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TWENTY
The Vivisectionists’ Garden
The glittering assembly of the Wildfell Ball swarmed out into the gardens like a school of silver fish. The moon rode so high in the sky it seemed as distant and remote as the stars. Charlotte and Emily stepped out onto a rich green lawn gone black with moonlit shadows and dew. They didn’t need Crashey to find their way now. Everyone seemed to know where to go. The press and swell of bodies carried them along down the path, through indigo stone arches and tall braziers full of violet coals. They finally got a moment alone in the crush. Crashey and Byron and Gravey and Rogue and Wellington and all the rest streamed on ahead.
Charlotte pulled a lock of Emily’s hair over a little spot on her forehead where the silver paint had begun to fade.
“Did you have any luck?” she whispered.
Robin Hood jostled Emily lightly as he passed by and stepped on her hems. She felt certain that if she had been carrying a purse, she wouldn’t be carrying it any longer. “I’m not sure,” she said quietly. “George may help us, though I’m not entirely sure what he can do, other than write a poem about the whole mess.”
“George?” Charlotte arched her golden eyebrow.
“Yes, George. Lord Byron. That’s his name, you know. He’s . . . well, he’s completely as I thought he’d be, but at the same time, not at all.”
“Wellington is much the same. Like, and not like. Though I don’t expect he’d think much of me calling him Arthur just yet.” Charlotte looked down at the deep, shadowy lawn. “He turned me down flat, Em.”
“He’s hardly the only fellow here with a good arm and a good head,” Emily said. “We’ll find someone else.”
But she could tell by Charlotte’s face that no one else would do. Her sister had a story in her head, and the story went: Charlotte and the Duke of Wellington ride together as equals and companions into battle and save everyone from everything. But that wasn’t the story. Emily was riding, too. And she was feeling bold enough to dismiss a Duke with a flick
of her hand. “He’s rather a stodgy thing, anyway, isn’t he? All brooding and distant and cold and glum and barely saying a word even at a party! I can’t imagine what you see in him. I much prefer George. And Crashey.”
Over the jeweled heads of the revelers, they could see one last stone archway. It was set into the scarlet prickles of a long, winding holly hedge wall. This one was obsidian, shining like a black mirror. There were moonstones set into the rock to trace out medieval-looking letters that read:
The Vivisectionists’ Garden
“I am slightly concerned, Emily,” confessed Charlotte. “Ellis, I mean, I am slightly concerned about what exactly a Vivisectionists’ Garden might be.”
“It does sound gruesome, doesn’t it?” Emily said.
A flush rode as high on her cheeks as the moon in the sky and though her stomach churned at the thought of what might lie beyond this last archway, her heart thrilled at the possibility of seeing something she really, really oughtn’t.
“You know vivisectionists cut up corpses and study them, don’t you? It might be all kidneys and lungs among the rosebushes. You won’t be squeamish?” Charlotte asked.
“I read just as many books as you, Currer,” Emily snapped. She’d been dancing with Lord Byron! No one could have much to teach her about anything after that! “I’m not an idiot! I know what words mean, even if they have more syllables than Bran says they should.”
At the thought of Branwell, they grew somber. Such a lot of fun it had been, dancing and meeting famous and magical and mythical people and bantering with clever men. Almost marvelous enough to make them forget how badly they were needed elsewhere, how desperately they had to find a way home now that the evening train had long gone. They clasped hands and laced their fingers together, gold and silver, and began to say something to one another about how shamefully they’d been laughing while poor Anne was probably still wedged under Brunty’s armpit. Then, they stopped. Was it such an awful crime to enjoy one minute of this strange day? They’d come on purpose, hadn’t they? They’d wanted to come. Wanted to run away. They’d escaped the maw of School so narrowly—wasn’t that worth one laugh, one smile, one spin in the arms of a poet or a Duke? But then, they couldn’t bear to say that out loud, either. What if it was not worth that, and they were being terrible sisters by not focusing every fiber of their beings, every single second, on finding their family?
“I forgive you, C,” whispered Emily.
“I forgive you, E,” Charlotte whispered back.
They plunged into the Vivisectionists’ Garden.
The guests of the Wildfell Ball sprawled out in a sparkling half-moon around a luxurious puppet theater. There were no seats; everyone lay about relaxing on a thick lawn of soft purple grass and tiny wild roses. For all the glorious clothes and tiaras and refined voices, it looked just like a country picnic back in Yorkshire. The Duke and Duchess of Can’t even had a hamper of champagne flutes and vol-au-vents like the one Charlotte had had on the train. They wept all over it, which probably got their wine horribly salty, and daubed each other’s eyes with the corners of their checkered blanket. Ross and Parry slurped down seal meat and iced oysters on a walrus-skin. The Shelleys shared sandwiches with the Queen of the Bluestockings. Wellington and his limeskin sailors stood on the outskirts, still smoking and joking and snickering and catcalling Guinevere and never fully joining in. The Marquis of Douro and his lover, Mary, sat nearest to the theater. Mary admired the mauve brocade curtains and the curving, intricate woodwork that ran up and down the base and the poles and the crown of the thing, all painted silver, just like a certain girl in the audience. Crashey, Gravey, Rogue, and their lady companions had staked out a claim under a plum tree heavy with fruit. Lord Byron spread out an ancient, threadbare patchwork quilt with a hundred different coats of arms fading away on it. He judged it fine and lounged back on his elbows, leaving plenty of room on the blanket for company. Someone had thoughtfully hauled Josephine’s cage out so she could see the show. She did not look like she was looking forward to it.
Not a single one of them was looking at the statues.
All round the walled garden, there were little alcoves in the holly hedge. In each alcove stood an extraordinary, beautiful, horrible, hideous statue. Charlotte and Emily could not help goggling at them. How could everyone else just sit there like there was nothing unusual about anything? The statues were all handsome men and women, pale and expressive and very realistic. They looked much like the Greek ones they’d seen illustrated in Papa’s magazines. Some of them had arms or legs or heads lopped off—but many of the ones in the magazine pictures did, too. They weren’t troubled by that.
Charlotte walked up to the one nearest her. It was a young girl, a Venus or a Diana, just exactly as she might have been carved in Athens. Only this Venus didn’t have any marble skin over her stomach. Charlotte could see all her organs, placed in perfect anatomical position, and carved out of precious gems. Her stomach was a huge pearl, her liver a massive black opal, her esophagus a curling length of coral, her kidneys a pair of garnets, the pancreas a lump of emerald, the spleen an uncut topaz. The statues were all like that. Some part of their marble gone and their insides revealed. That man looked like Michelangelo’s David, only strand after strand of amethyst intestines spilled out of his gut. Nearest the puppet stage, the neck of a lithe youth in a short toga ended in a jade skull. Emily reached up to run her fingers along the ruby ropes of muscle showing through a child’s marble arm. She shuddered, but it fascinated her. Bran would love this, she thought. He would draw them over and over until he could get the one with the onyx heart just right. And Anne would have screamed if she saw that sapphire brain. Screamed, and then talked about nothing else for a month. Emily missed them so. She hoped desperately they were all right, wherever they were.
“Do you like my patients?” came the sleek leather voice of Dr. Home behind them.
Somehow, Charlotte got the idea Dr. Home preferred to sneak up behind people before he started a conversation with them. That way no one could ever start off on the right foot. They’d stammer and stutter and blink a lot and he’d get to play the calm, reassuring doctor. But she did not find his presence reassuring. He towered above them like a crow, miles of oiled satchel-leather folded tightly and crisply into the shape of a young man.
“Do you do a large business in healing statues?” Charlotte said archly. She would not stammer. Let him do what he liked with that.
