Wuthering Heights Read online

  ALSO BY TANYA LANDMAN

  Two Words

  Passing for White

  One Shot

  Jane Eyre: A Retelling

  First published in 2020 in Great Britain by

  Barrington Stoke Ltd

  18 Walker Street, Edinburgh, EH3 7LP

  This ebook edition first published in 2020

  www.barringtonstoke.co.uk

  Text © 2020 Tanya Landman

  The moral right of Tanya Landman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in any part in any form without the written permission of the publisher

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library upon request

  ISBN: 978-1-78112-988-3

  For Isaac and Jack, a Joseph-free version

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  A stranger is lying in my bed. He has helped himself to my books. His pudgy fingers are tracing the words I wrote as a child. Words meant for no one but myself. Words no one else should read.

  And now the stranger is speaking aloud the names I scratched into the paint on the window ledge.

  Catherine Earnshaw – the girl I was born.

  Catherine Linton – the wife I became.

  Catherine Heathcliff – who I should have been.

  Catherine Heathcliff – who I was in my heart.

  Catherine Heathcliff – who I was in my soul.

  The stranger pronounces each name in turn, uttering them over and over until the air swarms with Catherines. It’s a calling. A summons. He’s given me form, brought me into being – a child lost and wandering on the moor for twenty years but now come home.

  He sees me, but he will not let me in. He is cruel, this stranger. I grasp his wrist with my small cold hand and beg most pitifully, but he shows no mercy. The stranger tries to prise my fingers from his arm. When he cannot, he grinds my wrist on the window’s broken glass. My blood runs down onto the window ledge, pooling, blotting out my names.

  And now Heathcliff is here. Calling me, begging me, “Cathy, do come. Oh, do – once more! Oh, my heart’s darling, hear me this time!”

  “I am here,” I tell him. Because I always have been.

  But Heathcliff does not hear me. He does not see. He cannot.

  Not yet.

  I was always too much of one thing and too little of the other. Too loud. Too rowdy. Too wilful. Not meek or mild or gentle enough. Not ladylike. Mother and Father and the maid scolded me constantly, “Why can’t you be a good girl, Cathy? Why can’t you behave?” The more they asked, the worse I got.

  When I was six years old, Father said he was going to Liverpool. Sixty miles there, sixty miles back, and he was walking the whole way. If Father told us the reason for his journey, I can’t recall it. He’d be gone three days, he said, and when he returned to Wuthering Heights he’d bring us presents.

  When Father asked what we wanted, my brother Hindley said, “A fiddle.” Father gave him a smile, for he liked to think of his son as a musician. Then Father looked at me. I saw the hope in his eyes. He wanted me to be like Beauty in Beauty and the Beast and ask him for something simple that cost nothing. A kingfisher’s feather perhaps, or the shell of a robin’s egg, or the first rose of summer plucked from a hedgerow.

  I opened my mouth to speak, but before the words came out I saw something else in Father’s eyes, something deeper. It was a shadow of desperation, an expectation of disappointment. At that moment I knew I’d never measure up, no matter how hard I tried. It just wasn’t in me to be the obedient, devoted daughter my father craved. And I was sick of trying to be her. So I said I wanted a whip with an ivory handle carved in the shape of tiger’s head, inlaid with silver and gold, and with rubies for its eyes. It should be long and supple too so I could beat my pony to ribbons when it did not gallop fast enough.

  I suffered two full days of Mother’s nagging and the maid’s scolding while Father was gone. My brother Hindley was allowed to do whatever he pleased and to go wherever he wanted, for boys will be boys. But I had to be sweet natured and obedient and help around the house.

  On the morning of the third day I slipped away from Mother’s grasp, running onto the moor, my skirts raised high, as barefoot as a beggar. I ran until the pain in my side tore at me so hard I could run no more. By then I’d reached the high, rocky crags. The day was warm and I lay back on the springy turf and shut my eyes. I could feel the earth pulsing beneath my back. I could hear the throbbing of its life force as if I were a baby in my mother’s belly, listening to her heart beat. I felt a tug at my chest, something pulling at me, and then I was breaking free … I rose up out of myself into the spring air, flying with the lapwings into the blue sky, carried on the wind towards the billowing clouds. I looked down and could see my body far below me, scrunched up like a piece of waste paper. And being good or bad didn’t matter any more. I was tumbling, spinning, whirling, purely and fully myself, while at the same time lost in Nature.

  When I snapped back to my body on the ground, I could barely breathe. My ribs seemed as tight as a brutally laced corset. My body held me as securely as if it were a prison.

  Father was expected home in the afternoon. As the light faded, Hindley and I ran down to the gate once, twice, three times, but there was no sign of him. Mother put off supper for one hour, then two. Bedtime came and went and we still waited. It was close to midnight when the door latch was raised and in Father came looking as pale as death and so weary he could barely set one foot in front of the other. He staggered under the weight of a bundle he carried in his arms and collapsed into a chair, groaning. It was only after Father had drunk a little of the brandy Mother held to his lips that he managed to speak.

  Father told me and Hindley that we must wait for our presents: first, he had one for Mother. “It’s a gift from God, I believe,” he said. “Though he’s dark as the night.”

  Carefully, Father unwrapped his bundle. Inside was a child, a boy maybe a year older than me. His arms and legs were stick thin, his cheeks hollowed, his eyes too big for his head. The boy stank to high heaven. I remember thinking that I was no Beauty, but Father had brought home the Beast.

  Mother was horrified, her mouth hanging open. There was a long silence, broken only by the ticking of the clock and the crackle of the fire. And then Mother erupted at Father. “Are you mad? Haven’t we got our own children to feed and clothe? What are you thinking, bringing home a filthy beggar boy?”

  Father said he’d found the thing wandering alone in the street. No one knew who it was or where it had come from. He could hardly leave it to starve, Father said. Saving it was his Christian duty.

  Christian.

  Duty.

  They were two words Mother couldn’t argue with. She rumbled on at Father a while longer, but her temper finally rolled away like a passing thunderstorm. Father told the maid, Nelly, to take care of the child, to wash him and give him clean clothes. When that was done, Father said, the boy could sleep in the room I shared with Hindley and Nelly.

  And maybe the boy would have done, and maybe things would have turned out fine. But before Nelly led the boy away, Hindley started pok
ing around in Father’s coat pockets. He pulled out the fiddle he’d asked for, but it was in pieces, having been accidentally crushed on the journey. Despite being a strapping lad more than twice my age, my brother began to scream like a baby. No one told him to hush himself or be good. It so enraged me that when Father said my whip had got lost on the moor, I spat in the face of the beggar child. It had to be his fault.

  There was a moment’s hush. A moment’s perfect stillness. I looked into the boy’s crow black eyes. We both looked so deep that somehow – don’t ask me how – our souls seemed to tumble headlong into each other. I was speechless. My heart beat so hard against my ribs I feared they might break.

  Then Father hit me. “Mind your manners,” he said, and gave me a great slap to the side of my head that sent blood rushing to my ears. I did not cry and for that I was called cold and unnatural.

  The rest of that evening is something of a blur now. Father and Mother must have gone to bed, leaving Nelly in charge. The boy got a violent washing from her, for Nelly liked the intruder as little as Hindley did. She did not care how icy was the water or how hard the scrubbing brush. Nelly fetched out an old nightshirt of my brother’s, a garment far too big for the boy. After that, Hindley would not allow him into the room we shared. Nelly bolted the door against the boy and he spent that first night curled on the landing outside Father’s room like a dog.

  But I remember one thing clearly. I didn’t object to Nelly’s treatment – not because I agreed with it but because I was too shocked, too stunned to say or do anything. Something strange had happened to me in that moment after I’d spat in his face and before Father had hit me. Something I had no words to describe.

  *

  In the morning, Father tripped over the boy on the landing. He soon discovered how his foundling child had been treated by Nelly and was so enraged he sent the maid packing. But her banishment didn’t last more than a week, for it was hard to get servants to come to a house as remote as ours and Mother couldn’t manage without her. By the time Nelly returned, the beggar boy had been named Heathcliff and he and I were as close as needle and thread. My soul was not confined in my body any more – it had spilled across to his. I was Heathcliff. He was me. And the two of us together were bigger than the sky and freer than the wind.

  Two years passed. The affinity Heathcliff and I had would have been strong under any circumstances, but the hatred we shared towards my brother made our bond as solid as granite.

  From the very outset, Hindley could not forgive Heathcliff’s existence nor Father’s fondness for the “bastard brat”, as Hindley called him. My brother might have managed things better had he been cunning or clever. Hindley could have bided his time. He could have smiled at Heathcliff and pretended to be friends while quietly undermining him. But Hindley was a sledgehammer of a lad who swung blindly at whatever angered him and ended up knocking out only himself.

  To begin with, Hindley had allies in his war against Heathcliff. Mother turned a blind eye to Hindley’s bullying. Nelly would pinch and prod and punish Heathcliff for invented crimes whenever she got the chance. Father was busy with the running of the farm, but if he noticed any instance of cruelty – and there were many – he would take Heathcliff’s side every time. Mother would defend Hindley, so hour after hour, day after day, week after week Wuthering Heights was in uproar.

  But then Mother died. I can’t say I grieved for her. She’d scolded and scraped at me all the days of my life – her absence was a relief. But Hindley was distraught. He’d lost his most powerful ally. And not long after Mother was laid in the ground, Nelly’s attitude to Heathcliff softened. I don’t know what it was that caused her to desert Hindley, but he was left to rant and rave against his adopted brother all alone. Hindley gave us no peace and Father despaired of him. At last, Hindley was sent away to college to be turned into a gentleman. Heathcliff and I were left to run free.

  Oh, I know what folk said. I heard the whispers when we were in church. The Lintons of Thrushcross Grange muttered to the Braithwaites from Gimmerton behind upraised hands that Heathcliff and I were an unruly, wicked, wilful pair. Hadn’t the sexton seen us playing in the churchyard after dark, dancing between the graves? Hadn’t the gamekeeper seen us running half naked over the moors? Weren’t we a disgrace to God and man?

  Perhaps we were. But what did we care what the gossips said? In our eyes, only Heathcliff and I were real beings: other people were just shadows. Nelly tried to tame us and Father pleaded for us to behave in a seemly fashion, but we would not, could not be bound by them. We were wild, I admit that. We’d lie on our backs, staring at the sky, letting our spirits soar on the wings of the birds above. We’d strip naked and bathe in the icy waters of the beck. We’d shriek with delight running downhill, feeling we were about to take flight. And we’d laugh at something, nothing, anything. We’d laugh until we were breathless and so weak we could hardly stand. The idea of right and wrong, of good and evil, did not apply to us any more than they applied to a fox stalking across heather or a hawk riding the wind. Past, future, salvation, damnation meant nothing. There was only the here and now. Heaven for us was being together up on the crag. Hell was being separated after we’d pushed Father too far and he’d decided to punish us.

  For a few years Heathcliff and I lived in paradise and I thought it would last for ever. But then came one dreary October evening, when the wind shrieked about the house and set all the windows rattling. That evening, a catastrophe brought everything tumbling down around our ears.

  I was twelve years old and Heathcliff around thirteen. We were gathered by the fire: Nelly with her knitting on one side, Father in his chair on the other, me sitting on the floor leaning against Father’s knees. Heathcliff lay stretched out, basking in the fire’s warmth like a cat, his head in my lap. We’d tired ourselves out that day and I suppose we were oddly quiet, for Father laid a hand on my head and said, “Why can’t you always be a good lass, Cathy?”

  I laughed and replied, “Why can’t you always be a good man, Father?”

  Poor thing! Father could no more understand me joking than he could when I was being serious. He winced as if I’d struck him. His look was so upset that I regretted my teasing words. I kissed Father’s hand and then began to sing one of his favourite songs in a low voice to soothe him to sleep.

  Father’s hand slipped from my head as he fell into a doze. For a good half hour or more we sat as quiet as mice. We might all be sitting there still if Nelly hadn’t decided it was time for bed.

  I stood up to wish Father good night. Putting my arms around his neck, I was about to kiss his cheek. But something stopped me. Sleep and death might look the same, but they are so very different. His skin was still warm, his face hadn’t changed. But my father had gone and all that was left in his chair was an empty shell.

  “Oh, he’s dead, Heathcliff!” I cried. “He’s dead!”

  I remember weeping that night, weeping bitterly. I thought I’d killed him. I wept and wept and wept. For Father. For myself. For Heathcliff. He and I clung to each other like shipwrecked souls in a storm. We both knew that no good would come of this. None at all.

  Hindley came home for Father’s funeral and he brought a wife with him: a woman he’d never thought to mention in his letters to Father. How everyone’s tongues wagged! The Lintons and the Braithwaites were agog, their eyes on stalks. Heathcliff and I were all but forgotten in the light of Hindley and his wife.

  Hindley was twenty years old by then, his wife two or three years younger. He looked different: he’d grown taller, leaner, more handsome. But his temperament was as ugly as it had ever been. Hindley was a man now, the master of Wuthering Heights, and his bride was its mistress, though she couldn’t have been more empty headed, prattling and useless. Her name was Frances and she was a dainty, delicate thing, pretty enough and with sparkling eyes. She fussed over me to begin with, calling me sister, saying we’d be such fine friends, trying to buy my affection with gifts of ribbons and the
like.

  Frances should have saved her breath and her gifts. I hated every fibre of her being. She’d looked down her nose at Heathcliff the moment she’d stepped into the house. That alone had made me furious. But then she’d called Heathcliff dirty and shuddered as if he was something disgusting and repellent.

  Before Father was even cold in his grave, Hindley had demoted Heathcliff from family member to servant. Heathcliff was ordered about, Hindley’s words falling like clods of earth on a coffin lid. Heathcliff was no longer to dine with us at table but to keep to the back kitchen with Nelly and the farm lads. Heathcliff was to receive no more lessons alongside me but to work for his keep.

  It was harsh and cruel and it went against Father’s wishes, but in truth it came as no great surprise to Heathcliff and me. To begin with we carried on much as before. Heathcliff was banished out of doors. So what? We preferred the open air in any case. I joined Heathcliff in the fields if there was work that needed doing and if not we’d run off across the moors. I attended my lessons as usual and in the evenings I passed on everything I’d learned to Heathcliff.

  Hindley liked to chastise us. He’d order Heathcliff to be flogged, and if he could find no one to carry out the beating, he’d do it himself. Hindley would lock me in my room and deprive me of my dinner. But such things had no power to touch us. The more tyrannical Hindley grew, the more reckless we became. Heathcliff and I were engaged in a battle with Hindley and having our old enemy back brought us closer than ever. We plotted against my brother. We would pay him back one day, we solemnly swore. We noted every blow, every harsh word, every withheld meal and we would re pay it and then some when the time came. We would have our revenge one day. We would see Hindley in the ground and send his wife packing and then the two of us would dance together on his grave.

  *