We stood in front of the table where Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights were written, behind a rope that kept us just inside the doorway. Three housedresses stood awkwardly on their own.

‘Who sat where then?’ asked Emily.

‘We could do with those little place cards you get at weddings. I’m not getting much of an aura, are you?’

‘No,’ said Emily. ‘Let’s try. Imagine you’re here a hundred and seventy years ago.’

‘OK. I’m Emily, you’re Charlotte. Which dress is yours and which is mine?’

‘Don’t you want to be Branwell?’

‘Stop negging me. Let’s split up. I’ll see you upstairs. We’re interfering with each other’s receptors for ghostly vibes.’

I wandered round the kitchen and Patrick Brontë’s study, then headed upstairs. There was some kind of art installation in one room – no, it was a recreation of Branwell’s bedroom studio, excellent at the expense of accuracy, which some small print acknowledged: Branwell had shared a room with his father for a lot of his life; and this gloomy chamber was more like my bedroom in the château on a Sunday morning after I’d invited friends back, a disordered piling of books and newspapers and empties, scrawled poems and empty laudanum bottles – at least I assumed that’s what they were, since you couldn’t fit enough gin in them to get an alcoholic drunk, or certainly not this one. I wouldn’t have been surprised to have found NOS canisters on the floor; or empty baggies with Bob Marley’s face printed on them.

A tour guide in the hall outside was explaining about Branwell’s ambitious affair with Mrs Robinson, mother of the children he and Anne were hired to teach. When her husband had died, Branwell had been convinced she would send for him.

I backed out and into Emily.

‘This room is quite something,’ I said. ‘Look: he’s been reading a copy of his own poem in the newspaper.’

‘All these candles. I’m surprised he’s never set his bed on fire.’

We peered around the room, like a forensics squad.

‘Do you think people, er? Goths, er?’ she said, indicating the rumpled sheets.

We looked down at them together and back at each other.

‘Are you propositioning me?’ I asked.