Walking the Invisible

by Michael Stewart

  I wonder about extramarital affairs at a time when women could not grant a divorce – not until the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 – and were often married for consanguinity or financial stability. Were affairs as common then as they are now? Or perhaps even more common? Affairs these days are the bread and butter of soap operas. Emmerdale, EastEnders and Coronation Street are all exercises in dramatising extramarital intimacies. No other narrative form has taken to this storyline with such zeal.

  I kick fallen leaves as I walk, but really what I’m doing as I march back to Great Ouseburn is kicking myself. I’m kicking myself for not taking the opportunity yesterday, when the sky was so clear, of going up to Grafton Hill then. I’m angry. I’m angry with Great Ouseburn for attaching the epithet ‘great’. I’m angry with farmers for stealing footpaths hundreds of years old. I’m angry with the drivers who tear up country roads. But I save my greatest anger for myself for being such an idiot to pick the foggiest day of the year to walk to Grafton Hill. Never rely on the English weather.

  Post Scriptum

  No one really knows what happened between Branwell and Lydia. We have only the poems and a few scraps of biographical information. We don’t even know how the couple were discovered. But Juliet Barker thinks it must have been through the Robinsons’ gardener Robert Pottage. For some reason, he accompanied the Robinsons to Scarborough. We know this because a payment to Pottage is recorded as an expense for the journey. Barker thinks that this payment was a gratuity for information given. Pottage, if he did know the lovers’ secret, was between a rock and a hard place. To tell Mr Robinson would be to betray Mrs Robinson. But surely his loyalty was to his employer.

  Mr Robinson’s reaction to the news was immediate and unequivocal. He did sack Branwell, but there is no evidence that he said he would shoot him if he returned, as Branwell claimed. Mrs Robinson was never to see her young amour again, although she did send him a large payment. Patrick called Lydia Robinson a ‘diabolical seducer’. The end of the affair was certainly the undoing of Branwell. It was his last attempt at paid employment, and the start of his downward spiral into addiction and dissipation.

  9

  Looking for the Slaves’ Graveyard

  Dent is the only village in Dentdale, which is possibly the most intriguing and remote of all the Cumbrian Dales. Historically, Dent has comprised a community of maverick farmers and demon knitters, with some marble mining on the outskirts. These days it also contains a few arty ‘offcumdens’ (the term for out of towners seems to vary from region to region), including Pip Hall, the fine art letter carver who cut the letters into the Brontë Stones. Its streets are paved with higgledy-piggledy cobbles that poke out like pike fins – the walk between the two village pubs can feel like stepping on razors. The town is connected to the outside world by two B roads, neither of which allow you to get out of third gear, and is positioned in the fault line between Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cumbria. People from Dent have triple heritage.

  I’m here to explore another Wuthering Heights origin myth. I begin at the Dent Village Heritage Centre and Museum, a small, volunteer-run place with plenty of idiosyncratic charm. Inside is a display that celebrates life and work in the region. There’s a foreboding gin trap, which was used for snaring poachers by the ankle. I wince as I imagine the iron teeth cutting through skin and meat to the bone beneath. Its use was outlawed in 1827. There is also a lot of specialised farming equipment. I am drawn to one implement in particular: the probang, a length of leather tubing that was used to dislodge chunks of turnips and potatoes stuck in the guts of cattle, or, prior to this, in their rumen – the fore-stomach where the grass is fermented. There’s also a trochar and cannula. The trochar is a sharp, pointed steel rod that fits into the shorter steel cannula. This would be plunged through the cow’s flank behind the ribs if the beast’s stomach was distended. The trochar would then be pulled out, leaving the hollow cannula in place to allow the gas to escape. I read about the practice of lighting the methane gas to create a flamethrower, which came to an end after a barn was burnt down.

  There’s also an account of the ‘Dent Vampire’, George Hodgeson, who died in Dent in 1715 at the age of ninety-four. His longevity was attributed to devil-dealing. He had fang-like canine teeth and drank sheep’s blood every day. The rumour in the village was that George was one of the undead who slaked their thirst through sucking on human jugular veins. He was interred in a far corner of St Andrew’s graveyard, but after he was seen walking in the moonlight, and following some mysterious deaths in the area, a town meeting was held and his body exhumed. A brass stake was driven through his heart, and he was reburied at the church door. Dent folk don’t take chances.

  I get talking to the woman on reception. I ask her about the Sills, a family of farmers at the centre of a documentary called A Regular Black: The Hidden Wuthering Heights by Lone Star that asserts another possible origin for Emily Brontë’s novel. ‘We sell the DVD here,’ she says. ‘Sold quite a few.’

  ‘Where did they live?’ I ask.

  ‘Whernside Manor.’

  ‘Is that nearby?’

  ‘About a mile and a half away. Turn right at the George and Dragon. When you get to the sign for Ingleton, go the other way. You’ll see it next to the old Methodist chapel.’

  The film tells the story of the Sills, slave traders based in Dent. They had a plantation in Jamaica called Providence, and they brought back slaves to Liverpool and to their farm at the base of Whernside, where they were put to work. One of these slaves escaped and a bill of notice offered a £5 reward for his capture. There’s a reproduction of it in the heritage centre.

  During a visit to see his agents in Liverpool, Edmund Sill, the father of the family, brought back an orphan child, Richard Sutton, who was badly treated and beaten by the family. It was also said that he fell in love with Sill’s daughter Anne. A historian in the film says that Richard Sutton was ‘probably a black man’ but doesn’t cite any evidence. He apparently inherited the business. Another historian says that Emily Brontë probably heard the story when she was at Cowan Bridge. This is unlikely. She was only six years old at the time, and Cowan Bridge is nearly twenty miles away from Whernside Manor. But Emily may well have read about the story in Howitt’s Rural Life of England, which was published in 1838 while she was working at Law Hill School.

  This short film is interesting, but it does perhaps overstate its case. For instance, Caryl Phillips, a novelist I much admire, says that during Heathcliff’s missing years he must have been involved in the slave trade. But, again, there is no real reason why this should be the case. There were plenty of criminal avenues that might explain his fortune. The film also fails to mention the story of Jack Sharp, or Hugh Brunty, or Rob Roy, or any of the other likely sources. Having said all that, it’s an enjoyable half hour, and it makes a good case for Heathcliff’s ethnic origins, providing ample food for thought. In fact, it draws many of the same conclusions about Heathcliff’s origins as my novel Ill Will. At a recent screening, the film very much divided its audience. The same could be said about my book.

  It is rather odd that up until 2011 and the casting of Solomon Glave as the younger and James Howson as the elder Heathcliff in Andrea Arnold’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights, previous films have all cast white actors to play the character: Milton Rosmer in A.V. Bramble’s 1920 adaptation, Laurence Olivier in William Wyler’s 1939 version, Kieron Moore in 1948, Richard Todd in 1953, Timothy Dalton in 1970, Ken Hutchinson in 1978, Ralph Fiennes in 1992, Robert Cavanah in 1998 and Tom Hardy in 2009. Let’s not even think about Cliff Richard. But perhaps it isn’t so strange if we consider that white actors have continued to take the role of Othello until very recently. For example, Anthony Hopkins in the BBC Shakespeare television production in 1981, and Michael Gambon in a stage production at Scarborough in 1990.

  It is true to say that Heathcliff’s ethnicity in the book is ambiguous. He is called ‘black as the devil’, but this could be a judgement on his mora
lity rather than his ethnicity. He is called a ‘dirty lascar’. But lascar itself is an ambiguous term, referring to a sailor from India, Arabia, China or North Africa. He is also called a gypsy several times in the book, which, again, is ambiguous. But for me the clues have always led to one place. The title of the film refers to something that Nelly says as she washes Heathcliff’s face and combs his hair: ‘if you were a regular black’, a sentence she never completes. There is also the fact that he is brought from Liverpool when it was the biggest slave port in Europe, that he is referred to as ‘it’ and that a little later we are told that Mr Earnshaw tried to establish ‘its owner’. He is also found talking ‘gibberish’; i.e., another language.

  ‘Are you a writer?’ the woman behind the counter asks.

  ‘Er … I’m interested in finding the slaves’ graveyard.’

  ‘It’s said that I’m descended from one of the slaves,’ she says.

  ‘Really? You should do a DNA test.’

  ‘That’s the rumour.’

  ‘About this slaves’ graveyard—’

  ‘No one knows where they were buried.’

  ‘But you must have some idea?’

  ‘Most likely place is a field behind the old Methodist chapel. There’s a ring of trees. There’s nowhere else that looks likely.’

  I thank her and leave. Outside, the rain is hammering down like silver bullets and brass stakes. Wolfie is waiting by the door, already soaked to the skin. I pull my hood up and call him to follow. I make my way through the centre of the village, past the Sun Inn pub, the pink granite fountain and the memorial stone to Adam Sedgwick, one of the greatest field geologists of his time, and turn right at the George and Dragon.

  I traipse up the high road that sits above the River Dee, past Conder Farm, until I come to the crossroads at Howgill Bridge. I go left here past a disused quarry and over Mill Bridge. I soon come to the old Methodist chapel and, next to it, Whernside Manor. Its entrance is grand, and the gates are flanked by two square, no-nonsense pillars of stone. I ignore the ‘Private, Keep Out’ sign and wander along the path. The house stands back a few hundred yards and is elevated by a walled terrace. It is a solid, rugged structure, with large door-shaped windows and a massive white front door that is studded with black, heavy-headed doornails. The gardens are full of sculptural follies and ornate features. But it is the building behind which catches my eye.

  I wander further on. This is the farm’s outbuilding, a functional storage space, and yet it has a number of decorative features, including round windows fitted with cut stone and a lovely arched vent. It is claimed in the film that it was modelled on a sugar factory that was part of the Sills’ plantation in Jamaica. This building was there to remind them of that place. I have no reason to doubt this. Why waste money on cut stone if the building is merely functional? I imagine the manor as it was during the Sills’ tenure, with black Africans doing most of the labour. I wonder how this was received by the rest of the village. It must surely have been a talking point? Were people curious to know more about their origins?

  I wander back down the drive and turn up the lane towards Rigg End, which was the house the Sills lived in before the move to Whernside Manor. As I climb upwards, the brow of Whernside looms. It is the least distinctive of the three peaks of Yorkshire. Walkers who take the twenty-three-mile three-peak challenge normally start in the village of Horton in Ribblesdale, where you can check in and out at the local café. From here they climb up to Ingleborough, with its flat top above rugged shoulders, before dropping down then climbing up the comparatively conventional shape of Whernside and finishing the challenge with an ascent of Pen-y-Ghent, which looks like a monstrous flat iron. I’ve done the walk twice, the first time in my twenties, the second in my mid forties. The mid-forties me was pleased to beat the time set by my twenty-something self.

  Just behind Whernside Manor, along Dyke Hall Lane, is the ring of trees in a field that the woman at the heritage centre suggested as the most likely spot for the slaves’ graveyard. It is easy to see why she would come to this conclusion. It seems odd to have so many trees lined up in this way. There were said to be at least thirty house slaves at any one time, and they must be buried in unconsecrated land somewhere. It makes sense that you would inter them as close to their place of death as possible. Why waste energy travelling any further?

  I stop to ponder the idea of slaves buried beneath this grass, leaning against one of the trees and imagining skeletons underneath my feet. I think back to the facsimile of the newspaper notice that hangs in the museum. On 8 September 1758, an advertisement appeared in the Williamson’s Liverpool Advertiser for runaway slave Thomas Anson. It read: ‘THOMAS ANSON, a Negro Man, about five Feet six Inches High, aged 20 Years or upwards, and broad set. Whoever will bring the said Man back to Dent, or give any Information that he may be had again, shall receive a handsome Reward from Mr. Edmund Sill of Dent, or Mr. David Kenyon, Merchant in Liverpool.’

  Thomas wasn’t recaptured and never returned to the Sill family. Instead, one ‘Anson, Thomas’ appeared in military records as having joined the army as a bugler, being barracked first in Edinburgh and then Aldershot before retiring with a pension and his freedom some nine years later. I think about what must have led him to run away. Things must have got pretty bad to flee a place of shelter for these barren dales.

  I picture the Sills, or more likely their servants and slaves, lugging the bodies of dead West Africans up the hill to this spot. Digging holes deep in the stony ground to bury them would have been backbreaking work, and planting trees might have been a way of marking the graves that otherwise would have gone unmarked. I think about my own ancestors, indentured servants. Landowners considered them to be their personal property. If you were a commoner in the eighteenth century, you were subjected to servitude of one sort or another. Heathcliff is flogged and beaten with an iron weight.

  A little further on, the path leaves Dyke Hall Lane and snakes left towards Rigg End, in a very remote spot in the shadow of the fell. It’s extraordinary to think that anyone would choose to live in such an inaccessible spot, as the Sills did before they moved to Whernside Manor. It is a small farmer’s cottage, tiny in comparison to the manor. And it is obvious from the comparison that the Sills made a great deal of money from slavery.

  John Sill, the second eldest son of Edmund, went to sea to seek his fortune. It was John who set up the plantation called Providence. It’s a rather grand title for such a dirty business. But it is perhaps understandable that a man with the blood of black slaves on his hands might want to fool himself that his actions were not only condoned by God, but that God was offering him care and guidance along the way.

  In the documentary, historian Cassandra Pybus states unequivocally that it was the landscape of this dale that inspired Wuthering Heights, not Haworth Moor. It’s an odd claim. The landscape here is very distinctive, characterised by white limestone that pokes out from the hills and brows like fractured bones, such that the tops of these dales resemble a giants’ boneyard, a piecemeal scattering of clavicles, scapula, ribs, femur, fibula and tibia – white bones, picked clean by some giant corvid. The moors of West Yorkshire are characterised by less porous millstone grit. In West Yorkshire, the water runs off the moors and down into the valley. Here, it finds its way through holes in the limestone. Underneath my feet is a labyrinth of watery potholes and dank caves. You can spend all day exploring these subterranean chambers and tunnels. Nothing Emily Brontë describes in her novel exactly resembles this landscape.

  I climb further up to more remote farmhouses, Blake Rigg and Hingabank. I then circumscribe Whernside before climbing to the top of High Pike. Up here the air is clean and still. The sky is bruised with dark clouds, but the rain has thinned to fine mizzle. I come across the corpse of a ram. Its flesh has turned to liquid and all that is left is a white fleece rug with a skull and horns on top, stained red with blood and viscera. The black holes of the eye sockets stare into the abyss. It resemble
s a satanic offering, and I half expect to find an inverse pentagram inscribed in the chalky stone.

  I make my way along the dale tops, before dropping down along Flinter Gill and returning back to Dent village. The rain has stopped, and there is even a window of blue in the distance. I call in to the Sun Inn and think some more about the documentary, and about Richard Sutton. Just how badly treated and beaten was he? Despite all this, it appears it was Sutton who inherited the manor and became the richest man in Dentdale. I’m wondering why the historian in the documentary thinks that he was a black man. There are early photographs in the museum that show that black people were living in the village, but this is not evidence that Sutton was. I wonder where he was buried. There is no sign of him in the local graveyard. Perhaps he too is interred in unconsecrated ground, with the sinners, the suicides, the vampires and the unbaptised.

  I think about the last paragraph of Wuthering Heights and take out a battered copy of the book to reread it:

  I sought, and soon discovered, the three headstones on the slope next the moor: the middle one grey, and half buried in heath; Edgar Linton’s only harmonized by the turf, and moss creeping up its foot; Heathcliff’s still bare. I lingered round them, under the benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.

  I’ve read this passage countless times, but each time I reread it something new jumps out. This time it’s the moths. Why moths and not butterflies, the obvious choice? But I see why Emily chose moths over butterflies. And it’s not just that ‘moths’ assonate with ‘watched’ and ‘soft’. It’s more the sense of night and death, and of formication, that creeping feeling across one’s skin. It is moths that come out at night to pollinate, not butterflies. It is moths that are drawn to the naked flame, where they immolate their bodies, not butterflies. Many moths go without food and die of starvation, as it is suggested Heathcliff does. Sharing so many traits, surely it is moths that are Heathcliff’s familiars.