The House of Dead Maids Read online

  He burst into furious tears then, and went on blaspheming like a lost soul. I tried to soothe him, but he was inconsolable at his imagined loss. At length, the unnatural whelp sobbed himself to sleep.

  That night was an experience for which I scarcely have words, so far removed was it from the rest of my existence. After our harrowing escape, I had no fear to spare for the stream’s perils, and I listened with the greatest contentment to the quiet slap of water on rocks, the running whisper of the current, and the taps and creaks and croaks that rose with the mist around me. Overhead swung the glittering stars, and the bright moon shone down and lit the curling ripples on the water. At no time in my life have I been in greater danger from the elements, and yet if I learned that heaven is such as that night was, I should deem it a joy worth the dying.

  Morning broke, clear and chilly, over a broad river, down the center of which our frail craft rode. Dawn dyed the surface of the water rose-red, and then the rising sun turned it into a burnished mirror, while fingers of mist shone like spun gold. Himself awoke and gazed morosely over the expanse of flat water. He did not return my greeting.

  “Look there, a steeple in the distance,” I told him. “We’re coming to a town, and then we’ll have a bite to eat; that’ll cheer you up.”

  The little fellow did stand in need of cheering; it was strange to see him sitting so still. “I miss Rogue,” he muttered, wiping his eyes.

  “You left your pirate on that pagan rock of theirs, that Master’s Seat,” I said. “I saw him last night, but I couldn’t fetch him down.”

  Himself turned to me. “Then Arnby knows,” he said. “He knows I sat in his seat and I’m master after all.”

  “He’ll reach that conclusion, I suppose,” I said reluctantly.

  “Then he’ll not name a new master,” he said, growing animated. “He’ll search for me. He’ll wait till I come home.”

  “Home—that dismal hole?” I exclaimed. “You’ll not go there again.”

  “And you’ll not tell me what to do,” he rejoined. “Masters don’t take orders from maids.”

  “I only meant that it isn’t a suitable home for you,” I explained. “And Arnby is no friend to you, master or not. He locked you up, and he would have killed you last night. He doesn’t want what’s best for you.”

  “He wants what’s best for my land, and so do I,” he said. “I’ll grow bigger and stronger, and then I’ll find my way home. But you needn’t worry for your precious skin. I won’t take you with me. I’ll find a girl who’s fit to be maid.”

  “You’re all kindness,” I retorted, stung at his ingratitude. “What a fortunate young lady she’ll be.”

  “She must sing,” he declared. “And she must look better than you. I’ll not share my grave with a slattern.”

  “You wicked imp!” I cried. “This is the reward for my charity! Yesterday you begged me not to leave you.”

  “Yesterday I didn’t know you were false,” he said with such a miserable expression that it touched my heart, no matter how foolish I thought him. “You tricked me with your hide-and-seek game. But you didn’t mean to help me, you meant to help yourself. You knew what I wanted.”

  We reached the town, the name of which I took care not to learn. A boat hauling coal lay at anchor there, preparing to cast off, and the boatmen, seeing us adrift, snared our craft with hooks and brought us on board. When I learned they were headed downstream, we did not go ashore; instead, I offered to knit stockings for every man of the crew in exchange for our food and passage.

  Thus we came safe out of that accursed country, with not a footprint left behind to tell of our passing, nor a scent for the bloodhound to catch.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  That is almost all I have to tell. My travels over the succeeding months brought me to Haworth, where I found my surname among the new graves and Susanna Aykroyd welcomed me as family. Indeed, she had need of family then, with her parents carried off by infectious fever scant weeks before, and her brother George gone away to be a soldier. I taught her to knit as I did: Ma Hutton’s style of knitting was unknown in these parts, and our stockings fetched a good price. She taught me to read and write in return, and we soon opened our own knitting school, with her running the business side, as she was older, and me teaching the children.

  We gave out that we were sisters to lend an air of stability to our establishment, a harmless fiction that has long ago been accepted as truth, for Haworth is a modern town, all bustle and go; none can be acquainted with every one of its thousands of inhabitants, and the gossips have more than they can do to keep track of the bastard babies born in our midst before death can snatch their latest news away. And then, Susanna and I have been good sisters over the years, truer and more amiable relations than many bound by blood. As our school was a modest success and our needs were few, it follows that we prospered.

  For almost ten years, I did not tell a living soul of the events at Seldom House; nor did I think of them if I could avoid it. As the seasons came and went, I stopped scanning the streets for Arnby’s round face, and I began to believe that the sordid details of this narrative were episodes sealed in the past. But one fine summer evening not long after a shower of rain, I saw a woman standing in the street outside our rooms, looking up and down, as if she were unsure of the address. While the woman thus wavered irresolute upon the cobblestones, a man tramped by carrying a lantern, and I saw her features plainly. It was Miss Winter.

  Death had not been kind to that proud creature. Her dress was filthy, and webs and dirt clung in her hair. The glittering eyes that had told of her fear were gone, replaced by smooth pools of shadow. An instant she stood so, caught in the light of the lantern. Then she melted into the stones of the street. But I felt her spirit near me still, the spirit of the land itself. After nearly a decade of peace, I felt blind hunger flow through me from the dark places of the earth, and I knew that another sacrifice was taking place at Seldom House.

  My reason all but fled in the days that followed: brain fever, the doctors called it. Susanna was forced to close down the school for the time being and devote herself to my care. But we survived and even flourished by the change, for Amos Wood, the doctor’s assistant, spoke to Susanna, and they were wed as soon as my convalescence would allow. They set up housekeeping in a little cottage not far from our old rooms and invited me to join them.

  The three of us shared a happy home there for many years. The ghosts did not trouble me whilst we lived together, although they drew near at the time of the sacrifices. I would feel their presence beyond the window curtains; at such times, I took care to stay indoors. But Amos Wood had a bad chest, and he died by the seaside in 1823, whence the doctors had sent him to recover; and not long afterwards, Susanna went to Bingley to nurse her cousin Rose. In this way, I was left alone.

  On an evening during the winter of 1824, I was sitting by the fireside, sighing for happier times, when I heard a faint sound at the window. I took no notice at first, for the night was tumultuous, and the window glass rattled throughout the cottage, but the sound moved from pane to pane, low yet insistent, a tapping or scratching noise. Convinced at last that it was not the action of branches in the wind, I arose, opened a little window, and leaned out to see.

  An eyeless woman stood without, a most horrible visitant—the more ghastly, as she had at one time in life been excessively pretty; but the grave makes slatterns of us all. Her hair hung in untidy curls, and her slender frame stooped with fatigue, as though she traveled a weary road with no hope yet of reaching its end. Of all the maids, she alone was not in black, but wore a loose white dress. She was groping her way along a nearby window, clutching at the sill and turning her pale face with its shadowed sockets to and fro as if to catch a sound, or a scent.

  Head cocked, she paused; and then, by sound or scent, she found me, and she moved towards my window in a rush. I slammed it shut and bolted it and listened while she hammered against it so hard that I thought her fists would
break the glass.

  Terrified, I staggered back and huddled over the fire while that hideous wanderer circled my cottage, beating on the windows one after another as the wind moaned in dreary lamentation. Never did mortal flesh spend such a night as I did then, and how my wits survived it, I do not know. But I prayed that night as I had never prayed before, and there came to mind the kindly curate of my childhood. Ghosts cannot harm the living, he seemed to whisper in my ear, and his gentle faith sustained me in my hour of need.

  The first slanting rays of sunlight drove the gray-faced horror into the earth, and I bolted from my house and made for the parsonage. There I entreated the Haworth curate to take me into his household to work in exchange for my room and board. The Reverend Patrick Brontë was then bowed down with cares, a widower struggling to provide for his young children, and if there are those who call him a hard man, well, I call them liars, for no father ever watched over a family as anxiously as he. But gossips look for evil where none exists, to mirror the evil in their own soiled hearts.

  And that is how I came to live in the Haworth parsonage, in peace and contentment, for the dead maids dare not enter this quiet house where a man of God turns over the pages of his Bible. Sometimes on a stormy evening I see their spirits still as they gather beside the churchyard gate. But they cannot pass the holy ground guarded by the remains of countless Christians, and my good Susanna’s family among them.

  I cook the meals and keep the house for Mr. Brontë, and bake the family bread, and watch over his children, my four motherless lambs. Each morning, their father does his duty to instruct them in their faith, to which I say a hearty Amen. But when night falls, and the harsh wind scours the snow from the ground and casts it against our windows, and my little ones wrap up in shawls and creep downstairs to warm their frozen fingers by the kitchen fire, then I tell them tales that their pious father cannot know, about the red-eyed Gytrash, the slavering devil dog who waits for the wicked, and about the young girl who was murdered by her lover on the moor and who roams barefoot on the bleak hills yet. And this is as it should be, that the children should learn from us both, for bright day and dark night both work together unto good.

  While the wind howls, my lambs beg me to tell them again about Seldom House, with its hidden grave and its pagan rites and its catalog of masters and maids. Young Branwell plays with his toy soldiers at being the evil pirate Rogue, and Charlotte and gentle Anne throw their arms around my neck and swear that I will never be turned out of the house to face the dead maids, but they will keep me in my old age as faithfully as I keep them now. And Emily Jane sits at my knee, gazing into the fire, and asks what became of the heathen boy who escaped with me. Did he return to claim his house and lands, as he had promised to do? Did he forsake his Christian baptism to shed blood?

  Myself, I fear the worst for him, since the sacrifices have continued. Perhaps the ancient Master’s Seat exerted some diabolical influence that could not be undone by the water of salvation. But the truth is that I do not know what happened to the child. We parted ways within a few weeks of our escape.

  I had taken him with me, first on the boat and then through the strings of towns as I searched for a situation, but he was no longer the happy boy I had known. He had grown sullen and bitter, like a man who has seen his hopes die at the turn of a card; he did as I bade him, but if he spoke, it was to curse. I tried to love him, and I tried to cheer him, too, and show him the error of his ways, but he persisted in blaming all his troubles on me, who had stolen him from his land and his land from him. He swore he was the master yet, with the luck that belonged to the house, and I will say this, that he was very lucky, for I thought more than once I should have to watch him hang.

  We had reached Liverpool on a day so hot that we longed for the weather to break, and the clouds built into towers above us without giving a breath of sweet, cool air. My charge and I were dirty and hungry, and hot and miserable besides, with our nice black clothes worn to rags already by the hard days we had seen. I ordered him to wait for me while I sought us a bite and a sup, but when I returned, he was throwing dice with some other young rascals. I chased them away, and he swore at me again, and then I lost my patience and told him to seek his living how he liked, but I would help him no longer.

  “I don’t want your help,” he said. “I’ll do better than you. I was winning just now, and you spoiled my game.”

  “You’ll end up on the gallows, and I won’t be there to cry,” I retorted, and I went about my business.

  By afternoon, the towers of clouds had turned black and oily green, and the steaming heat was soon to be drowned in a violent deluge. My conscience smote me, and I went to seek the little boy again to find him shelter from the coming storm. You may imagine my dismay when I beheld him in the grip of a hale and hearty gentleman who had evidently witnessed a crime.

  “Do you know this young blackguard?” asked the man when I ran up. “He’s stolen my pears, but he’s only a lad; he needs a good hiding, not the magistrate and the hangman. I’ve tried to ask him about his parents, but I can’t seem to make him understand me.”

  At this, my former charge leered at me, and pulled a face, and jabbered away in his savage tongue.

  “Oh, sir,” I said, “your kind spirit does you credit, and I do hope you’ll show him mercy yet. It’s a sad tale, and if it ends on the gallows, it will be sadder still. His parents are dead; his mother was killed before his eyes, and those who should have shown him Christian charity plotted to kill him as well. The poor boy has not a soul in all the world.”

  “There now, that’s a good lass,” said the gentleman, plainly touched by my distress. “You say he’s an orphan, then, and ill used,” and he bent down to look Himself in the face. “You’re a sturdy lad, I’m thinking, even though you are on the small side, and you look as if you have your wits about you, too. Tell us, boy, what’s your name?”

  The little scoundrel glanced sidelong at me and bared his teeth just to spite me. “Heathen git!” he shouted. I was furious, but the gentleman stared as if he’d seen a ghost, and his hands began to tremble.

  “Heathcliff?” he said in astonishment. “Why, Heathcliff’s a family name. Heathcliff was the name of my own dead son.”

  A moment’s thought revealed his error, and I opened my mouth to speak, but by then he had made up his mind.

  “I’ll not leave a Heathcliff to beg for his bread in the street,” he declared. “You must come home with me to Wuthering Heights.” And he picked up the boy as tenderly if he had been his own son and walked away into the shadow of the storm.

  EPILOGUE

  Tabitha Aykroyd was housekeeper to the talented Brontë family, which gave English literature two classic novels, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. The Brontë sisters thought of dear “Tabby” as one of the family, and they looked after her devotedly in her old age. She is buried in the Haworth cemetery only a few dozen yards from the vault where Charlotte and Emily Brontë lie.

  This beloved servant was the daily companion of three authoresses, yet almost nothing is known about her. But the family’s first biographer, Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, mentioned the dark, otherworldly tales that Tabby told her young charges, and Ellen Nussey, a family friend, remembered that of all the siblings, Emily Brontë loved those wild tales the best.

  Much more detailed information about the Brontës and about Wuthering Heights, the novel that inspired this story, is available at the author’s Web site, www.claredunkle.com. You may find there photographs of Yorkshire, an analysis of the mysteries and motifs of Wuthering Heights, an exploration of some myths surrounding the Brontë family, and a select bibliography for further study.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Heartfelt thanks to Reka Simonsen for being the Platonic ideal of editorhood—practically perfect in every way.

  Warmest thanks to Patrick Arrasmith for creating the wonderfully atmospheric illustrations in this book. He has caught the dark heart of this story.

  My dee
pest gratitude to my mother, Dr. Mary Buckalew, Professor Emerita in the Department of English at the University of North Texas, for inspiring me with a love of Wuthering Heights before I could even read. My mother wrote her master’s thesis, Heathcliff: A Satanic Hero, four years before my birth, and when I was a little girl, she regaled me with thrilling stories from Emily Brontë’s life and masterpiece.

  Sincere thanks to Dr. Ronald Hutton of Bristol University, England. His scholarly works on paganism in the British Isles allowed me to interpret some of Wuthering Heights’s most perplexing passages in ways I would not otherwise have dared to do.

  Special thanks to Don Shelton, collector and researcher in the field of portrait miniatures, for graciously sharing his singular knowledge.