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“Watch the edge on that wit, girl! You’ll cut yourself before you cut me.” Then he was all secret smiles and anticipation again. “Hush, hush now, we’re going to miss it!”
Still more puppets crowded on. How many had the boy made? A black leather marionette with long, thin limbs and a soldier made of simple yellow wood knelt beside Douro and lifted him up onto an invisible gurney. The drums beat wildly. A scarlet flower caked with crystal beads rose up from below the stage.
But ho! But lo! What flower is this
Beneath dead Douro’s head?
These unassuming petals stained
With Glass Town blood so red?
What luck, what joy! A miracle!
Heaven turned against the frogs!
The angels brought us Dr. Home
And Crashey’s death-defying grog!
Sergeant Crashey threw his arms in the air. “Bullyblimey it all down the road and back! It’s me! Would you lookagander at that! It’s puppet me! I’m famous! Look at my legs! Good Lord, but I never was that thin!”
The Shelleys, Keats, Jane, and Kate Crackernuts shushed Crashey violently. Dr. Home bent his shiny leather head as the folk around him showered the man in praise.
“I will not shush!” Crashey announced. “I have never been a puppet or done up theatrisculpturally and I am chuffed as a steam train! Dunno why he couldn’t use the Latin, though. He’s overstuffed the meter as it is! Who’d notice one more bit of fatticus in that rex sausageorum?”
“Shut it, Crash!” Lord Byron yelled. Beside him, Emily’s mouth had dropped open in surprise.
“Crashey!” said Charlotte. “It was you? You invented the . . . the . . . something . . . vitae . . . grog?”
The Sergeant preened. “What did I say? What d
id I expressxactically say? I said you two didn’t know a thing about me and I could be brainyrich and bigshotted as anything for all you could guess. Sergeant Crash C. Crashey is an enigmariddluzzleman and a half!”
Miss Jane narrowed her eyes at Charlotte. Lady Zenobia whispered in her fiancé’s wooden ear.
“Surely Thrushcross is not so remote that such basic facts have not reached your muddy, unhinged door,” Miss Jane hissed.
Charlotte’s stomach turned cold. She cast about for something to shut up the nasty little gossip. “A . . . a Lady . . . needn’t concern herself with stuffy old things like history books.” She couldn’t help it. The idea of not concerning herself with books was so hilarious to Charlotte that she threw in a giggle for good measure. She was warming up to the lie, now. “Papa said it dries out a girl’s brain and ruins her for marriage.”
This seemed to satisfy her.
“He hasn’t got it on straight, anyhow, Austen old girl.” Crashey dismissed her with a flutter of his fingers. “It was mostly Dr. Home what did it. It were only my laboratoryottage and my equipment and my idea.”
The petals on the beaded scarlet flower slowly fell away to reveal a miniature bottle filled with the moonlit fluid she’d seen seeping into Leftenant Gravey’s wounds at Port Ruby. Grog. Rhodinus Secundi Vitae. Young Soult’s effects were rewarded with an appreciative gasp.
From Gondal’s humble flowers they brewed
The answer to our prayers.
They took our lives, we took their weeds—
I’d say that’s pretty fair!
This was answered by a great whooping and cheering and stomping of feet.
“Well,” Crashey whispered bashfully. “It’s a dashbittle more complicated than that, you know. The blossom’s just the beginning. There’s berries and vitalegetable flooooids and stufflike. We found old Douro dead as a fatherless donkey, that’s true, but he had all these petals and that stuck to him and wherever they stuck the wounds were all stitched up like a doctor did it! But he were still donkeyed, poor lump. Took us ages to science it down to size, especially in the field— lucky me I had a summer house in Gondal back before the war—so we recommandeerandered it and anyhow, this, that, and the other biochemical thing, Dr. Home and me beat death. Not bad for a boy who never so much as met Mr. Cambridge or Mr. Oxford! I thought I’d get a Knighthood out of all that excitement but the Duke just said: Terribly sorry, old chap, but I just can’t. What a snorfling, dripping nose of man!”
Charlotte goggled, delighted and dumbfounded all together at once. But then that black cat came creeping up the stairs of her thoughts again. If such a thing can be made with science and study, not magic, perhaps . . . perhaps . . . perhaps it is no different than medicine. . . .
