“I admit this matter fills me with a sense of great unease.” Charlotte took a seat at the table, the little spaniel Flossy sitting beside her, nuzzling her head under Charlotte’s palm until Charlotte’s fingers found exactly the spot under her ear where she liked most to be scratched. “It will sound fanciful to you, I am certain, but did you not feel that there was a kind of sickness within Top Withens Hall? For all of Old Bess’s housekeeping and Liston’s good nature and clear devotion to the place, it was almost as if the building itself was full of some kind of malice.”

“That does sound fanciful,” Emily said, sitting up suddenly, “but yes, I had much the same impression. However, the reason we visited was a very grim one, Charlotte. Should we have called by on a summer’s day without knowledge of the bones, I daresay we would have had a quite different impression. And no ghosts spoke to me while we were there, so I must assume there are none.”

“A terrible feeling is not a rational reason to turn away from the work that is required to resolve the truth,” Anne said firmly. “Indeed, that something awful happening should elicit awful feelings seems entirely sensible.”

“Perhaps,” Charlotte said, “but we must also think of our real work, our purpose. Perhaps Aylott and Jones will agree to publish our words, and thereafter we may be called upon for more. Should we not answer the calling that will bring forth our novels and thus, with God’s grace, grant us a living that will allow us to stay together at home with Papa? Don’t you agree, Emily?”

“You are frightened, Charlotte,” Emily said, not unkindly. Even so, the observation cut through her sister most keenly.

“I am not,” Charlotte countered. “I simply want my life to move forward, to be done with the tedium of teaching, the fear of poverty and homelessness. I want to have the time and freedom to write every day, simply because I cannot do otherwise. Detecting delays that moment from being realised.”

“We all want that, but we have a duty to do what is right,” Anne reproached her mildly, “to ourselves as much as to others. We have never been women who look away from injustice, Charlotte.”

“And what can we three do that is any different from what the constable or the courthouse might?”

“We can care about a lost child no one has ever missed or looked for,” Anne said.