Worlds of Ink and Shadow (10 page)

“I expect I've sounded very foolish, preaching my sermon against the old gods,” said Rogue, when they were once more bumping over the cobbled roads. “In fact, most days I am able to convince myself it's all in my imagination. Other days, of course . . .” He broke off and suddenly—inexplicably—began to smile.

Something in the pit of Branwell's stomach knotted in fear. Rogue's teeth were far too white and too plentiful, like an animal's, like a wolf's. No. Charlotte was not responsible for these physical changes in his favorite character. She was far too sensible for this, too prudent.

“Other days?” Branwell asked.

“Other days I hope the Genii do exist—because if they do, it
is not the Duke of Zamorna who is my true enemy.” Rogue sat back, his jacket opening so that Branwell could see the revolver at his waist. “Mark my words, Thornton. If I ever meet those cursed beings, I shall paint this city red with their blood.”

ANNE

S
OME TIME BEFORE THEY WERE BANISHED
from the invented worlds, when Anne was about eight and Emily was about ten, Charlotte invented a game for them. It had been to get rid of them, Anne now realized, something to occupy the younger ones while Charlotte and Branwell created their Glasstown adventures without interruption—but Anne had loved it anyway. After helping them to cross over, Charlotte would make Anne and Emily a room with nothing in it but a window and an empty wooden chest.

“This is a magic chest,” Charlotte told them the first time. “It will give you anything you want.” She closed the lid. “Like this: One, two, three . . .” She opened the lid again, reached inside, and pulled out two crowns, which Anne and Emily dutifully put on their heads.

When she was gone, Anne had no trouble making the chest work. She asked for a pencil to draw with and got it; she asked for thread to sew with and could make whatever color she pleased. But when Emily asked for emerald thread, she got a chest full of emerald green beetles that swirled around her when she opened the lid and then flew out the window. When Emily asked for a pencil, she got a long, red snake—pencil thin—that coiled around her wrist and up her arm. She called the snake Jack and cried when she realized she couldn't bring him home.

After a while they learned not to ask for anything, but to see what gifts the chest would give to Emily on its own—brass doorknobs of different shapes and sizes; a pair of lime green gloves, both for the left hand; chipped teacups with scenes from their favorite books painted on the sides; a beautiful set of mourning jewelry made from the braided hair of a dead person. Anne and Emily had played with that last gift a long time, marveling at the intricacy of the fine plaits and trying to imagine who the dead person might have been.

Anne had known from the start that the “magic chest” wasn't truly magic—or at least it was no more magic than anything else in the invented worlds. She and Emily themselves created what was inside. It was odd, though, that Emily never knew what would be there before she opened the lid. Anne reasoned that there must be a part of Emily's mind that Emily herself was unaware of, a part of the mind that flowed unseen like a
subterranean river, thinking its own thoughts and making its own decisions without consulting Emily at all. Anne wondered if she, too, had such a river inside her—but whenever she asked the chest for nothing, counted to three, and opened the lid, nothing was exactly what it gave her.

“Look what she's done to my hair!” Emily exclaimed, looking in the mirror. “She obviously hates me.” She lifted a loopy plait and let it fall. “What other explanation could there be?”

She had pulled Anne through room after room of Wellesley House—galleries and gaming rooms and salons—until the noise of the party was far behind them. Finally she must have decided that they were far enough away, and they had stopped in what seemed to be a lady's private sitting room.

Emily flopped down on a plump sofa. “Do you think we made this little chamber, or did Charlotte?”

Anne looked around. It was a comfortable room—smaller and slightly less ornate than many of the others they had seen. There was a chair by the window for sewing and a desk in the corner for writing. The sofa sat in front of the fire—fireplaces were always lit in Verdopolis, she had noticed, regardless of the weather. “Why, Charlotte made it, of course. She makes everything in Wellesley House.”

“Yes, but she can't be imagining all of it at once, can she?” Moments earlier Emily had been livid, but now she seemed quite
at ease, with her arm draped over the sofa's back. Perhaps she had decided not to ruin what might well be their last visit to Verdopolis.

Anne sat on the sofa's edge. It was so overstuffed that it seemed to sigh underneath her, a disconcerting feeling. How strange, Anne thought, that Emily should be so accustomed to luxuries she had never known in life.

“Are you suggesting that we made this room without realizing it?” Anne asked.

“Well . . . perhaps Charlotte makes the room, but we fill in the details based on our ideas of what Zamorna's mansion should look like.”

Anne's eyes fell to the mahogany claws on the feet of the writing desk, the green tassels on the curtain sash. She remembered that they had always been able to make small changes in the invented worlds, and there did seem to be a little bit of Emily in these things. The pattern on the wallpaper, when she examined it closely, was one of heather and foxglove.

Abruptly, Emily sat up. “And here's another question. That hall we just came down.” She pointed to the closed door. “Is it still there?”

“Of course it is.” Anne stood and opened the door, revealing the rather nondescript hallway.

Emily turned her eyes to the ceiling. “Well, of course it's there now, but perhaps it simply appears when you open the door and will disappear the moment you close it.”

Anne laughed. “That is an unprovable hypothesis.”

“In fact, all those rooms we passed—do they exist when no one is there, I wonder? Does Verdopolis itself?”

Anne had always thought of the invented worlds as places to be visited, but of course they were made by her siblings and wouldn't exist without them. She looked around, seeing the room anew.

“I wonder how much power we have to change this place,” Emily mused. “I wonder if she banished us so we'd never find out the scope of what we can do.”

A thought occurred to Anne. “Scissors, please,” she said. She counted to three and pulled open the drawer of the nearest side table, smiling as she took out a pair of scissors. “Look, Emily. We can still change some things, just as we could before.” She sat down again on the sofa and began to cut the silk flowers from her dress, tossing them one by one into the fire.

“Oh,” Emily cried. “Don't ruin your dress. It looks so lovely on you.”

Anne snipped the head off a flower with a bit too much vigor, leaving a small hole. She'd expected Emily to understand. “I wanted to be exactly myself, not Lady Anne from the provinces. It's what I chose.”

Emily frowned. “I thought you simply couldn't think of a character to play.”

Anne shook her head, trying to find the words. “It's foolish . . . but you know that I wish Charlotte's writings were more true.
I suppose I thought a plain Haworth girl might be just what Verdopolis needed.”

“I see.”

“And a muslin dress, too.” Anne looked up at her sister. “They can catch fire, you know. I feel quite in danger.”

“Oh, Anne, that's just an eccentricity of Papa's,” Emily said, sitting down again. “But I'm very sorry, at any rate. If I'd chosen to play a character Charlotte approved of, she might not have changed either of us.”

Anne couldn't help but smile. “You were so wicked, Emily. I don't know how you dared. The Red Countess, of all people!”

Emily smiled, too, but then leapt up again with an “oh” as if struck by lightning. “I have an idea,” she said. “If you and I
do
create these rooms without realizing it, do you think that if we closed that door, counted to three, and opened it again, we could make any room we wanted?”

“Haven't we just determined that it's a hallway?”

Emily made a frustrated hiss. “For heaven's sake, Anne. It could be anything. It could be a magical door. To Gondal.”

Anne doubted this was possible. There were unwritten laws and rules to Verdopolis set down by Branwell and Charlotte. Occasionally characters had visions or saw ghosts, but Anne had read enough about Verdopolis to know that there was no fairy-tale magic like what Emily was describing.

“I don't . . .”

“There's no harm in trying, is there? Stand here with me.”

Anne joined Emily in front of the door. “Very well, but don't say what you wish for aloud. Remember when we used to play with the wooden chest that Charlotte made for us? Things were always more interesting when you asked for nothing and then opened the lid.”

“Splendid idea,” said Emily. She put her hand on the door handle, giving Anne a nervous glance. “One. Two. Three.” She threw open the door.

It was still only a hallway, just as Anne had imagined it would be. However, it wasn't empty now.

“Ladies,” said a deep voice. Into the room stepped Alexander Rogue.

CHARLOTTE

W
AS IT CHARLOTTE'S IMAGINATION, OR
was the room different in some inexplicable way? She was still in the green and gold salon, and the malachite fireplace was still exquisite, but the paintings on the walls were all of shipwrecks or storms raging over jagged mountains. Hadn't they been tranquil landscapes before?

This was Emily's doing, somehow. Even as a child, she had ruined stories with her strangeness. Charlotte should have remembered how, in the old days, her plots had veered off in odd tangents when Emily was around, and even her own characters became unpredictable. At least Charlotte's collaboration with Branwell allowed for each of them to have their own particular stories—whereas Emily's imagination seeped into everything
like strong dye, changing what wasn't hers to change.

“Did you hear? Zenobia Percy is at the party,” a woman said.

Charlotte was alone in the room, but the double doors were open. She could see the party guests gliding by in their finery and could hear snippets of their conversations.

“The Red Countess?” a man answered. “Why would she be here? Her husband is the duke's deadly enemy.”

Why indeed. What in heaven's name was Charlotte to do with this plot development? Truth be told, Emily was right about the character's potential. Zenobia could be the Verdopolitan Madame de Staël. The modern Cleopatra.
Perhaps she plays the mandolin and speaks fluent Chinese
, Charlotte thought.

“
All covet an invitation to her salons
,” she said under her breath, “
where the greatest politicians, the wittiest authors, and the most talented artists gather around her like moths to a flame.
”

Yes. She liked that. But still, why would the Red Countess come to the party?

“A love affair,” she breathed aloud as the idea struck. “A love affair with the Duke of Zamorna.”

Now, that was interesting.

Not only were there hundreds of dramatic possibilities to such a romance, but it would also mean that Branwell's character, Alexander Rogue, was a dupe and a cuckold. Charlotte grinned, thinking how vexed this would make her brother. He deserved it. Hadn't he threatened to kill off Zamorna?

Charlotte felt a twinge of guilt for what this would do to
Mary Henrietta—she'd be devastated to learn that her husband was having an affair with her own stepmother—but then, she would be so beautiful in her melancholy. Besides, her noble and virtuous love hadn't set Zamorna's heart on fire the way Charlotte had hoped it would. Perhaps forbidden love—guilty, tortured love—with the Countess Zenobia would finally bring him to life.

Charlotte ducked behind a sofa and squeezed her eyes shut, ready to take hold of the story. In a singsong voice, she murmured:

“
The young lord Charles, though intelligent beyond his years, was not above the games and japes to which all boys are prone. After being abandoned by his rude cousins, he fell to playing with a ball, which bounced under the legs of a silk-upholstered sofa that had once belonged to Louis the Fifteenth. It was for this reason that when the duke of Zamorna and the viscount Castlereagh entered the room and shut the door, they believed themselves to be alone, not noticing Zamorna's young brother behind the sofa. Dear reader, do not blame young Charles for not admitting his presence, for otherwise how would we know of the conversation that ensued?
”

“I did not ask her to the party,” came Zamorna's voice. “You must believe me. She took that upon herself. But now that she is here . . . I must dance with her, Castlereagh. By God, one dance is all I ask.”

Charlotte opened her eyes. The Duke of Zamorna stood by the fire with his friend, the Viscount Castlereagh, a handsome,
fair-haired gentleman of twenty-one. Both held glasses of sherry in their hands. In past stories the young viscount had idolized the duke, but now he looked at his mentor with shock and disappointment in his eyes.

“Zamorna, you are mad. You have married the most beautiful woman in Verdopolis—a paragon of virtue and loveliness. Why throw away your happiness for a dance with another man's wife?”

“
Zamorna hurled his glass into the fire
,” Charlotte said, “
making the flames dance
.”

Zamorna hurled his glass into the fire. “Damn it, Castlereagh! I tell you, I must! She and I have a history—one that I cannot forget.”

“I would think a face like Mary Henrietta's could make you forget all else.”

“A man such as I can never be content with one woman.” Zamorna looked into the distance, his face twisted with strange passions. “It is my curse.” He grabbed his friend by the hand. “I beg you, find some pretext for keeping my wife away from the ballroom, for if she sees me dancing with . . .
her
. . . she will know all.”