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“And the ninepin brigade, and the vivisectionist’s garden, and even this Darwin fellow if you say he is a good man and wise,” said Emily.
“I should like to go with you to the Island of Dreams,” said Anne softly, not yet over the bright shaft of joy that had flared up and gone suddenly out in her little heart at the thought that their mother might enter the hall in as much glory as these four monarchs. “And perform the rite with you. I wish all things to be orderly and well.”
The children clapped upon this immediately as the thing to be done, though Crashey and Bravey declined bashfully, feeling it was their private affair. But in the end no fiber of them could refuse their creators, and a great elephant was called, for this was a common conveyance in Glass Town, for those who could afford it. As the negotiations were made, Chief Genii Emmii happened to cough into her kerchief, and Charlotte saw in the silken square a spray of rubies fall like blood. The corners of Emmii’s mouth seemed to crack ever so slightly, and a glittering scarlet light escaped before the skin made itself whole again.
“We must go quickly and with as little sound as we may,” admonished Crashey. Branwell was disappointed in him. They rode upon an elephant—not only an elephant but one whose skin was diamond, yet soft, with tiny silver hairs upon it and iron bones visible down deep beneath the millions of facets. How could they go quietly? Why should they? They would fight, if the ninepins came for them! Yet secretly Branwell hoped they would, for surely Buonaparte, his chief among the Young Men at home, would come with them, and they would be fast friends.
“What is it that Waiting Boy brought from our country?” said Emily as the sun went down over a broad sea that foamed on a beach below the green cliff on which their road ran. It spooled out a hot, rosy light along the horizon like calligraphy.
Bravey blushed; the birch wood of his face went the color of cedar. “To ask us to reveal these things is like asking us to discuss the details of our wedding night,” he said miserably.
“I command you to tell us!” cried Branwell.
Crashey removed from a pocket concealed in a patch of bark a crystal glass, stoppered and filled with a thick black liquid.
“Ink?” said Anne, reaching out to touch it. The sunset leant the glass a molten, volcanic splendor.
“In your country it is ink,” Crashey agreed. “Here it is a philtre which compels the truth from whomever would use it.”
Branwell was possessed by a powerful urge to snatch it away. He would make Charlotte taste it. Then she could not lie to him when he asked the questions buttoned up into his chest. Do you still love me as you used to when Emily and Anne were too young to interest us? When you go away to school again, what will become of me? Is it me you love best, or the tale of the Young Men which you require me to tell fully? You are going so fast, I cannot keep up with you. Why will you not wait for me?
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 the
m 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.
