There was a moment’s hush. A moment’s perfect stillness. I looked into the boy’s crow black eyes. We both looked so deep that somehow – don’t ask me how – our souls seemed to tumble headlong into each other. I was speechless. My heart beat so hard against my ribs I feared they might break.

Then Father hit me. “Mind your manners,” he said, and gave me a great slap to the side of my head that sent blood rushing to my ears. I did not cry and for that I was called cold and unnatural.

The rest of that evening is something of a blur now. Father and Mother must have gone to bed, leaving Nelly in charge. The boy got a violent washing from her, for Nelly liked the intruder as little as Hindley did. She did not care how icy was the water or how hard the scrubbing brush. Nelly fetched out an old nightshirt of my brother’s, a garment far too big for the boy. After that, Hindley would not allow him into the room we shared. Nelly bolted the door against the boy and he spent that first night curled on the landing outside Father’s room like a dog.

But I remember one thing clearly. I didn’t object to Nelly’s treatment – not because I agreed with it but because I was too shocked, too stunned to say or do anything. Something strange had happened to me in that moment after I’d spat in his face and before Father had hit me. Something I had no words to describe.

*

In the morning, Father tripped over the boy on the landing. He soon discovered how his foundling child had been treated by Nelly and was so enraged he sent the maid packing. But her banishment didn’t last more than a week, for it was hard to get servants to come to a house as remote as ours and Mother couldn’t manage without her. By the time Nelly returned, the beggar boy had been named Heathcliff and he and I were as close as needle and thread. My soul was not confined in my body any more – it had spilled across to his. I was Heathcliff. He was me. And the two of us together were bigger than the sky and freer than the wind.

Two years passed. The affinity Heathcliff and I had would have been strong under any circumstances, but the hatred we shared towards my brother made our bond as solid as granite.

From the very outset, Hindley could not forgive Heathcliff’s existence nor Father’s fondness for the “bastard brat”, as Hindley called him. My brother might have managed things better had he been cunning or clever. Hindley could have bided his time. He could have smiled at Heathcliff and pretended to be friends while quietly undermining him. But Hindley was a sledgehammer of a lad who swung blindly at whatever angered him and ended up knocking out only himself.