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Charlotte frowned doubtfully. Wellington rubbed the back of his neck like a schoolboy.
“Oh, I do try to make grand speeches, but I always muck it up. By light them on fire, I mean set sail for Gondal at first light on a ship full of very angry people and just massive heaps of gunpowder.”
TWENTY-ONE
The Princess in the Tower
This cell was much nicer than Branwell and Anne’s had been.
There were plush red and blue chairs and a neat red and blue bed with a red and blue brocade canopy. A round table covered in a red and blue cloth and a sapphire tray full of breakfast leftovers stood beside the biggest chair. All along the thick stone walls of the vast room full of toys hung a great walloping tapestry. It draped down in panels between the windows, reaching up to the ceiling and down to the floor. Each panel showed a map of a different city, painstakingly woven with a million tiny, brilliant threads. Their names were stitched near the ceiling in silver. There was Ochreopolis in gold thread, and Port Ruby in crimson, and the Plaid Lands in black and brown and white, and some very violet place called Lavendry-on-Puce, and Verdopolis in emerald. There were others, too, places they had never been but imagined a thousand times. They’d marched their wooden soldiers through them and argued over their names and climates and peoples. Bran had spent hours drawing their borders, their castles, even their local trees and fruits. Regina and Lake Elseraden and Almadore and Zamorna and Calabar Wood and the Isle of Gaaldine and Ascension Island and the Isle of Philosophers and the Isle of Dreams.
The whole world hung in that room. Their whole world.
Bran stood on tiptoe and reached out toward the Ascension Island tapestry. He couldn’t help it. It was just right. It wasn’t any loud color like Port Ruby or Verdopolis. Just brown earth and green leaves and black chimneys and the blue sea.
“Do you see it, Annie?” he whispered. His throat had got all thick and tight. He couldn’t name the feeling swelling up inside him the way he and Charlotte had named the place on the tapestry. “That’s my map. I drew it! On the blank page at the back of Papa’s copy of The Iliad.”
“Ooh! You sneak!” Anne sucked in her breath. “I’ll tell! And get your hand out of the bars, idiot!”
He snatched his fingers back. “You won’t tell, or I’ll tell Tabitha you fed her Christmas cake to the badgers out the back of the garden!”
Anne started laughing. She thought you probably weren’t meant to laugh in prison. She tried to do it without making any noise. Bran’s face went red with being laughed at. He hated anyone laughing at him. How did other people stand it?
“Bran,” Anne giggled helplessly. “Who cares about the cake or the
badgers or the silly old Iliad? We’re in jail! We’re already in all the trouble we can be!”
“I did draw it,” Bran grumbled. “It’s mine. That’s my handwriting up there on the banner in silk and my special way of making palm trees. Nobody else does them like me. Somebody took my drawing and made it bigger and better than me.”
Anne’s knees ached from crouching in the cold on a stone floor.
The doll who was not a doll moved again. It was hard to tell the difference between her and the bigger toys leaning against the wall or lying on the floor. She was small and pale and she didn’t make a sound. Slowly, their eyes traced out the shape of a girl sitting at an ebony desk pushed up against the wall between the green Verdopolis panel and the snowy Elseraden panel. She was writing something with a beautiful black quill pen and a silver ink pot. Her posture was as perfect as a picture book. Whenever she finished a page, she blew on it gently to dry the ink and lay it aside in a neat stack. All over and around the desk and her feet lay books wedged open at favorite pages and pile upon pile of those strange toys.
At first, Anne thought the girl was wearing a white dress. But she wasn’t—or rather—she was a white dress. A dingy, faded white wedding dress folded and coiled and arranged and draped into the shape of a terribly thin child around Anne’s age, with orange blossoms in her white lace hair and ink stains on her white silk thumbs. Anne shook her head from side to side. It couldn’t be. Oh, of course she’d hoped, in all this whole country of their own best dreams, that her best dream might be here, too. But it couldn’t be!
Branwell squinted in the stranger’s direction. “I don’t think I like her.” He ducked back down below the barred window and leaned his back against the green glass door. “She’s just . . . sitting there. While we goggle in at her! She’s being very rude. But then, jail has different manners.” He gave a world-weary sigh. “I know that now that I’ve served time.”
“Branwell, you hush right now or I shall hit you. I shall hit you hard. I shall hit you thoroughly. And I shall keep hitting you. That’s her, Bran!” Anne’s eyes grew huge and liquid and loving as she stared. “That’s my Victoria. And she’s writing! Just like Charlotte and Emily! Just like me!”
“And me.” Branwell frowned. As if he hadn’t written Douro and Napoleon and Rogue and Gravey and Crashey, too. And Bravey. Oh, poor Captain Bravey. Still, how valiant he was! I wonder if I shall ever be valiant?
“She’s perfect. She’s real.”
Branwell felt quite put out. Anne had never said his name like that, even when he’d come back to life. And not to put a fine point on the thing, but if any hitting was to be done, he would do it. “Still don’t like her.”
Anne rolled her eyes again and stamped on his foot. “How do you know if you like her? You haven’t even talked to her.”
“You should do it,” Bran said decisively. “I’m not afraid or anything! But she’s your . . . and you’re both girls . . . and she’s rude . . . and you’re . . . you’re Anne . . . so perhaps you’d better have a go first. She may bite. I can’t tell from here. Did you make her a biter?”
But he was afraid. Anne and the girl in white had secrets between them. He would be left out again.
Anne made a face. “Oh, Bran, we’ve just ridden a huge crawly fly while being squished half to death by a very nearly dead Brunty and you’re scared to talk to a girl?” She stretched out her knees and whispered in a singsong, teasing voice: “When I tell Charlotte and Em they’re going to press that in a book and keep it forever and ever and ever.”
Bran frowned at his sister, trying to glare her down. “I’m not scared! And she’s the crawly one! She’s just sitting there! Like a weird white rat!”
Anne crossed her arms over her thin chest. “If you’re not scared, then you talk to her.”
“You’re scared. You’re little, you’re always scared.”
