Heathcliff's Tale (10 page)

For we were like two animals in heat, my sister-in-law Cathy and I, though it is painful even now to confess it. After that first evening, when the band playing in the crimson and white room and the red berries of the rowan tree lit up by lanterns, had become exaggerated, a memory of impossible romance and reciprocated passion, Heathcliff stayed away from The Grange and it was as if he had never come at all. The maids, who had been as much taken as their mistresses by the arrogant look of the stranger, pretended they had information from Leah at The Heights that Mr Heathcliff had settled in there after his long journey back from the New World. He had visited The Grange to pay his respects to Mr and Mrs Linton (and here the odd part is that the servants guessed nothing of my sister-in-law's feelings for the vagrant millionaire, imagining that I, single as I was, could be
the only maid to have fallen lock, stock and barrel for our newly sophisticated neighbour). The next visit must be paid by us, as custom went, to the rough and rude house on the moors which I had known so little and despised so thoroughly, in my earlier years. Two of the maids vied to accompany Mrs Linton, when the time came to return the call. But days passed and there was no mention of an excursion. Ah, I should have understood then that the plan was not ready yet: all must be in place before it could be accomplished; and I was no more than a small—but vital—part of that all-important design.

Edgar also noticed nothing strange in his wife, and this I found most astonishing of all. Impatient with him one minute and overly-demonstrative the next, Cathy would descend the stairs into our elegant hall like a woman of loose morals, skirt bundled over her arm and breasts peeping indecorously from her dress, a parody of the dreadful playing-card Mrs Cox had frightened me with in her cottage by Gimmerton crossroads. Without any idea that I watched her—for I followed her every movement, in fear she would slip away to the stables and saddle up the pony Edgar had given her for her birthday and be off up across the heather to The Heights, rain or shine—without acknowledging my right (for was I not at the age of betrothal and she a married woman?) to fall in love where and when I pleased, Cathy nevertheless gave every indication of her own passion and had no shame in showing it. ‘Edgar, my sweet' she would purr at my poor brother, who was as besotted as a mooncalf and twice as clumsy and maladroit in her presence as any brute would be, ‘fetch me my shawl and we'll go out walking in the garden'. And she would rub herself up against him, this while Nelly was standing there and I was in the rocking-chair in the morning-room, all of us on a calm, grey day trying not to observe the excited antics of the mistress of Thrushcross Grange. ‘Or shall we go as far as the orchard?'
And I knew then that I had in turn been watched and followed; and that my kiss had been like a knife plunging right into that pretty breast. But Edgar perceived only the flesh, and almost moaned aloud at his wife's teasing. ‘No, it's raining!' Cathy went on, and I knew she saw how monstrously dull the orchard would be without Heathcliff, even if her last visit there had meant seeing him kiss me. ‘I'll sit here and write my letters'. And this coy harridan settled herself in the inglenook of the old fireplace while Nelly was sent for her writing-case and the rest. ‘Why did not Mr Rutherford agree to visit next week with his parents?' Cathy wanted to know next; though her pout and simper showed she knew perfectly well that tales of my escapade on the night of the ball must have reached the young man's ears and quenched his desires most efficiently. ‘We do not wish to offend the county, do we Edgar dear? I shall invite them once more, making clear the company will consist solely of Mr and Mrs Edgar Linton.'

These insults and insinuations were too much for me, and I left the room with burning cheeks. My resolve was heightened, however: if I had lost the respect of the neighbourhood, as my sister-in-law was anxious to make out, then I should visit The Heights without any further dilly-dallying. I—and my family later—must take the consequences.

So, by the time I set out, I was half-swooning with the need to see the man I had all my young life despised and ignored—‘the Gypsy up at The Heights'. As it turned out, I did not have to travel that far to find him—but, as my flushed face and faltering step must have betrayed—I had no notion when I left The Grange in a light rain and found him no more than a mile down the road leading to the moor, whether he lingered there in the hope of finding
her
… or me.

I was soon to discover where I stood—if, alas, that can even be said to be the word, for I was to fall often at his cruel blows or lie prone, too numb with grief to speak, after one of his dreadful sallies. ‘You'll take me to Miss Catherine', was his command, when I had sidled up to him, no more capable of showing pride or dignity in my position as sister of the master of Thrushcross Grange than my own pet dog, Fanny. ‘And make no excuses about it', he added, this time with a leer I was foolish enough to believe at first was a smile. And he held up his hand with outstretched index finger, to show me what I already had a sad suspicion of: that Edgar departed for a visit of some hours to the tenants on outlying farms, and so the house and its mistress would be able to receive the vagabond.

Heathcliff had no desire to wait while I dithered there in the lane, as I fast discovered. No sooner did the figure of my brother and his horse Paddy begin to grow smaller—and then disappear in the bend in the road that leads down to the soft landscape of our pasturage, than my companion—the very man who had kissed me a few days before in the orchard of The Grange, proceeded to do so again. Which of us indeed, did he yearn after?— but I was a fool, and knew it—for the kiss was to act as a key or open sesame to Catherine's boudoir, and no more; and before I knew fully what I did, I led him straight in there, nodding at the servants as I went to assure them that all was well.

So it was that I engineered the meeting of the man who would shortly declare his passionate intention to carry me off and wed me, with the woman he had a burning aim to make love to and be with all his days, in a true union of heart and mind.

I—who loved my brother more than any man I had yet had the chance to know—betrayed him then. He did not forgive me; and it was for this, as I am in my heart
aware, that I was never again to be permitted to come into my own home, a place I had not left in all my eighteen years on earth. Edgar would come to know me as one who would sell her own flesh and blood for a touch of the Gypsy's hand or a spark from his black eyes. It was little wonder that I was abandoned to repent my folly with only poor Nelly to write to, or receive a timorous visit from, when once I had been banished from my childhood abode. I did not deserve my brother's love—nor that of any decent member of society, once I had been depraved by the returning stranger. I was ostracised; and yet, when the chance came to witness the murder of the man who had exiled me from the company of my peers, my friends and my relatives, I leapt in to save the rogue's worthless life, so abject was my surrender to Heathcliff.

I skirt the subject that cannot be spoken of here; and yet, if I am to reveal at last the terrible truth of that September evening in my brother's absence, I must for the first and only time give account of that depravity and its occasioning. That Hannah and Joel, two servants carrying logs to Miss Cathy's boudoir (I cannot refer to her as Mrs Linton, here: she is Cathy, Heathcliff's Cathy, and I was blind not to see him tie her to him as closely as a master to a slave, on the very first night of his walking into the ball at The Grange)—that Joel, at least, may have seen, as I was forced to do, what took place there, is scarcely to be doubted. Whether this faithful retainer, shocked beyond utterance by what he witnessed, then found speech enough to report it to my brother, I do not know. But I suspect, from Nelly's cautious silence on the subject, that he did; and thus, as far as my relations with family are concerned, my banishment was forever sealed.

Catherine sat at the dressing-table in her room, looking dreamily out at the garden and the hills beyond.

What came next is neither dream nor true remembering: it was as though my soul left my body in one quick flight, and as if my movements were not my own but those of an abandoned ship, sailing rudderless across a foreign sea. I could neither accord nor resist: I knew myself dead but horribly alive; and I found myself powerless to resist commands from the devil who now possessed me.

‘Go there, Isabella', said Heathcliff at last, when I had stood for what seemed a century on the threshold of the once-familiar room. ‘Go—and keep your tongue from wagging, or you'll know the voice this one speaks'—and here a black leather belt, studded with gold, was brandished and a sneer, transforming the newly costumed gentleman into a brute, spread across his features. ‘Whatever you may see, you will inform no one', were Heathcliff's last words, as he propelled me towards a tall press that stood, as it had since my earliest days at The Grange, by the door that led onto the stairs and landing. And before I could fully accept, with a dreadful cold certainty, the absence of my true self at the inner core of my being, I was marched into the depths of the cupboard and left there, with only the keyhole for source of light and window onto my new master's activities.

At first I thought myself a child again, hiding in the silk gowns my mother kept in the press—and which remained there long after her death, for my poor father did not have the heart to move them. Then, attempting to gain a balance in my prison—and this it was, for I could no more dare to move outside and confront my captor than to hang myself with a tassel from one of the garments dangling above my head—I saw I was indeed among the dresses of my sister-in-law, or Madam, as Edgar would have had Heathcliff address her in past days. I shrank from the unintentional caress of muslin, satin or the pleated silk she'd worn on the evening of our ball at
The Grange; and as I did so, I half-fell against the door of the press, which yielded an inch or two into the room. But I went unheard; the owner of the fine dresses, visible now, could not have spied me even if a creaking door had alerted her to the presence of a stranger; and only modesty and a fear of detection by
him
, prevented me from bursting out and running from the house altogether.

Cathy lay on her back on the four-poster bed, her petticoats billowing out around her. Her face—thought pretty by Nelly, I know, but a face that could appear wild and cruel and so had long been unappealing to me—could just be seen, deep in the welter of cushions and pillows she liked to keep her company on the bed. Her cheeks were flushed—that I did see—and her hair as messed as if the moor wind had blown it out forever from the constraints of curlers and fine coiffure. A look of joy in her eyes—I had never seen them like that before, dark one moment and blue as a summer sky the next. And she wept—
she
could make any sound she wished, it was soon clear. Heathcliff, naked and brown-skinned as a child that has bathed in rock pools and lain in heather to dry—lay astride her. I thought at first—in my innocence—that they played a game together, aping their childhood days just as the sudden confinement in my mother's press had momentarily returned me to mine. But
their
childhood had indeed been different to those of the children of The Grange, if this was the case; for soon I could be left in no doubt as to the passion and reality of their love-making.

Afternoon turned to dusk, as it does in autumn in the North, more quickly than could be expected; and I heard Edgar's voice outside, as he dismounted from his mare and came into the hall. What were we all to do now? Would I be discovered as an accomplice to the adulterous crime? I pushed open the cupboard door; my will returned to me in a great burst; I fled.

From that time, I became a servant of the Devil—for there is no other way to describe the man I loved and hated and married, while knowing his own heart was frozen in a raging Hell. I was at Heathcliff's beck and call, aware of his undying devotion to another; and I wished a hundred times that my brother had come more quickly up the stairs on that fateful September day, to discover and arrest the sinners and expel them from our lives and home. But, as ever in our tranquil existence at The Grange, Edgar suspected nothing. I went to Nelly and complained of a headache, once I felt safe to crawl from my hiding-place beneath the stairs; and for all I know, Cathy and her devoted husband dined amicably enough together while I was put to bed by the old servant. At least there was no sound of disagreement in the house that night. The Grange was calm, and the recent visitor—or interloper, as Heathcliff certainly was—had vanished as surely as the last glow of the September day.

It took three months more of this dreadful year for me to find myself a bride and banished forever from the home I had since infancy cherished and adored. All the autumn, Heathcliff called when my brother was abroad—he had, it seemed, powers of some kind which informed him of the absence of the proprietor of The Grange
and Cathy, aware also for some reason of the suitability of the time, was ever prepared for his coming—and I would see them steal off into the orchard, or even run as far as the moor, returning spangled with the muddy rain and bracken shoots where they had lain. I was not taken on these lovers' journeys—and for this I was glad; but I was not left to my own devices, either, Heathcliff ensuring I knew the occasion of their setting off and their return. He would take me aside for a passionate, stolen kiss when a tryst was about to occur, and on one occasion had me half-naked in an upper room while Cathy sought him everywhere—but however much I begged him to stay with me, he would be gone before I could plead with him any further. He used me as kindling for the flames which followed between the wicked adulterers; and I, in despair, burned as they pursued their love. It was little wonder, I suppose, that I thought it the happiest day of my life when Heathcliff took me, one January evening, to the blacksmith's forge in Scotland and had us married there. I was fool enough to believe he found himself in love with me—I suffered then and still, to think of my folly then, I suffer now. But it was only in the two months we spent together after the marriage at the blacksmith's forge that I began to learn of the diabolical tricks my new husband was able to conjure from the depths—and entertain himself by tormenting me.