“I pray one prayer,” he told Nelly. “I will repeat it until my tongue is stiffened by death. Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living. You said I killed you – haunt me then! Be with me always, take any form – drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this void where I cannot find you! Oh, God! It is unbearable. I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul.”

“I am here,” I said again. “I am here.”

But Heathcliff was dashing his head against the trunk of a tree, howling, so maddened with pain that I could not reach him.

I was put in the ground, buried not in the family crypt but at the place where churchyard meets moor. That night Heathcliff went to my grave and dug down to where my coffin lay with his own two hands. He thought to pull off the lid, to hold me in his arms once more.

I whispered, “Don’t.”

He still could not hear me, yet he sensed I was there.

That sense of me has tormented Heathcliff for twenty years. He’d walk into a room and feel that I’d just left. If he went out, he’d think he’d meet me on the moor. If he was on the moor, he thought I waited for him at home. Heathcliff turned his head, expecting to see me. But he never did. I was there all the time, standing right beside him, but he was so blinded by hate that he could not see.

Time passed. Events moved on. So many tragedies. So many deaths.

Poor, silly Isabella ran away from Heathcliff not long after I died. Their son was born the same month Hindley finally succeeded in drinking himself to death. My brother was so deeply in debt to Heathcliff by then that Wuthering Heights went not to Hareton, who should have been the rightful owner, but to Heathcliff.

Hareton grew up ignorant and uneducated. Heathcliff kept Hareton as an unpaid servant, who loved and blessed him for it, for Heathcliff had saved Hareton from his father.

Heathcliff’s son grew up, as did my daughter. She had Edgar’s fair skin and blonde hair, and looked more like Isabella than me. She was a loving, devoted darling, and exactly what Edgar deserved.

Heathcliff had never seen nor taken interest in his son, but when Isabella died, he took the boy back to Wuthering Heights. He was a weak, miserable little thing, unlikely to live long, and had the Linton looks. There was nothing of his father, Heathcliff, in him. But the boy was a useful weapon, and Heathcliff was devious enough to compel my daughter to marry his son. Edgar died from the sorrow of their marriage soon after. Heathcliff’s son took the same fate a month later. My daughter was left an orphan and a widow, with her fate entirely in Heathcliff’s hands.