The Howling Girl: A Story from the collection, I Am Heathcliff

The Howling Girl: A Story from the collection, I Am Heathcliff
Laurie Penny

A story from Laurie Penny to stir the heart and awaken vital conversations about love.An ex-boyfriend reaches out and invites a woman to a cottage in the wilderness. But lingering behind the clapboard, a ghost from the relationship resides…

The Howling Girl

by Laurie Penny

A short story from the collection

Copyright (#u7cfe1b3f-ff38-5441-b7dc-03615cbcbfaa)

Published by The Borough Press

an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

In the compilation and introductory material © Kate Mosse 2018

The Howling Girl © Laurie Penny 2018

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

Cover design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Cover photographs © Sally Mundy/Trevillion Images, © Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com) petals

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This story is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical events and figures, are the works of the author’s imagination.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008257439

Ebook Edition © August 2018 ISBN: 9780008303174

Version: 2018-07-17

Contents

Cover (#u8093a444-dcf9-5fce-bb00-91fb1564585b)

Title Page (#ua2b8642e-aa76-5be3-b202-048fc08ea880)

Copyright

Foreword by Kate Mosse

The Howling Girl

Note on the Author

A Note on Emily Brontë

About the Publisher

FOREWORD BY KATE MOSSE (#u7cfe1b3f-ff38-5441-b7dc-03615cbcbfaa)

SO, WHAT MAKES Wuthering Heights – published the year before Emily Brontë’s own death – the powerful, enduring, exceptional novel it is? Is it a matter of character and sense of place? Depth of emotion or the beauty of her language? Epic and Gothic? Yes, but also because it is ambitious and uncompromising. Like many others, I have gone back to it in each decade of my life and found it subtly different each time. In my teens, I was swept away by the promise of a love story, though the anger and the violence and the pain were troubling to me. In my twenties, it was the history and the snapshot of social expectations that interested me. In my thirties, when I was starting to write fiction myself, I was gripped by the architecture of the novel – two narrators, two distinct periods of history and storytelling, the complicated switching of voice. In my forties, it was the colour and the texture, the Gothic spirit of place, the characterisation of Nature itself as sentient, violent, to be feared. Now, in my fifties, as well as all this, it is also the understanding of how utterly EB changed the rules of what was acceptable for a woman to write, and how we are all in her debt. This is monumental work, not domestic. This is about the nature of life, love, and the universe, not the details of how women and men live their lives. And Wuthering Heights is exceptional amongst the novels of the period for the absence of any explicit condemnation of Heathcliff’s conduct, or any suggestion that evil might bring its own punishment.

This collection is published to celebrate the bicentenary of Emily Brontë’s birth in 1818. What each story has in common is that, despite their shared moment of inspiration, they are themselves, and their quality stands testament both to our contemporary writers’ skills, and the timelessness of Wuthering Heights. For, though mores and expectations and opportunities alter, wherever we live and whoever we are, the human heart does not change very much. We understand love and hate, jealousy and peace, grief and injustice, because we experience these things too – as writers, as readers, as our individual selves.

THE HOWLING GIRL (#u7cfe1b3f-ff38-5441-b7dc-03615cbcbfaa)

LAURIE PENNY (#u7cfe1b3f-ff38-5441-b7dc-03615cbcbfaa)

IN THE END, IT was the edge of panic in Jamie’s voice that decided her.

‘Hey, it’s good to talk to you. Really good. I’ve missed you, G.’ The number was unlisted, so for Grace the greeting was an ungloved fist, right up under the ribs, no warning. How many years had it been since he’d said her name like that? Her initial in his lovely long-ago-and-far-away mouth like that?

He had a problem, he said, something he was working through, and it would be wonderful if she could help out – but it would be better face-to-face. Would she come up?

Somewhere inside her a barricade started to dismantle. A white flag waved after months and years of siege. We’re starving in here. Let us come to terms.

Jamie laid it on thick. Unusually thick. The new place was so lovely, even in winter, so healing – the perfect place to write, or – was she still writing? Anyway, it was a nice place for a break, and they could talk in private. Could she make it?

Grace made a noise that gave what she hoped was a convincing impression of looking at her calendar and thinking it over. Jamie would absolutely pay the train fare, least he could do at short notice, he’d book it now, no problem at all – but could she come soon? Next weekend?

She could.

The cottage was a two-mile ride from the deserted station. She asked the taxi driver polite questions about his life, and didn’t really listen as he told her how old his kids were, how many years he’d been in the country, and what the weather would be like this time of year wherever it was that he was from. He asked her the same sort of questions about London, and she stared out at the rushing darkness, and contemplated lying about having a husband, having a child, or at least plans for one or the other. In the end she simply said that she was working too hard to think about those things. Concentrating on her career right now. Maybe some day.

‘London,’ said the driver, making a sympathetic clucking sound. ‘You young women can have a very bad time there.’

She didn’t know what to say, so she said nothing, and eventually he turned on the radio.

She was going to see Jamie again, and he needed her. She couldn’t resist that. Not even after ten years, and he probably knew that well enough, she acknowledged to herself, as the taxi took knuckle-whitening turns through the blood-black tunnels of grasping trees that all country roads turn into at night.

The thing was, he really had sounded glad to hear her voice.

Later on, she would remember that, and wonder.