Tewit Laithe had been so long neglected that it had almost fallen back into the hillside from which its stones had been hewn three centuries earlier. The house was a long, uneven concoction, made up of four workers’ cottages that sat halfway up the hill, shielded from sight by a thick copse of trees and briars. The local legend went that Ned Sladden had acquired the three other cottages that adjoined his own soon after his younger daughter was born. The child was grossly malformed, they said, and ought not to have survived, but it was the mother who had died from loss of blood, and desperate to keep the cruel world away from his twisted child, the farm foreman had somehow bought the whole row of cottages from the landowner and made a sanctuary for his daughters. None knew how it was done, for Ned Sladden was a man of modest means, but there were rumours—there were always rumours.

Within ten years Sladden had passed, and since then—a period of time Emily was not entirely sure of, but was somewhere close to forty years—the sisters had taken care of themselves, refusing all offers of outside help. Scarcely seen and mostly forgotten by those who lived and worked around their little island of solitude, halfway up the hillside, they wandered their realm like a pair of lost ghosts.

The land surrounding Tewit Laithe had long since returned to the wild moorland, and the path that led to it from the road was barely visible even in daylight. On this frozen winter evening, it was near impossible to navigate; all they had to guide them was a vague idea of where they remembered the building being in relation to the peak of the hill, and even those memories were uncertain.

On they walked, upwards to where the dark brow of the hill met with the velvet blue of the night, stars appearing one by one like faraway lanterns. At last Emily saw the shadow of a building crawl out from the darkness and make itself known, as it unfolded into view. From without it appeared entirely dark and uninhabited, lacking the discernible flicker of a candle or the glow of a fire, but it could not have been any other house but the one they were seeking, not in this area.

“It seems utterly deserted,” Charlotte whispered, though there was no one to overhear the sisters talking. “Perhaps the sisters have moved on after all.”

“It may just be that they are at the back of the house,” Anne said as she pushed open the rusty gate with some effort. “I shall knock on the door.”

Anne banged firmly once or twice on the low oak door set into thick walls. There was no reply, no trace of movement from within.