Nelly

I write to you as I can write to no other at this present moment. Least of all to Catherine. I leave it to you to intimate the contents of this letter as you see fit to her, or, if your mind takes such a strange turn, Hindley. You take odd actions too often, and I could not reach you easily to stop you from doing what you will.

I imagine now as I write, you sit in Wuthering Heights, still watching the sodden lad that is Hareton. And though my hand hates to write it, I think you are all alone at the Heights, for I would think Cathy is married. Is she not? I do not imagine she would wait – I remember perhaps more clearly than you her last words concerning me before I left. Perhaps I can almost understand why she chooses to marry a whey faced Linton –

No. I cannot. He has money, true, looks to make the angels sigh, and a position I suppose many would envy. But not Cathy. That desire for things pretty – that was never there before, no more than the manners she chose to adopt when the Lintons came by. Cathy – at least the Cathy I knew – would never abandon her true life. She is the moors, the grim house of Wuthering Heights, the broken Crags. Could she deny her own spirit, her very being? To marry a Linton would stifle her, Nelly. The fool would try to keep his precious bird in a gilded cage, and never let her fly; he would clip her wings. He could not understand Catherine, his essence is incapable of understanding her. He may well as be a fish desiring union with a bird – he is as cold and diluted as she is wild, free.

Nelly, I have rarely turned to prayer before. And yet I pray, with all the hopes and my fullest entity – that Cathy has not married Edgar Linton – that she has not walked willingly into a web. Perhaps you think I speak from selfish desires. I promise you, my desires are nothing compared to hers – I would see my own wishes broken to a thousand pieces by a Linton staff, before I put them before hers. If I thought she would be truly happy, truly content to be married with Linton, then my own feelings could go unrequited till death and beyond. But I know Catherine, perhaps better than she knows herself, and I know she cannot rest in a place like the Grange.

Perhaps now, in your reading, you wonder from where I write this epistle, from which forsaken place I am compelled to write these words. I am on the seas now, but no – more than that I won't say! Call it what you will, but I'll keep my affairs as dark as I perceive them to be, there. But beware to warn to Linton, or Hindley, if you can raise him from his stupor! Make them ware of the next time they think to talk ill of me. Maybe I shall stand just hidden from view, then make myself seen. They will be treated to a shock indeed, I think, and the thought affords me withno smallpleasure. Yes, Nelly, I will enjoy myself I think, on my return, if Cathy is indeed married. For I will return, sooner, rather than later. I could not bear to be anywhere else, not from the moors, not from my hated Wuthering Heights, and not from her. When I come, I'll never leave. Promise her that, if she waits.

Heathcliff.

He set his quill down, and gazed earnestly at the boundless sea that surrounded him. The waters, were, perhaps, not wholly unlike the moors. They were wild, dangerous, unpredictable, and left bare to whatever stormy weather took it. Around him, the men kept away from the outside, flinching at the harsh wind, its biting salt, its eerie moans. But he listened to it, intently, as if trying to make something out from its cries. For a while he merely stood, thinking, listening, his soul somewhere far from his body, his heart thudding in rhythm to one else's. He looked again at the letter in his hand, already creased and crumpled, black ink smudged by water, thought again of the recipient, a woman barely ten years his senior, with a strange affinity to his worst enemy. He listened again to the sobs and calls in the wind.
He threw the letter into the ocean.

Cry now Cathy. I will return.

A/N: One of my favourite books of all time, and just a little one shot I wrote after finishing it for the umpteenth time, and being struck by a few lines Heathcliff utters to Nelly at one point: "You suppose she has nearly forgotten me? Oh Nelly, you know she has not! ...At a most miserable period of my life, I had a notion of the kind, it haunted me on my return to the neighbourhood..."
It betrays one of those insecurities in Heathcliff that we so rarely see. And yes, I'm a shameless Heathcliff fan, despite that little insanity thing he's got going. I fan Nelly too, actually, despite all the hate that comes her way. I wrote a little piece on her and Hindley's relationship once. Maybe I'll put it up later...