Chapter 17: Counting the Coins
The counting stopped sometime in the deep night. Athena woke to grey light and an empty space beside her that was still warm. She could hear him outside already, the methodic thump-thump-thump of the mallet driving the north fence posts home. She lay still, feeling the ghost of his weight, the sweet soreness in her muscles. The coins were gone from the table, tucked away somewhere safe.
She forced herself up. The air in the room was cold, the fire down to ashes. She dressed quickly, pulling on her oldest work dress, and rebuilt the fire, blowing on the embers until a flame caught and warmth began to bleed back into the small space. The silence of the house felt different now. It wasn’t just an absence of people; it was a presence they had made. Their boots by the door. Their blanket on the bed. Their shared air.
She made porridge, stirring in a precious handful of dried apples. When she carried a bowl out to him, the morning was sharp and brilliant, the frost on the grass glittering like a million tiny pins. He’d already set three posts, straight and true. He saw her coming and leaned on the mallet, his breath pluming in the air. He’d forgone a shirt again, despite the cold, his skin flushed with effort.
“You’ll freeze,” she said, handing him the bowl.
“I’m boiling.” He took it, his fingers brushing hers. He ate standing, shoveling the hot food in, his eyes scanning the line of the fence, then the track leading to the main road. “Henshaw’s place is a four-mile walk. I’ll leave after this.”
The reminder was a cold drip down her back. “What’s the favor?”
“Doesn’t matter. I’ll do it. It’ll be done.” His tone closed the subject. He finished the porridge and handed her back the bowl. “Stay inside today. Paint. Don’t go far from the house.”
“Heathcliff—”
“Just for today.” His gaze was level, uncompromising. “While I’m not here. Humor me.”
She nodded, a tight knot forming in her throat. He saw it. He stepped close, his hand coming up to cup the back of her neck. He didn’t kiss her. He just held her there, his forehead resting against hers, their breath mingling in a single cloud. “It’s one day. Then it’s done. Then we’re square.”
“Then we’re square,” she repeated, the words a fragile hope.
He pulled on his shirt and his old coat, the new moleskin trousers already stained with earth and resin. He shouldered a bag with a water skin and a hunk of bread. He looked back once from the edge of the yard, a dark figure against the bright, vast moor. Then he was gone, swallowed by the dips and rises of the land.
The silence after he left was absolute. Oppressive. The wind seemed to whisper threats she couldn’t quite decipher. She took his advice. She bolted the door. She tried to paint.
She set up her small board by the kitchen window, mixing colours aimlessly—the dull green of the winter grass, the slate grey of the sky. Her hand moved without conviction. The shapes were bland, lifeless. She was painting the view, but not the feeling. The feeling was a tight coil of dread in her gut.
She gave up. She cleaned what was already clean. She rearranged the copper pots on their hook. She went to the bed and folded the blanket meticulously, her hands pressing into the wool, remembering the weight of him, the heat. The house felt like a shell. Too big, yet somehow too small.
By mid-afternoon, she couldn’t stand it. The walls were pressing in. She needed air that didn’t smell of her own anxiety. She unbolted the door and stepped into the garden plot, the spade still stuck in the earth where she’d left it. The physical work was a relief. She attacked the ground, turning soil with a vengeance, the effort burning away the nervous energy. She worked until her palms blistered, until sweat dampened her back despite the cold.
She was digging out a particularly large stone when she heard it. Not the wind. A horse. Coming fast.
Her head jerked up. A rider was approaching down the track at a hard gallop, not from the direction of the village, but from the way of Wuthering Heights. It wasn’t Robert Linton. It was Hindley Earnshaw.
Her blood went cold. She froze, spade in hand, as he reined in his lathered horse at the edge of the garden. He looked worse than the last time she’d seen him. His eyes were bloodshot, his fine clothes stained and loose, hanging on a frame grown gaunt with drink and spite. He stared at the farmhouse, at the smoke from the chimney, at her standing there with dirt on her face, and a sneer twisted his features.
“So it’s true,” he slurred. He swung down from the saddle, landing unsteadily. The smell of whisky rolled off him from ten feet away. “The gypsy and the little thief. Playing house.”
Athena tightened her grip on the spade. “This is private land, Mr. Earnshaw.”
He barked a laugh, taking a staggering step forward. “Is it? My father’s land, you mean. Let to Henshaw. And Henshaw lets to any stray who can pay, doesn’t he? Even the help.” His eyes raked over her. “Where is he? The great Heathcliff. Hiding behind your skirts?”
“He’s not here.”
“Convenient.” Hindley took another step. He was close enough now that she could see the broken capillaries on his nose, the yellow in his teeth. “Cathy’s in a state. A valuable piece of jewelry missing. And then you disappear. And he disappears. And suddenly you’re here, in a house, digging a garden.” He leaned in, his voice a poisonous whisper. “You think I don’t know what you are? What you’ve always been? A pair of cunning, greedy snakes.”
The anger then was a clean, bright flame. It burned away the fear. “We paid for this,” she said, her voice low and clear. “With our own labor. We stole nothing from you.”
“From her!” he roared, spittle flying. “You stole from Catherine! That pin was my mother’s!”
“Then she should have taken better care of it.” The words were out, reckless and sharp.
Hindley’s face contorted with rage. He lunged for her, his hand swinging in a clumsy, open-palmed slap aimed at her face.
Athena didn’t think. She jerked the spade up, not to strike, but as a bar between them. The flat of the blade caught his forearm with a solid thwack.
He yelled, more in shock than pain, recoiling. He stared at his arm, then at her, his expression one of pure, uncomprehending hatred. No servant had ever raised a hand to him. No woman. “You bitch,” he breathed, the words choked. “I’ll have you hanged. I’ll see you both in the ditch.”
“Get off this land.” She held the spade like a pike, point toward him, her hands trembling but her aim steady.
For a long moment, he wavered, drunk fury battling a sliver of sober calculation. She saw it—the realization that Heathcliff would return. That Heathcliff would find him here. The fear of Heathcliff’s wild, untamed violence was the only thing that ever pierced Hindley’s drunken haze.
He took a wobbly step back, pointing a shaking finger at her. “This isn’t over. You tell him. This isn’t over. He owes me. He owes this family everything. And he repays it with theft and whoring.” His eyes swept over her one last time, a look of such contempt it felt like a physical stain. He clumsily mounted his horse, yanking its head around. He kicked it, hard, and galloped away, leaving deep, chaotic gouges in the soft earth of the track.
Athena didn’t move. She stood there, the spade held aloft, until the sound of hooves faded completely. Then her strength left her. The spade fell from her hands, clattering on the stones. She sank to her knees in the turned soil, her whole body shaking. The adrenaline ebbed, leaving a cold, hollow terror in its wake. He would be back. With the law. With worse.
She stayed there until the light began to fail, the sun dipping below the moors. The cold seeped into her bones. Finally, she stood, her legs stiff. She picked up the spade, walked back into the house, and bolted the door. She didn’t light a lamp. She sat at the table in the growing dark, waiting.
It was full night when she heard footsteps, heavy and tired, on the path. A key scraped in the new lock. The door opened.
Heathcliff filled the doorway, backlit by starlight. He was filthy, covered in a fine grey dust that clung to his hair, his eyebrows, the moleskin trousers. He smelled of lime and sweat and something metallic. He looked exhausted, his shoulders slumped with a deep weariness. But his eyes found her instantly in the gloom.
He stepped in, closed the door, locked it. “Athena?”
She couldn’t speak. She just looked at him.
He saw it. The empty bowl on the table. The unlit fire. Her posture, rigid with withheld panic. The weariness vanished from his face, replaced by a terrifying alertness. “What happened?”
“Hindley,” she managed to get out. The name was a rusty nail in her throat.
He was across the room in two strides, kneeling before her, his dusty hands gripping her knees. His eyes scanned her face, her body, for injury. “Did he touch you?”
“He tried. I stopped him.” Her voice was a whisper. “With the spade.”
A flicker in his eyes—pride, then immediate, all-consuming fury. It darkened his face like a storm cloud. “When?”
“This afternoon. He was drunk. He came from the Heights. He knows about the pin. He said… he said he’d see us hanged. In a ditch.”
Heathcliff’s hands tightened on her knees until his knuckles were white. He bowed his head, his forehead resting against her legs. She felt the tension vibrating through him, a live wire. He breathed, deep and ragged, trying to leash it.
“What was the favor?” she asked, her fingers drifting into his dusty hair.
He didn’t look up. His voice was muffled, flat. “Henshaw’s brother died. In a fall from a ladder. Two days ago. The body was… bad. Nobody local would prepare it for the coffin. Too superstitious. Henshaw remembered I wasn’t local.” He let out a short, humorless breath. “I spent the day washing broken bone and torn skin off a dead man I never met. That was the price. For the loan of the blade. For our first stake.”
The horror of it settled over her, cold and thick. The metallic smell on him was lye soap and death. Their new beginning was paid for with coin from a hairpin and labor among the dead. It was all tainted.
He lifted his head. In the near-dark, his eyes gleamed with a ferocious, desperate light. “He threatened you. In our place.”
“He was drunk. He’s always drunk.”
“It doesn’t matter.” He stood suddenly, pulling her up with him. He held her face, his thumbs sweeping over her cheekbones, leaving trails of grey dust. “Listen to me. They will never leave us alone. Not Hindley. Not Catherine. Not as long as they can see our smoke. As long as they think we’re something they can kick.” His voice dropped, became a raw, fervent vow. “We have to become something else. Something they can’t touch. Not with laws, not with drunken threats. Something that terrifies them.”
“How?” The word was a breath.
“I don’t know yet.” He pulled her into him, crushing her against his dusty, exhausted body. He buried his face in her hair. “But we will. We have to. Because I won’t go back. And I won’t let them take you.”
Outside, the wind moaned across the moor, a sound of endless wanting. Inside, they stood locked together in the dark, their future no longer a sunlit garden, but a darker, harder thing they would have to forge from the very threats that sought to break them. The coins were spent. The favor was done. The line had been drawn. And on the other side of it, the past was gathering its strength.
The dust of the dead still clung to him. It was in the lines of his palms, ground under his nails, a fine powder in the roots of his hair. He scrubbed at the kitchen basin until his skin was raw and pink, the water turning a cloudy grey. Athena watched from the table, her hands wrapped around a cold cup of tea she hadn’t drunk. The silence was a third presence, swollen with what he’d done and what Hindley had said.
He finally turned, drying himself with a rough cloth. His eyes were hollow, the fury banked to embers for now. “You should sleep.”
“I can’t.”
“Neither can I.” He tossed the cloth aside. “But we have to try. Standing watch won’t stop him. Not if he decides to come back with others.”
They moved to the bed like ghosts. The mattress, which had felt like a promise, now seemed a temporary raft on a dark sea. He lay on his back, staring at the beams. She curled on her side, facing him, tracing the new, tense line of his jaw.
“Tell me about the paintings,” he said suddenly, his voice rough in the dark.
“What about them?”
“The ones you hide. The ones of the moors. Are they any good?”
The question surprised her. “I don’t know. They’re just… what I see.”
“Show me tomorrow.” He turned his head, and his gaze was earnest. “All of them.”
Sleep, when it came, was thin and fractured. She dreamed of Hindley’s sneering face melting into the lime-washed features of a stranger’s corpse. She woke with a gasp just before dawn to find Heathcliff already gone from the bed. She found him outside, shirtless in the freezing morning, splitting wood with a violent, rhythmic precision. Each crack of the axe was a punctuation mark in the quiet. He didn’t stop until a sizable pile lay stacked by the door, his breath roaring in the air, his muscles corded and gleaming with sweat.
“Heat,” he said by way of explanation, plunging the axe into the stump. “We’ll need a lot of it.”
After a breakfast of silence, he pointed to her small trunk in the corner. “The paintings. Now.”
She felt strangely exposed, more than when he’d undressed her. This was a different kind of nakedness. She opened the trunk, moving aside her few spare clothes, and pulled out the bundled canvases wrapped in an old scrap of sacking. She carried them to the table, her heart beating a clumsy rhythm against her ribs.
He wiped his hands meticulously on his trousers before he touched them. He unwrapped the sacking with a care she hadn’t expected. The first was a small study of the valley at twilight, all deep purples and bruised blues, with a single slash of gold where the sun had finally vanished. He said nothing. He set it aside and picked up the next. A detailed rendering of a gnarled hawthorn tree, its branches clawing at a stormy sky. Then another. The farmhouse itself, seen from a distance, looking lonely yet defiant under a vast cloudscape.
He went through all twelve of them, laying them out on the table, the floor, propping them against chairs. The room filled with captured light and weather and aching, empty space. He stepped back, his arms crossed, his head tilted. His silence was agonizing.
“They’re just…” she began, wanting to dismiss them before he could.
“They’re not just anything,” he interrupted, his voice low. He pointed at the painting of the farmhouse. “You made it look like it belongs. Like it has a right to be there.” He turned to her, and his expression was one of fierce discovery. “Merritt. The merchant. He has a shop in Gimmerton. Sells tea and ribbons and books to the ladies from Thrushcross Grange.”
“He sells paintings?” The idea was absurd.
“He sells what people with money will buy.” Heathcliff picked up the hawthorn tree study, holding it to the light from the window. “This is what they buy. A piece of the wild to hang on their parlor wall. A safe, pretty version of it.” He looked at her, a plan solidifying behind his eyes. “You’ll go to Gimmerton. Tomorrow. You’ll take these.”
Panic fluttered in her chest. “He won’t want them. They’re done on scraps, on old boards…”
“He won’t care about the board. He’ll care about what’s on it.” He came to her, gripping her shoulders. “It’s a thing they understand, Athena. Money for a pretty thing. It’s clean. It’s not a favor. It’s not a threat. It’s just… trade.”
The next morning, she wrapped the paintings in the sacking again and tied them with twine. She wore her least-mended dress. Heathcliff walked her to the edge of their land, his hand tight around hers. “Just the paintings,” he said. “Nothing else. Don’t talk about where you live. Don’t talk about me. You’re a painter from over the ridge. That’s all.”
She nodded, her throat tight. The walk to Gimmerton was three miles of biting wind. The village, with its tidy stone houses and single bustling street, felt alien. Merritt’s Mercantile was a narrow, cluttered cave smelling of cinnamon, tallow, and newsprint. A bell tinkled when she entered.
Merritt himself, a man with spectacles and ink-stained cuffs, looked up from a ledger. “Miss? Can I help you?”
Her voice almost failed her. “I was told… you might be interested in paintings. Of the moors.”
His smile was polite, skeptical. “I do occasionally source local art. Let’s see.”
Her hands trembled as she untied the twine on the counter. She laid out the first three. The twilight valley, the hawthorn, a sweeping view of Penistone Crags. Merritt’s polite smile faded. He leaned closer, adjusting his spectacles. He was silent for a long time. He picked up the crags painting, turning it to catch the light from the window.
“These are quite remarkable,” he said, and his tone was entirely different. It was assessing, professional. “The technique is… untutored. But the feeling is there. The scale.” He looked at her. “You did these?”
“Yes.”
“From life? Out there?”
“Yes.”
He hummed, setting the painting down. “There is a market. The new curate’s wife is decorating. The Lintons at the Grange occasionally want a ‘rustic’ piece for a guest room.” He said the word with a faint, knowing smile. “They’d need to be framed, of course. Properly. I could have that done in Halifax.”
He named a figure for the three. It was more money than she’d ever held at once. It was enough for a sack of proper seed, nails, a new axe head. It was a month of safety.
“I have more,” she heard herself say, the words tumbling out. “Nine more.”
His eyebrows rose. He spread his hands on the counter. “Let’s see the lot, then.”
She unpacked them all. He arranged them, muttering to himself. “The tree is exceptional. The mood of this storm… yes.” He finally looked up. “I’ll take them all. But at a bulk rate. I’m assuming the risk, you see. Framing, finding buyers.”
The negotiation that followed was brittle and terrifying. She heard Heathcliff’s voice in her head. It’s just trade. She stood her ground, her voice barely above a whisper but steady. She got him to increase his offer by fifteen percent. It was a fortune. It was a future.
He counted the coins into her hand, heavy and cool. “If you produce more,” he said, wrapping the paintings carefully in brown paper, “bring them directly to me. Consistent quality, mind. No childish daubs.”
She walked out of the shop, the money a hidden weight in her pocket. The wind felt different. It wasn’t a threat chasing her home; it was just the weather. She stopped at the edge of the village, looking back at the tidy street, then out toward the wild, rolling moors. She had taken a piece of that wildness, shaped it with her own hands, and sold it. They had bought her time.
She ran most of the way back. She found him not at the house, but at the far end of the north field, wrestling the last post into its hole. He saw her coming, her face flushed, her eyes wide. He dropped the mallet.
She didn’t speak. She just walked up to him, pulled the heavy pouch from her pocket, and pressed it into his filthy hand. He felt the weight, heard the clink. He looked from the pouch to her face, his own a mask of stunned disbelief.
“All of them?” he asked.
“All of them.”
He opened the drawstring, peered in at the gleam of silver. His hand closed around it, tight. He looked out at the moor, at the harsh, beautiful landscape that had been their prison and was now their inventory. A slow, real smile broke across his face, erasing the shadows of the dead man and the drunken master. It was a smile of pure, savage possibility.
“Well then,” he said, his voice full of gritty wonder. “Paint faster.”