Around midnight, Catherine Linton gives birth prematurely to a weak seven-months child, the younger Catherine later seen at Wuthering Heights. Two hours later, Catherine dies without fully regaining consciousness, never knowing Edgar again or asking for Heathcliff. Edgar is devastated, and Nelly mourns both Catherine and the child, whom Nelly considers unwanted and left without the secure inheritance an heir might have had.

The next morning, Nelly watches Catherine’s body in the silent room. Edgar lies beside Catherine in exhausted grief, while Catherine’s face appears peaceful and almost smiling. Nelly reflects on death, consolation, and Catherine’s uncertain spiritual fate, then leaves the room at sunrise to find Heathcliff and tell him the news.

Nelly discovers Heathcliff in the park, where he has apparently stood all night beneath an ash tree. Heathcliff already knows Catherine is dead and rejects Nelly’s tears. When Nelly says Catherine died quietly and never recovered her senses after Heathcliff left, Heathcliff’s grief turns violent: he refuses to imagine Catherine in heaven or gone from him, curses her not to rest, and begs her ghost to haunt him because he cannot live without his life and soul.

Heathcliff batters his head against the tree and howls in agony, leaving blood on the bark, his forehead, and his hand. Nelly is more frightened than comforted by the display, and when Heathcliff orders Nelly away, Nelly obeys because Heathcliff is beyond consolation.

Catherine’s coffin remains open in the drawing room until the Friday funeral. Edgar keeps constant vigil beside Catherine’s body, while Heathcliff spends the nights outside. On Tuesday evening, when Edgar has briefly gone to rest, Nelly opens a window so Heathcliff can enter and say farewell. Heathcliff does so secretly, removes a pale lock of Edgar’s hair from Catherine’s locket, and replaces it with a black lock of his own; Nelly later twists both locks together and seals them in the locket.

Hindley Earnshaw is invited to Catherine’s funeral but does not come, and Isabella is not invited. Catherine is buried neither with the Lintons in the chapel nor with the Earnshaws outside, but on a green slope at the edge of the churchyard near the moor. Nelly notes that Edgar is now buried in the same place, with simple markers over both graves.