Heathcliff's Tale (9 page)

I must confess to a hope that the drunken, bullying Hindley was no longer of this world—though to imagine the two fighting in a hideous perpetuity was almost too awful to contemplate. And I must own, also, to a desire
in which it is impossible to take pride: that of learning the fate of Cathy, wife of Edgar Linton, love for all time of my hero and leader, Heathcliff. Did they consummate their passion? Was the young woman who had gone impetuously to a calm existence of which she could never possibly have dreamed, so suffocated by the hypocrisies and idleness of the well-bred folk she found herself to belong to by virtue of her union with Mr Linton, that she had chosen to die along with Heathcliff? At least, in death, they would be united.

With such morbid and excited conjectures I occupied the next hour or so; and despite the cautious expression on the face of the inn-keeper when further hot brandies became necessary to me, I downed them with all the expertise, or so I persuaded myself, of the late Master Branwell. I had burning flights of the imagination, following on the sudden cessation of Heathcliff's narrative, to contend with: I understood for the first time the ecstasy and agony of the artist (for, I know not how, I learned in my inner mind that Master Branwell ‘was' Heathcliff, and that his genius had brought this demonic figure to an everlasting life) and, quite literally, I worshipped the man who had brought this character into existence. I offered, as it were, a libation to the creator, the author of Heathcliff; and I began to perceive, as the Black Dog grew busier still with New Year revellers, that I could not continue with my own existence if my curiosity about the future of this momentous passion remained unsatisfied. I would—I must!—as a lover of words so
puissant
that they are indeed made flesh—hold Cathy in my arms as Heathcliff, I ardently desired, had done.

It was some minutes later, when the ‘snug' had filled further and I found myself pushed up hard against a man with side-burns that resembled nothing more than carrot-tops stained green by a life passed in the damp fields and mildewed walls of a hill farm, that the horrid
possibility I would never know what took place next came in to my mind. Branwell Brontë was dead: I had been told of his dreadful end only a short time ago; and his sister, devoted to the brilliant brother who provided the avid reader with the story of Heathcliff and his loves and hatreds, had followed him to the grave. I would never know—it was unbearable to contemplate, and the realisation had me calling for a toddy as if I had just awoken in the aftermath of an avalanche, in a blanket of snow—I would never learn the outcome of my hero's lust for love or for revenge.

I set down my glass with a thud—this also observed by the inn-keeper with a marked lack of appreciation—and, as if to exonerate my action by pointing out that his table remained undamaged, I pulled the sheaf of papers from it and waved them in the air. The glass, miraculously escaping a plunge to the floor, I rescued with my right hand and lifted to my lips. And it was thus—for I admit I had had no further interest in the contents of the bundle of papers recently confided to my keeping, now Heathcliff's line had been drawn across the page—it was with my left hand that I brought the smudged and crumpled pages up to my eyes.
ISABELLA'S STORY
, ran the legend across the top of one of these unappealing sheets, in a hand both large and, while attempting to be plain, difficult to decipher. No author was attached to this title, though I fancied I smelled violets, or roses, like the dried petals collected by my mother in a bowl, in my far-off home in Leeds.

I decided to read—if only to discover more of the man I now wished above all to emulate. Indeed, I saw his name there soon enough. But whether this new and unknown writer put down the truth was impossible to ascertain.

We are bound to declare, with the discovery of the following pages, our total ignorance of their provenance. Were they written by a schoolgirl so infatuated with the character of Heathcliff that she could not prevent herself from imagining the unimaginable: that is, the life of a bride of this Romantic anti-hero? Is this the final, true cry of woman wailing for her demon lover?

We cannot say, but assume the pages to have been secreted in the antique shop where the ‘Newby manuscript' came to light and pushed in with it by a member of the Braithwaite family, proprietors of the shop for over two hundred years. What is irrefutable is that Isabella Linton, sister of Edgar and thus sister-in-law of the ill-fated Cathy, did marry Heathcliff in
Wuthering Heights,
and repented her elopement exceedingly. She ran away to live in the south and was the mother of young Linton Heathcliff
.

He came one evening when the sun was going down over Gimmerton chapel, earlier than I liked to see it doing for I had come to hate autumn and the apples that reddened in the orchard where I was sent to pick fruit for supper at The Grange. It was September, and he had been away three years—or so he told me on the second day we met there, under trees heavy with plum and crab apple and quince. On the first day, I saw only a man I had always heard called the Gypsy up at The Heights—and yet saw him now as if we had never met before.

It is hard to describe the effect the stranger Heathcliff had on all who encountered him in those last months of 1783. Some, like Nelly Dean, said money was what made the difference in the rough stable lad who had left The Heights and ran away one night as if he never intended to return. After all, there had been nothing to look forward to in the house where Hindley Earnshaw drank away the few profits from the farm. Why had Heathcliff come back there when there was so little to gain by it? people asked. To flaunt his wealth, came the reply, from those who liked to make out they knew best. But soon I knew better still: Heathcliff came back a rich man in order to kill those who had slighted
him; and by marrying Catherine Earnshaw, my brother had offended most of all.

I am Isabella Linton and I grew up at Thrushcross Grange with my brother Edgar. I was eighteen years old when I ran off to get married, and my brother never spoke to me again. Then I ran from my marriage, also—there is a lot of running in this story—and I went south to live, far from the moors that rise above us at home, threatening us like a horizon where a storm gathers, ready to break even when it is a fine day. My story becomes obscure at this point and Nelly Dean—dear Nelly, the housekeeper who cared for the monster my brother married and did nothing from that day but scold and upbraid me for the slightest thing—‘Isabella, don't snivel like a child!'—‘Isabella, if I catch you speaking with that man again I shall go directly to Mr Linton'—said to anyone who cared to ask after me that I was dead. She visited us once at The Heights (and by ‘us', which sounds so much like a happily married couple I have to confess I describe the very opposite, myself and the devil, Mr Heathcliff). She had not good to report of my swollen eye—and worse, of my legs, blue from the fiend's kicking when I was thrust down on the ground and had no strength to get away from him. I daresay she went straight back to The Grange and my dear brother decreed that I was no longer to be visited, I could not be a part of the polite society we had enjoyed in the past. I had pined to remove myself from the constrictions, as I then saw them, of the life my brother led, the life our mother and father had before him: fine linen, meals that chimed with the fancy clocks all hung with crystals that rung in breakfast, luncheon and a sumptuous evening meal, maids in starched aprons who came silent-footed to answer every summons. I yearned—foolish child that I was—for the honesty of a life out in the open, such as I had seen my sister-in-law, a child of the moors, lead in her young days at
The Heights. I was jealous of Cathy already, I suppose: she captured Edgar so completely. And he had been my friend and my supporter, defending me against the ill temper of a governess or the envy of girls from good families who lived round and came to visit, for they soon saw that I was prettier than they and liked to make sly remarks and pinch me when no one saw.

So you could say my life changed from the time Edgar married Miss Earnshaw from The Heights. Whether she loved him in return it would be hard to say; and I believe Edgar was blinded by his own emotions; but once or twice, not a few weeks after the wedding, I saw the incomparable Miss Catherine—or Mrs Edgar Linton, with all the graces and favours such a position grants the possessor of the title—yawn openly as dear Edgar described his day, shooting or visiting an outlying farm. I suspected, in short, that my sister-in-law had married in haste and now observed herself to be the unfortunate owner of as much leisure as Satan could provide for idle hands, and repented her marriage. Why it was that she had come down to settle in the crimson walls and fine white satin cushions of The Grange never occurred to me; I was occupied, I suppose, in repelling the suitable young men invited to balls and dinners with the sole purpose of meeting Miss Isabella Linton of Thrushcross Grange. For it soon became abundantly clear that Catherine wished to rid herself—and my brother also, naturally—of my company at the earliest possible opportunity.

It was at the most ambitiously laid-out entertainment in my honour that I found my life changed a second time; and, fool that I was, I believed the change to emanate from Heaven and not from Hell.

It was a fine evening, September it was true, but as warm and pleasant as a summer's night. The garden, famed in the neighbourhood for its rare shrubs and highly coloured blooms, was lit with a forest of lanterns,
each illumining the finely cut lawn or raised flowerbed dictated by MacGregor, our gardener. My brother had thought of everything; even Cathy had bestirred herself to throw rose petals in the great bowl of punch the butler brought in at the appointed hour; and, shy at first but soon emboldened by the fine welcome accorded him in look and speech, the swain of the moment stood by the side of the parquet floor, awaiting his partner to open the festivities with a dance.

The awaited partner, I regret to confess, was of course myself. How satisfied and smug, with children at my knee and a life without fretfulness, my life might now be, had I accepted the proposal of marriage Mr Rutherford brought with him that evening! How well provided for and comfortable, with visits to my dear Edgar every other week (the Rutherfords being no more than six or seven miles distant from The Grange). Yet—as if I had no choice but to run from all the assurances and delights of an excellent match, I rose like one walking while asleep and went from my window-seat at the end of the long drawing-room where guests thronged and music had already started to play for the dance. I walked out from the French windows into the dark and brightly-shining garden, and there I saw the man whose features, glimpsed dimly a moment or so before through glass, I both recognised and yet did not know.

And when I reached a pool of light under a lantern by the big rowan tree, I stretched out my hand and the stranger, neither bowing, taking my fingers politely in his, nor acknowledging my status as the young lady of the house, came forward and seized me by the waist instead.

We were under the tree; and the red rowan berries and feathery leaves swept across my cheeks as he kissed me. I tasted wine—and something more intoxicating still—in that long kiss. It was the taste of savage freedom—or
so I thought then, as he held me close and Edgar, concerned that the dancing could not commence without me, came stumbling out into a pool of darkness.

‘Isabella?'—but when I broke away at the sound of my name, the stranger left me and was nowhere to be seen.

Yet I knew, the next day, as if the words had been whispered to me as we kissed, that I must go to the orchard, and I would find him there. As you may imagine, I remember nothing more of the ball, the compliments of the neighbours, or of Mr Rutherford.

From that day I thought and dreamed of no one and nothing but the dark stranger who had come into the closed, calm world of Thrushcross Grange like a hurricane or—as I was to feel later when the sway he had over me had revealed itself as inescapable, horrible in its power—a figure from the pack of Tarot cards the old fortune-teller kept always with her, in the cottage down past the trees at Gimmerton crossroads. First she showed me the hangman, old Mrs Cox whom I had known only as an apple-cheeked ancient; hoping to please my brother's new wife (though, as I was to discover much later, she and Miss Cathy, as the wild, wicked girl was known, had had plenty of business together. They called up the black arts between them, and the card of Death was surely waiting for one of us; for Cathy or for me.)

‘You will go to a lake in the north where the swan floats over his shadow,' Mrs Cox said, and she pulled a picture from the greasy pile on the little table in her front parlour. ‘But you will find only a dream there and will come to understand that you are never to know love—' and she cackled, pulling out now a hideous playing-card, not a Tarot at all, that depicted a Queen of Hearts with corsets unlaced and breasts thrust forward into the frame. ‘And your two feet will lead you from his evil ways', Mrs Cox finished, with another peal of the laughter I had
never heard from the quiet, respectable old woman before.

With such nonsense I passed my time after that first meeting with the man Nelly Dean excoriated—but often with a tinge of affection in her voice, as I was quick to notice. ‘Heathcliff will never alter his ways', she said and sighed; and I could see from her shrewd glance at me that she knew we had kissed in the orchard, a longer, harder kiss than the night before, under the rowan tree. ‘He came to us that way when he was five years old. I used to tell him, “You're the son of an Indian princess and the Emperor of China” when Master Hindley had given him a good hiding and brought him low. “You can do what you will in life, Heathcliff, never forget.” And he did—for isn't he a wealthier man now than Mr Edgar, even—and what he lacks in land he'll make up for in some dastardly way or another.' And here Nelly would stop herself from going on, and warn me sternly against seeing the dark stranger again. None of which, naturally, had the slightest effect on me.