by Alison Case
‘We have always been fond of each other. Ever since we were babies together. In your care. Remember?’
‘You know that’s not what I mean. Have you been forming romantic ideas about him?’
I said nothing.
‘How often have I told you that you are not to think yourself the equal of the Earnshaws? You are a servant, Nelly, the daughter of a servant and a half-illiterate stonemason. Hindley is a gentleman’s son and heir. To pursue him—’
‘I never pursued him! He pursued me!’
‘Young men of Hindley’s age will pursue any girl who gives them encouragement. Can you say that you did not encourage him?’
Again, I was silent.
‘To encourage him, then, was an act of grossest ingratitude to the Earnshaws, who have been your benefactors from an early age.’
I was crying again by this time, but I managed to speak through my sobs. ‘You said when a man marries down, he raises his wife to his level. And I would be a good wife to him.’
‘Don’t bandy words with me, Nelly,’ she said angrily. ‘I am telling you that you cannot marry Hindley. The master would never permit it, and neither would I. It is nothing but a childish fancy, and you must put it from your mind.’
I had no answer, only sobs. My mother took a deep breath.
‘I think it is time you left Wuthering Heights.’
This was too much: the dam burst. ‘Is that what you came here to do?’ I accused her. ‘He sent you to order me away, didn’t he, so he wouldn’t have to do it himself, and break his vow!’ That stopped her short.
‘What vow?’
‘The one he made after I saved Heathcliff from the measles, when he blessed me, and said I was born to be the salvation of the family, and that while he lived I should always have a home at Wuthering Heights – always, he said, and he vowed it – and now he wishes he could take it back so he sent you instead, but I don’t want to leave, this is my home, I have been here always, I don’t want to go anywhere else, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t.’ I was pounding my knees with my fists as I spoke, tears streaming down my face. I had lost my baby, I had lost Hindley, and I could not bear to lose Wuthering Heights too, and the family I still loved as my own. My mother grabbed my wrists and held them, hard. That made me look at her, and I saw tears in her eyes.
‘God forgive me, what have I done?’ she cried, and wrapped me in her arms. But I was frozen, and would not return her embrace. At length she pushed away from me, still with her hands on my shoulders, and took a deep breath. ‘I did not know about this vow,’ she said. ‘It explains … some things. The master did not ask me to send you away. That would not be like him, to take an underhand way out of an obligation he laid on himself. It was my thought only. I did not realize how deep were your roots here. I thought you might be happier with me, at Brassing, where there are a greater variety of people about, and more opportunities for a girl like you. I still do think that, Nelly, but I will not force it on you. You must make your own choice.’
‘I choose to stay here.’
‘Think about it, Nelly. You need not decide now. You must think on it, when you are calmer. You would not be leaving immediately, in any case – they would need to find someone to replace you, and you would need to show them what to do; it would be a matter of weeks, at the least, if not months. So take your time, and think about it.’
I said that I would. I had a great many things to think about – why not this too? But I knew I would not change my mind. It was not just that I loved Wuthering Heights and its inhabitants, but to work under my mother, or among strangers, and as an underservant, when here I was housekeeper in all but name, and manager of my own time, held little appeal. And a part of me still hoped, whatever my mother might say, that in time I could prove myself to Mr Earnshaw as a worthy wife for Hindley.
My mother left the next day, and the master returned, alone, the day after. He was gloomier than when he had left, and more distant with all of us, but other than that he treated me no differently, and I began to think that Hindley had not spoken to him, after all. I did not trust myself to ask about why he had sent Hindley away, but Cathy and Heathcliff were not so shy. I had told them already that Hindley was being sent to school, but as soon as the master came back they began pestering him with questions. And since at that age beasts interested them more than people, they began with the ram.
‘Where is the ram? Did you buy the ram?’
‘I did not,’ was the grim reply.
‘Why not? Were the sheep as fine as Hindley said? What were they like?’
‘Inferior to ours, in every way,’ the master snorted. ‘I don’t know what that fool of a lad was thinking. “Sweetest mutton I ever tasted,” he said.’
‘Hard labour is a great sweetener of victuals,’ I said.
‘Yes, well, that certainly explains why ours never tasted so sweet to him. I suppose hard labour is a great softener of wool, too.’
I held my tongue.
‘Why did you send Hindley away to school?’ asked Cathy.
‘Because he will never amount to anything here. The lad is useless, and will learn nothing while he has his friends and amusements at home. Perhaps a schoolmaster can do better with him. At any rate, he will be no loss here.’ Cathy and Heathcliff grinned broadly, and ran off together, as cheerful as if Christmas had come again. I fled to the kitchen, and chopped onions. It was going to take some time to inure myself to hearing Hindley talked about in such terms again, without seeming to mind it. In the meantime, I chopped a great many onions.
So there you have it: the secret I have harboured all these years, with such bitterness and shame – or one of them, anyway. And now that it is told, there is nothing very remarkable about it. A maidservant got herself with child by her master’s son, because she was foolish enough to believe his promise of marriage. But she had the good fortune to lose the child, before it could cost her either her position or her reputation. Who would be interested in such a story, compared to the wild, destructive passions of highborn ladies and gentlemen, and orphans of mysterious parentage? Certainly not you, Mr Lockwood, Mr Knockwood, Mr Lockheart. But I can tell you, the story was vivid enough for me, while I was living it, and the tears for my lost dream none the less bitter, for shaking the bosom of a stout, plain girl in a homespun apron and cap. And that was not the end of it, either, for this story played its part in stranger happenings that came after.
THIRTEEN
They were quiet years, those that followed. For me, they began with my slow, sad adjustment to the full scope of Hindley’s banishment. For the first few months, I was in daily expectation of a letter from him. I knew he could not write to me directly, but I was sure he would find a way to get a letter to me – via one of his friends in Gimmerton, perhaps. But none came. If he wrote to his father, or the master to him, there was no sign of that either, that I could see. I would have written to him myself, if I had known where to write, but the master never so much as mentioned the name of the school, or even the part of the country it was in. When I realized that no letter would come, I still expected that Hindley would be home for the school’s summer holiday, but the expected period came, with no sign of him. At this, I finally gathered my courage to ask after him.
‘When will Hindley be home from school?’ I asked the master one day as I served him his breakfast, striving for a casual tone.
‘He will spend all his holidays with his relations,’ the master said, in a tone that invited no further discussion. At this, whatever shred of hope I had remaining, that Hindley’s disappearance had nothing to do with him and me, was gone. Had I understood this at once, perhaps I would have left Wuthering Heights, as my mother wished me to. But as I said, my hopes diminished gradually, over many months, so that, by the time I was conscious that they were truly gone, I had grown used to living without them.
The gloom that had settled on the master never lifted. If anything, it seemed to deepen with each passing month, and he became eve
r more stern and silent. The more striking changes, to me, were the loss of his energy, and the growing power ceded to Joseph. The farm the master had taken on was let again, and more and more of the business of our own farm, which he had always seen to himself, seemed to be left to Joseph to manage. With the latter’s greater responsibilities, apparently, came greater influence. Joseph not only lorded it over the rest of us, but he did not even hesitate to lecture the master on spiritual matters, and especially on the state of his soul, all of which the master bore with a meekness I could never have imagined in him before. Only the subject of Heathcliff was forbidden. Joseph hated the lad like poison, and for a time he tried to turn his master against him, but Mr Earnshaw’s old spirit would flare into life again at any attempt to disparage his favourite, and Joseph soon left off the attempt.
I was concerned that Joseph would now turn his energies to disparaging me to the master, but he must have realized that I had become essential to the smooth running of the household (as indeed I had), for he confined himself to harassing me personally. I had finally learned how best to deal with this, which was by wrapping myself in a hard carapace of respectful politeness to his face, which gave him no opening for complaint, and then making horrible faces at him behind his back, to soothe my own feelings. I only did this while I thought no one was watching, of course, but on one occasion Cathy and Heathcliff happened to be peeking through the door, unbeknownst to me, and caught me doing it. They went off into gales of laughter, and Joseph whirled round to demand the cause. I put my finger to my lips to beg their silence, which made them laugh the harder, but they kept mum, even when Joseph condemned them to listen to an entire sermon, as an antidote to their insolent levity. After that, they took up the practice themselves, casting me conspiratorial looks all the while, but they were far less careful not to be seen by him. In fact, they seemed to like nothing better than to have Joseph spot them with their faces twisted and their tongues out at him, and then run off before he could catch them. But they never said a word about my part in it, and in truth it gave all three of us a good deal of much-needed amusement, during those gloomy times.
I don’t know when I first truly realized that the master was in his final illness. It is not that I didn’t see the signs, or even that I didn’t draw any conclusions from them. It is rather that, no sooner would the thought, ‘Mr Earnshaw may be ill,’ or ‘Mr Earnshaw may die soon,’ flicker across my mind, than a number of other thoughts would follow, willy-nilly: that if he did die, Hindley would come home; that he would become master of Wuthering Heights; that there would be nothing, then, to prevent us from marrying as soon as we liked. You might think that these would be welcome thoughts, but they were anything but that: they filled me with terror. To imagine that what I most desired would follow directly from the master’s death felt too much to me like wishing for him to die, and though I was not conscious of really wishing that, the fear of it was enough to make me push away any signs or hints that might otherwise have been clear enough.
I have told you that my mother’s story came to haunt me. This is where it really began. I could not stop thinking about how the farmer had wished for his wife’s death in his heart without knowing that he did so, and imagining the horror he felt, when his wish was granted, and he knew that it was his own heart that had done the evil. It even crossed my mind at this time, that earlier, while Hindley and I had been debating when to tell his father our news, I had wished in my heart that I were not with child, and perhaps it was that, more than anything my mother might have done, that had led to the babe’s death.
I tried to reason myself out of my superstitious fear. I reminded myself that wishes, whether good or ill, did not come true just by wishing them, that ‘if wishes were horses, then poor men would ride’. I told myself that the farmer in my mother’s story had earned the Brownie’s ill will by abusing his generosity, something I was not aware of having done to any creature, magical or otherwise. And when that did not ease my anxiety, I tried to ensure that my heart was in good trim by acting as if it were. I flung myself with renewed vigour into fulfilling every duty, and treating the master with all the deference and consideration I could muster; I prayed for the health and prosperity of each family member nightly; but above all, I tried to avoid thinking those thoughts I believed to have evil at their roots, however innocent their outward appearance. And so it was not until Dr Kenneth was called in, and officially pronounced his verdict, that I allowed myself to think of the master as truly ill. Dr Kenneth now became a regular visitor at our house again, though not so regular as he had been with the mistress, for the master disliked frequent medical attendance.
One bright spot during this time was the return of Bodkin. At one of Dr Kenneth’s visits, he mentioned that his son was back from Edinburgh, now a doctor in his own right. I asked if we would be seeing him at the Heights any time soon.
‘Ah, the days when I can bring him along on my own cases are done now,’ he said with a smile. ‘He must manage his own cases.’
‘Will he be taking over the whole of your practice?’ I asked.
‘Only gradually,’ he replied. ‘My older patients, your master, for instance, have known me too long to accept a substitute, particularly one they are not yet accustomed to seeing in long trousers. And I myself should be sorry to bid farewell to them. For now, he is managing the surgery and going out for new cases. Then we will see how it goes. But do visit him – I know he would like to see you. And he has news to give you.’
‘What news?’
‘I’ll leave that to him,’ he said with a smile.
With that as an incentive, I seized the next opportunity of going into Gimmerton for some errands, and stopped by the surgery before heading home. There were three people waiting there already – an older gentleman, a young woman, and a boy, presumably her son, with a bandage on his leg – so I feared I would not be able to do more than greet Bodkin and be on my way. Soon the door opened, and Bodkin came in, looking taller and older, and sporting a trim little beard only slightly less red than his hair.
‘Nelly!’ he cried on seeing me. ‘How good of you to come. If you can stand to wait a few minutes, I will be at your service.’
‘You seem to have your hands full with patients,’ I said doubtfully.
‘Ah, that is an illusion,’ he said, ‘for Mr Gross is only here to pick up his medicine, which I have right here,’ he flourished a blue bottle which he handed to the gentleman, who thanked him and left, ‘while this exceedingly brave little man is here to have some stitches removed, which will only take a minute, and his mother is here to witness his bravery, so she can brag about it to all the neighbours. Is that right, Tommy?’ The little boy managed a nervous smile and a nod, and Bodkin ushered both of them into the next room, where, to judge from the wails that followed, Tommy was anything but brave. But the operation was quickly finished, and the child emerged with a peppermint stick in one hand, his mother’s hand in the other, and a great eagerness to be out of the place. As soon as they were gone, Bodkin came out and put up a little pasteboard sign, saying that the surgery would reopen at four o’clock (it was just after three), and then he led me through the surgery into the sitting room of the main house, stopping a small maid along the way to ask her to bring tea and biscuits, forthwith.
‘Dr Kenneth,’ I said.
‘Oh, please don’t call me that,’ he said. ‘I keep looking round for my father.’
‘But you’ll have to get used to it,’ I protested.
‘Yes, I will, in time, but not from you. To you I must remain Bodkin, or how am I to remember, amidst all these new responsibilities, that I was ever young?’
I laughed, and promised that he would always be Bodkin to me. Then I asked him how he liked his new practice.
‘Well enough,’ he said. ‘Father is staying with his older regular patients for now, so mine are mostly children and poorer folks. It makes for a good deal less bowing and scraping, which is fine with me, but I am worried I
will forget everything I ever learned about gout.’
‘No, I don’t suppose you see much of that among the young or the poor.’
‘Oh, it is so far a badge of mature wealth, these days, it is almost as good as a title. In Edinburgh men who have come into money late in life will bandage a toe and take to crutches, just to hide their upstart origins. You’d be surprised how well it answers.’
I laughed. ‘You seem to have a way with the children, anyway,’ I said. ‘Though Tommy was not so brave after all, was he?’
‘No, I’m afraid little Tommy is not at all brave,’ he sighed. ‘The poor child cries if a fly lands on his arm, and expects imminent death if he stubs his toe. He’s a trial to his mother, I know.’ He smiled. ‘But I try to keep on good terms with him, anyway, for he has the makings of an excellent hypochondriac, and they are bread and butter to a country doctor.’
‘Your father said you had news?’
‘I do, and you can probably guess what it is,’ he grinned.
‘You are getting married.’
‘I am indeed.’
‘To Anna Smythe.’
‘Damn Gimmerton’s gossips – they leave me nothing to tell! It’s quite true. Father said there was no reason for us to wait, with the practice well established and this house sitting nearly empty, and he is keen for us to supply him with grandchildren while he is still spry enough to chase them about.’
‘Gossip says it was your fathers made the whole match, with an eye to their mutual business advantage.’
‘That’s nonsense. Father gave me a free and full choice – between Anna and Old Elspeth.’
I laughed. ‘Well, at least with Elspeth, you would know exactly what you were getting.’ Bodkin affected to shudder.
‘But seriously, Nelly,’ he said more soberly, ‘I don’t like to hear you lending an ear to such talk, let alone passing it along. Anna Smythe and I have known each other since we were children, and we have always been fond of each other. As far as Gimmerton gossip is concerned, there was never a marriage made in this town that was not compounded of varying parts of greed, folly, and deceit, though none of them could point to a greedy, foolish, or deceitful thing my father has ever done before.’