Free The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Brontë by Syrie James Page A

reading them. For months, I had forbidden myself the pleasure of speaking about him, even to Emily, the only person in my household who knew him.
    Oh! The folly of the human heart! If only we could choose, through prudence and discernment, the recipient of our admiration. It was different with corporal afflictions, I thought, like the blindness from which papa suffered; in such cases, we were sadly compelled to make all those who surrounded us sharers in our anguish. The troubles of the soul , however, should and must be kept hidden; I could not speak of my secret to any one, not even my family. They must believe that I felt—and had felt—only friendship for my master; that I merely held him in the highest esteem as my teacher, and nothing more.
    For Monsieur Héger was married, and had been married the entire time that I had known him in Brussels.

Four
    F or some time, I had been desirous of a change of scenery from Haworth, if only for a brief respite. My sisters convinced me that, with Anne’s return, there were now two of them to assist papa; and so I ought to avail myself of a long-standing invitation to visit my oldest and dearest friend, Ellen Nussey.
    I had known Ellen since I was fourteen years of age. We were faithful correspondents, exchanged frequent visits, and had taken several pleasant holidays together. Ellen currently lived with her mother and unmarried siblings at a house called Brookroyd in Birstall, about twenty miles distant. It was not, however, to Brookroyd that I was now directed, but to Hathersage: a small village in the Derbyshire Peak District near Sheffield, a place I had never seen. Ellen had been at Hathersage the past few months supervising alterations to the vicarage as a favour for her brother Henry, a serious-minded clergyman who had recently found himself a bride.
    On the second of July, I corded up my trunk and sent it with the carrier to the train station. Early the next morning, my sisters walked with me to Keighley to see me off on the first leg ofmy journey, to Leeds. With great excitement, I boarded the locomotive, wherein I was fortunate enough to secure a window seat. My own place of residence being so remote, and every field, hill, and valley so familiar, I always found great pleasure in looking out, as I travelled, at the many and varied scenes passing by: in imagining who might live in that quaint farmhouse, or what fascinating landscapes might lie on the other side of that pale, distant mountain.
    On this excursion, however, as I relaxed into my seat, jostled and lulled by the movement of the train, instead of focusing on the vistas spread out before me, I found myself staring at my own countenance in the window, which was reflected back to me against the shadowy backdrop of the misty day. I saw before me a mouth too wide, a nose too large, and a forehead too high, all set in a complexion that was too ruddy; the only redeeming feature, if there was one, were the soft brown eyes. As I stared, the stinging remark which Mr. Nicholls had recently made came back to me:
    The words, gentlemen, of an ugly old maid.
    The statement haunted me. I had been called ugly only once before, a long time ago; it had been, in fact, on the day I first met Ellen Nussey—the very friend I was travelling to see. I could laugh about the incident now; but then, it was no laughing matter. As I sat back in my seat, my thoughts drifted away to that other time and place, some fourteen years earlier: when I was a lonely new arrival at Roe Head boarding school—an establishment which was to for ever change my life in innumerable, unexpected ways.
     
    It was a stark, grey day in early January, 1831, when I first learned that I was to be sent away to Roe Head School. I was adamantly opposed to the idea of going to school at all—and no wonder. For years I had taken charge of my own studies, and worked at my own pace at home; the prospect of giving up that delicious freedom, and of being separated from my