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Charlotte raised her voice. “Haworth! Yorkshire! England! You were there, Crash. Where breathers come from!”
“Oh,” Sergeant Crashey said quietly. He plunked down his head in his hands and grinned. Charlotte reminded herself to ask the Quartermaster to make up a pair of eye patches for the poor man. The ragged bandage looked too wretched. “Oh, that.” He scratched his chin. “It did look a bit dullerydag for Angria. But I never have traveled much. What do I know? We only went trainchasing after Brunty to make the arrest in the name of the Duke. Ended up in the wilderness, is all.”
Dr. Home sipped from Crashey’s flask. “It has long been theorized by . . . well, by abstract thinkers . . . that Glass Town and Gondal are not the only . . . ahem . . . realities in the cosmos.”
“Theories . . .” Crashey shrugged. “Can’t kick off your shoes at the end of the day without whacking a theory in the head with ’em. Always liked the one Dr. Home’s referindexing, though. Always thought the world’d be a prettier place if it were true.”
Dr. Home stroked his gaunt leather cheek. “The theory goes that new worlds are being created all the time. That there are as many worlds floating in the void as there are votive candles alight in St. Paul’s Cathedral.”
“And how are these worlds created? In your theory, I mean,” Charlotte asked.
“Oh, it’s not my theory. My philosophy is much more . . . pragmatic. But as far as I understand it, there’s no special rite or ritual. New worlds just . . . come on in the dark like fireflies. Every time a choice between two roads is made, a universe fires up to follow each path. Every time a war begins or ends. Every time a child huddles up in his room imagining stories for his dolls. Nothing is too small to create a world, the theory goes. Each beautiful in its way. Some as similar to ours as twins. Some so strange that they would be, to us, as we are to lantern fish under the sea. Some even speculate that what we call heaven and hell are merely other worlds such as this, and death is but a swift carriage from here to there.”
“There must be another way to travel between these places,” Charlotte said. “Other than by dying or . . . or by . . .” Charlotte’s voice died in her throat. This was the moment. She could either say it all at last or keep mum. Would they believe her? Would it matter if they didn’t? Did it actually matter at all that they’d made this world in their little house above the churchyard in Haworth? Crashey and Bravey and Wellington and Lord Byron and Leftenant Gravey and Brunty the Stonking Great Tome and sweet, vain Ginevra Bud, and wonderful Bestminster were all just as real as Tabitha or Aunt Elizabeth or Papa. Had she any right to tell them they were only toys and games and stories? Did it really matter, in the end, if they were? Everybody was somebody’s toy or game or story. Everybody was made by someone else, even if it was only their mother and father. It didn’t make them any less real.
A savage pinch snapped Charlotte out of her thoughts and back to the roaring sea and the racing ship. A pinch worthy of Branwell. Emily had crowded in while she was off in the wilds of her own mind. She hadn’t even seen her coming. The doctor and the Sergeant waved hullo and went on arguing the finer points of theoretical planes of existence, each trying to out-lecture the other.
“Don’t you dare,” Emily hissed, and pinched her sister again. This time she got her bony fingers underneath the velvet officer’s coat. Charlotte yelped softly. Emily sat scrunched in next to her, eyes half mocking and half really, actually furious. Her long hazelnut-colored hair rippled down over the gold braid on her jacket. “You were going to tell! Without me! You weren’t even going to ask first!”
“I wasn’t—”
“You were so!” Emily whispered close to Charlotte’s ear. “I can’t believe it. After all this time! You haven’t any right to decide by yourself, Charlotte! This isn’t just your place; it’s ours, all of us together! It started with four children and twelve wooden soldiers, not one and one! If you want to lay our cards on their table, there has to be a vote. And since Branwell and Anne aren’t here for a Thump Parliament, the least you could do is do a quick straw poll of me.”
“It’s a hypothesis, Crashey, you stump!” Dr. Home roared. The oily, slick voice was gone, replaced by one that sounded like everyone’s angry uncle at Christmas. Charlotte rather liked the new Dr. Home. “It’s not even my hypothesis! Take it up with Miss Jane; it was her stupid idea in the first place! Don’t you read the journals I send you?”
“Miss Jane?”
“Oh, don’t let the fan fool you,” the doctor said ruefully. “It hides a mind like a porcupine. That’s the whole purpose of a fan. She only faints when she needs a moment to think in peace.”
“But which one’s the primoriginal world, that’s the question,” Crashey proclaimed loudly. He jabbed his finger into the air. “The proper one, the one all the others came fireflying out of in the first place! World Number One.”
“Maybe none of them,” Emily said suddenly.
“That’s just it, brother,” Dr. Home replied, wrestling his temper back under control. “We are all of us fireflies, blazing bright in the shadows, and then fading. None of us comes before the other. All are equally proper. No world is copied from another. They are each their own. As complete and unique as a single living heart.”
“Rubbish! Balderdashnanigans!” Crashey threw his arms about wildly. “You said worlds are being created all the time. That means some of ’em were loitering around in front of the bottle shop before others even got their stockings on! Or are you saying time’s not linear, because if that’s what you’re saying, I’ll box your ears, blind or no blind.”
“Well, time isn’t linear—”
“You take that back!” Crashey bellowed, and lunged for his friend Dr. Home. He missed the vivisectionist by yards and stumbled down the stairs, cursing his blindness, Douro for doing it to him, and all of theoretical physics.
Copenhagen bounded down the length of Bestminster and landed on Crashey in two leaps. His blue, watery paws left puddle-prints on the deck. He could not abide fighting amongst his kittens. Copenhagen thought of everyone in his master’s army as his kittens, though he was sensible enough of men’s pride not to share this opinion. So he snatched Sergeant Crashey up by the scruff of his neck like one of his own salty babies and shook him roughly. How naughty of him, to quarrel with the other kittens! He set him down again and growled a warning. Crashey nodded. He was quite soaked.
“Fair point, Copey,” he sighed. “Fair point.”
Wellington’s lion padded over to Charlotte and nuzzled her face. The brief nuzzle knocked off her tricorn hat, drenched her hair, and filled up her shoes with seawater.
“He likes you,” Wellington said, finally catching up to his steed. It took a few more than two leaps for the Duke to cross the ship from fore to aft. “I suppose the old boy probably knew all along. You wouldn’t have smelled like gold, to his nose.”
“I like him,” Charlotte said, wringing her brown hair out. “And I suppose he did. You’re not still angry, are you? We did mostly tell the truth. If we’d told all the truth, we’d never have met you, and none of us would ever have managed to get so far, or know so much.”
Wellington cleared his throat and scratched Copenhagen behind the ears. She purred. “Yes. Well. No need to dwell on it.”
“You can just pretend I’m gold on the inside, if it makes you feel better.”
Now Wellington had to clear his throat three or four times before he could get over his embarrassment. “We’ll make landfall in a few hours. I wondered, perhaps, whether Miss Charlotte”—he leaned hard on her name, so that she’d know he preferred her false one—“might join me for a nightcap in t
he Captain’s quarters?”
