by Alison Case
Hindley roared again. Mrs Earnshaw forced herself to laugh, but it was so evidently false that even he noticed, and ushered Hoggins out of the house, post-haste. When he returned, he was treated to an angry lecture by his wife, the details of which I did not hear, for I had left the room, but the words ‘low’ and ‘disgusting’ figured prominently in it. Hindley was evidently apologetic, for he replied in soothing tones.
This episode had two effects, neither of them good. One was that Hindley promised never again to bring tenants into the house to meet his wife, a ban that of course included the more respectable class of tenants by whom that privilege had always been respected. The other was that the remaining tenants concluded that the best way to ‘get round’ the new master was to put him in a good humour with scandalous stories and drink. A basket of eggs or a piece of salt beef was no longer acceptable as a set-off to the rent, but the gift of a bottle of spirits, they found, was always welcome, and produced reductions far beyond its cost, and since Hindley generally opened the bottle immediately to share a glass or two, the tenants got to ‘give their gift, and have it too’. Squire Hide-th’-ham was no more; Hindley was Squire Bring-th’-bottle.
The results proved satisfactory to no one, however. The income from the estate continued to decline. Some of the tenants, to be sure, were too proud or too honest to resort to the accepted method for mollifying Hindley, but they were embittered by the advantage gained by those they saw as beneath them. And since Hindley was too straitened ever to agree to contribute to the cost of repairs or improvements, their houses and barns began to suffer from dilapidation. Even those who did ‘bring the bottle’ often had reason to be dissatisfied with the result, for however agreeable Hindley might be in his cups, he often forgot to write down the results, and then on sober review he would be outraged at the arrears, and threaten all manner of dire punishments.
For all my determination not to involve myself in such matters, I soon found myself drawn in anyway. One by one, the tenants, great and small, began contriving ways to deal with me rather than with Hindley or Joseph. It began with my purchase of kitchen provisions, as I said, but soon extended to other matters, such as the hiring of lads and lasses to help out in the household and the farm. When one of the tenants married a baker’s daughter, I employed her to come one day a week and bake for us, at considerable savings over deliveries from the bakery in Gimmerton. I paid them all with chits that I signed, which I told them to present to Hindley against their rent. They all assumed I had prior approval for these arrangements, but in fact I held my breath on the first rent-day at which they were to be presented. I thought it likely that Hindley would honour them, since he had certainly had the things for which they paid, and at a saving, too, but if he didn’t, I was prepared to make them good out of my own funds, for I had no wish to get anyone into trouble. The day passed without any difficulties – in fact Hindley never said a word to me about the chits, good or bad. I took the absence of objections as tacit approval of my efforts, and kept on.
Up to that point I had been careful not to handle money directly: I negotiated for goods or labour, and signed chits in return. But then, on one of my visits to Mrs Dagley, which happened to fall two days before the rent was due, her husband asked if I would convey the funds to Hindley for him. ‘If tha can joost write me a receipt, as tha did for the eggs before, that’s good enoow for me, and ’twill save me half a day’s work, not having to bring it in myself.’ I took the money and the chits for the eggs, and gave it to Hindley that afternoon, being careful to do so while his wife was present, in case there was any question later. He pocketed it immediately, and thanked me.
‘You’ll be wanting to enter it in the rent-book, sir, won’t you?’
‘Oh yes, of course,’ he said, but instead of going to the office to do so, he tossed me the keys. One was to the office, and another to the great heavy safe set deep into the stone floor.
‘Will you be wanting me to put the money in the safe, sir, while I am there?’ I asked.
‘Eh, not this time,’ said Hindley. ‘I have a use for this. But in future you should. And be sure to keep good records of everything you do.’
I went into the office, and opened the rent-book to make the necessary entry. It was a mess. Notes were scrawled every which way, sometimes illegibly, and sums added and subtracted with no very high degree of accuracy. I longed to sit down and put it all to rights, right then, but I had other duties to attend to. I opened the safe, too, to see what was there, and found a surprisingly small sum. I had intended to return the keys to Hindley as soon as I was finished, but the condition of the rent-book gave me a new resolve. I would keep the keys until Hindley requested them back, and see if I could take on the duties of rent-collector more directly.
I arranged with Mrs Earnshaw to borrow her pony chaise the next day – it had fallen into disuse once we began to exchange regular visits with the family at Thrushcross Grange, for they always sent their carriage for Cathy and the mistress. That day I rose well before dawn to get an early start on my household duties and set tasks for the house- and dairymaids before setting out. Then I got the rent-book from the office and began paying calls on the tenants. I went first to those that were apt to pay a day early, and those I had had dealings with for provisions. I told them that Hindley was very busy over the next day or two, and I wished to save them the trouble of coming to the Heights themselves. Most of them were glad enough to pay their rent directly to me, and see their payments and credits entered conscientiously. For those who could not pay in full, I took what they could pay and then talked over with them how we were to make up the difference, and I wrote the results directly into the rent-book also, borrowing the methods I had found in the earlier entries in the book, from the days of my late master.
When I returned that afternoon, Hindley was in the house with his wife, taking tea. This was excellent news: I wanted a witness to what would follow. I was nervous – it was a bold move I had made, after all, and if Hindley wanted a reason to send me away, my taking such a liberty as this would give him a perfect one. I was counting on his old trust in my competence and honesty, and what I hoped was some dissatisfaction with his own performance as rent-collector. I took a deep breath, and entered the room with the rent-book.
‘Good afternoon to you sir, and madam,’ I said as respectfully as possible. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt, but some more of the tenants asked if they might pay their rents to me today, as I was calling on them – I believe they got the idea from Mr Dagley yesterday – and so I took them, and entered it all in the book. Here are the book and the money both. If you have a moment, sir, might you look them over, and see that all is in order?’
Hindley scowled, but he took the book and glanced over my entries.
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Go and put it back in the office, with the money.’
‘If you please, sir,’ I said, ‘I need for you to count the money, too. I shouldn’t wish it to be said later that the amounts didn’t match up properly.’
Hindley grumbled, but he took the box, opened it, and counted the money. ‘It’s all here,’ he said.
‘Could you just sign in the book there, by the total, then?’ I handed him a pen and ink, and he scrawled his name. ‘Thank you, sir. I’m sorry for disturbing you. I’ll just go and put these things in the office. Will you be wanting dinner at the usual time, ma’am?’ She nodded, and I made my exit. I brought the things to the office, put the money in the safe, and left the book on the desk, open to the correct page. Then I went back to the house and gave the keys back to Hindley. He said nothing, but nodded slightly in acknowledgement. I breathed a sigh of relief – it had gone as well as possible. I had reason to believe that many of the tenants would prefer to deal with me, and that, as word spread of today’s proceedings, more and more of them would contrive in future to pay me instead of Hindley. I hoped that the sight of my good results, in contrast with his own, would incline Hindley to acquiesce, as gradually more of the rent co
llection fell into my hands. But things moved rather faster than that.
The next morning was rent-day. I rose at dawn, as I usually did, and began preparing breakfast. The mistress nearly always slept late, but Hindley was still an early riser. When the weather allowed, he would often take a mug of tea and a slice of bread outside for an hour’s walk on the moor, as a prelude to breakfast. Today was no different. By the time he returned, most of the household was up and about, and I was dishing out the porridge for breakfast. The others were out in the courtyard, performing their morning ablutions, so I chanced to be alone in the kitchen when he came in. He reached into his pocket and laid down the keys on the table in front of me. I looked at him in surprise.
‘Go on,’ he said in a low voice. ‘You want to do it, and God knows you do it better than I can. So go on. But see them here – it is not safe for you to be on the road with that much money.’ And with that he gave me just a hint of a rueful smile, and took his plate of porridge with him into the next room.
I stood staring at the keys for some time, until the sound of the others coming through the door warned me to put them out of sight in my pocket. I am almost ashamed now, looking back, to think how much that little gesture touched me. I was like a starving man, who falls on a crust of bread as if it were a feast. I, who not long before had confidently expected to be Hindley’s wife, and mistress of Wuthering Heights, was now moved to tears of joy by the honour of being permitted to perform all her functions and more, without any of the benefits.
So the tenants who filed into the office that day to pay their rent met me instead of Hindley. Most were glad of the change – even some of those who had profited by Hindley’s weakness before. Farmers have so much uncertainty attendant upon the nature of their livelihood, they prefer as little of it as possible in their other dealings. It was a great strain to them to have a landlord who proved as unpredictable as next year’s weather.
On the whole, I believe I performed rather well in my new role. To be sure, my age, my sex, and my status in the household were all against me when it came to exerting authority over refractory tenants. Pounding my fist on the desk and lecturing them on their shortcomings, as the late master had done, was clearly out of the question. But I found a great deal could be accomplished merely by telling them, in the mildest possible manner, that I didn’t ‘feel able to agree to that on my own authority, but I should have to consult with the master, to see if it were agreeable to him’, but if they could just see their way clear to add thus-and-such, there would be no need for that. There were a few who rebelled, and insisted on speaking to Hindley themselves, but they found this of little service. If he was to be found at all, which was not always possible, he would be thoroughly jovial and friendly with them until they brought up the matter under dispute, whereupon his face would close down and he would wave them back to me.
I was strict in my accounting to Hindley at the end of the day. As before, I made sure that he read the entries in the rent-book, counted the money, and signed the book to indicate his acceptance of my efforts. He would have liked to skip this stage altogether, but I was adamant on this front, and on giving him back the key to the safe when I was finished with the collections for the day. I knew how quickly the cash dwindled in the safe, and how poor were Hindley’s records of how he and his wife spent it, and I wanted no accusations coming my way if he found it empty sooner than he expected.
Unlike my late master, who had accepted payment in kind only as a last resort when tenants could not scrape together the rent by other means, though, I encouraged the practice whenever I could. The tenants liked it, for it saved them the time and expense of finding another market for their produce and their labour, and I liked it, for it allowed me to plan ahead to supply the needs of the household, and at a lower cost than I would otherwise pay. More importantly, it kept more of the rent money out of the hands of Hindley and his wife, for whom it was only a temptation to thoughtless extravagance, and saved me having to ask him so often for cash for necessary household expenses, which was always an awkward proceeding.
It would have been shamefully easy to line my pockets at Hindley’s expense, he was so careless of money, and so inattentive to the price of goods or the quantities consumed in the household. The tenants, too, were eager to curry favour with me now, and often offered me tokens of their esteem, which were really little better than bribes. But I refused all such. I was so wary of seeming to take advantage of my situation, in fact, that I would not even deduct my wages from the money I collected, but left it to Hindley to pay me out of his own hand, even though that made payment considerably more irregular.
There was one area in which I knowingly deceived Hindley about money, however, and that was to keep Heathcliff decently clothed and shod. He was growing like a bean, and outgrowing his shoes and trousers even faster than he wore them out – and that took some doing, I can tell you. Yet Hindley would have been content to see him in rags – and this although he had put the poor lad to work to earn his keep, without paying him a penny of wages. I thought this a great wrong, both to him and to my late master, and a discredit to the family, and so I found ways to put aside money without Hindley’s noticing, that I might use to buy what was needed. So when Mrs Earnshaw tired of her visits in Gimmerton, for example, and Hindley asked me to dispose of the pony chaise for whatever I could get, I was able to sell it to a milliner in town for a good price, but I told Hindley I had got less, and put the remainder aside for new winter clothes and boots for Heathcliff. I would have liked to keep this a secret from Heathcliff as well, and let him believe Hindley had at least enough concern for him to keep him decently clothed, but I needed his connivance to hide the purchases from Hindley’s notice, by muddying his new things when he first put them on, so their newness would not be so obvious. And I little thought, then, that Heathcliff was storing all such wrongs up in his mind, to be paid back with interest at a future date.
If I thought that Hindley’s gesture of trust, in giving me the keys, would usher in a new period of greater friendliness between us, I was mistaken. He still avoided speaking to me or looking at me as much as he could, made a great show of adoring his wife when I was about, and discouraged her from treating me in any way as an equal. But when he was obliged to consult with me, he did so respectfully, and on the whole he was not so rude as he had been at first. That, and the charm of my great responsibilities, was enough to keep me satisfied with my place on the whole.
SEVENTEEN
We were not long into that first winter when it became evident that Mrs Earnshaw was with child, and we were all told that she expected her confinement in July. I thought back to my conversation with Bodkin at the funeral, and concluded that whatever he thought he had seen then, that had concerned him, was nothing more than the earliest stage of this condition, which of course he could not have known then. Certainly she looked blooming and happy. She was not strong, and was often too weary to rise until late afternoon, but I remembered my own experience, made allowance for her greater opportunity to indulge in leisure, and concluded that this was nothing unusual.
As her pregnancy progressed, Hindley became, if possible, even more attentive and affectionate than he had been before, and more distant and dismissive towards me. It was hard to bear, at first. When I had told my mother that I had accepted Hindley’s marriage and my own position in the household, I had meant it, and believed it to be true. But watching them now brought vividly back to me my own experience of that state, so very different from hers, and it was hard not to feel bitter.
One afternoon, not long after Easter, I was sweeping in the kitchen when I heard a sudden outbreak of crashing, shouting, and screaming coming from the house that made me dash in, expecting I knew not what catastrophe. When I opened the door, my first impression was that they had all suddenly gone mad: Heathcliff was leaping about on the furniture, Cathy was shouting and struggling to follow him, but was held fast by Frances, who was cowering on the sofa shrieking, and Hind
ley, most frightening of all, was waving a gun about, and making as if he would fire it. I soon saw the cause: a falcon had flown into the room through an open window and was flapping wildly about trying to escape. Frances was screaming to Hindley to kill it before it attacked her, Cathy was begging Heathcliff to save it at all costs, and Hindley, clearly inebriated, was getting ready to shoot, unconcerned that he was more likely to hit Heathcliff than the bird. I took it all in at a glance, and acted before I thought. I wrenched the gun out of Hindley’s hands and flung it aside, then struck the bird with my broom as it swooped by, and, when it fell stunned on the floor, whipped off my apron and rolled it up inside. The whole time I was shouting at them all that they were as great a pack of fools as I had ever seen in my life, to make such a fuss and be ready to kill or be killed over a terrified creature that meant them no harm. I was in a white rage, and must have impressed them with it, for they all froze still and silent until I had the bundled-up bird in my hands. Then the spell broke.
‘Give it here, Nelly,’ Hindley cried, ‘and I’ll dash its brains out, for frightening my wife.’
‘Don’t let her do it, Heathcliff,’ sobbed Cathy, still trying to prise herself free from Frances’s terrified clutches. Heathcliff looked ready to leap on me, in obedience to Cathy’s command.
‘Nobody’s doing anything with it,’ I said. ‘It’s my captive and I’ll dispose of it. Hindley, you had much better take care of your wife, and you too, Cathy. She’s had a bad fright, thanks to you all. Heathcliff, come with me.’ And with that I strode briskly out of the door. Heathcliff followed at my heels, promising Cathy that he would make sure I did the bird no further harm.
Once outside and clear of the house, I paused, and peeled back the wrapping just enough to free the creature’s head so it could breathe, making sure to keep my fingers well away from the sharp beak. It was awake, but, bound tightly and unable to move, it seemed oddly calm, the deep black eye in its gold rim fixed on me unmoving. Heathcliff hovered close.
