Heathcliff's Tale (11 page)

We left Thrushcross Grange only just in time, as I soon came to think, for there had been fights of a very injurious nature between my brother and Heathcliff, and the former had tried on several occasions to eject the unwelcome visitor from the house. Heathcliff had been too well-instructed in the administering of bodily harm, it was clear, for poor Edgar to take him on, on his own, and footmen and workers on the estate were brought in to subdue the glass-breaking, kicking and punching miscreant who attempted to destroy the peace of our beloved
home. But Heathcliff was always stronger than all of them—Cathy would cry piteously that he must go unmolested, while Edgar hesitated at her pleas—and time and again the ruffian was winner in these uneven bouts of violence.

It is painful for me to relate here the progress of the wedding journey taken by the newly married couple— that is, Heathcliff and myself—though I can hardly bear to this day the pain of describing us as such.

We were at Gretna Green, on a dark, tempestuous evening in midwinter, after our gallop north from Thrushcross Grange; we spoke our words just as so many young folk had done, who were too much in love to await the sanction of their parents or the assurance of an heiress's fortune. Yet, for us, there was to be no happy exchange of kisses, no blissful union in the rough sleeping quarters of the ancient inn. ‘Well, my dear Miss Linton', was all my new spouse would say as we went to the tavern, where he would drink himself insensible before the hour was out, and a long night of blackness and desolation faced me on my wedding night, ‘you are Mrs Heathcliff now … you must obey my wishes to an even greater degree than before. When I signal to you, go up to bed. Lie on the right side, so you heart is open to the visitations of the dead. Walk where you are led—you have my assurances that you
will
indeed return to the land of the living. Though'—and this he added with a terrible, melancholy laugh that had the other frequenters of the inn looking over at him in sudden fear and perplexity, ‘you may wish you had remained in the Isle of the Damned a while longer, once you find yourself back at home with me.'

I did as I was told. Already, as I was to conclude much later, Heathcliff poisoned me with his strange potions and weeds, these smuggled in the glass of punch the hostelry offered as sly felicitation on our marriage night. Already, by the time I was instructed to mount the
stairs—by a groom now grown drunk and morbid, his swarthy features arousing both curiosity and hostility amongst the dour revellers of the Scottish establishment—I knew my heart and mind to be affected, most disagreeably, by the beverage. My legs trembled, but obeyed my will—yet whose will this was, I could not say. Nor, when I had lain down obediently on the right side of the ill-made wooden bed, could I recognise the dreams which came abruptly and insistently to my sleeping brain. These were visions of great strength and clarity—but they were not mine. I knew myself, yet could not alter or resist this state in which I knew myself inhabited by another, one who must now be dead.

At first, I confess to having been bewitched by the beauty of all I saw. A sky of a deep and piercing blue hung above the cliffs, sandy shores and emerald forests of an island lapped by a calm and wave-crested sea. Women with bundles on their heads walked in a market where bright fruit was piled; long boats with carved prows bobbed in a harbour fronted by pretty houses, these painted in luscious colours like the cottons and striped garments of the thronging crowds. Wild birds, flame-red in their plumage, raucous in their long, demanding calls, flew down from the pinnacles of two mountains by the sea, these so tall, like needles—yet formed of rock and bright scrub and soaring up into the heavens. Over all was the sound of singing, market bargaining and the cries of children; yet there was no sense of harmony here, nor of peaceful co-habitation: many bore, I saw, marks of wounds inflicted lately, in the form of scars across the face or on a back bared to the sun; others lacked features or limbs altogether, as if these had been eaten away by termites or chopped off randomly, to leave the sufferer mutilated but walking still. Despite the sounds I have described, no one spoke, or looked me in the eye—it was as if, as I was to realise with a dreadful sense of chill, the happy bustling
trading calls and clamour of the young all came from another world, a world I could no longer enter. I walked alone, amongst the dead.

I cannot say how many times I woke—or tried to wake—from the nightmare, on that long, dark winter night in the Border inn. I know only that the face of Heathcliff, wearing the sardonic, devilish expression I had believed myself enamoured of, in the safety of my brother's home, appeared again and again amongst the people of this distant, sad and high-coloured place. His eyes looked out at me from under the brows of men and women manifesting the imprint of chains or the deep marks of whiplash, on their flesh; and his angry, insolent smile took in the quay, the prison and the market-place with the same force of contempt and superiority I had admired and craved at home. But now, seeing him thus—surrounded by his people and gloating at the gold that made him apart from them, master instead of slave—I feared him and I prayed for release from his dreadful powers.

You will know by now that I did not find freedom—for a time, at least. If Heathcliff came up to bed on our wedding night, the drug he had administered did not wake me or let me know it: I lived in that far port, with all its cripples and its dead memories of a happy life, until a frosty morning showed at the window-pane. When the sun rose, we rode north of the border; and here, among the burns that widen as they come down the hillsides, to open out into a great loch, I believe the man—or demon—I had married, searched for a lost memory of his own. It was cold, but we climbed, in heather and cloudberries, to the summit of a mountain where a cairn marked the highest point. Here, Heathcliff gazed down at the land and the expanse of black water below. He seemed to identify a field where a shepherd walked with
his dog across the grass. But nothing was said to me, other than to give orders—and soon we moved on.

For all that, I had the distinct sensation in those days by the still, dark stretch of deep water—and in the whitewashed inn where we stayed, cold in the fireless room but never warm in each other's arms—that another intelligence from my husband's dictated our trajectory and took charge of our lives. Heathcliff was ever brooding, starting up suddenly when a chance cruelty or opportunity for malice came his way; but sometimes, as if in despair, he would run along the dark roads or tracks we tramped each day, these bordered by larch or tall pines and seeming to constrict us further as we went. Someone or something kept this strange, half-human being as obedient to their will as his own dreadful spells and savage gods had rendered me to him. He acted as he was bid; and the worst of it lay in the nature of the charm the poor brute was subject to: an undying love for the wife of another.

I tried at first to cure him of his obsession with her. ‘Cathy', I heard Heathcliff cry in his sleep; or at times when he wandered beneath the ruined walls of Castle Douglas, where he sought her. ‘Cathy, come back to me', he begged, by the banks of the brown River Yarrow that runs down there through snow—‘Cathy' he would sob, as if the word was written in the stones and ditches of that blank landscape. Then he would return to my side and march on. He belonged there—he had been placed there, so it seemed to me, by an imagination that burned to enslave him forever in a Border song of anguish, betrayal, death. I had no place there; but for a while, for I could neither stay nor leave, I accompanied him through the frozen Hell where he was condemned to remain until death freed him to rejoin his love.

‘Tell me, Isabella'—we sat one night at a table in the modest inn at Tibbie Shiels, on the northern shore of St Mary's Loch—‘tell me, do you believe in happiness? Do you cling to the hope, my poor child, that you will find it in your marriage—that I will sigh for you one day, as I do for my love, the light of my life, at present? Do you imagine, if
she
should die—' and here Heathcliff looked across at me, his black eyes alight with the contempt I had come to expect from him, ‘do you live in hope, Isabella, that I would shift my affections to my darling bride?' And he sat back in his chair and laughed, his face caught between the shadows of the falling night outside, and the glow of flames from the fire that leapt in the grate behind him. ‘You are of the opinion that your sop of a brother, Edgar, would grieve more deeply than I, at the loss of Catherine', he said, and his voice was low now, for the first time since we had run away together, on that night which was to mark the ending of a life both indulged and happy: my life with the brother so regularly condemned by my husband that I could no longer hear the hurtful words.

‘Why do you imagine that others cannot suffer as you do', I replied—in part, I suppose, because I had been addressed in this unusual, thoughtful tone—and also by reason of sheer habit, for I knew myself to be little better, in these new days, than an automaton.

‘You, who were once of a keen disposition, my Isabella', said Heathcliff, and as so often before he took my sad thoughts straight from my mind. ‘It amazes me that you should sink to little more than a serving-girl in your intelligence and ambition in life.' And the monster gave a loathsome bellow of laughter which brought tears welling once again from my eyes. ‘Can you not understand that
no one
'—and here he thumped the table where we sat in the low-ceilinged, smoky little room of the lochside inn, so that the cat, a tabby with a markedly ferocious expression,
was forced into flight—‘no one suffers as I do, my dear wife. There is a special antechamber in Hell reserved for me, Mrs Heathcliff—and the difference lies in the fact that I inhabit it already, whereas the other poor sinners in this dreadful world live only in anticipation of the comforts provided there'. This time, no laughter accompanied the desperate testimony; and my much-regretted spouse fell into a long silence. Rain began to fall, it covered the pines and firs that fringe the loch in a silvery blur; and soon I could no longer feel where the misery invading me ended and the weeping skies of the outside world began. There was no hope, for me or for Heathcliff—I believe I saw this truly then; but it may also indicate a measure of the extent to which I was bound to this uncanny being, that I should place us together still, in dreams and my imaginings.

After a few days more we left the Ettrick Forest, the dark waters of St Mary's Loch and the bleak valley of the Yarrow, where this half-man, half-devil seemed drawn as if by a will stronger than his own. When we walked there, on sliding snow beside the frozen brown burns, he was at his mildest—if that is the term—and I would think that one day, if we became accustomed to each other, Heathcliff would learn to like my company, at least, even if he could never love me while Cathy lived. But the yearning, quizzical expression he directed to the tops of the larches—or the small smiles he sometimes lavished on bare hills, snow drifts and distant sheep pens of crumbling stone that stood against the horizon in the fast-falling light, were for another, not even Cathy, I believe; and certainly not for me. Someone or something knew the inner workings of his soul; he obeyed their commands and he could no more escape from them than could I from him.

I did escape, however. You know the story of our time at The Heights, when we returned from two months in a country that soon became as vivid and unbelievable in my mind as the bright-coloured land of my dreams, the land of the maimed and dead across a far sea. You have heard tales of violence in that accursed place, where the master, the drunken Hindley Earnshaw, fell each day and night deeper and deeper into Heathcliff's power, his passion for gaming earning a mountain of debt which the wretched child Hareton, Hindley's child from an earlier, more promising time, will never have the ability to repay. The violence arose from this terrible situation; and I, who had become slothful and slatternly, surly in my hatred of the brute I was chained to in that remote and hideous place, longed only for the two men to fight it out and for Heathcliff to die.

Cathy it was who died as her child was born, a puny seven months baby, just as the first lambs appeared in the Gimmerton fields. I heard of it from Nelly Dean: she loved the infant from the start; but Heathcliff's terrible grief, combined with my own no less appalling suspicion that my brother Edgar might not be the father of the child, numbed my heart almost to the point of extinction. How should I reply to my brother, if he should himself suspect the paternity of the child? My guilty knowledge of the whole affair—my participation, even, as I must see it, in their sinful acts—would show clearly on my face if he were to ask me.

As with so many instances of fear and dread, this did not occur; but worse did. On the night of what appeared to me at the time to be the last and fatal battle between Hindley and Heathcliff—he who passed his days and nights in the graveyard now, with little more than a black eye to give to his wife on the few occasions we came together in the hall or kitchen of The Heights—I found my courage and I walked out into the night.

Whether the brute had grown so enmeshed in his death-worship of Cathy that he had clean forgotten to administer the drugs to keep me a zombie—as I learned later I had surely been, a woman possessed of a dead woman's self—I do not know. But on the night of that great fight, when a knife, directed at my throat, had only narrowly missed its destination, I knew myself capable of going, and of caring little whether Heathcliff lived or died. I had saved him that night once, from Hindley's murderous rage; and I feared my allegiance, shown in my unexpected loyalty—yes, as unforeseen by myself as by him— would bring me back, a boomerang, to the source of my hatred and despair.

I am living proof that it did not. I have only one reason for the guilt I sometimes suffer, when I look back on the events which succeeded my departure from that evil place. Had I remained there, a beaten wife, a sad relic of the pretty, spirited girl I once had been, I could have saved poor Hindley from his untimely death. For six months after the death of Cathy, her poor drunken brother died, too: and here is a matter for grave suspicion, once again. Hindley Earnshaw was found dead by none other than Heathcliff, at the end of a night's heavy drinking; and I have to declare that Mr Kenneth the apothecary, with whom I kept up a correspondence for some years after settling in the South, near London, expressed his own doubts as to the causes of the death. Nelly, who also wrote to me, gave her assurances that old Joseph the servant had considered Master Hindley to be in perfectly good—if inebriated—health, a short time before he was sent to fetch Mr Kenneth. Did Heathcliff murder Hindley Earnshaw? In my own opinion, and as principal witness of the terrible enmity between the two men—he did.