Heathcliff's Tale by Emma Tennant Read Free Book Online

walk in with them upright. I remember we ate fish, and I would dig holes in the ice to catch them; and at one time I had an eel between my teeth and a fish in either hand; though I had to run up a tree, which I could do with ease even at that age, to escape those who wanted to seize them from me.
    â€˜When the ship came in, I was dragged to the far end of the hut and black paint was put on me, covering my whole body. People were laughing; and the disguise was a caprice of the Captain or of someone who wished to sell me as a slave when once we reached the West Indies.
    â€˜For this was where we were bound, in the great ship. As we sailed into warm seas I made a friend of a Negro boy, who had come over from an island in the West Indies and was now taken back there, to go into slavery also. We used to make signs with our hands to each other, for we knew nothing of each other’s language. At first, my friend the Negro lad would take my handsand spread my fingers out, to stare at them in amazement. For it was true that my thumb and first finger were longer by far than his, or anyone else’s on board ship. This came from climbing the trees and grasping the branches, which I had learned to do even when they were slippery with ice and snow.
    â€˜As the sky grew blue and the seas warm, my companion the Negro boy grew excited at the return to his native island of St Lucia, in the Windward Islands south of America. But I wanted only to swim in cold water; even when we docked in the busy harbour at Soufrières and went round by canoe to the shore where people were to be judged and sold, I felt no sense of belonging in this landscape. The sad palm trees I had no wish to run up, for I knew I would find myself stranded, once there, amongst the spiky fronds at the top.
    â€˜You may understand, Mr Lockwood, why my visit to this island—and to this dreadful shore, with my late wife Louisa—brought me little but alarm, even a sense of persecution. How had I come to find myself in the place I had been brought to as a child, barely old enough to care for myself? What evil star had dictated my return to the very coast I had fled?
    â€˜It may be that I shall never know the answer. But on this second occasion of coming to the wild and lawless area that forms the southern part of the island of St Lucia, I remembered with the vividness of a dream the day when, as a child without language, family or hope, I ran off into the rainforest and lived there days and nights before a passing huntsman found me and smuggled me on board a ship to England. I remember the bright birds, no bigger than a glance from beneath the eyelashes of a courtesan’s painted eye; and I recall the monsters, iguanas I daresay they may have been, which glared at me once night fell, their green orbs flickering on and off until I thought I would go mad at their determination andregularity. Most of all, I thought then very fondly of the man who rescued me from this island I knew I would hate, but with a familiarity I have since learnt belongs to a dread of kin—for I had none, and could not explain my aversion to the place.
    â€˜My saviour, a man who had no fear of capture (and I heard it said of him when once we arrived at the harbour that it was he who, as chief of these Caribee people, decided on which of his fellow islanders would be saved and which sent to almost certain death on the stifling slave-ships) carried me aboard a vessel bound for the cold waters I pined for. He showed neither fear nor haste in depositing me with the Captain’s mate, and, treated like a pet monkey by the crew, I sailed to Liverpool in safety.
    â€˜Mr Lockwood, there are times in life when self-sufficiency is all. I found this when taken in by a family of Scots who beat and starved me, making of me a servant, worse than the slave I would have been if I had suffered transportation to the sugar cane fields of Antigua, as so many of the other conscripts had been. I