Chapter 3 — Wuthering Heights

Zillah lodges Lockwood in a chamber Heathcliff keeps closed, warning him to hide his candle and make no noise. Inside the box-bed closet Lockwood finds the window ledge carved with Catherine Earnshaw, Catherine Heathcliff, and Catherine Linton in every size of hand. He reads her childhood diary in the margins of mildewed books: Hindley's tyranny after their father's death, Joseph's three-hour sermons in the garret, Catherine and Heathcliff rebelling on the moors while Hindley and Frances kiss by the fire. Joseph tears down their pinafore curtain and boxes their ears; Hindley hurls them into the back-kitchen, and young Catherine writes in stolen ink while plotting a moors scamper under the dairywoman's cloak.

Drowsy, he dreams of Jabez Branderham preaching four hundred and ninety sins from seventy times seven, then wakes to a fir branch tapping the pane. He breaks the glass to stop the noise and catches an ice-cold child's hand. A voice sobs Let me in: Catherine Linton, lost on the moor twenty years. Terror makes Lockwood brutal. He grinds the wrist on the broken glass until blood soaks the bed, piles books against the hole, and shouts that he will never admit her, not in twenty years. The voice answers that it has been a waif for twenty years.

His screams bring Heathcliff in his shirt, white with shock and furious that Lockwood slept in this room. When Lockwood mentions Catherine's ghost, Heathcliff erupts, then collapses behind the bed struggling not to weep. Sent to another room, Lockwood hears him wrench open the lattice sobbing for Cathy to come in once more. In the back-kitchen he waits with a grey cat until Joseph and Hareton pass without a greeting. At dawn he declines breakfast while Heathcliff insults young Mrs. Heathcliff over the hearth. Heathcliff then guides him across snow-blinded moors where guide-stones vanish under drifts.

Lockwood arrives at Thrushcross Grange at noon, given up for dead, and retreats to his study feeble as a kitten. He still does not grasp that naming Catherine made a private wound visible. Heathcliff returns to a sealed misery Lockwood will soon ask Mrs. Dean to explain.