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comes as no surprise to this reader that the pages had been intended for burning— and I make this deposition for the purpose of announcing that when they have been read they will be incinerated and never referred to more. Meanwhile, I hereby declare that the search for the missing manuscript, a mission which has at least acquainted me with the power of the word, is at an end. The house stirs and someone, doubtless Tabby or the woman referred to last night as ‘Miss Charlotte’, can be heard moving about: a poker riddles the grate in what I assume to be the ‘downstairs study’, directly below; curtains are drawn back. But before I slip from the window of the tiny room I have occupied for what seems an age—since last year, one might say, as the year of our Lord 1849 has come in since I entered it—I must finish my perusal of this confession by a madman and (it seems) a murderer, a being for whom I have nevertheless the deepest sympathy and understanding.
    To go back to the beginning: since first light entered this miserable cell I have been occupied in reading thesepages. My father and my brothers would be astonished to find me so engaged. But, as I stated previously, a record of the pain and ecstasy of a living being is preferable by far to the blank page presented by the dead. If I am to be haunted, it will be by a man who has fought for his life and for the recognition of his humanity all his days, a man who knows passion as few possibly could; and whose need for revenge is as urgent as the demands addressed by a parched throat to the desert. Mr Heathcliff—for it is he who recounts his life to Mr Lockwood still—is in his upper room at The Heights, a room not unlike the chamber where I find myself today. Oh, if I could only have known Mr Lockwood!—but his pages are dated 1802 and Mr Lockwood, should he be alive still, would very likely have forgotten the import and even the content of his visit there, close on half a century ago. I tremble to think of Mr Lockwood’s state of mind when, on returning to his lodgings, he sought to write down the story of Mr Heathcliff—particularly, one might say, when his lodgings, supervised by the good Ellen Dean, were located in Thrushcross Grange. Poor Mr Lockwood, seated (as I envisage him) at the desk lately occupied by Mr Edgar Linton, must have realised, even as he wrote, that Mrs Linton (that is, Cathy, Mr Heathcliff’s undying passion) had lain on her deathbed just above him, in the scarlet and white drawing-room. He would have been inhuman if he had not thought he heard cries of love and yearning emanating from that chamber.
    But I have been transported out of myself in a manner unsuitable for the writing of this Deposition. I wish merely to transcribe what I have found; to leave for posterity a record of what I have had before my eyes today. Whether the account of the early life of this strange, inscrutable man, ageing and resigned to his own coming death on the occasion of Mr Lockwood’s last visit to The Heights, will provide the key to his nature, we may neverknow. But, for the future interest of those who visit the now uninhabited dwelling ‘The Withens’, this account supplies a summation, at the least, of the sufferings endured by an unwanted and abandoned child in the last third of the past century. And I conclude that it is in order for us to congratulate ourselves, as a nation, on the progress we have made, both in ensuring the passing of laws to abolish slavery and in the growth of charitable foundations and the like—the latter a lifetime’s interest of my dear mother, the late Mrs Eileen Newby.
    â€˜My first memory’—
here Heathcliff continues to Mr Lockwood
—‘is of the ship that bore me from a country where it was white with snow nearly all year round, and people went into the long hut on hands and knees—although I, being no more than three or four years old, could