Heathcliff's Tale (3 page)

‘I will not give in detail the horrors and griefs of my arduous journey. The horror lay in the almost physical sickness which afflicted me as I walked the long road to the city, this alleviated at the last by a kindly waggon-driver, who set me down on the outskirts of Liverpool.
From there, as if I could already smell the sea and savour the bitterness of my escape from the only world I had ever known, I went to the docks. A rat could not have gone with surer instinct to a shipload of cane sugar than I to the harbour; a serpent could not have wound itself more cunningly than I did that night in the hold of an unsuspecting ship destined for distant shores.

‘I did not rest until I knew myself secure amongst the cases and barrels bound for the New World—for CAROLINA was stamped everywhere—and I heard from the shouts and conversations above my head that at dawn we would sail to America. Once the hold was fastened down I made myself comfortable on a sack of flour and I began to feel excitement at my impending departure to a world where a war raged, as I knew from the talk of the gentry brought over from The Grange, and there were many dead and wounded. I knew myself to be on the side of those who fought the British. The enemy I saw as smiling, fair and sweet-mannered as the odious Edgar Linton.

‘I had bread and water and a flagon of spirits, seized from a tavern where the girl who believed I had love or at least lust in my heart for her, went willingly to the kitchens to procure them. But I felt nothing, neither love nor hatred nor gratitude, to anyone. By the time my little servant had handed me the food, she had seen my eyes and already shrank from me. She saw, I have no doubt, the wound inflicted on me that night: the dark moor, the lovely face of Cathy framed by the larder door outside, the stable where I had been taught to belong by her cursed brother Hindley. And my little helper must have heard, too, the words which sounded so loud and repeated again and again in my ears, the words with which my one and only love informed Nelly Dean that she would marry Edgar Linton.

‘The journey was as long as time and as short as a passing dream. I saw the dawn and darkness through a crack in the roof of the hold. I took the ship's biscuits and rum and water the half-witted cabin boy, finding me there one night when ordered to dig for provisions in a barrel, brought me in exchange for the card games and tricks I taught him. For a Gypsy, as Master Hindley Earnshaw would be pleased to say, does not travel without his Tarot or his faking cards. I told the lad a hundred times over that he was born under the sign of the Sun and would find fortune in the far-off lands where we would one day drop anchor. But I felt no belief in this: the chap was a blackamoor and dwarfish to boot, and I expected the Captain to abandon him on some marshy island when once we came to our destination.

‘Of all the good fortune that ever smiled on this poor creature you see before you—a broken man, you might say, Mr Lockwood, even if ownership of both The Heights and Thrushcross Grange may bestow some distinction in the neighbourhood, I am not deluded as to the obloquy which attends my every action—the most outstanding was that of discovering myself, once we were arrived in Carolina, to be in the middle of a most well-placed battle. Well-placed, because it took me not more than an hour to pull off the redcoat of a dying soldier on the ground and assume a different identity.

‘But I go too fast for you, sir. You must understand, as of course I did at a later date, that the battle of Eutaw Creek was the last in the American war; that the chaos and confusion which reigned there made dissimulation easy and daughters of prosperous landowners as desperate to catch a handsome soldier as their fathers were agreeable to the prospect. Many were ruined, others were in a state of panic that the holdings they had built up in the Colony would be lost in the war. And I, poor Heathcliff, stable lad at Wuthering Heights, orphan and discarded
brother of Catherine Earnshaw and her drunken devil of a true brother, Hindley, lost no time in taking on the swagger of the blood-stained uniform I had seized, and of hinting at a substantial fortune left behind in the old country.

‘You may frown at me, for taking a woman without any love for her and of promising to cherish the wretch for all her days. But I did just this. I needed the gold which would one day bring me back to Cathy. For I knew she could not mean what she had vowed to Nelly, that she would marry the feeble-hearted Linton and bear him children in the gentry world of which neither she nor I could ever be a part. I knew she lied—even if she thought me nowhere near and had no notion that I heard her silly prattle—she lied to herself and to the foolish old housekeeper too, to keep up her spirits in our hopeless situation.

‘Do not imagine I hadn't tried a thousand times to find a way of extricating us from the prison of my poverty and the impossibility of our union. There was never an answer to my prayers—whether I addressed Satan or the Lord Jesus Christ who is shown to us as possessing the mild manners of a Linton. Nothing and nobody supplied the answer. I would live and die amongst the animals, where old Earnshaw's heir had so happily imprisoned me.

‘But here, in the New World, a gallant captain, all fortune smiled on me.

‘And so I married Louisa—as her name was—but already, I must confess, I forget her face.

‘Things settled down and I became a farmer. My father-in-law, glad to get his daughter off his hands, increased the acreage when I told him of the moors and
fields and grazing lands I owned here. For I informed the old fool that if there was any ever trouble in Carolina, he and his wife could accompany us to England, to my estates.

‘Yet I could feel no satisfaction with my new prosperity, for I dreamed day and night of Cathy. I wanted no one else, and the hours passed with my new wife became a game to me, where I would half-close my eyes and see my darling there instead—in the hammock on the verandah of our lovely house, or across from me at the mahogany table piled with luscious fruits and fine glazed meats and hams. I saw my Cathy there, wife and hostess—but soon in my fevered thoughts we'd run away together and go into the marshes, as muddy and dangerous as the moor where we belonged. We'd kiss and fall there amongst the spiky grasses.

‘I don't know if Louisa guessed any of this, but it soon became clear to me that my restlessness could be cured only by travelling and by gaining a real fortune— enough, in short, to transport me back to Yorkshire a rich and respected man.

‘I told my wife—I recall it was a poignant scene— that I must leave her for six months and make my way to Jamaica. We all knew I meant to build up a fortune on plantations bought with my wife's money, but nothing was said on the subject.

‘The mistake made by my faithful spouse was, I suppose, inevitable. She announced she would come with me, and could not be persuaded otherwise. Whether she saw in me the evil intentions which immediately filled my mind, I cannot say. It was true that her mother had long suspected me—but of being a member of a dark race, not of the murderous plan which now occupied me day and night.

‘We embarked on a slave-ship to Jamaica four weeks later. I would prefer, Mr Lockwood, to leave subsequent events unspoken, but this is impossible—for I have not long to live and my story must be fully told. I returned from Jamaica to Liverpool a very rich man, Mr Lockwood. We shall go downstairs now and take a glass of wine, before I resume.'

Letter from Henry Newby to Thomas Cautley Newby
.

January 4th 1849

Dear Uncle,

You must forgive the pause—of very short duration, I sincerely hope—which follows on from my last, abruptly terminated missive to you. When once the circumstances are understood, I know you will forgive your dutiful and loving nephew. There are, as you are sure to concur, times when politenesses and formalities, generally observed in the writing and addressing of letters and the like, cannot be observed. One of these must be the accounting of my own grim experience in the study at Haworth Parsonage on New Year's Eve last, when to read the confessions of a murderer and to find oneself alone with what must have been a ghost, contributed, as I know you will comprehend, to a state of mind far removed from that of a composed gentleman.

In short, Uncle, I do wish most earnestly that it was not I who had been despatched on this errand. Literary gifts—or rather, the lack of them—no longer seem to be of import here: rather, the apprehension and arrest of a criminal, not the appreciating of a work of art, is in question. For I have no doubt whatsoever that the monstrous author of the pages I
rescued from the fire is a killer, and that he will kill again.

The task of copying to you the dreadful confession on charred and singed paper which I have recounted to you, is too disagreeable, not to say terrifying, for me to be able to do so.

I shall therefore supply you—and as a publisher I have little doubt that you will find a writer both easily and cheaply to make this a story with potential for good sales—with the final details of the incriminating pages I took—and now deeply regret having done so—from the fire at the house to which you directed me.

It is possible that you may be able to trace Mr Lockwood to whom the brute gave his account? Our firm will do all to assist you. The unprincipled thief, impostor and—almost certain—wife-killer of whom you have been reading is named Heathcliff. This braggart in a dead Captain's uniform took some time before being able or willing to own up to his true appellation; it was immediately clear there had been no baptism of the little stray picked up in the streets of Liverpool by a kindly landowner, a Mr Joseph Earnshaw; and that the bastard, dark-skinned as a Lascar, had been encouraged to regard his position in the family as a blood member, a mistake sometimes encountered at Newby & Sons, when a Will is contested by a person once adopted and then discarded by a distinguished family.

As my father, dear Uncle, has often remarked, this illusion of equal prospects when entertained by an outsider, can lead only to trouble. And in the case of Heathcliff—named after a son of the Earnshaws who had apparently died in infancy—the trouble was not cauterised, as it should have been, by the expulsion of the child when once his ungodly
and vituperative nature was clear. Heathcliff was permitted to remain at The Heights—as he refers to it: do you know, Uncle, of any information as to the whereabouts of this place? My father had not heard the name, though my brother Horace remarked that he'd heard recently of a farmhouse, very isolated, that had a similar title: Top Withins.

However that may be, Master Hindley Earnshaw, once the old man had died, soon put the un-Christian creature in his place, where he was to remain as stable lad. There was even—and now, with both parents dead there was only an elderly housekeeper, Nelly Dean, to say yea or nay to friendships and associations formed by the children in this lonely spot—a passion, if one is to believe the pages drawn from a blaze where they should, once consigned to the flames, have remained. The passion between Heathcliff and Hindley Earnshaw's sister Cathy is referred to endlessly. I was both sickened and ashamed to read of it; and, not for the first time, complimented in my mind the person who had decided to dispose of the confession—Tabby, the maid who had admitted me earlier, so I came to think.

There is worse to come, Uncle, than an admission of a totally unsuitable infatuation for the late landowner's daughter. Had this been the most heinous crime owned to in the pages, I could in all probability have set the bundle of paper down and gone in search of the true cause of my visit to Haworth Parsonage, i.e. the retrieval of a late author's manuscript. But there was something so horrifying—so inhuman, one might say, in what I read, that I did not feel it any other than a moral obligation to continue reading—and this, as you know me since my early years, has not been an occupation to
find favour in my eyes. I confess here also that I no longer considered myself confronted with the fantasies of a fecund brain; rather the finder of a true rendition of evil.

For your sake—and for mine, too, I shall summarise.

The ship with Heathcliff and his wife as sole passengers on the journey out, sailed to Jamaica and returned to Bristol fully laden with cotton and sugar.

Mr and Mrs Heathcliff (I refuse the false title of Captain for the scoundrel) were not on board on the return journey. We are informed—this in a page which the devout Tabby had pushed right to the rear of the grate so nearly half was burnt and thus illegible—that Heathcliff, wooing his wife with false promises, then hired a sloop and proceeded to make a tour of the Grenadine and Windward islands, stopping the longest time in the south of St Lucia, where a family of friendly natives welcomed the visitors from the New World.

Here, in a stretch of land dedicated to the religious rites of the natives—a bay lying between the great Pitons was the site of ceremonies too appalling to recount to you here, Uncle—Heathcliff ‘lost' his wife Louisa. I cannot say whether his account suggests sacrifice, cannibalism or any other heathen practice: what appears to be the case is that little or no effort was made to save poor Louisa from her fate.

Heathcliff, it pains me to relate, shows neither grief nor compunction at his spouse's death. He returns to Carolina, comforts with all his usual vile hypocrisy the devastated parents of Louisa; and then departs for England with her fortune in his hands.

Most distressing of all, Uncle, is the fact that one name, one woman, haunts Mr Heathcliff as he
makes his way back to the city which saw the evil day of his birth, namely Liverpool.

The name is Cathy. He believes he will return to marry her, with his new wealth. Cathy, Cathy … you must forgive me, Uncle, if I say the sense of this passion quite overcame me as I read.

As I laid down the last page, the handle of the study door was turned and I leapt to my feet, abashed I must confess, at the turmoil of emotions occasioned by reading the confessions of this wicked man. Amongst these troubling sensations lay the suspicion that someone in this very house must be the author of these awful crimes, and so must be responsible for the charred pages. These I stuffed into my satchel, taking care to push in also the bag under the rag rug, and as I reached the door to turn the key, found a knife had slipped the lock, causing the door to swing open in my face.