“It will be difficult, but it will be done on the morrow,” Liston said at once, with a resolve that Emily found intriguing. “I must return to Top Withens and face my father’s wrath. Pa is a . . . a hard man, but though it must seem strange and remote to most, Top Withens is my home; its earth is in my blood and lungs. If I can’t return there, then I shall die, like a fish dragged out of a river.”

If those words had been spoken with any less intensity or certainty, then Emily would have been tempted to laugh at such a proclamation, but it was clear by the hot flush on his otherwise fair skin that Liston was deadly serious. Here was a man who loved the land he had grown up on as if it were his mother; indeed since his own mother was taken, perhaps it had been. That was a devotion that she could understand. But there was something else to Liston that she hadn’t yet quite fathomed: a kind of wariness. He looked like a haunted man, as if there were a shadow at his back that had not been cast by him. Perhaps he knew more of his father’s deeds than he had yet been able to speak aloud. He would have been a child when his mother died, about twelve years old, not old enough to have any control over his life, but of an age to detect wrongdoing.

“You each did a good thing this day, my children,” Papa said finally. He turned to look at each of his children as he spoke, though Emily could not be sure that he could distinguish her from her sisters. The deep Irish rumble of his accent hadn’t faded, though, and she always took great comfort in it, even when it was about to deliver a lecture. “Even so, you should have come to me first, for the duty you carried out this afternoon is mine or my curate’s. No matter how the Lord decides to test me by taking my sight, I am the defender and the shepherd of this parish and shall be until the day I am in my grave. To make decisions and allowances for me is to disrespect me. Am I clear?”

“Yes, Papa,” Emily and her sisters muttered in unison, joined a moment later by Branwell.

“Sight or no, I am in my prime, and I am certain that Arthur and I could have retrieved the poor child between us, and in doing so completed our duty as men of God. Branwell behaving so impetuously is one thing, but young women were never meant to be curates or parsons—it is not in God’s plan.”