Excerpt:
The Madwoman Upstairs
by Catherine Lowell

(From THE MADWOMAN UPSTAIRS by Catherine Lowell, on sale now from Touchstone. Copyright © 2016 by Catherine R. Lowell. Reprinted with permission from Touchstone, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.)

In Catherine Lowell’s smart and original debut novel, the only remaining descendant of the Brontë family embarks on a modern-day literary scavenger hunt to find the family’s long-rumored secret estate, using only the clues her eccentric father left behind, and the Brontës’ own novels.

Samantha Whipple is used to stirring up speculation wherever she goes. Since her father’s untimely death, she is the presumed heir to a long-rumored trove of diaries, paintings, letters, and early novel drafts passed down from the Brontë family—a hidden fortune never revealed to anyone outside of the family, but endlessly speculated about by Brontë scholars and fanatics. Samantha, however, has never seen this alleged estate and for all she knows, it’s just as fictional as Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights. 

Yet everything changes when Samantha enrolls at Oxford University and long lost objects from the past begin rematerializing in her life. Her father’s distinctive copy of Jane Eyre, which should have perished in the fire that claimed his life, mysteriously appears on Samantha’s bed. Annotated in her father’s handwriting, the book is the first of many clues in an elaborate scavenger hunt derived from the world’s greatest literature. With the help of a handsome but inscrutable professor, Samantha must plunge into a vast literary mystery and an untold family legacy, one that can only be solved by decoding the clues hidden within the Brontës’ own writing.

For readers who devoured The Weird Sisters and Special Topics in Calamity Physics, The Madwoman Upstairs is a suspenseful, exhilarating debut by an exciting new talent who offers a moving exploration of what it means when the greatest truth is, in fact, fiction.

CHAPTER 1

The night I arrived at Oxford, I learned that my dorm room was built in 1361 and had originally been used to quarantine victims of the plague. The college porter seemed genuinely apologetic as he led me up the five flights of stairs to my tower. He was a nervous man—short and mouthy, with teeth like a nurse shark—who admitted through a brittle accent that Old College was over-enrolled this year, and that the deans had been forced to find space for students wherever they could. This tower was an annex to Old College. Many tragic and important people had lived here before me, apparently: had I heard of Timothy the Terrible? Sir Michael “the Madman” Morehouse? I shook my head and said that I was sorry—I was American.

The porter, Marvin, dropped my bags inside. The stairs had left him breathing heavily, and a thin line of sweat appeared in the crease on his forehead. He was not making direct eye contact with me, I noticed. I wasn’t sure if this was due to sheepishness over the condition of my room or because he had nearly choked over my last name when I first introduced myself and hadn’t quite recovered.

I made a quick inspection of the room. Whoever had quarantined the plague victims had done a thorough job. The walls were covered in peeling red paint that gave the chamber the look of a giant, bloodshot eye. In the corner was a boarded-up fireplace and a horrible painting of a woman, who, by the look of it, was halfway through drowning.

“Well, Miss Whipple,” Marvin said with forced optimism. Fuzzy, uneven scruff covered the lower half of his face like a failing garden. “Will you be happy here?”

I didn’t know what to say. This was not a dorm room; this was the sort of place people dumped you when they secretly thought you were insane.

“Very happy, thank you,” I said. “That woman in the painting—who is she?”

He looked past me. “The Governess. Beautiful, isn’t she?”

“May we get rid of her, please?”

Marvin’s eyes widened as though I had suggested castration. “Pardon?”

“She reminds me of someone,” I explained.

“Miss Whipple, she is part of the tour.”

I said, “Ah,” not understanding the reference, and we suffered a small moment of silence. I could tell he wanted to leave—his upper lip was twitching like a small, impatient alarm. I didn’t blame him. I wanted to leave too. After one last look around, he reminded me about the meet-and-greet tea in the quad tomorrow, gave me a hasty good night, and closed the door.

With Marvin gone, I was alone with The Governess. Something, surely, was not quite right.  From the two nights I had spent in college during interviews last December, I knew that everyone else’s rooms would not reek of feet and damp meat. Some had windows. The room in which I had stayed even had friendly blue walls. So friendly, in fact, that during those two nights, my room was the watering hole for all the English literature candidates. We sat on my bed and looked at the pale blue walls and bonded over the fact that applying to Old College was one of the more miserable things we would ever have to do. I felt at home in that cozy blue room—at least, up until Shelly from Portsmouth asked me whether I was really a Whipple, and did that mean I had an automatic advantage over the rest of them?

My cheeks burned. Shelly from Portsmouth was a leggy redhead whose arms were covered with mysterious moles. At the time, I said, “Of course not.” Insulted, I had also added a “Good night, I’m a little tired.” But the next morning, I wondered if Shelly from Portsmouth hadn’t been right. It was clear from the moment I walked into my interview that Dr. Margaret King from the Old College English department wanted nothing more than to interrogate me about my family. I was impressed that she managed to restrain herself for as long as she did. She was a pinched woman whose crooked flamingo legs ended in two pointy black shoes. There was a girlish smear of lip gloss on her lips and front tooth, and she smelled of artificial watermelon. Her interview questions had pertained to Aphra Behn, about whom I knew very little, but judging from the sort of novels scattered around the room—Belinda, Love in Excess, Emma—I assumed that she was a woman, a writer, and dead. I launched us into a discussion about proto-feminism and offered a borderline insightful comment about male hegemony, but it wasn’t enough. The pointy shoes started to tap.

“And, of course,” I said, “Behn’s work paved the road for the Brontës.”

It may not have been true, of course, but it didn’t matter. The name Brontë was like a drumroll. The pointy shoes stopped tapping and one of the flamingo legs crossed over the other, freeing the right foot to wag.

She had found her excuse to launch a series of questions at me—all of which I had been asked before, all of which I knew how to answer well. How did the lives of the Brontës affect the vitality of their writing? Yes, that’s very true, Miss Whipple, interesting insight. How did Emily

Brontë revolutionize the modern conception of the novel? Yes, that she did—right, right. The interrogation began to acquire a more personal nature: I gather you’ve read the press surrounding the Brontës, especially about their surviving family? Oh goodness, Tristan Whipple was your father? Well, I admit I did wonder whether he might be a relative. . . . If you don’t mind my asking, were you two close? Ah, I see. A fascinating man, your father.

Then, as it always happened, Dr. Margaret King became Maggie again, a schoolgirl ogling her literary heroes. The Brontës pulled their age-reversing magic trick and there she was, a wide-eyed teenager who wanted nothing more than to traipse over the brooding English moors like Catherine and Heathcliff. I nodded and smiled and prostituted my ancestors until, together, we’d exhausted every nuance of Jane Eyre. But what does the wedding veil mean, Miss Whipple? Oh, goodness, how clever! Is that what your father thought too? Oh, I’m being so insensitive—forgive me, dear.

I usually became a “darling” at this point in the conversation, but “dear” was okay too. Whenever I became a dear, I fell mute. A dear couldn’t explain what she really thought about her relatives.

When King stood up at the end of the interview, I did too. Even in heels, she was several inches shorter than I was. She smiled, but timidly, like a brainy child who’s forgotten how to make a friend.

“Well, Samantha,” she finished brightly, “are all Americans this tall?”

“Just the tall ones,” I said.

I headed for the door. She called after me, “May I ask—do you also write?”

I fumbled for an apology and told her that no, the talent in my family had unfortunately been squandered in the last century and a half. My father had been the exception, not the rule. She walked toward me, hard heels clanking on hard tiled floor. I thought she might like to say something else, but she just opened the door and tilted her head to the left, just like my mother used to do when I did something right. But it wasn’t I who had impressed her. As my sneakers plodded back down the polished hallway, I once again tipped my hat to my three dead female ancestors. Even in the grave they managed to exert the power I could not.

The cell phone on my lap gave an aggressive buzz, alerting me to three new e-mails. Apparently, my tower had wireless internet, but no windows. The first message explained that the meet-and-greet tea party would begin at 10:30 a.m. in the quadrangle, and no one was to walk on the grass, if you please. The second e-mail provided me an excuse not to attend: my professor—a Dr. James Timothy Orville III—had arranged a preliminary meeting tomorrow morning to discuss the objectives and requirements of our tutorial and to supply me with a list of important deadlines, which I would be left to peruse at my own convenience. He signed his note O.

The last e-mail was from B. Howard from the trusts and estates division of the British National Bank. The blood drained from my face. B. Howard had already called once this evening, after I landed at Heathrow. Ours had been a brief conversation, in which she informed me that now that I was at Oxford it was time to discuss my late father’s somewhat confusing will. I know that this must be painful for you, Miss Whipple, she told me over the phone, and I gather you have only just arrived in England this evening—yes, Customs will be straight ahead, surely; just follow the signs—but as you know, this is a sensitive matter and now that you will be at Oxford it must be discussed in a timely fashion. Can you still hear me, Miss Whipple? Miss Whipple?

At the time, I explained that I was in a terrible rush and that I would call her later. Really, I had just been sitting by the baggage claim carousel, chewing on a soggy British sandwich. The thought of discussing my father’s will turned my heart inside out, in the way of all unhealed despair. I had a vague and unpleasant idea of what was in that will, and it was not something I wanted to discuss—not with Marvin, not with Maggie the Mortician, and not with B. Howard of the British National Bank.

I walked to my bed. Beneath my feet, the old floorboards creaked and cracked like old bones. On the rectangle of wall directly underneath The Governess, I noticed a series of scratches and carvings, etched deeply into the stone. There were gouges and stick figures and what appeared to be several Roman numerals. I was half expecting to find the name Byron, but the only legible letters were the initials J.H.E.

I took a seat. My gaze rested upon The Governess. For several moments, the woman in the painting and I stared at each other in unpleasant recognition. She was clutching something in her hand—a folder? A book? The Bible? Behind her was a half-submerged mast, on which sat a bird, dark and large, wings flecked with foam. In its beak was a gold bracelet. The bird was staring at the Governess, but the Governess was staring straight at me. She had bright eyes, thin features, and the expression of a caged animal. I remembered her well. I had read about her, once upon a time—or, at least, I had read about someone very much like her. It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity, she once told me from within the pages of an old, terrible book. They must have action, and if they cannot find it, they will make it.

I couldn’t look at her any longer. I switched off the lamp on the nightstand and fell into darkness.

Sunshine has a way of softening the recollection of the previous evening. But when I walked outside in the morning, the sun was nowhere to be found. The sky was a dull shade of concrete.

I had dressed in three layers of black for my first meeting with James Timothy Orville III. In his e-mail last night, he had introduced himself as a research fellow in nineteenth-century British literature. I sincerely hoped his interests extended to the twentieth century as well, because I had made clear in my personal statement that I had a well-developed vendetta against the Victorian era. If James Timothy Orville III turned out to be a George Eliot enthusiast, then I might have to quit here and now. There would be no switching professors and there would be no switching courses. Old College was unique (and famous) for its rigidity. Whereas other Oxford colleges offered classes and seminars in addition to tutorials, Old College students suffered one hour-long session each week, alone with a single tutor. The hope was that the intensity of the relationship would trump any diversity of instruction. What it really meant was that my entire education and mental health rested in the hands of one person.

I walked around the perimeter of campus, making sure to steer clear of the lawns. (I had once read that the last student who walked on the Old College lawn was chased off by a porter wielding a stick.) I found the exit gate, which, as Marvin had explained last night, was not the same as the entry gate, and please don’t confuse the two. Several members of the college staff were transporting tablecloths inside the quadrangle. The meet-and-greet tea, I presumed. I was relieved that I didn’t have to go. Orientations only highlighted my dissimilarity to other people my age. My father had homeschooled me for as long as he was alive, which meant that I had spent the first fifteen years of my life living in a pleasant anachronism. His idea of a Friday night was to fill up the paddling pool on the front lawn, stir up a margarita, and read me Shelley until it grew dark. He disliked Shelley—it was actually my mother’s middle name—and Dad would read every verse with dripping sarcasm. O! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I BLEED! It was the sort of joke only the two of us found funny. I couldn’t remember why we needed the paddling pool.

Twenty-eight Broad Street, the meeting point suggested by James Timothy Orville III, turned out to be an underground pub. Near the entryway were two pots of skeletal flowers and a life-size statue of Hereward the Wake, who was holding his own head on a stake. I walked through the second set of doors and stumbled directly into the bar, which jutted out of the side of the room like a bad tooth. There was a lone bartender, a wild-eyed redhead with lips the color of undercooked beef. She was drying dishes with a rag.

“Excuse me, is this The Three Little Pigs?” I asked.

She looked me over, unimpressed, and handed me a menu. The top read, The Three Pigs’ Heads, and I congratulated myself on arriving twenty seconds early. I noted a number of boozing patrons: a squawking couple guzzling Irish coffee, a woman who appeared to be counting her teeth with her tongue, and a double-chinned man with a barking, pterodactyl laugh. I searched the room for the withering old man with a well-trimmed gray mustache and a suitably gold monocle who could possibly have the name James Timothy Orville III.

My eyes alighted on a figure in the far corner of the room. He was sitting down, with one hand resting on the table in front of him, one in his lap. At first, I thought he was one of Hereward the Wake’s friends—stuffed, almost lifelike. But when I squinted and peered into his corner, I saw the slow rise and fall of his chest. I stared at him, and he stared at me, and as he stared at me his eyes narrowed, and as I stared at him I began to panic because it occurred to me that this non-old, non-gray, non-ugly man might be James Timothy Orville III.

There was a raucous burst of laughter from one of the nearby tables, where a woman with a big scream of a hat was pushing a Kleenex up her sleeve. My professor—God, was that really him?—watched as I crashed into a nearby table leg. He looked like a safari animal attempting to be incognito.

I stopped in front of him. There was a moment of silence. He had a noble, expansive forehead that made me want to write calligraphy on it. When I didn’t move, he said:

“Well? Have a seat.”

I dropped into a chair. He was young—couldn’t have been over thirty—and seemed tightly bound in his clean, pressed suit.

He said: “I am James Orville.”

I didn’t have a chance to respond because a gray-haired waiteremerged from behind us and paused in front of me. He seemed to be waiting for me to order, so I said, “Just a steamed milk, please.”

“A what?” he said. His eyes were vague and cloudy, and I had a feeling that the sixties may have been a blur for him.

“Steamed milk?” I repeated.

The waiter turned to my professor, whose gaze had not left mine. “Two fish and chips and a pint, Hugh,” he said.

Hugh left and the two of us sat in silence. Orville stared at me, and for the first time, I realized how difficult it is to stare at two eyes at the same time. I wondered how I had ever done it before. He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a slender blue file that he dropped on the table without looking at. His expression was impassive. Somewhere, I just knew, he must have a slew of illegitimate children, all named Bartholomew.

“Well,” he said, and he smiled—almost. “Tell me about yourself.”

I gave a nervous laugh. “No, thank you.”

“That wasn’t a question.”

“I’d rather not discuss me if that’s okay,” I said. “How are you?”

He blinked. I moved my left leg on top of my right, then back again. It seemed unfair that he should be so young, and that I should be even younger. He did not respond, and as a result, neither Orville nor I said anything for several moments.

“What would you like to know?” I asked, finally, even though I already knew. Orville, like Maggie the Mortician, would want to talk about my last name. He would want to discuss my father. He would want to discuss the fire, the estate, the legend. He would want to know what Emily Brontë ate for breakfast on the morning of December 5, what erotic poems Anne wrote in her spare time, what Charlotte secretly had tattooed on her bottom. It was my own personal curse, being related to the three most famous dead women in all of England.

I swallowed and said, at last, “I was born in Boston.”

His expression didn’t change. He had picked his acne as a kid; there was a small chain of scars above his right eye.

“I’m an only child,” I continued.

Silence.

I took a breath. “I went to a small boarding school in Vermont, which you probably haven’t heard of, because it really is very small, and I haven’t been to Europe much, unless you count Paris, because that’s where my ex-mother lives. Excuse me, ex-wife. I mean, my father’s ex-wife. My mom. I don’t get a chance to visit her much, because, like I said, I live in Vermont. I mean, Boston, but I said that already. I—”

“Miss Whipple,” interrupted Orville.

“Yes.”

“Can we get on with it?”

I said, “Pardon?”

“I am your tutor, not your therapist,” he said, somewhat bored. “Please take care to remember that in the future.”

I said, “Sorry.”

“Never apologize.”

“Sorry.”

“Tell me about your academic self,” he continued. “I would like to know what interests you, besides run-on sentences. Why did you come to Oxford?”

“Everyone’s got to be somewhere.”

“Is that supposed to be funny?”

“I don’t know, was it?”

I gave an awkward laugh, which fell flat. I envied people who could talk to important people like normal humans. I had never been particularly smooth. Orville’s face was expressionless in the pale light.

I said, “I came here to study English literature.”

“And why was that?”

“I like books.”

“You like books.”

“I’m good at reading?”

“I did not ask whether you are literate. I asked why you are studying English literature. What do you imagine it will provide you?”

“Unemployment?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Joke,” I said. “Joke.”

My cheeks were burning. Suddenly, he leaned forward across the table, resting his entire weight on his forearms. He looked like a surgeon who, in the midst of a routine operation to find someone’s soul, had discovered it just wasn’t there.

He was frowning. “What is the purpose of literature to you?”

He might have been asking me if I believed in God.

“English is the study of what makes us human,” I said. It was a phrase I had learned from standardized tests.

“Human biology is the study of what makes us human,” he said. “Try again.”

“English is the study of civilization.”

“History is the study of civilization,” he corrected.

“English is the study of art.”

“Art is the study of art.”

I let out a flush of air. “English tells us stories.”

“If you can’t think of anything intelligent to say, don’t say anything at all.”

I shut my mouth. Orville leaned back in his chair. The waiter named Hugh returned and dumped two plates in front of us. On each one was a fish that looked like it had died tragically by drowning in its own fat. The scent was something savage—salty and prehistoric, wrought from an age in which people still ate each other. Hugh shoved a pint of ale on the table in a final act of punctuation.

Orville unfolded his napkin in his lap. He had a strong chin and thin lips that cut across it in a straight line. Right now, they were pursed to the point of invisibility. He did not seem like the sort of person who would frequent dimly lit pubs before noon. The entire place reeked of ale and centuries of smutty assignations.

“Perhaps we can try going about this a different way,” he said.

“What sort of authors do you admire?”

I said, “Name a few and I’ll tell you if I like them.”

He raised his eyebrows, and I wondered if I had been rude. He severed the head of his fish with one thwack of his fork.

“Milton,” he said. “Do you like John Milton.”

“No.”

“Chaucer?”

“No.”

“Thoreau?”

“Oh, please.”

There was a bit of a pause. Orville seemed to be considering whether I was, in fact, a criminal. He took a small, well-proportioned bite.

“T. S. Eliot?” he said. “Jane Austen?”

“No, and no-but-nice-try.”

“Coleridge, Keats, Wordsworth?”

“No, sort of, and no.”

He paused. “Brontë?”

I paused. I had been right. Orville did, in fact, want to discuss my relatives. How could he not? We stared at each other in a moment of mutual understanding. He knew who I was; I knew that he knew; he knew that I knew that he knew.

I crossed my arms in a way that felt childish even to me. “That depends. Which Brontë?”

“Charlotte.”

“Hah.”

“Is that a no?”

I didn’t respond. The name Brontë had, predictably, changed everything. He was still frowning, but it was now a curious frown. From across the room, the man with the pterodactyl laugh let rip another roar.

“Can you appreciate no authors?” Orville asked.

“I appreciate them,” I said. “I just don’t like them.”

“Why?”

“Personal reasons.”

“Which are?”

“I thought you weren’t my therapist.”

Orville placed his napkin back on the table. He almost smiled. Almost. The trajectory of the academic year was now spanning out in front of me, and it looked like one blackened stream of intellectual dictatorship. The more time Orville and I spent together, the more I would become one of those pale-faced vampire children in films who emerge only to say something unsettlingly prophetic in a half whisper.

“Won’t you tell me a little about yourself now?” I asked.

He raised an eyebrow again. I half hoped he would say nothing, or snap at me. But to my surprise, he became quite friendly.

“What would you like to know?” he said. “I was born in London to two academics, matriculated at Cambridge when I was fifteen, graduated when I was eighteen, earned a graduate degree in the States, and for the past eight years have been a fellow at Old College, where my research focuses on the structural and grammatical integrity of texts, and contends that a perfect novel is proof of authorial invisibility.”

I said, “That sounds riveting.”

“I dislike still water and raw fish, never exercise except in the early morning, and find A Separate Peace to be one of the most singularly moving works of the twentieth century.”

I nodded. I had a feeling that he had given this autobiography many times before, and to many students. I wondered how many he had taught, exactly, and how many of them had at some point been undone by his hellish beauty.

“You attended Cambridge at fifteen?” I clarified.

“Yes.”

“What—you couldn’t get in any earlier?”

He took another bite of fish. “Why don’t you tell me what you hope to study this year.”

I answered, “Postmodernism.”

“That is a very small swath of literature.”

“With a great overall concept: books don’t have answers because life has no meaning.”

His eyes flicked from one side of my face to the other, as though he were skimming an empty book.

I continued, “For example, have you ever read White Noise? It’s—”

“Yes, I’ve read it.”

“Sorry.”

“Stop apologizing,” he said. “Do you honestly believe that life has no meaning?”

I said, “Is that a problem?”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty.”

A small silence. He leaned forward; instinctively, I leaned back. I thought he was about to question why a first-year was twenty years old instead of eighteen, but all he said was:

“I imagine you think you are very complicated.”

“Meh.”

“Excuse me?”

I didn’t respond.

“You have misread White Noise—and, I wager, all of postmodernism,” he said, dabbing his mouth once with his napkin. “What appears to be a lack of meaning is in fact an example of authorial craft. DeLillo illustrates the inability to communicate through a medium of communication; he asserts that the world is too complex to understand in language that is unusually simple. He demonstrates significance precisely through a lack of overt significance. I imagine you cannot find its ‘meaning’ because you lack the passion to try.”

Passion. There it was, my least favorite word. It was the elusive—yes, meaningless—term people used when they wanted to believe they were more human than other humans.

The lamp nearby sputtered, leaving Orville’s face shrouded in a half light. I was silent. He reached for the blue file in front of us—my application?—and flipped through it like it was one of those picture books that tells a story if you run through the pages fast enough.

“Our meeting times will be on Thursday, from half eight to half nine in the morning,” he said. “By next week, you will have read the Old College Book of Disciplinary Procedures, which you will find in the post in a few days. You will also have prepared an analysis of Robert Browning’s ‘Porphyria’s Lover.’ The highest mark any late assignment will receive is fifty percent. If you do not complete the reading, do not bother coming to see me.”

I nodded. “Sir?”

“What.”

“Browning was not a postmodernist.”

“I never said he was.”

He tossed me my academic file and told me to have a nice day.