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call at his uncle’s behest to Haworth Parsonage. I told him about the saintly woman lost by the daughters to the family disease of consumption; of the cruel school which had claimed the lives of the two eldest girls, and how Patrick Brontë had kept Charlotte and Anne and Emily at home to be educated after that, with his wife’s sister Miss Branwell in attendance.
    â€˜Branwell?’ said Henry Newby, and he sat up with a jerk in his bed, so his head hit the ceiling of the wooden box bed. ‘Did she speak in a high-pitched voice—didshe care for a girl who died in the upper room at the Parsonage?’
    â€˜No, Master Henry’, I replied—for I saw now that there had been events of the night before that were of an unusual nature, and I knew it was best, if the truth was to be extracted, with those who think themselves gentry at least, to take on the voice and manner of an old nurse or retainer. ‘Aunt Branwell, as they all called her, was impartial in her care for the remaining children. Master Branwell—that was the name of the only son—well, she found it hard to like him, I’ll confess. And Miss Emily after that, who had as stubborn a nature and as wild a temper as you could find’, I went on, wondering what type of visitation my poor visitor had suffered. ‘Especially after Miss Charlotte and Miss Anne went away to teach, that was a hard time for Miss Branwell. You’d think, with only two young ones in the house—Master Branwell and Emily, that is—that her work would be reduced. But they were up to any crazy scheme you could imagine, Mr Newby. Old Mr Brontë knew nothing of their deceivings and exploits. One day they’d be out on the moor dressed as pirates—if you can call a few old rags a true disguise—the next, Emily would have pulled one of her mother’s dresses from the press on the landing and be dressed for a ball, or so she thought it, calling herself a Countess and having her hand kissed and bowed over by young Branwell. It wasn’t good then, Master Henry, and no one could speak to the Reverend Brontë about it because he was off in his own imaginings, with God I daresay, though it seemed altogether stranger than that.’
    A silence fell, as my guest digested some of the complexities of the family. ‘So who was Mr Ellis Bell?’ he asked at last, as I heard the men down below spooning in their meal, and the dog barking beyond the pantry door to be let in. ‘Was he a lodger at the house?’
    I’d been expecting the question so I answered with all I truly knew, unsatisfying though it must have seemed to the young man. ‘The three sisters used the same name of Bell for their writings’, I said. ‘Miss Charlotte—that was the one you informed me earlier you’d heard speak in a loud voice on the stairs—she was the eldest and she didn’t mind that they knew she was a Mr Currer Bell, though I cannot see for the life of me what good it did her to be laughed at by the county. Miss Anne didn’t mind either, when the news came out. But Miss Emily—the youngest—she wanted it kept a secret, that she was Ellis Bell. Right up to the day of her death, just two weeks ago, she wanted it to be kept quiet. That’ll be the reason your uncle sent you to Mr Bell, sir.’
    â€˜I see’, said the young man, though just at that moment he saw nothing at all, having fallen back on his bunk, and the curtain falling closed beside him.
    â€˜Master Branwell died just three months before his sister’, I went on, though I doubted whether my visitor needed any more information on the subject of the Brontë family. ‘Ever since the day the moor went up—back when they were very young—they were close. She pulled him out of the bog—it was like lava, pouring down the side of the hill, and I well remember it all even now.’
    There was silence from the interior