Chapter Text
Isabella Linton’s biggest downfall was that she idealised. She had idealised Heathcliff and believed him to be a good man under that rough exterior, believed him to be loveable and loving. She had believed that getting to London would be the difficult part and that things would fall into place once she was there. She had been wrong on both accounts.
She still had some of the money she had left the Grange with, parts she had managed to hide from Heathcliff. Parts that had landed her with bruises as she had refused to disclose where she hid it. It had been enough to get her the coaches she needed to travel to London. Three coaches and an overnight stay in a rundown inn near Nottingham had left her extremely out of pocket. Reading London, she had felt a serge of hope. London was so big it seemed impossible to find someone who left for London. It was magical like something out of a fairy tale that she knew she was too old and too experienced to believe in.
Instead, London was something out of the modern poems that she so enjoyed reading. It was a burning furnace of smoke and heat and discomfort. She had never been a particularly well person, she had been prone to asthma, with weak lungs, and London only increased this. She coughed and spluttered in an attempt to just breathe. The air was wrong. Of course she was aware of the thick smoke air caused by the ever-growing industrial but that had only been on one of their rare visits to Keighley or Leeds. She was used to the free, windy, wiley air of the moorlands. She may not have spent time, like Catherine, clambering the crags and splashing in the streams, but the moorlands were just as much hers. And the air in London was wrong.
She walked with a handkerchief at her mouth, trying to breathe as little of this air as possible. The streets were dirty in the wrong way. The Grange had always had its approach perfectly swept but she knew of the muddy dirt of the moors and experienced it first hand at Wuthering Heights. London was the dirt of open sewers and uncleaned horses. It made her long for the lavender and heather smells she had grown up with. The stink mixed with a wave of nostalgia brought tears to Isabella’s eyes but she wiped them away with the end of her handkerchief and swallowed back the lump in her throat. She didn’t have the time to cry.
Finding shelter was not easy. She was low on money and the prices she came across where unrealistic to her, though they were mere pennies to Edgar or Heathcliff. She came away from several landlords and ladies with more tears in her eyes and a true uncertainty of what to do in her heart. When the sign for a pawnbroker caught her attention, Isabella considered what few things she had in her bag, clothing and a few keep sakes. She took herself inside. These were her only worldly possessions and she had to sell the majority.
She left the shop with her bag much lighter, no jewellery and only a couple of her less fancy dresses left. She, however, also had enough money to at least find accommodation for the foreseeable. The long term she would have to sort out when it turned up. She was exhausted from travel and the heaviness of her heart and simply wanted to lay her bed down.
She knew she would have to become used to less than what she knew, but that did not make the leaky, cold, and filthy flats any more appealing. She kept her tears silent and unseen, or so she thought, until the wife of the final landlord put an arm around her and said she would put the kettle on with her husband shown her the apartment. It was small, barely more than a bed and washbowl, but it was cheap, it wasn’t leaky and the cup of tea in her hand reminded her what welcoming warmth felt like. She excepted it and managed to hold back the worst of her tears until she was alone.
She fell onto the bed and sobbed There were a few springs missing and it was not comfortable, but it would do. It would have to.
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Isabella spent the following months crying, screaming, and begging potential employers to look over the fact that she was soon to be a single mother, and employ her any way. All kinds of insults were thrown at her; she was accused of being a prostitute, of being easy, of being not good enough to keep a husband. She had tried lying, saying that she was a widow and her husband had passed away, but it made no difference. She was holding tight to the money she had made at the pawnbrokers, she brought cheap clothing and sold the remainder of her old clothes. The Isabella Linton who had lived at the Grange was dead and gone. She didn’t even recognise herself.
She knew the stress was not good for the baby. She imagined Edgar attempting to soothe Catherine, telling her that she had to relax for the sake of the baby. It caused her to cry all the more, knowing that she was supposed to be with a husband that would do the same for her. The stress was not good, and she went into labour early.
The birth was long and painful. Isabella spent several hours screaming and crying. She lost consciousness a few times. She screamed at the doctor and midwife to get that monster away from her and her child, and a few moments later begged them to let him closer, let him in, perhaps he would forgive her. They didn’t understand that she was seeing first Heathcliff and then Edgar. There was a lot of blood, a lot of mess and more pain than she had ever experienced. Isabella had never felt more alone than when she had to go through that within anyone to hold her hand or stroke her forehead. The hours passed and eventually, wrapped in a small rough blanket, a quiet baby boy was handed to her.
Linton Heathcliff – she had been forced to give the baby the father’s name, despite wanting to keep it singular – was the image of a Linton. His hair was a paler blond than young Cathy’s had been in that small glimpse Isabella had got when she had last been at the Grange. His eyes were the bonniest and brightest of blues. Isabella understood, the moment she held him, what people meant when they spoke of the bond between a mother and her child. She felt like she could fight the entire world for the sake of this tiny little boy.
She cried as she held him for the first time, partly from the exhaustion and remnants of pain, but mostly from the fear. Linton was so small, he couldn’t do a single thing for himself, his entire life for her responsibility. It terrified her. She was barely more than a child herself and now she was responsible for this whole other life. She was almost certain she wasn’t up to the task. She, however, was more certain that Satan himself could not stop her fighting for Linton.