Emily's Secret

by Jill Jones

  “How will she take it?” I exclaimed “What will she do? The surprise bewilders me—it will put her out of her head! And are you Heathcliff? But altered! Nay, there’s no comprehending it. Have you been for a soldier?”

  “Go and carry my message,” he interrupted impatiently. “I’m in hell till you do!”

  March 31, 1846

  Not knowing what else to do with him, I sent Heathcliff away. It was a device, nothing more, to make sure his fate, as regards Miss Catherine Earnshaw, was sealed. For with Heathcliff’s disappearance, Catherine had no more excuse to refuse to wed the limp-wristed Linton. But now Heathcliff is back, full-grown, but tormented as ever by Catherine. Will he win her back? Nay, she is now a lady, Mrs. Edgar Linton. It is too late, Heathcliff! Too late.

  It is too late for me as well, too late to regain my senses as regards Mikel. When I wrote of Heathcliff’s return, I felt a fire ignite in those mysterious parts of my body that cry out to me in my dreams. Oh, how I longed for Mikel to come back, as Heathcliff did, to claim my love. How tortured I feel and so I have tortured Heathcliff in return.

  I could not bear to keep Heathcliff too long away from my story, for even his snarling countenance brings me some measure of comfort. I will not send him away again, but will make him endure my own pain until, perhaps in time, we will both be free.

  I wonder what I would do if Mikel did in truth return?

  In her eagerness she rose and supported herself on the arm of the chair. At that earnest appeal he turned to her, looking absolutely desperate. His eyes wide, and wet at last, flashed fiercely on her; his breast heaved convulsively. An instant they held asunder, and then how they met I hardly saw, but Catherine made a spring, and he caught her, and they were locked in an embrace from which I thought my mistress would never be released alive—

  “Let me alone. Let me alone,” sobbed Catherine. “If I’ve done wrong, I’m dying for it. It is enough! You left me too—but I won’t upbraid you! I forgive you! Forgive me!”

  “It is hard to forgive, and to look at those eyes, and feel those wasted hands,” he answered. “Kiss me again; and don’t let me see your eyes! I forgive what you have done to me. I love my murderer—but yours! How can I?…”

  About twelve o’clock, that night, was born the Catherine you saw at Wuthering Heights; a puny, seven months’ child; and two hours after the mother died, having never recovered sufficient consciousness to miss Heathcliff, or know Edgar.

  April 2, 1846

  I have devised the greatest torture yet for my hero villain. I have taken his love away with absolute finality. I have killed her, and buried her at the edge of the churchyard. And she has died bearing another’s child. It is the ultimate betrayal. No longer can he see her, even if from a distance and as another’s wife. No longer can he hold out hope for their reunion. She can be no more to him now than a ghost, haunting his every moment as the ghost of Mikel haunts me still. What will we do now, Heathcliff? What must we do with our ghosts? Is there naught but suffering ahead? Haven’t we suffered enough? Where I will take my story from here my muse may know, but I do not.

  April 29, 1846

  The dreams have ceased. Even as I write each page, I can feel that energy losing its power. Heathcliff’s fury-fueled and deliberate plans for revenge against those whom he blames for the loss of his love have evolved into a determination to be together with her again. Believing as I do in all things being Eternal, I am beginning to form an idea for the resolution to his torment, and my own.

  May 16, 1846

  As my story wends to a close, I feel a sense of peace returning to my heart and I can no longer sustain the bitterness I have felt against Mikel. Perhaps I am just tired of the strife, or maybe the writing has completed its work and has, as I wished, removed the tribulation from my soul. Perhaps that is Heathcliff’s redemption, that he has freed my spirit from the torment I suffered. I must thank him for this gift. I must reunite him with his love even if, as it must be by the evolution of this story, in death. I can tame his wickedness, fulfill his obsession. I can, and will. But how shall I do the deed? Not by murder, surely, although there are many in the farmhouse who would happily help in the effort. Not by accident. That would be too contrived an ending. I rather think I will do it more subtly. He will end his own life by simply losing the will to live. He will quit struggling against a life he despises. He will enter into a strange peace of mind, where time and nourishment matter not. He will see the blessed shore on the other side and Catherine will be waiting there for him. I have contemplated such an end to my own misery this last year, but now there is no need. I can once again let Heathcliff do the work for me. When he is in peace and reunited with Cathy, I too will find my peace.

  May 26, 1846

  Two entries of significance tonight. First, our poems, to Charlotte’s delight, have finally reached publication. It is strange to see our words and thoughts bound in volumes for all to read. Not that we need worry on that account. For who would buy such poems as these? No reader in England has any knowledge of the poets, Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. We shall try, nonetheless.

  What is more important to me is that I have written the last line of “Wuthering Heights.” The story is told. All that remains is to review it and clean up the manuscript, for Charlotte, as she did with the poems, has convinced me our three novels should be submitted for publication. It feels strange to let Heathcliff die and to let all the others go now into a world I will no longer attend to. Young Cathy and Hareton have found the happiness which escaped the rest, Nelly Dean will find some peace at last, and Mr. Lockwood, lingering round the three graves in the old churchyard, will never know that the bodies of the lovers lie in ghoulish consummation beneath his feet. The ghosts of Catherine and Heathcliff, no doubt will walk the moors forever.

  As for my own ghosts, I believe they too are now at rest.

  Chapter 13

  From high atop the rock formation known locally as Ponden Kirk, Alex could just make out the old farmhouse in the valley below where Selena lived. The precipice on which he stood was called Penistone Crag in Wuthering Heights, the place where Emily Brontë had allowed Heathcliff and Catherine to escape from their tormented lives and into each other’s arms.

  Staring across the expanse of gorse and heather that stretched between him and the farmhouse below, Alex hungered to see Selena’s slender figure running up the hillside toward him, as Catherine had run to Heathcliff.

  But the hard reality was, he hadn’t seen her or heard from her in the week that had passed since the evening at Harrington.

  He knew he should be relieved, because he was moving into dangerous territory in pursuing her. When he was near her, he seemed to lose focus of the fact that he didn’t want or need the aggravation involved in a committed relationship, and he was unwilling to risk the pain when things fell apart. It had taken some time, but he had his life sorted out. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t bad either. He had only himself to answer to, and if he wanted to drown himself in his work, there was no one else he had to consider.

  But in spite of all that, he was driven by an irrational urge to see Selena again. Since the party, he had been distracted, edgy, unable to concentrate. He was consumed with thoughts of the beautiful woman in the blue silk dress that revealed her soft breasts and clung to her thighs as she walked. The scent of her perfume lingered in his memory, and lying alone in his bed, he ached to hold her again in his arms, to taste the sweetness of her lips.

  He frowned, wondering what she was doing down there in that house right now, while he stood on this jagged crest, unable to get her off his mind. Why hadn’t she called? Was she too busy working?

  Or did she simply not want to call?

  Unhappily, he settled back against a soft clump of grass where he could still spy on her dwelling. Perhaps if she stepped outside he would catch a glimpse of her. Small satisfaction for his hungry heart, but safer than going there and knocking on her front door again.

  With an e
ffort, he forced himself to concentrate on the reason he was here, high on Haworth Moor, the reason he’d come to England in the first place—the debate.

  The clock was ticking.

  Alex had climbed to this particular place on the moors today to seek an answer to the riddle of Emily’s death amidst those things she loved most in her life.

  Heather and sandstone.

  Wind and sky.

  It was here, perhaps on this very spot, that Emily had found her greatest happiness in life. It was to these moors that she fled to find the only freedom she knew in the “outside” world.

  Otherwise, her freedom came solely from the world “within,” that intensely private, personal domain that was the source of her powerful poetry and passionate single novel. From his studies, Alex knew that Emily’s inner world was her very life, but he wondered how much that inner world depended for its survival upon this outer world, the moorlands she loved so fiercely.

  If she had indeed taken her own life, was it because of something that happened in this outer world, which threatened to destroy the inner?

  Alex tried to stretch his imagination to encompass a problem she might have encountered here on the moors intense enough to drive her to suicide, but his mind couldn’t reach that far.

  Around him the hillsides were verdant, as it was too early for the heather to paint them purple. The summer sunlight was strong and warm. The wind was light, and there was not a hint of a cloud overhead. All was peaceful, as it must have been in early June of 1845, when she wrote one of her most famous poems:

  How beautiful the Earth is still

  To thee—how full of Happiness;…

  Alex took out a battered copy of her poems and read the entire text, even though he knew it by heart. It was a masterful piece, admired by her sister, Charlotte, who had notated Emily’s manuscript with “Never was better stuff penned.” It was a pleasant enough poem in which the speaker, somewhat smugly, advances her own philosophy that it is preferable to anticipate “what is to be” rather than destroy one’s illusions by pursuing their fulfillment and ultimately being disappointed.

  Sound familiar, Hightower?

  Emily knew better than he how to cope with love, he thought bitterly, remaining aloof as she did, above those “Poor slaves, subdued by passions strong, A weak and helpless prey!”

  Was she referring here to her own siblings’ pathetic longing for their respective unrequited loves…Charlotte for her former teacher, Monsieur Heger, and Branwell for Lydia Robinson? Or was this philosophy her own emotional wall that enabled her to remain happily isolated from most of the rest of the human race, as history depicted?

  Or could it be that Emily had been emotionally hurt at some point, and that this poem reflected her strategy for avoiding any relationship that might result in more pain?

  He could relate.

  Avoiding involvement had a certain security. But the cost was high in terms of loneliness, he’d discovered. It was easy to vacillate in one’s determination to remain uninvolved, when the lonely nights threatened to eat you alive and normal hormones screamed for satisfaction. He’d tried to escape that lonely hell with the string of one-nighters, and later with Maggie.

  But in the end, the result was still more pain.

  Followed by more lonely nights.

  Alex glanced down the mountainside at Selena’s house. Was that what his attraction to Selena was all about? A need to assuage his loneliness and satisfy his sexual drive? It was a simple answer. Rational. But a closer examination of his feelings told him Selena’s special allure was more than just her beauty and sex appeal. It included fascination, respect, and something more…

  Love?

  The thought terrified him. Besides, he didn’t know how that could be possible. They were virtually strangers.

  And yet…

  No! Whether he loved her or just felt a fleeting infatuation, he must let it drop now. Stop it before it ever got started. Like Emily’s poetic speaker, he preferred the safety of anticipating what might have been and not putting his heart on the line again.

  Love, Alex knew, was something he wasn’t very good at.

  He looked back at the book in his hand and the puzzle of Emily Enigmatic Brontë. Had she ever known love, or were her lines written as so many scholars believed, in an emotional vacuum? There was no biographical evidence that she’d ever had, or even wanted, a love in her life, although it remained a popular topic of conjecture. Most scholars accepted the traditional image of Emily as being a strong-willed, philosophic, sometimes mystical poet, reclusive, celibate, and idealistic.

  And based on these and many other lines and images in her work, it was a believable portrait.

  Alex supposed Emily could have looked around at the plights of Charlotte and Branwell and congratulated herself on her wise decision to always anticipate rather than consummate. Or, he supposed, she could have just made it all up from her obviously fanciful imagination.

  But in January 1846 this same detached, lofty philosopher embarked on her first and only novel, Wuthering Heights, and produced a work so dark and disturbing that Alex couldn’t begin to conceive that its source lay solely in the author’s imagination. That an isolated spinster holed up in her father’s Parsonage on the edge of the wild Yorkshire moors could have conjured up purely from her imagination a work so filled with passion, vengeance, anger, cruelty, and manipulation was beyond Alex’s comprehension. Her dark hero, Heathcliff, despotic and driven by pain and passion, was so strongly drawn that he remained one of the romantic giants of English literature a hundred fifty years later.

  Such heroes are not created in a vacuum.

  And yet the author of Wuthering Heights was the same person who had written “Anticipation” and other equally sublime lyrics. What happened to her between June 2, 1845, and January 1846 to alter her writing so drastically?

  He scribbled the question on his notepad.

  Then he added a second question, one that was not unfamiliar to most Brontë scholars: From what part of Emily’s imagination did Heathcliff spring?

  And to that, a third: Was Heathcliff an imaginary figure, or was there a model for his character, as there seemed to be for so many other people and places in the book?

  And from that followed another and another: If Heathcliff was based on a real person, was it someone Emily loved and lost? Could it have been a lover’s betrayal that drove her to despair?

  Alex knew he was reaching, but his research down traditional pathways had led to nothing he could use in the debate. His suicide theory was certainly not traditional, and to prove it, he now felt compelled to turn tradition on its ear.

  What if…

  What if Emily had a lover? A secret lover she’d managed to hide even from her sisters? What if that lover was the model for Heathcliff? Alex ran his fingers through his hair. Where in the world would she have met such a character in real life?

  Certainly it seemed doubtful that Emily ever encountered such a personality, cloistered as she remained most of her life behind the walls of the Parsonage. Alex chewed on the end of his pencil, his imagination traveling back in time to visualize a young Victorian woman who shunned the presence of others to the point of rudeness, who chose solitude over the companionship of others, the only exceptions being her siblings. It was inconceivable that she had ever actually met such a ruffian as Heathcliff.

  Or anyone so tormented by love for another. Perhaps Branwell could have provided part of that drama in his grief over losing Lydia Robinson, but short, paunchy, carrot-topped Branwell was no Heathcliff.

  No, Alex felt sure Emily had never met anyone like Heathcliff. She was a preacher’s daughter, and even though she didn’t buy into the dogma her father spouted from the pulpit, neither did she associate with the vulgar elements of society, with the possible exception of the times she and her sisters were called upon, as the curate’s daughters, to nurse the sick in the village.

  What caused her to create this monster, Heathcliff
, who, for vengeance against Catherine’s betrayal of his love, seduced her innocent sister-in-law and then violently, physically and emotionally abused her? Heathcliff, a villainous hero who came to Wuthering Heights as a befriended Gypsy orphan at the beginning of the book, and who, before it was two-thirds finished, managed to steal his benefactor’s property:

  The guest was now the master of Wuthering Heights: he held firm possession, and proved to the attorney—who, in his turn, proved it to Mr. Linton—that Earnshaw had mortgaged every yard of land he owned, for cash to supply his mania for gaming; and he, Heathcliff, was the mortgagee.

  Was Heathcliff a figment of an angry imagination, created to compensate for Emily’s own lonely, loveless existence? And what about the other side of Heathcliff—the man who loved Catherine so completely and passionately that he will commit any crime, endure any pain, even welcome death, to rejoin her in the hereafter? Where did Emily learn of such passion?

  And what dark emotions drove Emily Brontë to fill her novel with snarling dogs, derelicts, child abusers, and other such fellow travelers? In 1847, when Wuthering Heights was first published, a literary review found it abhorrent:

  …people like Cathy and Heathcliff are too odiously and abominably pagan to suit the tastes of even the most shameless class of English readers.

  Even by today’s standards, the book would have to be considered one of the world’s all-time frightful tales, the “grandmother of all shockers,” as Eleanor Bates had so aptly described it.

  Where in hell did it all come from?

  Alex’s line of interrogation produced one possible hypothesis for Emily’s suicide: that this type of strongly negative review caused her such despair that she gave up on writing, her mainstay in life, and simply lost the will to live.