of mascara andeyeliner. When it smudged, he wiped it away and applied it again with a steadier hand. But it was no use. He couldn’t get the flick right. He stopped, shut the compact mirror, threw it into the open bag, and turned to watch the screen, comforted by its misty feel, the light it threw across the room, and the soundtrack muffled by aged speakers.
The film had played to his favorite part: a yellow-green poppy field pockmarked red, the display of wild barley and Italian countryside, and those two people who should not have been together by matter of convention, coming together almost in celebration, in tandem with Bron’s defiance of what some might call “normal.” For times had not changed: boundaries continued to exist, and a child born in possession of an external appendage, or lack thereof, must be either one thing or another.
As someone assigned male but who came to be fond of primarily feminine clothing in his early adolescence, this was not a truth Bron had been born into. It had been an otherwise uneventful Friday evening when Bron stumbled upon Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity on the internet, and such power did he find in those words, whereperformancewas no longer a thing ascribed to the arts, but a behavior in which we are all complicit. This theory proved to be a major checkpoint in his life, and with a new mantra to follow, he immediately swapped the shapeless, faded trousers and dull patterned hand-me-down shirts for leggings and other much-loved articles procured from the local Oxfam: high-waisted jeans, frilly blouses, and oversized jumpers that fell just below his natural hipline. Apart from the silhouette sculpting him to appear shorter, he was pleased with this newfound style and would eventually get used to walking without the luxury of pockets at his side. On the weekends he’d haunt the local bookstore in a pinafore dress and trail the fields in a maxi skirt, enjoying the way it flapped in the wind, all the while shrinking at the back of the classroom, during the week, in his stiff collar and baggy school trousers, waiting, cyclically, for his snippet of freedom. It always came back to this claim:It is theclothes that wear us, and not we them, and the notion coiled around his mind like a tourniquet, limiting the flow of other thoughts. He was not performing. He was fashioning himself in an already established social structure. He knew the codes, and from there governed his own being.
Bron wasn’t a woman—of that he wasfairlycertain—and yet there was no denying that something feminine lingered at the core of his character. He was always more conscious of himself and attuned to the differences between him and his male counterparts. For years he’d prescribed this as merely a gay tendency, very much aware of his attraction to the boys around him, always measuring their nearness. He could recall the summer where things clicked into place, when his dorm mate returned from the holidays quite changed, his voice broken, puppy fat gone from the neck to reveal a more definitive jaw, and a stronger smell about him after PE class. And then, cementing his love for boys, the arrival of his best friend, Harry Blackwater. But as his circle of peers grew into adolescence and the boys at St. Mary’s developed that bisexual instinct that pervades such English institutions, he found himself existing outside those circles. And once Bron had graduated from student to teacher’s assistant, still he was looked upon as something different. Not quite one of them. Not quite authority.
He turned off the television, after packing the last of his things, and gripped the wooden balustrade before descending the stairs. He would not miss this phase of his life: the regimented row of iron beds beneath the ceiling, slanted like an attic’s; the plumed yellow mattresses, streaked like varicose veins; the distressed floorboards, which, though polished in anticipation of the boys’ return, did little to mask the scent of rot. And yet he couldn’t mistake the swelling of his heart, the stiffness of his neck, for something resembling sadness. This place was all he knew. St. Mary’s had always been home. But a new servitude awaited him.
He scrolled to read the email once more. A much-needed boost of confidence.
RE: Application for Manor House Au Pair
Richard3:55 PM to B.Ellis
Dear Brontë Ellis,
Thank you for taking the time to meet with me, via video call, regarding the live-in tutor position for my daughter, Ada, at our country-house residence. I very much enjoyed my consultation with you and was impressed by the more than satisfactory references provided, as well as your academic achievements and work experience so far. I particularly enjoyed your application by handwritten letter, a habit that has fallen quite out of practice. As it stands, I would like to offer you the position, and I would be delighted to welcome you into our home, should you still be interested.
With kindest regards,
Richard B. Edwards
And in the following chain of emails: Bron’s acceptance of the role, the back-and-forth toward an agreed-on start date, and finally Mr. Edwards’s personal contact number, should Bron need it on his journey.
He zoomed onto his employer’s email signature with his forefinger, enjoying the almost clacking sound his nails made now they’d grown long: Greenwood Manor, Cambridgeshire. Cambridge, in truth, was a place Bron had only dreamed about, having experienced its centuries-old magnificence through celluloid depiction and literature—a place of towering spires reaching up to the heavens, of academics strolling about with black winged gowns and reading poetry and Latin aloud on punts.
Access to the University, of course, was not a thing that justhappenedto someone like him. After finishing his mandatoryeducation at the age of eighteen, St. Mary’s knew he had nowhere else to turn, and offered him a job as a teacher’s assistant. Over these consecutive years he’d applied to the two Oxbridge universities, hoping that in this day and age his grade-A average and position as an orphaned, working-class, queer applicant might help him in his ambition, buttwicehe hadn’t gotten in. Though his spirits dampened, all wasn’t lost; by the age of twenty-one he’d saved enough of his wages to earn him his escape from the school, and now with a job to accompany him. This wasn’t the route his dreams had tread, but still there was something powerful about the prospect of change in both his situation and his surroundings. A great academic he wasn’t to be, but a great governess-like figure? Well, that was attainable, almost prophetic.
The journey to Cambridge was to last almost three hours. At the train’s window he occupied himself by tracing the high and low folds of the green and yellow fields rolling past at high speed. He caught sight of old villages, followed the length of the marshes, picked out the square of each clock tower before locking onto a large estate in the middle of nowhere, with its large plot of land seen only by some longing passengers at a distance and zipping through the tracks. He was thinking, at that moment, of his beloved Jane Eyre delivering her letter, from Thornfield Hall all the way to Hay, on foot in the bitter cold, and wondered if he too would be tasked with such an errand, and who he might meet on his way.
After the inspector came to check his ticket, and once the train had passed through enough tunnels for him to lose Wi-Fi and his patience with loading reels, Bron opened up his book and spent the remainder of his journey sunk within it.
He’d brought himself up on anything Victorian, everything Georgian, and mourned like a loss his having not been born into one of these earlier times. This yearning for the past was a search for tradition, a lineage—anything to which he could attach himself. It had been easy to forget at St. Mary’s, with the daily sermons, the supper eaten by dim light, that what he was seeing in real time versus reading or watching were not one and the same.These forms of media all provided a soothing nostalgia for a life he’d never known, an escape from the loneliness of every day. And so he clutched at them tightly, pored over the words and shots of characters therein and lived vicariously through them, either by torchlight after dark, or a lit-up ghoul behind a gray-blue gleam of a screen.
The train pulled into his first stop. Bron closed the book and used the ticket as a bookmark—would make a point of holding onto it. This ticket served as a talisman, he thought. The very thing that had brought him to his future, linking him back to his past. A memento mori of sorts. Five syllables forming in the front of his mouth, though he didn’t sound them. The old Bron, he’d decided, was dead—had perished the second he’d stepped onto the train. And like Jane’s departure from Lowood School, he’d throw off the shackles of his past, and today he would be reborn! But what would that mean for him now, he thought, in that limbo space between Stevenage Station and Cambridge, where he turned outward of the platform, in search of his connecting Thameslink service? He’d need to think about that.
The Thameslink’s train carriage was only half full. He dragged his luggage through the tight aisle, passing a suited man drinking from a Styrofoam cup, and a family who’d taken over a four-seater, the table strewn with mobile phones and the cardboard wrappings of a meal deal. He picked a seat at the back of the carriage and closest to a window.
Soon after departure, he spotted a woman sitting in the seat adjacent to him. Bron had no doubt she was staring at him. Her hair was scraped back and hidden under a purple bucket hat, her body devoured by a long black coat, dazzling with brooches. It was a shock to feel, each time he lifted his nose from his book, the brown-eyed glance from her lightly wrinkled face. She held her newspaper wide open, severing head from body and appearing to float. But she wasn’t reading. It knotted his stomach, this stranger’s judgment. Anger and sadness rose within him. He’d made such an effort to look presentable, professional, maybe evenpretty. Put together for the first day of his new life. And for what? This stranger’s stare to bring him down.
When the train drew into Hitchin Station, the woman stood as if to leave, but instead she placed a many-ringed finger on his shoulder, which startled him.
“Would you like some tea?” she asked, bending to offer him the flask from her bag. He shook his head, softly declining. Smelling strongly of peppermint, she settled into the seat opposite before pouring a cup for herself. “I had a child about your age. He liked pretty things too.” She gestured to Bron’s pearls, the pride flag pin he wore on his lapel, and then to her own accessories, as if to say his taste resembled her own. “I’m Ndidi Flanders.”
