Wuthering Heights Revisited Read online

  Wuthering Heights Revisited

  G. M. Best

  Contents

  Title Page

  Prologue

  1 Meeting Charlotte

  2 Unrequited Passion

  3 Suspicious Deaths

  4 A Scarborough Farewell

  5 Cathy’s Story

  6 The Cornish Connection

  7 Recollections of a Cornish Wrecker

  8 The Thrushcross Grange Letters

  9 Walter Hodges

  10 The Fire at Wuthering Heights

  11 The Return of Heathcliff

  12 Branwell’s Infernal World

  13 A Marriage and a Meeting

  14 The Death of Charlotte

  15 Where Lies the Truth?

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Ellen Nussey was Charlotte Brontë’s most long-standing friend. She died in 1897 in Moor Lane House in Gomersal in Yorkshire. Following her death, her possessions and letters were dispersed at auction, and many of Charlotte’s letters eventually made their way through donation or purchase to the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth in Yorkshire. What follows is a document that never became part of that collection or any other, one that has only recently been uncovered. If it is genuine, it totally changes our understanding of Charlotte’s character and, in the process, reveals the shattering truth about Heathcliff Earnshaw, the most powerful figure in her sister Emily’s novel, Wuthering Heights, and how he ultimately destroyed the Brontë family.

  1

  Meeting Charlotte

  I was puzzled to receive Charlotte’s letter in December 1836. It was so full of self-loathing. She, who had been my friend for five years, seemed to think I was ignorant of her true character. She said that her heart was a hotbed for sinful thoughts and that she yearned to be like me – a person who could aspire to be one of the saints. I did not recognize myself in this description. It was true that even then as a young girl I looked to my Redeemer for guidance, but I was no paragon of virtue. The letter seemed totally out of character. Normally Charlotte was full of how talented she was and how one day she would become a famous writer. What had brought her to such a depth of misery that she could only describe herself as being destined for damnation? I had no doubt that some people were, but surely not my dearest friend, not Charlotte Brontë.

  It is now almost sixty years since I opened that letter. It lies in front of me as I write this. I read again its opening lines: ‘If I could always live with you, and daily read the bible with you. If your lips and mine could at the same time drink the same draught from the same pure fountain of Mercy – I hope, I trust, I might one day become better, far better, than my evil wandering thoughts, my corrupt heart, cold to the spirit, and warm to the flesh will now permit me to be.’ Did she truly mean that? I would like to think that the letter was written in a genuine moment. Or was it penned simply to evoke my sympathy? The truth is that our friendship mattered far more to me than to her and for many years I was happy to bask in her shadow. I knew nothing of the guilty secrets that lay in her past and which made her feel one of the damned until circumstances led me to seek the truth about her.

  The prospect of my death has made me feel it is time that I wrote about what I uncovered so many years ago and my role in the tragedies that ultimately destroyed the Brontë family. After Charlotte’s death I was accused of betraying too much information about my friend to her biographer, Mrs Gaskell, but the truth is that I hid so much, so very much, from that gifted writer because of my love for Charlotte and her sisters, Emily and Anne. I feared that their literary reputation would be forever ruined if I disclosed the real truth and that my own standing would be seriously impaired. Such is their fame now that I am sure it will survive. As for me, I no longer care what people will say.

  My name is Ellen Nussey and my own early life can be told very briefly. I was born in 1817, the twelfth child of a prosperous cloth merchant who lived in Birstall, near Gomersal in the West Riding of Yorkshire. My parents wanted to provide me with a good education and I attended a small local school. My father, who was a kind and generous man, died when I was only nine years old and my brothers took over the family business. My mother ensured that I progressed first to the Gomersal Moravian Ladies Academy and then, in January 1831, to the newly opened and more fashionable Roe Head School, outside Mirfield. This was a kind of finishing school for young ladies and it was based in a fine, three-storeyed eighteenth-century mansion, which still stands alongside the road that leads to Dewsbury and overlooks the beautiful parkland of Kirklees Hall. Its headmistress was a clever and kindly woman called Miss Margaret Wooler and her four able sisters, Catherine, Susan, Marianne and Eliza, assisted in the running of the school. Miss Wooler took a motherly interest in all her pupils and I was to count her as not just a mentor but also a close friend until her death when she was in her nineties eleven years ago.

  It was at Roe Head that I first met Charlotte Brontë, who was a shy and nervous fellow pupil. She had arrived just eight days before me. On first showing she had little to commend her. She was small for someone approaching her fifteenth birthday and her dumpy figure was dressed in a dark, rusty-green dress that was patched in places and distinctly out of fashion. To this had been sewn what was obviously a homemade lace collar and cuffs. She was very plain of face because she had an overhanging brow, a large nose, and a mouth that was slightly crooked. It did not help that her head was overly large for her body and that her dry, frizzy, brown hair, which was screwed into tight curls through the use of heating tongs, emphasized this defect. She also seemed to be constantly staring at everyone through her reddish-brown eyes. Only later did I discover this arose because she was extremely short-sighted.

  Charlotte was terribly homesick, far more so than any of the other girls. I learned that her Irish father was a curate in Haworth and that her family had faced a triple tragedy – not only had her mother died ten years earlier, but also, in 1825, so had her older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, who were then aged only ten and nine. They and Charlotte had been sent to a newly opened school for the daughters of clergymen at Cowan Bridge in Lancashire. Charlotte had not only hated the overcrowded dormitories and inedible food, but also resented the ruthless cropping of her hair to which all the girls were routinely subjected. Her outspoken desire to return home had led to her being constantly vilified and she was cruelly made to feel that her mother’s untimely death must have been God’s punishment for her sinfulness. When Maria and Elizabeth contracted consumption, all three returned to Haworth, but then Charlotte was forced to watch her sisters die. She had looked on helpless as gobbets of blood had trickled out of their mouths from their failing lungs. She told me that the sound of their tortured breathing still gave her the most appalling nightmares.

  There was, of course, nothing in our school that was remotely like the harsh environment of Cowan Bridge and I tried to encourage Charlotte to take pleasure in its oak-panelled rooms and its sweeping lawns and sweet-scented rose garden and apple orchard, not to mention the fine panorama over meadow and parkland. Unfortunately I was unsuccessful, partly because she found the school’s structured day very irksome but mainly because she missed her family too much. Following the deaths of her elder sisters, she had understandably grown much closer to her brother, Branwell, who was just a year younger than her, and more protective towards her younger sisters, Emily and Anne, who were aged thirteen and ten. It was in one of our conversations about them that Charlotte gave me the first hint of that self-condemnation whose cause I was later to discover. She told me there were aspects of her character that she had to strive to conceal and suppress and that I should understand that her brother and sisters were fa
r worthier than her.

  Some of the girls teased Charlotte because of her ugly and stunted appearance and her squinting eyesight, and others were amused at her ignorance of some very basic skills and social graces and mocked her occasionally Irish accent. She took to staying apart from their games, preferring to read books, but the sight of her squinting at these only caused further mockery. She would hold each book so close to her face that it would almost touch the tip of her nose. The girls thought it unnatural that she should desire to possess knowledge of poetry, art, literature and politics and were resentful of her easy grasp of things that were beyond their range of thinking. However, my mother had taught me to be kind and so I took pity on her and comforted her as best I could, as did another girl called Mary Taylor, who was the elder daughter of a cloth manufacturer in Gomersal. She shared a bed with Charlotte in our dormitory and was stunningly beautiful, so much so that I still remember how our headmistress, Miss Wooler, used to say that she was too pretty to live for very long. The three of us became great friends, though we were dissimilar in appearance, aptitude and temperament. Gradually Mary and I persuaded the other girls to look on Charlotte with greater kindness. It helped that one of Charlotte’s gifts was storytelling and that all the girls began to look forward to the tales she would spin at bedtime.

  I soon discovered that Charlotte was far more academically gifted than me. I was judged dull by comparison. She soon moved from being bottom of the junior class to the top of the senior one, outshining all except Mary, who was not only highly intelligent but also more assertive. I was a conformist, keen to obey the school rules and do what society deemed appropriate in terms of dress and behaviour, but Mary encouraged Charlotte to challenge accepted behaviour and opinions. I remember her saying to Charlotte that she must think of a life beyond the confines of her home. ‘It is better, Charlotte,’ she said, ‘to try all things and find all empty, than to try nothing and leave your life a blank by burying your talents in your home in Haworth.’ Then she laughed and joked, ‘Do you want to take each gift and deposit it in a broken-spouted teapot or shut it up in a china closet among tea things or smother it in piles of woollen hose or hide it in a tureen of cold potatoes, to be ranged with bread, butter, pastry and ham on the shelves of the larder?’ Many years later Charlotte depicted Mary as the feisty Rose Yorke in her novel Shirley.

  In one of her more open moments, Charlotte informed me that she had been sent away from home not only so she could acquire the skills to become a governess but also in order that she would spend less time with her brother Branwell. Her father had judged the intensity of their relationship inappropriate. The bright spot of her week was always when she received a letter from Branwell, though she never shared its contents with me. Once I managed to get hold of one of his letters whilst she was out, but I found his handwriting mostly illegible and the little of the contents I could vaguely decipher confusing. I once also sneaked a look at the contents of Charlotte’s homemade, stitch-bound notebooks, although she had banned any of us from reading them. They were filled with a virtually illegible script, and seemed to largely be about imagined adventures in Africa and in a kingdom called Angria. Only years later did Charlotte talk to me about the fantasy worlds she and Branwell had created and how, whilst at school, she had secretly transformed me and other girls into characters within them.

  On one occasion Branwell turned up at our school, having walked sixteen muddy miles to give his sister a birthday present. Given Charlotte’s rapturous idealization of him, he was a huge disappointment to me. It was obvious that he was not accustomed to being in polite society and he was quite short in stature, unpleasantly thin, and far from good-looking. His forehead was bumpy, his nose was overly large, and his slightly retreating chin conveyed weakness. It did not help that his face was freckled and that his reddish hair, which he had tried to brush into a Byronic style, was thick and matted. Because he shared Charlotte’s eyesight problem, he also wore unattractive spectacles and, even worse, rarely looked you in the face. Instead he tended to stare at his feet or hands. His physical failings were matched by clothes that were dirty and sweat-marked and too small for him and by a strange manner that was far too excitable and impetuous and unpredictable for my liking. Nevertheless, I could see Charlotte was completely overjoyed at his presence.

  When I tried to ask Branwell questions about his sisters, he answered flippantly. He said that I had to understand his sisters were honoured to have him as their brother. He described Charlotte as a broad, dumpy thing, Emily as a lean and scant creature, and Anne as an absolute nothing. ‘What?’ I said. ‘Is she an idiot?’ ‘Next door to it,’ was his joking response. Charlotte took no offence at these remarks but laughed and then took him away. It was obvious that she had no desire to share his company with us and we saw little of them for the rest of the day. Once he had headed back to Haworth, she could talk of nothing but his visit. She said with total conviction that her brother was destined for greatness. It was not until the next day that she repented that she had not asked him more about her sisters and about her aunt, Miss Elizabeth Branwell, who had come from Cornwall to care for them all after their mother’s death.

  By the summer of 1832, it was decided Charlotte’s education was complete enough for her to cease attendance at Roe Head. She and I agreed to remain in contact via letters. When term ended and the time came for us to separate and return to our respective families, she wept. She, who had once desired nothing more than to return home, now bemoaned that she was to be confined to the monotonous life of Haworth. Her new role was to simply pass on what she had learned to her sisters, Emily and Anne – a task she was to fulfil within the parsonage for the next three years. In July 1832 she wrote this in a letter to me:

  An account of one day is an account of all. In the morning from nine o’clock till half past twelve I instruct my sisters and draw, and then we walk till dinner. After dinner I sew till teatime, and after tea I either read, write, do a little fancy work, or draw, as I please. Thus in one delightful, though somewhat monotonous course, my life is passed. I have only been out twice since I came home.

  I invited her to come and stay with my family in our house, the Rydings, the following month in order to cheer her up. Her father was quick to grant his permission but he made it a condition of her visit that her brother Branwell should accompany her. He loved my home, particularly because it had mock battlements that appealed to his military tastes, and he compared walking in our lovely grounds to a stroll through paradise. Charlotte was equally taken and I am proud to say that years later she based Mr Rochester’s home in Jane Eyre on the Rydings and Briarfield Church in Shirley on St Peter’s, the church that my family attended. For three weeks we all thoroughly enjoyed each other’s company and both Branwell and Charlotte were therefore loath to return home. Charlotte promised that she would persuade her father to invite me to stay with them.

  I first visited the small, grey parsonage at Haworth in July 1833. The large village had nothing to commend it. Its bleak main street was lined with dismal buildings and I had to cover my nose with my handkerchief because of the stench that arose from the damp, soot-soaked air and the effluvium that flowed from privies and open cesspits. As I rode in a gig up the steep hill, dirty, unwashed people gathered in many of the doorways to stare at me, their hostile and prematurely aged faces showing not the slightest hint of welcome. At the top of the village, there was an ugly mix of cottages and back-to-back houses that were obviously hugely overcrowded. I saw a number of people queuing to get water from a well, but what they were collecting looked green and putrid. It was safer to drink alcohol and I was not surprised to hear the sound of drunken revelry from each of the three public houses that we passed, especially the last, which stood at the foot of the church steps and was named the Black Bull.

  From what Charlotte had told me, I knew that Haworth suffered from a very high death rate – worse even than London – and having seen the squalor of the place I was not surprised. Not
that I had seen the worst because there were places where entire yards were filled with a stinking combination of rotting rubbish, discarded offal and the refuse of privies and where, when it rained, the foul mix found its way into those damp cellars where the poorest families had to live and work. I found it hard to understand why Charlotte had yearned to return to such a miserable place. The graveyard bore evidence of many new graves and, during my stay at the parsonage, I was to find it depressing that it was rare not to hear the ‘chip, chip’ of the mason cutting fresh headstones in a nearby shed or the toll of the funeral bell. However, I also came to appreciate that the parsonage was almost the last house at that side of the village and so it overlooked miles of moorland. This vast open space was Charlotte’s real love and she and her sisters seldom ventured into Haworth itself.

  A cobbled lane led, via the graveyard, to the parsonage and church. I did not regret my journey when I saw the excited smile on Charlotte’s face as she stood waiting for me at the gateway. She had heard the sound of the gig as it neared her house and hastily come to greet me. Once I entered the house, Miss Branwell appeared, dressed all in black. This did not surprise me because Charlotte had warned me that her Aunt Elizabeth always wore the colour of mourning, despite many years having passed since her sister’s death. She was small and stout, plain in feature and in form, eccentric in manner and, to my young eye, very antiquated in appearance. She wore wooden patens instead of shoes, a gown that was obviously old, and a jacket that had long been out of fashion. On her head was a frightful white frilly cap that stood a quarter of a yard broad around her face. This served only to emphasize her unattractive upturned nose and her dormouse cheeks, and it also drew attention to the fact that she was obviously wearing a false-piece of auburn hair. She offered me a pinch of snuff from a gold box – a habit that had long ceased to be fashionable. I courteously declined but I appreciated that it was her way of treating me with all the care and solicitude due to a weary traveller.