PROLOGUE—1830
Come walk with me, come walk with me;
We were not once so few
But Death has stolen our company
As sunshine steals the dew . . .
—Emily Brontë
Halfway up the steep grassy slope, the three children sat down to rest. It was only midafternoon and the sky was clear, but their breaths were steam on the cold spring wind, and the two girls pulled their woolen coats more closely around their shoulders.
They were in shade now, for thirty feet farther up the slope stood the imposing stone edifice known as Ponden Kirk, its weathered, striated blocks looking like nothing so much as two stacks of gargantuan petrified books. Its top was level with the western plateau, and a few bare tree branches could be seen up there against the empty blue sky.
The boy tipped back his cap. “This is exactly how it was in my dream,” he assured his sisters.
It had been a tiring three-mile hike from home across the low hills. They had followed sheep tracks and clambered over dry-stone walls and waded through broad fields of flowering heather and foxglove, and hopped from one flat stone to another across the rushing water of Dean Beck; and this rectangular crag had been a punctuation mark in the otherwise featureless horizon for the last mile.
The taller of the two girls took off her straw hat and pushed back her disordered dark hair. She squinted up at the twenty-foot stone monument.
“Do we climb it? We could have got round to the top from the north path, by the old foundations.” Though only twelve years old, she had many times walked much farther than this across the moors, often alone.
Her brother Branwell, a year older, blinked at her. “Foundations?” His hair was carroty red, and random curls poked out from under his tweed cap. “You mean that old ruined farmhouse?”
“Closer than that—flat stones. They’re broken up, hard to see among the grass unless you’re right on top of them.”
The younger sister giggled. “Emily imagines a Pictish temple out there.”
Emily gave Anne a wry smile and shook her head. “They might be Roman foundations. Did the boy in your dream look like a Roman?”
“Maybe,” said Branwell. “Like a gypsy, really. No, we won’t climb it.” He pointed at the base of the edifice on the north side. “Our destination is the fairy cave, in the bottom corner.”
“I don’t want to get married,” Emily told him. According to local folklore, any girl who crawled out of the little cave through a narrow gap between the stones would marry within the year.
Anne just tugged the hem of her skirt over her boots and looked on, her eyes wide under her knitted wool tam.
“That doesn’t work with children,” said Branwell impatiently. “I doubt it works at all. No, that’s—” He hesitated. “That’s not what the dark boy was talking about.”
For several seconds the wind whistling between the stones of Ponden Kirk was the only sound.
“In a dream,” Emily said finally.
“What he said only happens in our stories,” piped up Anne.
The three children, along with their older sister Charlotte, had for the last several years been making up stories about an imaginary country they called Glass Town, and frequently the plots required that one character or another be restored to life after being killed in an earlier adventure.
This afternoon’s hike had had the flavor of an enacted scene from their stories; it was only now that they were here, under the shadow of this primordial monument, that Emily seriously considered the supposed purpose of their journey.
Two of their older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, had died of tuberculosis five years earlier—Maria, who would have been the oldest of them all, at the age of eleven. Their mother had died three years before that, and their aunt had moved in to help their father with the feeding and clothing and instruction of the children . . . but it had been Maria who became almost a second mother to the others, inventing games and cooking treats for them when they were sick and telling them stories when it was time for them all to go to bed. The surviving children had mourned Elizabeth, but it was Maria whose absence they still felt every day.
Emily carefully shifted around on the slope to look away from Ponden Kirk, down the wide valley that stretched away for miles between moorland hills streaked with green grass and purple heather. Distance and intervening hills made it impossible to see Haworth church, of which their father was the perpetual curate, and the adjoining parsonage, where Charlotte was no doubt reading to him from Pilgrim’s Progress or Paradise Lost, since he was nearly blind with cataracts.
This morning the three girls been peeling apples at the parsonage kitchen table when Branwell had come clattering downstairs to tell his sisters that he had dreamt of meeting Maria at Ponden Kirk, and that Emily and Anne must accompany him there directly after their midday dinner.
Anne had glanced apprehensively at Charlotte, now the eldest, who had frowned at the heathen fantasy. That’s an unwholesome place, she had said, and Maria is a saint with God now.
But Emily and Anne had finished their chores, and Branwell didn’t have any to do, and Charlotte had of course known that even young Anne missed Maria as much as she did herself.
Very well, she had said finally. You three go and have your game.
And after their noon dinner of boiled beef and turnips and apple pudding, the three children had set off. It was only when they had walked over the first hill that Branwell told his two younger sisters the details of his dream. There was a dark little boy, he had said, younger than you, Anne—he was at Ponden Kirk, and he said we might bring Maria back to life there.
Emily stood up now and brushed off her dress. “What do we do?”
The children often enacted fanciful plays, though generally in the parsonage parlor, and often got very carried away with the characters and the plots; and Emily was nearly certain that this was another of the same, performed outdoors for once. Certainly she didn’t really expect some ritual here to let them see Maria again. She was pretty sure Anne looked at it in the same way.
She was undecided about Branwell.
He had already resumed climbing toward the foot of the monument, leaning forward to grip firmly seated stones while his scrabbling boots found purchase against woody clumps of old gorse. He looked back over his shoulder and gave a jerky nod. “In the dream,” he called, “the three of us—”
“You saw us here?”
Anne got to her feet. “Not Charlotte?”
Branwell took a deep breath, then said loudly, “She wasn’t in the dream. The dark boy showed me where . . .”
Emily quickly glanced along the plateau edge that loomed above them, from south to north, giving particular attention to the broad black topmost stones of Ponden Kirk; then she looked at the slope on either side, and back at the sunlit valley behind them, and she exhaled. Of course no dark boy from Branwell’s dream would actually be here.
Anne hadn’t moved. “Didn’t he want her to come along?”
“She couldn’t, she wasn’t there.” Branwell was now standing beside the bottom blocks of stone, panting. He waved impatiently to his sisters. “Shift yourselves!”
The two girls looked at each other, then simultaneously shrugged, spread their hands, and began carefully climbing up the slope to where their brother stood.
“Round the corner here,” he said, and stepped out of sight behind a moss-streaked block, taller than he was, that made a crude pillar under a long horizontal lintel slab.
When the girls had got up to the base of the structure, they saw that Branwell had already crawled into the roughly square waist-high opening on that side; it led into a narrow cave perhaps six feet long, with gaps between the sharply angular stones of the floor and an opening onto daylight at the far end. He was sitting against a projecting shelf, his cap brushing the low overhead stone, and he shifted to make room for his sisters.
“Come on, then,” he said, his voice sounding metallic in the constricted space. “Here’s where we do it.”
Emily tossed her hat aside and hiked herself in, and edged forward on her hands and knees. The rough stone surfaces under her palms were damp and cold, and the breeze from the valley below sluiced the tiny cave with the smells of earth and heather.
Branwell contorted to get his hand into his trouser pocket, and pulled out his penknife and opened the short blade.
“That won’t incise stone,” Emily said.
“It’s to incise us,” he said. He made a fist with his left hand and carefully drew the edge of the blade across an old scar on his wrist. “There,” he said, pointing with the knife at a smooth surface of stone in front of him; and he slid the back of his hand across it, leaving a streak of blood.
He swayed, then held the knife out to Emily. He cleared his throat. “Right next to mine,” he told her.
She was looking at his now blood-streaked hand and recalling that the scar was from the bite of a strangely malformed dog that they had all supposed to be mad, though the bite had healed quickly and with no aftereffects.
Emily slowly reached across and took the knife.
She looked at the damp rock with Branwell’s blood on it—then shook her head. “And you should pray you don’t catch a pestilential distemper.” She had borrowed a copy of Richard Bradley’s The Plague at Marseilles Consider’d from their neighbors at Ponden House, and had been impressed with the notion that microsopic poisonous insects transmit diseases.
Branwell shrugged. “Just as you please. My hand will heal. And Maria can recede again into oblivion.”
“She’s in Heaven,” said Anne, who had crawled into the cave beside Emily.
“And might have visited with us,” said Branwell.
Emily exhaled throught pursed lips, then quickly cut the tip of her left forefinger. She rubbed it across the stone beside the faint streak of Branwell’s blood—and leaned against the rock at her back, momentarily dizzy.
Branwell said, “That’s two,” and Anne took the knife from Emily’s hand.
“No, Anne, wait—” began Emily, but Anne had already cut her finger. Emily caught her wrist and said, “Don’t touch the stone.”
“You did.” Anne brushed the tip of the cut finger with the thumb of her other hand and pressed it against the stone.
A cloud might have passed overhead, for the light dimmed briefly.
“Ah!” said Anne softly. Emily squeezed her wrist and shook it before she let go.
“And that’s three,” said Branwell.
Anne sat back, sucking her finger, and after several seconds she said, “This wasn’t all a game, was it? And it never had anything to do with Maria.” She looked past Emily at Branwell. “Did you know? Or did that dark boy in your dream lie to you about it? That,” she went on in a wondering tone, “is why Charlotte wasn’t in your dream—why she isn’t here. She wasn’t there.”
Emily felt as though all the warmth had drained from her body, leaving her as cold as this cave. Until Anne spoke, she had thought that the memory, which had surfaced when she touched the stone, had been a stray association of her own.
“Yes,” she said, “it was the three of us then.” Turning to Anne, she added, “I’m surprised you remember. You were only four.”
Six years ago, just a few months before Maria’s death, Branwell and Emily and Anne had gone for an afternoon walk on the moors with the parsonage housekeeper, Tabby. A mile northwest of where they now sat, a sudden gusty rainstorm had sent the four of them running for the nearest shelter from the wind, an abandoned and roofless stone farmhouse. From the doorway they had watched the curtains of rain sweep heavily across the suddenly shadowed moors . . . and then the hill from which they had descended only minutes before had exploded.
With a boom that shook the dirt floor under them, the side of Crow Hill had erupted in a spray of flying chunks of earth and even spinning boulders, and half the hillside had broken up and slid away in a torrential flood down into the valley; the earth had rumbled for a full minute as water continued to cascade through the new channel.
Branwell took the knife back from Anne and closed it. None of them stirred to see if Maria might have appeared outside, on the slope or the plateau.
Branwell was blinking in the streaks of daylight as if disoriented. “So it was just a dream,” he said gruffly. “A fantasy—we all miss her.”
“No,” said Emily. She stared at her brother. “You knew this would be some kind of . . . continuation of that afternoon in the storm, the eruption on Crow Hill. On the climb up here, when Anne asked you why Charlotte didn’t come with us today, you said she couldn’t, she wasn’t there.” She cocked her head, and her eyes were narrowed as she smiled at him. “Do we have some pestilential distemper now? Who was your dark boy?”
“Out,” said Branwell. “It was a game, an adventure in Glass Town.”
Anne slid her legs out of the opening and then carefully lowered herself onto the steep slope. Emily followed and retrieved her hat, and when Branwell joined them they began picking their way down toward the path at the bottom of the valley.
“Best not to bother Papa with any of this,” said Anne breathlessly.
Previous curates at Haworth church had warned the congregation of devils that still roamed these remote northern hills, and the children’s father often emphasized the same spritual peril in his sermons. Too, he was more superstitious than seemed quite right in a clergyman, and took all sorts of eccentric precautions at the parsonage.
“No,” agreed Emily. “Why worry him—” She couldn’t, with any conviction, add the word needlessly.
When the three children had hiked back across the moors and marshes in the waning daylight to the parsonage, they told their older sister Charlotte about crawling into the fairy cave in Ponden Kirk, and the knife, and the blood on the stone. Branwell did his best to dismiss it all as a game inspired by a meaningless dream, but Charlotte seemed uneasy at having given them permission to go, and emphasized Anne’s advice that they not trouble their ailing father with it.
Oddly, for the four children were closely united in their losses and their shared stories and their preferred isolation from most of the people in their small Yorkshire village, it was to be many years before any of them would speak again of that day.