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Tabitha and Aunt Elizabeth scrubbed and soaked and wrung out the week’s linens in the old washing tub. Their eyes were red and sunken with worry and with lye fumes. Papa stood in the doorway, smoking his pipe, but his heart wasn’t in it. All the other children had arrived home from Cowan Bridge School already. He could only think that Branwell and Anne had gone along with the girls in the carriage from Keighley to see them properly settled in and all four had been lost in the blaze that destroyed Cowan Bridge School. Branwell had always been thoughtful that way.
The children came stumbling into the kitchen garden from the frosted twilight. Their clothes smelled faintly of smoke. Their faces were smudged and exhausted and hollow-looking, but the color was high in their cheeks. They were hungry and bickering and alive.
Tabitha and Elizabeth fell upon them like hens on autumn apples.
“Where have you been? My darlings, my darlings, you frightened your auntie so!”
“You are just the worst children,” Tabitha said fondly, runing her fingers through their tangled, filthy hair.
Papa could not bring himself to join in the smothering. He stood his ground and held out his arms, waiting. His son flew into them and he held the boy tight.
“We feared the worst,” he said gruffly. “When word came about the fire, and no sign of any of you. But it’s all right now. It’s all right. We’re all here.”
Charlotte and Emily exchanged glances. What fire?
“There are other schools,” Papa whispered into Anne’s hair as he picked her up. “Better schools. You’re all safe and you’re all mine.”
“Buck up, Papa!” Anne laughed.
“Be brave,” Branwell said into his father’s coat.
“Busy hands.” Emily leaned against her aunt.
“Make bright hearts,” Charlotte finished, and lay her head on her sister’s lap. She had never been so tired.
What they had been about they would not say, nor how they had been gone so long, nor why Branwell and Anne had not just let the girls go in the carriage as they were told, nor how they had found their way home in the dark. In fact, all four were silent as monks.
Aunt Elizabeth sent the girls and Branwell to scrub their cheeks and dress for supper.
“There’s a bit of time to play with your wooden soldiers, if you like,” Tabitha called after them. “The fish will not be ready for three quarters of an hour!”
In the playroom at the top of the stairs, four solemn judges stood before their wooden soldiers.
“Crashey’s got to be punished somehow,” Emily said. “Everyone who took Josephine’s hair. It’s too awful to let them off scot-free.”
“Go on, Charlotte,” said Branwell, “you’re best at punishments.”
Charlotte thought for a long time. “In the morning I shall take him down to the kitchen gardens and leave him there, where he will wander in exile, being set upon by mice and cats and foxes and badgers, and at the end of a month, I will collect him again.”
“In Glass Town, that will be the most awful and extraordinary tale of penance,” Emily breathed.
“It’s not enough,” Anne mumbled. “Not really. Not when you think it all through as hard as you can.”
When three quarters of an hour had passed, no one came to the table.
“They can’t do this to me again!” Tabitha cried. “My heart won’t take it!”
Aunt Elizabeth and Tabitha drew on their woolen shawls and went out into the gloam to find the little wastrels while Papa tried to calm his breathing in the parlor. They would not stop running off, those four. Just like their mother. Probably watching some silver worm chew the earth or counting cobblestones. They could not have gone far. The women would find them. It would be all right. Buck up, he told himself.
It would be spring soon. Green snapped in the air though the yews in the churchyard gave no hint of bud.
Aunt Elizabeth and Tabitha turned down the path to the churchyard without saying a word to one another. They knew where the little ones would be. They spied four dark heads down among the gravestones. They’d been through so much—of course they’d run to their mother, and to their sisters, too. Anne and Charlotte, Emily and Branwell stood before three headstones on the slope next to the open moor. The middle one, Lizzie’s, shone gray in the moonlight beside Maria’s. Their mother’s marker was half-sunk in heath and moss.
Little Anne had something in her hand. A vial wrapped up in leather and strips of fur. All the other children were staring at it.
“You really are the best thief of all of us,” Emily marveled. “Good show. But it won’t work, you know. It’s the bravest idea imaginable, but it won’t work.”
