by Alison Case
‘I don’t want that,’ I said miserably.
‘You think not, now, Nelly, but give yourself time. I won’t tell you to leave, but think about it. Remember that you can give your notice at any time, and come to Brassing to find a new place.’
‘I will,’ I promised, with as much conviction as I could muster. Then I turned back to my work, relieved to have the conversation over with.
*
Mrs Earnshaw’s taste for visiting in Gimmerton abated a good deal after Cathy’s five weeks’ residence at Thrushcross Grange, that I told you of before, brought the family into regular communication with the Lintons. They were the first family of the neighbourhood – a good deal wealthier than the Earnshaws, though the family name was not so ancient – and Mrs Earnshaw had longed to be on visiting terms with them. But she had received no encouragement in that direction until Cathy fell into their hands and Mrs Linton decided to make a project out of ‘civilizing’ her. This could not be accomplished without the connivance of her female guardian, of course, and so Mrs Linton was obliged to draw Mrs Earnshaw into her circle of acquaintances.
That she did so with some reluctance I found out a few weeks after Cathy’s return home. Heathcliff had just been beaten and sent off supperless to sleep in the cold stable for some fancied ‘insolence of manner’ towards Mrs Earnshaw. Cathy was ordered to remain in the house, but she refused to stay in the room with the master and mistress, and soon crept into the kitchen to complain to me. She got my sympathy readily enough – I felt Heathcliff’s wrongs hardly less keenly than she did – but when she tried to parlay that into permission to sneak out to the stable and visit him, I had to say no.
‘My instructions were very clear, miss, that I was to bid you stay with me if you would not sit with them, and that if you attempted to go out, I should bar the door, and call out to them straight away. I let you go once before, you recall, and got in a peck of trouble for it when Hindley found out. If I do it again, I might lose my place.’
‘But why should he find out? I would be gone only a few minutes. He’ll never notice.’
‘You said that last time, too, but you were gone an hour, and we both got caught. I’m sorry, but I just can’t risk it again.’
Cathy crossed her arms and scowled. ‘I hate them both,’ she announced. ‘An “insolent manner” indeed! What is that? And who is she, anyway, that Heathcliff should bow and scrape to her?’
‘The mistress of the house,’ I said reprovingly, ‘and the person most concerned with helping you grow up to be a lady, so you both owe her some deference.’
‘She is no lady, really, or so the Lintons said. I overheard them talking once, when they didn’t know I was near, and Mrs Linton called her “a vulgar little thing, with no family and no manners”, and said she hated to encourage her, but she had no choice if she wished to help me. I’ve a good mind to throw that in Hindley’s face, next time he goes after Heathcliff for not showing her enough respect.’
‘You’ll do nothing of the kind, if you have any sense at all,’ I said vehemently. ‘It’s a cruel thing to say, and would wound her deeply. And she has been such a good friend to you too, these past few weeks – just think of that new bonnet and gloves she bought you, only last week.’
‘I don’t care what she buys me,’ said Cathy, ‘she’s no friend of mine if she’s not a friend to Heathcliff, too, and she isn’t – she only encourages Hindley to hate him more. And he is so high and mighty now, it would do him good to be taken down a peg.’
‘It would do no good at all,’ I said angrily, ‘and if you won’t hold back for her sake, then do it for Heathcliff’s. If you humiliate Hindley and make him angry on his wife’s behalf, he’ll only take it out on Heathcliff, as he always does, and you’ll have no one but yourself to blame.’ This argument seemed to strike her better than my other, and she promised to keep her information to herself. I had little hope that she would keep to her resolve, though. She was so little accustomed to controlling her impulses that this nasty bit of gossip was like a charge of gunpowder, that needed only a spark to set it off – and they flew all too frequently in our volatile household.
Sure enough, not a week had gone by before Hindley again seized some trifling excuse to punish Heathcliff, and then, when Cathy rose up to defend her favourite, declared him ‘not fit to be under the same roof as ladies, even as a servant’. I saw in her face what she was about to do, and sent her a stern look and a tiny shake of my head as warning, but it was no use. The bomb was exploded, and Mrs Linton’s cruel words were repeated in detail.
When she was finished, Mrs Earnshaw’s eyes widened, and then she flushed deeply and looked down at her sewing. She tried to act as though she had not heard, but I could see that she was fighting off tears. Hindley stopped dead, and the colour drained from his face. Then he slowly raised his hand and slapped Cathy sharply across the cheek.
‘You are a poisonous little bitch,’ he said coldly, and slammed out of the house.
Cathy stood still a moment in shock – Hindley had never struck her before – and then burst into tears and ran to kneel in front of her sister-in-law, who by now was sobbing likewise.
‘I didn’t mean it!’ she cried miserably. ‘I never meant to say it, and it’s not even true! Oh, I wish I could take it all back!’
‘Well, you can’t,’ I said angrily, and I turned on my heel and left them to give each other what comfort they could.
Hindley did not return that night, but Cathy crept into the kitchen about an hour later, still red-eyed and pale, to ask for some hot milk. I complied, for I was glad to see her so contrite, but as soon as she was recovered a little, she was back to her old ways.
‘I wish you had stopped me, Nelly,’ she said peevishly. ‘Why didn’t you?’
‘Stop you!’ I cried. ‘Good heavens, miss, have I the government of your tongue? If you can’t heed your own conscience at such times, you certainly won’t heed mine. Why I’ve a good mind to slap you myself, for even suggesting it!’
‘But I can’t help it!’ she wailed. ‘When I get angry like that, I act without thinking.’
‘That is because you have no training in self-control,’ I said sternly. ‘If you would practise self-denial in small things, every day, you would be better able to hold yourself back, when it is a matter of consequence. That is what your mother would have taught you, were she still alive, as my mother taught me.’
‘I don’t want a lecture from you, Nelly.’
‘Well if you won’t listen to sense from me, then don’t expect me to prevent you from acting foolishly, that’s all I can say.’
SIXTEEN
It was not long after this that Hindley began to feel straitened as to money. I had begun keeping the household accounts, as I told you before, though they were still nominally in Mrs Earnshaw’s hands, so it was easy to see that the money was flowing out at a higher rate than it ever had before, but that was only half the difficulty. Hindley appeared to think that the rents due to him from the tenants would roll in like magic whenever they were due, without any effort on his part, but of course they did nothing of the sort. I was surprised at his ignorance, for we had both heard enough from our hideaway in ‘the robbers’ cave’ to get some idea of the effort required to get anything like the full value of the rents from the tenants. But apparently only one of us had learned from what we had heard.
The late Mr Earnshaw had taken the time to know his tenants well: their characters, the size of their families, the yields of their plantings and livestock, and all the yearly ups and downs of their prosperity. When, as often happened, one or more of his tenants came into his office to confess that they could not make up the full sum of their rent, he knew how to tailor his response to each individual circumstance. One man he might berate for improvidence, and ask him, if he had not the money for rent, why had his wife come to church last week in a new bonnet so resplendent it made Mrs Linton blush? If he had not the cash to pay his rent today, he would be told, he mu
st send over the fat pig he had been rearing all summer, to make up the difference, and when his family sat down to their Sunday dinner of plain porridge, they could put the bonnet in the centre of the table, where the roast would have been, as a lesson to them all. But then, when the reluctantly surrendered pig had been slaughtered, the master would like as not send me over with a quarter of it to return to its original owners, to soften the bitterness of the appropriation. Another man, blessed with a large and increasing family that threatened to outgrow his ability to feed it, might be told to send a couple of his older children over to help out at the Heights, where they would get their dinner and some wages to help make up the shortfall, and might learn something of farm or household management at the same time. We usually had two or three such lads or lasses about, of varying degrees of usefulness, in light servitude for their parents’ debts.
The tenants liked to grumble at the adroitness of this approach, and among themselves they called him Squire Hide-th’-ham, joking that if he walked into their cottage of a Sunday and saw a roast on the table, he would be sure to tuck it under his arm and take it away with him, in lieu of back rent. But they knew he was a just man, and always charitable to the truly unfortunate. He was conscientious, too, about encouraging improvements, and a tenant who came to him with a proposition for rebuilding a barn or shed, or adding a room to his house, could be confident of having a large portion of his expenses applied against the rent.
During Mr Earnshaw’s illness, these duties had devolved onto Joseph, who had none of his master’s subtlety in judgement, let alone his charity. His uniform response to any shortfall in payment was to harangue the offending tenant as a liar and a thief, and threaten him with eviction and damnation both, those apparently being equivalent punishments in his eyes, and equally in his power to administer. And he did indeed evict two of the tenants, and would have evicted a third, a good steady man who had suffered extraordinary reverses in just one season, had I not gone behind his back to the master to appeal for clemency. But of the two cottages that were vacated, only one had been let again, and that at a reduced rent, for the evictees had spread the story of their harsh treatment throughout the neighbourhood, and frightened away potential tenants.
This then was the state of affairs when Hindley came into his estate. At first Hindley left the rent collection to Joseph, not wishing to take the trouble himself, but when this failed to yield the expected sums, he decided to look into the matter.
‘I have been looking over the rent-book,’ he announced one evening, as Frances and I both sat by the fire in the house – she had called me in to keep her company – I knitting a stocking, and she working on some embroidery. ‘It is plain that things have been going downhill since Joseph began collecting the rents – why fully a third of the tenants are in arrears, I find, and some by almost a year! And there is one cottage that has been sitting empty for nine months now, that ought to have paid three pounds in that time!’
I explained about the evicted tenants.
‘Well it is no use evicting people, if you have no one to take their place. You will never get back the rent they owe, once they are gone, and then if the place stays vacant, you are worse off than ever! I wonder Joseph didn’t show more sense.’
I opened my mouth to tell him that if no one was ever to be evicted, it might be rather harder to convince the tenants that the rent must be paid, but thought better of it. Why should I defend Joseph to Hindley?
‘You should talk to the tenants on rent-day yourself, dear,’ said Frances. ‘They all respect you so much, I am sure, much more than they do that horrible old man.’
‘I believe I shall. I am master here now, and it is time I took things into my own hands. If a man cannot pay me what he owes me, let him look me in the eye and tell me so: that will put a different complexion on it, you may be sure.’
We got our first taste of the effectiveness of Hindley’s methods the following rent-day. Two or three of the best tenants had always made a point of paying their rent a day early – to avoid the ruckus, they said – and Mr Earnshaw had been in the habit of rewarding them by inviting them into the house to take a cup of tea or a glass of cowslip wine with himself and the mistress. This privilege was highly valued, and such tenants often brought their wives with them to share in it. The custom had been kept up even after the mistress’s death, when it fell nominally to Cathy, but really to me, to pour the refreshments and assist in entertaining the wives, and it had only fallen into abeyance when the master fell ill.
Sure enough, the day before rent-day brought one of our best farmers to the Heights in the early afternoon. His wife was with him, dressed in her Sunday finery, so evidently they were in hopes the old custom would be revived. Hindley hurried to the old office to receive him, but when they emerged a few minutes later, the man was dismissed with little more than a curt nod at him and his wife. I tried to make up for it by being as hospitable as my position allowed, which is to say that I invited them into the kitchen for a cup of tea and a slice of seed cake. They came willingly enough, but it was evident that they were rather put out.
‘Ey’ll tell tha soomthing, Nelly lass,’ the farmer said, when they were settled with their tea, ‘a mon dusn’t loyke et mooch, when hoo comes early to pay hoos rent in good gold an’ siller, an’ not in hanks o’ homespun or baskets o’ eggs as soom folk mun do, an’ when hoo has not shorted a farthin’ of hoos rent these last five year or more, to hev the maister look back through the rent-book groombling, an’ make oot the receipt at last, as though hoo were sorry not to find ony arrears to charge hoo with, an’ be sent awa’ loyke ony other mon, without so mooch as a handshake.’
‘Not to mention which hoos wife has coom with oom to pay her respects to the new missus,’ his wife interjected, ‘and given up a good half-day’s worth o’ work to do it, an’ is sent to the kitchen instead, which I mean tha no disrespect, Nelly, for tha knows I’m always happy to see tha, lass, but it isn’t right, is it?’
I soothed them as best I could, reminded them that Hindley was new to his duties, and predicted that he would not be long in recognizing the value of such excellent tenants as themselves. They went away somewhat appeased, but still grumbling, and I sighed to think of how far their story would spread, before a week was out.
The next day brought the bulk of the tenants, to pay what they could, and explain what they could not. Hindley duly established himself in the office with the rent-book, and as the tenants trickled in over the course of the day he called them in, one by one. I had arranged my work to keep me in and around the dairy a good deal, so that I might overhear a little of what was being said, if not in the office itself, at least among those coming and going from it.
My main impression from those who came out was of a great deal of grumbling, though it generally went silent whenever I passed near enough to hear what was said. But from the scraps I could hear, I gathered that Hindley had shown himself insufficiently appreciative of those who had paid in full, while raging at those who could not. Excuses had all alike been dismissed, and suggestions of payment in kind spurned. I thought I had better do what I could to stem the tide of resentment, so I abandoned my post as eavesdropper and set myself up in the kitchen instead, providing cups of tea and a sympathetic ear to a steady stream of tenants, and where possible, making private arrangements to purchase provisions for the household.
I was in the midst of one such negotiation, when we heard Hindley in the yard, roaring with laughter, and went to the door to see what was up. Hindley had his arm around a little man, Hoggins by name, who was one of our least respectable tenants, prone to drinking his earnings and beating his wife. He had skirted eviction these many years only through the efforts of said wife, who was far better than he deserved. He was the last person I would have expected Hindley to be pleased with on rent-day.
‘That is the best story I’ve heard in years,’ Hindley was booming. ‘You must tell it to my wife – it’s worth a glass of brandy, that one
. And never mind about the arrears. Squire Hide-th’-ham indeed! Come inside and tell my wife.’ And so the grubby little down-at-heel man was ushered into the house, looking sheepish at the unexpected honour. I hastened to attend to them there.
Poor Mrs Earnshaw looked rather flustered for her part in having such a specimen foisted upon her for entertainment, but she did her best, smiling kindly and offering him tea, which Hindley forestalled by pouring him the promised glass of brandy, as well as a generous one for himself.
‘You must hear this story Hoggins tells about my father, my dear – it will make you howl, I promise you. Come, my man, tell the story to my wife.’
Both Hoggins and Mrs Earnshaw looked as if they would have preferred to dispense with this, but the former took a large swig of the brandy to fortify himself, and plunged in.
‘Ee wor joost tellin’ th’ maister as how we used to call hoos faither Squire Hide-th’-ham, meanin’ no disrespect, ma’am, but joost that hoo allus seemed to know what a mon could spare t’ gie hoom, ef hoo couldn’t pay hoos rent.’ Hoggins finished the brandy, and Mrs Earnshaw forced herself to smile and nod.
‘Oh, come now, man, that is not what you told me. Tell it all.’
Encouraged by the brandy, and seeing that Hindley would not be satisfied with less than the whole story, Hoggins carried on. ‘It wur said that one day th’ old maister cum to th’ house of one of hoos tenants, an’ hoo walked right in to where the mon and hoos wife were sitting.
‘“Where’s my rent?” hoo says.
‘“I ha’nt got it,” says the tenant.
‘“Well then, I’ll just tek this soocklin’ pig here, for my dinner,” says th’ maister.
‘“That’s noo soocklin’ pig,” th’ wife cries, “that’s my son!”
‘“Well then,” says th’ maister, wi’out missin’ a beat, “do you joost feed hoom up another ten years or so at yur own cost, an’ I’ll take hoom then.”’