Timeline: Non-linear, from the first meeting between Branwell and Leyland to the last three years of Branwell's life covered by the movie.

Thanks to: My kindly and valiant beta Kathy.

Author's note: The Brontës (1994) by Juliet Barker was an invaluable second source in addition to the film.

I.
„So you know what Satan looks like, do you?", one of them asks, and the other nods and says: „Intimately." That's how it began, and that is how it ends.

They meet at the Great Summer Exhibition in Leeds in 1834, organised by the Royal Northern Society for the Encouragement of the Arts. Branwell is seventeen, and considers himself in paradise as he wanders among the four hundred and sixty four sculptures, paintings and drawings. Ostensibly, he's here to support his older sister Charlotte, who has submitted two pieces, not originals but copies of engravings she nonetheless has laboured on for six months. Thus, two of her works appear in the same catalogue as the paintings of the great Turner and of the portraitist whom Papa wants to win as Branwell's teacher, Mr. Robinson. Reason enough for a rare family journey from Haworth to Leeds, and Branwell knows what he's supposed to do, alternatively study Mr. Robinson's paintings and ingratiate himself so the man will agree to Papa's request, and hold Charlotte's hand as she tries not to stare at any visitor coming close to her tiny drawings.

What he actually does, what he can't help doing, is to run from work to work and allow himself to be carried away by the marvels he finds between such careful but unexciting pieces as Charlotte's. They have all seen engravings before, but this is the first time Branwell can look at William Turner's paintings in all their bewitching colours, and he wishes to step inside them and never to leave. And then, when he thinks it can't get any better, he comes across a colossal bust. It's a male head, tearing itself out of the stone, beautiful and terrible at the same time, and the expression seems to change depending on the angle you're observing it from. The catalogue says the bust is simply titled „Satan".

It is Northangerland, Branwell thinks, Alexander Percy himself, his favourite character to write in the Infernal World he shares with Charlotte and no one else. How is it that someone else knows what the creature of Branwell's imagination looks like?
„Admiring Satan and all his works, are we?" asks a voice behind him. Branwell turns around and finds a young man, just a few years older than himself by the looks of him, but taller, which isn't hard. To his chagrin, Branwell hasn't inherited Papa's height but seems to have stopped growing for good while his younger sister Emily is already taller than him. Charlotte isn't, but then Charlotte is tiny even for their family. The stranger, by contrast, is a man of solid growth, and dark hair like the late Lord Byron's, not the ginger mess on Branwell's own head. He does have a Yorkshire burr, so he's definitely a local, not a Southerner from London. Still, there is an aura of confidence and ease around him Branwell can't help but admire.

„Always," Branwell says, trying to sound amused and sophisticated, like the essay writers in Blackwood's Magazine, his and Charlotte's favourite journal on which they have modelled most of their secret writings. His voice sabotages him somewhat, doesn't sound deep and resonating like the stranger's, but so far remains regrettably that of a boy. Fortunately, though, the memory of so many books eagerly devoured is his to access, and so he follows up the assertion with a quote. Not from Milton; anyone could quote Milton on the Devil. „His brow was like the Deep when tempest-tost – Fierce and unfathomable thoughts engraved", Branwell adds instead, quoting Byron's Vision of Judgment, „Eternal wrath on his immortal face – And where he gazed a gloom pervaded Space."

„So you know what Satan looks like, do you?" the stranger asks, not giving away whether or not he recognized the quote but sounding just a bit challenging to Branwell.

„Intimately," Branwell asserts, thinking of Northangerland, whom he has written and drawn as often as Charlotte has her hero Zamorna, Northangerland's best of enemies.

The skin around the stranger's eyes crinkles, and he smiles then, a warm, friendly smile. „Well, Sir, so do I. This is my work. If I may introduce myself: Joseph Bentley Leyland."

II.

Leyland's new studio at Swan Coppice in Halifax is a visible decline from his previous studio at The Square, smaller, and full of unfinished work. Not too dissimilar in nature from Branwell's room at the parsonage, full of manuscripts either written when he was much younger, or unfinished. Still, Leyland has a studio of his own. He's still creating. His large hands, very much like John Brown the mason's back home, are warm and firm, not cold and trembling like Branwell's own.

It's 1846, more than ten years since their first encounter at Leeds. They're neither of them old yet – Branwell not yet thirty, Leyland only just past it -, but somehow it feels as if their future is already used up.

Unbelievably, Leyland's face lightens up when he sees Branwell, and his embrace has nothing hesitant about it. A part of Branwell wants to weep in gratitude, because it's been a while since someone has been so happy to see him. Another part of Branwell wonders what is wrong with Leyland. Leyland had been an artist who'd taken London by storm once. People had known his name and his works when Leyland had been in his early twenties. So why is Leyland still in Halifax, and happy to waste his time with the likes of Branwell Brontë?

„You really walked here?" Leyland asks, and Branwell shrugs. He used to walk far larger distances than the one from Haworth to Halifax. Twenty odd miles from Haworth to Charlotte's school at Roe Head once, and the same amount back, because he missed his sister and needed to tell her of his latest ideas for the Infernal World so they could plot Glass Town and Angrian politics together. Back when Charlotte had still been Charlotte, not a tiny ball of contempt and rage which is all she seems to be these days, at least when looking at him. She will never forgive him for disappointing her, but that is alright. He will never forgive her for disappointing him, either. She has left Angria behind, and for what? Failed school schemes and pious lectures. Charlotte, who once was the Chief Genii Tallii, plotting the rise and fall of nations with him.

„It's as if we don't speak the same language anymore," Branwell says about his sisters and himself to Leyland when they later sit in the pub. He'd hoped to watch Leyland work, which has always thrilled him, but drinking together was just as good. It does help with feeling warm. Leyland listens to his outburst without too many comments, only becoming opinionated when the conversation turns to Lydia. Of course, Leyland knows all about Lydia. Branwell had written to him about her when still employed at Thorpe Green by Lydia's husband, the brute, the tyrant.

„I love her," he insists now, and Leyland doesn't judge the way Branwell's family does, doesn't use the term „adultery", but he does say Branwell should look forward. Move on. He says this in a low voice, almost whispering, sitting close enough that Branwell can feel his breath.

„But she loves me", Branwell protests, because that is what he clings to in the unbearably slow ongoing trainwreck that is his life these days. Lydia loves him, no matter that he is much younger than her, and was her son's tutor. She's waiting for him. She's just not able to say so. Sending servants with money is her way of of showing she still loves him. It is not a way to bribe him so Branwell stays away from her. It is not.

„She doesn't even know you," Leyland says with surprising and sudden harshness that startles Branwell out of the circle his thoughts run in.

„Of course she does. We…"

Leyland grabs Branwell's chin with both his hands, making it impossible for Branwell to move.

„Listen to me. There's knowing, and then there's knowing. When they asked Michelangelo how he did it, he said he was only liberating the statue from the marble around. Well, the rest of us don't have it that easy. Sometimes you think there's a sculpture in a block, but then you hit a weakness, and suddenly everything is too damaged to continue in the way you wanted. That's just how it is. You can still make something out of the rest. Just not if you keep seeking the statue that's not there."
He does hear what Leyland is saying, that's the trouble. It's sensible advice, perhaps. But neither of them is in the business of being sensible, which is why it's also hypocrisy. He feels Leyland's thumb with the hardened skin on his face, as if Leyland is taking his measurements.

„Isn't that what you are doing right now?" Branwell asks coldly. „Seeking for the statue that's not there? That would explain your studio."

As soon as he's said it, he's sorry. Leyland is more than his friend. He's the first artist Branwell has ever met outside of his imagination, and not from afar. And he knows Leyland has problems of his own; to make ends meet, he's been forced to accept smaller and smaller commissions. Leyland deserves support from Branwell, not insults for his kindness.

„Forgive me"', Branwell says. „I shouldn't… I don't know why I said that."

„I do," Leyland replies. „Because I do speak your language, Brontë. It's almost as good as creating, isn't it. Burning it all down. At least it means there's fire instead of emptiness."

III.

It's 1842, and Branwell is intimately familiar with death. He will never forget how Maria died, his oldest sister, sent back from school to die when they were all still children, and after her his sister Elizabeth. But these had been deaths he has been given a lifetime to reshape in his memories. This is not true for far more recent deaths. Only three years ago, he'd witnessed the aunt who raised him dying, holding her hand during the four tormented days it had taken her. Later, the doctor had said it had been the internal obstruction of her bowel which had reduced Aunt B to screaming agony, but that knowledge hadn't made anything better. In fiction, Branwell had killed and resurrected characters countless times, but he'd been helpless to do anything to soothe the pain of the woman who had been his mother in practice if not in fact.

Charlotte and Emily are in Brussels when Aunt B dies, and Anne at Thorpe Green, which at this point is just a name to Branwell. His time as a tutor there is still in the future. There is his father, but he knows that if he stays with Papa he will say something about the cruelty of God which the Reverend Patrick Brontë will find deeply hurtful. But there's Leyland who it just so happens is nearby because Branwell has managed to get a commission from the Haworth Monument Committee for his friend. The two of them end up getting drunk in the moonlight, far from the parsonage.

„Sometimes I think I should have killed her", Branwell says. „Just to end her pain. But Papa was there, and so it was impossible. I wouldn't have wished such a death on my worst enemy. And she loved me, Leyland. All of us. She came here from Cornwall to raise us and never stopped missing the sun and the warmth. She wanted to see the sea again for so many years. Now she never will." He laughs without humour. „What kind of God permits that?"

„Sometimes I think it's far worse to imagine we deserve what happens to us", Leyland retorts. „And you wouldn't have killed her even if your father hadn't been there. It takes something to end a life. I once went to a hangman because I wanted to make a statue of the Angel of Death and I thought, someone who kills so many must have something written in his face. I was wrong about the face, though. It's in the eyes. They're dead, and you can't do that in sculpture." He waved with his left hand in Branwell's general direction. „You have the most alive eyes I've ever seen, Brontë."

„It's the glasses," Branwell says, because even when he's feeling intensely miserable, there is something in him driving him to make Leyland smile. „All reflection and enlargement. My entire family is shortsighted and reduced to blinking at life."
„Then it's a good thing you stopped being a painter and went back to writing, my friend."

Moonlight and drink and Leyland, and his aunt's screams fade a bit from his mind. He wonders, though. Leyland hasn't said whether he believed himself capable of killing. At least killing in mercy, not hate. Presenting oblivion. There is something in Leyland's sculptor hands that makes one feel he could take you apart.

IV.

It's 1846, and Branwell returns to Leyland's studio with him. It's dark, there's no moon, and not nearly enough street lamps in Halifax, but both of them know the way. At least, they believe they do. It turns out they're heading towards the old studio address twice before realising their mistake and tracing their footsteps back.

„If we were already dead," Branwell says, „roaming the earth as ghosts, doing the same thing over and over again – how would we know?"

Leyland laughs. „I think we would."

„No, but seriously", Branwell insists, warming to the idea. Neither of them had the money for whisky tonight, so they've drunk gin, and he's not nearly drunk enough for his voice to slur, not with the kind of practice he's accumulating. „I dreamt a poem like this once. Or maybe it was something I heard in the pub. I just don't know anymore. About ghosts who don't know they're ghosts. They keep coming back to the old places they used to live in before, and don't understand why no one sees them or listens to them, because they don't know they're dead."

That would explain everything, he thinks. Not just the lack of letters from Lydia, only verbal messages through the coachman, and these just descriptions of her delicate state . No, also the fact Charlotte, Emily and Anne think he's so deaf, blind and dumb that he hasn't noticed all the packages and letters sent from and to the parsonage. And the worst: they didn't ask him, none of them did, whether he had something to contribute.

If he was dead, and simply hadn't understood it yet, that would explain everything.

„Dead men have no creditors", Leyland says in his matter-of-fact-way. „I don't know about yours, but mine plague me every day. Especially since my most recent commission was returned."

„There's that", Branwell says and doesn't have to fake his disappointment. To be dead without remembering the experience of dying would be a gift, as far as he's concerned. „Unless our creditors, too, are ghosts. Or we imagine them pursuing us because we cannot bear to acknowledge we're truly nothing."

They've finally found the entrance to Leyland's new studio, and after some fumbling, he finds his keys.

„Didn't you write a poem like that once?" Leyland asks while opening the door „Nature abhors to look at naught /And frames for ease a world of thought?" something like this? I remember reading it in the Halifax Guardian."

The fierce gratitude Branwell feels pierces through the daze that surrounds him. Not only is Leyland not the type to indulge in empty compliments, but for him to be able to come up with this quote while drunk, the poem really must have impressed him.
„Azrael", he replies with the name of the poem in which these lines appear, and stumbling behind Leyland into the room full of half finished works, he wants to provide Leyland with the same sense of being heard and seen in his creation. He kneels down next to something half his height, something fragmentary, and lets his hands run over it. Leyland seems to be looking for a candle, given the way he moves through the dark room. There's plaster under his fingers, unsurprisingly, because Leyland hardly gets commissions for marble or sandstone anymore these days, but the form is unmistakable.

„Your hangman?" he asks, because there seems to be a noose around the neck of the male head Branwell's fingertips are tracing.

„Hangman, victim or both. You should know", Leyland murmurs, and Branwell remembers he's drawn himself hanged by a noose in one of his letters to Leyland. „But now that I have you here, I might remodel. Smash the thing and start anew. Looking for the statue in the flawed material."

There's some anger in his voice along with the teasing. So Leyland did mind the insult earlier this evening. Oddly enough, there's a thrill in that for Branwell, almost, though not quite, as much as in Leyland quoting from his poem. The darkness suddenly lessens a bit, as Leyland has found his candle, and is returning to Branwell's side, kneeling as well.

„Smashing what?" Branwell asks. „The plaster or me?"

He takes his hands from Leyland's sculpture and puts them on Leyland's shoulders. That first day, at the exhibition in Leeds, Leyland had worn a fine velvet coat. Today, he wears something made of worn out linnen, with no collar. In the light of the lone candle, Branwell watches his fingers rest on Leyland. No more tremors.

„Both," Leyland whispers, and then his mouth closes in.

V.

It is 1841, Christmas, and the great Franz Liszt, possibly the most famous pianist of Europe, is giving a concert in Halifax. Branwell is working for the new railway, as station master of Luddenden Foot, not something he expected to do as a boy, but it pays reasonably well. In fact, his salary is a third more than that of his father's curate in Haworth, and he's allowed to travel by train for free, which means he can visit Manchester or any other place with a railway connection. There is plenty of time to write, which he does, and to visit friends. Thus, Branwell is able to invite Leyland to Liszt's concert at Halifax. His sister Charlotte, preparing for her and Emily's departure for Brussels, pretends not to mind.

„I suppose Liszt might come to Brussels as well", Branwell overhears her say to Emily, and only then does it occur to him that he could have invited his sisters as well. All three love music as much as he does, though they don't have his facility with instruments. Emily shrugs. She's not that keen on Brussels; going there has been Charlotte's idea, in the hope that some continental gloss and polished French will help them attract students to the school Charlotte has decided they must found. This despite the fact Charlotte hates teaching, Emily does as well, and Anne regards her current work as a governess as an unpleasant but necessary duty in order to support herself.

„I don't think there are any tickets left, but I could try", Branwell says, hesitating, and Emily snorts. Charlotte says sharply: „Do not bother on my account."

Yes, she's angry. He tells himself she'll get over it. After all, it's true, Liszt very likely will visit Brussels as well, which is a far larger city than Halifax. Later, he wonders whether that was when it started, him and Charlotte dealing out tiny, tiny paper cuts to each other, each by itself not fateful, but all together creating a hurtful whole, until the very air between them vibrates with spoken and unspoken slights every time they are in the same room.

„Poor Branwell", she says in the winter of 1841, eyes flashing, and he knows she's in sarcastic Charles Wellesley mode, adopting the voice of the most sharp tongued of Angrians she has ever created. „It will be a day full of hard choices for you. Whom to moon over more, Mr. Liszt or Mr. Leyland?"

„Why choose one if there are both to admire," Branwell says grandly, and heads off to enjoy his perfect day at Halifax. Leyland and he have become close while Branwell has been trying, in vain, to establish himself as a painter in Bradford, true, but now he's technically no longer an artist, and he has been somewhat concerned Leyland might no longer be interested, might consider a railway employe as beneath him, truth to tell. But Leyland accepting his invitation to the Liszt concert has proven the opposite.

The concert is everything Branwell hoped for, and more. There are countless encores, and Liszt, looking dashing and handsome with his shoulder length blond hair and elegant figure, brings the house down with an impromptu set of variations on the National Anthem. Northerners who regard French speaking continental Europeans as untrustworthy foreigners even when they are world famous are melting in adoration. This, Branwell thinks, is the effect Zamorna and Northangerland have on crowds. He just never expected to see it played out in real life.

„Do you want to introduce yourself?" he asks Leyland, half curious, half hoping that Leyland would say yes and would take Branwell with him. After all, Leyland is a sculptor who has lived in London for a while. Liszt must have heard of him, will surely receive him.

Leyland hesitates. „Best not", he says, and there is something in his eyes that Branwell immediately recognises. He's seen it in the mirror for the first time that day he himself had been supposed to present himself to the Royal Academy of Arts in London and instead spent the day realising how utterly insufficient his skills as a painter were. „Let's not spoil the music by meeting the man", Leyland adds. „Artists can fall short of the art, Brontë."

So Leyland has fled London, too. Has feared he would fail there, maybe has failed there. Believes that Liszt instead of greeting him as a fellow artist, a man of fame, would only ask „who are you?" But Leyland has no need of such insecurity, he truly is one of the greats. Branwell knows this.

Unless his judgement in art is as flawed as his own skills.

No, Branwell decides. This is not a line of thought he will pursue. He, Branwell, might not be a good painter, but he has shown judgement in realising this in time. On the other hand, he is a great writer, and one day, the world will realise it. As for Leyland, his initial success might be on the wane right now, but that was just when those fools who only followed fashion abandoned artists, whereas people of true discernment continued to believe in them.
„Wise words," he returns to Leyland, and pretends he doesn't notice the relief in his friend's face.

„It's the art we've come to admire, after all."

VI.

It is the year of hell, whichever year it is, and Branwell is reasonably sure he'll never be out of it. In fact, he seems to have dragged his best friend to perdition as well. And hell has nothing in common with the Infernal World, more's the pity.

Hell is knowing the warmth of Leyland's body, the relief in his own not only can't last but can't be forgiven. For all his anger at God for the cruel deaths the Almighty inflicted on those who least deserved them, for all the unspecified vices he and Charlotte used to breathlessly ascribe to Northangerland and Zamorna, for all the arguments with his father about money and debts, in his heart Branwell has always remained a parson's son. His sister Anne quit her position at Thorpe Green because she knew about Branwell and Lydia, and could neither betray him nor condone adultery. She still feels guilty for not having done anything to stop Branwell; it's there in her troubled gaze every time he looks at her. Branwell has always told himself Anne is a child. But she's not, she's a woman who has heard the same lessons he has, and unlike him, has been able to live by them.

Adultery is a sin. A common one in the mundane world as well as the Infernal one, Branwell has told himself, and besides, Lydia will be his wife one day, once her goaler is dead. Love is all the justification needed. But if he loved Lydia, truly loved her, he would not have been able to committ the act of sodomy with Leyland. It is as if he's gone through a mirror, and on the other side is a harsh landscape presenting him with a world where none of the few things he's still been clinging to are true anymore. There will not be a marriage with Lydia providing his salvation both in the material and the moral sense. His past with her is not justified by love. And as for his hope to create something that will outlast him; the seventeen poems he has published in various newspapers have long since turned to ashes along with the material they were printed on. Nobody but him will ever read the many chronicles of Glasstown and Angria, for Charlotte has turned her back on the Infernal World, and Emily and Anne have left it decades ago to live in their own creation, Gondal. He's tried to transport one of his old Angrian tales to the mundane world in order to get it published as a novel, but is still struggling with the early chapters; so far, Alexander Percy stubbornly refuses to come alive outside of Angria, and at this moment, Branwell knows he never will.

„Stop thinking," Leyland says, his voice sounding tired and affectionate. „Sleep a while."

They're covered in broken plaster, the both of them.

„There's no sleeping if you've destroyed art", Branwell murmurs. „I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done that."

Leyland narrows his eyes and sounds a bit more alert now as he says: „We did it together. It wasn't really good anyway. Now that you're here, I can do it again." His hand runs across Branwell's back. „Stay a while. It'll do you good. You can get some writing done here, be my model, and we can share expenses."

For a moment, Branwell can see it, a new vision to cling to: living with Leyland, instead of making his sisters and father as miserable as their disappointment makes him. Start anew, with his dearest friend, the man he has always admired. Two artists together.
Except that is not what will happen.

„Share debts, you mean", Branwell replies. „Nicholson is as much after you as he's after me, and if he finds us together, he'll send the bailiffs at once. And you need to create something that sells. Who on earth is going to pay for any version of that?" he finishes, and doesn't hide the loathing he feels for his own body, small at the best of time, and now an unappealing mixture of stringy flesh and cold, sweat-soaked skin, the head that's conversely too tall and manages to unite a far too strong nose with not enough of a chin and eyes that can't see without glasses, the hair that is that of a hedgehog.

All of which would be bearable if he had to offer something other than a rotten soul to compensate. Which he does not, as the last twenty four hours prove only too well. If Leyland wants someone this worthless, what does it say about Leyland?
Something in Leyland's face changes. He pulls back his hand, and Branwell feels the withdrawn warmth at once. But Leyland doesn't move away. Half resigned, half amused, he says: „They might pay if I call the result Satan. I've reconsidered, you see. Back then I was too young to understand. Satan shouldn't look like he still wants to win. Because he doesn't. That's the thing. He doesn't accept hope, he wants to destroy himself more than anyone else, and that's what people need to see."
He stretches out his hands again, grabbing Branwell by the chin, but this time to move it left and right, and his eyes are that of a sculptor, judging, probing. Despite himself, Branwell senses something ignite, a spark that promises to free him from his own devastation, for another hour at least. Burning it all down, indeed.

„So you know what Satan looks like, do you?", he asks.

Leyland nods and says: „Intimately."

That's how it began, and that is how it ends.