To control Branwell they had to subdue him. To subdue him, they chose to burn him. So, on the fifty-third day of the village’s isolation from the world, a day that might have been April 29^th of 1846 if the calendar could be trusted, the farm laborers and wool-combers and idle-hands of Haworth took Branwell out of the Black Bull and incinerated him by proxy.

Samuel coaxed him from the public house readily enough with the promise of free bathtub gin at his home, but as soon as Branwell saw the grinning mob that awaited him in the street, he panicked and bolted.

Unfortunately, his instinct was to flee back into the Inn rather than into the Church of St. Michael and All Angels that offered sanctuary adjacent to it, or even to his own home at the Parsonage a mere eighty paces beyond. Had Branwell made it home ahead of the mob -- and the burst of speed he exhibited in the street argued in his favor -- he would undoubtedly have been allowed to remain there unmolested, rather than being dragged out in front of his father and sisters. As it was, the men tackled him easily in the pub doorway, knocking him down. Four men then each took up a limb and carried him down the street, with Samuel walking alongside as ringleader.

Branwell’s sentence would be carried out not outside the Black Bull Inn, but at the toll-bar at the foot of Main Street, where the Thornton and Halifax roads merged to enter Haworth proper. As well as the heavy oak bar itself, the roadway was also blocked to any traffic that might appear out of the mist -- from shamblers to carts to chariots -- by a barricade of heavy rocks, and by a squad of six dour, craggy men with knives and makeshift pikes.

By the toll-bar was a wooden platform where political hustings had been held in pleasanter times. The church, inns and most of the houses were set high on the hill, and were afflicted by strong winds that might carry away the voices of the speakers, and sometimes also their hats. The lee ground allowed some meager shelter from the Yorkshire gales. Also, the men from the outlying farms and mills that lined the fertile valley floors had walked far enough by the time they reached the toll-bar; little point in forcing them to trudge another mile up the slick cobbles of the Main.

The guards at the toll-bar watched impassively as the small procession approached, yet nudged one another and smiled when three young women came tearing down the Main in hot pursuit, their lace-trimmed skirts flapping like flags around their ankles.

Emily and her sisters arrived panting at the platform just as the men frog-marched Branwell up its three oaken steps and thrust him forward to greet his own image.

Branwell and his effigy stood facing each other, eye to eye, nose to nose, animal to vegetable. The effigy’s face was a turnip cleverly carved with Branwell’s slightly heavy brow, adorned with orange threads to mimic the original’s carroty, thinning hair. Both sets of eyes were equally blank. The Branwells were similarly attired in threadbare jackets and trousers shiny in the seat and knee, the straw overflowing the shirt of the one an uncanny mirror of the hair that sprouted from the other. The effigy was supported by a wooden staff up one trouser leg that formed a spine upon which the turnip-head was set. Toe to toe they stood, unholy twins, and the only striking difference was that one of the Branwells was not quivering like a sapling in a storm.

The farmhands and weavers let Branwell drink his fill of terror. Samuel held the firebrand close -- Branwell was mortally afraid of fire, yet he moved not an inch. Sweat leaked from his forehead. It looked as if he was melting. So sure was Emily for a brief hallucinatory instant that the man and his double had been reversed that she yelped aloud when Samuel put the torch to the effigy’s britches.

A high whine split the air. Branwell was keening, a high Irish wail of terror like a horse on the brink of death.

The effigy’s clothing caught quickly in the breeze that rolled off the infinite moorland. The scarecrow subsided, its lower portion quickly consumed by the flames. It looked as if the effigy had dropped to its knees, and with a cry of desperation the human Branwell did the same, reaching out to his burning likeness. The men held back his arms to prevent his immolation, and Branwell’s keen became a howl.

Emily believed he had lost the distinction between himself and the scarecrow, or perhaps he mistook its bumpy vegetable face for his fictional alter ego, Alexander Rogue. Either way, as the sparks alighted on his jacket and his hair, Branwell was clearly gazing straight into Hell.

Air and fire combined to consume the earth that made up Branwell’s double, and threatened to devour Branwell himself. The next moment the water came, cast from a bucket held ready by Matthew Briggs, and the blaze was part-quenched. Branwell knelt on the platform, broiled, frozen, terrified, drool escaping from his lips, and when the men released him he clamped the still-smoldering scarecrow to his chest in an unbreakable embrace.

* * *

The stony rough-scrabble fields around Haworth were among the least bountiful in the North, yet they produced pale green-gray oats sufficient for the village’s needs. Before its markets disappeared over the horizon, Haworth’s principal commercial enterprises had been the farming of sheep and pigs on the wild moorlands, the quarrying of sandstone from the surrounding hills, and the wool trade. Aside from the mills in the valleys, now too far away to reach, Haworth had a sizeable cottage industry of handloom-weaving, wool-carding, and spinning. The Black Bull and the other five public houses had always brewed a fair fraction of their own beer.

Thus, even stranded as they now were beyond reach of the rest of England, the people of Haworth would survive. None need go hungry, and all could be clothed. The peat on the moors would provide an infinite stock of fuel to burn in their fires. If ever a village had to be isolated, Haworth was more favorably disposed to adjust than most.

By and large, the townsfolk had taken their newfound isolation in stride. They were people rough-hewn of Yorkshire granite and weathered by the elements: sheep-farmers, drovers, lime-kilners, butchers, spinners and wool-combers, uncomplicated folks of flat vowels and little sophistication. Their Celtic, Norse, and Saxon forefathers had tilled the stark soil of these parts long before steam and looms and poor-houses, before enclosures and drystone walls. It took more than the transformation of their world to cower men like these.

Yet as civilization and law receded they were becoming more ingenious in their punishments. These were men becoming free, inch by inch, and Emily feared how they might ultimately choose to celebrate that freedom. Perhaps by the time true barbarism returned, the very village of Haworth would be stretched out to the horizon, the Parsonage would have grown to a palace, and the graveyard that surrounded it would cover a hundred acres, instead of the few short paces to the church door. It was unnerving to speculate that their fate might lie in the balance between the physical expansion of their world, and the social distortion it engendered.

PANVERSE ONE

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