by Alison Case
TWENTY-TWO
Two days after Joseph returned, the question of how to manage my secret in Maggie’s presence was solved for me. Maggie came in that morning at her usual time, but instead of settling straight in to her duties, she stood in front of me looking at the ground, twisting her apron in her hand, and generally looking anxious and miserable.
‘What is the matter, Maggie?’ I asked gently.
‘Please, miss, my da says I am not to work here any more after today. I am sorry about the short notice and all, and my da says I must lose some wages for it, but that’s all right with him.’
‘Why does he want you to leave?’
‘It’s the master, miss, he’s got so wild. Not that I told him anything about … about how things are here, sometimes – I wouldn’t do that, you know. But Mr Earnshaw is at the inn in the village most nights now, and the way he talks and acts there, well, word has gone round. So now my da says it’s no place for a girl my age. I am so sorry, miss, for I do like helping you and all, and you have taught me so much, and I shall miss little Hareton, and I don’t want to go and leave you to manage all by yourself—’ Poor Maggie here dissolved into tears. I hastened to reassure her.
‘It’s all right, child, I understand. Of course you must do as your father says. I can manage well enough by myself here – there is not so much to do as there was when we had a mistress here, and regular meals to serve to the family.’ I was a little downcast, though. Even after what I had heard from the Dodds, I had hoped Hindley was not making so much of a spectacle of himself in public as he did at home, but evidently he was.
‘But you’ll have no help with Hareton, especially in the mornings after you’ve had a bad night with him. I did ask my da if I might come here just in the mornings, but he said I must look for a regular position somewhere else.’
‘Hareton is doing much better now – he won’t need feeding in the night for much longer.’
‘Thank you, miss,’ she sniffled, ‘for taking it so kindly and all. I was afraid you would be angry at me.’
‘Of course not child, I am not angry at all. I will miss you, Maggie, for you’ve been an excellent helper, but I’m sure you will get a good position somewhere else, and use all you’ve learned here.’ I would miss her, it was true. But I was also somewhat relieved to have the matter taken out of my hands, and in a way that would not hurt her feelings, either.
Maggie was the first to leave, but before long, as I told you before, the household was deprived of all servants but Joseph and me. No one wished to stay in a household so strange and violent as ours had become, particularly when their wages were so uncertain. I continued to manage the rents as best I could, but I was hampered in my efforts by Hindley’s constant demands for money, money, money. Nothing but cash would serve him to buy drink, and as long as he had that, he cared not what the rest of us lived on! The dairy was reduced to two cows, as I could not manage more without the help of a dairymaid. I had endeavoured to press Cathy into service in that area, on the grounds that her mother had not been above it, but she was having none of it. Isabella Linton, she said, had never touched a cow in her life, nor set foot in the dairy either, and what she would not do, Cathy would not do. And so I had to struggle on by myself.
Still, though, I had my little Hare. My milk had indeed waxed with the moon, and before a week was passed Hareton was sleeping longer at night, and spending more of his days in cheerful wakefulness between feedings. It was not long after that when he began smiling at me, and then crowing with delight at anything that caught his eye, but always looking back to me, to share his pleasure. In short, he was such a joy to me, that I would have tolerated worse than I did, for his sake.
As a young child, I had once seen, at the house of an elderly lady in town, a large glass bottle, turned sideways, in which she had laboriously planted a whole living garden in miniature – as great a wonder to me then as if a ship in a bottle had floated on a real little sea, and swarmed with tiny sailors. It was winter at the time, but though snow and wind howled out-of-doors, it was always summer in her fairy garden. Now, as I stretched myself thin to cover and protect my little bairn, I thought of myself as like the glass skin of that bottle, creating for him a whole little world of warmth and safety amid the storm all around him.
I had weighed him not long after my return from Pennistone Crag, in the hanging scale in the barn that we used for fleeces. It was not very accurate, but it would do to tell if he was gaining weight, which was of course a great concern to me. I weighed him weekly after that, and the results were encouraging. When he had gained a whole pound, I thought to myself, ‘That pound came from my own body, just as the flesh he was born with came from his mother.’ And when a few more had been added, I thought, ‘Now one-third of him comes from me.’ When at last his weight had more than doubled, I felt a secret delight in the fact, as if now my claim on him as my own child were sober fact. As I thought it, there came before my mind’s eye the image of Frances in Hindley’s dream, unwrapping the clothes and finding, not her baby, but a stone, and I had a flash of compunction. ‘But what was I to do?’ I addressed the ghost silently. ‘I could not let him die, could I?’
And did I think, ever, of how Hindley had once wished to marry me, and wonder if he might yet do so? Ah, that is a difficult question to answer. I believed that I ought not to think of it. I had promised, at Pennistone Crag, that if I were granted the great boon of making Hareton my own, so that I might save him, I would never repine again for what was passed and gone. To be sure, I was uncertain to whom this promise had been made: was it to some local demon like the Gytrash or a Brownie? Was it to the King or Queen of Faerie, who were said to rule the fairy cave and its environs? Was it to the Devil himself, as Joseph would aver? Or to Nature, who Bodkin had told me does miracles of her own? Or was it, after all, to God, who hears and sees all we do, and knows the secrets of our hearts, as we say in the prayer, better than we do ourselves? Whomever was the recipient of that desperate promise, they had certainly carried out their end of the bargain, and so it was surely up to me to carry out mine. Still, it is one thing to believe that it is wrong to harbour certain wishes, and quite another to expunge them from your heart and mind. Over the years, I had grown used to living much in daydreams of what the future might hold. They filled the monotony of my daily labours, and comforted me in all my disappointments and sorrows, little and great. So how could it not cross my mind, willy-nilly, that as I was now Hareton’s mother, and Hindley his father, it would be well for all of us if we married?
Still, there was little enough in Hindley’s behaviour to encourage such thoughts. I had hoped, at first, that Hindley’s heart would be warmed towards both of us, by seeing us so happy together, but I soon realized that the opposite was true: the sight of us together seemed to irritate him more than either of us separately, and anything that showed the child’s affection for me or dependence on me enraged him. And so came the habit of tucking Hareton away out of sight when Hindley came home. Usually I could manage it so that Hareton was asleep and tucked into his crib upstairs by that time, but Hindley was unpredictable in his comings and goings, so I was not infrequently obliged to resort to hiding him in the cupboard, as I think I told you before.
Even when Hareton was not about, though, Hindley’s behaviour towards me was not pleasant. For the most part he just ignored me, or gave orders as shortly as he could, but every now and then his cruel streak would surface, and he would set out to distress me.
‘Look at our Nelly Dean,’ he said one day, when Cathy and Heathcliff happened to be by. ‘Strong as a mule, and just as good-natured, isn’t she? She will make a fine catch for some hard-working man, if he’s not too particular about her breeding. It’s a wonder more of them don’t come knocking to seek her out. Have you a sweetheart, yet, Nelly? Or shall we try to find one for you? I shall put up a notice at the inn: “Healthy girl of fine peasant stock seeks mate with similar qualifications.”’
I had found in th
ese situations that defiance answered best. ‘Better a sober peasant than a drunken squire,’ I replied coolly.
‘I wouldn’t know – I have never met a sober peasant.’
‘Perhaps you are looking in the wrong place, then. They are not generally to be found in a public house.’
‘But your father was, wasn’t he? Why, you were practically bred in a public house.’
‘All the more reason to marry outside of one.’
‘Ah yes, it won’t do to marry where you are bred, will it?’
‘That must depend on circumstances, of course, sir.’
‘Oh ho! So you have your eyes set on someone in the household! Well, pickings are slim here, to be sure. There is Joseph, of course – he is certainly sober, but a little old, and I doubt he’d have you. I have detected in him, now and again, some slight hints of an aversion to you, strange as that may seem. How about Heathcliff? He is on the young side, to be sure, but he will grow, he will grow. Or is his gypsy blood too low even for your taste?’ But when he turned to where Heathcliff had been, he found that both the children had fled. ‘Oh dear,’ he said sarcastically, ‘it appears Heathcliff is no more eager for the match than Joseph. Well, what are we to do, then?’
‘I am not looking to marry at all, sir, but if I ever do, I certainly will not seek your services as a matchmaker.’
‘But I know you so well!’
‘Not as well as I know you. Come, sir, there is no one left here to be amused by your teasing, and I have work to do, even if you do not.’ Then I turned my back on him and left to go to work in the dairy.
That was a fair sample of many such conversations, if they can even be called conversations. They all had this in common: they were intended to wound me, and they did so by harping on my ‘low’ birth and scant qualifications for marriage.
‘There is no mystery here,’ you will say. ‘Hindley is making it as clear as he possibly can without saying it outright, that you are not to think of marrying him.’ True. And yet, and yet … why did he keep recurring to the subject? And why was it that, the drunker he was, the more improper his teasings became? I tell you, sir, though you will think me mad with self-regard to say it: I think he loved me yet, and that he was fighting the feeling, not only when he lashed out at me, but in all the wild dissipations into which he flung himself. He would stumble in, bleary-eyed, fouled and stinking with mud or worse, and push himself into my face with his nasty remarks and crude insinuations, and seemed as though he were saying to me, plain as words, ‘There is no depth I will not sink to, no degradation of body or spirit that I will not embrace, except you. Except you.’ I think that his love held him as a steel trap holds a fox, and he was gnawing at himself to get free. And he tore so deep as he did because the trap had bitten deep, so that when he finally got free he could only drag himself off, bleeding, and fall prey to the first beast that came his way. When I think back on those scenes now, Mr Lockwood, the tears spring to my eyes, though I was dry-eyed then, and to this day I do not know whether they are tears of anger, or shame, or love. For yes, I loved him still. Not with the romantic passion of a green-sick girl, nor yet with the steady joy of one who holds a confirmed mutual affection, but with the sad, anxious love a mother has for a wild and wayward child, who hurts her most when he hurts himself.
And while I am confessing to you (for I will never send this to you, Mr Lockwood, Mr Knockwood, Mr Lockheart) I will say this too: that whatever promise his father had extracted from him, or whatever solemn vow to God he made at his behest; whatever faith he was still holding towards his late wife, or however low or degrading he believed a match with me to be, he would have been in every way a better man had he denied them all, and married me. There. It is written, in black and white. Of course I wished it, however hard I tried not to. Of course I dreamed of it, even as I tried to push the dreams from my mind. It would have been best for Hareton, best for Hindley, best even for Cathy and Heathcliff, and certainly best for me. How could I not?
Then he dropped my baby from the top of the stairs, and everything changed.
Did it really happen all in one night? That Cathy pinched me and slapped Edgar, that Hindley stuck a knife in my teeth, told me he had just drowned Bodkin in a bog, got hold of my bonny, winsome nurseling and threatened to cut his ears off, and then, dear God, dropped him, in front of my eyes? That Cathy sneaked in later, and confessed to me her love for Edgar, and her deeper love for Heathcliff, and poor Heathcliff heard only the former, and ran off that very night, and Cathy made herself ill with searching for him? It seems impossible that it was all compressed into one fateful evening, a few hours that changed the whole future for all of us, did we but know it. I remember it so, now, but perhaps that is only because I told it to you that way, compressing into one night what took place over many. To save time, for it was growing late, or perhaps only to stuff something, anything, into the space between Hareton’s fall and what it did to me, for my heart stopped dead in that moment, and when it started up again, when Hareton landed safe in Heathcliff’s arms, it beat to a new rhythm henceforward.
The image of his fall is seared into my brain, yet I know that what I see when I think of it cannot be what really happened. I see a scene with figures stiffly posed in exaggerated positions, like the illustrations to a book, or the players in a village pageant: Hindley at the top of the stairs, arms wide, hands still in position as if they held his son, staring down at the falling child with his face frozen in a look of shock and anguish that in reality he had no time to assume; Heathcliff poised beneath, face solemn, arms already cradling the space where the child would be, and between them, about midway down, Hareton, seated serenely on the empty air, with one hand raised in blessing, like the Christ child in a picture.
Afterwards, I screamed at him, as I told you – I made one final, desperate effort to reach him, but I could not. So I turned my back on him and wrapped myself over the child, weeping and rocking and crooning all the love words I had hitherto taken such care to keep from his father’s ears, whispering over and over again, ‘Hareton, my little hare, my leveret, my love.’
How Hindley took this demonstration I had no way of knowing, for he said nothing, and I would not so much as look round until the sound of his boots on the stairs told me he had gone up to bed.
Much later I finally mounted the stairs myself, Hareton fast asleep on my shoulder. When I reached the top, the door to the master’s room opened, and Hindley stood there. If I was startled it was only for a moment, for there was nothing to fear in his face. Drained of the anger and sarcastic mirth into which it had so often been twisted, it looked, not quite like his boyhood self, but like a ghost or memory of it. He said, ‘Nelly.’ Just that, ‘Nelly.’ Said it, not pleading or demanding, but as if it were simply a fact, a truth he had finally brought himself to see.
How often had I imagined that scene, and how many responses to it had I rehearsed to myself in my mind? But whether they were angry or tearful, exuberant or calm, brief or long-drawn, my mental scenes had always ended in the same conclusion: myself, with Hareton, in Hindley’s arms, his face looking down on us both, suffused with a peaceful joy in my simple presence that I had not seen there in many a long year. Yet when the moment came in sober fact, all my imaginings and rehearsals went for naught, for I spoke without thinking at all. ‘Goodnight, Hindley,’ I said. I heard my voice as if it were a stranger’s: sad, calm, firm, kind. And that was when I knew my heart had changed. I walked past him to my room, entered it, and closed the door. Afterwards, lying in my bed in the dark, listening to the soft snufflings of Hareton’s breathing next to me, the reaction came. Long into the night, tears streamed down my face, and my body shook with silent sobs. That is what I wished to forget. That is why I merged that awful night with Cathy’s confession and Heathcliff’s flight. As if I could have sat there in the kitchen after what had just happened, catechizing Cathy on her two loves and offering sage advice.
It was a momentous thing for me, to have the gr
eatest dream of my life extinguished – or rather, to know that I had myself extinguished it. I thought, when I rose the next morning, that the change would have somehow suffused the whole household, as if lightning had struck the house and torn down a wall while we were sleeping. Yet everyone went on as if nothing had happened – as indeed for, most of them, it had not. Even Hindley seemed unchanged, when he finally rose from his bed. Perhaps he was a little more distant to me, but that may have been only my imagination, for he was usually so in the mornings.
No, it was Cathy’s feelings that brought upheaval to all of us, as ever – not mine. It could not have been more than a day or two later, for Hindley was still fresh in my mind, when I had to listen to her saying that marriage to Heathcliff would ‘degrade’ her, and so she would marry Edgar instead, but keep Heathcliff by her as a hanger-on, so that he could serve her with his whole heart, and be fed in return with the scraps of her affection, as I had been by Hindley, all this time. Is it any wonder I loved her not?
I was glad that Heathcliff had left. It made the house a little less violent, though not by as much as I might have hoped. And though Cathy grew quite tyrannical, as I told you before, she was at least more predictable in her demands, as there was nothing to compete with her desire to impress and attach young Mr Linton – which, for that matter, Hindley wished also. As for Heathcliff himself, wherever he had gone, I could not imagine that his situation was worse than it had been before. I believed he was gone for good, and I thought him wise to break his tie with Cathy, and shake the dust of Wuthering Heights from his feet, to make his own way in the world.
One great sorrow during that period was the sudden debility of old Dr Kenneth. Only a few months after Cathy took sick (as she did just after Heathcliff’s departure, you may recall), he had a stroke that left him unable to speak or walk. He could get about a little, pushed in a wheeled chair, and could communicate laboriously with pencil and paper, but of course he could not see patients any more, so Bodkin had to take over the practice entirely. He and his wife had a son of their own by then, a few months younger than Hareton, named Richard after his grandfather. As soon as I heard of the good doctor’s trouble, I made it my business to go into Gimmerton and see how the family was doing. The surgery was open, but nobody was waiting, so Bodkin called me in straight away. Then Anna came in, and took Hareton away with her to play with Ricky, so Bodkin and I could chat at leisure.
