Heathcliff Is Not My Name: A Story from the collection, I Am Heathcliff. Michael Stewart

Чтение книги онлайн.

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

       Foreword by Kate Mosse

       Heathcliff Is Not My Name

      Note on the Author

      A Note on Emily Brontë

       About the Publisher

       FOREWORD BY KATE MOSSE

      SO, WHAT MAKES Wuthering Heights – published the year before Emily Brontë’s own death – the powerful, enduring, exceptional novel it is? Is it a matter of character and sense of place? Depth of emotion or the beauty of her language? Epic and Gothic? Yes, but also because it is ambitious and uncompromising. Like many others, I have gone back to it in each decade of my life and found it subtly different each time. In my teens, I was swept away by the promise of a love story, though the anger and the violence and the pain were troubling to me. In my twenties, it was the history and the snapshot of social expectations that interested me. In my thirties, when I was starting to write fiction myself, I was gripped by the architecture of the novel – two narrators, two distinct periods of history and storytelling, the complicated switching of voice. In my forties, it was the colour and the texture, the Gothic spirit of place, the characterisation of Nature itself as sentient, violent, to be feared. Now, in my fifties, as well as all this, it is also the understanding of how utterly EB changed the rules of what was acceptable for a woman to write, and how we are all in her debt. This is monumental work, not domestic. This is about the nature of life, love, and the universe, not the details of how women and men live their lives. And Wuthering Heights is exceptional amongst the novels of the period for the absence of any explicit condemnation of Heathcliff’s conduct, or any suggestion that evil might bring its own punishment.

      This collection is published to celebrate the bicentenary of Emily Brontë’s birth in 1818. What each story has in common is that, despite their shared moment of inspiration, they are themselves, and their quality stands testament both to our contemporary writers’ skills, and the timelessness of Wuthering Heights. For, though mores and expectations and opportunities alter, wherever we live and whoever we are, the human heart does not change very much. We understand love and hate, jealousy and peace, grief and injustice, because we experience these things too – as writers, as readers, as our individual selves.

       HEATHCLIFF IS NOT MY NAME

       MICHAEL STEWART

      YOU ARE WALKING THROUGH Butcher’s Bog, along the path at Birch Brink. You traipse across Stanbury Moor, to the Crow Stones. A morass of tussock grass, peat wilderness and rock. There are no stars to guide you, just the moaning of the wind. Stunted firs and gaunt thorns, your only companions.

      Perhaps you will die out here, unloved and unhomed. There was the tale of Old Tom. Last winter, went out looking for a lost lamb. Found a week on, icicles on his eyelids, half-eaten by foxes. Or was it the last wolf? Said to roam these moors. The ravens will eat out your eyes and the crows will pick at your bones. The worms will turn you into loam. You’ve forgotten your name and your language. Mr Earnshaw called you ‘it’ when first he came across you. Mrs Earnshaw called you ‘brat’ when first she took you by the chuck. Mr Earnshaw telt to call him father and Mrs Earnshaw, mother, but they were not your real parents. Starving when they took you in. They named you after their dead son. The man you called your father, carried you over moor and fell, in rain and in snow. When finally you got to the gates of the farm it was dark and the man could hardly stand. He took you into the main room and plonked himself in a rocker. By the fire you stood, a ghost in their home. Next to you a living girl and living boy, who spat and kicked. This was their welcome to your new hovel. Over ten years ago now. You’d spent weeks on the streets, eating scraps from bin and midden. Kipped by the docks and ligged in doorways. You’d trusted no one, loved no one, believed in nothing.

      It was tough in the new place but you’d had it worse. You’d almost died many times. You’d been beaten inside an inch of your life. Gone five days without food. Slept with rats and maggots. Nothing this new place had in store could harm you more than you’d been harmed before. Or so you thought. The girl was called Cathy, the boy Hindley, and you hated them apiece.