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“Well, I did die, didn’t I? Deserves a bit of jewelry!” Gravey laughed along with his men and snuck a sip of something from a flask on his belt.
The lady in the gray dress cleared her throat politely. “Ah!” Sergeant Major Rogue cried, slapping his beechwood forehead. “I would forget my own King if he weren’t on the money! Miss Currer, Miss Ellis, this is my betrothed, Lady Zenobia Elrington of Verdopolis.”
Gravey put his arm round the shoulders of the girl in blush. “And this is most emphatically not my betrothed, Miss Jane Austen of . . . well, anywhere she likes, I expect. Jane is far too fine for the likes of me. Says I’m morbid and rude. Well, I only squired her up because I am an excellent and long-suffering friend. Roguey told me to scrub it and get my arm under this one so Miss Z wouldn’t feel lonely, and here we all are! You must try to hear one of Janey’s storyables while you’re here; they’re better than any of the desserts.”
Charlotte and Emily stared all over again, dumbfounded once more, delighted once more to meet somebody so famous she shone. But this time Charlotte didn’t gush about the lady’s novels. She had never much cared for them. Too prim and neat and breakable. Nobody could ever really be that polite when their lives burst open like rotten dams. Emily liked them just fine, and said so. But more importantly, Leftenant Gravey just called Jane Austen “Janey.” And he was still alive. Jane’s pale eyes shot daggers at the Leftenant. Crashey hurried to skewer the awkward silence.
“All rightnough! Moving on to the lessminor gentry!”
“Oh wait, please! That’s quite enough for a first course!” pleaded Emily. “I’m already full!”
Gravey and Rogue and their dates made affectionate farewells and promises to find them all again later, but Charlotte and Emily scarcely heard a thing.
The dancing floor of the Wildfell Ball was half-filled with their toys and half-filled with the greatest men and women in Britain. Either of them could recite all those names back with hardly a breath between, but they could not understand it. It made them dizzy, trying to untangle the mess. Charlotte and Branwell had invented Adrian, the sly and wicked Marquis of Douro! And Emily had dreamed up Mary Percy after Branwell killed Douro’s first wife “to make love more interesting.” Branwell signed all his dreadful poems as Young Soult the Rhymer. And of course Anne had her Victoria. But Victoria, and Ross and Perry and John Keats and Jane Austen were quite real, and so was Lord Byron and Mary Shelley and Napoleon’s poor wife, Josephine. They’d never played Byron and Josephine of an afternoon, not once. Yet right at that very moment, Charlotte was staring into the black eyes of Lady Zenobia Elrington, a name she had spent hours thinking up while the Headmaster droned on about the Norman invasion.
“Look at what we made,” Charlotte whispered to her sister.
She could not doubt any longer that they had made it. Not with Douro and Zenobia and Mary Percy slurping brandy not ten steps away. It w
as impossible, of course, and no one would ever believe it, and she hadn’t the first guess as to how or why or when they’d done it. Only it was all so much grander and bigger than just the four of them huddled together in the playroom at the top of the stairs. So much thicker, so much wilder. She was, against all logic, walking through the insides of their four heads, and the wine there tasted wonderful.
SEVENTEEN
The Only Onions in the World
Branwell and Anne slept and slept and slept.
They had a few dim, unpleasant dreams. When they hashed everything out later, they discovered they’d dreamt the same murky, echoing stuff. Very clumsy ogres with cold, sticky hands moved them about. They pinched and sniffed and prodded roughly, shoved them here and there, ordered them to take one or another thing off or to put this or that thing on, marched them down halls and up staircases that never seemed to end, the way they never do in dreams. And the whispering! Those stupid ogres were always whispering, and at the most maddening volume: just softly enough so that they couldn’t hear, but too loud to ignore. Their whispering breath smelled like water in a still, scummy pond.
Anne woke first, but she pretended she was still asleep, just in case the ogres weren’t dreams. The pond smell still wriggled around in her nostrils. She pretended for so long that Bran woke up as well, and she lost the chance to scold him for being lazy. Her hand flew to her chest—was it safe there? Was it hers? She breathed a shaky sigh of relief.
“I can tell you’re faking, Anne,” Branwell said, and poked her in the ribs. “You always scrunch up your eyes when you’re faking. Come on, up you get! Prison’s not bad, really. Though I’m hungry as Hades. Oh, and don’t look out the windows. It’s a ghastly long way down. You know how you get.”
Anne opened one eye. Clear, cool sunlight drifted through six tall windows shaped like church candles. She was lying in a bed in a little round room. Bran sat on the edge of his own bed, swinging his feet impatiently. Their sheets and blankets were blue and red. So was Anne’s nightgown and Bran’s pajamas.
“Gondal’s colors,” Bran said. The idea of it excited him a little. He picked at the white buttons on his nightclothes.
“And France’s,” Anne said. “And England’s, come to think of it. And America. And Russia as well!”
Bran shook his head. “Good grief, didn’t anyone think that might get confusing? What’s the matter with a bit of black?”
“Or purple! Purple is much nicer than black. Oh!” Anne exclaimed, clutching her rough-spun nightgown. “Bran, where’re our clothes? My dress and my shoes and my lemon? That’s our ticket home!”
“I haven’t the foggiest,” Branwell answered gloomily.
Anne climbed out from under the covers to have a look round. The polished flagstone floor was cold under her bare feet.
There was a hearth down one end of the room with a fire going about its business inside. A pot of something that smelled oaty and milky bubbled over the flames.
“It’s vile,” Branwell assured her. “Turns out gruel is gruel wherever you go.”
Over the hearth hung an obnoxiously large portrait of Bonaparte and a lady made of roses wearing crowns the size of rain barrels. They looked smugly pleased to be having their portrait painted. The lady’s rose-hair had lost a few petals, and where they lay, they shone the most peculiar color, like moonlight. Anne chewed her lip. Down the other end was a thick, heavy door hacked out of wood so old it might have started out as the gangplank on Noah’s Ark. It had one little square window in it, too high for either of them to look out of, and full of iron bars anyway, even if they tried.
“Prison, you said?” Anne said to her brother.
“Well, it’s locked, if that’s what you mean. I don’t expect they lock you in if they mean to throw you a birthday party.” Branwell clasped his hands behind his back and began to pace up and down the cell with his best hardened warrior expression on. “Best face up to it, Anne. We’re prisoners of war, now. It’s to be interrogations and meager rations for us. We shall have to be strong. We shall have to be resolute!”
Anne rolled her eyes.
