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of the bed. I had sent Mr Newby to sleep, so I supposed, by recounting the sad lives of those sisters in this remote place. But, as I went to pull the curtain aside, a pale hand shot out to grasp mine.
    â€˜You have neglected one person in your account, Mrs Woodhouse’, came a low, urgent voice from within. ‘What became of Heathcliff? I do not hear of his life or fortunes from you, madam. Is he alive but forgotten by all of you? Is that the reason for your refusal to speak of him?’
Editor’s Note
    We would have liked to have had the satisfaction, here, of informing hapless readers of these ‘statements’, ‘depositions’, ‘fragments’ and the like, that Henry Newby’s visit to Mrs Woodhouse was a fiction, possibly his first foray in the world of creative writing. Mrs Woodhouse did not exist: the budding author’s imagination took over, and in his desire to portray a woman’s voice and view of himself, he ran riot amongst the real inhabitants of Haworth and the fictional characters
of Wuthering Heights.
    This, unfortunately, can be seen not to be the case. Parish records show J. Woodhouse and his wife Cecily to have been in residence at the farmhouse on the fringes of the village in the year 1849, although Mrs Woodhouse was that year removed from the parish register. We may conclude that Henry Newby was unable to resist taking the real name of the woman whose farmhouse he visited and then, in his eagerness to revisit the novel which by now seemed so much more real to him than the mundane existence he found there, gave her as kinswoman the famous Nelly Dean
.
    The above led us, with the assistance of the University of York, to search for an Ellen Dean in the vicinity. Had Emily Brontë perhaps taken her moorland Scheherezade from real life? Enquiries have so far produced no answers
.

Chapter Eight
The Deposition of Henry Newby
    It is difficult to set down—even to recall correctly—the succession of events following the speech of the shepherd’s wife on that bleak New Year’s morning of 1849. There was a scuffling downstairs, followed by the dog’s name bellowed out by a man as bad-tempered as might be expected after suffering a snowstorm on the hill and very probably the death of three or four of his ewes. ‘Heathcliff!’ the husband—as I took him to be—of my informant shouted out a few more times, the word jarring in my ears along with my own plaintive request of the good woman that she tell me the story of the man I now pitied and loved and would never scorn, for all the evil deeds laid to his name. ‘Heathcliff!’ shouted the farmer—and I heard the door bang out at the back and three or four others set off, whistling in long, shrill bursts to the collie, to go seek in deep drifts those members of the flock lost since the last ravages of the storm.
    I decided to wait no longer. Mrs Woodhouse, as I was to discover was her name, had run from the room and down the stairs, and a fine to and fro started up, succeeded by the clatter of a spoon against a pot and a chair scraping across the flags, this joined by another.
    I crept from the box bed where I had lain hidden and made my way onto the sloping roof above the pantry, by way of a small window rimed with snow and frost but surprisingly amenable to my thumbnail and a strong tug when it came to be needed. I slipped and slithered down to the ground, dislodging parcels of snow as I went. I was able to observe, once on the ground, that the men were a good hundred yards off, climbing the hill with their heads bent as they searched the terrain. The dog ran ahead of the men, stopping once to paw the snowy hillocks and whimper, when they had got nearly to the cairn at the summit of the hill.
    I eased myself round the side of the house. However tempted I might be to enter by the back door, I resisted the urge. In any case, I felt no interest in looking through the kitchen