And me? I was in Hell. But I kept my face composed, I nodded and smiled when folk expected me to. I made the right replies when called on to speak, but I could not manage to swallow a mouthful of the food. I was choked with hatred for my brother. And sick with sadness for Heathcliff’s misery, for I felt it all. More than that even, I was enraged by my own weakness. I was twelve years old and could do nothing to help Heathcliff. Not yet.

I was thirteen when Hindley’s son was born. Hareton was a bonny baby, sturdy and strong. But it seemed all his mother’s strength had gone into making him and Frances died not long after. My brother – who’d been brutal before – now became the very devil and Wuthering Heights the deepest pit of Hell. My lessons stopped. No one came near the house apart from Edgar, who’d rarely make the journey and only if Hindley was out drinking himself into oblivion.

Heathcliff took little satisfaction from Hindley’s self destruction. He feared my brother would kill himself before he’d the chance of taking his revenge.

I’d no fondness for Hindley, none at all. I didn’t much care what harm he did to himself. But I cared very much that he was dragging Heathcliff down with him.

Hindley reduced Heathcliff from servant to labourer. Every stinking task that no one else would do fell to him. Heathcliff worked from dawn to dusk and when I did see him he was so tired he could barely say a word. He became the very brute Hindley had always called him.

I would have combed the tangles from Heathcliff’s hair. I would have bathed his feet and scraped the muck from under his nails. I would have kissed away the pain of his blistered hands. But Heathcliff kept me at arm’s length – if I tried to touch him he’d push me away. He was so sullen, so surly. Every day Heathcliff grew further from me and there was nothing I could do to bring him back. It grieved me beyond bearing. I could not understand it.

And then there was Edgar: a ray of sunlight shining into the darkness. Edgar, who would listen when I spoke, his head tilted to one side, an expression of deep concentration on his face. It was as if Edgar wanted every word of mine to become fixed in his mind like print on the page. He would gaze at me as if he was trying to paint my face inside his eyelids so that he could still see it when I was not there. There was an innocence to Edgar, a sweetness that made him seem like an illusion. After he’d gone, I always felt I’d been dreaming and that I’d imagined him.

I’d first spoken to Edgar when I was twelve. For the three years after that I lived a kind of double life: there were two completely separate Catherine Earnshaws.