The Bread We Eat in Dreams (34 page)

For her part, Charlotte also wished to talk to her brother away from the others, but she did not think she needed a philtre. He would tell her the truth because he was Branwell, and if he did not she would know.
I do not think the Genii really look like us,
she wanted to tell him.
I think they are wearing us like masks. Perhaps they are really us, but changed, like Buonaparte with his ram-face, which you know, I had only just conceived of when all this began, but now it is true! I would not have put it in the chronicles, as it is too fanciful even for our purposes. But if it is real it cannot be fanciful! Did you see the skin of the Genii when it cracked? Beneath I saw the swirling spangled lights of the heavens, like a furnace full of stars. It is not safe, the Young Men’s country. We are not safe.

In the late evening they came upon a house in a quiet section of quite another town, a stately place with black marble porticos and a cheery light within. They dismounted the elephant and were greeted by three of the most beautiful young men the children had ever seen. They seemed, indeed, more like paintings of men than men, and Charlotte was certain she could see brushstrokes upon their hands and faces, though this made them no less lovely.

Crashey and Bravey greeted them with laughter and claps upon the back, and the brothers invited them all in for brandy and the business at hand.

“Allow me to present,” said Crashey, “Currer, Acton, and Ellis Bell, friends of the crowns and initiates of the first order.”

“Initiates into what?” Emily said as Acton kissed her hand.

“The secrets of our yearly rite. It is a brotherhood we maintain for all time. We have come to fulfill their portion, and also for their excellent table.”

“I only wish you could have met our sister Danett,” sighed Currer, whose glossy auburn hair smelled of linseed. “But she died last year. Laudanum, I confess, and despair.”

Bravey let out a woody sob, for it seemed that he loved the Bell sister all in secret and would now bury his heart in the earth. The men shared brandy around and drank in painful silence.

Anne looked around at the house. Books lay everywhere, half in order and out. Maps hung upon the walls, of the polar regions, the Himalayas, the Yukon wilds. A great black opal desk took up the center of the room, which seemed to have been made for four people to work together upon it, though now only three manuscripts lay on its many-colored surface, each with its own quills and ivory-handled knives for making points and decanters full of rich ink. A plate of grapes, thick cheese and yellow cakes lay in the meeting place of the three stations, so any of the brothers might sample it while at work.

Anne recalled an evening at home when, distraught over Charlotte or Branwell receiving some preference, her father had asked what she wanted most in all the world. She had been younger then, not yet achieved the seasoning of six or seven years, and had been seized with the sure knowledge that whatever she asked for then her father had the power to grant it. Everything relied upon what she said in that moment. And so she told the truth, being so small and surrounded by the older children, invincible and mighty creatures whom she could never best.
Age and experience.

And yet she had remained small.

But the Bell house seemed to her the exact house that she would have when she possessed age and experience. A house
of
and
for
age and experience, where siblings might dwell together in peace and write upon a single great desk, recalling and inventing adventures, just as they did now, but with the impossible power of adults to do as they pleased.
I shall remember this house, Anne thought. I shall remember it as I remember my own name.

“Buonaparte has been to see us.” Ellis Bell’s voice cut through Anne’s thoughts. “He has decided his newest mischief will be to keep the rite from proceeding.
What if something splendid were to happen? Destruction is a wonder, disaster a fascination. We can set it aright by supper if it should go poorly.
What a creature! And the boss of his ninepins, Young Man Naughty, beat us about the head and burned our birds in their cages. But we did not give it to him. We are true.”

“Good boys,” said Bravey, quite drunk by now but still amiable.

Currer Bell went to the opal desk and drew out a ponderous quill, a feather of one of the flying peacocks they had seen in Glass Town. Its point was as sharp as a bayonet. He folded it into an oilcloth and pressed it into Crashey’s arms, leaving pale paintmarks on the cloth where his fingers touched it. “Godspeed, for he is faster than that.”

Through the long night, the children fell asleep on their diamond elephant. Crashey allowed himself to stroke the brow of Charlotte and Branwell, touching the wood-knot wound on his chest with his other hand, remembering the flames of Acroofcroomb, the blood of his comrades everywhere like a hideous ocean. The wooden soldier shook his head to clear the cloud of his many deaths.

He could not bring himself to wake them when the elephant trod into the Hall of the Fountain, so vast in its domes that the elephant was as a lowly dog in its vault. Many hours yet they marched through the long distance of the Hall, which stretched many leagues lined with statues of black and white marble as well as amethyst and peridot. He could not bear to wake them as they passed the fountain for which the place had been named, a pale snowy pool whose foaming plume reached as high as a cathedral. Only when they came to the room concealed behind a white silk curtain did he wake his charges, his small gods, and Bravey, who had sunk into sleep and brandy-fed grief over the lost Danett Bell.

Behind the curtain stood an iron door. The children stood soundless and still, with the wide, limpid eyes of those just wakened. Crashey and Bravey took wooden keys from beneath their helmets and turned the door’s two locks at once, opening with a long creak the inner chamber.

The square chamber was a red room. A bed supported on massive pillars of mahogany, hung with curtains of deep red damask, stood in one corner. A red table covered with a crimson cloth, a red toilet table, a red floor and red draperies that concealed only blank red wall and no windows. Standing out like a tabernacle in the center of the room was a red writing desk, its chair festooned with red cushions, and at it sat a young girl near Emily’s age, with long dark hair drawn in to cover her ears and searing, bold eyes. She wore a red dress.

“Hullo, Captain Tree,” the girl said brightly. “Sergeant Bud.”

“M’am,” they replied in unison, bowing.

Bravey set the crystal glass upon her table, while Crashey set the oilcloth at her side, opening it to show the quill beneath.

“My heart is racing, I am so eager to begin!” said the little girl. “But who have you brought with you? New recruits?”

Crashey introduced the children in turn, without mentioning their curious history.

“And I am Victoria,” said the child, and she smiled at them. Her smile had a strength like a blow.

Victoria picked up the huge turquoise and emerald quill and dipped it into the ink. She began to write upon a great stack of blank pages before her, her hand easy and confident, her excitement flowing off of her in curls of red heat.

“This year, I have a new world in mind,” Victoria said as she wrote. “In it, I shall put myself! I have never done that before! It’s very daring, don’t you think? Here I don’t have many prospects—my father was a clerk and a copy-editor; I went hungry plenty often, and had meat only when the butcher felt sorry for us. And I never leave this room anymore. My boys fill my larder but I’m never lonely, with all my histories to write! It takes the whole year to think through the next far country of my heart. But there! There I shall be a great Queen—not just a Queen but an Empress!—and rule forever and ever over a great kingdom. I have invented a wonderful consort for myself as well, and I shall name him Albert, and make him handsome and brave—but not so brave that he will lord over me! I shall give myself a number of children, and those children will all be Kings and Queens and Emperors and Empresses as well, so that no one must feel lesser when we gather for holidays. There will be wars, of course, you cannot make everything perfect or else it’s not very interesting. But I have planned a whole pantheon of wonderful poets and scientists and authors and inventors and painters and composers for my court—I can put you girls in it, if you like! I’m very generous! What would you like to be?”

“What about me?” said Branwell, who did not even understand what he had been left out of, but smarted all the same.

“If it pleases you,” said the child Victoria with a gracious wave of her pen.

“Poets,” Charlotte said. She did not need to take a vote; she knew them and they her. “And authors. The sort that last.”

“I shall not forget when I come to that part! There is plenty of room. Oh, wait until you see the inventions I have imagined! Lightning in a glass and tin ponies that run upon two wheels! Locomotives crisscrossing the world , even running underground like iron worms. Flying balloons and a fairs so big you have to build a whole new city just to contain them! My country will
shine
.”

And the child Victoria, her long hair spilling down over her slim shoulders, began to write so fast that they could no longer see the strokes of her pen. Sheafs of paper flew out from the desk, falling like snow onto the floor, piling up in drifts, nesting in a plush red chair, on the wide red bed. The pages were so filled with Victoria’s tiny hand they looked nearly black.

“She is writing a world into life,” said Bravey softly. “Just as you did. You did it all unknowing, but it is her whole being.”

“Which one?” said Anne, for she recalled that the Genii had said there were countless in number. “Which world?”

“Who knows? Each year she writes a new one and sets it in motion; each year we bring the ink that will compel the world to become true and the quill to carve it out of nothing. We never see her countries, the copies of ourselves and the Genii and Sir Walter Scott and Wellington and Young Soult the Rhymer that live there. It is enough to know we have brought life somewhere, instead of death. Soldiers cannot ask for more.”

Again Branwell felt a shiver of terrible responsibility at the numerous wars he had sent his Young Men to with glee, designing each of their deaths like suits. Perhaps it was this shiver that was to blame for what followed, perhaps it was that Victoria had not included him in her largesse, perhaps it was the nagging, terrible sense that Charlotte was always running ahead of him, further and further ahead, and Emily and Anne would catch her but he could not, that they were not like him, they did not see how silly their stories became when they did not have deaths by stabbing and massacres and horror in them, when they bore no hint of war, but thought
he
was ridiculous, that
he
was the strange, violent interloper in their interior nations when the wooden soldiers had been his,
his
, all along.

And perhaps it was simply that he loved Buonaparte still, his first and best Young Man, and longed to see him come real. But when he saw the ninepins creeping in, glorious fiery designs upon their black chests, he did not cry out in warning. He only watched them, dazzled and glad after the fashion of a father upon seeing his son exceed all expectations. Buonaparte himself strode forward through the ranks of his personal guard, his ram’s head carved beautifully from blackthorn wood, astride a lizard of white pine, its tail thick and whacking, its tongue a balsam whip.

And Branwell did not cry out. Victoria’s papers flew and folded and slid to the floor. Crashey and Bravey stroked her hair and rubbed her shoulders which must surely ache from her work, their faces fixed in religious ecstasy, midwives to a place they would never see.

The ninepin boss, Young Man Naughty, opened his mouth, a slit in the surface of his pin-head, and let a slow flame roll out from between his lips like a woven cloth. Branwell did not cry out. He was curious. What would happen? He did not feel any worry—if the country where Victoria was Queen burned up it was no real loss. Branwell felt no loyalty to an unborn cosmos. His loyalty was with Buonaparte.