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“Are you mad?” Victoria repeated his question. “I shall never leave England! I could never!”
“It’s just a stupid story!” Branwell yelled. “It’s not even any good! No one dying and everyone loving each other—it’s dreck! Just leave it! You can make another one!”
But Victoria would not listen to him.
An old, sour, awful, familiar feeling rose up inside Branwell. The nagging, terrible sense that no one really saw him or thought of him at all. Charlotte was always running ahead of him, further and further ahead, and Emily and Anne would catch her but he could not. They were not like him, they did not see how silly their stories became when they did not have deaths by stabbing and massacres and horror in them, when they bore no hint of war, but thought he was ridiculous, that he was the odd one, when he was meant to be the one they all looked up to. When the wooden soldiers had been his, his, his, all along.
He shouted wordlessly in disgust. At Victoria, at Anne, at Charlotte, at Emily, at all of them. But Victoria especially. Anne would replace them all with this piece of stuffed nothing! He had to show her that Victoria wasn’t real, she wasn’t important, her stories were just stories but they had done all this together! The little brat hadn’t any right to make him die just so she could pack her stupid scratchings. The stupid scratchings of a stupid scratching!
Why wouldn’t they ever listen? Why did she care so much about that wretched story? It wasn’t anything. Half of it was still lying in drifts on the floor. They didn’t have time for this nonsense. They had to leave. Now. Branwell snatched Victoria’s papers. But the wedding dress girl would not let go.
“Stop it, stop it!” wept Victoria.
“Just leave it!” shouted Branwell.
They struggled. She was stronger than she seemed. The pages began to tear.
“Oh, no, no, please!” Victoria sobbed. “You’re spoiling it, you’re spoiling everything!”
Finally, Branwell gave up. He seized the silver inkpot on the desk and dumped its contents onto the papers, onto the floor, onto Victoria’s pure white satin hands. Victoria went slack. Black ink dripped off her chin. Her pages flew and crumpled and slid to the floor. The pale girl sunk to her knees.
“Bran! What have you done, you brute?” Anne snarled. She rushed to hold little Victoria by the shoulders. “Why must you always do the awfulest thing?”
“I’m sorry,” he said stonily. But his heart shivered and trembled. It wasn’t his fault. It was the right thing to do. They could go now. They could go and live and be safe. If she’d only listened to him in the first place. If only they all would.
“It’s all broken up now,” Victoria whispered, two heavy tears rolling down her face. She ran her hands over the ruined pages. “My darling Albert is all black and sopping and ruined. It’s all bled out and mixed together.” She grasped at a miserable soggy heap of story. “My children! All my little Kings and Queens! Now there’s nothing but a horrid scrubby black space in the middle of them all, a black trench where half my perfect world will fall and choke and break my kingdom of forever into nothing. I wanted it so beautiful, I wanted it to be a kingdom without pain, and now it is drowned.” Victoria held out up a few bedraggled pages. “Even the part I had written for you, look how it’s spoiled. Look how dark it’s gone.” Victoria ran her fingers over a black page, her tears puddling as they fell on it.
“Don’t worry,” Branwell said helplessly to Anne as she glared hatefully at him. “It’s not our world. It’s not us. Even if it were like Glass Town, even if it were real, it’s somewhere else, somewhere far away that’s nothing to do with us! I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have shouted. I won’t, ever again, I swear it. But it’s not us, it’s another place, another Branwell and Charlotte and Emily and Anne, if it’s any real place at all. No harm done. No harm.”
Victoria pressed her forehead to the inky floor and wrapped her arms around her belly, weeping as if it were the end of the world.
“Get out,” the Princess hissed. “Get out, get out, get out!”
Charlotte ducked beneath a collapsed doorway as a sizzling spike of lightning shot so near to her it burned her hair. She could hardly see for smoke. We’re losing, she thought. It’s not supposed to happen this way. Welly wins, he always wins, we always win. But the bullfrogs were leaping everywhere, with such delight, with such ease, twanging out their victory songs in their huge green throats. Napoleon and Wellington wrangled in the center of the courtyard, their breath fogging in the air.
Suddenly, Charlotte heard a voice. From nowhere, and belonging to no one in Verdopolis. The feeling was not like an electric shock, but it was quite as sharp, as strange, as startling. They saw nothing, but they heard a voice somewhere cry—
“Oh, my babies, where are you?”
“Oh God! What is it?” Charlotte gasped.
“Charlotte! Emily! Annie! Branwell!”—then nothing more.
It did not seem to be in the courtyard—nor in the castle—nor in the garden; it did not come out of the air—nor from under the earth—nor from overhead. And it was the voice of a human being. A known, loved, well-remembered voice.
It was Aunt Elizabeth. And her cries were full of pain and woe, wild, eerie, and urgent.
She was not the only one who heard it. The whole battle froze and listened, straining their ears. No one moved. No one breathed. In the midst of all that silence, Napoleon rolled his eyes and shot Wellington through the heart.
“Ah ha!” Old Boney shouted. “I am triumphant! Look at me! I am GOOD!”
Charlotte cried out, but her cries were lost as the battle began again, more furious than before. But now, it was only the clang of swords and the bang of muskets. The horrible acid lightning had stopped, somehow. The bolt that nearly took her head off had been the last. Of course, Charlotte couldn’t know what Emily had done. She expected the next bolt of electric death at any moment. And yet Charlotte ran toward the fallen Duke in a blind rage. She hardly knew what she meant to do before she’d already mounted Copenhagen and pulled the watery lion round.
“Byron!” she yelled from lionback. “Find Emily, now! And Crashey, get the Duke some grog right this second, this second, hear me?”
“What?” bellowed Lord Byron as a musket ball slammed into the stone wall behind him.
“Just find her! Run! Find her or you never deserved a single dance!”
