Daniel joined Father in the kitchen just as Bett was chopping some of last autumn’s parsnips and adding them to the pottage that would cook until they were ready for it that evening. A fire glowed in the grate, throwing a sheen on to the gleaming surface of the table that stood next to it, and the room smelled of baking bread and the bubbling grain and beans.

‘Are you ill? Looks like there’s a fever on you.’

She laid her hand on his forehead. A touch that was efficient if not loving.

‘No,’ she said, shrugging and turning back to the pot. His good health rendered him unworthy of attention.

Father grunted. ‘’Tis idleness not illness that delays him. Come, lie-a-bed, Bett needs to away and we must go to church.’ His mood was unusually sour, and blood seeped from his nostril. Daniel feared he could guess the cause.

‘Y-you, ah – you have a …’ He tapped under his own nose.

Father scowled and wiped the blood away as they stepped through the door. ‘There’s a damned lamb missing,’ he said. Daniel shuddered. ‘Keep an eye out. It’s escaped through the hedge, no doubt, and must be found. I cannot abide to lose a thing of value.’

Daniel trudged behind him, grateful that he’d had the presence of mind to wash the blood from the path by the field the day the lamb was taken. All the while, the Devil-boy’s voice seethed through his mind, as it shadowed his dreams and left him afraid of darkness. Glad he had again been spared to see dawn, Daniel did not allow himself to feel guilt at burning through so many lights and waking to a pile of ash on the floor. He made them himself, pulling and stripping the rushes, dipping them in mutton fat. A job that left him retching from the stink. A job for a woman, in any other house.

He jumped at a rustle in the hedgerow; at the sound of a whisper, surely, from that direction – ‘Bring hell on you.’

Blonde tendrils of hair escaped Molly Matthews’s hat, grazing the back of her neck. Daniel tried to concentrate on the image of Christ and the words of the parson. Kept his eyes open until they burned, for when he blinked the boy’s face taunted him.

If he leaned forward in his pew he would be able to smell Molly’s skin, newly scrubbed for church.

Daniel was weighed down by the sleepless night. Church was surely the safest place to be, yet he could not be rid of the fear that the Haworth boy would appear, reaching a filthy hand from under the pew to grab him, or transforming the serene features of Christ into his own rotting smile. The faint but constant smell of fish, always present when the village gathered together, churned his guts.