There was something amiss here—Emily could sense it—in Agnes’s benign smile, her calm and measured responses. It simply wasn’t . . . Well, it wasn’t like Haworth for someone to be given an opportunity to gossip freely and to refrain. Talking about one another was about the only source of entertainment outside of a rare treat like a concert or a good book. And as many of the villagers couldn’t read as well as their children, then hearsay was at the very top of their list of leisure activities. Agnes was doing her very best not to tell them something. If Charlotte were here, she would have drawn the truth out slowly and carefully with such a care that Agnes might not even notice that she was being beguiled. But Charlotte was not here, which meant Emily would have to do it her way, and there was nothing subtle about that.

“You are holding something back from us,” Emily said. “Not lying, not that, but not telling the truth, not all of it. The question is, why? Whom do you want to protect, Agnes? Is it yourself? Are you trying to hide your own transgression?”

“What? No!” Agnes was horrified. “How dare you!”

“Emily,” Anne interjected calmly, “you cannot make assumptions like that about this good woman’s character, especially not in a village where one word out of turn can become a rumour before you know it, and then suddenly the whole village is poking its nose in.”

“There is nothing for the village to know here,” Agnes said urgently. “I do my work and live a quiet life, and that is all.”

“I’m sure it is,” Anne said gently. “And I’m sure you aren’t hiding anything. After all, nothing can be kept secret for very long in Haworth, can it? Please, tell us, do you remember if Top Withens ever felt like a dangerous place—a place where something so terrible could happen?”

Agnes looked deeply into the fire, and it seemed to Emily that she was seeing those long-ago summer days there in the flames.

“Dangerous, no. Odd . . . unfamiliar . . . disjointed and strange, yes.”

“Can you try to explain to us what you mean?” Anne asked. “Help us get a picture of the farm back then?”

Agnes sighed heavily, her eyes on the clock once again, but nevertheless she began to talk, to truly talk this time.