Heathcliff's Tale (16 page)

The past—the winter of her death and of my walk in the snow to the shepherd's house, soaked but determined to find the truth of those characters I could not forget: this was where and how I had seen her. Up at the ruined farm of Top Withens—‘Darkwall' Branwell termed the place, as if trying to convince listeners that he and he alone had brought the people and the setting to life— up in the fragments of a book that was an abandoned house, I had seen her kissing—and here I halted and rose to my feet. Already, the uncertain afternoon fled the garden of the Parsonage; there was no fire to get going in the grate; and I had no choice but to take her lamp to light me away from the house. For some power told me I
was threatened, if I lingered even a minute longer, in the room.

Yet I did not go. I heard the voices, even as I began to cross the floor to the door; I heard them rise and then fall again, and I knelt by the end of the truckle bed to hear better through a crack in the planks there. I set down the lamp; and it seemed the voices flew up to me, like creatures of the night. I knelt, and looked down at a portion of the small study below.

‘I did not die, and here's the proof of it!' The young woman who spoke was fair—fair as a Linton, I sensed in my heart already, but not calm as the family from The Grange had been known to be. She was wild—wilder than Cathy in the days of her long escapes to Peniston Crag, with the rain and the wind and young Heathcliff for company. ‘You stole my son from my brother's house', Isabella went on—for it was she, it was she!—and I felt the thud of my heart against my ribs and then a long breathlessness. ‘And I knew I would never have him back from a blackguard such as you, Heathcliff. Now you must return him to me. Today!'

How can I describe these people, in the brightly lit room that lay just seven or eight feet below me, but unreachable, as if in deep transparent water, like a sunken ship. The passengers were ghosts—but they lived—and moved and spoke. And Isabella, in her dress as red as the fire which blazed behind her in the mirage of the little study, was more beautiful than ever she had been when in my dreams. Heathcliff—how could I have pitied the monster? how loved him also, wishing to extend a hand to this disfigured, corpulent reveller at a Black Sabbath of the soul—Heathcliff stood opposite my darling Isabella and laughed at her demands.

So Isabella told her secrets to the man who broke her heart, the man who stands in all weathers still at Gimmerton crossroads where the suicides are buried,
and where he may meet his Cathy if the clouds are torn apart and a hag moon comes bobbing through. She told him of his mother—of Nelly's story—and of his father, Joseph Earnshaw; and he laughed even longer. ‘What is it to me if I am?' he cried, and the flames leapt up to the mantel as if fanned from Hell. ‘My Cathy—my little Cathy—is my daughter, and I begot her on my sister. She weds Linton tomorrow…'

‘No!' Isabella's cry was piteous; in my attempt to struggle to my feet I overturned the little lamp and the light went out. I was now in complete blackness.

Linton, the son taken from Isabella, has Heathcliff as his father; and so, as Isabella knows, has young Catherine Linton. They should not marry; but they will.

I cannot say how much time passed before the scene beneath my feet melted away, a minute or maybe more. But for a time the voices rose with the March wind that whistled eerily outside on the moor and I heard the rage and grief of Isabella and the laughter of the fiend who had brought a curse to her family, the Lintons, and to the Earnshaws up at Top Withens.

After his death from consumption in 1861, Henry Newby was seen to have left a chapter of either biography or fiction (it is hard to tell which) entitled
The Rape of Gondal.
We present it here for the interest of future scholars.

by Henry Newby

The bedroom corridor at Haworth smells of fat; beef dripping stored in a jar in the larder by Tabby and scooped out for frying up the potatoes the Reverend Patrick likes to eat for supper on Saturdays. The smell comes down from the pulpit on Sunday morning, when hellfire is threatened for sins too terrible to bear telling of again, these long known about by all the parish: the robbery up at The Heights where one of the thieves, face blackened, plunged a knife into the chest of Jonas Pickles; the birth of a baby to the Heaton family who had to pay the defecting father to marry the girl; incest down at Rush Isles where another Heaton, Betty, had married her stepbrother John Shackleton. The strong, stale smell comes from the mouth of God and is a slow and painful punishment for the dreams and fantasies and crimes committed by those who try to fight free from the limits and constrictions of a righteous life. Now, as Emily lies awake in the bed she had until a few days ago shared with her elder sister Charlotte, the smell creeps along the bedroom passage and slides under the door. Saturday night prepares for Sunday morning. On the ground floor of the house, where her father's study contains the hunched figure and wild disorder of papers of his Sabbath sermon, Patrick Brontë sits wrapped in the comforting, familiar
smell. It reminds him of his dead wife, Mary. Her sister Aunt Branwell was a Cornishwoman, who had liked to make pasties in the cramped kitchen. She had tried to persuade Tabby to do the same. But Tabby is faithful to the wishes of her Irish-born employer. At Haworth, the Reverend Patrick will never lack potatoes: pasties don't go down well with him at all. Potatoes, eaten boiled for the midday meal, will continue for eternity to be fried on Saturday nights in dripping.

Emily, at twelve, is the second youngest of the six Brontë children. Tonight, the 20th of January, is also her second night alone. For Charlotte, two years her senior, has now gone off to school at Roe Head; and their shared bed, so lately a theatre, a magic cave filled with stories and adventures, is empty and cold. There is nothing left in the house to concentrate on but the smell—deathly now, to Emily's imagination: an omen of the dreariness and desolation of the coming year. January, with its two-faced god, leers at her from the dark window where the rosy curtains Aunt Branwell made after Maria and Elizabeth died fail to meet in the middle, and so let in spectres and bogeys, all the roaming spirits of the moors. The smell turns to a white vapour, a creeping shroud, and envelops Emily as she lies in blankets and sheets so rough with starch her legs are rubbed raw with her attempts to run away and escape in her sleep. Is there a sound, a movement, on the landing outside her room? It is even blacker out there than in the garden, high above Withens, where the ghost of the miserable Heaton girl, dead since giving birth to her unwanted baby, walks and weeps at night with her poor mother. Is the handle of the bedroom door, fastened a hundred times a day by Tabby when it slips from the lock (there is no man in the household to perform these menial tasks: Branwell, the only boy, is as excitable and Irish as the rest of Patrick's family,
and the clergyman himself too preoccupied with sin and redemption to attend to a faulty door handle)—is the door about to swing open, as it terrifyingly does, even on a windless night, revealing the horror of black nothingness, the void? Charlotte has always been there, when it does. But now, Emily, wide awake and lying flat beneath the sheets, is alone. She feels the clammy persistence of the smell, as it coils across her legs and lays itself on the quilt. She screams—but, as in all the most terrifying tales concocted by her elder siblings, Branwell and Charlotte—no sound comes.

The bedroom door opens, and then closes again. The smell grows stronger before receding, its tail slithering over the bed and landing with a thump on the bare boards before vanishing altogether. Another presence replaces it: a presence as well known to Emily as the odour of potatoes-and-dripping that has come to stand for all she dreads, hates—and once, when her mother Mary was alive, had loved. But, as it comes towards her and fastens on her face, she does this time scream aloud. The presence has cold lips; and they land on her own like stone. Tabby, far away in the kitchen, can of course hear nothing. If the Reverend Patrick hears a sound, he does nothing about it. Aren't the children always shrieking and play-acting, in the world he knows, somehow, they must learn to leave if they are to grow up to be responsible adults? Emily's scream, to Patrick, is another melodramatic expression from the kingdom he has heard referred to as Angria. He resolves to stamp it out—but at present he has his sermon to write, and besides, as he will never admit to Aunt Branwell, he is suffering from indigestion, from eating too many of those richly fried potatoes, glistening in their bed of fat.

Alexander Percy, Earl of Northangerland, is six feet tall with auburn hair, a fine aquiline nose and the air of command to be expected from one who conquers wherever he goes—whether in Nigrittia, province of the African realm so densely populated with earls, dukes, Border chieftains and lovely, languishing maidens—or in the country of James Hogg and Walter Scott, the mountainous areas where the Brontë children place their imaginations. No one—and nothing—can overpower Alexander Percy, once Alexander Rogue and before that, in an early incarnation, Alexander Naughty. He is the son of the Border Ballad, the scion of
Blackwood's Magazine
where the most violent and ghoulish stories of those great writers and tale-tellers, appear regularly, to be pounced on and read again and again. Alexander Percy, with his habitual sneer and his passionate nature when aroused, is the terror of the neighbourhood, the lord and master of all he surveys.

The dark valley of the Yarrow, the wide river that flows down from the ghost-filled hills of the Ettrick shepherd, James Hogg, poet and author of
The Memoirs of A Justified Sinner
, lies before Percy, Earl of Northangerland as he strides towards his next conquest. For long now, the hero with flaming hair has courted the Lady Augusta Segovia, and now the time has come to seize her, pillage the sweet modesty of which Emily and Branwell, collaborating in the long odes and ballads dedicated to Lady Augusta, have made much; and then watch her die, to be succeeded in Lord Percy's affections by her cousin Harriet. There comes a question of rivals fighting for the hand of Augusta—but Percy neither cares nor remembers how the last, breathless confabulation might have gone.

For the Earl of Northangerland, the diminutive, bespectacled Branwell Brontë, has at thirteen years of age discovered the truth of the ‘bad things' for which the
great Lord Byron had been known. Neither John Brown, the handsome sexton's son at Haworth, nor Aunt Branwell, who professes herself, being a Cornishwoman, more attuned to the ways of the world than her brother-in-law—have done other than turn away and change the subject when the name of Lord Byron comes up. But Branwell, now transmogrifying from Alexander Percy to the great poet himself, has found and ordered the volume which outlines his hero's crimes.

It is past midnight when the Earl leaves the valley of the Black Douglas's castle, crosses the Yarrow on his foaming steed, and arrives on the shores of St Mary's Loch. He dismounts and looks about him, as is customary before a raid; and it is as George Gordon, Lord Byron, that he swaggers down the bedroom passage and tries the faulty handle on Lady Augusta's door….

THE END

Born in London, Emma Tennant was educated at St Paul's Girls' School and spent the World War II years and her childhood summers at the family's faux Gothic mansion The Glen in Peeblesshire. Her family also owned estates in Trinidad.

Tennant grew up in the modish London of the 1950s and 1960s. She worked as a travel writer for
Queen
magazine and an editor for
Vogue
, publishing her first novel,
The Colour of Rain
, under a pseudonym when she was twenty-six. Between 1975 and 1979, she edited a literary magazine,
Bananas
, which helped launch the careers of several young novelists.

A large number of books by Tennant have followed: thrillers, children's books, fantasies, and several revisionist takes on classic novels, including a sequel to
Pride and Prejudice
called
Pemberley
. In later years, she began to write about her own life in such books as
Burnt Diaries
(1999), which details her affair with Ted Hughes.

Tennant has been married four times, including to the journalist and author Christopher Booker and the political writer Alexander Cockburn. She has two daughters and a son, author Matthew Yorke. In April 2008, she married her partner of 33 years, Tim Owens.