The Cord: A Story from the collection, I Am Heathcliff. Alison Case

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

       Foreword by Kate Mosse

       The Cord

      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.

       THE CORD

       ALISON CASE

      HE REACHED THE CRAG just as the clouds finished blotting out the moon, plunging him into perfect darkness. No rain, as yet, but a distant flash and crack of thunder told him it would come soon. Blinded, he dropped to his hands and knees, feeling for the edge of the stone and then the path that ran down along the far side of it. He crawled slowly down, backwards so that he faced up the hill, checking always that the stone was on his left, until he came to the bottom edge of the crag. Then he turned right. There was barely a path here; it was a matter of keeping level, moving neither up nor down the hillside, feeling for the slight gaps in the weeds, and checking what he felt against the map of his memory. It had been years since they were last here together, but before the old master died they had come often. Feeling in the darkness, he plunged his hand straight into a patch of nettles, and drew it back with a curse. But it reassured him – he remembered those nettles, or thought he did. It was hard to judge distance, crawling slowly where he was used to scrambling with confidence, but if he was right, he was halfway to his goal. The sting of the nettles was good, too. It kept him in the present, kept him sharp, and he needed that, because the thunder was getting closer and the first drops were falling. He could not let the storm find him on this open hillside. He moved a little faster, then stopped, suddenly confused. Had he gone too far? Did the path, if it was a path he was on, lead straight to the cave, or pass underneath it? He could not remember.

      Another flash of lightning came to his rescue. It showed him the cave, directly uphill, further up than he had thought. Quickly, while the image remained burned on his eyes, he scrambled up towards it, until he felt the bare earth that floored it, and then knocked his head on the low overhang of rock above it. The heavens opened then. By the time he had worked himself into the back of the cave, away from the rain, he was wet, but not soaked through. Good enough, he thought. It would be a grim night, but that was nothing new. He curled himself into a tight ball and shivered. There was nothing to do but wait: for the rain to pass, for his body’s warmth to dry his clothes, if it could, for daytime. One thing he could be sure of – there would be no sleep for him, not at this distance from Cathy, and certainly not with his blood still racing at her words.