“No,” Anne replied. “No, he is more than that—so much more—and we didn’t think of him when we sent away the poems, not once. We have hurt him, and even if it wasn’t our intention, we must make amends, because I am very afraid that he cannot take much more hurt. But not now—now we must find Miss Goddard, and I cannot fathom where she might be in the collection of farmhouses and workers’ cottages.”

“I believe Mrs. Seed was lying to us,” Charlotte said.

“One moment.” Anne stopped on the road as a thought struck her. “There is a house just past Stanbury that used to be workers’ cottages, but they were bought up years back and made into one home—now occupied by two lone spinsters.”

“You mean the Sladden sisters, out at Tewit Laithe,” Emily said. “They are hardly ever seen—one of them not at all—not by anyone for years and years. It seems hardly likely that they would employ a companion in their crumbling little cottage.”

“Unlikely, perhaps,” Anne said, “but not impossible. You said yourself that there are no other properties for us to call on that we do not already know, and perhaps such a forgotten place as Tewit Laithe might prove appealing to a young woman and a boy who believe they are in hiding from a monster.”

“It’s another two miles,” Charlotte said. “I cannot feel my feet.”

“But we must be thorough, Charlotte,” Anne told her sister. “Surely the central tenet of detecting is that we miss not a single detail that might lead to the truth. If you will not accompany me, I will go alone.”

Anne waited as her sisters exchanged glances.

“We shall come with you,” Emily said after a moment, “as you knew we would. For if we did not, Tabby would never let us hear the end of it. And besides, Anne who is the baby no longer, you are quite right. True detectors leave no stone unturned.”

41

Emily