by Alison Case
‘Laughter and tea, again?’ I asked.
‘Laughter and tea, and’ – he reached over and extracted my sodden handkerchief from my hand, replacing it with a clean one from his own pocket – ‘dry linen. My tried and true treatment for Miss Ellen Dean of Wuthering Heights – cures all her ailments at once.’
‘I wish it could.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, just that things will be difficult here if … if what you say is true. I don’t know how Hindley will … he and the master are … well, they just don’t get on well.’
‘Well, but Hindley is not your ailment, is he?’
‘No, I suppose not, but trouble is trouble, all the same. And the master relies on me to keep peace in the household.’
‘He asks a good deal too much of you, then.’
‘Oh no! I am happy to do my best for them all. I just worry sometimes that it is beyond my power.’
Bodkin looked thoughtful. ‘You know, Nelly, you are not obliged to keep working here.’
‘But Wuthering Heights has been my home for as long as I can remember. I love them bet— like my own family. I could never leave them while they need me. And where else would I go, anyway?’
‘As long as you are content here, of course there is no reason to leave. But if that should change, Nelly, please don’t imagine that you are obliged to sacrifice your happiness for theirs. You may be sure they would none of them do the same for you.’
‘Well, thank you for that kind thought Bodkin! As I struggle through the hardship that awaits us all, and grieve for their loss as well as my own, it will be a great comfort to reflect that none of them gives a fig for my feelings.’
‘I didn’t mean that, Nelly, just that—’
‘Please, Bodkin,’ I interrupted, ‘don’t you think I’ve had enough hard truths for one day? I love the Earnshaws, and have good reason to believe they are fond of me as well. I will not leave them just when trouble comes upon them, because I might be more comfortable elsewhere.’ I forced a smile. ‘If you tell me any more, I really will have to bite you.’
Bodkin shifted the talk to local gossip, then, and made his farewells as soon as his father came downstairs. But the conversation stayed with me, like a lump of cold porridge caught midway between my throat and my stomach.
During these months, we carried on a sort of triangular correspondence with my mother. She wrote to the mistress about once a week – long, chatty letters full of the pleasures and challenges of her new position – with greetings to me enclosed, and the expectation that the whole letter would be passed on to me afterwards. In fact I had them as soon as they came, for the mistress had me read them aloud to her – reading made her head ache, she said. For the same reason, it was left to me to write back to my mother and give the news of the family. This I did faithfully, as regards the frequency, but not so faithfully in the contents, for I omitted at least as much as I told.
I did not tell, for example, of the mistress’s increasingly peevish remarks on my mother’s oft-expressed enthusiasm for Mrs Thorne. The latter had not only entered with interest into my mother’s plans for the dairy, but expanded them with benevolent schemes of her own, such as providing a cup of fresh milk each morning to the children who filed into her husband’s mill to work, and another as they left in the evening – with great effects as to their health and spirits, she said. In addition, Mrs Thorne had embarked with my mother on a course of evening reading, meant to repair the deficiencies in her education, beginning with the plays of Shakespeare, of course, so as to find names for all the new cows. All this and more my mother told at length, delighted to have found a companion who shared her energy as well as her interests. But her enthusiasm grated visibly on the mistress, who felt slighted by my mother’s interest in her new friend.
‘She has forgotten,’ she would grumble, ‘how we used to look after the dairy together ourselves, and read Shakespeare of an evening, and vow that we would never be separated.’
‘Of course not,’ I would assure her, ‘it is her memory of those happy times that gives her such joy now in reliving them, and she shares them with you for that reason.’
‘No, she has replaced me entirely with this Mrs Thorne,’ she replied. ‘I don’t think she misses me at all any more, as I do her.’
Well, I would soothe and reassure her as best I could, but I took to editing my mother’s letters as I read, leaving out her praise of Mrs Thorne whenever I could, and laying stress on any little difficulties or disappointments in her new life of which she made mention, and of course on all her expressions of affection and concern for Mrs Earnshaw.
As I say, I made no mention of this in my letters to my mother. I also said next to nothing of the mistress’s condition, only that she was still ‘a little weak’ from her illness, but mending. At first this was no more than what we all endeavoured to believe ourselves, the mistress included, but even after Bodkin had, as it were, opened my eyes to the true state of affairs, I continued to hide it from my mother. I told myself that there was no need to disturb her happiness in her new position, and that there would be time enough to send for her, if the mistress’s condition should worsen further. But then, having hidden her true state for so long, it became difficult to see how I might reverse my news, and tell of her steady decline, without making clear how much I had been prevaricating already.
I don’t know how long this might have gone on if it were left only to me, but one day in February, when I had just brought the mistress a cup of warm tea, she startled me by taking both my hands in hers, and looking solemnly into my eyes.
‘It is time to send for your mother, Nelly,’ she said. ‘She must have her chance to say farewell.’
I opened my mouth to protest, but a slight pressure of her hands, and the sight of her gaunt, pale face, and the sunken eyes fixed so calmly on mine, stopped me, so I did no more than whisper, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ and slip away. With that compulsion fresh upon me, I sat down and wrote quickly to my mother that the mistress was ‘sinking’ and, we feared, past recovery, and that she wished my mother to come to her as soon as was practicable.
As expected, the letter brought my mother to us within a few days, arriving in the same pony carriage that had carried Mrs Thorne, a year before. She wasted little time on greetings, only stopping to give a brief curtsey towards the master and confirm that Mrs Earnshaw was awake, before sweeping up the stairs to her room. I had just come from there, brought out by the hubbub of my mother’s arrival, so I could whisper to her on her way in that she was expected. She went in and closed the door. I hovered nearby, hoping to catch some sense of what passed, but heard only a low, soothing murmur from my mother – the mistress’s voice was too soft to be heard at all. A rustling sound gave me warning that she was leaving, and I hurried to leave my post, and make it appear that I was just walking past as my mother came out. My mother was smiling and composed in taking leave of the mistress, but as soon as the door was shut she whipped round and grabbed me hard by the shoulders.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she hissed, pulling us both from the door at the same time. I opened my mouth to speak, but could get no words out, so overwhelmed was I by what seemed to me in that moment the enormity of my crime against her.
‘I didn’t know,’ I burst out at last, and then collapsed into sobs.
Her face melted then, to my immense relief, and she wrapped me in her arms.
‘No, of course,’ she sighed, ‘how could you?’
I ought to have confessed to her then, just how much I had known, and when, and how much of selfishness and heedlessness there had been in my silence. She would have forgiven me, I am sure, and we would have been closer, and had more genuine comfort from each other, in what we both knew was coming. And in what came afterwards – well, many things might have been different. But I lacked the courage.
By tacit consent, my mother took over the nursing of Mrs Earnshaw entirely. She had a little bed made up for herself on the floor
– the master had moved out some weeks earlier to the spare bedroom, so as not to disturb her light sleep with his snores. I, who had prided myself on my skill in preparing nourishing foods that would tempt the mistress’s increasingly delicate appetite, found my experience swept aside in the kitchen, so my mother could prepare forgotten delicacies from their youth, and honey-sweetened tisanes made up of odd-smelling herbs she went to Old Elspeth to purchase. I felt a little put out by this at first, but I soon had to concede that my mother knew what she was about, for the mistress visibly brightened and improved under her care. That, of course, only stung my conscience the more: if I had only sent for my mother sooner, might she have cured the mistress altogether? One quiet evening as we both sat by the fire in the kitchen, I ventured to put this to her.
‘I wish—’ I began, meaning to say that I wished we had brought her sooner, but she interrupted me.
‘Whisht, Nelly, what have I said to you about wishing?’
‘Very well then, I wonder, if you had come sooner, might you have made the mistress well?’ I held my breath after, for this was the closest I had come to confessing that I ought to have sent for her before I did. My mother was silent for a long time, and I saw tears gathering in her eyes.
‘I think not,’ she said at last. ‘Mrs Earnshaw has been weakening for a long time – much longer than this one illness. What you are seeing now is only a little burst of energy because she is glad to have me here again, and glad to know that I will be with her until—’ She stopped, unable to continue. ‘If I had come sooner, that too would have faded in time.’
I was fighting back tears myself, but if I had any inclination to throw myself into my mother’s arms again to sob, she was not encouraging.
‘Come now,’ she said briskly, ‘there will be enough weeping when the time comes – until then we should keep our hands busy and our minds on happier things.’
I picked up some sewing, and she took up a piece of knitting she had brought with her, and we both worked in silence for a little while. I cast my mind about for something to discuss, and at last hit upon something I had been wanting to ask her for a long time.
‘Why do you never speak of your younger days with Mrs Earnshaw, when you were both girls together? She speaks of it all the time.’
‘I don’t like to talk of it,’ she said shortly. ‘Those days are passed and gone.’
‘But you like to tell stories,’ I persisted, ‘and those are of days passed and gone, too. And weren’t those happy times, for both of you?’
‘They were,’ she said, and I saw her eyes look off into the air, while her lips pressed together, and the needles stopped in their restless motion. Then she seemed to reach some decision, and the needles began moving again. She began speaking, but without looking at me.
‘Mrs Earnshaw, Helen Thwaite before she married – you are called Ellen after her – was my close friend and companion in girlhood. We grew up on adjacent farms not far from here: the Thwaites’ was freehold, and my father held his from Mr Linton. Our mothers were relations by marriage, and had always kept up a regular visiting between them, sharing receipts for jam and cakes, and trading gifts of butter and eggs, cheeses and chicks, back and forth, as farmers’ wives do, to tide each other over, say a fox had got in among the poultry, or the cows fallen sick in the dairy.
‘So we girls were often together, and called each other cousin, and as we grew older and were expected to take our share of the work at home, we took to working together at each other’s houses, turn and turn about. Our mothers were happy to see it, they said, for it made our work an extension of our play, and instilled early those habits of cheerful industry that are the best dowry of a farmer’s daughter. In my case, it was all the dowry I was likely to have, for my father was over-free with his money, and though my mother was a thrifty and sensible manager enough, it needed all her skill and contrivance to see to it that the rent was made up each quarter day, and my three younger brothers kept in boots and schoolbooks, without putting any aside for my establishment.
‘We doted on each other, with a great deal of kissing and laughter, in the way that girls will before their attention is turned to the lads. But for all we were so much together, we were not much alike, in looks, or manner, or talents. Helen was a light-hearted wisp of a girl, with sparkling brown eyes, hair that fell in bright chestnut curls down her back, and a complexion any lady might envy. Even now in her middle age and after many sufferings of mind and body both, you can still see in her face the pretty lass she had been, and how easily she won the love of all who knew her.’
I nodded – indeed, it had sometimes troubled my conscience that my heart was drawn to her more, so I thought, than to my own mother – and motioned her to continue.
‘I was more solidly made than my cousin, even as a young girl, and had that sort of brown complexion and plain broad country face that is made pretty only by youth, health, and good cheer, and soon marred by the loss of any of them – much the same face you see in your own glass, Nelly. But what I lacked in beauty, I made up in quickness of mind and good practical sense, and steady health and spirits.
‘I have said we shared our work, but from the start I took the lead in practical matters. Helen was clever with her hands, especially in small things, and had an excellent taste. I have yet by me a needle case she made once from scraps of ribbon and satin anyone else would have thought too small to save, all joined together with fancywork and a few stray buttons and beads into as lovely a thing as you could hope to see. But with ordinary chores it was another matter; she was inclined to be flighty, and disliked much of the daily work a farmer’s daughter must turn her hand to: sweeping and scouring, straining the milk, churning and making up the butter, baking and the like, for such work, it seemed to her, was no sooner done than undone: the food eaten, the milk drunk, the pots dirtied again, and all to be done over the next day or week. With me at her side she could get through her tasks with credit enough, for we could chatter over the dough-tub and the milk pans, and if I did more than my strict share of the labour, why, Helen provided most of the entertainment. And as Helen felt in her heart no great pride in such work, she was content, too, to be assigned menial tasks and be ordered about by me as a sort of assistant, which fell in well with my love of order. So, despite our differences, or because of them, we pleased each other and our parents too, and had between us as happy and carefree a girlhood as any farmers’ daughters could hope for.
‘But when we came to young womanhood, our situations altered. Helen at eighteen caught the eye of the young master of Wuthering Heights, as likely a catch as the neighbourhood could boast at that time, the Earnshaws being an ancient family and the estate sizeable, though not rich. Mr Earnshaw was conscious of a gentleman’s claim to a genteel wife, and he had a young man’s eye for a comely face and manner. But he had also had the management of his estate long enough to know that the mistress of Wuthering Heights needs to be more than an adornment to the household. As you must have seen by now, Nelly, the farms that make up the estate are generally poor ones that owe but little rent and are often in arrears on that, and the family can only be kept up in respectable comfort by turning their own hands to the work of farming their best lands.
‘In Helen Thwaite, Mr Earnshaw had reason to think he had found all he sought. He had tasted the cheese and bread made by her own hand, and seen the scoured cleanliness and order of the dairy that he had been told was her special care. He had admired the samplers and coverlets worked by her, and still more the pretty modesty with which she acknowledged that they were done from her own designs. He had heard her mother, with studied casualness, make reference to the substantial portion set aside for her from the butter-and-egg money, and the prize cow that was “Helen’s own special pet” and must of course go with her “whenever she comes to marry”. And if these substantial virtues were not enough (and for what young man of spirit would they be?) he saw them combined with a cheerful disposition, manners that would grace a
gentleman’s table, and a face and figure to gladden any man’s heart.
‘Helen was delighted with the handsome young man, whose habitually serious face lit with a smile whenever he spoke to her, and who treated her with a reverential dignity so different from the heavy familiarity of the sons of local farmers. But I watched and listened with a heavy heart. I was not jealous of Helen’s good fortune, I don’t think: I had always loved my cousin better than myself, always gladly given her the best of anything I had – and at any rate, I had long known that Helen would almost certainly marry better than I could myself – if indeed I married at all. But I saw, as neither of them did, that the courting couple had each very different visions of what their marriage would bring. He, in choosing as a wife the daughter of a farmer, believed he was gaining a mistress who would take on as a matter of course the direct management of the household, the dairy and poultry yard, and the kitchen garden: assisted by servants, to be sure, to a greater extent than in the home of her birth, but still not above getting her hands dirty, and working side by side with the help as needed. But I knew, better even than Helen herself, that Helen did not quite possess the skills she appeared to, and that she looked forward to the marriage as lifting her out of the sphere of such duties. I dropped such hints as I could to her, but Helen couldn’t or wouldn’t see any difficulties ahead, and finally accused me of speaking out of jealousy. So I held my tongue, and when, in due time, Mr Earnshaw’s proposal was made and accepted, I endeavoured to share in my cousin’s joy, and hoped all would work out for the best.’
‘And did it?’ I asked.
‘Better than I feared, and worse than she hoped, I suppose. He loved her deeply – as he still does – and if he felt any disappointment in her practical skills, he was too much the gentleman to reproach her outright. But it added, I think, a deeper shade of sternness to his character, which she felt keenly, being such a light-hearted soul herself. And then the children began coming, and that made things much more difficult.’
