Anne had read that when the Romans had first come to Britain, they had believed it to be the island of the dead. The local tribes they encountered were so strange and superstitious that it seemed to those invaders that this was a land of ghosts, already half lost to the underworld, with whole realms existing out of sight. It was something like that she felt as she crossed the border from the snowy moor into the quiet decay of the wooded area.

Here the evergreen cover of the conifers was so dense that only a little snow had settled on the ground, leaving a blackened carpet of fallen needles to form a sucking pulp with the sodden peat. There was no birdsong, no noise at all except for their own footsteps.

“What are we doing here exactly?” Branwell asked, drawing his muffler tighter around his neck. “I thought we were going to see a witch, not drown in freezing mud, which, if I am honest, is not my favoured method of death. I’d rather be turned into a toad. At least a toad knows where he stands with other toads. Toads are much less likely to be deceived and ignored.”

Anne could only surmise that Branwell’s last letter from Mrs. Robinson had not been to his liking.

“Agnes Fielding told us to come and see for ourselves if we wanted to know what events she witnessed here the summer that the Top Withens child was hidden in the chimney,” Anne said as they trudged on. “Though now we are here, I must admit I cannot conceive of what could possibly remain of an event that took place so long ago.”

Though they took but a short time to walk around the little copse, it seemed to be taking them twice as long to walk through it and out the other side. It was so difficult, so boggy and damp, that for a little while Anne fancied that they really had wandered into one of those hidden lands the ancient Romans had written of, when the weather and the locals had proved too unpalatable for them to bother conquering on their first attempt: the lands of the hidden folk, always there and always out of sight.

“Perhaps we might see something that would link these woods to the markings from the fireplace,” Emily suggested as she looked around. “Look for carvings in the trunks of the trees or a great sacrificial altar in a clearing . . . ?”

“I’m fairly sure we won’t find anything like that . . . Oh.” Anne stopped in her tracks just behind her sister, with Branwell at her shoulder. For sure enough, just ahead was a small circular clearing made luminous by the snowfall that had covered it. At its centre there stood a formation of three huge stones. One great flat flag lay across two others on a slight tilt, rather like a giant’s table.