“I looked carefully at him; for a moment I wondered whether a lost traveller had stumbled in from the moors. His clothes were dishevelled, as though he had slept in them, his coat splashed with mud, and his hair dark, loose and unfashionably long. There was something in the way he held himself that reminded me of Hester: a straightness of posture, drilled bone-deep as a child. His face, pale in the candlelight, had a youthful turn to it, its surface clear and white but for a dark patch beneath his cheekbone. I thought I saw – but wondered if I imagined it – the moistness of tears on his face.”
Photographs taken Haworth, Yorkshire, November 2017.
“I took off my gown, and, dressed in my shift, climbed into my new bed. Then I pulled the blankets over my head, so I could only hear my own breathing, trying to block out the dark weather coming over the moors, the wind buffeting the house, and finding its way into every nook and cranny of White Windows. The headache came, a pulse in my skull, rising and deepening until I did not feel the fear any more, only the pain.”