Читать книгу Nelly Dean - Alison Case - Страница 10

Now, why did I write that? I am sure I thought nothing of the kind at the time. Indeed that friendly visit had been a great relief to my conscience, in freeing me of many a guilty unbidden daydream in which my father’s death figured prominently. And though it might certainly be said that I wished for his love, it was a wish I both prayed for and intended to work for – resolving to show him in future such a mixture of dutiful respect and easy affection as would assure him I had forgiven and forgotten the wrongs of the past. How could such a wish be wrong? It is true that my mother’s story came in time to haunt me, but that was years later, after other, darker events, and less innocent wishes. And I am getting ahead of myself again.

I had expected that I would see my father on my next month’s day off, but in the meantime, he was called away for a large job at some distance from our home. An old friend of his boyhood – a lad as poor as himself, but with a genius for all things mechanical – had risen in the world, and was now the owner of some prosperous mills outside Brassing, about thirty miles away from us. He had bought a good-sized piece of land, and was having built for himself a large manor house, and he took it into his head that none other than his old friend should oversee all the stonework, and at pay several times what my father could earn locally. My father wished to move there outright with my mother – there would be work for at least a year or two just on the house, and he counted on getting more through the connection after. But my mother flatly refused to leave the neighbourhood so soon, not wishing to be gone so far from me while I was new to my duties, or to give up the small farm into which she had poured so much work over the years, without more certain prospects elsewhere. There were hard words between them about this, as I gathered from my mother’s hints, but the result was that my father left alone, with the understanding that my mother would join him in a year or two if the situation proved as good as he thought. And so he passed from my life again, though on better terms than before, certainly. I wrote to him now and again, printing in large letters so that he could read them easily, and saying as little about the Earnshaws as possible, on my mother’s instructions.

When I returned to Wuthering Heights to take up my position as a maidservant, I found my new duties easier in some respects, and harder in others, than I had anticipated. Mrs Earnshaw kept to the intention she expressed to my mother, and was an easy, indulgent mistress. Had her commands been all I had to consider, I would have seen little difference in the tenor of my life at the Heights. She had no wish to banish me from the lessons she superintended with Hindley and Cathy, for in truth they were both more refractory pupils in my absence. Hindley could not keep his mind to a schoolroom task for five minutes together, and his mother quickly lost patience with him without me there to devise games or rhymes or riddles to keep him to his task, and make him learn his lessons in spite of himself. Cathy was much better, but she was motivated primarily by a desire to outshine Hindley, and when that became easier, her own progress slowed accordingly. So when it was time for lessons, Mrs Earnshaw would generally call me to suspend whatever I was doing and join them. And then, having included me in the labours of the schoolroom, she was too kind to deny me its holidays, too, so when Cathy and Hindley were released outside to run off the ill effects of two or three hours of sedentary application, I would be told to join them.

But my mother put a stop to this arrangement, when she came to hear of it, and there were words between her and the mistress about it, too. These I did not manage to overhear, but I saw the signs of them clearly enough, in my mother’s set face and the mistress’s quiet tears after they had been shut up together. After that my mother made time to walk over to the Heights nearly every morning, to instruct me in household duties and set my tasks for the day. These tasks, she made clear to me, were to be performed faithfully, whatever the mistress might say to the contrary – so that, in performing my new duties, I had to fight not only my own inclinations, but those of all around me. I did not take well to the change – I could not see why, if Mrs Earnshaw thought it worth my wages to have my assistance in the schoolroom, I should be denied the benefit of being there, and by my own mother, too. After a week of the new arrangement, I finally made bold to put this to her.

‘You are paid wages as a servant, Nelly, and have a duty to do the service you are paid for, even if Mrs Earnshaw is too kind to ask it of you.’

‘But you don’t know what it is like for her, teaching Hindley and Cathy without me there,’ I protested. ‘She can keep no order at all, and Hindley learns nothing without me there to help him. She said herself that it is little help to her to have me shelling peas in the kitchen while she is driven to distraction by the two of them – she would rather shell them herself later, and have my assistance where it is most needed. And I want to keep learning.’

‘Yes, she told me that, too.’ She sighed and motioned me to sit down. ‘This is hard for you, Nelly, I know. But there is not only Mrs Earnshaw to consider. The master permitted you to return on the footing of a servant, and it is he that pays your wages. He has been much occupied this week with moving the sheep to fresh pastures, but when that is done he will be looking into the household again, and there will be anger for all of us, the mistress not excluded, if he has reason to feel that we have connived in circumventing his commands. And he would have reason to feel that. You do see that Nell, do you not?’

I said nothing, but looked downward and felt my face flush. I knew she was right, but it was a bitter draught to swallow, for all that, and I should have preferred to put it off as long as I could. But that was never my mother’s way: she preferred to face unpleasant duties ‘head on’, as she said. It was the hardest of all the lessons she taught me, but it was a good one, and has stood me in better stead than all the rest combined. So I bid farewell to the schoolroom, and took some comfort in the general grumbling at this change, without adding much to it myself.

There was actually much to learn in my new sphere: I had to know all about the proper management of a dairy, from scouring and scalding the milk pans, to skimming and churning the cream, making up the butter, and straining curds to make cheese. I had to learn how to keep the fire in the kitchen hot enough for our daily needs without making it so hot that it burned the oatcakes and wasted the coal, and how to make the smooth, thick oat porridge we ate daily, without creating lumps from too much haste in adding the oats, or burning the bottom through too little stirring – and a great many other things which it would bore you to hear, no doubt. In time, as my mother predicted, I came to take almost the same pride in my quickness and efficiency at these duties that I had in my book learning before, and I had the added comfort of knowing that these skills would allow me to earn a living anywhere – which could not be said of my command of the principal rivers of Asia, or my familiarity with the longest words in Johnson’s Dictionary.

There were other changes in the schoolroom at this time besides that of my absence. Heathcliff too had been excluded from it at first, on the grounds that he was too young and could not speak our language – but it was really because no one in the house wanted him there – and so he fell to my charge. I soon found, though, that it was only that his accent was so queer we could not make out what he was saying, nor he us. He must have been a bright lad at base, because within a few weeks that had changed, and he and I could make shift to understand each other well enough. By that time the master was back, and he made it known that Heathcliff was to have his lessons with the other children. And so he was settled on a footstool in the far corner, and given Cathy’s old hornbook to begin learning his letters. At first, both Cathy and Hindley made faces at him and jeered at his ignorance, every chance they got. But Heathcliff took no notice of it, except to turn his back to them and hunch more tightly over his hornbook, and Cathy soon tired of this sport and began to take an interest in the lad’s progress. Her first kind words to him brought forth a grateful devotion: he began following her about like a puppy, and taking her commands with such joyful alacrity that it is no wonder she was soon won over to loving him.

We have a saying that ‘a four-wheeled cart is steady, and a two-wheeled cart is quick, but a three-wheeled cart is good for naught but landing in a ditch’. Before Heathcliff came, Hindley and I were the two-wheeled cart, and Cathy was often left behind on our excursions, or excluded from our sports, on the grounds that she was too little to participate. Now, with Heathcliff arrived and me gone from the schoolroom, Cathy saw that the tables could be turned, and Hindley would be the third wheel. And so it fell out.

The effect of all this on Hindley’s behaviour was not good. He became, as I said, more refractory in the schoolroom, and often uncontrollable out if it, except by his father, who enforced obedience with fear rather than love. Even the mistress, who had always loved Hindley best despite all his waywardness – or perhaps for it – lost all patience with him, and took to reporting his more egregious misdeeds directly to the master, something she had never used to do before, as it invariably earned the boy a beating. Hindley had always been a difficult, wilful child, but he began now to exhibit signs of real maliciousness and ill temper. And his favourite object for these was the new boy in the household. Heathcliff learned early not to carry tales to the master or mistress, except in extreme cases. Not that they were not ready enough to credit his tale and punish Hindley accordingly, but the master’s bitterness too often spilled over – most unreasonably – onto Cathy as well, which Heathcliff could not bear to see. Also, every flogging Hindley received on Heathcliff’s behalf only lengthened the score of the former’s vengeance, and heightened his violence when the next opportunity presented itself. Cathy, for her part, would fight like a wild cat to defend her favourite, or if that failed, scurry off with him to nurse his wounds with kisses and plot some petty revenge. I would remonstrate with Hindley, and if possible interfere between them, if only for Hindley’s sake, but we would neither of us carry tales, partly from the old loyalty of the schoolroom, and more because we could see that it did more harm than good. Even old Joseph, though normally he liked nothing better than to get any of us into trouble with the master, disliked Heathcliff too much to take up his defence. And so it became a more or less constant game of cat-and-mouse between Heathcliff and Hindley. Hindley knew that, if he could catch Heathcliff out of sight and hearing of either of his parents – and what was more difficult, away from Cathy as well – he could do pretty near whatever he liked to the boy with impunity, only provided he restrained himself from producing conspicuous injuries.

I saw it all with a heavy heart. Towards me, and me alone, had Hindley retained any of his old warmth and boyish sense of fun, and I felt I had still some good influence over him, but we had little time together any more.

One day, about a month after Heathcliff’s arrival, we contrived to go off for a whole day together. It was the first of my monthly holidays, but my father being away, and my mother still a regular visitor at the Heights, I was not expected at home. Hindley had just succeeded (with much secret assistance from me of an evening) in keeping the whole of some hundred lines of Shakespeare in his mind at once, in honour of which achievement he had been granted a day’s freedom from lessons. The day being sunny, we had resolved to go to Pennistone Crag for a picnic. Mrs Earnshaw made up a packet of oatcakes and cheese for us to take along, which Hindley put in an old sack and slung over his shoulder, and off we went. But the day was unseasonably hot, so we chose to stop instead at another favourite place about midway there, a little hollow graced by a burbling stream and a small waterfall that stayed always cool and refreshing even when the rest of the world was baking.

It was a beautiful little grotto, naturally walled with stone, where the water ran in over flat slabs of bedrock and then dropped in little waterfalls through multiple pools of varying shapes and levels. The water was coloured orange by the iron-rich soil, which also drifted to the bottom and made the pools red. There was one in particular in which a narrow fall dropped straight into still water, causing it to roil up in red bubbles. We had always called this ‘the pool of blood’, and avoided touching its contents with as much superstitious horror as if it had been blood indeed. At another place, the sunlight somehow came through the water from the back, though there was only stone behind it, so that the little waterfall, no more than a hand’s-breadth across, danced with an orange glow like flames. We called it the ‘the waternixie’s bonfire’, and liked to imagine tiny fairy-like creatures dancing behind it. Once, Hindley put out his hand and caught up the water’s flow, so we could see behind it and ‘catch them at it’ as he said, but there was nothing but bare stone behind. ‘Too quick for us,’ I said.

We took off our shoes and sat on a rock to dangle our feet in the stream. Then Hindley scooped up some water in his hand to cool his face and neck, and I did the same. By chance, a bit of it splashed onto Hindley, and he responded by flinging some on me. Then I returned fire, and soon we were in full battle, chasing each other about, splashing and laughing until we both collapsed, sopping wet and exhausted, on the bank. In that state, we found the shaded hollow a little too cool, so we went back up into the sunlight, where we rolled about on the dry heather, and lay in the hot sun to dry our clothes. After a time, Hindley declared us ‘toasted to perfection’ – neither too hot, nor too cold – and said it was time to eat, so we made our way back to where we had left our provisions.

‘This is a bit like old times, is it not, Nelly?’ he said, as we sat ourselves on a patch of soft moss beside the stream.

‘Better,’ I said, ‘because these days are rarer for us now, and more precious accordingly.’ I was fond of wise sayings, then.

‘No, not better, because even now I can’t forget what I have to go home to,’ he replied bitterly. Then he burst out, ‘What am I to do, Nelly? Everybody hates me now, except you.’

Well I had a dozen answers on the tip of my tongue, beginning with ‘Leave Heathcliff alone’. But for once I knew better than to offer them. I made no answer but to lean against him, and he was silent too, for so long that I peeked over to see if he had fallen asleep. But his eyes were open, and I saw a steady trickle of tears making a path down the side of his face. When he saw me looking at him, he made a savage grunt and turned away, ashamed to have been caught weeping. But by then I’d caught the infection, and I was soon sobbing away myself, huddling myself against his back for comfort. And then he turned round, and we held each other until the worst of it passed. There was no need to speak. We both knew what we had lost. After a while I began to busy myself with our provisions: I spread my kerchief on the ground and started to empty the sack and arrange our meal on it. When that was done, we both ate, still silent, but not so grieved as we had been.

‘When I am grown up and Wuthering Heights is mine,’ Hindley said at last, ‘I shall marry you, Nelly. I shall send Heathcliff packing, and Joseph too, and then we will be happy all day long.’

I made no reply to his announcement, but blushed, and no doubt looked as awkward as I felt. When we were small children, Hindley and I had often talked of marrying when we grew up, as if it were a matter of course. We had even gone a whole fortnight, once, pretending that we were secretly married already, with a ‘cottage’ marked out with a square of stones in a little hollow nearby. But, as we got older, we had become shy of such talk, so that there had been no mention of marriage between us for some years. I had retained some secret hopes on that score, though, and often wondered if he did the same – especially after I had transformed from playmate to maidservant.

Hindley looked a little dismayed at my reaction.

‘You will marry me, won’t you, Nell?’ he asked anxiously. I hastened to assure him that I loved him as dearly as ever, all my shyness dissolving in the face of his obvious distress. And then I had a marvellous thought.

‘Hindley,’ I said excitedly, ‘I tell you what we must do. We must not grieve for the past, but think to the future, and prepare ourselves to be a good master and mistress of Wuthering Heights, as we will be some day. I am learning a great deal about that already, and you must learn too. You must ask your father if you can help him more in managing the estate, and ask him a great many questions about everything.’ Hindley caught my enthusiasm, so much so that he proposed we should return home straight away to put this plan into action. And so we packed up our things and headed back to Wuthering Heights, both of us more cheerful than we had been in a month. I was particularly delighted with my own cleverness in finding a way to turn Hindley into a path more likely to win him his father’s approbation, and more conducive to general peace in the household. When we were nearly home, with but one little hillock hiding us from view of the house, Hindley stopped and quickly kissed me on the lips. It was but a child’s kiss, after all, but it seemed momentous to us, and we walked the rest of the way holding hands and feeling rather solemn.

Well, turning a person out of his wonted path is not like turning a sheep, to be accomplished with a single wave of a stick or a nip at the heels. It is more like trying to shift a stream out of its bed: it looks easy enough at the start, as the water will go wherever you send it, but your dam of pebbles and mud will only hold so long as you are there to tend it, and left alone the water soon finds its way into its old path again. So it was with Hindley. To be fair, it was not all his fault. He began with great enthusiasm, hovering about his father, offering his help, and asking all manner of questions. But the change was so sudden that his father was more puzzled than pleased, and suspected some hidden motive, the more so as he could not help but observe that the lad did not attend particularly well to his answers. I assured Hindley at every opportunity that the master would come round in time if he would but persevere, but in the end the father’s suspicions lasted longer than the son’s resolve. Not only did the waters return to their own path, but the release of dammed-up force only dug the channel deeper: to the master, Hindley’s short-lived reformation seemed to confirm that the boy would never come to anything, while Hindley took his father’s refusal to credit his good intentions as proof that any further effort to please his father would be fruitless. And I, who had been so pleased with my own hand in bringing this about, felt sick at heart, and feared I had done more harm than good.

Despite this, however, Hindley and I still spoke privately of our marriage as a settled thing, and I continued in my own resolve to learn as much as I could of household management, against the day that I would be mistress there, and to steer Hindley into good behaviour whenever I could, and comfort him when I couldn’t.

As the weeks passed, my mother’s visits to the Heights became more infrequent, and my own responsibilities increased. I was still but a girl, of course, and not likely to be placed in command of servants older and longer-serving than myself, but I soon saw that it would not be long before I attained that eminence. At that time there were two maidservants employed at the Heights besides myself: one assigned to the dairy, and the other to the kitchen and household. They were both good, obedient, hard-working girls, like most rural folk, but rather slow of mind. They grew anxious when left to direct even their own work for very long, let alone anyone else’s, and, when faced with an unexpected obstacle, would come to a puzzled halt, like a sheep encountering a wall, until it was removed. Furthermore, neither of them expected to spend more than a few years at the Heights before leaving for homes of their own. When they did so, I foresaw, their replacements would naturally look to me for instructions when the mistress was not available, which was more often than not, and I would be housekeeper in effect, if not in name.

During this period, I received my first and, did I but know it, only letter from my father, all but the signature written not in his own painstaking, coarse print but in a flowing script that told me he had pressed someone into service as a scribe. I have it still. It reads:

Dear Nelly,

I hope this finds you well. I am well myself. I have five men working under me. They are all good men now but one was a lazy sot so I had to let him go and find another to fill his place. You would like to see the house I am building. It is very grand. It will have two floors above the ground plus the attics. The stones for the ground floor are very large and we must use a tackle to move them, but they are all dressed stone and easy enough to work with once they are in place. They have a better sort of mortar here too, smooth as butter. I am boarding at a house in town. It is a clean place and the landlady is very kind but not so good a cook as your mother. I hope your mother will come here soon. This house will need many servants when it is done and I am sure they would take you on if I said the word. Also you would get better wages I guess than you do now. Meantime, work hard and be a good girl. Be sure to save your wages and take them to your mother.

Your loving father,

THOMAS DEAN

Letters were scarce in those days, so this one would have been a prize whatever its contents, but ‘Your loving father’ moved me to tears, and remained precious to me for years, even after I realized that it was but a conventional closure, probably suggested by the scribe. The thought that my mother might leave soon, though, and worse, that my father might move me to a position in his employer’s household, filled me with alarm, which I conveyed to my mother on her next visit.

‘The house will be at least another year a-building, Nell,’ she assured me, ‘and probably more. And by the time it’s built, God willing, your father may be prosperous enough that he won’t wish you in service at all, and certainly not in his own neighbourhood.’

‘Will you be going there yourself soon?’

‘Not right away. I should like to see you better settled in your duties, and know that Mrs Earnshaw can rely on your abilities, before I leave you all.’

‘What about the cows?’ I asked. My mother had but four cows at present, but her dairy was her greatest pride and pleasure. Though generally unsentimental, she loved her ‘ladies’, as she called her cows, and continued the practice, begun in her girlhood by Mrs Earnshaw, of naming them all after Shakespeare’s heroines. So it was that I was plain Ellen, but her barn was populated with, at present, Rosalind, Ophelia, Viola, and Marina.

‘Only Reenie and Rosie will need milking over the winter,’ she told me, ‘Feelie and Vi are drying off now – they’re due to calve in March. I shall take Reenie with me – your father has his eye on a little house in the town with one stall that will do for a cow, and she’ll bear the journey easily enough. The other three shall come here – I’ve spoken to Mr Earnshaw about it already. In return for feeding them through the winter, he’s to have Rosie’s milk and his pick of Feelie’s and Vi’s calves come spring. They won’t overload the dairy either, for you’re getting low on milkers just now. And I know I can count on you to make sure my ladies get good care.’

Accordingly, one bleak afternoon in late November she appeared at the Heights, driving three weary-looking cows before her, and looking thoroughly exhausted herself.

‘Nelly,’ she called out, ‘come out here, my dear, and take these three into the barn. My, that was weary work! I thought to have been here hours ago, but these ladies won’t be hurried – balky as mules, they were.’ Despite her weariness, she was shaking her head and laughing as she spoke. Meanwhile Mrs Earnshaw had hurried out, wrapping a shawl around her as she came, and keeping up a steady stream of excited talk.

‘Mary, there you are at last! And your ladies, too – is this Rosalind? Ah, you didn’t think I’d recognize her, did you? But I remember her clear as yesterday – the prettiest heifer in all the barn she was, with those long legs and that little star on her forehead, when I picked her out to be your wedding present. And my, what a beauty she has grown into. You say she’s your best milker still, after all these years? You see I haven’t lost my eye for a good cow, at any rate.’

‘No you certainly haven’t, and not a day passes that I don’t thank you for her: Rosie’s been a rare treasure to me in the dairy. And so good-natured! She’s still as an owl for the milking, and an angel for temperament always: I don’t think she’s ever kicked in her whole life. These two here are her daughters, Vi and Feely – Viola and Ophelia, that is – you see I’ve kept up our old practice. Reenie – that’s Marina – is back at home. She’s Rosie’s granddaughter, and bids fair to be her equal, but she’ll go with me to Brassing.’

‘Oh Mary, must you really go? Brassing is so far away, and I can’t bear to think of you being gone so long.’ The mistress was pulling my mother towards the house as she spoke.

‘Come now, Helen, you wouldn’t have me neglect my duty to Tom, would you? The poor fellow is living in paid lodgings, and eating Heaven-knows-what: tallow in the butter, chalk in the milk, and the last time the landlady served goose, it tasted so foul, he thought it must be a vulture! He was half minded to demand to see the feet, he said. And I’ll only be gone until spring – I’ll be back before you’ve noticed I’m gone.’ With suchlike jollyings and reassurances, my mother led the mistress back to the house, while I turned away to attend to the cows, awkwardly shooing them towards the barn. I actually had little to do with managing livestock at the Heights – the produce of the dairy was more my department than its four-footed inhabitants – so I was in some difficulties, until Joseph spied me and came running over.

‘What are ye up to, ye daft hinny? That’s no way to move cattle – ye’ll only get them into a fright, and have them trampling all the beds.’ He snatched the stick from my hands and, with a sequence of light taps, accompanied by deep cooing noises, soon had the cows moving into the barn.

‘Do you know where they’re to go?’ I asked, trying to sound as if I knew myself.

‘A-course I do – wasn’t it left to me to ready the stalls for them? An’ it’ll be left to me to find fodder for them too, I suppose. Feeding three for the milk of one – that’s a bad bargain the maister’s made – but he always did make bad bargains wi’ womanites, and yon canny witch is the warst on ’em.’

I had turned away before Joseph shot this parting bolt, but I turned to call back at him: ‘It’s nothing to the bad bargain you’d be to any “womanite” foolish enough to look twice at a sour-tempered, monkey-faced dwarf like you!’ I regretted it the moment I’d said it, of course. Not for its unkindness, which was well deserved, but because Joseph was forever trying to provoke me to lash out at him, so that he could denounce me to the master for ill temper and insubordination, and I had been trying to school myself to ignore him, or at least respond with no more than dignified silence and scornful looks. Now he had just what he wanted, and was gleefully working himself up into a hopping rage before running to report to the master: ‘Hoo, listen to the little hussy – she’s as bad as her mother – nay worse, for talking evil to her elders and betters. The maister shall hear of this – he’ll turn you out, this time, he will, for sure. It’s too long he’s put up with your insolence and bad ways, but now he’ll see, now he’ll see what she’s really made of, witch bastard that she is.’

I was almost at the house by now, using up all my little stock of self-control not to reply, or give any sign that his words affected me. ‘Witch bastard’ was one of his favourite epithets for me, combining as it did aspersions on my character, my mother’s, and the circumstances of my birth, and it usually got a response from me when nothing else could, but today I did no more than slam the kitchen door behind me and commence chopping onions with a fury, both to vent my anger, and to provide some cover for the tears that were sure to follow.

Hearing the slam and subsequent racket, my mother came into the kitchen.

‘Have you got the cows settled in, Nelly?’ she asked, but then seeing my face, ‘Whatever is the matter, Nell? You’re red as beef – and here, if you don’t slow down with that knife you’ll lose a finger for sure. Put it down, now. Good heavens, child, you’ve chopped enough onions to stew a whole ox! What brought this on?’

I did not trust myself yet for a full reply, and said only ‘Joseph’. But that was a full enough explanation for anyone who knew the household as well as my mother did.

‘I might have known,’ she said – and then, seeing me about to elaborate, ‘No, don’t tell me what he said. I’m sure it was not worth hearing, let alone repeating. And I suppose you replied in kind?’ I nodded, shamefaced. ‘Well, he’ll carry that to the master, for sure. How many times have I told you to leave him be? Just because someone pours gunpowder in your ear, there’s no need for you to set a spark to it. And the worst punishment you can give that old fool is to ignore him when he starts ranting at you.’

‘He called me “witch bastard”,’ I burst out in spite of myself. Her face went still.

‘Did he now?’ she said quietly, and then looked at me for a bit in silence. Then she gave herself a little shake, and said, ‘Don’t you think any more about it, Nell. You’re not a bastard, and as for “witch”, Joseph thinks all women are witches – except perhaps his sister, who’s as dried up and miserable as he is himself. So pay no mind to what he says, and he’ll soon tire of provoking you. Now, then, what about my cattle?’

‘Joseph put them away – he knew where they were to go. Do you think he’ll mistreat them?’

‘If they were only my cows, I have no doubt he would drive them into the nearest bog – but I’ve been careful to arrange things so that it’s in the master’s interest for them to be well looked after, and Joseph knows it. Oh, he’ll grumble about them, and at them too, most like, but he’ll do all he can to be sure that Rosie gives good milk all winter and Feelie and Vi both bear healthy calves.’

‘He said it was a bad bargain the master made,’ I couldn’t resist adding.

‘And would have said the same if I were paying their weight in gold,’ my mother replied. ‘Now I’m serious, Nell, pay no mind to what Joseph says. And you are not to carry me any more tales about him. Do you understand?’

I nodded, and the subject was dropped. But I have reason to believe she spoke to the master on the subject, for, though Joseph continued to mutter that I was a witch, he never again called me a bastard, nor did he ever refer to my mother by any worse name than ‘Mrs Dean’ or ‘your mother’ – though he contrived to throw into the latter enough scorn that you would have thought there was no worse title to be had.

My mother would have liked to return home that evening, not wanting to leave even Reenie’s milking to the neighbour’s boy she had left in charge, but night was falling by the time all was settled at the Heights, and the night being moonless and cloudy to boot, it was of that inky blackness wherein you cannot see your own feet, let alone the path ahead. So she was persuaded to spend the night with us. The mistress was all for making up the guest bed for her, but my mother would not hear of it, and insisted on sharing my little bed instead. So I was very warm that night, sleeping in her arms for the first time since I was a little child. In the morning she kissed me goodbye, and promised to write to me and the mistress both, and the mistress cried heartily, and I cried a little, too, as we watched her disappear over the nearest rise.

A few weeks later, I had my first letter from her.

My dearest Nell,

You will be glad to know that I arrived safely in Brassing, and am now settled with your father in a cottage on the edge of the town. I was glad not to be in the centre, for the stench there is dreadful to someone accustomed to the clean air of the moors. I think my cowshed at home is sweeter to the nose. But I am getting used to it now. The cottage your father found was smaller than we have at home, and not over-clean, but I have got it done up now and it will do.

Reenie made the trip like a born traveller; she was only leaner and a bit footsore by the time she got here. She too has smaller and poorer lodgings than she did at home, but when I have got your father to plug some holes in the wall, and found some better straw for the floor, she will be quite cosy. It is warmer here, with all these houses to stop the wind, and everyone burning coal as well. We share a wall with a family of wool-combers, and they keep their stove red-hot all day long – they have to, you know, or the grease in the wool goes hard, and it can’t be combed out.

If you ever feel sorry that you were born poor, Nelly, think on these poor wool-combers’ children, who from early childhood work all day long in a hot, airless room, doing hard and monotonous labour, and live on bad bread (the bread here is shocking) and worse tea. There are six of them altogether, all sleeping on one filthy pallet, like a heap of puppies. I am doing what I can for them, at any rate. At every morning and evening’s milking, they line up, from youngest to oldest, and drink each in turn a mugful of Reenie’s good fresh milk. I told their father it was in payment for his stove half heating our cottage for us.

I had planned to sell the rest of the milk in the marketplace – what we don’t use ourselves, that is – but I am not to have that trouble, it seems. Word is out in the neighbourhood that we have a cow, and folk just show up at the door with their pitchers and cans and their coins, and they all say they have never tasted such milk in all their lives, which I can well believe. So I am quite a feature in the neighbourhood now, and have many acquaintances already.

Your father is earning very good wages, and drinks but little of them, so there is a good deal of money in the house. But living in the town is more expensive than I ever imagined, as we must buy everything we need, even to the greens we eat – and it’s no easy matter finding good ones, I can tell you. I go to the market at dawn, even before the milking, to get the freshest stuff, and pay extra for it, too. But what I meant to say is that we have enough money, so you can save your wages, and perhaps get yourself a new winter dress, as you have nearly outgrown the old one. Don’t go spending your money on trifles, though, Nelly.

Take good care of yourself in this weather. Always wrap up about the neck before you go outside, and drink something hot when you come in. And never, never go about with your feet wet. And work hard, and do your duty. Send my love to the family, and to my ladies too. Your father sends his love.

Your loving mother,

Mary Dean

The next few months passed quietly enough. My mother kept up a regular correspondence with the mistress, so she and I exchanged shorter letters enclosed in those to save on postage, but there was little enough to tell, particularly as I did not care to comment on Hindley, who was going from bad to worse, despite all my best efforts to restrain him.

It was early March, and the snows were just starting to recede from the roads, when Cathy came running into the kitchen to announce that she had spied a pony carriage coming our way, and who could it be? We all hurried out to look, but could make out no more than that it was a woman driving, and not like anyone we knew. The mistress sent us back in again with orders to put the kettle on for tea and see to it that the house was presentable, while she ran upstairs to freshen her toilette for a visitor. When the cart pulled up, we saw that it was driven by a handsome, fresh-faced woman, perhaps thirty years of age. Her gown and pelisse were of good materials, and well made, in a simple, sober style, her only mark of fashion being a jaunty bonnet from which sprang a beautiful dark-dyed ostrich feather.

She jumped lightly down from the carriage and handed the reins to one of the lads hovering around. Cathy and I had been instructed to make ourselves scarce, so we were crouched at the top of the stairs, trying to be within sight and sound of the visitor without being seen or heard ourselves. But the lady spoke in a low, soft voice to the mistress, and we could not make out any of it. We were not left in suspense for long, though, for as soon as they had consulted, the mistress called out to me.

‘Nelly, come down here and meet Mrs Thorne. She has a message for you from your mother.’ I came down and curtseyed as the mistress introduced me. Then she took both my hands in hers, and I looked up and saw tears in her eyes. My heart dropped. I opened my mouth to speak, but could get nothing out.

‘So you are little Ellen,’ she said kindly. ‘I am so sorry we should meet under these circumstances, dear child, but I have sad news to bring you. Your father has had an accident at work. A stone they were moving slipped and fell on top of him. He is badly injured, and it is not known whether he can recover. Your mother is with him now, and dare not leave his side, so I said that I would come to fetch you. I know this is very sudden, but do you think you can gather some things together and be ready to go with me, in perhaps half an hour? I should like to get back as soon as we can.’

I felt as if I had been struck with a stone myself, but I nodded mutely and turned to go upstairs. But the mistress took one look at my white face and folded me in her arms instead, and instructed the other maidservant to fetch tea for all three of us.

‘There will be time enough to get ready when you have both sat down and refreshed yourselves,’ she said. I sat down. I could not cry, but could not seem to do anything else either. Finally the tea arrived, which at least gave me something to do with my hands and mouth. Meanwhile, Mrs Thorne and the mistress kept up a low, soothing patter of small talk. Mrs Thorne, it appeared, was the young wife of my father’s friend – I had recognized the name when she came in. She owned quite frankly that she was ‘new to being a fine lady’, having begun life as a factory girl, and met her future husband at the works before his career was well begun.

‘It was a great relief to me to meet Mrs Dean,’ she said. ‘I do have a difficult time talking to the well-bred ladies I am supposed to visit all day. They talk of nothing but scandal, their children, and the iniquities of servants, whereas Mrs Dean is full of good, practical advice on everything from the planting of a kitchen garden to the best books to read, and she never tries to make me feel ignorant or crude.’

This set the mistress off on one of her favourite themes: the good sense, omni-competence, and general all-around excellence of my mother, though she carefully refrained, in this case, from interleaving her talk with the usual regrets and complaints that she no longer lived at Wuthering Heights. It was as soothing a cover as they could have hit upon under which I could recover my wits a little, and in a few minutes I had gathered enough of them to look about me a bit, and begin to stir myself to get ready. At this point, Cathy, who had been hovering in a corner, jumped up.

‘Shall I pack your things for you, Nelly?’ she asked, evidently eager to be of help. I was about to decline, but, before I could speak, the mistress accepted on my behalf, and Cathy raced upstairs to begin. I wanted to go up with her, not quite trusting her judgement, but the mistress kept me next to her on the sofa, saying I must rest for the journey to come. Cathy, meanwhile, came to the head of the stairs every few minutes to consult.

‘You will want your new brown dress, won’t you, Nelly?’ was her first query, and then ‘Mama, may Nelly borrow your old valise?’ and next, ‘What is she to do for gloves, Mama? Yours would be too small for her,’ and ‘Will she need a clean apron?’ By the time all these questions and more had been settled, and Cathy had dragged the packed valise to the top of the stairs for Hindley to carry down, I had to acknowledge she had done a better job than I could have in my present addled state. Nor were we much behind the half-hour Mrs Thorne had allotted to us to get ready. Mrs Earnshaw hugged and kissed and cried over me, assuring me all the while that I would be back soon enough, and my mother with me. Then she dug a crown out of her purse to bestow on me, and I shook hands with all the children and the master too (he had come in in the meantime), and the master told me to be a good girl, and we climbed into the carriage, and were off.

At Gimmerton we exchanged the pony and carriage for a post-chaise, and drove on to Brassing at the fastest pace the post-boy could be coaxed to permit, stopping only to change horses again. All this was very new to me, and would have been a wondering pleasure, but in me both thought and feeling seemed stuck in one round. I didn’t know which I feared more: that my father would die before I arrived, or that he would be alive, and not pleased to see me. Mrs Thorne seemed to understand something of what I was feeling, for she talked but little herself, and asked almost nothing of me.

Brassing, when we finally drew nigh, looked to be a much larger town than Gimmerton, but it had little else to recommend it that I could see. The houses were of grey stone, and crowded together all higgledy-piggledy, and the air was thick with an acrid miasma composed of coal smoke mingled with the smell of open privies. The post-boy let us down at the top of a narrow lane, next to a small public house. Mrs Thorne said we would stop in there to get ready. Inside, she carried out a whispered consultation with the landlady, who then produced a pair of pattens for each of us. Mrs Thorne pulled a packet of pins from her bag, and said we must pin up our skirts, and strap on the pattens, before venturing into the lane, for it was ankle-deep, or worse, in dirt. I was in a trembling hurry to be on our way, but she assured me, on the landlady’s information, that there was no immediate cause for haste. Once equipped, we set off down the lane. Mrs Thorne kept a tight grip on my arm, which was just as well, as I was unaccustomed both to pattens and to cobblestones, and until I found my feet, each step threatened to pitch me head-foremost into the muck. From halfway down that lane, we turned into another still narrower, and at the end of it I saw my mother standing in a doorway. Mrs Thorne restrained me from rushing forward, but quickened her pace, and in another minute I was in my mother’s arms. Mrs Thorne stayed only to receive my mother’s thanks for fetching me, and then went on her way back up the lane.

‘How is Father?’ I asked, as soon as I caught my breath.

‘He’s resting,’ she said, and then set me on a stool in the entryway and began removing the pattens and taking the pins from my skirt. That done, she declared me fit to step indoors. The cottage had two small rooms, but the door to the bedroom was shut. My mother sat me down by the small fire, and fetched me tea and some sweet biscuits. For some time, she would not let me speak, only directing me to eat and drink instead. I would have thought that I had no appetite at all, but the tea awakened it, and between it, the biscuits, and some bread and cheese that followed, I found the haze lifting that I had been in since Mrs Thorne’s first news.

‘Do you think Father will wake soon?’ I asked at last. ‘When will I be able to see him?’ My mother knelt beside me and put her arms around me. Her eyes were filled with tears.

‘Oh Nelly, he will never wake more in this world,’ she said. ‘He went to his final rest some three hours since. He asked for you near the end, though, to say farewell, and to beg your forgiveness for his early cruelty to you.’ This opened the floodgates at last. I sobbed myself into exhaustion on her shoulder, and she sobbed as well. Then a woman opened the door to the bedroom to say that all was ready – she had been engaged to wash his body and lay it out. So we went in, both of us, and I saw my father. The stone had struck his chest, so his face was his own, only paler and thinner than I remembered. I bent down and kissed his cold cheek – the first kiss I ever bestowed on him, that I remember, and the last.

My father lay in state for two days, so that his friends and neighbours could come to pay their respects. Mr and Mrs Thorne were among the first, and they spoke simply and frankly of their respect for my father, and their regret that they should have been in some manner the cause of his death, and Mr Thorne shed real tears for his boyhood friend. They also left with us a hamper of food, containing a ham, a large Dundee cake, a block of good Cheddar cheese, and a packet of fine tea, to feed ourselves and to offer to the other mourners as they came. There were a good many of them, for all my father’s residence in the town had been so short – all the men who had worked with him or under him on the house, and all those whose acquaintance he had made in the pub. My mother’s milk customers came too, and the wool-comber next door with his children. Their grief was very real, though I think it was less for my father himself than for the imminent departure of my mother and her cow.

My mother did not wish my father to be buried in Brassing, where the churchyards were all crowded and airless. The weather being cool, she resolved to transport him back home, to be buried in the churchyard at Gimmerton. The Thornes very kindly arranged all this, so we had only to pack up the household’s few things to put in a hired wagon (not the one the coffin was in, to my relief) and tie Reenie to the back of it, before setting off home. Our progress going back was considerably slower than mine had been on the way, but another day brought us within sight of my parents’ cottage. Reenie grew excited then, and threatened to overset the wagon, so my mother untied her, whereupon she tossed her head and took off at a slow, lumbering gallop towards the barn.

‘Well, she is not sorry to shake the dust of Brassing from her feet, at any rate,’ said my mother.

And so we settled back into our old places – I at the Heights, and my mother at the cottage, which she had resolved to keep. I used most of my small stock of savings to buy myself a full suit of mourning, and made much of my grief for my father. Had I known what was coming, I would have saved my tears.