‘I have fled my country and gone to the heather.’
‘You know,’ said Noah reflectively two minutes into their walk. ‘I’m not sure that motorcycle boots and a leopard-print fun fur constitute sensible walking shoes and a thick coat.’
‘They do in my world,’ Nina said, panting slightly. Her boots were fine for the job in hand. Her coat, not so much.
Noah, of course, was wearing a navy windcheater cum anorak-type affair (Nina didn’t know what the technical name for it was), which was no doubt made of some space-age, weather-proof, anti-sweat wicking. He had also not been idle during his downtime in Glasgow.
Armed with his trusty iPad, which was also clad in a weather-proof case, Noah was the font of all things Brontë. As they walked back along Main Street, it was to a running commentary.
‘And that gift shop used to be the post office, which was where the Brontës mailed off their manuscripts,’ he said. Then, as they walked a narrow path through the old churchyard, Noah made Nina stop at ‘the iron kissing gate’. Her heart began to beat faster than was strictly necessary. How romantic, she thought, and she raised her face, pursed her lips ever so slightly in anticipation of a …
‘And the oldest part of the church dates back to the fifteenth century.’
… a lecture on how many times the church had been knocked down and rebuilt and could Nina spot the Ordnance Survey mark on the south-west corner of the church tower to mark the fact that they were seven hundred and ninety-six feet above sea level?
When they came to a rustic wooden sign informing them that they had two and a half miles to go until they reached the waterfall, Nina thought that she might cry. Not just because she didn’t think she’d ever walked two and a half miles in her life, but the anticipation of Noah commenting on every fence-post and large rock they passed was too awful to contemplate.
‘So, Penistone Hill, don’t worry, it’s quite a gentle incline, means we’re now in an official country park and this area used to be a quarry.’
It looked quarryish. There were big lumps of rock scattered about as Noah walked and Nina trudged along. They crossed over a main road, not a car in sight unfortunately because Nina wouldn’t have thought twice about flagging one down and demanding that the driver take her back to civilisation. Noah was banging on about the reservoir they could see in the distance and that there should be a cattle grid coming up.
‘And now we’re on open moorland,’ Noah said, squinting down at his iPad and trying to wipe the screen as the drizzle was starting to upgrade to proper rain. ‘This is an area of special scientific interest, especially if you’re a birdwatcher …’
‘Stop! Just stop!’ Nina demanded, holding out her hands like she was trying to beat back a flock of scientifically interesting birds. ‘Please …’
‘I was trying to make the walk interesting,’ Noah protested. ‘I know you’re a city girl and I thought if I pointed out significant features, it would make the walk less … walky.’
‘And I appreciate that, I really do,’ Nina said, because she did, even if Noah pointing out significant features was making her want to scream. ‘I appreciate all the trouble you’ve gone to and how much time you must have spent in your hotel room in Glasgow putting this all together, but I don’t need to know about reservoirs or starlings and sparrows or whatever these scientifically interesting birds are.’
‘Curlews and peregrines actually,’ Noah said with a little sniff.
‘I went on a date with a guy called Peregrine once,’ Nina recalled. ‘He was so posh that what came out of his mouth didn’t even sound like English.’
Noah sniffed again as Nina slowly turned a full circle. ‘Do you want to go back then?’ he asked in the same huffy voice.
Nina turned again. ‘No,’ she said. ‘But look. Just look.’
No wonder they described Yorkshire as God’s own country. The moors weren’t like the neatly clipped lawns and manicured paths of the parks that Nina was used to. Here, up this high, the sky, dark and grey, hung heavy and looked bigger, mightier than sky normally did. It was the perfect dramatic backdrop for the lush green below; every shade of green that Nina had names for, from sludgy khaki to rich emerald, moss and fern, to palest seafoam.
But the scenery stretching out before her from every side wasn’t pretty. There was a savage beauty to the land, deep seams riven through it, teetering, haphazard rock formations looming at every turn.
It was wild, untethered, elemental. And over the light patter of the rain on the unflinching stones from the old quarry, Nina could hear the wind wrapping around them.
‘Noah! Listen!’
‘I thought I was meant to be looking,’ he grumbled.
‘The wind … I think it’s wuthering.’
‘What even is wuthering?’
Nina put a hand to her ear. ‘It sounds like the wind’s calling us.’ She shivered and not just because she was bloody freezing. ‘This is the same wuthering that Emily Brontë wrote about and if you forget about the reservoirs and the quarry and Ordnance Survey marks, and just look around us, this, this, is what the Brontës saw. We might even be standing where they stood. Charlotte wrote about the waterfall so all three of them must have walked these paths two hundred years ago. That just blows my mind.’
‘It’s blowing mine too. Or that might just be the wind. Wuthering,’ Noah said and he wasn’t looking quite so cross now. ‘Shall we take a moment?’
‘Let’s.’
They stood side by side to appreciate again the rugged moors, the untamed landscape, how insignificant they both were compared to the vastness of nature.
‘OK, I’m done taking a moment,’ Nina decided. ‘How about you?’
Noah nodded. His face was quite raw from being so rigorously scrubbed by the wind. ‘Moment taken.’
They set off again and though Noah couldn’t resist a few informed remarks about the terrain or the occasional derelict cottage they came across, he kept them brief. Nina’s head was full of images of Cathy and Heathcliff. Now that she’d been here, she couldn’t wait to reread Wuthering Heights.
The last part of their journey to the waterfall involved clambering over stone steps slick with rain and unevenly dispersed like they’d been thrown down by an angry god.
Noah raised an eyebrow when Nina told him this. ‘OK, if you say so.’
‘I’m really big on the symbolism of Wuthering Heights right now,’ she explained. ‘How the moors represent Heathcliff; all savage and unpredictable. Luckily, no one is going to make me write an essay on the use of nature as metaphor.’
‘Oh, that’s what I had planned for this evening – among other things,’ Noah said and then he smiled in a way that made Nina feel quite hot even though she was still bloody freezing.
They were joined for the last few metres of their journey by a small group of ramblers and then, at last! They were at Brontë Falls.
It had rained heavily the day before according to the man who was leading the ramble, which was why the waterfall was such an impressive sight as it gushed down a series of stone shelves that had been carved into the hill over thousands of years. There was a stone bridge at the bottom of the falls, though apparently the original bridge had been swept away in a flash flood in 1989, according to a small plaque.
‘Do you think it’s safe?’ Nina asked Noah before she stepped on to it. ‘I really want a selfie but I don’t want to be swept away by the current.’
Noah cast what looked like a professional eye over the water descending down from above. ‘Well, it is a pretty small waterfall as waterfalls go. I reckon you’ll be safe.’
It wasn’t the ideal conditions for a selfie. The lighting was terrible. And even with it pinned up and mostly hidden under a polka-dot scarf, Nina’s hair looked awful and the wind and the mizzle seemed to have removed quite a lot of her make-up so that her …
‘Come on, you know you always look good,’ Noah said though Nina knew no such thing.
‘My eyeliner is but a distant memory,’ she groused as she held her phone up, sucked in her cheeks, pouted then shot off ten quick frames, angling her head in a different position in each one.
If there was one thing that Nina knew how to do, it was taking a selfie, though the ramblers were looking at her like she’d suddenly started spewing ectoplasm out of her ears.
Noah was watching her too, with amusement that quickly turned to horror when Nina beckoned him closer. ‘You don’t want me cluttering up your selfies.’
‘’Course I do!’ Nina insisted. She’d dreamed of coming here, well maybe not to a waterfall, across open moorland in damp, cold weather, but of coming to Haworth and Noah was the person who’d made it happen. And they’d been on two dates or non-dates, hung out an awful lot and they hadn’t even taken a selfie together. ‘Get your arse over here!’
Noah was taller and with longer arms so he held up his phone and patiently (though there did seem to be some teeth grinding) listened to Nina’s instructions to ‘move your hand a fraction to the left, no, too far, back, back, back!’ and suffered her deleting most of the photos as they didn’t come up to the high standards she expected from her selfies.
‘Much as I hate to rush you, we’re due at Haworth Parsonage at four and it’s quarter to three now,’ he said at last. ‘We really should turn back.’
‘Oh, you’ll be wanting to go at a brisk pace,’ a lady rambler swathed in a purple cagoule told them. ‘Forecast is for rain.’
‘Isn’t it already raining?’ Nina ventured.
‘Pffttt! You call this rain? It’s barely even spitting,’ the woman said with a derisory snort, though actually the mizzle was far more like a very determined drizzle now. ‘Come on, you can walk back with us and I’ll make sure you don’t start to dawdle.’
‘So kind,’ Noah murmured, giving Nina a little warning nudge when she giggled a little hysterically at the thought of having to yomp back the way they came with Mrs Purple Cagoule yelling at them if they dared to lollygag.
Maureen, as Mrs Purple Cagoule had been christened, ‘though you can call me Mo,’ was a small, sprightly woman of very strong opinions. ‘I don’t think much of the soles on your boots,’ she said, eyeing Nina’s motorcycle boots with distaste. ‘And as for that coat. Well, you’ll catch your death,’ she added.
‘Here’s hoping,’ Nina muttered because the brisk pace that Maureen had promised felt like a very close cousin to jogging and Maureen’s hectoring tone was very similar to her mother’s. In fact, it was a pity that the FitBit that Alison had bought her for Christmas last year (her mother excelled in the buying of passive-aggressive gifts) was languishing in a drawer, because Nina was sure that she’d smashed ten thousand steps today and they weren’t even halfway back to Haworth.
Noah, who’d been walking on ahead with the other ramblers, stopped to wait for Nina. ‘How you doing?’ he asked.
‘I’ve decided that it’s best that you leave me here on the moors,’ Nina panted. ‘It’s too late for me and I’ll only slow you down but you can still make it back to civilisation. Christ, I’m unfit.’
‘You’re doing fine,’ Noah said encouragingly even though Nina was doing the very opposite of fine. Even though she was cold and yes, her sodding coat was sodden through, she was also hot and sweaty from the enforced exercise. ‘We haven’t got that far to go.’
‘Oh, it’s at least another mile,’ Mo said cheerfully as if she was actually enjoying this. Yes, she must definitely share DNA with Alison O’Kelly.
‘But just think, it won’t be long before you’re standing in Haworth Parsonage,’ Noah reminded her. ‘Where Emily and her sisters and that wastrel brother of theirs, what’s his name again, lived.’
‘Branwell,’ Nina said, although she wanted to use what breath she had left for walking not talking. ‘He was a wrong ’un if ever there was one. Ran up huge debts gambling and drinking – it was one of the reasons why the sisters turned to writing. Branwell ploughed through what little money they had.’
‘Are these relatives of yours?’ Mo asked with a little gleam in her eye as if she suspected that Nina came from a whole family of wrong ’uns.
‘No, we’re talking about the Brontës,’ Noah said politely. ‘It’s why we came to Haworth. Nina loves Wuthering Heights.’
If Noah could make an effort then so could Nina. ‘It’s my favourite book,’ she explained. ‘And I’ve always wanted to come here to see where Emily Brontë lived. Have you read it?’
‘I don’t have time to read,’ Mo said, a censorious expression on her weather-beaten face.
Usually those six smug words were a red rag to a bull but now Nina merely grunted as they were retracing their steps over the site of the old quarry, the slabs slick and wet, and she didn’t want to go arse over tit.
‘Careful.’ Noah took her arm without commenting on the non-grippiness of her boots. ‘Broken bones didn’t feature too highly in my plans for the day.’
‘I’m glad to hear that,’ Nina panted then decided she needed all of her energy for walking and not talking because the ramblers, despite the fact that they were all much, much older than her, were still cracking on at a punishing pace.
But the journey was much easier with Noah to lean on and soon the church spire came into view and not long after that, they were passing through the kissing gate again and saying goodbye to their companions.
‘Mark my words, you’ll be coughing and sneezing before the day’s out,’ was mighty Mo’s parting shot.
Nina waved her off, though her instinct was to flip her off instead.
‘I’m fine,’ she insisted when she saw the concerned look on Noah’s face. ‘Honestly, I’m not about to do an Emily Brontë.’
‘How does one do an Emily Brontë?’ Noah asked as they headed back to where he’d parked the car.
‘She caught a bad cold at Branwell’s funeral, which turned into TB and she refused all medical treatment until it was too late, and then she died. In Haworth Parsonage,’ Nina added and a little chill did run through her at the thought of poor headstrong Emily finally asking Charlotte to send for the doctor, then dying a couple of hours after that. ‘But I’m not about to keel over during our tour. I’ll take off my coat though, because it smells like wet dog, and anyway since the mid-nineteenth century they’ve invented Lemsip and Day Nurse and all sorts of over-the-counter medicines for cold and flu.’
‘Are you sure?’ Noah took one of Nina’s hands, which made her shiver again, but not because she was thinking of untimely death. ‘You’re freezing.’
‘I’m going to swap my damp coat for a jumper,’ Nina said. They were at the car now. ‘Um, do you have a jumper I can borrow?’
There was no way that Nina and her breasts could fit into one of Noah’s navy-blue jumpers – unlike Emily Brontë and her infamous coffin that had measured only sixteen inches wide – so she had to make do with a zip-up fleece that didn’t go with her black fifties dress with its novelty print of sleek white pussycats.
‘You should never go out with a man skinnier, shorter or younger than you,’ had been one of Alison’s life lessons when Nina had hit her teens and her words came back to taunt Nina as she tried, and failed, to heave up the zip on the fleece.
‘That fleece looks much better on you than it does on me,’ Noah said appreciatively even if Nina was sure that he was lying.
Then he took her hand again and not because he was helping her over wet quarry slabs or checking that she hadn’t developed tuberculosis. Just taking her hand for the pleasure of taking her hand. Like he enjoyed touching her.
Nina squeezed Noah’s fingers gently and he instantly returned the pressure. The fleece smelt faintly of the clean, zesty scent of his aftershave so it felt a lot like she was wrapped up in him. She shivered for the third time, glanced up to see Noah looking at her with that thoughtful expression on his face as if he wished he had his iPad on him so he could make some detailed notes.
Finally, she looked away and then her breath caught in her throat and she gasped as she saw the neat garden in front of them and the neat house beyond them.
The Brontë Parsonage.