Heathcliff's Tale (8 page)

As it transpired, my new friend John Brown had many to visit on this bleak morning of 1st January last; and soon I desisted from following his progress round the room, a sense of tact and discretion preventing me from attempting to overhear the murmured expressions of grief—and, so it seemed—condolence, both given and received by the good sexton. There was a predominance of the mention of ‘Master Branwell'—that I will say—and on each occasion the sad demise of the son of that cavernous Reverend Brontë whom I had met briefly at the Parsonage was mentioned, poor Mr Brown wiped away a tear. But the name of ‘Miss Emily', said with an altogether different and cautious-sounding ring, was, to my mind at least, the more affecting of the two recent bereavements suffered by the people of Haworth. I took the opportunity, therefore, when approached by the host and asked in the blunt tones so different from those of my native Leeds, if I desired more of the hot brandy, to double my order in the hope of obtaining further information on this curious and perplexing family.

‘He would sit where you are now', the landlord assured me, once the strong liquor, as fiery to touch and to stomach as any beverage served in the infernal regions could be; ‘Master Branwell would take as much as you, sir, and three times over, before it was time for him to find his way back to the Parsonage. It was impossible, on occasion, for the climb to be attempted. But you know all that, sir, I have no doubt. For all his oddities—and I believe I've seen a whole world slumbering in the eyes of that man, a country known only to himself and his sister—'

‘Yes', chipped in a man who moved from his pew and came to join me in the ‘snug', a tankard of ale in his hand. ‘She had the patience, and he was blessed by good fortune to have a woman who'd carry him up to bed. Everyone said that. She'd wait up for him half the night,
Miss Emily, for fear the parson would come to know of Master Branwell's drinking. Yet they say, on the day he died, he rose to his feet when Mr Bronte entered the room and then he fell dead.'

‘And what world did you see in Branwell Brontë?' I enquired of my host once our new companion had buried his lower face in his ale. I had the impression the poetic sensibilities of the Black Bull's proprietor would yield more than the prosaic delivery of the beer-drinker; though in this, as in so many other assumptions made at this time I was, as I must confess, completely in error.

‘Oh, they whispered their plots and stories', the publican confided, his excitement subsiding as he came to realise—or so it appeared clear—that the content of these ‘plots' and stories were completely unknown to him. ‘She lasted only three months after he went, Mr—' And I saw that my imaginative host, still filled with the spirits of the New Year's Eve which had gone before, now tried to dampen his own while searching for some reassurance on the subject of my reliability.

‘I was asked by my uncle, the London publisher Thomas Cautley Newby', I began, aware I sounded pompous; and at once I knew myself rewarded by looks of ill-disguised merriment from others at tables in the inn. ‘I am in search of a manuscript written by a Mr Ellis Bell—or, as I am informed, a Miss Emily—'

‘Master Branwell, he was writing when he died', vouchsafed the ale-imbiber, his upper lip now adorned with a white foam. ‘His sister cared for him when he was poorly, she'd do anything for him. She had a temper on her, though: she'd beat her dog half to death, would Emily'.

The landlord left us at this point; and John Brown came to sit by us, just as I had hoped to pursue my investigations. I had not thought before that I would regret the arrival of the sexton, when I had looked forward so keenly to speaking with him, and to thanking him for acting as my guide through the snow, even if he had not been conscious at the time of his kind actions. Now, however, I felt I'd more to gain from filling the now-empty tankard held aloft by my new friend; and once my offer had been accepted and he had gone off from the ‘snug' to be replenished, I turned to Mr Brown for a brief exchange before my informant's return. Something told me, I should say, that scandal or a secret of some kind lurked here at the Black Bull, and the sexton, mistakenly assumed at first by myself to be as outspoken or brutally frank a man as Heathcliff, would prove the last being on earth to confide it. In this, at least, I found I was correct in my assumptions.

‘No', said the handsome sexton, shaking his head firmly when I enquired whether Mr Branwell and Miss Emily Brontë had indeed ‘plotted' in some way against others—maybe against members of their own family, when they had been still children, with unpleasant consequences. ‘No, Mr Newby'—for he had heard my name, and at least, as I noted with some satisfaction, spoke it respectfully. ‘There was a time when the two were together without their siblings, at the Parsonage. The sisters had gone off to teach, or were at school. There were—' and here John frowned, while searching for the word. ‘There were intimations that the works of a poet who lived far from God influenced their thinking, for they spoke to each other in a way that was, for that brief time, quite dissimilar from their previous allusions or way of speaking.'

‘And who was that?' I enquired, not wishing to show my sense of sudden regret at the absence of knowledge on the subject of poets or other literary matters. ‘You intrigue me, Mr Brown.'

But at that moment the beer-drinker reappeared, brimming tankard in hand, and joined us on the wooden bench, while the landlord came forward with an armful of stout logs and piled them on the fire. ‘If you wish to know my opinion', said the man with his mug of ale, once a long draught had been taken and the foam had risen up his cheeks again, ‘they each said they wrote books—but it was he who showed me a letter that proves he was the writer, out of the two of them'.

‘And what letter is that?' asked John Brown in icy tones, before I could discover more on the subject of the brother and sister so recently interred in the churchyard adjacent to the Parsonage. ‘I would thank you—'and here the mild-mannered sexton positively glowered at the man who buried himself once more in his beer—‘I would be glad if you would not confuse matters so indiscreetly, Sam'.

At this, and in response to a New Year's greeting called out by an arrival at the Black Bull, a jovial-looking man with a younger companion, the sexton rose and hurried away to return the season's good wishes. My new friend—if I may call him such: perhaps all new friends start as appearing to be inveterate gossips and gain our affection that way—leant towards me on the bench. His beer breath came strong at me; but I did not shrink from him, for a bundle of papers was fished from the depths of his coat and pushed across the table towards me. By a miracle—for so I was to consider it later—no one saw the transaction, and the sheaf of closely written pages was transferred to my bag while the inn-keeper served those who had just come in, and the other patrons of the Black Bull entered some kind of singing which took up
every scrap of their energies. ‘The letter is from Heathcliff, said my supplier (for such he was, of the most powerful substance I had tasted, that of the written word). ‘I heard you when you came in here asking Mr Brown if he should be Mr Heathcliff—and I am here to inform you that I understood the jest, sir—Mr Brown was indeed a friend to Mr Branwell, and Mr Branwell it was, who gave me this.'

The authorship of the following ‘letter to Mr Lockwood' has become the subject of considerable controversy worldwide (in academic circles, that is: the ‘man on the Clapham Omnibus', should such a being continue to exist, has little interest in the hand wielding this particular pen. Celebrities rule the book world these days, so it is widely believed)
.

To us, however, the fact that the script closely resembles that of Branwell Brontë is of enduring fascination. If Branwell was the author of this ‘letter', is it proof of his identification with Heathcliff? If this is the case, did the drunken failure in whom the family placed all their hopes, entertain a passion for his sister Emily which sparked the incestuous love (for many considered Heathcliff to have been old Earnshaw's son) between that devil and Cathy? This possibility has been ignored in recent biographies of the poet and author of
Wuthering Heights,
but we feel duty bound to record it here
.

Dear Mr Lockwood
… the letter began. (Apart from a date, 1802, scrawled in a shaky hand at the top of the page, there was no indication of the provenance of the missive.)

… I awaited your visit when spring came this year—which will, I have no doubt, be my last. Do not grieve for me, for I rejoice at leaving a world so long without life, where the moor is dead without the sound of her step or her voice, and where the only spot I care to visit is the quiet hillside where she lies asleep.

I write because I must tell you of my return from the West Indies and what I found here when I came.

I had hopes—more than hopes: you might say expectations—of finding myself welcomed with a passion all the more ardent for having waited three long years for my reunion with Cathy. I left the docks at Liverpool a rich man—where a poor stable lad had embarked all that time ago. I disembarked with the means to make my wife blaze with the gold and jewels, the rubies and fine gowns to render her the most admired and envied woman in the country. That Cathy wished for none of these I knew well; but I had resolved in advance that she should flaunt my wealth occasionally, if only to remind the world
that she had married a man of substantial means, who housed her like the queen she has always shown herself to be.

Yes, I expected her to marry me. I saw her—as I did a hundred times a day—standing in the kitchen with the old housekeeper you know well, Mr Lockwood, and this time, seeing me lurking in the gloom outside, she would run to the door and hold out her hand to me and we would fall into each others' arms. It was all a foolish mistake: I heard her say this a hundred times also—she had jested, she had no love for the weakling Edgar Linton, and had never loved anyone but me. Well, you must know the outcome of my own foolish dreams by now, Mr Lockwood—you will have heard the story from Nelly Dean. And all the county knows, with a quarter of a century gone by, how Miss Catherine Earnshaw did not wait for the lowly labourer (as her brother Hindley had made of me, but more of that later: too much, even, I daresay). Miss Earnshaw was not to be Mrs Heathcliff—and even as I write this to you after such an expanse of time, my hand curls around my pen and lifts it to the ceiling, before crashing down on table, paper and inkwells, so hard is it to rein in the rage and bafflement felt then and remembered just as vividly today. Miss Earnshaw had already, as I learned from the jeers of her odious brother, married Mr Linton and was ensconced, with all the comforts a gentleman can provide for his bride, at Thrushcross Grange.

It was dark and a moonless night, and I had travelled the best part of three thousand miles to arrive at the home I had always dreamed would one day be mine and hers. I had plans to offer a large slice of my fortune to Hindley, to give up his ownership of The Heights in favour of one who knew
each mile of heather and bogland and mossy turf like the back of his hand. How unlike we were! For Master Hindley Earnshaw, who had gone deep into his drinking habits before I left for the Americas, would by the time of my return hardly be able to leave the house without stumbling and finding himself lost in a ditch or beck quite unfamiliar to him. Whereas the one who held the house in his heart and loved it with the same attention and care as did his beloved Cathy—was, Mr Lockwood, none other than the orphan brought back from Liverpool by old Mr Earnshaw and loved in turn by the old man over and above his own son. It was I, Heathcliff, who had the right to old Joseph Earnshaw's home—and to his daughter, too. She loved me. We had grown together like stalks of bracken on the moor: twined, inseparable.

Hindley leaned from an upper window of The Heights and laughed when he saw me standing there. The kitchen was in darkness; I had sensed already the absence of my love, the light of my life, my darling Cathy. I knew from the desolate air of the building that this was now no more than a drunkard's house; a drunkard no one would visit or care for. And in that instant, as he laughed down at me, I resolved to kill Hindley Earnshaw. If I had lost Cathy—and I knew, from the air of desuetude and solitary despair about the place that she had been long gone from home—I would take The Heights. And, once the vile Earnshaw's words confirmed a truth I still cannot bear to write or hear, that ‘Mrs Edgar Linton' could be found at The Grange—though, he added still laughing, he doubted they would receive one such as me—I determined on becoming the owner of that estate also. Not much time elapsed, Mr Lockwood, before I
had scanned the horizon for other ways to inflict damage on Mr Linton and his family—and shortly, when I have recovered strength, I shall outline to you the terrible revenge exacted on Mr Linton's house and those who lived within. For the moment, think only of me as I walked back across the moor to Gimmerton, and sought lodging as any poor vagrant might, hoping for shelter if only for the dark hours which still remained. Gone were the exalted dreams of joyful return, of compliments and vows exchanged. Like any wandering mendicant, I went knocking on an almshouse door.

Heathcliff's story stopped abruptly here, a long line running across the page like a blade—or so I fancied, the very threat of murder on the part of the author seeming to take possession of me to the exclusion of any other thought.

Why had this violent, angry man stopped here?—for I saw no sign of an identical hand in any of the pages lately thrust into my grasp—what, if not his own death, could have prevented Heathcliff from going on? Had Hindley Earnshaw, a figure I now hated with all the ferocity of one who is a convert to a new faith, one in which the enemy must at all costs be eradicated from the world, found the man who dreamt of ousting him, and killed his old foe and foster-brother? If Heathcliff was indeed dead, what had been the outcome of his last message, in which he had sworn revenge on all the denizens of Thrushcross Grange? Had he succeeded in his dreadful and bloodthirsty aim: did Heathcliff writhe now in the eternal flames of Hell?