Heathcliff's Tale by Emma Tennant Page A

at the servants as I went to assure them that all was well.
    So it was that I engineered the meeting of the man who would shortly declare his passionate intention to carry me off and wed me, with the woman he had a burning aim to make love to and be with all his days, in a true union of heart and mind.
    I—who loved my brother more than any man I had yet had the chance to know—betrayed him then. He did not forgive me; and it was for this, as I am in my heartaware, that I was never again to be permitted to come into my own home, a place I had not left in all my eighteen years on earth. Edgar would come to know me as one who would sell her own flesh and blood for a touch of the Gypsy’s hand or a spark from his black eyes. It was little wonder that I was abandoned to repent my folly with only poor Nelly to write to, or receive a timorous visit from, when once I had been banished from my childhood abode. I did not deserve my brother’s love—nor that of any decent member of society, once I had been depraved by the returning stranger. I was ostracised; and yet, when the chance came to witness the murder of the man who had exiled me from the company of my peers, my friends and my relatives, I leapt in to save the rogue’s worthless life, so abject was my surrender to Heathcliff.
    I skirt the subject that cannot be spoken of here; and yet, if I am to reveal at last the terrible truth of that September evening in my brother’s absence, I must for the first and only time give account of that depravity and its occasioning. That Hannah and Joel, two servants carrying logs to Miss Cathy’s boudoir (I cannot refer to her as Mrs Linton, here: she is Cathy, Heathcliff’s Cathy, and I was blind not to see him tie her to him as closely as a master to a slave, on the very first night of his walking into the ball at The Grange)—that Joel, at least, may have seen, as I was forced to do, what took place there, is scarcely to be doubted. Whether this faithful retainer, shocked beyond utterance by what he witnessed, then found speech enough to report it to my brother, I do not know. But I suspect, from Nelly’s cautious silence on the subject, that he did; and thus, as far as my relations with family are concerned, my banishment was forever sealed.
    Catherine sat at the dressing-table in her room, looking dreamily out at the garden and the hills beyond.
    What came next is neither dream nor true remembering: it was as though my soul left my body in one quick flight, and as if my movements were not my own but those of an abandoned ship, sailing rudderless across a foreign sea. I could neither accord nor resist: I knew myself dead but horribly alive; and I found myself powerless to resist commands from the devil who now possessed me.
    â€˜Go there, Isabella’, said Heathcliff at last, when I had stood for what seemed a century on the threshold of the once-familiar room. ‘Go—and keep your tongue from wagging, or you’ll know the voice this one speaks’—and here a black leather belt, studded with gold, was brandished and a sneer, transforming the newly costumed gentleman into a brute, spread across his features. ‘Whatever you may see, you will inform no one’, were Heathcliff’s last words, as he propelled me towards a tall press that stood, as it had since my earliest days at The Grange, by the door that led onto the stairs and landing. And before I could fully accept, with a dreadful cold certainty, the absence of my true self at the inner core of my being, I was marched into the depths of the cupboard and left there, with only the keyhole for source of light and window onto my new master’s activities.
    At first I thought myself a child again, hiding in the silk gowns my mother kept in the press—and which remained there long after her death, for my poor father did not have the heart to move them. Then, attempting to gain a balance in my prison—and