Free Heathcliff's Tale by Emma Tennant Page A

hope of obtaining further information on this curious and perplexing family.
    â€˜He would sit where you are now’, the landlord assured me, once the strong liquor, as fiery to touch and to stomach as any beverage served in the infernal regions could be; ‘Master Branwell would take as much as you, sir, and three times over, before it was time for him to find his way back to the Parsonage. It was impossible, on occasion, for the climb to be attempted. But you know all that, sir, I have no doubt. For all his oddities—and I believe I’ve seen a whole world slumbering in the eyes of that man, a country known only to himself and his sister—’
    â€˜Yes’, chipped in a man who moved from his pew and came to join me in the ‘snug’, a tankard of ale in his hand. ‘She had the patience, and he was blessed by good fortune to have a woman who’d carry him up to bed. Everyone said that. She’d wait up for him half the night,Miss Emily, for fear the parson would come to know of Master Branwell’s drinking. Yet they say, on the day he died, he rose to his feet when Mr Bronte entered the room and then he fell dead.’
    â€˜And what world did you see in Branwell Brontë?’ I enquired of my host once our new companion had buried his lower face in his ale. I had the impression the poetic sensibilities of the Black Bull’s proprietor would yield more than the prosaic delivery of the beer-drinker; though in this, as in so many other assumptions made at this time I was, as I must confess, completely in error.
    â€˜Oh, they whispered their plots and stories’, the publican confided, his excitement subsiding as he came to realise—or so it appeared clear—that the content of these ‘plots’ and stories were completely unknown to him. ‘She lasted only three months after he went, Mr—’ And I saw that my imaginative host, still filled with the spirits of the New Year’s Eve which had gone before, now tried to dampen his own while searching for some reassurance on the subject of my reliability.
    â€˜I was asked by my uncle, the London publisher Thomas Cautley Newby’, I began, aware I sounded pompous; and at once I knew myself rewarded by looks of ill-disguised merriment from others at tables in the inn. ‘I am in search of a manuscript written by a Mr Ellis Bell—or, as I am informed, a Miss Emily—’
    â€˜Master Branwell, he was writing when he died’, vouchsafed the ale-imbiber, his upper lip now adorned with a white foam. ‘His sister cared for him when he was poorly, she’d do anything for him. She had a temper on her, though: she’d beat her dog half to death, would Emily’.
    The landlord left us at this point; and John Brown came to sit by us, just as I had hoped to pursue my investigations. I had not thought before that I would regret the arrival of the sexton, when I had looked forward so keenly to speaking with him, and to thanking him for acting as my guide through the snow, even if he had not been conscious at the time of his kind actions. Now, however, I felt I’d more to gain from filling the now-empty tankard held aloft by my new friend; and once my offer had been accepted and he had gone off from the ‘snug’ to be replenished, I turned to Mr Brown for a brief exchange before my informant’s return. Something told me, I should say, that scandal or a secret of some kind lurked here at the Black Bull, and the sexton, mistakenly assumed at first by myself to be as outspoken or brutally frank a man as Heathcliff, would prove the last being on earth to confide it. In this, at least, I found I was correct in my assumptions.
    â€˜No’, said the handsome sexton, shaking his head firmly when I enquired whether Mr Branwell and Miss Emily Brontë had indeed ‘plotted’ in some way against others—maybe against members of their own family, when they had been