Heathcliff's Tale (4 page)

A tall man stood facing me. You will forgive me, Uncle, when I say I thought the features, strong and brooding as they were, could be those of the villain, Heathcliff. You must pardon my heightened state of excitement, and thus my lack of judgement in this matter.

‘Mr Heathcliff?' I said, noting my voice was as tremulous as a girl's.

Uncle, you know the rest. A man of God stood before me. He looked sternly down at me and asked why I had been ‘left in here': what did Charlotte think she was doing, to forget me?

My host—as he turned out to be—then introduced himself as the Reverend Patrick Brontë.

January 24th 1849

Dear Uncle,

You must forgive me yet again, Uncle, for delaying in despatching to you this latest instalment of my account of the visit, suggested by yourself, to Haworth Parsonage on New Year's Eve. The mission to ‘rescue', as you termed it, a manuscript by a late author, Mr Ellis Bell, has been a trying, not to say, disagreeable one, puzzling as well as actually terrifying in its mish-mash of changed identities and even—though I do not expect to be believed or respected for my assertion—giving proof, if such were needed, of the existence of a world beyond ours, a world, as one might describe it, ‘beyond the veil'. This aspect of my visit was the reason, I must confess, for my postponement of the posting of this last part of my letter to you: I snipped it off from the rest, I am ashamed to own, and concealed it in the drawer of the dresser in the dining-room of our house in Leeds, once I found the strength and capacity to return there. You will think me childish in my concealment of the rendition of the horrible events which befell me: you will consider your youngest nephew an unsuitable emissary, and you will doubtless transfer similar requests for the finding and rendering to you of manuscripts legally yours to my brothers Horace and Edward. I cannot feel reproach or, I must admit, sorrow, if you do. For never again will I go in search of property written by a nonexistent author who, when investigated, transpires to be a ghost.

Only my determination not to betray your trust in me, dear Uncle, led me finally to open the drawer of the dresser—and, watched with some alarm by our good Susan, remove the offending last segment
of the letter, seal and post it off to you. Make of it what you will. I can have no more to do with Bells, Brontës or any other person with connection past or present to Haworth Parsonage.

The Reverend Patrick Brontë, once I had come to understand that this was not the evil Mr Heathcliff whose confessions I had just read, answered my questions at first with politeness and consideration, No, Mr Ellis Bell was not at home—and nor, as the holy man continued in what I heard as a sepulchral tone, would he ever be.

‘Mr Bell is—deceased, Sir?' I said, for you, Uncle, had after all informed me that the works of this late author were in your copyright for many years to come. I wished, I may assure you, solely to speed up the proceedings; and by showing I was cognisant of the sad state of Mr Bell, to assist the Reverend Mr Brontë with his search for the missing manuscript.

‘Ellis Bell is not known to me', came the reply, and I could see the vicar was accustomed to chide his parishioners regularly, should they overstep the limits of good behaviour. ‘You are in the wrong house, Mr Newby, and I will be grateful to find you have departed from it within the next minute.'

‘But—' I began.

‘Mr Newby, I believe you must have entered the Parsonage by the front door', was all I received by way of cure for my bewilderment. For if the author was not even known here, then you, Uncle, had surely been gravely mistaken in your directions. ‘Ellis Bell, care of Brontë', I said, remembering your strict instruction that I should not permit myself to be ‘fobbed off by anyone attempting to hold on to the manuscript and by so doing contravene the regulations regarding copyright. Your £25, Uncle, was uppermost in my mind at that moment; and for the
first time in my life I own I felt a slight stirring of interest in the law. Did I have the right, if this vicar held back the goods from me consistently, to arrest the man as a citizen and take him to the courts so that my complaint could be heard?

‘You will kindly leave now, Mr Newby, or I shall call the dog', my host proceeded to announce. ‘Keeper!' he shouted out, not waiting any time to carry out his threat. ‘Keeper, come here!'

All I shall report from this moment on, Uncle, may seem so improbable and extraordinary as to lack veracity—but I do not lie; neither, God forbid! do I jest.

A huge dog, violent in appearance and growling menacingly, rushed from the kitchen, the door of which seemed to have been flung open by an invisible hand before closing again abruptly. At the same time, as the dog ran to sink its teeth in my leg—and it did, dear Uncle—your brother's Benjamin was grateful indeed to have secreted the bag of papers in a pocket of the greatcoat borrowed from my father, and thus doubly important as a means of evading the jaws of this Cerberus—at the same time, as I was about to confide to you, the good Lord himself intervened, though whether the Reverend Mr Brontë welcomed the intervention cannot be known.

A thunderclap—a series of thunderclaps, rather, each louder than the last—sounded right over the roof of the Parsonage. We were in darkness now, Mr Brontë and I, as he led me from the doorway of the study into the hall, and lightning in shafts of a terrible brightness pierced the pitch blackness. ‘My eyes are bad', the holy man cried. ‘Help me, Mr Newby, I cannot see my way to the front door!'

As might have been expected, a dreadful wind now rose, and the study door slammed shut as the
strong, freezing air blew in under the portals and filled the hall with a tomb-like atmosphere. I truly thought I would die then, Uncle, and feel no shame in confessing that I was as eager to discover the front door as was Mr Brontë. I wished only to depart then, as you may imagine, and if I lacked a manuscript, I could not place this as the chief of my priorities.

But then, Uncle, as is so often the case with a thunderstorm, there came the rain. It was not ordinary rain—God save my soul, it was black rain and I could swear on that—though naturally, as it was dark outside as well as in, and I saw this through the one window of the hall, I could have been mistaken. But it was loud rain; it battered down as if a ton of hailstones had been added to the load. And when, groping along a wall, I found the door, the wind and rain together blew it shut with force right on my fingers. ‘Damn you, open it!' was all the compassion I received from the gaunt old vicar at this; and I confess I thought for a moment that I led Mr Heathcliff and no other across the stone floor of the Parsonage.

When I was saved, it was by the very creature who had assisted my entrance earlier. Tabby, as I recognised she must be, pushed the kitchen door ajar and appeared, an oil-lamp in her hand. The wick was low and the flame guttered wildly; but it survived a crossing of the hall, and at her command the dog Keeper, annoyed no doubt to find a dry mouthful of cretonne and cottons for his pains, let go of me and slunk back to the kitchen. ‘The gentleman cannot go out in this weather', said the crone, speaking up into the face of the parson—and very wild he looked by now, as if the storm had frightened him more even than it had me—‘he can go to
the upstairs study for the night, surely, Mr Brontë? There's no fire laid there—but it is best that he goes in there, as Miss Charlotte has given her consent, sir'.

So it was, Uncle, that I avoided a death by lightning or immolation on New Year's Eve at Haworth.

Yet I give my solemn word that I would give my all to have run out in the storm, however vile the consequences. For, by staying the night at the Parsonage—well, I can say merely that I might have thought myself ill-treated earlier by my hosts (and worse treated by the cruel storm that raged out across the moor)—but there was worse to come.

Letter from Thomas Cautley Newby to his nephew Henry Newby
.

February 3rd 1849

Dear Henry,

I am in receipt of your various missives concerning your (supremely unsuccessful) visit to Haworth Parsonage.

I will not say here that I feel shame at owning a kinsman of your intellectual calibre, which is limited indeed; for on your mother's side, as was accepted at the time of the marriage of your parents, there were—and remain still—relatives of a markedly low ability, being in some cases virtually illiterate, and certainly, in the case of Hugh who came for a week to work here as a clerk, either innumerate or frankly dishonest.

No, I will not admit to shame. But I must sound a note of reproach. Your last letter, ending as it did with the (highly improbable, indeed impossible) visitation you describe, I have destroyed, in fear that one day a descendant in this illustrious business might discover it in our files. We may deal in fiction, Master Henry—but we do not trade in lies. I can conclude only that a natural exuberance of spirits combined with strong liquor on the occasion of New
Year's Eve last, led you to hallucinate. What aggravates me particularly is your insistence of setting these wild flights of fantasy—a delirium, even— down on paper. Even if the account you produced had in fact been intended as fiction, no reader would have suspended their disbelief in your crazy tale. If you wish to concoct a story, dear nephew, may I suggest you open a volume—by Sir Walter Scott or another—and learn your craft. Leading a reader to believe what you put down is altogether a more difficult business than you give credence for.

So please understand that I can go as far as the door of the ‘upstairs study' you describe, with you; and no further.

You state that you found the bleak small room to which the housekeeper conducted you most unwelcoming (this I can believe if the room was, as I imagine it to have been, the bedchamber of the late author whose manuscript you have not rendered to me).

You go on to remark that ‘as soon as the door was closed, the terrible cold tomb-wind entered through the window; the lamp blew out; and what appeared to be a hand knocked at the lattice'.

How can this be, dear Henry? On a freezing night, a hand at the window of an upper floor? Your contention that there were repeated attempts by this ‘hand' to open the lattice leaves me completely unconvinced. The bare bough of a tree, my boy, no more. And the fact you ‘nearly died of fear' appears little other than the ridiculous exaggeration of a drunkard. I shall not write to your father directly on the subject of your visit to Haworth, but I shall consider doing so if this ineffective and unmanly behaviour is seen to continue.

It is unpleasing in the extreme for me to have to refer to your next contention, in what is throughout a preposterous letter. You say that ‘heart beating wildly'—please dear nephew, a Newby, a relative of a publisher accustomed to dealing with the most refined and discriminating of authors, should not deal so freely in cliché—you say you ‘groped your way towards a narrow truckle bed and as if drugged fell into a heavy sleep'. (I make no comment here: I do not trade in the obvious.) Then, in your own unappealing terminology, ‘worse was to come'. I hesitate to repeat to you the unsavoury assertions which follow, here: only the hope that the perusal of your own words may give you pause for thought, leads me to believe that you may learn to improve your ways, and this sooner rather than at a later date.

I shall go on, for this reason alone. ‘I woke when the church clock, as I assumed it must be, began to chime', you write, ‘and as I counted to midnight I realised I was awake and seeing in the New Year in the most ghastly and intolerable way ever devised—if devised it was. For surely, what now took place was the work of an evil prankster; one who knew I lacked light in that dreadful little cell of a room and thus could assume any shape, in my fearful imagination, that it pleased?

‘Uncle'—you continued, praying I daresay for my belief in this nonsense and thus for a reprieve from my inevitable wrath at the incompetence you have shown—‘Uncle, the dank creature which now lay beside me on that narrow bed was more horrible by far than the hand at the window—more shattering to the heart and soul than any monster dreamed by a child. For what lay beside me was a woman— not long dead as I soon saw when the moon looked in through the lattice with a harsh light—a woman
who clung to me with the piteous desperation of one who dreads a certain return to the tomb. She asked me to save her: I swear she did; but my arms were as heavy as lead; and she died a second time beside me there, her skin giving out a chill impossible either to forget or to describe.

‘I have had horrors, Uncle, pray forgive and understand me in my hour of need.

‘I lay all the remainder of the night while the moon played catch-as-catch-can with the black clouds that trailed the night sky. I froze; my teeth chattered; and when the handle of the bedroom door began to turn I almost wept with relief that someone—Tabby, perhaps; I did not even care if it was the Reverend Brontë himself—had come to assuage my fears. But the turning of the handle was ghostly, too, Uncle, I give you my word it was. ‘Emily!' came a voice from the passage: a high, squeaky voice, yet the door did not open and my dead bed-companion did not move an inch. ‘Emily'—that is all it said: oh Uncle, do believe me now!'

Henry, I shall terminate this letter to you with a few words of advice. First, you must expunge from your mind instantly all thoughts of that night at Haworth Parsonage. I believe you were not, as you had at first suspected, the victim of a prankster, but instead the innocent recipient of a potion or dangerous drug administered to you earlier. (The good Tabby had left a carafe of water in the room, I daresay: in your fevered condition you drank some, and hallucinated the rest.) There was no hand at the window; no squeaky-voiced supplicant at the bedroom door; and, most worthy of all to remember, no one whatever in your bed.

I am interested, however, by your description of the early hours of January 1st in this year of Our
Lord, 1849. You stated that it ‘brought a sense of returning sanity' to pull out the contents of the bag of snippets found under the rug in the downstairs study. ‘I had been with people from another, terrible world, all night', you write, ‘and to read of the exploits of mortals, wicked though they may be—and I speak, naturally, of Mr Heathcliff, of whom I informed you earlier, Uncle—is infinitely better than to be closeted with the dead.