Alison Case - Nelly Dean

‘You will want your new brown dress, won’t you, Nelly?’ was her first query, and then ‘Mama, may Nelly borrow your old valise?’ and next, ‘What is she to do for gloves, Mama? Yours would be too small for her,’ and ‘Will she need a clean apron?’ By the time all these questions and more had been settled, and Cathy had dragged the packed valise to the top of the stairs for Hindley to carry down, I had to acknowledge she had done a better job than I could have in my present addled state. Nor were we much behind the half-hour Mrs Thorne had allotted to us to get ready. Mrs Earnshaw hugged and kissed and cried over me, assuring me all the while that I would be back soon enough, and my mother with me. Then she dug a crown out of her purse to bestow on me, and I shook hands with all the children and the master too (he had come in in the meantime), and the master told me to be a good girl, and we climbed into the carriage, and were off.

At Gimmerton we exchanged the pony and carriage for a post-chaise, and drove on to Brassing at the fastest pace the post-boy could be coaxed to permit, stopping only to change horses again. All this was very new to me, and would have been a wondering pleasure, but in me both thought and feeling seemed stuck in one round. I didn’t know which I feared more: that my father would die before I arrived, or that he would be alive, and not pleased to see me. Mrs Thorne seemed to understand something of what I was feeling, for she talked but little herself, and asked almost nothing of me.

Brassing, when we finally drew nigh, looked to be a much larger town than Gimmerton, but it had little else to recommend it that I could see. The houses were of grey stone, and crowded together all higgledy-piggledy, and the air was thick with an acrid miasma composed of coal smoke mingled with the smell of open privies. The post-boy let us down at the top of a narrow lane, next to a small public house. Mrs Thorne said we would stop in there to get ready. Inside, she carried out a whispered consultation with the landlady, who then produced a pair of pattens for each of us. Mrs Thorne pulled a packet of pins from her bag, and said we must pin up our skirts, and strap on the pattens, before venturing into the lane, for it was ankle-deep, or worse, in dirt. I was in a trembling hurry to be on our way, but she assured me, on the landlady’s information, that there was no immediate cause for haste. Once equipped, we set off down the lane. Mrs Thorne kept a tight grip on my arm, which was just as well, as I was unaccustomed both to pattens and to cobblestones, and until I found my feet, each step threatened to pitch me head-foremost into the muck. From halfway down that lane, we turned into another still narrower, and at the end of it I saw my mother standing in a doorway. Mrs Thorne restrained me from rushing forward, but quickened her pace, and in another minute I was in my mother’s arms. Mrs Thorne stayed only to receive my mother’s thanks for fetching me, and then went on her way back up the lane.

‘How is Father?’ I asked, as soon as I caught my breath.

‘He’s resting,’ she said, and then set me on a stool in the entryway and began removing the pattens and taking the pins from my skirt. That done, she declared me fit to step indoors. The cottage had two small rooms, but the door to the bedroom was shut. My mother sat me down by the small fire, and fetched me tea and some sweet biscuits. For some time, she would not let me speak, only directing me to eat and drink instead. I would have thought that I had no appetite at all, but the tea awakened it, and between it, the biscuits, and some bread and cheese that followed, I found the haze lifting that I had been in since Mrs Thorne’s first news.

‘Do you think Father will wake soon?’ I asked at last. ‘When will I be able to see him?’ My mother knelt beside me and put her arms around me. Her eyes were filled with tears.

‘Oh Nelly, he will never wake more in this world,’ she said. ‘He went to his final rest some three hours since. He asked for you near the end, though, to say farewell, and to beg your forgiveness for his early cruelty to you.’ This opened the floodgates at last. I sobbed myself into exhaustion on her shoulder, and she sobbed as well. Then a woman opened the door to the bedroom to say that all was ready – she had been engaged to wash his body and lay it out. So we went in, both of us, and I saw my father. The stone had struck his chest, so his face was his own, only paler and thinner than I remembered. I bent down and kissed his cold cheek – the first kiss I ever bestowed on him, that I remember, and the last.

My father lay in state for two days, so that his friends and neighbours could come to pay their respects. Mr and Mrs Thorne were among the first, and they spoke simply and frankly of their respect for my father, and their regret that they should have been in some manner the cause of his death, and Mr Thorne shed real tears for his boyhood friend. They also left with us a hamper of food, containing a ham, a large Dundee cake, a block of good Cheddar cheese, and a packet of fine tea, to feed ourselves and to offer to the other mourners as they came. There were a good many of them, for all my father’s residence in the town had been so short – all the men who had worked with him or under him on the house, and all those whose acquaintance he had made in the pub. My mother’s milk customers came too, and the wool-comber next door with his children. Their grief was very real, though I think it was less for my father himself than for the imminent departure of my mother and her cow.

My mother did not wish my father to be buried in Brassing, where the churchyards were all crowded and airless. The weather being cool, she resolved to transport him back home, to be buried in the churchyard at Gimmerton. The Thornes very kindly arranged all this, so we had only to pack up the household’s few things to put in a hired wagon (not the one the coffin was in, to my relief) and tie Reenie to the back of it, before setting off home. Our progress going back was considerably slower than mine had been on the way, but another day brought us within sight of my parents’ cottage. Reenie grew excited then, and threatened to overset the wagon, so my mother untied her, whereupon she tossed her head and took off at a slow, lumbering gallop towards the barn.

‘Well, she is not sorry to shake the dust of Brassing from her feet, at any rate,’ said my mother.

And so we settled back into our old places – I at the Heights, and my mother at the cottage, which she had resolved to keep. I used most of my small stock of savings to buy myself a full suit of mourning, and made much of my grief for my father. Had I known what was coming, I would have saved my tears.

I did not dare to speak to you of her death – the mistress’s, that is – how it tore us all apart, and left wounds that never did heal. Yet if I didn’t mention it to you, you might have asked about it at any time, and caught me unawares, and that would be worse. So I gabbled over it as fast as I could, and in the wrong place, too, so that I had to go back and tell things that came before it, as if they were after. But this is cool paper, that soaks up all I tell it without remark, and I am not so grieved now as I was then, either, by all that happened in those days.

It began with the measles. It was midsummer. My mother, I forgot to mention, had left her little cottage. It proved lonelier than she had expected, she said, without my father. And then Mrs Thorne, who had been much impressed with my mother’s good sense and practical energy, wrote to ask if she would come back to Brassing to manage the dairy Mrs Thorne had been persuaded by her to establish. She offered generous terms, including the purchase of all my mother’s cows, and my mother thought it best to accept. But her cows were not all as fresh-footed as young Reenie, and so my mother, as she put it, ‘turned drover for a time’, driving the cows before her at an easy pace, taking frequent rests, and boarding at farmhouses along the way.