Free Heathcliff's Tale by Emma Tennant Page B

still children, with unpleasant consequences. ‘No, Mr Newby’—for he had heard my name, and at least, as I noted with some satisfaction, spoke it respectfully. ‘There was a time when the two were together without their siblings, at the Parsonage. The sisters had gone off to teach, or were at school. There were—’ and here John frowned, while searching for the word. ‘There were intimations that the works of a poet who lived far from God influenced their thinking, for they spoke to each other in a way that was, for that brief time, quite dissimilar from their previous allusions or way of speaking.’
    â€˜And who was that?’ I enquired, not wishing to show my sense of sudden regret at the absence of knowledge on the subject of poets or other literary matters. ‘You intrigue me, Mr Brown.’
    But at that moment the beer-drinker reappeared, brimming tankard in hand, and joined us on the wooden bench, while the landlord came forward with an armful of stout logs and piled them on the fire. ‘If you wish to know my opinion’, said the man with his mug of ale, once a long draught had been taken and the foam had risen up his cheeks again, ‘they each said they wrote books—but it was he who showed me a letter that proves he was the writer, out of the two of them’.
    â€˜And what letter is that?’ asked John Brown in icy tones, before I could discover more on the subject of the brother and sister so recently interred in the churchyard adjacent to the Parsonage. ‘I would thank you—’and here the mild-mannered sexton positively glowered at the man who buried himself once more in his beer—‘I would be glad if you would not confuse matters so indiscreetly, Sam’.
    At this, and in response to a New Year’s greeting called out by an arrival at the Black Bull, a jovial-looking man with a younger companion, the sexton rose and hurried away to return the season’s good wishes. My new friend—if I may call him such: perhaps all new friends start as appearing to be inveterate gossips and gain our affection that way—leant towards me on the bench. His beer breath came strong at me; but I did not shrink from him, for a bundle of papers was fished from the depths of his coat and pushed across the table towards me. By a miracle—for so I was to consider it later—no one saw the transaction, and the sheaf of closely written pages was transferred to my bag while the inn-keeper served those who had just come in, and the other patrons of the Black Bull entered some kind of singing which took upevery scrap of their energies. ‘The letter is from Heathcliff, said my supplier (for such he was, of the most powerful substance I had tasted, that of the written word). ‘I heard you when you came in here asking Mr Brown if he should be Mr Heathcliff—and I am here to inform you that I understood the jest, sir—Mr Brown was indeed a friend to Mr Branwell, and Mr Branwell it was, who gave me this.’
Editor’s Note
    The authorship of the following ‘letter to Mr Lockwood’ has become the subject of considerable controversy worldwide (in academic circles, that is: the ‘man on the Clapham Omnibus’, should such a being continue to exist, has little interest in the hand wielding this particular pen. Celebrities rule the book world these days, so it is widely believed)
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    To us, however, the fact that the script closely resembles that of Branwell Brontë is of enduring fascination. If Branwell was the author of this ‘letter’, is it proof of his identification with Heathcliff? If this is the case, did the drunken failure in whom the family placed all their hopes, entertain a passion for his sister Emily which sparked the incestuous love (for many considered Heathcliff to have been old Earnshaw’s son) between that devil and Cathy? This possibility has been ignored in recent biographies of