Anima: A Story from the collection, I Am Heathcliff

Published by The Borough Press

an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

In the compilation and introductory material © Kate Mosse 2018

Anima © Grace McCleen 2018

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

Cover design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Cover photographs © Sally Mundy/Trevillion Images, © Shutterstock.com petals

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This story is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical events and figures, are the works of the author’s imagination.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008257439

Ebook Edition © August 2018 ISBN: 9780008303143

Version: 2018-07-17

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Foreword by Kate Mosse

Anima

Footnotes

Note on the Author

A Note on Emily Brontë

About the Publisher

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 MEN ARRIVED IN the afternoon with horns and with dogs. Rain came in swathes; mist was cold on my skin. I slipped out after lunch. There was only packing to be done, and I didn’t want to stand and watch. ‘You’ll like it,’ they told me, ‘you’ll see. Just give it time. You’ll learn to be a lady,’ they said. ‘Oh miss, such airs and graces, you’ll have – you won’t know yourself!’

It was this that concerned me. ‘But can I come back?’ I asked them.

‘Of course,’ they said. ‘But you won’t want to. You’ll be so busy with your new life there. It’s time you grew up, anyway. You’ve been left to your own ways too long. You can’t stay here for ever. It’s time you went into the real world.’

I was sure I would be content to stay here, amongst these fields and woods, this hill, for the rest of my life; I did not care if I never discovered the ‘real’ world, but I said nothing. I could always run away, I thought; if the new place was as bad as I imagined, I could run away and come back here. But then I couldn’t stay; they would send me back. Could I live in the wild? I wondered, as I watched them label vests and socks; What would I need to survive there?

It wasn’t sadness I felt that day, but disbelief that this could be happening. I had never lived anywhere but here. I didn’t know if I could. It seemed inconceivable. I wasn’t sure how my body would function. So there was no sadness, only shock, only amazement that such a thing was taking place. Stupor, I suppose.