The Sisters of Gondal is an unpublished story from a scrapped range featuring 1963's Kathleen Brady. It was not the first episode of that range, but being mostly standalone, is perfectly accessible -- so I have decided to publish it at long last.
At the start of the story, Kathleen is about to join the Fourth Doctor on their first adventure together, following several episodes with the Third Doctor in 1980s London. One section of the episode was lost due to the draft being mislaid, but the rest remains intact.
This ended up as something of a thematic precursor to Erasure, so I hope people can enjoy my (educational!) exploration of history's three most remarkable sisters.
- Janine
Prologue
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.
Kathleen was glad, as she stepped over the threshold of her kitchen and into the TARDIS. Glad, because the rain was battering so hard against the windows she was beginning to worry it would break through. Life in England often felt like an assault from the atmosphere.
She was glad because now, the climate had an off-switch. She wondered, then, whether the Doctor’s other companions had felt the same: whether the Susan Foremans, Ian and Barabra Chestertons, Liz Shaws and their inevitable successors had perceived that transition into what she could only describe as godhood. And if they hadn’t felt it, if she had been the only one… what did that say about her?
Dear God, help me, she thought to herself as the TARDIS doors closed behind her. I’ve barely been here a few seconds and I’m already in the self-doubt phase.
“I’m sorry it took me so long to get to you,” said the Doctor not-at-all sincerely as he flicked away at some switches on the console unit.
Kathleen left her reverie then, and realised that her eyes were struggling to adjust to the harsh white glow of the TARDIS. She had, after all, just left the greyest country on Earth.
“It’s not a problem,” she answered, though realised she wasn’t quite happy with that response. “Mind you, I’m sort of assuming how long it’s taken you, but you’re a time-traveller.”
“Well observed, Kathleen, incredibly well observed!”
“What I’m asking is, exactly how long has it been for you?”
“Well… in that last face of mine, I had quite a few more adventures, which to cut to the necessary information led to me meeting a rather remarkable young woman by the name of Sarah Jane Smith.”
“Not the journalist Sarah Jane Smith?”
The Doctor seemed to have two separate and simultaneous reactions to question. He raised an inquisitive eyebrow and stayed still, whilst excitedly beaming, running a hand through his thick mass of hair.
“You know of her?”
“I do read. So you travelled with a journalist? Not bad.”
“As I say, remarkable woman, very remarkable…” he squinted at the scanner like a child, eager to rush outside and play. Though as Kathleen observed, he hadn’t even taken off yet. “I lost my life after an encounter with a rather nasty bunch of arachnids, but Sarah Jane stayed with me until we were forced to part ways. That must have been about a week ago – I had to return to Gallifrey, you see, my home planet. I cleared things up there, and now I’m free again. My first thought was to come to you.”
Kathleen nodded. “And thank you very much for doing so.”
“I’ve had a very long time to think, Kathleen. I know we’ll have such fun together; I just know it.” He beamed again, and Kathleen found herself involuntarily doing the same. “So,” the Doctor started. “Where would you like to go?”
“I’d love to see another planet… but I’d also love to see the past. Hmm.” Kathleen placed her thumb and index finger on her chin thoughtfully. Everyone got asked the ‘If you could travel in time…’ question at some point during their lives, but none gave the most pragmatic answers for the very obvious reason that they’d never have to be applied. Kathleen regretted how little she’d actually thought about the topic. “Can we see the past? Something like, oh I don’t know, the Victorian era?”
“The Victorian era?” The Doctor dashed around the console to Kathleen’s side, and tapped in a set of coordinates. “Why, that’s easy. I am, after all, the finest navigator in the galaxy.” The ship jolted suddenly, and Kathleen gripped onto the slippery ridge of the console unit for dear life.
“But not the smoothest pilot!”
“I’m always open to constructive criticism!” Finally, just as Kathleen began to accept that her end was to come from not wearing a helmet indoors, the ship returned to its state of relative balance. “Still, there are worse pilots, I’m sure.” The Doctor examined the scanner again and grinned like a fool. Kathleen found herself bizarrely impressed that he’d actually managed to land the thing.
“The village of Haworth, 1839. I’ve been here before. Oh Kathleen, you’ll love it.”
As the doors to the TARDIS swung open, a white light flooded in, blinding Kathleen instantly. Within a few seconds, she had lost consciousness.
***
The woman opened her eyes.
She was greeted by the dim light of the cave, listened to her own sharp intake of breath, and perceived beyond those senses that something had changed.
“Choose me the cave most worthy choice to make a place for prayer,” she whispered, the words not quite her own. “And I will choose a praying voice, to pour our spirits there.”
She tested her voice. Not the quiet murmur which the cave reflected back at her, but the voice her captors tried to ignore: the shrill scream, as rehearsed once every decade, which haunted them all through the next.
“She is here… KATHLEEN BRADY HAS ARRIVED IN GONDAL!”
The Sisters of Gondal
Written by Janine Rivers
Kathleen opened her eyes. A blurred figure hung over her vision, colours surrounding him like a rainbow against the pale blue behind. She realised that she was lying down. As her vision adjusted, she also realised that the rainbow was, in fact, his scarf.
“Are you okay, Kathleen?” asked the Doctor, helping her up. “That was some sort of transmat.”
“Like the one that sent me back to you in the 1970s?” Kathleen massaged her temples. Her head felt light, too light.
“Perhaps. It’s hard to say for sure until we get a better idea of where we are. The transmat moved us outside the TARDIS and now I haven’t got the faintest idea where the TARDIS is. But I suspect we’re nearby. What do you make of the surroundings?”
Truthfully, she had barely taken them in. Kathleen tried again to make sense of them, and became suddenly, cripplingly aware of her own situation. She could have been absolutely anywhere – and now, it seemed as if she was nowhere. The spot they stood on had a view expanding miles, and the landscape dipped and rose again in elegant curves ahead of them. The expanse was endless, but Kathleen knew – no, felt – as if she were completely alone on it.
Just as she was beginning to appreciate the rare beauty of that sort of stillness, a chill ran over her, and she hid her hands inside the sleeves of her jumper, wishing she had entered the TARDIS wearing a coat.
“Moorlands,” she said, in response to the Doctor’s question. She couldn’t be sure this wasn’t a test – some sort of Time Travelling Adventurer Practical Examination now she’d demonstrated her understanding of the theory. Maybe he’d ditch her here if he didn’t like the answers. She continued. “Freezing cold, but the same climate as Earth, right? Or does the climate always feel the same to us?”
“Oh, Kathleen!” complained the Doctor. “I told you, I’m the best navigator you’ll ever have. This is Earth.”
“Are you sure?” Kathleen raised her hand to shield her eyes from the sunlight, and managed to discern the peaks of hills further out. They were capped with snow, and looking below her, she saw that the grass under her feet was not much further off, turned white and rigid by the frost. This was an Earth-like climate, but something about it felt different.
“I know this might not be the Earth that you’re used to, but this reminds me distinctly of parts of Yorkshire. Probably West Yorkshire. We must be right next to Haworth! That might even be where the TARDIS is. Oh, I’m very good.”
“You can’t just conclude that it’s Yorkshire from a quick inspection. You’re seeing what you want to see. We need to take a look around.”
The bickering pair began to descend, carefully, down the steep hill they had woken up on. As they made it further down, it occurred to both how poor their visibility actually was: the mist was so thick that details simply became shapes, and the landscape felt oddly characterless.
Gloomy. Under what was turning into a shower of sleet, walking through the mist, feeling a crunch with each step, Kathleen found herself turning to the bluer corners of the English language where her friends Gloomy, Melancholy, Miserable and Solemn helped her to articulate her feelings. She enjoyed the cold sometimes, loved Dublin’s biting city air on a December morning, and in its own way this was beautiful too. But there was something else here. The breeze itself was singing an elegy.
The Doctor and Kathleen carried on for a while longer, walking what felt like a mile, but was no doubt exaggerated by the intermittent pushes uphill, which only seemed to take them further into the wilderness. Barely any words were exchanged at this point, which Kathleen found unusual. It was unlike the Doctor to run out of excited ramblings, personal recollections, ridiculous trivia or any of his usual points of conversation. Kathleen was surprised that this incarnation, apparently the strangest and maddest of the lot, would be so inclined towards silence.
“Now,” the Doctor murmured eventually, much to Kathleen’s relief. “Would you look at that?”
He was pointing into the mist. Kathleen took a few steps forward and focused. Finally, she made it out. It was a spire of some kind, sharp and metallic with a flashing red beacon on the top, reaching a good thirty feet above the hilltops.
“Still think this is Victorian Yorkshire?” asked Kathleen, raising an eyebrow and loving the feeling of knowing the Doctor better than he knew himself.
“I’m not so sure about the Victorian era, but I’m holding out hope…”
As the Doctor’s voice trailed off, something moved through the mist, startling the Doctor and Kathleen. It got closer, and they realised that it was a person; a man, to be precise, of a short and round stature, dressed in the most archetypal and unbelievably overstated sense as a Victorian gentleman. Kathleen could virtually taste the Doctor’s smugness in the air.
“Pardon me,” began the man in a dialect thicker than the mist, “you two caught me quite unaware. Forgive me if I startled the pair of you.”
“I say,” whispered the Doctor, leaning closer to Kathleen. “That’s a Yorkshire accent.”
“Okay,” conceded Kathleen. “That does sound a bit familiar.”
“Now, my fine fellow,” exclaimed the Doctor, approaching the stranger, “I don’t suppose you would be able to tell me when and where I am? My companion and I have been wandering for quite some time, and we’ve been, how would you describe it Kathleen?”
“Outside of the world,” Kathleen improvised, hoping that had some colloquial relevance.
“To be quite frank,” continued the Doctor, “I have such little recollection of the last year of my life that I couldn’t even be sure what country I’m in.”
“Now come sir,” answered the man with a tip of his hat, “you must know your own homeland? Why, this is Gondal!”
“Gondal!” cried the Doctor, exuberantly, but within seconds his face had returned to its lost and bewildered expression. “And that’s an island, is it?”
“You push even the boundaries of my own beliefs, sir. Of course Gondal is an island! It is just north of Gaaldine, which I’m sure is where you must have come from, explaining why you are struggling to adjust to our own harsh conditions. I have often thought of visiting Gaaldine; it must be Eden’s isle, if ever there were one.”
“How wonderful, how wonderful! I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about!” Grinning, the Doctor shook the poor man’s hand with quite some vigour. “It’s a delight to meet you, sir, and I’m sure we’ll be very, very happy in Gondal. Gondal. Hmm…” He let go and took a step back, tipping his own hat to the man as he continued on his way.
“I was right,” said Kathleen as they carried on towards the spire. “It’s not Yorkshire.”
“It’s not Gondal either.”
“What?”
“I’ve just remembered where Gondal is. I’ve been before.”
“Enlighten me.”
“Gondal is an imaginary world. If we’ve really returned here, then we aren’t in Gondal at all – because we’ve left the material world altogether. We’ve entered the very fabric of the human mind.” The Doctor turned away, breaking off his monologue, distracted. “Oh look, a spaceship!”
Kathleen decided that this was definitely, without doubt, the most surreal day of her life.
The Doctor was right: the spire was part of what, at the foot of the hill, Kathleen could now identify to be something akin to a rocket: a smooth, towering and streamlined object, too sleek in appearance to be even from her own time. A child’s idea of space travel. The Doctor approached the door which, ludicrously, was wooden, ornate, and finished with its own doorknob, and entered the ship.
The inside of the ship was as perplexing as the outside. Either someone from the future had been aiming for retro and gone way too far, or some Victorian had an unhealthy obsession with anachronisms. The floors of the ship creaked. There were staircases – not ladders or even steep metal steps like you might settle for in a rocket, but staircases with bannisters and rugs, and things which were superficially lovely but utterly impractical. Next to portholes were painted portraits, one of which Kathleen was drawn to; a round-faced but not overweight man with thick lips, rough eyebrows, wide eyes and a very loose collar.
“Lord Byron,” the Doctor clarified, and Kathleen vaguely recalled an English class she’d sat through a very, very long time ago, where Mr Monahan had thrown the blackboard rubber at Lochlan Drake for passing a note around the class in Pig Latin.
As they ascended the staircase, Kathleen took the opportunity to get some actual answers out of the Doctor.
“So you say we’re in a fictional realm. How do you get to one of those?”
“Well, usually you’d have to enter the Land of Fiction, but I suspect that’s not where we are. You see, Kathleen, I’ve been to Gondal before, in a manner of speaking. Gondal is the product of two children’s minds, a world they created so that they could imagine that they were able to act freely, when in the real world they couldn’t.”
“Because they were children?”
“No, because they were women.” The Doctor let that comment hang in the air like a bad smell, then continued. “It’s what’s called a paracosm.”
“Must have been a rough childhood, then.”
The Doctor stopped on his step and spun around to face Kathleen.
“You know what a paracosm is?”
Kathleen raised her eyes. “Of course I know what a paracosm is. I’m a nurse; I’ve done my fair share of reading about mental health issues. Provided we have the same definition, it’s an imaginary world, which reflects the real world, created by children who have usually suffered a tragedy of some kind.”
“You make it sound like a delusion.”
“Not at all. They’re perfectly happy – they help children to make sense of what they’re feeling. It’s what authors do, isn’t it?”
The Doctor grinned again. Kathleen had obviously said something he liked the sound of a lot.
“Yes,” he said, resuming his steps now at thrice the speed. “Yes, it is what authors do – and these children would grow up to become two of the greatest authoresses of the nineteenth century.”
He reached the top of the staircase and pushed open the door to the room on the right, beckoning Kathleen to follow. She ducked to enter the room when she reached it, conscious of the shape of the rocket’s doom above her head. The room, thankfully, was the highest-ceilinged of the lot, with the rocket’s tip at its centre.
The room had a melancholy grey wallpaper and a large window, about three metres across and seventy centimetres high, watching over Gondal from its great height. In the centre of the room was a console unit, not unlike the TARDIS’s, but newer and smarter, operated by touch-screen and hologram.
Next to it, the creators of Gondal stared at their unexpected visitors.
There were three of them, not two as the Doctor had supposed. The first was very slight in stature and must have been under five feet; the second was much taller, with beautiful hair in tight curl and frizz, and eyes that never seemed to meet your own. The third was quite exceptional in appearance, with pencilled eyebrows, light brown hair which curled gracefully on her neck, and eyes which would not part from yours: those eyes were deep, perfect, and violet-blue.
“Make that three,” whispered the Doctor. “I didn’t realise they were all in on it. Kathleen Brady, may I introduce you to my…” he searched for the correct word. “My acquaintances: Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Bronte.”
Kathleen gasped. She hadn’t heard of Gondal. It had taken the Doctor to jog her memory of Lord Byron. But even she had heard of the Bronte sisters, and knew instinctively that they were no ordinary family.
The three sisters stared back at them, processing their arrival. Then, they reacted – each one in their own unexpected way.
The shortest one, whom the Doctor had introduced as Charlotte, continued to stare on, unmoved, as if nothing had happened at all.
Emily, the second, taller one who had looked away managed to finally look the Doctor in the eyes, at which point her own complexion turned pale and bitter. She dropped the handkerchief she was holding – or more like threw it to the floor – and rushed out of the room through the door at the other end.
Anne – the most beautiful and beguiling of the group, Kathleen thought – beamed, at odds with her sisters, and was about to approach the Doctor warmly when she turned back, figuring it was a better idea to go and comfort Emily instead, so left the room, leaving the Doctor and Kathleen with Charlotte.
Kathleen realised she had been holding her breath for quite some time. In fairness, she thought, that had been a very strange moment which she was unlikely to ever relive.
“Right,” she started, placing her hands on her hips. “Which one of you two is going to do the explaining?”
***
Emily was crouching on the floor when Anne found her, hand held over the glass of the small room’s porthole. She looked like a captive dreaming of the outside world.
“I know this is difficult,” whispered Anne, crouching down and reaching out to her sister. Emily did not turn around, but neither did she flinch when Anne placed a hand on her shoulder. “I know you did not want this – but Emily, the Doctor is one of your demons, and you must face him as your heroines face theirs.”
“You do not understand, Anne.” Now that Emily spoke, Anne could hear that she was crying. She felt a lump in her throat. “How can I face a man to whom I am nothing? I stare at the Doctor and he makes me feel powerless.”
“For once in your life, sister, listen to me. You – we – are powerful. More powerful than he will ever be. We created this world ourselves – just the two of us. I was eleven years old, I recall distinctly, and you Emily, even you had only thirteen years. If as children we made kingdoms with our minds, what boundaries could possibly stifle us in adulthood?”
“You are right, sister. You are always right.” Emily turned around, red-faced and teary-eyed, and motioned to wipe her face. She seemed consoled, but glared towards the door. “But know one thing – we are still prisoners of the world we were born in. In that world, he will always have power over us.”
“The Doctor?”
Emily chuckled. “Not the Doctor, no more than any other. No, just… Him. Every time. Always, him.”
***
Kathleen knew a little about the Brontes. Just a little. She had a bit of pub quiz trivia; somewhere up there, she was sure, she even remembered the dates they had died on, when the local pub had inadvisably let the English professor take over the quiz. On top of that she’d studied some English at school, even done a little bit of reading in her own time when she decided she should get into some higher-brow material, though she never found herself able to commit – as far as high-brow and challenging went, she was reliably happy with Jodi Picoult.
So, she’d read Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. It was very good, from what she recalled of it. She knew that Emily Bronte had written Wuthering Heights, though all she knew of Wuthering Heights was that Cathy was so co-o-o-old that Heathcliff ought to let her in-a-your-window. Okay, Kate Bush might have helped her along to that one. As for Anne, she knew very little, and was surprised when she found herself drawn to her more than either of the other two; to her old, old eyes, her calm demeanour, the fact that she almost didn’t belong as one of these siblings.
And yet, neither did the other two. Anne might have had a stillness which her sisters lacked, but Emily’s temper, passion and evasiveness far outweighed the little she had seen of the other two. Charlotte, on the other hand, felt as though she were missing out on a joke shared by her sisters. Anne and Emily were still gone, and Charlotte piloted the ship alone. She didn’t seem to mind.
She had piloted the ship well above the Earth. It had been a smooth take-off, smoother by far than the Doctor’s. Space was not what Kathleen had expected. The Earth was caked in a protective orange glow; sunset from above. But then, was this Earth? Absolutely nothing, Kathleen reminded herself, made sense here. Even from her limited experience of the Brontes, she was sure she’d have heard if they’d been the very first astronauts as well as a family of writers and governesses.
“So you’ve met before then?” Kathleen found herself asking, of all the questions in the world she could have chosen.
“As I said,” explained the Doctor. “Gondal is a paracosm, an imaginary world. I came across it when I visited the sisters as children. We had adventures together during that time, and they saw some of my world. As you can see, it rubbed off on them. Images of spaceships and star systems layered over the Gothic and even the mundane. I had no idea I would be so… impactful.” For the first time all day, he seemed genuinely dismal, gazing out of the window as he was.
“You can observe Gondal down there. A population of eleven million.” Charlotte pointed to an island in the North Pacific, straddling the equator. Kathleen was glad of her general knowledge, because she knew that Charlotte was right – that was not a real island. “The capital is Regina; I met you in the country. Just south of Gondal is Gaaldine, also populated by eleven million, which is of a far warmer and more tropical climate. Notwithstanding, Gaaldine is subject to Gondal.”
“Sign of the times,” added the Doctor, noting Kathleen’s reaction of surprise. “They constructed Gondal as a reflection of their own world – and these sisters lived at the very height of the British Empire.”
“Gondal is indeed a remarkable creation,” agreed Charlotte, “a reflection of our own world and I daresay of my sisters’ aspirations. However, I cannot take credit for it. Branwell – that is, my brother – and I, being as we were the oldest surviving siblings, relegated Emily and Anne within our own game. They consequently staged a rebellion – all in good nature, I can assure you – and established Gondal as their own realm. It is only in our adult years that I am now invited to partake in Gondal’s affairs; sadly, we very recently suffered the loss of Branwell, and now it is us three and us three alone who watch over our fantasies.”
“Who rules Gondal now?” asked the Doctor, like someone catching up on a television series. “Is it still that old Julius fellow?”
“Julius was assassinated. The usual political unrest, instigated no doubt by republican sentiments. His daughter, Augusta Geraldin Almeda, has now taken his place as ruler.”
“What’s she like?”
“A distinguished character. And if you’ll pardon my vulgarity, characterised by ways indistinguishable from her father’s.”
“I see.” The Doctor nodded.
“That’s lovely,” said Kathleen, interjecting before she lost her grip on reality altogether. “But I still don’t understand. Is or isn’t this a real place? Am I real?” She gestured down to her body. “Are these my real legs or am I just dreaming them up?” The Doctor gave no answer. She raised her voice. “Simple question, multiple choice. Is this real or this this imaginary?”
“Your friend makes the mistake of assuming the two are mutually exclusive,” said Charlotte to the Doctor, not even looking at Kathleen. Kathleen tried her hardest not to feel offended.
“What Charlotte’s trying to say,” explained the Doctor in a kinder tone, “is that something can be both real and imaginary. Imaginary spaces exist within the mind, but can be accessed through other means, and in being accessed become, in their own way, material places. We must have fallen into Gondal through a breach in space-time; that’s one way you can enter an imaginary space. The other is the ship we’re currently standing in, which is a form of Metaphysical Engine.”
“Metaphysical Engine,” repeated Kathleen, more for her own benefit than anybody else’s.
“Like a TARDIS. Except it travels to imaginary or fictional places. A TARDIS can, but with more difficulty; for a Metaphysical Engine, entering the mind is just like, well… changing into second gear. It usually interacts with belief systems which are powerful enough to generate a reality corresponding to them, but frequently throughout history authors have created whole worlds which can be accessed through one. When I last visited the Bronte sisters, I discovered that a Metaphysical Engine had fallen into their hands when it fell through a rift in times – as children they were travelling to Gondal in both an imaginary and a literal sense.”
“So you took it off them?”
“Took it off them?” The Doctor scoffed. “Kathleen, my job isn’t to confiscate children’s toys. I only demonstrated how to correctly and safely operate it, and made a couple of alterations to limit their control over it.”
“And look at her now, a better pilot than you!”
The Doctor glowered. “It’s a simpler mechanism.”
“So let me get this straight.” Charlotte looked up now, finally interested in what Kathleen had to say. Kathleen went on. “This is a space created by the minds of Emily and Anne, which also reflects their childhood trauma…”
“Loss of their mother,” the Doctor finished helpfully.
“…and the values of their society, and their own personal desires.”
“There’s probably a name for it,” added the Doctor again. “Geopsychi – no… Psyh… Psych… Psychogeography? Psychoimpressionali- no… psychochr… chr…” He gave up. “Remind me to make one up.”
“Right,” said Kathleen, loudly so that the Doctor knew to shut up. “As I was saying: fictional space, created by the two sisters, they invite Charlotte along to see it now they’re all adults, get here in a Metaphysical Engine which is sort of like a TARDIS and sort of not, and we’ve got here by inadvertently stepping on what you’d call, um, a metaphorical crack in the pavement, and now we’re escaping inside their Metaphysical Engine, right? Am I close?”
“Kathleen!” cried the Doctor. “That’s remarkable! You should really consider a career change, you know, I’ve known journalists less succinct!”
“So you’ve met before.” As Kathleen said that, Charlotte looked quickly back down at her screen. “And whatever you did, it upset Emily. A lot.”
“Ah. Yes.” The Doctor frowned. “I say, Charlotte, what are you getting up to over there?” Hurrying to change the subject, he walked over to Charlotte to see what was on the screen. “Not navigation at all – poetry! Oh, how terribly interesting.” He removed his hat and bent over to read the screen.
“Not my own work,” admitted Charlotte. “My sister, Emily, began writing it earlier today. She often writes here.”
“While on my lonely couch I lie,” read the Doctor at a murmur, “I seldom feel myself alone, for fancy fills my dreaming eye, with scenes and pleasures of its own. Then I may cherish at my breast, an infant's form beloved and fair, may smile and soothe it into rest, with all a Mother's fondest care. What a lovely poem! Isn’t that lovely, Kathleen, Charlotte?”
“It is adequate,” replied Charlotte. “With all due respect to a remarkable woman, my sister Anne was always the most unremarkable poet, and indeed writer, of the family. Her novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was, though a great effort, an entire mistake on her part.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t be so critical, you know it experienced quite a surge in popularity in Kathleen’s time, didn’t it, Kathleen?”
“Um, yes,” answered Kathleen, truthfully knowing very little about it but trusting the Doctor’s own account for some reason.
“All three of you are talented,” concluded the Doctor. “I would never dismiss your gifts for a moment, Charlotte, but don’t doubt your sister’s. Anne is every inch the visionary, every inch the revolutionary, and in every sense the poet that you or Emily are.”
Charlotte was about to say something else, but the door at the other end of the room opened abruptly, and in walked Emily and Anne. Emily seemed calmer now, though was careful to avoid eye contact with the Doctor (or anyone else, for that matter). Anne smiled, in a hopeless – and in light of the conversation which had just occurred, awkward – way to lighted the mood.
“Where now?” asked Anne.
“I’m still growing used to the controls of this ship,” answered Charlotte. “I think we’ve landed somewhere…”
She pulled what looked to Kathleen like a handbrake, and after the sound of an unhealthy chug-chug-chug, the room was filled with a bright white light…
***
[Lost section of story: set at Wildfell Hall, as featured in Anne Bronte’s novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
- The Doctor, Kathleen and the sisters become aware at this point that they are travelling to places within the Brontes’ own stories, through the Metaphysical Engine.
- In this section, Anne expresses her admiration for the Doctor, as the youngest and most impressionable sibling; she was the Amelia Pond of the group, if you like, with a childhood innocence as well as a real wisdom to her.
- Before they move on, Anne mourns the loss of her lover, William Weightman, who died of cholera. This is a chance for Kathleen to bond with Anne, having lost her own husband as a young woman.
- The Doctor also realises that there was a very low chance of them ending up in the locations of one of their own stories – there must be another key player, someone nudging everything into place, playing a very long game.]
***
The room was red: that much was clear. Everything in it, save the head of the bed and its piled-up mattresses and pillows, were red. Every kind of red. Mahogany, damask, crimson, fawn, mahogany; deep reds, soft reds, old reds, new reds, darkly polished reds, reds with blushes of pink, and reds that were just red. Everything was red, from the bed and its massive pillars, the curtains, the two large windows with their blinds drawn down to the drapery, the carpet, the table at the foot of the bed; and the walls, the wardrobe, the toilet-table, the chairs, red, red, red, more red, redder still…
“It’s very red,” observed the Doctor.
One thing stood out, and it wasn’t a white mattress or pillow: it was a little girl, curled up on the floor, sobbing. The girl was young, and plain-looking, and frankly a mess.
Kathleen knew the girl. She hadn’t known Wildfell Hall, hadn’t known Gondal, hadn’t even known the Brontes at first, but she knew this girl. Lots of people read Jane Eyre at some point in their lives, and many of them let it fade from their memory over time. But no one, no one, ever forgot the red-room.
“Jane Eyre,” whispered Kathleen, recognising the little girl instantly.
“Your greatest work,” murmured Emily, looking nervously over at Charlotte. “Except… I do not find myself fancying this for a night.”
“Jane was locked in the red-room by her Aunt Reed,” recalled Charlotte, her voice trembling. Charlotte Bronte was not the kind of person to tremble as she spoke, Kathleen thought. Whatever this place really signified, it was able to shake the unshakable. “Aunt Reed was repulsive, abusive, excluded the orphan Jane from her family… and it… I…”
“Charlotte,” said Anne, calmly. “Do not be afraid. We are with you.”
“Writing could be called the process of reflecting reality so that it is unrecognisable as reality, but representative, symbolic, of what that reality meant, yes?” Charlotte looked to her sisters for approval. “One is able to disguise the reality which is being depicted, and yet still convey important messages about that reality. It is the writer’s oldest defensive strategy: to protect himself from scrutiny by creating something which appears fictional, so that he can safely comment on what, to many, would be undesirable?”
Emily and Anne nodded.
“Then forgive my digression,” continued Charlotte, “but I fear I must now tell you the truth about the red-room, as neither of you will be able to recall, with the same awful intensity which I can, your spell at the Clergy Daughters’ School, following the death of our mother. The austerity we endured…” she shook her head, furrowing her brow. “No, no, not austerity, starvation. We were starved, neglected, ailed, and the deaths of our sisters Maria and Elizabeth were hastened by that starvation…”
“What are you saying?” asked Emily, failing to make the connection between the school and the red-room, between the real and the imagined.
“All your life,” said the Doctor, calmly, on Charlotte’s behalf. He was looking Charlotte in the eye. “In every story you ever told, it was there. The fear, the horror, of institutionalisation and everything it entailed: your fear of starvation, your fear of imprisonment…” he looked around the room, at the carpet so indistinguishable from blood, at the locked door. “It all came from there, didn’t it? You were never able to leave that memory behind.”
“I was out of myself,” said Charlotte, only half-aware that the Doctor had even been speaking. “Jane Eyre allowed me to look… back into myself.”
The Doctor sauntered over to the pale throne next to the bed, and sighed contentedly – and, Kathleen thought, inappropriately – as he settled down in it.
“And now you are imprisoned inside the red-room,” he mused. “Inside your own creation. Forced to confront not just a chapter of your novel, but a chapter of your life.”
Charlotte flinched, not at the Doctor’s words but at something else. Slowly, the others in the room began to see it too. Shadows were moving across the walls: not their own shadows, but something darker, wider, less human. Nothing was casting the shadows, or at least, nothing from within the room, and so they could not be expelled from their source.
“It’s fine,” said Charlotte, though everyone in the room knew that it wasn’t: the big sister, as always, was putting on a brave face. “It is all a matter of perspective. We are experiencing the red-room as it is narrated: from Jane’s point of view. These are nothing more than her demons. Nothing more than… my…”
“No.” The Doctor stood up, and paced about the room. “No, something isn’t right here, I can smell it; Kathleen, can you smell it?”
“I can’t smell anything, except a bit of damp.”
“It’s not you I need anyway, it’s…” he waggled his finger around for some time, almost in synchrony with the shadows. “It’s you.” It rested on Anne.
“Me?”
“When I mentioned that this place was a prison, I saw the look on your face. You were terrified. You hated the idea of confinement, even more than Charlotte did. I wonder why that is…”
“I do not hate the idea of confinement, Doctor. This is different.”
“Yes, it is. Of course it is! You aren’t just confined; you’re confined within one of Charlotte’s works. Works that will always be better than your own, am I right? Because you will never be as good as Charlotte Bronte, never as beloved, never as-”
“Doctor!” interrupted Kathleen. “Maybe come off the arsehole pills now?”
The Doctor laughed. “Don’t you see? Oh, I’m so glad I’m not confined inside one of your brains, now that would be oppressive. No, no, no, Anne is every bit as good as her sister, her works are every bit as worthy…” he turned to Anne now. “Their works will always be equal, and sometimes when the sun is shining and the Earth is on her side, she will even be… better. But you don’t think that, do you, Anne? You don’t believe it. Well, believe me. This is not Charlotte’s hell at all – it’s yours: being confined within her paradigm. I’m here to give you the good news. You can leave it.”
“It’s not her hell,” repeated Anne. “It’s mine.” As she spoke those words, the girl – Jane Eyre, as they had called her – stood up, stopped crying, and turned around. Her face was dry and utterly pale, and it was not the face of any orphan child: it was the face of Charlotte Bronte. When her sisters turned around in confusion, the original Charlotte had gone.
“Can I go?” asked the Jane-Charlotte. “Can I leave now?”
The room fell silent. The Doctor nudged Anne. “She needs your permission.”
“You may leave,” answered Anne, quivering. Slowly, Charlotte approached the door, and upon touching it, it swung open. Charlotte stepped out, and was gone.
“I don’t understand.”
“Don’t worry.” Kathleen gave Anne a pat on the back, before giving the Doctor a look. “I don’t think any of us understand.”
“I think Emily understands,” countered the Doctor. Emily was, again, looking away. “Charlotte was never real – not here. Gondal was, after all, your paracosm – Emily and Anne Bronte, the rebellious little sisters who made their own world. You fictionalised Charlotte within that world, eventually forgot that she was a work of fiction and believed her to be your real sister. In actual fact, she symbolised something far worse. She was your insecurities, Anne. A little orphan child you were carrying around with you, whose shadow you could never escape from.” He smiled. “The shadows have gone now.”
“We can leave too?” asked Anne.
“I think we’re about to,” said the Doctor, and slowly, the room began to get lighter. Kathleen looked over in that last moment at the great looking-glass situated between the muffled windows, and found herself drawn to it. She took a step forward and gazed into her reflection.
But it wasn’t her reflection.
In that cold, dark visionary hollow, another woman gazed back at her. A terribly old, terribly angry woman, with crooked teeth and eyes that glistened. Before Kathleen could react, the light filled the room, and the woman was gone.
***
The mood back inside the Metaphysical Engine was solemn. Emily and Anne sat together at the side of the room, and Kathleen made sure to keep her distance, gazing out of the window at deep space not because she found it beautiful (though, she admitted, it was), but because she knew that the sisters needed space. Space to think things through. Space to come to terms with something so strange, so outside of their comprehension.
The Doctor, meanwhile, was the elephant in the room; except an elephant would have made considerably less noise, showed far more discretion, and damaged far less things. He darted around the room like he was looking for something whilst trying to remember what it was he was looking for, examining the ship to try and understand it better. All Metaphysical Engines are different, he said to Kathleen earlier. If I understand the ship a bit better… I might be able to understand who is controlling it. Kathleen decided not to mention the old woman in the mirror.
“Do you remember when Charlotte discovered my notebooks?” asked Emily. “Back in eighteen-forty... eighteen-forty-five, it must have been?”
“You were furious,” chuckled Anne. “You disliked anyone invading your privacy to any degree, and Charlotte, in uncovering your poetry, had more or less committed the ultimate violation.”
“And yet,” recalled Emily, “she refused to back down. She insisted that we publish the poems. I refused outright, but she pressed on, and then you arrived accompanied with your own manuscripts and the admission that you, too, had been writing poems, and I suppose I was just moved; moved that all three of us, together, had undertaken on this secret enterprise unaware of the others’ activities. They were just musings, of course, scraps; but when we joined together, I should say, we were a force to be reckoned with.”
Anne smiled sadly. “I only wish Charlotte had seen in my poems what she saw in yours. I tried so hard, Emily; I tried harder than you both, sometimes, not for fear of rejection as Acton Bell, but as Anne Bronte. I cared little for the reader on the street. I wanted my sister to turn the pages of one of my own novels and nod, approving, and say: ‘Yes, this is my flesh and blood, and I recognise her pursuits as a writer just as I recognise my own, just as I recognise Emily’s’. But I was always second-rate.”
“You resent her?”
“Resent?” Anne shook her head. “Resent is the wrong word entirely. I loved my sister. I know that having taught at Brussels with her you must have been closer to her than I was, but I still loved her, still admired her. She was a sister, but she was a mother and a friend too. It is no wonder I so frequently sought her approval. I was proud to be able to call her one of my own kind.”
“Sorry to interrupt!” called the Doctor, though it didn’t sound like he was. “I think I understand the Metaphysical Engine now. We need to make one more visit – just one. I’m afraid it won’t be very pleasant at all. But after that, if it’s successful, we can finally get you all home.”
***
They were in a large, airy sitting room, with a small, empty kitchen and parlour. The floor was of what would have once been smooth, white stone, but was now chipped and blackened. Dust clogged the worktops. The high-backed chairs were falling apart where they had been left in the shade. A huge fireplace rested, unlit, at one end of the room; at the other, a vast oak dresser, full of pewter dishes, silver jugs and tankards, towered row upon row until it touched the ceiling.
The Doctor craned his head to look up, and disapproved of the paraphernalia the owners of the house had left on display: old guns, a couple of old horse-pistols, and three gaudily painted canisters which were lined up next to the candles on the windowsill.
“This could be anywhere,” observed Anne, sighing. “Doctor, how much longer must we be subjected to this torment?”
“As long as God wills it,” answered Emily, and turned to her sister. Kathleen noticed, then, that Emily did look people in the eye: or rather, someone. Her sister seemed the exception to every rule she had about social conduct. “I recognise this place,” Emily continued, “for no reason other than that I created it. This is Wuthering Heights.”
Kathleen shivered. Then she heard a Kate Bush song playing on a loop in her head.
“Ah yes, Wuthering Heights, and seemingly abandoned for some time,” began the Doctor, and Emily turned to face the door, infuriated by the sound of his voice. “I read that once. Remarkable book, Emily, though incredibly hard to fathom, I found. Have you ever read it, Kathleen?”
“No, but I’ve heard the s-”
“-anyway, anyway, that was a long time ago, a very long time ago. A very depressing read, I found. What was that bit about, the other house, the-”
“Be quiet!” yelled Emily, at a volume which no one in the room, not even Anne, had anticipated. Still she fixated on the door; still she would not look him in the eye. “I stood for your godless humour and your repulsive arrogance when I was conscious of passing through your world, Doctor, but you will not affect such a display when you are in mine.”
“And why do you think we’re here, Emily? Anne’s had her closure already. Perhaps it’s time for you to confront your own monsters.” The way the Doctor spoke… he hadn’t quite done anything to offend her or any of the others, and yet Kathleen found herself becoming just a little irate at him. Repulsive arrogance. Perhaps Emily had a point.
And then Emily turned, and looked straight at Kathleen.
“You are a friend of the Doctor? A travelling companion of his?”
“Yes,” Kathleen replied calmly. “Yes, I am.”
“Then either he has not yet finished indoctrinating you in his ways, or you are as morally pernicious and deceitful as he!”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Will you tell her, Doctor?” Still, her eyes were fixed on Kathleen. “Or shall I?”
“Yes, Doctor,” murmured Kathleen. “I think you’d better speak up about now.”
The Doctor walked up to the fireplace, ran his finger along the mantelpiece and, observing the dust it collected, took a deep breath and began to speak.
“I visited the siblings before. All three of them: Charlotte, Anne, Emily and… Branwell.” He bowed his head. “Branwell was always a troubled young man, but I think I helped, for a while. You see, Kathleen, when I discovered that a Metaphysical Engine had fallen into their hands, well, I… I couldn’t resist. We went on adventures together, all four of us. Those siblings were so au fait with literature I felt they were entitled to see the worlds they’d invested themselves in as children – why not let them have their own Pilgrim’s Progress, their own Paradise Lost? It was the least they deserved. I visited them on and off through their childhood, and into early adulthood, and then Branwell…” The Doctor had stopped, distracted. He was staring intently at the ashes in the fireplace, what was left of something burnt so long ago. The next words he spoke were heavy, almost regretful. “Branwell fell ill.”
“I never asked the Doctor to save him,” said Emily. “I never asked him for more time because I understood as well as any man or woman does that death is inevitable, whether or not one can travel through time. I understood that my brother had to die.” And at last, after what felt like hours of exhaustion, she stared at the Doctor: a terrible, terrible stare that wounded even him. “But he didn’t have to die in pain.”
“I don’t understand,” said Kathleen. She realised she sounded like a poor listener. In actual fact, she had understood the narrative perfectly: what she didn’t understand was why the Doctor, of all people had done what Emily was implying.
“As I suspected,” said Emily. “You are a good woman; and you are not yet acquainted with his wicked ways.”
“Now I’d never have had you down as a wicked man,” started Kathleen, “but you’d better have a bloody good explanation for this.”
“It was not just Branwell’s lifespan that was a fixed point in time, Kathleen,” the Doctor flustered. “It was his death, the very nature of it, the historical account as it were. Branwell couldn’t have an easy death, just as Emily…” He stopped there, and that was fine, because Kathleen knew what he was about to say. “The nineteenth century. There was no such thing as an easy death.”
“The Doctor had the means to ease his pain,” Emily explained, “but he refused. He said it was not his place to intervene in the affairs of mortals, and that by making of us his companions, he had made a mistake. He left. I never saw him again.”
“Doctor?” asked Kathleen.
“It’s not my place,” the Doctor repeated, as if it meant anything at all. “I walk in eternity.”
“And I do not!” cried Emily, tears falling from her cheeks. “I am not an immortal, I am not invincible, and every wound winds up fatal in the end. He was my brother and it was I who sat by him in those final days while you sauntered through eternity. I thought we had friendship once, yet looking back, you were scarcely more than an ally in a common cause.”
“I’m not apologising for the laws of time, Emily!” shouted the Doctor, and how Kathleen wanted to shout back. But she didn’t. She took a step forward, between the Doctor and Emily, and kept her voice low as she spoke to him.
“I’d hit you, Doctor. I’d hit your right across the face in front of these women right now, and I’d enjoy it. Except I won’t, because I won’t stoop to your level. I won’t be a nurse who hurts people. You might have been enforcing the laws of time, but what you did… you weren’t being a doctor. You shame our profession; you shame our name. We’re meant to make it better, whenever it’s within our power. I am do disappointed in you.”
The Doctor had no words. Anne smiled to herself, sensing that Kathleen was a mother; wishing, again to herself, that she had been her mother, and that she had lived to see them grow up.
“If he won’t apologise then I will,” said Kathleen, and placed a hand on the side of Emily’s arm. “I am so sorry for what the Doctor put you through. You’re a good woman. You didn’t deserve that.”
Emily laughed softly. “Good is too strong an adjective to describe my disposition, Kathleen. I am nothing more than a woman trying to get by in the world, as any woman does. I worked no miracles in my time, I can assure you. After my years teaching I stayed at home – I cooked, ironed, cleaned; I practised the piano in what little time I had left.”
“My daughter plays the piano,” reflected Kathleen. “And do you know what? That is good. All those women trying to get by in your world were good, in their own way. I don’t think it’s too strong a word at all. And though I haven’t read Wuthering Heights, I’m willing to bet you were a great author too.”
“Now there is something I have the Doctor to thank for. It was my relationship with him which inspired the narrative of the two houses, each so diametrically opposed to the other that it denies its existence. And Heathcliff, as demonic and depraved as he may seem, was at least a victim in his own way: in moral terms, he is only a shadow of the monster which the Doctor represents.” She let Kathleen process that, and then continued. “Shortly after I parted ways with the Doctor, I dreamt that he returned: he asked me where I wished to travel and I told him that I wanted to see Branwell in heaven, to see that he was free of pain and fear, and was a man now apart from his demons. I dreamt that the Doctor took me there but heaven did not seem to be my home, and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to Earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out onto the moors, where I woke sobbing for joy. Perhaps Blake was right. What if Hell is Heaven, and Heaven is Hell? What would we do then, Kathleen?”
“If my experience has taught me anything, it’s that there’s no such thing as either,” replied Kathleen. “Heaven always comes at a price, and Hell isn’t so bad once you’re out of it.”
The Doctor was bored now. He walked up to the door and stepped out. A gust blew in, and realising that there was no shelter from it, the three women stepped outside and joined him.
The moorlands were similar to those in Gondal, almost indistinguishable; but the mist was thinner, and the air was darker, beckoning the night forward. The winds continued to whip around them, and Kathleen realised, as she tried to keep her hair neat, why they called this place Wuthering Heights.
Turning around, she noticed that the house was built to survive the winds, with narrow windows deeply set in the wall, and corners defended with large jutting stones. She also noticed a carving above the door, among many others, with the date 1500 and the name Harteton Earnshaw just visible. There were so many mysteries to the house, but anyone concerned in them must have been dead by now. It was a strange prospect, to imagine fictions aging with their creators.
“I love the moors,” said Emily, simply. “They are sad places, but there is a beauty in their solemnity. There is beauty, too, in their chaos: how, in the absence of order, the creatures of the moor love to run this way and that, for no reason other than that they can. Other than my sister…” she took Anne’s hand. “I never had friends. I just had them, in this fallen world: the fledging and the rabbit, in the places where no man ever ventured.”
They all looked ahead, and as they did, noticed something impossible: a window. Not on the side of the building, not on the floor, but a scientifically impossible window, suspended in the air above them; and through it, the same light which had carried them to Wuthering Heights, and all those places before.
“We’ve done it,” said the Doctor. “We’ve made it through the trail. Now we can finally return home.”
Anne reached out her hand, the most desperate of all, and took the first step. As she climbed through the window, she became a part of the light, until she had disappeared altogether. Kathleen stepped forward next.
“Let me in-a-your window, oh-oh-oh…” she sung, unable to resist.
“Kathleen,” complained the Doctor. “There’s a time and a place.”
“Sorry.”
She stepped through.
***
Home.
The sisters finally let go of each other’s hands, and shared a smile. For once, there was nothing to regret, nothing to get angry about, nothing even to question.
They were back in Haworth. They looked down the cobbled streets as people passed by, unaware that their fellow villagers had just journeyed across fictional landscapes, unaware that a woman from their future was gazing at them.
They got a wave from a man as he entered the shop opposite.
“That’s John Greenwood,” Anne explained, for Kathleen’s benefit. “He runs the local stationery store. Without meaning to boast, we are for obvious reasons his best customers.”
“What a charming village,” marvelled Kathleen, nodding. Finally, somewhere worth seeing: not quite the Victorian England she’d had in mind, but in many ways, better.
“I said I’d get us to Haworth eventually,” muttered the Doctor.
“So the TARDIS is around here somewhere?”
“Oh, I should think so. It’ll turn up.” He seemed casual about that, Kathleen thought; too casual. If she’d lost her time machine, she was sure that she would be searching every passing stationery store until she found it.
“It is a tiny village,” Anne elaborated. “The only two businesses are the stationery store and the pharmacy, which… used to supply Branwell.” Even back home, that was a difficult topic. She pushed on. “It grew in size around the time of our arrival; my best guess would be that there is a population of approximately three thousand. Our father was appointed perpetual curate of the church some decades ago. To call our conditions austere would be an understatement, but our father always made sure that what the house lacked in warmth, it made up for in imagination; our shelves were lined with all manner of tale from those of Sir Walter Scott to the poems of Lord Byron.”
“It’s a village of death,” re-joined the Doctor, and Kathleen found herself wanting to hit him again. “I warned them of it last time – there’s a reason barely anyone in Haworth makes it out of their twenties: the lack of sewage system, the faecal matter and the decomposing bodies contaminating the well water, the scarce food supplies… of course, I couldn’t stay and help.”
“Let me guess,” asked Kathleen, her patience beginning to run thin, “the laws of time?”
“Yes. And don’t talk to me in that tone of voice, this is your first adventure with me. Could you maybe save your criticisms for when you have some actual experience?”
“How d-”
“Please!” complained Emily. “You two will start a commotion on the street at the rate you are going. No one in Haworth, I am sure, would wish to see two strangers – and strange you are – quarrelling like this.”
“Sorry,” said Kathleen. She stepped away from the Doctor, thinking it best to avoid him, and then it hit her.
The pub quiz.
Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and Branwell Bronte.
The dates.
She gasped. She put her hand to her mouth. She had been so stupid, and now, every hope they had ever committed to was lost. She, alone, was going to have to tear this whole world apart in front of them.
Branwell Bronte died in 1848. She remembered learning that for the pub quiz. Looking up the date, she had come across an article on his death. It caught her attention, because a week later, Emily Bronte also developed tuberculosis. She died. Anne, so deeply affected by the death, died of consumption sometime after. The dates escaped Kathleen, but those precise details didn’t matter, only the one fact of importance: Charlotte Bronte was the last surviving sibling.
And they’d talked about her in the past tense.
“Anne,” she said, trying to control her breathing. Her whole head was spinning. “Earlier, when we were talking about Charlotte, you spoke about her in the past tense. Like she wasn’t around anymore.”
“I… did.” Anne frowned. “That is because she died, a very long time ago. Is that a problem?”
“I hardly think it appropriate to consign talk of the dearly departed to the present tense,” added Emily.
“Doctor.” Kathleen nudged her companion. He thought about it. And then he saw it too.
“Oh, no.” He turned to face Kathleen.
“Is this what I think it is?”
“I’m rather afraid it is.”
“Deception is no desirable trait,” said Emily, which Kathleen supposed was Bronte for “spit it out, then”.
“I’m so sorry,” said Kathleen. “But you’re dead.”
Silence. Then…
“What?”
“No.”
“We can’t…”
“But surely…”
“This is…”
It was inexplicable, Kathleen thought, how despite language’s evolution over time, those basic responses to the delivery of grave news stayed the same over time: those simplest of words, those shortest and sharpest of unfinished phrases. She longed to say something else, something that would help them, assure them, but nothing she said would be true.
“I… remember.” Emily closed her eyes, Kathleen imagined, to stop herself from keeling over altogether. “I died because I refused the help offered to me. Doctor, you left me in a state so bitter and betrayed that I began to associate you, and your title, with the whole of your profession. I would not have any Doctor near me, for fear that they would poison me just as you poisoned the well of my existence. When I finally realised my mistake… it was too late, and I perished. You, in plainest terms, Doctor, are my murderer.”
“I’m sorry,” said the Doctor, and this time it seemed like he was. “I truly am.”
“I remember,” said Anne. “And I remember my own, too. They told me that I only had days left. Looking back, I cannot begin to comprehend how I dealt with such news, and yet… I did. I had no horror of death; I quietly resigned myself to the prospect after I understood its inevitability. I just wished that God would spare me so that I could do some good in the world before I left it.”
“You did,” Kathleen promised. “You did so much good for so many, and I don’t know why it’s taken me all those years to see it…”
“I returned to Scarborough before the end,” Anne continued. “Charlotte was with me, and I could sense a fear greater than my own inside her. I told her to take courage. And then… I closed my eyes. Beyond that, I have no recollection at all. I’m…” the great author stumbled over the word. “Dead.”
“You’re not even dead,” said the Doctor. “You’re not the Bronte sisters at all.”
Oh God. Kathleen felt a lump in her throat. I was right.
“Emily and Anne Bronte created Gondal as children, and they carried on playing that game, carried on imagining that world, until the day they died. And they left behind impressions. Impressions of each other, the two people they knew best in the world. Charlotte Bronte, as remembered by you both.” He turned to Anne. “Anne Bronte, as remembered by Emily Bronte.” Then to Emily. “And Emily Bronte, as remembered by Anne Bronte.”
“But we… we are… real.” Emily stared down at her hands. But were they her hands, Kathleen wondered? Were they even hands at all?
“Of course you’re real!” exclaimed the Doctor. “Even impressions, even memories, are real!”
“But we are not memories! We are people! Living, breathing, thinking women. We think, we are aware, are we not, Anne?” Her sister nodded. “We are not the vestiges of the dead. We are the living.”
“Because that’s how you remembered each other: alive. You managed to create sentient reconstructions of the people you loved. Beautiful, poetic… far beyond anything a god could ever even imagine accomplishing. So in a way, you are Emily and Anne Bronte, because you knew each other better than anyone could ever know themselves.”
“Doctor,” interjected Kathleen. “Not to ruin the moment, but if they’re not real, why are we back in Haworth? In the real world? Wouldn’t they just fade.”
“Kathleen,” the Doctor murmured in a low voice, so that only she could hear. “We aren’t in the real world.” He raised his voice again, probably realising that the other two may as well be allowed in on the truth now they knew this much. “Emily and Anne also remembered Haworth, every last detail of it. Which means that this is your memory too. Whoever organised this, they’re keeping us here, refusing to let us leave the paracosm until they’ve finished their twisted little game.”
“How do you know that anyone is keeping us here?” questioned Kathleen. “What if there isn’t a big villain after all?”
“I know,” began the Doctor, “because she’s just invited us in.”
He pointed to an opening in the ground, an opening that, judging by Emily and Anne’s responses, did not belong. It was a large, rocky opening. In fact, it could only be described as a cave.
I hate being wrong sometimes, thought Kathleen.
***
It was just a cave. ‘Just’ being the word, because it was, in the most definitive sense, a cave: cramped, rocky and in a perfect womb shape, like a naturalistic artist had been told “Draw a cave” or someone had typed “Cave background” into Google. It was so archetypal that it almost didn’t feel real.
Then there was the woman. The woman from the mirror. She was chained from either side, facing the wall of the cave and unable to move, even to turn her head. Just occasionally, one of the group would walk past the entrance and the light would catch them, casting their shadow onto the wall in front of the woman.
“Plato’s cave,” the Doctor tiredly recited. “The oldest philosophical parable there is: the slaves who are chained up and can only see a shadow of the real world. It’s meant to be a metaphor for the world. And yet in this case, he rather missed the point – because what else is a cave, but a space for the women of the world? A secret, sacred place for the lonely and the lost, the sacrificed and the abandoned. This is where the mother of the tribe would wait patiently, or where the witch would be sacrificed, or where the priestess would consult her gods. The man leaves the cave every day, and whoever she is, she has to stay. Over time she forgets where she is, because the cave becomes the only reality; and she forgets how she got there, and she forgets who she is, and in the dim light of the cave she can’t even search for answers. She doesn’t understand what she sees. How could she? Locked up here…”
“Thank you for the analogy,” mocked Kathleen. “But how about you tell us where we actually are?”
“That is where we are, Kathleen!” the Doctor growled. “Don’t you understand? This is all a mental construct. Nothing here is real, nothing here is literal. You are walking among symbols. Everything I have just said, that is the only reality. Cast aside your logic, Kathleen Brady – you won’t be needing it anymore.”
“Okay.” The Doctor was chipping away at her. Testing her. She tried not to let it get to her. “So you’re saying Emily and Anne created this as… what? A manifestation of their anxieties as women?”
“Exactly. Well, you’re getting close.”
“Charlotte pursued this obsession,” began Anne. “This… vision, I suppose it could be described as. A woman trapped, enclosed in a prison constructed by men, always trying to escape, to complete her pilgrimage in the process. I needn’t tell you – you all saw the red-room earlier.”
“You had a similar vision yourself,” replied the Doctor. “Perhaps the two of you together, influenced by Charlotte, created this place. After all, it’s hard, isn’t it, being a lady? Lots of feelings, nowhere to put them.”
“One minute, you are a member of the family, more beloved even than an aunt or an uncle,” recalled Emily. “The next, you are an inconvenience; replaceable. That was only as a governess. In all aspects of life, we walked invisible until we transgressed; then we were stopped from walking on any further at all.”
“You all felt like captives,” agreed the Doctor. “Especially you two, the ones who challenged the status quo. But none of you could conceive an escape route. I’m not sure what this woman is.” The Doctor spoke of the prisoner like she wasn’t there at all. “Perhaps she’s your creation. Or perhaps she’s something greater.”
Right again, thought Kathleen. The Doctor kept taking the words out of her mouth, but she let him have the honour of explaining each time.
“Perhaps,” continued the Doctor, “this woman was created by all of you. All the great female authors, from the invisible to the persecuted to their successors. From the first woman who dared to draw on the cave wall to the working mother in her London apartment. This woman is mother to them all: The Great Mother, putting together the fragments of their stories the best she can, but always imprisoned, always only ever shown a shadow of freedom. But she’s real. You made her real, all of you. Sometimes she went mad. Sometimes she grew vengeful, planned escapes which always failed. Sometimes she dreamed, imagined, a better world. Other times she sat back and resigned herself to her fate.”
“But hang on a minute.” Kathleen paced around a bit, worried where her own brain was taking her. “If we’re here, this is way beyond the Brontes. You were right about this being a long game – but this long – wow! Because here’s the thing, Doctor. I’ve been quietly working this out as we’ve gone along, and I think Emily and Anne have too.” The two sisters nodded. “Firstly, Branwell was excluded from this paracosm, and I’ve been wondering why. Secondly, you told me at the start about paracosms. I had a paracosm when I was a little girl – just after I lost my father, around the time we moved to Dublin, I escaped inside my own little world. I even... God help me, I even dreamed I was having adventures with you. So what if that gave me access to this place?”
“Kathleen,” the Doctor cut in, “where exactly are you going with this?”
“Sorry. It’s taking me a while to piece this all together – it would anyone. My question is this: if this world is built by the women of history, in their dreams and their writings and their paracosms… then what are you doing here?”
The Doctor was silent.
“Unless…”
“Kathleen?” murmured Anne. She didn’t like the look on the Doctor’s face, or the complete lack of one: cold, emotionless, shell-like.
“When we first arrived here, you showed off by telling me about paracosms,” explained Kathleen, still talking at the Doctor. “But I already knew about them from my studies on mental health. I figured out that the Bronte sisters had died and left impressions way before you said they had. Any other information you gave me can be accounted for by the Brontes: any historical knowledge, anything you knew about their lives, was projected by them. In other words… you haven’t told us anything we didn’t already know. You’ve spent this whole time looking clever when all you’ve really been doing is explaining the obvious.” She paused, shivered as a breeze passed over them. “You’re not the Doctor at all, are you? You’re just an impression.”
The Doctor didn’t answer, but his eyes, his deep, dark, swirling abysses of eyes, they answered for him.
“A bit of this, and a bit of that. My childhood memories of the Dr. Who of the movies. My memories of the fun, all-knowing man with a plan who loves his mysteries. Anne’s memory of the enigmatic stranger. Emily’s memory of the monster with godlike powers. And all of our fears combined. That’s not to mention the literary stereotypes.”
“Quite,” said Emily, gaining confidence. Now she knew she was speaking to a figment, she had gained a lot of confidence. “A flawed but charismatic figure with passion, rebellion, and arrogance. A ‘troubled’ man, prone towards self-destruction, who purports to despise society and hierarchy even though he epitomises it. We all wrote about them – about you. Sometimes we even idealised you.”
“No wonder we haven’t been able to escape,” continued Kathleen. “You’ve been preventing us. This whole journey has been about the sisters confronting their demons, their anxieties and their fears. But it wasn’t the Great Mother planning this at all – she’s just another victim. It was you. We can’t leave…”
“…until we’ve confronted him,” finished Anne, a look of horror on her face.
“I’ll make it easier for you then, shall I?” The Doctor pulled out a gun. Before Kathleen could react, before either of the sisters could run, he held it out, offering it to Kathleen. “Take it,” he urged, but with more emphasis on menace than generosity. “You know what you have to do. You have to kill me. Kill me, release the Great Mother, and then you’ll all be free. But can you do it? Can any of you?” He smiled. All of a sudden, his smile wasn’t reassuring at all. It sent a chill through their bones. “I know who has to do it. Which means you all know, too.”
Kathleen’s hands hesitated over the gun. Then, she took it, walked to the other side of the room, and passed it to Emily.
“How does it work?” ask Emily.
“With any luck, you shouldn’t need to be told,” explained Kathleen. “I know how to use one; you should be able to draw on my memories.”
“Oh.” Emily held the gun up with staggering confidence. Anne’s mouth twitched in shock and discomfort. “It seems I can. Though I confess to not fully understanding what it in fact does.”
“It kills him,” said Kathleen, bluntly. “Or in this case, it kills the idea of him. It releases the Great Mother. I’m sorry, I know it isn’t nice, but it has to be you. I think it was the strength of your hatred that brought him here.”
“Oh, how I have dreamed of this,” hissed Emily. “The nights I have lay awake, exhausted with my hatred. Such passions drain; kill, even. I had to take that passion to the grave with me: like Branwell, you caused me pain, Doctor. I hate you. I hate you.” A tear fell from her eye as her finger played with the trigger. “Tell me, sister… why am I so changed?”
“Emily,” breathed Anne. “You don’t have to do this.”
“I want to!” bellowed Emily. “And I always have! You ruined my life, Doctor; you showed me a glimpse of the great beyond and then you left me, abandoned me, to toil and suffer like all the other mortals you abandon! I want to kill you. Oh, I have dreamed of killing you. I have wished you dead. And yet…”
She closed her eyes. Concentrated. She knew what she had to do. When she opened them, as she had hoped, the gun was gone.
“…I will not.”
“Emily,” urged Kathleen. “I’m sorry, but you have to…”
“No.” Anne shook her head, and smiled. “I think she does not.”
“I was prepared,” said Emily. “I was prepared. But killing is not my way. The man may wish to slay his dragon, but I create rather than destroy. I made my choice. I chose not to kill. That is who I am, and freely I chose to be myself.”
When Kathleen looked at the Doctor, she realised Emily was right. His face was white with terror. Something had gone wrong.
“You weren’t meant to,” he spluttered. “You should have followed my order. You should have done as I suggested…”
“My sister wrote her own fate,” said Anne proudly. “That is how her demons are expelled.”
Behind the Doctor, something moved in the shadows. The Great Mother was standing up. Her chains were, slowly, turning to dust. She made one last pull, and as she screamed a terrible, primal scream, they ripped from the ground and faded altogether.
The Great Mother was free.
“No promised Heaven, these wild Desires could all of half fulfil!” she cried, in a voice croaky from silence. “No threatened Hell, which quenchless fire Subdue this quenchless will!”
Anne stepped back, fumbling for her crucifix. “What have we done?”
“We’ve done what needed to be done,” said Kathleen. “It’s not always pretty.”
The Great Mother pulled a box of matches from her pocket. Emily and Anne stepped forward to intervene, but Kathleen held them back. What needs to be done, she assured herself.
The old woman struck a match, and held it out. Suddenly, the shadows began to disperse from the cavern in the light of the flame, and the rocks around their feet began to shift.
“What is happening?” cried Emily.
“Change,” answered the Great Mother, in a voice that was young, renewed. “And not a moment too soon.”
***
What the hell have I just been through? Kathleen asked herself. She had woken up in the TARDIS, and there was no other way of phrasing it.
And indeed, What the hell have I just been through? was an entirely reasonable question for a woman to ask, if that woman had just been introduced to three historical authors, blasted into space, locked in a fictional location, arrived in a pretend Yorkshire village full of dead people, and stood in a cave as it burnt around her with only a dark fictional representation of her best friend, and three impressions of dead authors, for company. But how to ask him? Just how to broach the subject with the Doctor? There was, of course, always the obvious.
“What the hell have I just been through?” Kathleen asked the Doctor.
“I’m ever so sorry Kathleen,” said the Doctor, and Kathleen breathed a sigh of relief. This Doctor was different. His apologies were sincere and from the heart, without the sense that there was either another motive, or that he was guilty of some transgression himself. “It was my fault for trying to show off; the TARDIS didn’t like it. In trying to land in Haworth, I got her caught in a spatio-temporal weakness, a sort of pothole, and due to your own paracosm still being active, you ended up trapped in the Brontes’.”
Kathleen raised an eyebrow. She hadn’t mentioned anything about the Brontes. “You… saw?”
“Only a little, when I was attempting to revive you. Just a minor psychic transference. Most of the details were lost in translation, though from what I saw, I was impressed! You’re more than capable of replacing my dear Sarah Jane, Kathleen. In fact, I do believe she’d be proud of her successor.”
“And the Brontes?” asked Kathleen. “What happened to them? Or, you know, their duplicates.”
The Doctor gave a dramatic shrug. “Who knows? The dullest form of rationality would say that they were destroyed along with the paracosm, but it’s entirely possible that freeing the Great Mother also freed them, and that they survived, manifesting in the dreams and visions of all the women writers of the future, finding their part in that legacy…” He smiled, stared into the distance, and Kathleen found herself startled that the Doctor, of all people, was such a dreamer.
“So she was real, then? The Great Mother?”
“That’s the problem with oppression,” replied the Doctor, seeming to somewhat evade the question. “When so many people are bullied into submission for so long – there’s all that pent-up anger, and nowhere for it to go; all those unfinished stories, and no one for them to finish. Everything man attempted to suppress in women was only projected at a far deeper, subconscious level onto the image of… well, a mother. Now if those feelings count for anything, if those experiences carry meaning, if ever a woman picked up a pen and knew that she was embarking on not just a job, but an adventure, then… yes. The Great Mother was real.”
“Okay.” Kathleen nodded and thought that one over. The Doctor had caught her off-guard with the honesty and passion of his answer. “So, everything in the TARDIS at the start, that was real?”
“Correct.”
“But everything after I saw the light, that wasn’t? When I woke up on the moors and you helped me up, that wasn’t… you?”
“Correct again.”
“And I understand, everything that followed up until I woke here was an illusion too, except…” Kathleen rested her face in her hands. She wanted to say she was tired, but… no, that couldn’t be it. Actually, having just been dreaming, she was very awake. “I’m struggling, Doctor, to understand one thing. Because what Emily told me, what she remembered, that was real, wasn’t it? Those were her memories?”
“Yes.” The Doctor bowed his head, and Kathleen shivered. Was the man in the cave about to come back?
“So you really did it, then? You really walked out and left her to care for her brother, alone?” Her voice lowered a semitone. “You left him in pain?”
“Initially, yes. The Time Lords had been following me, you see – they were complaining, as they always did, about my interference in history. When Emily asked for my help, I appealed to them, but they reminded me of my duties. So I… I went back to her, and I told her their story: that I walked in eternity, that it wasn’t my place to interfere! You know, that old mantra I do so love to rattle off. As I strolled away I realised I couldn’t leave it like that – I couldn’t just let them suffer. So I went forward in time to collect a suitable painkiller. Not a remedy –” he waggled his finger. “A painkiller. Something to make it a little more bearable.”
“Then why didn’t she get it? What changed?”
When he spoke again, his voice seemed to rumble, like there was a lump in his throat. “I was unaware that the Time Lords were one step ahead. They tampered with the controls of my TARDIS. When I returned, he’d already perished. I figured, at that stage, it would be better to leave altogether than to confront the sisters. I never meant to cause harm!” He was talking to someone else now as his eyes became lost somewhere on the other side of the room. “I only tried to do my bit, to ease the pain.”
Unsure of what would really count as meaningful to a Time Lord, Kathleen placed a comforting arm around the Doctor, and rubbed his shoulder supportively.
“I take back what I said in that world. You’re a good doctor. Turns out you’re just a very shoddy pilot.”
He chuckled softly. “Yes, I suppose I am. Where shall I aim to take you now, then?”
Kathleen glanced to the door. “Are we actually in Haworth, or did you make that bit up too?”
“No!” the Doctor cried defensively. “I mean, yes, we are in Haworth!” Then he added, in a mutter: “Possibly a hundred years later…”
“Perfect – no accidentally meeting yourself. Fancy a walk? We could get afternoon tea or something, if they do it. You eat scones, right?”
“Scones?” exclaimed the Doctor. “Yes, I do eat scones. Scones in the twentieth century, and then…?”
“Then an alien planet,” decided Kathleen. “My first alien planet. Not an imaginary alien planet, not the traumatic mental landscape of a kiddie alien, a real alien planet. Think you can manage that?”
The Doctor tapped his nose. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Well,” laughed Kathleen, “we’ll stick to the scones for now.”
***
Haworth, a hundred years earlier
Charlotte and Anne sat at the table, their eyes both directed at the window, out at the same view of the village they always woke up to. Emily, meanwhile, was peeling potatoes at the worktop as she routinely did.
“I had a memory of our mother, earlier,” said Anne out of nowhere. “Sitting at this table and recounting a story to us. I was able to remember none of the story’s content, but it was the first recollection I experienced of her before her illness struck. Sometimes I wish I had known her better.”
“She was a remarkable woman; and I wish you had witnessed her at her most remarkable,” replied Charlotte, after a moment’s contemplation. “Full of vigour but always tender; a hard a worker as you, Emily, and as strong a fighter as…” Her eyes wandered and finally settled in the last place Anne had expected. “As strong a fighter as you, Anne. You so often remind me of her, carrying with you a vaulted calm of which even I am envious. You are conscious of your responsibilities and flourish as you fulfil them. You are an asset to this family, sister.”
Emily, even though she wasn’t a participant in the conversation, had stopped peeling potatoes and turned to observe the utterly unexpected declaration of love. She found herself smiling, a rarity when she observed conversations with other people.
“Now,” said Charlotte, “I feel a drive for creativity. If you will excuse me…”
She stood up and left.
“Our sister never ceases to surprise,” said Anne, once she was out of the room. “I hope I shall never forget this exchange.”
“Your thoughts echo my own,” agreed Emily. “Sometimes, I think you are more myself than I am.”
***
Charlotte sat down at her desk with a smile on her face. She tried not to indulge her sisters in sentiment too often, but sometimes it was necessary. Sometimes the love she felt, however deep and unbreakable it was, was not obvious to those to whom it was directed. Sometimes it needed expressing.
As this thought crossed her mind, and rain began to batter the windows, the words she had to write became suddenly, perfectly clear to her.
And so she began:
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day…
At the start of the story, Kathleen is about to join the Fourth Doctor on their first adventure together, following several episodes with the Third Doctor in 1980s London. One section of the episode was lost due to the draft being mislaid, but the rest remains intact.
This ended up as something of a thematic precursor to Erasure, so I hope people can enjoy my (educational!) exploration of history's three most remarkable sisters.
- Janine
Prologue
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.
Kathleen was glad, as she stepped over the threshold of her kitchen and into the TARDIS. Glad, because the rain was battering so hard against the windows she was beginning to worry it would break through. Life in England often felt like an assault from the atmosphere.
She was glad because now, the climate had an off-switch. She wondered, then, whether the Doctor’s other companions had felt the same: whether the Susan Foremans, Ian and Barabra Chestertons, Liz Shaws and their inevitable successors had perceived that transition into what she could only describe as godhood. And if they hadn’t felt it, if she had been the only one… what did that say about her?
Dear God, help me, she thought to herself as the TARDIS doors closed behind her. I’ve barely been here a few seconds and I’m already in the self-doubt phase.
“I’m sorry it took me so long to get to you,” said the Doctor not-at-all sincerely as he flicked away at some switches on the console unit.
Kathleen left her reverie then, and realised that her eyes were struggling to adjust to the harsh white glow of the TARDIS. She had, after all, just left the greyest country on Earth.
“It’s not a problem,” she answered, though realised she wasn’t quite happy with that response. “Mind you, I’m sort of assuming how long it’s taken you, but you’re a time-traveller.”
“Well observed, Kathleen, incredibly well observed!”
“What I’m asking is, exactly how long has it been for you?”
“Well… in that last face of mine, I had quite a few more adventures, which to cut to the necessary information led to me meeting a rather remarkable young woman by the name of Sarah Jane Smith.”
“Not the journalist Sarah Jane Smith?”
The Doctor seemed to have two separate and simultaneous reactions to question. He raised an inquisitive eyebrow and stayed still, whilst excitedly beaming, running a hand through his thick mass of hair.
“You know of her?”
“I do read. So you travelled with a journalist? Not bad.”
“As I say, remarkable woman, very remarkable…” he squinted at the scanner like a child, eager to rush outside and play. Though as Kathleen observed, he hadn’t even taken off yet. “I lost my life after an encounter with a rather nasty bunch of arachnids, but Sarah Jane stayed with me until we were forced to part ways. That must have been about a week ago – I had to return to Gallifrey, you see, my home planet. I cleared things up there, and now I’m free again. My first thought was to come to you.”
Kathleen nodded. “And thank you very much for doing so.”
“I’ve had a very long time to think, Kathleen. I know we’ll have such fun together; I just know it.” He beamed again, and Kathleen found herself involuntarily doing the same. “So,” the Doctor started. “Where would you like to go?”
“I’d love to see another planet… but I’d also love to see the past. Hmm.” Kathleen placed her thumb and index finger on her chin thoughtfully. Everyone got asked the ‘If you could travel in time…’ question at some point during their lives, but none gave the most pragmatic answers for the very obvious reason that they’d never have to be applied. Kathleen regretted how little she’d actually thought about the topic. “Can we see the past? Something like, oh I don’t know, the Victorian era?”
“The Victorian era?” The Doctor dashed around the console to Kathleen’s side, and tapped in a set of coordinates. “Why, that’s easy. I am, after all, the finest navigator in the galaxy.” The ship jolted suddenly, and Kathleen gripped onto the slippery ridge of the console unit for dear life.
“But not the smoothest pilot!”
“I’m always open to constructive criticism!” Finally, just as Kathleen began to accept that her end was to come from not wearing a helmet indoors, the ship returned to its state of relative balance. “Still, there are worse pilots, I’m sure.” The Doctor examined the scanner again and grinned like a fool. Kathleen found herself bizarrely impressed that he’d actually managed to land the thing.
“The village of Haworth, 1839. I’ve been here before. Oh Kathleen, you’ll love it.”
As the doors to the TARDIS swung open, a white light flooded in, blinding Kathleen instantly. Within a few seconds, she had lost consciousness.
***
The woman opened her eyes.
She was greeted by the dim light of the cave, listened to her own sharp intake of breath, and perceived beyond those senses that something had changed.
“Choose me the cave most worthy choice to make a place for prayer,” she whispered, the words not quite her own. “And I will choose a praying voice, to pour our spirits there.”
She tested her voice. Not the quiet murmur which the cave reflected back at her, but the voice her captors tried to ignore: the shrill scream, as rehearsed once every decade, which haunted them all through the next.
“She is here… KATHLEEN BRADY HAS ARRIVED IN GONDAL!”
The Sisters of Gondal
Written by Janine Rivers
Kathleen opened her eyes. A blurred figure hung over her vision, colours surrounding him like a rainbow against the pale blue behind. She realised that she was lying down. As her vision adjusted, she also realised that the rainbow was, in fact, his scarf.
“Are you okay, Kathleen?” asked the Doctor, helping her up. “That was some sort of transmat.”
“Like the one that sent me back to you in the 1970s?” Kathleen massaged her temples. Her head felt light, too light.
“Perhaps. It’s hard to say for sure until we get a better idea of where we are. The transmat moved us outside the TARDIS and now I haven’t got the faintest idea where the TARDIS is. But I suspect we’re nearby. What do you make of the surroundings?”
Truthfully, she had barely taken them in. Kathleen tried again to make sense of them, and became suddenly, cripplingly aware of her own situation. She could have been absolutely anywhere – and now, it seemed as if she was nowhere. The spot they stood on had a view expanding miles, and the landscape dipped and rose again in elegant curves ahead of them. The expanse was endless, but Kathleen knew – no, felt – as if she were completely alone on it.
Just as she was beginning to appreciate the rare beauty of that sort of stillness, a chill ran over her, and she hid her hands inside the sleeves of her jumper, wishing she had entered the TARDIS wearing a coat.
“Moorlands,” she said, in response to the Doctor’s question. She couldn’t be sure this wasn’t a test – some sort of Time Travelling Adventurer Practical Examination now she’d demonstrated her understanding of the theory. Maybe he’d ditch her here if he didn’t like the answers. She continued. “Freezing cold, but the same climate as Earth, right? Or does the climate always feel the same to us?”
“Oh, Kathleen!” complained the Doctor. “I told you, I’m the best navigator you’ll ever have. This is Earth.”
“Are you sure?” Kathleen raised her hand to shield her eyes from the sunlight, and managed to discern the peaks of hills further out. They were capped with snow, and looking below her, she saw that the grass under her feet was not much further off, turned white and rigid by the frost. This was an Earth-like climate, but something about it felt different.
“I know this might not be the Earth that you’re used to, but this reminds me distinctly of parts of Yorkshire. Probably West Yorkshire. We must be right next to Haworth! That might even be where the TARDIS is. Oh, I’m very good.”
“You can’t just conclude that it’s Yorkshire from a quick inspection. You’re seeing what you want to see. We need to take a look around.”
The bickering pair began to descend, carefully, down the steep hill they had woken up on. As they made it further down, it occurred to both how poor their visibility actually was: the mist was so thick that details simply became shapes, and the landscape felt oddly characterless.
Gloomy. Under what was turning into a shower of sleet, walking through the mist, feeling a crunch with each step, Kathleen found herself turning to the bluer corners of the English language where her friends Gloomy, Melancholy, Miserable and Solemn helped her to articulate her feelings. She enjoyed the cold sometimes, loved Dublin’s biting city air on a December morning, and in its own way this was beautiful too. But there was something else here. The breeze itself was singing an elegy.
The Doctor and Kathleen carried on for a while longer, walking what felt like a mile, but was no doubt exaggerated by the intermittent pushes uphill, which only seemed to take them further into the wilderness. Barely any words were exchanged at this point, which Kathleen found unusual. It was unlike the Doctor to run out of excited ramblings, personal recollections, ridiculous trivia or any of his usual points of conversation. Kathleen was surprised that this incarnation, apparently the strangest and maddest of the lot, would be so inclined towards silence.
“Now,” the Doctor murmured eventually, much to Kathleen’s relief. “Would you look at that?”
He was pointing into the mist. Kathleen took a few steps forward and focused. Finally, she made it out. It was a spire of some kind, sharp and metallic with a flashing red beacon on the top, reaching a good thirty feet above the hilltops.
“Still think this is Victorian Yorkshire?” asked Kathleen, raising an eyebrow and loving the feeling of knowing the Doctor better than he knew himself.
“I’m not so sure about the Victorian era, but I’m holding out hope…”
As the Doctor’s voice trailed off, something moved through the mist, startling the Doctor and Kathleen. It got closer, and they realised that it was a person; a man, to be precise, of a short and round stature, dressed in the most archetypal and unbelievably overstated sense as a Victorian gentleman. Kathleen could virtually taste the Doctor’s smugness in the air.
“Pardon me,” began the man in a dialect thicker than the mist, “you two caught me quite unaware. Forgive me if I startled the pair of you.”
“I say,” whispered the Doctor, leaning closer to Kathleen. “That’s a Yorkshire accent.”
“Okay,” conceded Kathleen. “That does sound a bit familiar.”
“Now, my fine fellow,” exclaimed the Doctor, approaching the stranger, “I don’t suppose you would be able to tell me when and where I am? My companion and I have been wandering for quite some time, and we’ve been, how would you describe it Kathleen?”
“Outside of the world,” Kathleen improvised, hoping that had some colloquial relevance.
“To be quite frank,” continued the Doctor, “I have such little recollection of the last year of my life that I couldn’t even be sure what country I’m in.”
“Now come sir,” answered the man with a tip of his hat, “you must know your own homeland? Why, this is Gondal!”
“Gondal!” cried the Doctor, exuberantly, but within seconds his face had returned to its lost and bewildered expression. “And that’s an island, is it?”
“You push even the boundaries of my own beliefs, sir. Of course Gondal is an island! It is just north of Gaaldine, which I’m sure is where you must have come from, explaining why you are struggling to adjust to our own harsh conditions. I have often thought of visiting Gaaldine; it must be Eden’s isle, if ever there were one.”
“How wonderful, how wonderful! I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about!” Grinning, the Doctor shook the poor man’s hand with quite some vigour. “It’s a delight to meet you, sir, and I’m sure we’ll be very, very happy in Gondal. Gondal. Hmm…” He let go and took a step back, tipping his own hat to the man as he continued on his way.
“I was right,” said Kathleen as they carried on towards the spire. “It’s not Yorkshire.”
“It’s not Gondal either.”
“What?”
“I’ve just remembered where Gondal is. I’ve been before.”
“Enlighten me.”
“Gondal is an imaginary world. If we’ve really returned here, then we aren’t in Gondal at all – because we’ve left the material world altogether. We’ve entered the very fabric of the human mind.” The Doctor turned away, breaking off his monologue, distracted. “Oh look, a spaceship!”
Kathleen decided that this was definitely, without doubt, the most surreal day of her life.
The Doctor was right: the spire was part of what, at the foot of the hill, Kathleen could now identify to be something akin to a rocket: a smooth, towering and streamlined object, too sleek in appearance to be even from her own time. A child’s idea of space travel. The Doctor approached the door which, ludicrously, was wooden, ornate, and finished with its own doorknob, and entered the ship.
The inside of the ship was as perplexing as the outside. Either someone from the future had been aiming for retro and gone way too far, or some Victorian had an unhealthy obsession with anachronisms. The floors of the ship creaked. There were staircases – not ladders or even steep metal steps like you might settle for in a rocket, but staircases with bannisters and rugs, and things which were superficially lovely but utterly impractical. Next to portholes were painted portraits, one of which Kathleen was drawn to; a round-faced but not overweight man with thick lips, rough eyebrows, wide eyes and a very loose collar.
“Lord Byron,” the Doctor clarified, and Kathleen vaguely recalled an English class she’d sat through a very, very long time ago, where Mr Monahan had thrown the blackboard rubber at Lochlan Drake for passing a note around the class in Pig Latin.
As they ascended the staircase, Kathleen took the opportunity to get some actual answers out of the Doctor.
“So you say we’re in a fictional realm. How do you get to one of those?”
“Well, usually you’d have to enter the Land of Fiction, but I suspect that’s not where we are. You see, Kathleen, I’ve been to Gondal before, in a manner of speaking. Gondal is the product of two children’s minds, a world they created so that they could imagine that they were able to act freely, when in the real world they couldn’t.”
“Because they were children?”
“No, because they were women.” The Doctor let that comment hang in the air like a bad smell, then continued. “It’s what’s called a paracosm.”
“Must have been a rough childhood, then.”
The Doctor stopped on his step and spun around to face Kathleen.
“You know what a paracosm is?”
Kathleen raised her eyes. “Of course I know what a paracosm is. I’m a nurse; I’ve done my fair share of reading about mental health issues. Provided we have the same definition, it’s an imaginary world, which reflects the real world, created by children who have usually suffered a tragedy of some kind.”
“You make it sound like a delusion.”
“Not at all. They’re perfectly happy – they help children to make sense of what they’re feeling. It’s what authors do, isn’t it?”
The Doctor grinned again. Kathleen had obviously said something he liked the sound of a lot.
“Yes,” he said, resuming his steps now at thrice the speed. “Yes, it is what authors do – and these children would grow up to become two of the greatest authoresses of the nineteenth century.”
He reached the top of the staircase and pushed open the door to the room on the right, beckoning Kathleen to follow. She ducked to enter the room when she reached it, conscious of the shape of the rocket’s doom above her head. The room, thankfully, was the highest-ceilinged of the lot, with the rocket’s tip at its centre.
The room had a melancholy grey wallpaper and a large window, about three metres across and seventy centimetres high, watching over Gondal from its great height. In the centre of the room was a console unit, not unlike the TARDIS’s, but newer and smarter, operated by touch-screen and hologram.
Next to it, the creators of Gondal stared at their unexpected visitors.
There were three of them, not two as the Doctor had supposed. The first was very slight in stature and must have been under five feet; the second was much taller, with beautiful hair in tight curl and frizz, and eyes that never seemed to meet your own. The third was quite exceptional in appearance, with pencilled eyebrows, light brown hair which curled gracefully on her neck, and eyes which would not part from yours: those eyes were deep, perfect, and violet-blue.
“Make that three,” whispered the Doctor. “I didn’t realise they were all in on it. Kathleen Brady, may I introduce you to my…” he searched for the correct word. “My acquaintances: Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Bronte.”
Kathleen gasped. She hadn’t heard of Gondal. It had taken the Doctor to jog her memory of Lord Byron. But even she had heard of the Bronte sisters, and knew instinctively that they were no ordinary family.
The three sisters stared back at them, processing their arrival. Then, they reacted – each one in their own unexpected way.
The shortest one, whom the Doctor had introduced as Charlotte, continued to stare on, unmoved, as if nothing had happened at all.
Emily, the second, taller one who had looked away managed to finally look the Doctor in the eyes, at which point her own complexion turned pale and bitter. She dropped the handkerchief she was holding – or more like threw it to the floor – and rushed out of the room through the door at the other end.
Anne – the most beautiful and beguiling of the group, Kathleen thought – beamed, at odds with her sisters, and was about to approach the Doctor warmly when she turned back, figuring it was a better idea to go and comfort Emily instead, so left the room, leaving the Doctor and Kathleen with Charlotte.
Kathleen realised she had been holding her breath for quite some time. In fairness, she thought, that had been a very strange moment which she was unlikely to ever relive.
“Right,” she started, placing her hands on her hips. “Which one of you two is going to do the explaining?”
***
Emily was crouching on the floor when Anne found her, hand held over the glass of the small room’s porthole. She looked like a captive dreaming of the outside world.
“I know this is difficult,” whispered Anne, crouching down and reaching out to her sister. Emily did not turn around, but neither did she flinch when Anne placed a hand on her shoulder. “I know you did not want this – but Emily, the Doctor is one of your demons, and you must face him as your heroines face theirs.”
“You do not understand, Anne.” Now that Emily spoke, Anne could hear that she was crying. She felt a lump in her throat. “How can I face a man to whom I am nothing? I stare at the Doctor and he makes me feel powerless.”
“For once in your life, sister, listen to me. You – we – are powerful. More powerful than he will ever be. We created this world ourselves – just the two of us. I was eleven years old, I recall distinctly, and you Emily, even you had only thirteen years. If as children we made kingdoms with our minds, what boundaries could possibly stifle us in adulthood?”
“You are right, sister. You are always right.” Emily turned around, red-faced and teary-eyed, and motioned to wipe her face. She seemed consoled, but glared towards the door. “But know one thing – we are still prisoners of the world we were born in. In that world, he will always have power over us.”
“The Doctor?”
Emily chuckled. “Not the Doctor, no more than any other. No, just… Him. Every time. Always, him.”
***
Kathleen knew a little about the Brontes. Just a little. She had a bit of pub quiz trivia; somewhere up there, she was sure, she even remembered the dates they had died on, when the local pub had inadvisably let the English professor take over the quiz. On top of that she’d studied some English at school, even done a little bit of reading in her own time when she decided she should get into some higher-brow material, though she never found herself able to commit – as far as high-brow and challenging went, she was reliably happy with Jodi Picoult.
So, she’d read Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. It was very good, from what she recalled of it. She knew that Emily Bronte had written Wuthering Heights, though all she knew of Wuthering Heights was that Cathy was so co-o-o-old that Heathcliff ought to let her in-a-your-window. Okay, Kate Bush might have helped her along to that one. As for Anne, she knew very little, and was surprised when she found herself drawn to her more than either of the other two; to her old, old eyes, her calm demeanour, the fact that she almost didn’t belong as one of these siblings.
And yet, neither did the other two. Anne might have had a stillness which her sisters lacked, but Emily’s temper, passion and evasiveness far outweighed the little she had seen of the other two. Charlotte, on the other hand, felt as though she were missing out on a joke shared by her sisters. Anne and Emily were still gone, and Charlotte piloted the ship alone. She didn’t seem to mind.
She had piloted the ship well above the Earth. It had been a smooth take-off, smoother by far than the Doctor’s. Space was not what Kathleen had expected. The Earth was caked in a protective orange glow; sunset from above. But then, was this Earth? Absolutely nothing, Kathleen reminded herself, made sense here. Even from her limited experience of the Brontes, she was sure she’d have heard if they’d been the very first astronauts as well as a family of writers and governesses.
“So you’ve met before then?” Kathleen found herself asking, of all the questions in the world she could have chosen.
“As I said,” explained the Doctor. “Gondal is a paracosm, an imaginary world. I came across it when I visited the sisters as children. We had adventures together during that time, and they saw some of my world. As you can see, it rubbed off on them. Images of spaceships and star systems layered over the Gothic and even the mundane. I had no idea I would be so… impactful.” For the first time all day, he seemed genuinely dismal, gazing out of the window as he was.
“You can observe Gondal down there. A population of eleven million.” Charlotte pointed to an island in the North Pacific, straddling the equator. Kathleen was glad of her general knowledge, because she knew that Charlotte was right – that was not a real island. “The capital is Regina; I met you in the country. Just south of Gondal is Gaaldine, also populated by eleven million, which is of a far warmer and more tropical climate. Notwithstanding, Gaaldine is subject to Gondal.”
“Sign of the times,” added the Doctor, noting Kathleen’s reaction of surprise. “They constructed Gondal as a reflection of their own world – and these sisters lived at the very height of the British Empire.”
“Gondal is indeed a remarkable creation,” agreed Charlotte, “a reflection of our own world and I daresay of my sisters’ aspirations. However, I cannot take credit for it. Branwell – that is, my brother – and I, being as we were the oldest surviving siblings, relegated Emily and Anne within our own game. They consequently staged a rebellion – all in good nature, I can assure you – and established Gondal as their own realm. It is only in our adult years that I am now invited to partake in Gondal’s affairs; sadly, we very recently suffered the loss of Branwell, and now it is us three and us three alone who watch over our fantasies.”
“Who rules Gondal now?” asked the Doctor, like someone catching up on a television series. “Is it still that old Julius fellow?”
“Julius was assassinated. The usual political unrest, instigated no doubt by republican sentiments. His daughter, Augusta Geraldin Almeda, has now taken his place as ruler.”
“What’s she like?”
“A distinguished character. And if you’ll pardon my vulgarity, characterised by ways indistinguishable from her father’s.”
“I see.” The Doctor nodded.
“That’s lovely,” said Kathleen, interjecting before she lost her grip on reality altogether. “But I still don’t understand. Is or isn’t this a real place? Am I real?” She gestured down to her body. “Are these my real legs or am I just dreaming them up?” The Doctor gave no answer. She raised her voice. “Simple question, multiple choice. Is this real or this this imaginary?”
“Your friend makes the mistake of assuming the two are mutually exclusive,” said Charlotte to the Doctor, not even looking at Kathleen. Kathleen tried her hardest not to feel offended.
“What Charlotte’s trying to say,” explained the Doctor in a kinder tone, “is that something can be both real and imaginary. Imaginary spaces exist within the mind, but can be accessed through other means, and in being accessed become, in their own way, material places. We must have fallen into Gondal through a breach in space-time; that’s one way you can enter an imaginary space. The other is the ship we’re currently standing in, which is a form of Metaphysical Engine.”
“Metaphysical Engine,” repeated Kathleen, more for her own benefit than anybody else’s.
“Like a TARDIS. Except it travels to imaginary or fictional places. A TARDIS can, but with more difficulty; for a Metaphysical Engine, entering the mind is just like, well… changing into second gear. It usually interacts with belief systems which are powerful enough to generate a reality corresponding to them, but frequently throughout history authors have created whole worlds which can be accessed through one. When I last visited the Bronte sisters, I discovered that a Metaphysical Engine had fallen into their hands when it fell through a rift in times – as children they were travelling to Gondal in both an imaginary and a literal sense.”
“So you took it off them?”
“Took it off them?” The Doctor scoffed. “Kathleen, my job isn’t to confiscate children’s toys. I only demonstrated how to correctly and safely operate it, and made a couple of alterations to limit their control over it.”
“And look at her now, a better pilot than you!”
The Doctor glowered. “It’s a simpler mechanism.”
“So let me get this straight.” Charlotte looked up now, finally interested in what Kathleen had to say. Kathleen went on. “This is a space created by the minds of Emily and Anne, which also reflects their childhood trauma…”
“Loss of their mother,” the Doctor finished helpfully.
“…and the values of their society, and their own personal desires.”
“There’s probably a name for it,” added the Doctor again. “Geopsychi – no… Psyh… Psych… Psychogeography? Psychoimpressionali- no… psychochr… chr…” He gave up. “Remind me to make one up.”
“Right,” said Kathleen, loudly so that the Doctor knew to shut up. “As I was saying: fictional space, created by the two sisters, they invite Charlotte along to see it now they’re all adults, get here in a Metaphysical Engine which is sort of like a TARDIS and sort of not, and we’ve got here by inadvertently stepping on what you’d call, um, a metaphorical crack in the pavement, and now we’re escaping inside their Metaphysical Engine, right? Am I close?”
“Kathleen!” cried the Doctor. “That’s remarkable! You should really consider a career change, you know, I’ve known journalists less succinct!”
“So you’ve met before.” As Kathleen said that, Charlotte looked quickly back down at her screen. “And whatever you did, it upset Emily. A lot.”
“Ah. Yes.” The Doctor frowned. “I say, Charlotte, what are you getting up to over there?” Hurrying to change the subject, he walked over to Charlotte to see what was on the screen. “Not navigation at all – poetry! Oh, how terribly interesting.” He removed his hat and bent over to read the screen.
“Not my own work,” admitted Charlotte. “My sister, Emily, began writing it earlier today. She often writes here.”
“While on my lonely couch I lie,” read the Doctor at a murmur, “I seldom feel myself alone, for fancy fills my dreaming eye, with scenes and pleasures of its own. Then I may cherish at my breast, an infant's form beloved and fair, may smile and soothe it into rest, with all a Mother's fondest care. What a lovely poem! Isn’t that lovely, Kathleen, Charlotte?”
“It is adequate,” replied Charlotte. “With all due respect to a remarkable woman, my sister Anne was always the most unremarkable poet, and indeed writer, of the family. Her novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was, though a great effort, an entire mistake on her part.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t be so critical, you know it experienced quite a surge in popularity in Kathleen’s time, didn’t it, Kathleen?”
“Um, yes,” answered Kathleen, truthfully knowing very little about it but trusting the Doctor’s own account for some reason.
“All three of you are talented,” concluded the Doctor. “I would never dismiss your gifts for a moment, Charlotte, but don’t doubt your sister’s. Anne is every inch the visionary, every inch the revolutionary, and in every sense the poet that you or Emily are.”
Charlotte was about to say something else, but the door at the other end of the room opened abruptly, and in walked Emily and Anne. Emily seemed calmer now, though was careful to avoid eye contact with the Doctor (or anyone else, for that matter). Anne smiled, in a hopeless – and in light of the conversation which had just occurred, awkward – way to lighted the mood.
“Where now?” asked Anne.
“I’m still growing used to the controls of this ship,” answered Charlotte. “I think we’ve landed somewhere…”
She pulled what looked to Kathleen like a handbrake, and after the sound of an unhealthy chug-chug-chug, the room was filled with a bright white light…
***
[Lost section of story: set at Wildfell Hall, as featured in Anne Bronte’s novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
- The Doctor, Kathleen and the sisters become aware at this point that they are travelling to places within the Brontes’ own stories, through the Metaphysical Engine.
- In this section, Anne expresses her admiration for the Doctor, as the youngest and most impressionable sibling; she was the Amelia Pond of the group, if you like, with a childhood innocence as well as a real wisdom to her.
- Before they move on, Anne mourns the loss of her lover, William Weightman, who died of cholera. This is a chance for Kathleen to bond with Anne, having lost her own husband as a young woman.
- The Doctor also realises that there was a very low chance of them ending up in the locations of one of their own stories – there must be another key player, someone nudging everything into place, playing a very long game.]
***
The room was red: that much was clear. Everything in it, save the head of the bed and its piled-up mattresses and pillows, were red. Every kind of red. Mahogany, damask, crimson, fawn, mahogany; deep reds, soft reds, old reds, new reds, darkly polished reds, reds with blushes of pink, and reds that were just red. Everything was red, from the bed and its massive pillars, the curtains, the two large windows with their blinds drawn down to the drapery, the carpet, the table at the foot of the bed; and the walls, the wardrobe, the toilet-table, the chairs, red, red, red, more red, redder still…
“It’s very red,” observed the Doctor.
One thing stood out, and it wasn’t a white mattress or pillow: it was a little girl, curled up on the floor, sobbing. The girl was young, and plain-looking, and frankly a mess.
Kathleen knew the girl. She hadn’t known Wildfell Hall, hadn’t known Gondal, hadn’t even known the Brontes at first, but she knew this girl. Lots of people read Jane Eyre at some point in their lives, and many of them let it fade from their memory over time. But no one, no one, ever forgot the red-room.
“Jane Eyre,” whispered Kathleen, recognising the little girl instantly.
“Your greatest work,” murmured Emily, looking nervously over at Charlotte. “Except… I do not find myself fancying this for a night.”
“Jane was locked in the red-room by her Aunt Reed,” recalled Charlotte, her voice trembling. Charlotte Bronte was not the kind of person to tremble as she spoke, Kathleen thought. Whatever this place really signified, it was able to shake the unshakable. “Aunt Reed was repulsive, abusive, excluded the orphan Jane from her family… and it… I…”
“Charlotte,” said Anne, calmly. “Do not be afraid. We are with you.”
“Writing could be called the process of reflecting reality so that it is unrecognisable as reality, but representative, symbolic, of what that reality meant, yes?” Charlotte looked to her sisters for approval. “One is able to disguise the reality which is being depicted, and yet still convey important messages about that reality. It is the writer’s oldest defensive strategy: to protect himself from scrutiny by creating something which appears fictional, so that he can safely comment on what, to many, would be undesirable?”
Emily and Anne nodded.
“Then forgive my digression,” continued Charlotte, “but I fear I must now tell you the truth about the red-room, as neither of you will be able to recall, with the same awful intensity which I can, your spell at the Clergy Daughters’ School, following the death of our mother. The austerity we endured…” she shook her head, furrowing her brow. “No, no, not austerity, starvation. We were starved, neglected, ailed, and the deaths of our sisters Maria and Elizabeth were hastened by that starvation…”
“What are you saying?” asked Emily, failing to make the connection between the school and the red-room, between the real and the imagined.
“All your life,” said the Doctor, calmly, on Charlotte’s behalf. He was looking Charlotte in the eye. “In every story you ever told, it was there. The fear, the horror, of institutionalisation and everything it entailed: your fear of starvation, your fear of imprisonment…” he looked around the room, at the carpet so indistinguishable from blood, at the locked door. “It all came from there, didn’t it? You were never able to leave that memory behind.”
“I was out of myself,” said Charlotte, only half-aware that the Doctor had even been speaking. “Jane Eyre allowed me to look… back into myself.”
The Doctor sauntered over to the pale throne next to the bed, and sighed contentedly – and, Kathleen thought, inappropriately – as he settled down in it.
“And now you are imprisoned inside the red-room,” he mused. “Inside your own creation. Forced to confront not just a chapter of your novel, but a chapter of your life.”
Charlotte flinched, not at the Doctor’s words but at something else. Slowly, the others in the room began to see it too. Shadows were moving across the walls: not their own shadows, but something darker, wider, less human. Nothing was casting the shadows, or at least, nothing from within the room, and so they could not be expelled from their source.
“It’s fine,” said Charlotte, though everyone in the room knew that it wasn’t: the big sister, as always, was putting on a brave face. “It is all a matter of perspective. We are experiencing the red-room as it is narrated: from Jane’s point of view. These are nothing more than her demons. Nothing more than… my…”
“No.” The Doctor stood up, and paced about the room. “No, something isn’t right here, I can smell it; Kathleen, can you smell it?”
“I can’t smell anything, except a bit of damp.”
“It’s not you I need anyway, it’s…” he waggled his finger around for some time, almost in synchrony with the shadows. “It’s you.” It rested on Anne.
“Me?”
“When I mentioned that this place was a prison, I saw the look on your face. You were terrified. You hated the idea of confinement, even more than Charlotte did. I wonder why that is…”
“I do not hate the idea of confinement, Doctor. This is different.”
“Yes, it is. Of course it is! You aren’t just confined; you’re confined within one of Charlotte’s works. Works that will always be better than your own, am I right? Because you will never be as good as Charlotte Bronte, never as beloved, never as-”
“Doctor!” interrupted Kathleen. “Maybe come off the arsehole pills now?”
The Doctor laughed. “Don’t you see? Oh, I’m so glad I’m not confined inside one of your brains, now that would be oppressive. No, no, no, Anne is every bit as good as her sister, her works are every bit as worthy…” he turned to Anne now. “Their works will always be equal, and sometimes when the sun is shining and the Earth is on her side, she will even be… better. But you don’t think that, do you, Anne? You don’t believe it. Well, believe me. This is not Charlotte’s hell at all – it’s yours: being confined within her paradigm. I’m here to give you the good news. You can leave it.”
“It’s not her hell,” repeated Anne. “It’s mine.” As she spoke those words, the girl – Jane Eyre, as they had called her – stood up, stopped crying, and turned around. Her face was dry and utterly pale, and it was not the face of any orphan child: it was the face of Charlotte Bronte. When her sisters turned around in confusion, the original Charlotte had gone.
“Can I go?” asked the Jane-Charlotte. “Can I leave now?”
The room fell silent. The Doctor nudged Anne. “She needs your permission.”
“You may leave,” answered Anne, quivering. Slowly, Charlotte approached the door, and upon touching it, it swung open. Charlotte stepped out, and was gone.
“I don’t understand.”
“Don’t worry.” Kathleen gave Anne a pat on the back, before giving the Doctor a look. “I don’t think any of us understand.”
“I think Emily understands,” countered the Doctor. Emily was, again, looking away. “Charlotte was never real – not here. Gondal was, after all, your paracosm – Emily and Anne Bronte, the rebellious little sisters who made their own world. You fictionalised Charlotte within that world, eventually forgot that she was a work of fiction and believed her to be your real sister. In actual fact, she symbolised something far worse. She was your insecurities, Anne. A little orphan child you were carrying around with you, whose shadow you could never escape from.” He smiled. “The shadows have gone now.”
“We can leave too?” asked Anne.
“I think we’re about to,” said the Doctor, and slowly, the room began to get lighter. Kathleen looked over in that last moment at the great looking-glass situated between the muffled windows, and found herself drawn to it. She took a step forward and gazed into her reflection.
But it wasn’t her reflection.
In that cold, dark visionary hollow, another woman gazed back at her. A terribly old, terribly angry woman, with crooked teeth and eyes that glistened. Before Kathleen could react, the light filled the room, and the woman was gone.
***
The mood back inside the Metaphysical Engine was solemn. Emily and Anne sat together at the side of the room, and Kathleen made sure to keep her distance, gazing out of the window at deep space not because she found it beautiful (though, she admitted, it was), but because she knew that the sisters needed space. Space to think things through. Space to come to terms with something so strange, so outside of their comprehension.
The Doctor, meanwhile, was the elephant in the room; except an elephant would have made considerably less noise, showed far more discretion, and damaged far less things. He darted around the room like he was looking for something whilst trying to remember what it was he was looking for, examining the ship to try and understand it better. All Metaphysical Engines are different, he said to Kathleen earlier. If I understand the ship a bit better… I might be able to understand who is controlling it. Kathleen decided not to mention the old woman in the mirror.
“Do you remember when Charlotte discovered my notebooks?” asked Emily. “Back in eighteen-forty... eighteen-forty-five, it must have been?”
“You were furious,” chuckled Anne. “You disliked anyone invading your privacy to any degree, and Charlotte, in uncovering your poetry, had more or less committed the ultimate violation.”
“And yet,” recalled Emily, “she refused to back down. She insisted that we publish the poems. I refused outright, but she pressed on, and then you arrived accompanied with your own manuscripts and the admission that you, too, had been writing poems, and I suppose I was just moved; moved that all three of us, together, had undertaken on this secret enterprise unaware of the others’ activities. They were just musings, of course, scraps; but when we joined together, I should say, we were a force to be reckoned with.”
Anne smiled sadly. “I only wish Charlotte had seen in my poems what she saw in yours. I tried so hard, Emily; I tried harder than you both, sometimes, not for fear of rejection as Acton Bell, but as Anne Bronte. I cared little for the reader on the street. I wanted my sister to turn the pages of one of my own novels and nod, approving, and say: ‘Yes, this is my flesh and blood, and I recognise her pursuits as a writer just as I recognise my own, just as I recognise Emily’s’. But I was always second-rate.”
“You resent her?”
“Resent?” Anne shook her head. “Resent is the wrong word entirely. I loved my sister. I know that having taught at Brussels with her you must have been closer to her than I was, but I still loved her, still admired her. She was a sister, but she was a mother and a friend too. It is no wonder I so frequently sought her approval. I was proud to be able to call her one of my own kind.”
“Sorry to interrupt!” called the Doctor, though it didn’t sound like he was. “I think I understand the Metaphysical Engine now. We need to make one more visit – just one. I’m afraid it won’t be very pleasant at all. But after that, if it’s successful, we can finally get you all home.”
***
They were in a large, airy sitting room, with a small, empty kitchen and parlour. The floor was of what would have once been smooth, white stone, but was now chipped and blackened. Dust clogged the worktops. The high-backed chairs were falling apart where they had been left in the shade. A huge fireplace rested, unlit, at one end of the room; at the other, a vast oak dresser, full of pewter dishes, silver jugs and tankards, towered row upon row until it touched the ceiling.
The Doctor craned his head to look up, and disapproved of the paraphernalia the owners of the house had left on display: old guns, a couple of old horse-pistols, and three gaudily painted canisters which were lined up next to the candles on the windowsill.
“This could be anywhere,” observed Anne, sighing. “Doctor, how much longer must we be subjected to this torment?”
“As long as God wills it,” answered Emily, and turned to her sister. Kathleen noticed, then, that Emily did look people in the eye: or rather, someone. Her sister seemed the exception to every rule she had about social conduct. “I recognise this place,” Emily continued, “for no reason other than that I created it. This is Wuthering Heights.”
Kathleen shivered. Then she heard a Kate Bush song playing on a loop in her head.
“Ah yes, Wuthering Heights, and seemingly abandoned for some time,” began the Doctor, and Emily turned to face the door, infuriated by the sound of his voice. “I read that once. Remarkable book, Emily, though incredibly hard to fathom, I found. Have you ever read it, Kathleen?”
“No, but I’ve heard the s-”
“-anyway, anyway, that was a long time ago, a very long time ago. A very depressing read, I found. What was that bit about, the other house, the-”
“Be quiet!” yelled Emily, at a volume which no one in the room, not even Anne, had anticipated. Still she fixated on the door; still she would not look him in the eye. “I stood for your godless humour and your repulsive arrogance when I was conscious of passing through your world, Doctor, but you will not affect such a display when you are in mine.”
“And why do you think we’re here, Emily? Anne’s had her closure already. Perhaps it’s time for you to confront your own monsters.” The way the Doctor spoke… he hadn’t quite done anything to offend her or any of the others, and yet Kathleen found herself becoming just a little irate at him. Repulsive arrogance. Perhaps Emily had a point.
And then Emily turned, and looked straight at Kathleen.
“You are a friend of the Doctor? A travelling companion of his?”
“Yes,” Kathleen replied calmly. “Yes, I am.”
“Then either he has not yet finished indoctrinating you in his ways, or you are as morally pernicious and deceitful as he!”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Will you tell her, Doctor?” Still, her eyes were fixed on Kathleen. “Or shall I?”
“Yes, Doctor,” murmured Kathleen. “I think you’d better speak up about now.”
The Doctor walked up to the fireplace, ran his finger along the mantelpiece and, observing the dust it collected, took a deep breath and began to speak.
“I visited the siblings before. All three of them: Charlotte, Anne, Emily and… Branwell.” He bowed his head. “Branwell was always a troubled young man, but I think I helped, for a while. You see, Kathleen, when I discovered that a Metaphysical Engine had fallen into their hands, well, I… I couldn’t resist. We went on adventures together, all four of us. Those siblings were so au fait with literature I felt they were entitled to see the worlds they’d invested themselves in as children – why not let them have their own Pilgrim’s Progress, their own Paradise Lost? It was the least they deserved. I visited them on and off through their childhood, and into early adulthood, and then Branwell…” The Doctor had stopped, distracted. He was staring intently at the ashes in the fireplace, what was left of something burnt so long ago. The next words he spoke were heavy, almost regretful. “Branwell fell ill.”
“I never asked the Doctor to save him,” said Emily. “I never asked him for more time because I understood as well as any man or woman does that death is inevitable, whether or not one can travel through time. I understood that my brother had to die.” And at last, after what felt like hours of exhaustion, she stared at the Doctor: a terrible, terrible stare that wounded even him. “But he didn’t have to die in pain.”
“I don’t understand,” said Kathleen. She realised she sounded like a poor listener. In actual fact, she had understood the narrative perfectly: what she didn’t understand was why the Doctor, of all people had done what Emily was implying.
“As I suspected,” said Emily. “You are a good woman; and you are not yet acquainted with his wicked ways.”
“Now I’d never have had you down as a wicked man,” started Kathleen, “but you’d better have a bloody good explanation for this.”
“It was not just Branwell’s lifespan that was a fixed point in time, Kathleen,” the Doctor flustered. “It was his death, the very nature of it, the historical account as it were. Branwell couldn’t have an easy death, just as Emily…” He stopped there, and that was fine, because Kathleen knew what he was about to say. “The nineteenth century. There was no such thing as an easy death.”
“The Doctor had the means to ease his pain,” Emily explained, “but he refused. He said it was not his place to intervene in the affairs of mortals, and that by making of us his companions, he had made a mistake. He left. I never saw him again.”
“Doctor?” asked Kathleen.
“It’s not my place,” the Doctor repeated, as if it meant anything at all. “I walk in eternity.”
“And I do not!” cried Emily, tears falling from her cheeks. “I am not an immortal, I am not invincible, and every wound winds up fatal in the end. He was my brother and it was I who sat by him in those final days while you sauntered through eternity. I thought we had friendship once, yet looking back, you were scarcely more than an ally in a common cause.”
“I’m not apologising for the laws of time, Emily!” shouted the Doctor, and how Kathleen wanted to shout back. But she didn’t. She took a step forward, between the Doctor and Emily, and kept her voice low as she spoke to him.
“I’d hit you, Doctor. I’d hit your right across the face in front of these women right now, and I’d enjoy it. Except I won’t, because I won’t stoop to your level. I won’t be a nurse who hurts people. You might have been enforcing the laws of time, but what you did… you weren’t being a doctor. You shame our profession; you shame our name. We’re meant to make it better, whenever it’s within our power. I am do disappointed in you.”
The Doctor had no words. Anne smiled to herself, sensing that Kathleen was a mother; wishing, again to herself, that she had been her mother, and that she had lived to see them grow up.
“If he won’t apologise then I will,” said Kathleen, and placed a hand on the side of Emily’s arm. “I am so sorry for what the Doctor put you through. You’re a good woman. You didn’t deserve that.”
Emily laughed softly. “Good is too strong an adjective to describe my disposition, Kathleen. I am nothing more than a woman trying to get by in the world, as any woman does. I worked no miracles in my time, I can assure you. After my years teaching I stayed at home – I cooked, ironed, cleaned; I practised the piano in what little time I had left.”
“My daughter plays the piano,” reflected Kathleen. “And do you know what? That is good. All those women trying to get by in your world were good, in their own way. I don’t think it’s too strong a word at all. And though I haven’t read Wuthering Heights, I’m willing to bet you were a great author too.”
“Now there is something I have the Doctor to thank for. It was my relationship with him which inspired the narrative of the two houses, each so diametrically opposed to the other that it denies its existence. And Heathcliff, as demonic and depraved as he may seem, was at least a victim in his own way: in moral terms, he is only a shadow of the monster which the Doctor represents.” She let Kathleen process that, and then continued. “Shortly after I parted ways with the Doctor, I dreamt that he returned: he asked me where I wished to travel and I told him that I wanted to see Branwell in heaven, to see that he was free of pain and fear, and was a man now apart from his demons. I dreamt that the Doctor took me there but heaven did not seem to be my home, and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to Earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out onto the moors, where I woke sobbing for joy. Perhaps Blake was right. What if Hell is Heaven, and Heaven is Hell? What would we do then, Kathleen?”
“If my experience has taught me anything, it’s that there’s no such thing as either,” replied Kathleen. “Heaven always comes at a price, and Hell isn’t so bad once you’re out of it.”
The Doctor was bored now. He walked up to the door and stepped out. A gust blew in, and realising that there was no shelter from it, the three women stepped outside and joined him.
The moorlands were similar to those in Gondal, almost indistinguishable; but the mist was thinner, and the air was darker, beckoning the night forward. The winds continued to whip around them, and Kathleen realised, as she tried to keep her hair neat, why they called this place Wuthering Heights.
Turning around, she noticed that the house was built to survive the winds, with narrow windows deeply set in the wall, and corners defended with large jutting stones. She also noticed a carving above the door, among many others, with the date 1500 and the name Harteton Earnshaw just visible. There were so many mysteries to the house, but anyone concerned in them must have been dead by now. It was a strange prospect, to imagine fictions aging with their creators.
“I love the moors,” said Emily, simply. “They are sad places, but there is a beauty in their solemnity. There is beauty, too, in their chaos: how, in the absence of order, the creatures of the moor love to run this way and that, for no reason other than that they can. Other than my sister…” she took Anne’s hand. “I never had friends. I just had them, in this fallen world: the fledging and the rabbit, in the places where no man ever ventured.”
They all looked ahead, and as they did, noticed something impossible: a window. Not on the side of the building, not on the floor, but a scientifically impossible window, suspended in the air above them; and through it, the same light which had carried them to Wuthering Heights, and all those places before.
“We’ve done it,” said the Doctor. “We’ve made it through the trail. Now we can finally return home.”
Anne reached out her hand, the most desperate of all, and took the first step. As she climbed through the window, she became a part of the light, until she had disappeared altogether. Kathleen stepped forward next.
“Let me in-a-your window, oh-oh-oh…” she sung, unable to resist.
“Kathleen,” complained the Doctor. “There’s a time and a place.”
“Sorry.”
She stepped through.
***
Home.
The sisters finally let go of each other’s hands, and shared a smile. For once, there was nothing to regret, nothing to get angry about, nothing even to question.
They were back in Haworth. They looked down the cobbled streets as people passed by, unaware that their fellow villagers had just journeyed across fictional landscapes, unaware that a woman from their future was gazing at them.
They got a wave from a man as he entered the shop opposite.
“That’s John Greenwood,” Anne explained, for Kathleen’s benefit. “He runs the local stationery store. Without meaning to boast, we are for obvious reasons his best customers.”
“What a charming village,” marvelled Kathleen, nodding. Finally, somewhere worth seeing: not quite the Victorian England she’d had in mind, but in many ways, better.
“I said I’d get us to Haworth eventually,” muttered the Doctor.
“So the TARDIS is around here somewhere?”
“Oh, I should think so. It’ll turn up.” He seemed casual about that, Kathleen thought; too casual. If she’d lost her time machine, she was sure that she would be searching every passing stationery store until she found it.
“It is a tiny village,” Anne elaborated. “The only two businesses are the stationery store and the pharmacy, which… used to supply Branwell.” Even back home, that was a difficult topic. She pushed on. “It grew in size around the time of our arrival; my best guess would be that there is a population of approximately three thousand. Our father was appointed perpetual curate of the church some decades ago. To call our conditions austere would be an understatement, but our father always made sure that what the house lacked in warmth, it made up for in imagination; our shelves were lined with all manner of tale from those of Sir Walter Scott to the poems of Lord Byron.”
“It’s a village of death,” re-joined the Doctor, and Kathleen found herself wanting to hit him again. “I warned them of it last time – there’s a reason barely anyone in Haworth makes it out of their twenties: the lack of sewage system, the faecal matter and the decomposing bodies contaminating the well water, the scarce food supplies… of course, I couldn’t stay and help.”
“Let me guess,” asked Kathleen, her patience beginning to run thin, “the laws of time?”
“Yes. And don’t talk to me in that tone of voice, this is your first adventure with me. Could you maybe save your criticisms for when you have some actual experience?”
“How d-”
“Please!” complained Emily. “You two will start a commotion on the street at the rate you are going. No one in Haworth, I am sure, would wish to see two strangers – and strange you are – quarrelling like this.”
“Sorry,” said Kathleen. She stepped away from the Doctor, thinking it best to avoid him, and then it hit her.
The pub quiz.
Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and Branwell Bronte.
The dates.
She gasped. She put her hand to her mouth. She had been so stupid, and now, every hope they had ever committed to was lost. She, alone, was going to have to tear this whole world apart in front of them.
Branwell Bronte died in 1848. She remembered learning that for the pub quiz. Looking up the date, she had come across an article on his death. It caught her attention, because a week later, Emily Bronte also developed tuberculosis. She died. Anne, so deeply affected by the death, died of consumption sometime after. The dates escaped Kathleen, but those precise details didn’t matter, only the one fact of importance: Charlotte Bronte was the last surviving sibling.
And they’d talked about her in the past tense.
“Anne,” she said, trying to control her breathing. Her whole head was spinning. “Earlier, when we were talking about Charlotte, you spoke about her in the past tense. Like she wasn’t around anymore.”
“I… did.” Anne frowned. “That is because she died, a very long time ago. Is that a problem?”
“I hardly think it appropriate to consign talk of the dearly departed to the present tense,” added Emily.
“Doctor.” Kathleen nudged her companion. He thought about it. And then he saw it too.
“Oh, no.” He turned to face Kathleen.
“Is this what I think it is?”
“I’m rather afraid it is.”
“Deception is no desirable trait,” said Emily, which Kathleen supposed was Bronte for “spit it out, then”.
“I’m so sorry,” said Kathleen. “But you’re dead.”
Silence. Then…
“What?”
“No.”
“We can’t…”
“But surely…”
“This is…”
It was inexplicable, Kathleen thought, how despite language’s evolution over time, those basic responses to the delivery of grave news stayed the same over time: those simplest of words, those shortest and sharpest of unfinished phrases. She longed to say something else, something that would help them, assure them, but nothing she said would be true.
“I… remember.” Emily closed her eyes, Kathleen imagined, to stop herself from keeling over altogether. “I died because I refused the help offered to me. Doctor, you left me in a state so bitter and betrayed that I began to associate you, and your title, with the whole of your profession. I would not have any Doctor near me, for fear that they would poison me just as you poisoned the well of my existence. When I finally realised my mistake… it was too late, and I perished. You, in plainest terms, Doctor, are my murderer.”
“I’m sorry,” said the Doctor, and this time it seemed like he was. “I truly am.”
“I remember,” said Anne. “And I remember my own, too. They told me that I only had days left. Looking back, I cannot begin to comprehend how I dealt with such news, and yet… I did. I had no horror of death; I quietly resigned myself to the prospect after I understood its inevitability. I just wished that God would spare me so that I could do some good in the world before I left it.”
“You did,” Kathleen promised. “You did so much good for so many, and I don’t know why it’s taken me all those years to see it…”
“I returned to Scarborough before the end,” Anne continued. “Charlotte was with me, and I could sense a fear greater than my own inside her. I told her to take courage. And then… I closed my eyes. Beyond that, I have no recollection at all. I’m…” the great author stumbled over the word. “Dead.”
“You’re not even dead,” said the Doctor. “You’re not the Bronte sisters at all.”
Oh God. Kathleen felt a lump in her throat. I was right.
“Emily and Anne Bronte created Gondal as children, and they carried on playing that game, carried on imagining that world, until the day they died. And they left behind impressions. Impressions of each other, the two people they knew best in the world. Charlotte Bronte, as remembered by you both.” He turned to Anne. “Anne Bronte, as remembered by Emily Bronte.” Then to Emily. “And Emily Bronte, as remembered by Anne Bronte.”
“But we… we are… real.” Emily stared down at her hands. But were they her hands, Kathleen wondered? Were they even hands at all?
“Of course you’re real!” exclaimed the Doctor. “Even impressions, even memories, are real!”
“But we are not memories! We are people! Living, breathing, thinking women. We think, we are aware, are we not, Anne?” Her sister nodded. “We are not the vestiges of the dead. We are the living.”
“Because that’s how you remembered each other: alive. You managed to create sentient reconstructions of the people you loved. Beautiful, poetic… far beyond anything a god could ever even imagine accomplishing. So in a way, you are Emily and Anne Bronte, because you knew each other better than anyone could ever know themselves.”
“Doctor,” interjected Kathleen. “Not to ruin the moment, but if they’re not real, why are we back in Haworth? In the real world? Wouldn’t they just fade.”
“Kathleen,” the Doctor murmured in a low voice, so that only she could hear. “We aren’t in the real world.” He raised his voice again, probably realising that the other two may as well be allowed in on the truth now they knew this much. “Emily and Anne also remembered Haworth, every last detail of it. Which means that this is your memory too. Whoever organised this, they’re keeping us here, refusing to let us leave the paracosm until they’ve finished their twisted little game.”
“How do you know that anyone is keeping us here?” questioned Kathleen. “What if there isn’t a big villain after all?”
“I know,” began the Doctor, “because she’s just invited us in.”
He pointed to an opening in the ground, an opening that, judging by Emily and Anne’s responses, did not belong. It was a large, rocky opening. In fact, it could only be described as a cave.
I hate being wrong sometimes, thought Kathleen.
***
It was just a cave. ‘Just’ being the word, because it was, in the most definitive sense, a cave: cramped, rocky and in a perfect womb shape, like a naturalistic artist had been told “Draw a cave” or someone had typed “Cave background” into Google. It was so archetypal that it almost didn’t feel real.
Then there was the woman. The woman from the mirror. She was chained from either side, facing the wall of the cave and unable to move, even to turn her head. Just occasionally, one of the group would walk past the entrance and the light would catch them, casting their shadow onto the wall in front of the woman.
“Plato’s cave,” the Doctor tiredly recited. “The oldest philosophical parable there is: the slaves who are chained up and can only see a shadow of the real world. It’s meant to be a metaphor for the world. And yet in this case, he rather missed the point – because what else is a cave, but a space for the women of the world? A secret, sacred place for the lonely and the lost, the sacrificed and the abandoned. This is where the mother of the tribe would wait patiently, or where the witch would be sacrificed, or where the priestess would consult her gods. The man leaves the cave every day, and whoever she is, she has to stay. Over time she forgets where she is, because the cave becomes the only reality; and she forgets how she got there, and she forgets who she is, and in the dim light of the cave she can’t even search for answers. She doesn’t understand what she sees. How could she? Locked up here…”
“Thank you for the analogy,” mocked Kathleen. “But how about you tell us where we actually are?”
“That is where we are, Kathleen!” the Doctor growled. “Don’t you understand? This is all a mental construct. Nothing here is real, nothing here is literal. You are walking among symbols. Everything I have just said, that is the only reality. Cast aside your logic, Kathleen Brady – you won’t be needing it anymore.”
“Okay.” The Doctor was chipping away at her. Testing her. She tried not to let it get to her. “So you’re saying Emily and Anne created this as… what? A manifestation of their anxieties as women?”
“Exactly. Well, you’re getting close.”
“Charlotte pursued this obsession,” began Anne. “This… vision, I suppose it could be described as. A woman trapped, enclosed in a prison constructed by men, always trying to escape, to complete her pilgrimage in the process. I needn’t tell you – you all saw the red-room earlier.”
“You had a similar vision yourself,” replied the Doctor. “Perhaps the two of you together, influenced by Charlotte, created this place. After all, it’s hard, isn’t it, being a lady? Lots of feelings, nowhere to put them.”
“One minute, you are a member of the family, more beloved even than an aunt or an uncle,” recalled Emily. “The next, you are an inconvenience; replaceable. That was only as a governess. In all aspects of life, we walked invisible until we transgressed; then we were stopped from walking on any further at all.”
“You all felt like captives,” agreed the Doctor. “Especially you two, the ones who challenged the status quo. But none of you could conceive an escape route. I’m not sure what this woman is.” The Doctor spoke of the prisoner like she wasn’t there at all. “Perhaps she’s your creation. Or perhaps she’s something greater.”
Right again, thought Kathleen. The Doctor kept taking the words out of her mouth, but she let him have the honour of explaining each time.
“Perhaps,” continued the Doctor, “this woman was created by all of you. All the great female authors, from the invisible to the persecuted to their successors. From the first woman who dared to draw on the cave wall to the working mother in her London apartment. This woman is mother to them all: The Great Mother, putting together the fragments of their stories the best she can, but always imprisoned, always only ever shown a shadow of freedom. But she’s real. You made her real, all of you. Sometimes she went mad. Sometimes she grew vengeful, planned escapes which always failed. Sometimes she dreamed, imagined, a better world. Other times she sat back and resigned herself to her fate.”
“But hang on a minute.” Kathleen paced around a bit, worried where her own brain was taking her. “If we’re here, this is way beyond the Brontes. You were right about this being a long game – but this long – wow! Because here’s the thing, Doctor. I’ve been quietly working this out as we’ve gone along, and I think Emily and Anne have too.” The two sisters nodded. “Firstly, Branwell was excluded from this paracosm, and I’ve been wondering why. Secondly, you told me at the start about paracosms. I had a paracosm when I was a little girl – just after I lost my father, around the time we moved to Dublin, I escaped inside my own little world. I even... God help me, I even dreamed I was having adventures with you. So what if that gave me access to this place?”
“Kathleen,” the Doctor cut in, “where exactly are you going with this?”
“Sorry. It’s taking me a while to piece this all together – it would anyone. My question is this: if this world is built by the women of history, in their dreams and their writings and their paracosms… then what are you doing here?”
The Doctor was silent.
“Unless…”
“Kathleen?” murmured Anne. She didn’t like the look on the Doctor’s face, or the complete lack of one: cold, emotionless, shell-like.
“When we first arrived here, you showed off by telling me about paracosms,” explained Kathleen, still talking at the Doctor. “But I already knew about them from my studies on mental health. I figured out that the Bronte sisters had died and left impressions way before you said they had. Any other information you gave me can be accounted for by the Brontes: any historical knowledge, anything you knew about their lives, was projected by them. In other words… you haven’t told us anything we didn’t already know. You’ve spent this whole time looking clever when all you’ve really been doing is explaining the obvious.” She paused, shivered as a breeze passed over them. “You’re not the Doctor at all, are you? You’re just an impression.”
The Doctor didn’t answer, but his eyes, his deep, dark, swirling abysses of eyes, they answered for him.
“A bit of this, and a bit of that. My childhood memories of the Dr. Who of the movies. My memories of the fun, all-knowing man with a plan who loves his mysteries. Anne’s memory of the enigmatic stranger. Emily’s memory of the monster with godlike powers. And all of our fears combined. That’s not to mention the literary stereotypes.”
“Quite,” said Emily, gaining confidence. Now she knew she was speaking to a figment, she had gained a lot of confidence. “A flawed but charismatic figure with passion, rebellion, and arrogance. A ‘troubled’ man, prone towards self-destruction, who purports to despise society and hierarchy even though he epitomises it. We all wrote about them – about you. Sometimes we even idealised you.”
“No wonder we haven’t been able to escape,” continued Kathleen. “You’ve been preventing us. This whole journey has been about the sisters confronting their demons, their anxieties and their fears. But it wasn’t the Great Mother planning this at all – she’s just another victim. It was you. We can’t leave…”
“…until we’ve confronted him,” finished Anne, a look of horror on her face.
“I’ll make it easier for you then, shall I?” The Doctor pulled out a gun. Before Kathleen could react, before either of the sisters could run, he held it out, offering it to Kathleen. “Take it,” he urged, but with more emphasis on menace than generosity. “You know what you have to do. You have to kill me. Kill me, release the Great Mother, and then you’ll all be free. But can you do it? Can any of you?” He smiled. All of a sudden, his smile wasn’t reassuring at all. It sent a chill through their bones. “I know who has to do it. Which means you all know, too.”
Kathleen’s hands hesitated over the gun. Then, she took it, walked to the other side of the room, and passed it to Emily.
“How does it work?” ask Emily.
“With any luck, you shouldn’t need to be told,” explained Kathleen. “I know how to use one; you should be able to draw on my memories.”
“Oh.” Emily held the gun up with staggering confidence. Anne’s mouth twitched in shock and discomfort. “It seems I can. Though I confess to not fully understanding what it in fact does.”
“It kills him,” said Kathleen, bluntly. “Or in this case, it kills the idea of him. It releases the Great Mother. I’m sorry, I know it isn’t nice, but it has to be you. I think it was the strength of your hatred that brought him here.”
“Oh, how I have dreamed of this,” hissed Emily. “The nights I have lay awake, exhausted with my hatred. Such passions drain; kill, even. I had to take that passion to the grave with me: like Branwell, you caused me pain, Doctor. I hate you. I hate you.” A tear fell from her eye as her finger played with the trigger. “Tell me, sister… why am I so changed?”
“Emily,” breathed Anne. “You don’t have to do this.”
“I want to!” bellowed Emily. “And I always have! You ruined my life, Doctor; you showed me a glimpse of the great beyond and then you left me, abandoned me, to toil and suffer like all the other mortals you abandon! I want to kill you. Oh, I have dreamed of killing you. I have wished you dead. And yet…”
She closed her eyes. Concentrated. She knew what she had to do. When she opened them, as she had hoped, the gun was gone.
“…I will not.”
“Emily,” urged Kathleen. “I’m sorry, but you have to…”
“No.” Anne shook her head, and smiled. “I think she does not.”
“I was prepared,” said Emily. “I was prepared. But killing is not my way. The man may wish to slay his dragon, but I create rather than destroy. I made my choice. I chose not to kill. That is who I am, and freely I chose to be myself.”
When Kathleen looked at the Doctor, she realised Emily was right. His face was white with terror. Something had gone wrong.
“You weren’t meant to,” he spluttered. “You should have followed my order. You should have done as I suggested…”
“My sister wrote her own fate,” said Anne proudly. “That is how her demons are expelled.”
Behind the Doctor, something moved in the shadows. The Great Mother was standing up. Her chains were, slowly, turning to dust. She made one last pull, and as she screamed a terrible, primal scream, they ripped from the ground and faded altogether.
The Great Mother was free.
“No promised Heaven, these wild Desires could all of half fulfil!” she cried, in a voice croaky from silence. “No threatened Hell, which quenchless fire Subdue this quenchless will!”
Anne stepped back, fumbling for her crucifix. “What have we done?”
“We’ve done what needed to be done,” said Kathleen. “It’s not always pretty.”
The Great Mother pulled a box of matches from her pocket. Emily and Anne stepped forward to intervene, but Kathleen held them back. What needs to be done, she assured herself.
The old woman struck a match, and held it out. Suddenly, the shadows began to disperse from the cavern in the light of the flame, and the rocks around their feet began to shift.
“What is happening?” cried Emily.
“Change,” answered the Great Mother, in a voice that was young, renewed. “And not a moment too soon.”
***
What the hell have I just been through? Kathleen asked herself. She had woken up in the TARDIS, and there was no other way of phrasing it.
And indeed, What the hell have I just been through? was an entirely reasonable question for a woman to ask, if that woman had just been introduced to three historical authors, blasted into space, locked in a fictional location, arrived in a pretend Yorkshire village full of dead people, and stood in a cave as it burnt around her with only a dark fictional representation of her best friend, and three impressions of dead authors, for company. But how to ask him? Just how to broach the subject with the Doctor? There was, of course, always the obvious.
“What the hell have I just been through?” Kathleen asked the Doctor.
“I’m ever so sorry Kathleen,” said the Doctor, and Kathleen breathed a sigh of relief. This Doctor was different. His apologies were sincere and from the heart, without the sense that there was either another motive, or that he was guilty of some transgression himself. “It was my fault for trying to show off; the TARDIS didn’t like it. In trying to land in Haworth, I got her caught in a spatio-temporal weakness, a sort of pothole, and due to your own paracosm still being active, you ended up trapped in the Brontes’.”
Kathleen raised an eyebrow. She hadn’t mentioned anything about the Brontes. “You… saw?”
“Only a little, when I was attempting to revive you. Just a minor psychic transference. Most of the details were lost in translation, though from what I saw, I was impressed! You’re more than capable of replacing my dear Sarah Jane, Kathleen. In fact, I do believe she’d be proud of her successor.”
“And the Brontes?” asked Kathleen. “What happened to them? Or, you know, their duplicates.”
The Doctor gave a dramatic shrug. “Who knows? The dullest form of rationality would say that they were destroyed along with the paracosm, but it’s entirely possible that freeing the Great Mother also freed them, and that they survived, manifesting in the dreams and visions of all the women writers of the future, finding their part in that legacy…” He smiled, stared into the distance, and Kathleen found herself startled that the Doctor, of all people, was such a dreamer.
“So she was real, then? The Great Mother?”
“That’s the problem with oppression,” replied the Doctor, seeming to somewhat evade the question. “When so many people are bullied into submission for so long – there’s all that pent-up anger, and nowhere for it to go; all those unfinished stories, and no one for them to finish. Everything man attempted to suppress in women was only projected at a far deeper, subconscious level onto the image of… well, a mother. Now if those feelings count for anything, if those experiences carry meaning, if ever a woman picked up a pen and knew that she was embarking on not just a job, but an adventure, then… yes. The Great Mother was real.”
“Okay.” Kathleen nodded and thought that one over. The Doctor had caught her off-guard with the honesty and passion of his answer. “So, everything in the TARDIS at the start, that was real?”
“Correct.”
“But everything after I saw the light, that wasn’t? When I woke up on the moors and you helped me up, that wasn’t… you?”
“Correct again.”
“And I understand, everything that followed up until I woke here was an illusion too, except…” Kathleen rested her face in her hands. She wanted to say she was tired, but… no, that couldn’t be it. Actually, having just been dreaming, she was very awake. “I’m struggling, Doctor, to understand one thing. Because what Emily told me, what she remembered, that was real, wasn’t it? Those were her memories?”
“Yes.” The Doctor bowed his head, and Kathleen shivered. Was the man in the cave about to come back?
“So you really did it, then? You really walked out and left her to care for her brother, alone?” Her voice lowered a semitone. “You left him in pain?”
“Initially, yes. The Time Lords had been following me, you see – they were complaining, as they always did, about my interference in history. When Emily asked for my help, I appealed to them, but they reminded me of my duties. So I… I went back to her, and I told her their story: that I walked in eternity, that it wasn’t my place to interfere! You know, that old mantra I do so love to rattle off. As I strolled away I realised I couldn’t leave it like that – I couldn’t just let them suffer. So I went forward in time to collect a suitable painkiller. Not a remedy –” he waggled his finger. “A painkiller. Something to make it a little more bearable.”
“Then why didn’t she get it? What changed?”
When he spoke again, his voice seemed to rumble, like there was a lump in his throat. “I was unaware that the Time Lords were one step ahead. They tampered with the controls of my TARDIS. When I returned, he’d already perished. I figured, at that stage, it would be better to leave altogether than to confront the sisters. I never meant to cause harm!” He was talking to someone else now as his eyes became lost somewhere on the other side of the room. “I only tried to do my bit, to ease the pain.”
Unsure of what would really count as meaningful to a Time Lord, Kathleen placed a comforting arm around the Doctor, and rubbed his shoulder supportively.
“I take back what I said in that world. You’re a good doctor. Turns out you’re just a very shoddy pilot.”
He chuckled softly. “Yes, I suppose I am. Where shall I aim to take you now, then?”
Kathleen glanced to the door. “Are we actually in Haworth, or did you make that bit up too?”
“No!” the Doctor cried defensively. “I mean, yes, we are in Haworth!” Then he added, in a mutter: “Possibly a hundred years later…”
“Perfect – no accidentally meeting yourself. Fancy a walk? We could get afternoon tea or something, if they do it. You eat scones, right?”
“Scones?” exclaimed the Doctor. “Yes, I do eat scones. Scones in the twentieth century, and then…?”
“Then an alien planet,” decided Kathleen. “My first alien planet. Not an imaginary alien planet, not the traumatic mental landscape of a kiddie alien, a real alien planet. Think you can manage that?”
The Doctor tapped his nose. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Well,” laughed Kathleen, “we’ll stick to the scones for now.”
***
Haworth, a hundred years earlier
Charlotte and Anne sat at the table, their eyes both directed at the window, out at the same view of the village they always woke up to. Emily, meanwhile, was peeling potatoes at the worktop as she routinely did.
“I had a memory of our mother, earlier,” said Anne out of nowhere. “Sitting at this table and recounting a story to us. I was able to remember none of the story’s content, but it was the first recollection I experienced of her before her illness struck. Sometimes I wish I had known her better.”
“She was a remarkable woman; and I wish you had witnessed her at her most remarkable,” replied Charlotte, after a moment’s contemplation. “Full of vigour but always tender; a hard a worker as you, Emily, and as strong a fighter as…” Her eyes wandered and finally settled in the last place Anne had expected. “As strong a fighter as you, Anne. You so often remind me of her, carrying with you a vaulted calm of which even I am envious. You are conscious of your responsibilities and flourish as you fulfil them. You are an asset to this family, sister.”
Emily, even though she wasn’t a participant in the conversation, had stopped peeling potatoes and turned to observe the utterly unexpected declaration of love. She found herself smiling, a rarity when she observed conversations with other people.
“Now,” said Charlotte, “I feel a drive for creativity. If you will excuse me…”
She stood up and left.
“Our sister never ceases to surprise,” said Anne, once she was out of the room. “I hope I shall never forget this exchange.”
“Your thoughts echo my own,” agreed Emily. “Sometimes, I think you are more myself than I am.”
***
Charlotte sat down at her desk with a smile on her face. She tried not to indulge her sisters in sentiment too often, but sometimes it was necessary. Sometimes the love she felt, however deep and unbreakable it was, was not obvious to those to whom it was directed. Sometimes it needed expressing.
As this thought crossed her mind, and rain began to batter the windows, the words she had to write became suddenly, perfectly clear to her.
And so she began:
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day…