Heathcliff's Tale (14 page)

The moon, a half-moon that bulged like an eye over the fat cheek of the distant Stanford Moor, had risen as I made my uncertain way around the house which once had contained the passions and rages of
the Earnshaws (I was certain, Uncle, that a collapsed fragment of the heraldic stone piece above the fireplace bore the initials H.E.—for the wretched Hindley and many Hindleys before him, I have no doubt, E. for the now blighted name of Earnshaw). I made my way to the window, the glass all smashed and snow piled high on the sill; and there, out by the back door, where the moor runs right up to the abandoned house, I saw them, kissing.

It was a full minute before I saw that the man, whom I had imagined to be Heathcliff, could not be he. And the young woman—how I had caught my breath at the idea I saw Isabella herself there, reconciled with her wicked hero!—was no resident of The Heights, nor of The Grange down below. She wore a dress such as my mother and sisters wore—and still do—it was very much of our day. Her lover, for so his persistent kisses proclaimed him to be, had not the height or presence of a Heathcliff: in the dim light it appeared his hair was reddish in colour, and he too wore the clothes of today, trousers and a jacket which had every appearance of attempting—and not succeeding in being—smart. They both turned; my heart leapt as I saw in my mind's eye the little sitting-room at the Parsonage where I'd passed a sleepless night; and again and again I travelled round that small room with its mezzotints and sketches hung on the walls, and saw both faces before me there.

Uncle, you know the rest. The collie dog was my helper, in the end: it brought rescue to the place where I had fallen unconscious in the ruins of Top Withens, and I was portered to safety by a team of men.

And now, Uncle, I end my letter to you. You may be interested to know that I have no further
connection with the characters I sought on that awful day, up on Haworth Moor. I know them for what they are; and I regret my folly in chasing shadows from the pages of a novel.

As I lay here recovering from my ordeal a few weeks back, the post came with this strange packet addressed to both of us. I opened it—but on seeing that it purports to be by ‘Ellen Dean' I stuck up the envelope once more, and duly send it down to you.

Your affectionate nephew

Henry Newby

The following ‘statement', purporting to be in the hand of the narrator of Emily Brontë's novel, Nelly Dean, is reluctantly included here. We own to a certain shame in presenting the clumsy efforts of a novice writer to become a published author: today, Henry Newby would be encouraged to join a Creative Writing Course at a respected university and instructed in the art of narrative. Unfortunately for us (and for his posthumous reputation) his wild surmises on the parentage of Heathcliff, etc., have come down to posterity
.

I, Ellen Dean of Thorn Cottages, Gimmerton, give here my account of the circumstances of the birth of one known as ‘Heathcliff, of Wuthering Heights.

In the summer of 1764 I left my parental home east of Halifax and found my way, by way of rides in waggon-carts and by hiding in stagecoaches, to the great city of Liverpool. I was twelve years old at that time, and could find neither happiness nor acceptance in my family.

Once I was in the city I soon found myself a bed in a house purporting to be run by a woman of good family, and was foolish enough to believe her declaration that she had taken pity on one so young adrift in the world, and wished for nothing more than to give me a roof over my head until I should be old enough to fend for myself.

It soon became clear that money changed hands in this household when the other inmates, all young girls like myself, were visited by gentlemen—or by sailors or worse—as was often the case. One of the girls I befriended: she was as bewildered as I by the goings on there. She evidently had no experience, either, of our native country, for she had been a slave and was just over from the islands, though where these are or were I cannot say. She
spoke a strange tongue, and became known as the Lascar maid, and some took her for the daughter of pirates.

We had not been there long when a man I had the necessary shame in recognising, came to this house of ill repute. He made it clear from the first that he came to save the fallen women and not to take advantage of them—but as he paid handsomely for the opportunity to carry out his reforms, our mistress of the house tolerated him quite happily.

This man was a cousin of my late mother, who had been an Earnshaw from Sladen Moor before she married and whose death, alas!—caused the remarriage of my father, and my own unhappy childhood.

At first I said nothing when Joseph Earnshaw came. I felt shy to be seen in these surroundings by the respectable old man, known for his hospitality at The Heights. Indeed, he would send a sheep each Christmas to my parents when my mother was alive and he wrote to her in her last illness with the kindness and affection for which he was famed throughout our county.

Joseph Earnshaw took particular trouble when trying to understand the speech of my dark-skinned friend—whom I called Sarah, for she had no name that any of us could get our tongues round when it came to calling her. Once he had ascertained that neither she nor I had yet been admitted to the cruel trade overseen by our mistress (she waited, I believe, until we were more developed as women, for Sarah was considered still too wild to fetch a good price and I, some years younger, was as thin and straight as a boy) it became Joseph Earnshaw's most devoted aim to remove us from these insalubrious surroundings. I, Ellen, as a daughter of his kinswoman, he took to The Heights where I worked as nursemaid until the death of Mrs Earnshaw, and after that as housekeeper. I was treated with the utmost consideration at The Heights by Joseph Earnshaw and Mrs Earnshaw,
and for all their faults I grew to love their children, Master Hindley and his sister, Miss Catherine. But Sarah, my dark-skinned friend, could have no place with us.

On the night he came to fetch me away, my friend Sarah became very aggrieved and despondent, accusing us both of abandoning her to her fate in the brothel—for this was no more and no less than what our home was. She begged Cousin Joseph to bring her home with me, and she cried piteously when he said he could not. Sarah did not avoid her fate as a woman of easy virtue and mother of an unwanted child. I shall be haunted to the end of my days by the sight of her at the window when we left.

It was late at night when my kinsman and I set off to return to The Heights—where, despite the hour, a great fire was burning, to welcome us in.

When Heathcliff, abandoned by all with whom he came in contact, and kidnapped, so it was said, by slave traders, was found wandering in the streets of Liverpool a few years later, a local woman who once had worked in the house that had been a home to me and Sarah, saw him and wrote to the kindly old man. He came into the city and retrieved the child—his own bastard son with Sarah.

Signed

Ellen Dean

September 1801

February 28th 1849

I have a confession to make. The fault must lie with my uncle and his pressing demands for chapters from the novel left unpublished—not even submitted—at Ellis Bell's death (whoever Ellis Bell may in the end turn out to be).

I did not stick up the packet from Ellen Dean without perusing the contents: I am not cured enough yet, if such can be the term, from the reading habits formed at the time of my unfortunate visit to Haworth Parsonage. I dream at night of a woman I found in a book, who belongs more strongly in the land of the living than any maid aspiring towards marriage and motherhood in the city of Leeds. I sigh and mope over my work in the law office on occasion, still—and I must lay the responsibility for this sad state of affairs with my uncle, Thomas Cautley Newby. Had he not sent me on an errand to retrieve new tales of horror and passion conceived in the brain of a deranged author, I should be rising higher in the firm of Newby & Sons and very likely announcing my betrothal to a Miss Pontifex, whose father's engineering works abut our own offices. My mother would be delighted at the glad tidings; and a house would be surveyed
and purchased on the west side of the city, with a garden where our children would play in summer.

Alas, none of this is to be. My excitement—nearly bringing on another bout of the fever suffered on Haworth Moor—has been intense since reading Nelly Dean's statement. I know more now, so I believe, than anyone else in this strange matter: I begin to know the origins of the man who is neither man nor devil. I yearn to confide my findings to the beautiful young woman who entrusted her life and future happiness to the monster; and where she seeks, I shall follow and entrust her with the secrets I have just read. Isabella shall learn of Heathcliff's early abandonment by his mother, and of his parentage. She it is who will judge Nelly Dean's silence in all those years at The Heights when Hindley Earnshaw cheated the lad of his rightful inheritance and demanded he work as a stable lad.

But who can condemn the discretion of servants? Nelly Dean knew more than she was prepared to say.

March 1st

A missive has arrived here from my uncle, expressing his disgust at the pages I sent down to him. He insists they are not by the same hand as chapters read and examined earlier: he even goes so far as to accuse me of being their author! And he asks me, in a tone both insulting and hurtful, to desist sending him this ‘improbable sequel' to Mr Bell's novel.

The worst aspect of the matter lies in the nature of the material my uncle returns to me. I sit and rub my eyes in the dingy office overlooking the Pontifex works— and for the first time I wish myself securely married and settled, even if my father-in-law, with his tricks and peculiarities, might prove intolerably irksome—for what I have had returned to me by my uncle is not at all what I sent.

Ellen Dean's statement is there in the packet, it is true. But there are other pages, in an envelope of their own and addressed—he is perfectly correct in asserting that the hand bears no resemblance to that appended to earlier chapters—to Thomas Cautley Newby directly. I opened the packet an hour at least after gazing inside, and observing the signature of the writer. I am in need of air—and find myself overlooked here at Newby & Sons, by the manager of the Works, the very man who expects to walk his daughter up the aisle to wed me there.

I have walked right out of the city, and sit on a bank that has a fine view of Leeds, its smoking stacks and busy manufactories. I am as far as it is possible to be from the world outlined to me here by the lovely young woman I once had yearned for, and now find immeasurably distasteful to contemplate. I am plunged, in this landscape of dark Satanic mills, into a society far more sinful than I could have imagined possible, and completely without the morals with which the inhabitants of this great city of Leeds have been imbued since birth: I am, in short, speechless at the wickedness practised by all those who came in contact with the man who is the personification of evil, Heathcliff. This is what I read: when I have done with it, the canals and waterways of our city shall bear the pernicious testament out to sea and it will be lost forever.

The pages were in the hand of Isabella, unhappy wife of the monster, Heathcliff. At last I would learn the story of her life; and I scarcely dared, so great had my fascination with her been, to open the packet and read on. These are her words:

‘I fled south from the ruin of my life, and found neither solace nor happiness in the house my friends found for me, nor relief from the pain that had been inflicted on me by the one—alas!—I still longed for and loved.

‘Night and day, I dreamed of Heathcliff, and of the passion we might have had together. Each day seemed a month in duration; the season—it was May—was as uninteresting as a dull book gone through too quickly; and the fact of my secret burden, the child I carried within me, brought a pall of fear and suspicion over all I saw and all those who tried to comfort or amuse me.

‘The house I had was near London and I visited a family there who entertained me very hospitably—for they had no idea, at that time, of my brother Edgar's decision to ban me from his company, or even of my imprudent
marriage to the man who now maltreated the owner of The Heights, Hindley Earnshaw, forcing him into debt and drinking, and removing his property from him as he did so. I was treated as a young unmarried woman—there were rumours that I was in fact a widow and did not choose to speak of my bereavement—and admirers in plenty appeared to escort me to various amusements in the capital.

‘I may say that none of this appealed to me; yet, as I pined for Heathcliff and at the same time prayed for deliverance from my unwelcome pregnancy, I began to understand that I might find the love of my life after all, and not where I had expected to seek him. For the old witch at Gimmerton had filled me with dreams and fancies—that I would come together with my own true love in Venice, the city in the sea, where the cats are fashioned from glass and good fortune follows bad like the masked dancers in the carnival.

‘I became convinced of Heathcliff's undying love for me—and this I confide in full awareness of the ridicule which will accompany my statement of this belief. I waited each day for the mail-coach, as if my life and future depended on it. At night I swooned in memory of the kisses I had shared—but only as I slept—with the man who was the Devil incarnate, and yet the only one I could be with, on earth or in Hell. I would tell him of the child I carried, and he would take me in his arms, proud at last that I had brought a son into the world, for him. For I had known that a son would come from our union, and seal the love we should have consummated and perfected long ago.