Nelly Dean

by Alison Case

  ‘Oh yes, they’re drinking tea.’

  I changed my apron for a clean one, and tidied myself up. Then I paused at the door. ‘What is she like?’ I asked.

  ‘Very pretty and good-natured, and he is mad in love with her, it’s clear. Such a happy couple they are!’

  ‘Well, here goes then!’ I said with a determined smile, and then, heart pounding, I took a deep breath and opened the door.

  Hindley and a slight-looking, pretty young woman were sitting side by side on the sofa, tea things in front of them on a small table. He looked older: he had grown a beard, and had more of the gaunt look of his father about him than he had had. They were neither of them in mourning, I noted – indeed her clothes were garishly bright, adorned with a welter of ribbons and bows, and a wide collar of coarse home-made lace. His clothes looked new, but not well made – a wedding suit, I guessed, made quickly, and on the cheap. Cathy and Heathcliff were nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Well, if it isn’t Nelly Dean,’ he said when he saw me, with a booming heartiness that sounded so false to me I wondered she wasn’t made suspicious by it. ‘Frances, my love, here is Nelly, whom I told you about – the housekeeper, who comes a fixture with the house. And Nelly, let me introduce you to Mrs Earnshaw.’ I coloured at ‘fixture’, but bit my tongue and managed a small curtsey in her direction. ‘We were surprised to find you gone when we arrived,’ Hindley went on in the same forced tone. ‘I thought perhaps you’d decided to flit altogether!’ He laughed as if this were a good joke.

  ‘Now why ever would I do that?’ I said evenly. ‘It would scarcely be sensible.’ His discomfiture was obvious, and my own anger was making me cool by comparison.

  ‘But you’re so young!’ Mrs Earnshaw burst out. She turned to Hindley. ‘The way you talked of her, dear, I thought she would be forty at least, but she is scarcely older than you!’

  ‘Mr Hindley – forgive me, Mr Earnshaw, now – has been away so long, perhaps he confused me with my mother, who was housekeeper here before me.’ It was a ridiculous suggestion, of course, and Hindley had the decency to blush at it, but his wife only looked puzzled.

  ‘It has only been three years,’ she said, looking at Hindley in confusion.

  ‘Ah well,’ I said, ‘girls grow up fast in service, you know.’ This was no more an explanation than my last, and Frances looked so befuddled that I decided she must be simple-minded. ‘And now, if you don’t mind, ma’am, I should be returning to my duties in the kitchen. What time will you be wanting supper?’

  ‘Why, I … I don’t know. When do you usually have it?’

  ‘We always used to eat at four o’clock,’ I said. ‘But it is past that now.’

  ‘Well, what would be … convenient, then?’ She was so unsure of herself, I saw that she had never run a household before. She was looking for help from me, but I was damned if I would provide it. My good resolutions had all flown away.

  ‘It is your convenience that matters, not mine,’ I said.

  ‘Would … eight o’clock be all right?’ she asked tentatively.

  ‘Eight it is,’ I said.

  ‘We’ll have no more of servants and family all eating together,’ Hindley interjected. ‘I don’t know what my father was thinking. This is a gentleman’s family. The servants should eat in the kitchen by themselves after waiting on the family at table.’

  ‘Very well, sir,’ I replied, with just the faintest emphasis on the ‘sir’. I turned and swept out of the room.

  I am sure it was not charity that made Hindley speak to me, and of me, so insultingly, but he could hardly have devised a better method to enable me to keep a cool head through this first awkward meeting. I felt as if I had quaffed a long, refreshing draught of pure scorn for both of them: he was a narrow-minded arrogant oaf who had thrown me over for a shallow, pretty simpleton, like a child trading dull gold for a shiny piece of polished tin. A fine pair they would make at the funeral as representatives of an ancient family: she in her loud, cheap finery, and he in his ill-made suit! All the sobriety and respect at the event would have to be provided by the servants, clearly, and I told myself that I owed it to my late master to ensure that we did.

  Back in the kitchen, I set to work to have dinner ready to serve by eight, which was less than an hour away. The kitchen maid, Maggie by name, had done much of the simpler preparation already, but she was only thirteen, and still new to her position, so there was plenty left to do. Maggie worked beside me, bouncing with childish excitement to talk of the new couple.

  ‘So what do you think of them?’ she asked. ‘Isn’t Mrs Earnshaw lovely? And her dress, so fine, too. And he seems a handsome man, and kind.’

  ‘She is very pretty, certainly,’ I said carefully. ‘But I knew Hindley Earnshaw long before he went away to school – I grew up here, you know – so I can hardly have a first impression of him now.’

  ‘Will he be a good master, do you think? My da always said that old Mr Earnshaw was a good master, for all he complained of him come rent time.’

  ‘I am sure he will do his best,’ I said. ‘But he is a young man to be taking on such large responsibilities all of a sudden, and we must not expect the wisdom of age from him, just yet.’

  ‘And her? She is so elegant, I’m sure she must be very clever.’

  ‘Only time will tell,’ I said, and turned my back to cut her off. I left it to her to wait on them at supper, too; I had no wish to experience any more of Hindley’s insulting remarks, nor his wife’s ignorant cheerfulness.

  Grief inclines us towards sleep, I have found, even when we feel it so keenly that we imagine we will never sleep again. But anger is another matter. It quickens the heart and mind, courses through our veins like fire, and makes us too restless to lie still. Or at least, so I have always found it. I had thought I was ready enough for sleep when that eventful day came to an end, and I closed my door and blew out my candle with a sense of relief. But there was no rest for me. My mind was spinning round with Hindley’s manner and Hindley’s wife. I told myself that he had no right to treat me so, and I would not bear it, and so on in the same vein, but the more I travelled over this ground, the more sleep receded from me. At last I grew weary of my own anger, so I got up and crept downstairs to relight my candle at the banked embers of the fire. I brought it back to my room, and opened my copy of Paradise Lost, the only book I owned.

  I read over again, as I had many times before, my favourite part: the stirring tale of Satan’s defiance, his rebellion against the Most High, and his establishment with his fellow rebels of the territory of Hell. I had sometimes thought before that Milton perhaps erred in making Satan such a thrilling figure, that his speeches were too powerful, too compelling, for a book written to glorify the Lord. But this time I understood at last that Milton had meant for us to be drawn to Satan, so that we might recognize in ourselves the seeds of rebellion against God, and see clearly whither they would lead us. I myself, I realized, had been all too ready to overthrow all right order, and make a Hell of the place I had thought would be my Heaven. Hindley was married, and not to me. What cause for outrage was there in that? Had he not been sent away by his father to prevent precisely that? I could not even know what his father had told him on the occasion: probably he had impressed upon him deeply that the marriage was degrading and wrong; perhaps he had even made him promise never to marry me. Could I blame Hindley for endeavouring to please his father in that, if in nothing else? And if, alone and far from home, cut off from friends and family alike, he had fallen in love with a pretty girl who was kind to him, what mystery was there in that, and what wrong?

  Now my thoughts turned to our reunion, and for the first time I tried to think of it from Hindley’s perspective. How awkward for him it must have been, to bring a wife home and introduce her to a servant with whom he had such a history as he had with me! Small wonder he had spoken of me as if I were a much older woman. And as for calling me a ‘fixture’, might that not be his way of telling me I was free to
stay if I wished? Many a man in his situation would have dismissed me forthwith, and many a new mistress might do the same, on mere suspicion, but he had called me a ‘fixture’, as though to say, ‘Nelly is here to stay; you must accustom yourself to that.’ If his manner towards me was a little rough, a little slighting, as it surely was, what was that but his awkwardness, and his uncertainty as to what he could expect from me? And what help had I given him, after all, in that difficult circumstance?

  By the time I had closed Paradise Lost, and put it back on my little shelf, it lacked but an hour or two of dawn, and I had brought myself to what I hoped was a better frame of mind than that with which I had retired to bed. I had recovered the good intentions with which I had returned from my walk the previous day, but with more sincerity and true humility, and a firmer grasp on my duty, than I had had then. Or so I believed. The truth is that I trod this same path, or one very like it, many times over the months and years that followed.

  FIFTEEN

  Well, the young couple made a better showing for the funeral than I expected. The mistress had her little fit of hysterics about the preparation, as I told you before, but at the event itself they were both in mourning clothes, at least, and treating the occasion with the solemnity it required. Hindley’s suit looked worn and a little tight, which puzzled me. I later learned that he had been forwarded funds, via the cousins in York, to buy a full suit of mourning, but had used them instead to buy a wedding suit, and have his old one dyed black. Her dress looked older too, and grey rather than black, though sober enough in style. I thought that perhaps she had bought it second-hand, but she told me, as we walked beside the coffin to the churchyard, that it had been bought at her mother’s death, two years earlier.

  ‘I was sorry not to be wearing it when we arrived yesterday,’ she confided, ‘but it is my only one, and I was so afraid it would get soiled or torn on the journey, and not be able to be made ready for the funeral today. Hindley says he does not like to see me in mourning, anyway,’ she added. ‘He says he does not see why I should wear black for a man I never met, and whose loss I can scarcely mourn. And I do have a horror of black, as you saw yesterday. But I told him I must wear grey at least, so that I would not be made a byword in the neighbourhood at the start, by not showing proper respect.’

  ‘That was very right of you,’ I said, as she obviously expected.

  At the service itself, Mrs Earnshaw showed so much respect that she even contrived to weep – in sorrow, she said, that she had never had an opportunity to meet such an estimable father. Hindley seemed less than grief-stricken on the occasion, but that was hardly surprising, considering how his father had generally treated him, and I could not hold it against him. I myself wept copiously, to the great annoyance of Joseph, who continued to insist loudly that no grief was needed for a man who had gone to his reward, and was now a saint in Heaven.

  Both Dr Kenneths, father and son, were present at the service, Bodkin with his new wife at his side. The elder came up to Hindley afterwards, to offer his condolences, but Hindley himself sought out Bodkin, clapped him on the back, and introduced him to Mrs Earnshaw – grinning broadly the whole time, in defiance of the sadness of the occasion. I was not near enough to hear what was said, but I guessed by their gestures that Bodkin was giving the news of his own marriage, and receiving his friend’s congratulations thereupon, while the two wives made each other’s acquaintance.

  Afterwards, as the crowd dispersed, I remained in the churchyard, to look at Mrs Earnshaw’s gravestone, to which her husband’s name and dates were soon to be added, and the sad little row of stones that marked their dead children. Then I wandered over to visit the far corner where my father was buried, under a stone much larger and more ornate than his circumstances might seem to warrant, which had been paid for by the Thornes. Bodkin soon joined me there.

  ‘It is a sad day for you,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘for all of us. But it had been coming on a long time. And Mr Earnshaw is with his wife now, whom he loved so – I suppose we ought not to grieve for that.’

  ‘And the new master has a wife now too. That must have been a great surprise.’

  I looked at him quickly, wondering if he meant anything more than usual by the remark, but his face showed nothing. ‘It was unexpected, certainly,’ I said carefully. ‘But Mr Earnshaw can do as he likes now, I suppose, and his wife seems a good creature. He is certainly very fond of her.’ Then I thought to turn the conversation. ‘I did not think you owned a mourning suit,’ I said. ‘I hope you have not had a death in the family?’

  ‘Oh no, it is only for funerals. It was the first thing my father gave me, when I came back ready to take up my own practice. He said he always attends his patients’ funerals, unless he is called away on some emergency, and that I should do the same. “It shows that you care about them as more than a piece of medical business,” he said, “and that you are confident you did your best for them.”’

  ‘That sounds very wise.’

  ‘It is indeed, though I’m not always sure I share his confidence in my own performance. But when I don’t, there is no better place than the funeral to reflect on my mistakes, and resolve to do better in future.’

  ‘And how is marriage agreeing with you? I saw you introducing your wife to Mrs Earnshaw.’

  ‘Oh, marriage is a highly agreeable institution, I find, particularly if one has the sense to choose a pretty and sensible girl.’

  ‘And if one can convince the pretty and sensible girl to accept, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes, I have been fortunate in that.’

  ‘And how are your father and Tabby taking to the change?’

  ‘Father is delighted. He likes Anna very well, and loves having a little more life in the house, as he says. Tabby was rather more put out than I expected, just at first, but Anna is so kind to her, and defers to her so about everything in the household that now she is as fond of her as the rest of us.’

  ‘Well, I suppose I must take a lesson from that, not to be too put out by my new mistress,’ I said. ‘She seems well-intentioned enough, but I don’t know that she’s had much experience in running a household.’

  ‘Very little, I would guess,’ said Bodkin. ‘But she cannot do better than to consult with you about it. If you like I will say something to Anna to that effect, and I am sure she will pass it on. Mrs Earnshaw seems eager to pursue the acquaintance.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you,’ I said, ‘but I’m sure it won’t be necessary. Did you find out anything about her family, by the way? She said nothing except that she lost her mother two years ago, and we are all rather curious, the more so since Hindley kept the marriage from his father.’

  ‘She said nothing to me, nor did Hindley – it was only a brief conversation. But I should tell you, anything I discover later will likely come under the doctor’s seal, as she will be my patient.’

  ‘What, is she with child already?’ I asked – not without a certain unchristian thrill, I must confess.

  ‘Oh no, but surely you can see it?’

  ‘See what? She seems well enough, a little slight, but with good colour in her cheeks.’

  ‘Ah yes, I forget not everyone sees with a doctor’s eyes. Let’s just say that I’m not as convinced of her good health as you are, but I hope I am wrong.’

  I tried to prise more out of him, but he met me with a firm, polite resistance that I soon realized would not budge. Whatever rights to confidence our long friendship had given me, I saw, his medical principles were stronger. I was glad to see it, actually, though it disappointed me in this instance. Who knew what future confidences I might need him to keep?

  At this point we spied his wife heading in our direction, and Bodkin moved off to join her.

  ‘Come meet my wife,’ he said to me.

  I laughed. ‘I know her already,’ I said. ‘You forget that for many years I was chief errand-girl to the apothecary shop.’ All the same I went with him.

 
‘Ah, you knew Miss Anna Smythe, but you have never met Mrs Robert Kenneth. She is a different personage entirely.’ We had joined Mrs Kenneth by then, and Bodkin performed the introduction with the greatest formality.

  ‘Good day, Mrs Kenneth, I am very pleased to make your acquaintance,’ I said with a curtsey.

  Mrs Kenneth looked puzzled. ‘But we have met already, surely – aren’t you Nelly Dean?’ She looked at her husband. ‘Is this one of your jokes? Am I to pretend that I don’t know her?’ She seemed very eager to please, but uncertain of what was wanted. Bodkin and I both hastened to reassure her that nothing was expected of her.

  ‘My wife is unaccustomed to life with a comedian,’ Bodkin explained. ‘I am forever discomfiting her with my poor attempts at wit.’

  ‘I am very glad that you can find so much to laugh about,’ she said. ‘There is so much that is serious in a doctor’s work, and so many occasions for sadness’ – here Bodkin gestured towards his clothes, in confirmation of her words – ‘I am sure that relief is very welcome. It is only that I often have a hard time telling when you are serious, and when you are not.’

  ‘I shall get a little flag to keep in my pocket,’ Bodkin said. ‘I can pull it out and wave it when I am not serious, so you will always know. Let me see, what colour shall it be? Not red certainly, that would send the wrong message, nor white either.’

  ‘Motley, of course,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, motley! I shall keep a motley flag in my pocket – or better yet, perhaps a fool’s motley cap, with bells, that I can clap on my head. How would that be, my dear?’

  Mrs Kenneth smiled. ‘I know you are joking now, about the cap at any rate. It would never fit in your pocket, and it would look very silly anyway, to be always taking it on and off. I wish I could have the flag – it would be a great help to me. But I ought to learn for myself, really, since it pleases you so, and I should like to do whatever pleases you.’