Emily and Anne were both pleased to note a slight easing in the severe cold—not so much that one could afford to lose one of the many layers they were bundled in, but enough to see that the great banks of icy snow that bordered the footpaths were softening a little, with water dripping off them in steady plops, and here and there to glimpse sodden, boggy mud beneath their feet. The sky was full of more snow yet to fall, and Emily was sure the worse wasn’t over. As much as she loved the winter, it always cheered her to remember that before long there would be snowdrops nodding their drowsy heads as they awoke from winter slumber, and not so long after that, the whole countryside would burst into joyous, colourful, chaotic life. Death was never permanent: every part of nature revealed it. It was simply a moment of transition before living once again, Emily thought. The idea of never existing, never thinking, feeling, seeing or loving this earthly world again, was too much for her to bear, more so since she had spent such a very long time gazing upon the human remains of a life. Heaven might well be glorious, but how could it hold a candle to the moors that she loved? The only thing she could think of to do was not to die or, if she did, never to leave this land. She would live again within it, just as the snowdrops did, and just as the heather, reborn every year, was always there in the wind, the streams, the bend of the cotton grass. That would be her paradise.

“Emily?” Anne said from a few feet behind her. “Do you think about the poems and what it will be like if . . . when they are published?” Emily turned to look at Anne, one hand securing the hood of her cloak to her bonnet, the other holding her skirts above the mud and slush as she picked her way along the slippery path.

“I do not,” Emily said. “I do not think of it at all. It was never my wish for my words to be put before other people. They may like them or they may not. I shall not care either way.”

“Truly?” Anne queried, stopping for a moment to take a breath. “It must be very nice not to care at all for the opinions of others. I wish I knew how to armour myself so. Sometimes I can hardly sleep at night for worrying about it, not even so much for myself as for Charlotte. She is so very certain that the world will proclaim her a genius, Emily. Imagine the sulking that will set in if they do not.”