‘Don’t look much like sisters to me.’

Ten-year-old Eddie Bryant said it and the irony of the comment wasn’t lost on the trio of young women who gazed out at the Three Sisters that clear summer morning. The famous monolithic spears of rock before them were beautiful in their own crumbling, craggy way, yet different from one another indeed, despite being hewn from a singular giant cliff of sandstone.

The Merriweather sisters perusing them were much the same, so unalike no-one ever assumed them to be related, yet it could never be argued that they weren’t derived from the same firm rock of their parents. In fact, argument was one of the unifying traits that proved their common parentage; ‘healthy debate’ their mother, Harriet, termed it. But the impassioned conversation that sparked endlessly between them all often drove their quiet father Albert to smoke his pipe in the garden.

Brown-haired Agatha, Aggie, was the eldest, and a more pleasant countenance would be hard to find, as her father had once remarked. Some thought her open features reflected a meek or compliant disposition, a misconception swiftly rectified in most cases…

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