Heathcliff's Tale by Emma Tennant

the poet and author of
Wuthering Heights,
but we feel duty bound to record it here
.

Chapter Nine
    Dear Mr Lockwood
… the letter began. (Apart from a date, 1802, scrawled in a shaky hand at the top of the page, there was no indication of the provenance of the missive.)
    â€¦ I awaited your visit when spring came this year—which will, I have no doubt, be my last. Do not grieve for me, for I rejoice at leaving a world so long without life, where the moor is dead without the sound of her step or her voice, and where the only spot I care to visit is the quiet hillside where she lies asleep.
    I write because I must tell you of my return from the West Indies and what I found here when I came.
    I had hopes—more than hopes: you might say expectations—of finding myself welcomed with a passion all the more ardent for having waited three long years for my reunion with Cathy. I left the docks at Liverpool a rich man—where a poor stable lad had embarked all that time ago. I disembarked with the means to make my wife blaze with the gold and jewels, the rubies and fine gowns to render her the most admired and envied woman in the country. That Cathy wished for none of these I knew well; but I had resolved in advance that she should flaunt my wealth occasionally, if only to remind the worldthat she had married a man of substantial means, who housed her like the queen she has always shown herself to be.
    Yes, I expected her to marry me. I saw her—as I did a hundred times a day—standing in the kitchen with the old housekeeper you know well, Mr Lockwood, and this time, seeing me lurking in the gloom outside, she would run to the door and hold out her hand to me and we would fall into each others’ arms. It was all a foolish mistake: I heard her say this a hundred times also—she had jested, she had no love for the weakling Edgar Linton, and had never loved anyone but me. Well, you must know the outcome of my own foolish dreams by now, Mr Lockwood—you will have heard the story from Nelly Dean. And all the county knows, with a quarter of a century gone by, how Miss Catherine Earnshaw did not wait for the lowly labourer (as her brother Hindley had made of me, but more of that later: too much, even, I daresay). Miss Earnshaw was not to be Mrs Heathcliff—and even as I write this to you after such an expanse of time, my hand curls around my pen and lifts it to the ceiling, before crashing down on table, paper and inkwells, so hard is it to rein in the rage and bafflement felt then and remembered just as vividly today. Miss Earnshaw had already, as I learned from the jeers of her odious brother, married Mr Linton and was ensconced, with all the comforts a gentleman can provide for his bride, at Thrushcross Grange.
    It was dark and a moonless night, and I had travelled the best part of three thousand miles to arrive at the home I had always dreamed would one day be mine and hers. I had plans to offer a large slice of my fortune to Hindley, to give up his ownership of The Heights in favour of one who kneweach mile of heather and bogland and mossy turf like the back of his hand. How unlike we were! For Master Hindley Earnshaw, who had gone deep into his drinking habits before I left for the Americas, would by the time of my return hardly be able to leave the house without stumbling and finding himself lost in a ditch or beck quite unfamiliar to him. Whereas the one who held the house in his heart and loved it with the same attention and care as did his beloved Cathy—was, Mr Lockwood, none other than the orphan brought back from Liverpool by old Mr Earnshaw and loved in turn by the old man over and above his own son. It was I, Heathcliff, who had the right to old Joseph Earnshaw’s home—and to his daughter, too. She loved me. We had grown together like stalks of bracken on the moor: twined, inseparable.
    Hindley leaned from an upper window of The Heights and laughed when he saw me