Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells

It seemed as if I were a non-existent shadow—that I neither spoke, ate, imagined, or lived of myself, but I was the mere idea of some other creature’s brain. The Glass Town seemed so likewise. My father … and everyone with whom I am acquainted, passed into a state of annihilation; but suddenly I thought again that I and my relatives did exist and yet not us but our minds, and our bodies without ourselves. Then this supposition—the oddest of any—followed the former quickly, namely, that WE without US were shadows; also, but at the end of a long vista, as it were, appeared dimly and indistinctly, beings that really lived in a tangible shape, that were called by our names and were US from whom WE had been copied by something—I could not tell what.

There was every possibility of taking a walk that day. Great dollops of sunshine melted on the moors; clouds and shadows cut the bare, winter-sleeping land into a checkerboard. The servant Tabitha had gotten a whole egg, wedge of bread, and a bit of her damson jam into each of the four children, bundled them in bonnet and gloves and extra stockings, and set them out of doors into a blue Yorkshire morning so cold it seemed ready to snap in half at the slightest touch. She thought absolutely nothing of turning them loose on the moor that day of all days—they needed a helping of the out-of-doors, such children as these, with their canny tongues and stubborn tempers. Judgment Day would come and go before those four would look up from their pens and papers otherwise.

Stiff gorse tangle burst underfoot as they took to the day. Charlotte, the oldest, a serious child with thick hair parted through the centre of her skull like a dark sea, a round, pallid face, and a fearsome scowl, trudged resentfully up a worn purple path through the bruised February hills. “I do not see in the least why we must leave Our Work just to satisfy Tabby’s obsession with fresh air,” she sniffed to none of her siblings in particular but all of them generally, her nose beginning to run in the hard, crystal air.

Branwell quickened his pace to keep up with her, his long curls whipping across the bridge of his great arched nose, his brow furrowed and fuming, frowning as if to reflect Charlotte’s expression as perfectly as possible though he could only see the back of her, her woollen dress prickled with bits of twig and old, withered heather.

“I had intended to explode the castle on Ascension Island today, with Crashey and Ross and Bravey and Stumps and Buonaparte and all the rest trapped inside!” he groused, his breath puffing ellipses ahead of him. “With much splendid blood and fire and leaping out of windows and dashing brains out on the earth! The heavens would have wept at my slaughter! Now Tabby has sabotaged me with her eat your eggs, there’s a lad and fasten up your coat good and tight; they’ll be safe and sound for ages yet. Until evening, anyway.”

Emily and Anne hung back from the older children, holding hands and picking their path carefully, so as not to crush any sweet plant that might erupt in spring with blossoms to cheer them. Emily looked up at the frozen sun, her brown ringlets crowding a narrow, sharp face that looked already quite grown, though she had only nine years. “We would have made them alive again by supper, Bran,” she snapped, tired of her brother’s thirst for the blood of their favourite toys, a set of twelve fine wooden soldiers their father had given as a present to his only son—but the girls had made a quick end to that. No sooner had Branwell got them but his sisters had colonised the kingdom of the soldiers, named them, and claimed their favourites. The Young Men ever after ruled their hearts and idle hours.

Little Anne, the youngest, laughed. The prettiest child in Haworth, her hair almost reaching the blond shades of girls in lovely paintings, she watched everyone with her wide, violet eyes as though spying upon them, with the necessity of making future reports to some unseen master. “It’s a wonder Crashey doesn’t get dizzy, with his forever falling down dead and getting up again!”

Charlotte stopped short at the flat top of a little hill that kept watch over a low, leafless valley full of the starving prongs of black yews and thorn trees and tumbling, colourless grasses, thistle, and old ivy, worn stones near as high as Anne. Every branch and blade was limned with glassy, golden light, which gave the scene a strange affect, as though the children were seeing it from much farther away than they really stood, and through a frosted pane besides. Charlotte put out her arms and her young sisters huddled into them, for the wind bit at their cheeks and made rosettes of their dimples. Branwell did not partake of their cup of affection, though he wanted to. But he felt Crashey would not, and certainly Buonaparte would have the head of any lad of his who behaved in such babylike fashion. Branwell had of late begun to feel his sisters were not quite serious about the game. They had romantic notions and did not submit to his pronouncements of death and disaster by flood or spectral conflagration, but went about healing everyone with phials until all his fun was spoilt.

“There’s nothing to be done,” Emily said. “Unless we should sneak back. Let us see if we can’t find the mushroom patch again and make believe there are fairies there. I’m sure you can explode the fairies if you like, Branwell, though since they have the power of flight, you won’t get quite so many brains dashed on the earth, but perhaps you can arrange a duel to make up the difference. Duels are superior to battles anyway.”

“I shall have a duel with Tabitha if she puts us to bed without our writing hours this evening,” Branwell said, kicking the hardened black earth with the toe of his boot. “I shall whack her with a biscuit.”

“If there are to be fairies,” said Charlotte imperiously, “the Duke of Wellington will have to be their king.” Anne ventured that her own favourites, Ross and Parry, the great polar explorers and namesakes of two of the smaller wooden soldiers, might be fairy lieutenants, perhaps wed to sensible fairy maids. But her sister, chief of the tale and engine of the game, did not hear her. The duke stood always at the centre of their pretended worlds, for Charlotte adored him as fiercely as Branwell worshipped Buonaparte. They had called their favourite wooden soldiers after the mortal enemies and insisted on their inclusion in every adventure. And what a dashing crystal image it was that rose in Charlotte’s heart then—Sir Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington and king of the fairies, with long black wings and a crown of lightning, astride, not a white horse this time, but a white rhinoceros, his sword a blue, lamplit flame! The beauty of the dream expanded like a silk balloon in her chest, almost painful in its familiar sweetness, the pricks of a tale, and as ever she felt as though she could never be big enough for even one of the stories that stormed inside her. It would drown her entirely or burn her up from within and leave no part of Charlotte behind. She could see him in ruby clarity, really see her duke, putting a lance of rose-coloured ice through the forehead of the pig-footed, ram-headed, lizard-mounted emperor of France.

A cracking, rustling thump down in the wintry hollow broke Charlotte’s vision into pieces. The sun dug down into a trench of clouds, casting the vale into shadow, sending a brute wind to rattle the thistle-heads. Something moved between the long, sharp trees.

“Look,” Emily whispered, her breath strangled and squeaking.

“I don’t see anything,” said Branwell, peering through the shade.

“Look.”

And they did see something—a man, a hugely fat man, in fact, tottering just below them, his collar turned up to the cold. But his collar was not a collar; it was a fine, illuminated page from some strange manuscript, folded crisply. His waistcoat was fashioned from a coppery book spread out along the spine; his cravat a penny dreadful folded over many times. But queerest of all, the enormous belly that protruded from beneath his coat of printed pages was the carved ebony knob of an ancient scroll, his legs were dark hymnals, and his enormous head was an open book longer than the Bible itself, glasses perched upon the decorated capitals of the pages: two handsome Os that served for eyes. The lower parts of the pages formed a moustache, and his nose crowned it all: a long, blood-scarlet ribbonmark.

After a moment of shock in which no one breathed and everyone clutched hands as tight as murder, all four children burst out of their stillness and tumbled down the hill after the book-man, calling out to him and demanding his name, his family, his business. He began to run from them, his breath whistling fearfully through the hundred thousand pages of his body.

“Go away!” he shouted finally as they ran together, leaping over frozen puddles and knotted roots. “If Captain Tree hears of this, I’ll be remaindered for certain!”

“We’re dreaming!” cried Anne. “It’s all right, it’s a dream and we’re dreaming!”

“You can run forever in dreams,” panted Branwell, “and I think if I don’t stop soon, I shall throw up!”

But finally the man of books did stop, skidding to a halt before two tall soldiers, made entirely of rich brown wood, their rifles leaning on their shoulders, their gazes clear and bold. The fat man looked back at them in terror, then folded up his face, his collar, his cravat, his waistcoat, and his long hymnal legs. He folded up so completely that between the children and the soldiers no longer stood a man at all, but a great fat book firmly shut, lying on the moorland. One soldier with painted black trousers bent and retrieved it, tucking the volume under his strong arm.

“Hullo,” said the other soldier. This one had a wood knot over his heart as though he had been shot there long ago. His mahogany mouth turned up in a sad, little smile that seemed to say: well, we had better make the best of things. “My name is Captain Tree, and this is my comrade Sergeant Bud. But you may call us Crashey and Bravey.”

* * *

Long afterward, Charlotte would try to remember how it happened, but her mind could not quite clamp down upon it. It had already had to struggle mightily with a man made out of books and was not at all prepared to record how one managed to lift a foot off the ground in Yorkshire and put it down in somewhere else altogether. They did not pass through a door, of that she was sure, nor was there a mystic ring or pool. Yet Crashey and Bravey—their own stalwart soldiers, their miniature toys!—had taken them up, and now the sun battered down hot and sultry through viridescent fronds and great pink hothouse flowers as tall as streetlamps, bobbing over a long glass road that lead to a palace of such grandeur it burned their eyes. All along the boulevard strange obelisks rose, tipped with fire or ice or balls of blue lightning, and between them great birds of marvellous size and countenance, like peacocks given the gift of flight, bobbed and darted, crying out like mournful loons.

“What is that place,” said Emily, her voice trembling. “That place you are taking us? It is too dazzling! I fear it will catch fire, the sun dances upon it so.”

“That is the Parsonage,” said Crashey. His voice was deep and pleasant. “It is where the Chief Genii of Glass Town live, and many other wonderful fine folk besides.”

“That is not the Parsonage!” protested Anne, who could bear very much fancy, being so young, but could not abide a lie. “We live in the Parsonage, with Papa and Aunt Elizabeth and Tabitha! It looks nothing like that!”

Indeed, this Parsonage was an edifice all of diamonds, its stately pillars sparkling emerald and ruby illuminated with lamps like stars. A sapphire hall opened up like a blue mouth in its exquisite face, and the light of the warm Glass Town day filtered through all these gems as through water, throwing up fountains of fitful reflections. A little churchyard lay just beside it, as it did at home, but here the gravestones were perfect alabaster stippled with black pearls.

“Sir, I must insist you admit this is all a dream,” Branwell said crossly. “If you are my Crashey, indeed you must do as I say. I have had quite enough silliness!”

Crashey and Bravey stopped and turned smartly to them, saluting. They stood on the porch of the bright Parsonage, and Charlotte heard her heels click on the diamond floor. That click, somehow, sounded deep in her and convinced her of the reality of this summer country as the birds and pillars and heat could not. The floor beneath her was real, and its facets yawned below her like mirrors. She drew her sisters in close and her heart battered madly at her ribs.

“I am your Crashey,” said the solemn soldier. “And so I must obey you, but I wish you would not compel me in this way. I will say it is a dream, if your will is set. But I am an honest nut, and I do not like to lie. I will show you my wounds if you require evidence—you may already see the place where the Marquis of Douro put his musket ball during the African campaign, but here”—and Captain Tree showed his thigh, which had a scorch mark upon it—“you may find proof of the explosion of the citadel of Acroofcroomb. Witness also my flank, whereupon Buonaparte stuck me with his knife, and my throat, slashed in the battle of Wehglon. If it will not make the ladies too faint, I can show you the scar over my liver, where the cannibal tribes made a lunch of Cheeky, Gravey, Cracky, and my humble self.”

Branwell at last relented and drew into the protective circle of his sisters. Charlotte held him tight about the waist and warmth spread through him as he put his hand upon little Anne’s shoulder as he had seen their father do when their aunt suffered a spell of grief.

“Those are our battles,” whispered Emily, utterly ashen. “We sent the Young Men to Acroofcroomb. We set the cannibal hordes upon them. We invented Glass Town, and Gondal, and the marquis. He is talking about Our Work.”

“Indeed, fair Emily, you did send us into service,” spoke up Bravey for the first time. “Well do I recall our suffering and many deaths—but also I remember gentle hands which restored us to life, fit and hale to strive again for the sake of our nation.” Handsome Bravey put his hand over his heart and bowed. Branwell flushed, remembering his own plans for the afternoon, which had included dropping Bravey from a great height onto sharp rocks.

Charlotte shook her head. “It is not possible. Fiction counts no casualties! The Young Men are playthings, made by a gentleman in Leeds and purchased fairly—they cannot simply become real.”

“I believe you will find all this easier on your stomachs if you join us within,” said Bravey uncomfortably. “For the whole of reality is not easily explained by a couple of old veterans with splinters still stuck in their bones.”

The children allowed themselves to be led into the long blue hall. They seemed to pass underwater, through green and turquoise shadows pierced by pins of sunlight. The hall opened into a great room with a floor like midnight, full of still more jewelled pillars of rose and silver and white. Four golden thrones arrayed themselves at the north end, and upon them sat four figures. Three ladies there were, two dark and one light, their glossy hair gathered at their necks, their pale faces calm and perhaps amused. They wore long, gauzy dresses of spectacular colours: crimson, blue so bright it seemed to crackle, and glinting garnet-black. Beside them a young man sat with one leg crossed over one knee, his face craggy and not unhandsome, his brow furrowed, his lanky hair coal-coloured and loose. The four bore a similarity of feature, of seriousness and of long familiarity.

Of all of them, little Anne, hardly turned seven, understood and ran toward the thrones.

“She is myself!” Anne cried. “All grown, and beautiful, and that is you, Charlotte, and you, Emily, and you, Branwell, your very scowl! Oh!” Anne put her hands to her face. “So that is what I will be. I have wanted to be grown-up all my life.”

“How small I once was,” marvelled the older Anne. A lock of her bright hair came loose as she put her own hand to her cheek.

“Welcome,” said the older Charlotte. “We are the Chief Genii of Glass Town. You may call me Tallii, and they Annii, Emmii, and Brannii.” The great lady dropped her formal demeanour like a fan. “You’ve caught us quite off guard! We are in the midst of our annual rite, and to be perfectly frank we did not think we should meet you here, or ever.”

The younger Charlotte approached the throne shyly. She extended her hand, still gloved from the distant, cold moorland, marvelling at this woman who was herself but not herself, herself older and wise and somewhat sad, herself whole and complete. The Chief Genii Tallii laced her fingers through the child’s and smiled.

“How strange,” she said.

“You must explain!” cried Branwell fearfully. “Or I will call the Young Men! Crashey said he would obey me!”

The older Branwell glowered, his dark eyes flaring red and smoky—and then his face smoothed over and grew kind again. “They are my Young Men as well, my boy. But they will serve as a lesson. You call that one Crashey, but also Captain Tree and Hunter and John Bull, depending on the tale that possesses you. And that is Bravey, but also Sergeant Bud and Boaster and Mr Lockhart.”

“We have only twelve,” said Charlotte. “They must stand in for whomever we need.”

“Indeed.” Brannii nodded. “And likewise, a soul must stand in wherever it is needed. In the universe, there is no such thing as a single soul. Where there is one in Yorkshire, there is a copy in Glass Town; where there is a maid in Angria, there is a copy in Paris. Where Wellington sheaths his sword, so do the many Wellesleys in many cities in many Englands in many worlds, all folded together like the pages of a book. You exist in Haworth, and we exist here, connected but not the same. Nothing happens merely once. The world repeats, like a stutter.”

“But the Young Men are not souls, they are not alive!” protested Emily.

The Chief Genii Emmii folded her hands. “But you gave them stories and histories, names and marriages. You loved them and gave them breath. In your world that is not enough to do anything at all except eventually break them to pieces from use. But here, they stood up out of some distant forest and began to live. Glass Town does not obey the rules that Yorkshire must.”

All along Chief Genii Emmii’s skin, a golden crackle seared and then vanished.

“Then Wellington is here?” said Charlotte wonderingly, and Anne laughed at her, a little cruelly, for she had tired of the duke’s primacy in her sister’s affections long ago.

“Of course,” said Chief Genii Annii. “And Buonaparte, too, I’m afraid. Everyone you have known and heard of has a copy here, and I daresay more and others in places we know not of. Wellesley and his sons with their wings of onyx and loyal rhinoceri defend us against the depredations of the ram-faced French genius with his saddled lizard and his terrible army of fire-breathing assassins, a clan of dastardly ebony ninepins.”

Branwell considered that a ninepin who was also a fire-breathing assassin was quite the most marvellous thing he could think of. He had pressed their aunt’s ninepins into service as enemy battalions many times, but never thought to give them power over the fiery elements. Even Wellington would certainly fall to such warriors—though it disturbed Branwell that his Buonaparte should live still, yet the real one had died lonely on a rock in the sea.

“I did not give him such an army,” he said meekly, in some defence.

“You gave him much thirst for blood and fire, and no need to restrain himself, and gifted him with a hunger for death more fierce than for bread,” Chief Genii Tallii said sternly. Branwell’s heart swelled and stung. Charlotte’s disapproval left welts upon his spirit, and in those great adult eyes he saw himself small and vicious, when he only wished to be the master of the game—was that so terrible?

The Chief Genii Annii went on, “But also Sir Walter Scott dwells in Glass Town, bent over his books in a wig of butterflies. So, too, is Lord Byron here, a bewitching warlock with hooves of gold. The anatomist Dr Knox tends a garden of fresh corpses, as sweet-smelling as orchids, to perform his experiments upon. Though we hold the throne, our father, Patrick Brontë, serves as prime minister, his official carriage drawn by a blue tiger sent to us in gratitude from the peoples of the Nile. You would find without too much trouble a young man with a finch’s bright head living among the turtles of the south quarter, near Bravey’s Inn, answering to the name of Charles Darwin.”

“I do not know that name,” said Charlotte.

“Time is not a perfect copy. Yet he is there, along with the editors of Blackwood’s Magazine, dipping their unicorn horns in ink; a poet called Young Soult the Rhymer, selling his verses beneath the ammon trees, young Benjamin Disraeli tossing his dragon’s head at the stars.”

A star glowed briefly upon Genii Annii’s head, blue and sere, then guttered out as if a wind had extinguished it.

“You are the authors of our world,” said Crashey softly, and the four of them had almost wholly forgotten he was there. “It is a mystic, decadent thing when one’s gods come home to roost. Waiting Boy did not mean for you to see him—the gentleman you chased away from your own Parsonage. Some transit must occur between our countries. It’ll be a century before he comes out of his book again. You gave him a terrible fright. Imagine if all the seraphim of heaven appeared while you were collecting the post.”

“But we are not seraphim!” insisted Emily.

Crashey said nothing.

“Is Mother here?” said little Anne. The Chief Genii turned to her as one. “You said Walter Scott is here. And Buonaparte, though everyone knows he is dead. Is our mother here? She died at home. Is she in that splendid courtyard of pearls and alabaster? Or does she live, with a lion’s tail or a sparrow’s head? I shouldn’t mind if she had a sparrow’s head. I can become accustomed to anything, really.”

The Genii did not answer, but their grave, dark faces answered Anne all the same. The child blushed. “I only thought…” But she could not finish. She buried her head in Emily’s breast.

“Why was … Waiting Boy … mucking about on the moor to begin with?” said Branwell, trying to defeat with false cheer his own hope that their mother could somehow be waiting for them in some place they had invented, Dr Hume’s house or the Tower of All Nations.

“Each year,” said Bravey, “the Young Men must perform certain arduous activities, or else the world will be destroyed and all sent into darkness.”

“You’re very matter-of-fact about it!” said Charlotte.

Bravey nodded. “I am. But it must be done. Waiting Boy was bringing to us a certain object, that we might begin our rite. It must come from your country, for it is from your country that we come.

“We will take it to the Island of Dreams hereafter and do what must be done there, and then another year may pass in which all is well and the sun in the sky.”

“And what is to be done with us?” asked Charlotte, speaking for the worries of them all.

“Done with you?” said kind Bravey. “Nothing. If you wish to go home, you may go home.”

“I do not!” shouted Branwell a little too loudly. “I wish to meet Buonaparte!”

“And Wellington!” added Charlotte.

“And the ninepin brigade, and the vivisectionist’s garden, and even this Darwin fellow, if you say he is a good man and wise,” said Emily.

“I should like to go with you to the Island of Dreams,” said Anne softly, not yet over the bright shaft of joy that had flared up and gone suddenly out in her little heart at the thought that their mother might enter the hall in as much glory as these four monarchs. “And perform the rite with you. I wish all things to be orderly and well.”

The children clapped upon this immediately as the thing to be done, though Crashey and Bravey declined bashfully, feeling it was their private affair. But in the end no fibre of them could refuse their creators, and a great elephant was called, for this was a common conveyance in Glass Town, for those who could afford it. As the negotiations were made, Chief Genii Emmii happened to cough into her kerchief, and Charlotte saw in the silken square a spray of rubies fall like blood. The corners of Emmii’s mouth seemed to crack ever so slightly, and a glittering scarlet light escaped before the skin made itself whole again.

* * *

“We must go quickly and with as little sound as we may,” admonished Crashey. Branwell was disappointed in him. They rode upon an elephant—not only an elephant but one whose skin was diamond, yet soft, with tiny silver hairs upon it and iron bones visible down deep beneath the millions of facets. How could they go quietly? Why should they? They would fight if the ninepins came for them! Yet secretly Branwell hoped they would, for surely Buonaparte, his chief among the Young Men at home, would come with them, and they would be fast friends.

“What is it that Waiting Boy brought from our country?” said Emily as the sun went down over a broad sea that foamed on a beach below the green cliff on which their road ran. It spooled out a hot, rosy light along the horizon like calligraphy.

Bravey blushed; the birchwood of his face went the colour of cedar. “To ask us to reveal these things is like asking us to discuss the details of our wedding night,” he said miserably.

“I command you to tell us!” cried Branwell.

Crashey removed from a pocket concealed in a patch of bark a crystal glass, stoppered and filled with a thick black liquid.

“Ink?” said Anne, reaching out to touch it. The sunset leant the glass a molten, volcanic splendour.

“In your country it is ink,” Crashey agreed. “Here it is a philtre which compels the truth from whoever would use it.”

Branwell was possessed by a powerful urge to snatch it away. He would make Charlotte taste it. Then she could not lie to him when he asked the questions buttoned up into his chest. Do you still love me as you used to when Emily and Anne were too young to interest us? When you go away to school again, what will become of me? Is it me you love best, or the tale of the Young Men which you require me to tell fully? You are going so fast, I cannot keep up with you. Why will you not wait for me?

For her part, Charlotte also wished to talk to her brother away from the others, but she did not think she needed a philtre. He would tell her the truth because he was Branwell, and if he did not, she would know. I do not think the Genii really look like us, she wanted to tell him. I think they are wearing us like masks. Perhaps they are really us, but changed, like Buonaparte with his ram-face, which, you know, I had only just conceived of when all this began, but now it is true! I would not have put it in the chronicles, as it is too fanciful even for our purposes. But if it is real it cannot be fanciful! Did you see the skin of the Genii when it cracked? Beneath I saw the swirling, spangled lights of the heavens, like a furnace full of stars. It is not safe, the Young Men’s country. We are not safe.

* * *

In the late evening they came upon a house in a quiet section of quite another town, a stately place with black marble porticoes and a cheery light within. They dismounted the elephant and were greeted by three of the most beautiful young men the children had ever seen. They seemed, indeed, more like paintings of men than men, and Charlotte was certain she could see brushstrokes upon their hands and faces, though this made them no less lovely.

Crashey and Bravey greeted them with laughter and claps upon the back, and the brothers invited them all in for brandy and the business at hand.

“Allow me to present,” said Crashey, “Currer, Acton, and Ellis Bell, friends of the crowns and initiates of the first order.”

“Initiates into what?” Emily said as Acton kissed her hand.

“The secrets of our yearly rite. It is a brotherhood we maintain for all time. We have come to fulfil their portion, and also for their excellent table.”

“I only wish you could have met our sister Danett,” sighed Currer, whose glossy auburn hair smelled of linseed. “But she died last year. Laudanum, I confess, and despair.”

Bravey let out a woody sob, for it seemed that he loved the Bell sister all in secret and would now bury his heart in the earth. The men shared brandy around and drank in painful silence.

Anne looked around at the house. Books lay everywhere, half in order and out. Maps hung upon the walls, of the polar regions, the Himalayas, the Yukon wilds. A great black opal desk took up the centre of the room, which seemed to have been made for four people to work together upon it, though now only three manuscripts lay on its many-coloured surface, each with its own quills and ivory-handled knives for making points, and decanters full of rich ink. A plate of grapes, thick cheese, and yellow cakes lay in the meeting place of the three stations, so any of the brothers might sample it while at work.

Anne recalled an evening at home when she was distraught over Charlotte’s or Branwell’s receiving some preference, and her father had asked what she wanted most in all the world. She had been younger then, not yet achieved the seasoning of six or seven years, and had been seized with the sure knowledge that whatever she asked for then her father had the power to grant it. Everything relied upon what she said in that moment. And so she told the truth, being so small and surrounded by the older children, invincible and mighty creatures whom she could never best. Age and experience.

And yet she had remained small.

But the Bell house seemed to her the exact house that she would have when she possessed age and experience. A house of and for age and experience, where siblings might dwell together in peace and write upon a single great desk, recalling and inventing adventures, just as they did now, but with the impossible power of adults to do as they pleased. I shall remember this house, Anne thought. I shall remember it as I remember my own name.

“Buonaparte has been to see us.” Ellis Bell’s voice cut through Anne’s thoughts. “He has decided his newest mischief will be to keep the rite from proceeding.” What if something splendid were to happen? Destruction is a wonder, disaster a fascination. We can set it aright by supper if it should go poorly. “What a creature! And the boss of his ninepins, Young Man Naughty, beat us about the head and burned our birds in their cages. But we did not give it to him. We are true.”

“Good boys,” said Bravey, quite drunk by now but still amiable.

Currer Bell went to the opal desk and drew out a ponderous quill, a feather of one of the flying peacocks they had seen in Glass Town. Its point was as sharp as a bayonet. He folded it into an oilcloth and pressed it into Crashey’s arms, leaving pale paint marks on the cloth where his fingers touched it. “Godspeed, for he is faster than that.”

* * *

Through the long night, the children fell asleep on their diamond elephant. Crashey allowed himself to stroke the brows of Charlotte and Branwell, touching the wood-knot wound on his chest with his other hand, remembering the flames of Acroofcroomb, the blood of his comrades everywhere like a hideous ocean. The wooden soldier shook his head to clear the cloud of his many deaths.

He could not bring himself to wake them when the elephant trod into the Hall of the Fountain, so vast in its domes that the elephant was as a lowly dog in its vault. Many hours yet they marched through the long distance of the hall, which stretched league after league lined with statues of black and white marble as well as amethyst and peridot. He could not bear to wake them as they passed the fountain for which the place had been named, a pale snowy pool whose foaming plume reached as high as a cathedral. Only when they came to the room concealed behind a white silk curtain did he wake his charges, his small gods, and Bravey, who had sunk into sleep and brandy-fed grief over the lost Danett Bell.

Behind the curtain stood an iron door. The children stood soundless and still, with the wide, limpid eyes of those just wakened. Crashey and Bravey took wooden keys from beneath their helmets and turned the door’s two locks at once, opening with a long creak the inner chamber.

The square chamber was a red room. A bed supported on massive pillars of mahogany, hung with curtains of deep red damask, stood in one corner. A red table covered with a crimson cloth, a red toilet table, a red floor, and red draperies that concealed only blank red wall and no windows. Standing out like a tabernacle in the centre of the room was a red writing desk, its chair festooned with red cushions, and at it sat a young girl near Emily’s age, with long, dark hair drawn in to cover her ears and searing, bold eyes. She wore a red dress.

“Hullo, Captain Tree,” the girl said brightly. “Sergeant Bud.”

“Ma’am,” they replied in unison, bowing.

Bravey set the crystal glass upon her table, while Crashey set the oilcloth at her side, opening it to show the quill beneath.

“My heart is racing, I am so eager to begin!” said the little girl. “But whom have you brought with you? New recruits?”

Crashey introduced the children in turn, without mentioning their curious history.

“And I am Victoria,” said the child, and she smiled at them. Her smile had a strength like a blow.

Victoria picked up the huge turquoise-and-emerald quill and dipped it into the ink. She began to write upon a great stack of blank pages before her, her hand easy and confident, her excitement flowing off her in curls of red heat.

“This year, I have a new world in mind,” Victoria said as she wrote. “In it, I shall put myself! I have never done that before! It’s very daring, don’t you think? Here I don’t have many prospects—my father was a clerk and a copy editor; I went hungry plenty often and had meat only when the butcher felt sorry for us. And I never leave this room anymore. My boys fill my larder but I’m never lonely, with all my histories to write! It takes the whole year to think through the next far country of my heart. But there! There I shall be a great queen—not just a queen but an empress!—and rule forever and ever over a great kingdom. I have invented a wonderful consort for myself as well, and I shall name him Albert and make him handsome and brave—but not so brave that he will lord over me! I shall give myself a number of children, and those children will all be kings and queens and emperors and empresses as well, so that no one must feel lesser when we gather for holidays. There will be wars, of course, you cannot make everything perfect or else it’s not very interesting. But I have planned a whole pantheon of wonderful poets and scientists and authors and inventors and painters and composers for my court—I can put you girls in it, if you like! I’m very generous! What would you like to be?”

“What about me?” said Branwell, who did not even understand what he had been left out of, but smarted all the same.

“If it pleases you,” said the child Victoria with a gracious wave of her pen.

“Poets,” Charlotte said. She did not need to take a vote; she knew her sisters and they her. “And authors. The sort that last.”

“I shall not forget when I come to that part! There is plenty of room. Oh, wait until you see the inventions I have imagined! Lightning in a glass and tin ponies that run upon two wheels! Locomotives crisscrossing the world, even running underground like iron worms. Flying balloons and a fairs so big you have to build a whole new city just to contain them! My country will shine.”

And the child Victoria, her long hair spilling down over her slim shoulders, began to write so fast that they could no longer see the strokes of her pen. Sheaves of paper flew out from the desk, falling like snow onto the floor, piling up in drifts, nesting in a plush red chair, on the wide red bed. The pages were so filled with Victoria’s tiny hand they looked nearly black.

“She is writing a world into life,” said Bravey softly. “Just as you did. You did it all unknowing, but it is her whole being.”

“Which one?” said Anne, for she recalled that the Genii had said there were countless in number. “Which world?”

“Who knows? Each year she writes a new one and sets it in motion; each year we bring the ink that will compel the world to become true and the quill to carve it out of nothing. We never see her countries, the copies of ourselves and the Genii and Sir Walter Scott and Wellington and Young Soult the Rhymer that live there. It is enough to know we have brought life somewhere, instead of death. Soldiers cannot ask for more.”

Again Branwell felt a shiver of terrible responsibility at the numerous wars he had sent his Young Men to with glee, designing each of their deaths like suits. Perhaps this shiver was to blame for what followed, or perhaps that Victoria had not included him in her largesse, or perhaps the nagging, terrible sense that Charlotte was always running ahead of him, farther and farther ahead, and Emily and Anne would catch her but he could not, that 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 strange, violent interloper in their interior nations when the wooden soldiers had been his, his, all along.

And perhaps it was simply that he loved Buonaparte still, his first and best Young Man, and longed to see him come real. But when he saw the ninepins creeping in, glorious fiery designs upon their black chests, he did not cry out in warning. He only watched them, dazzled and glad after the fashion of a father upon seeing his son exceed all expectations. Buonaparte himself strode forward through the ranks of his personal guard, his ram’s head carved beautifully from blackthorn wood, astride a lizard of white pine, its tail thick and whacking, its tongue a balsam whip.

And Branwell did not cry out. Victoria’s papers flew and folded and slid to the floor. Crashey and Bravey stroked her hair and rubbed her shoulders, which must surely ache from her work, their faces fixed in religious ecstasy, midwives to a place they would never see.

The ninepin boss, Young Man Naughty, opened his mouth, a slit in the surface of his pinhead, and let a slow flame roll out from between his lips like a woven cloth. Branwell did not cry out. He was curious. What would happen? He did not feel any worry—if the country where Victoria was queen burned up, it was no real loss. Branwell felt no loyalty to an unborn cosmos. His loyalty was with Buonaparte.

The ribbon of flame kissed the first papers of the red room, and the sound of it was like taking a breath. The wooden Buonaparte exclaimed with joy upon seeing Branwell—Branwell himself, not his sisters!—and embraced him while Crashey and Bravey came out of their dreaming joy and roared with horror, while Charlotte, Emily, and Anne tried to smother the flames with the rich red curtains and sought about for water, their panic held down by Charlotte’s iron calm. Buonaparte embraced Branwell while a world burned, and the ninepins danced in the ruin, stamping down on the papers like drumbeats.

And while Branwell held his best creation, a musket ball splintered Buonaparte’s wooden sheep’s skull and then the conqueror slumped at Branwell’s feet. With a whoop and a cry and a thundering gallop, the Duke of Wellington burst upon the scene, his wooden chest glowing, his white rhinoceros bleating, his sons spreading black and gorgeous ebony wings, their wooden rifles smoking still. Branwell howled and wept bitterly as his Young Man fell dead. Young Arthur and Charles Wellesley made work of the ninepins, who, without their leader, seemed to lose all hope and fell one after the other in a clattering row.

“No, no, no!” cried Victoria, trying to put out the flames with her own body. Crashey and Bravey dragged buckets in from the fountain in the great hall and coaxed the elephant into firefighting with her long diamond trunk. Damp, charred pages began to outnumber fiery ones, and Wellington prodded Buonaparte’s lifeless body with the toe of his wooden boot.

“Don’t cry, lad,” the duke said to Branwell. “He’ll be made alive again by suppertime, God save us all. That’s how it’s always gone. Judgment Day will come and go and still I will be fighting the man, round and around on the last piece of earth in a sea of darkness.”

Victoria clutched hundreds of papers to her breast, trying to piece some back together, trying to make them come right again. “So fast! All in a moment, less than a moment! Did you see them coming? Why did you not protect me, Captain Tree?”

Crashey looked stricken, then went ashy, as though he might pass dead away. Bravey buried his head in his hands.

“It’s all broken up now,” Victoria whispered, two heavy tears rolling down her face. “Look—my dear Albert is almost wholly burned out of the tale. My little wars of intrigue and interest have bled out and mixed together.” She grasped at a miserable black heap. “My children! All my little kings and queens! Now there is a black space in the midst of them, a black trench where half the world will fall and choke and break my kingdom of forever into burning shards. I wanted it so beautiful, I wanted it to be a kingdom without pain, and now it is on fire.” The girl held out another slim clutch of pages to the children. “Even the part I had written for you, look now how it’s spoiled. The books are there, yes, but your lives are scorched to a few slim chapters, brittle and thin. The smoke in this room will wither you away in that country, so that even the water you drink will bring you no health, even your home will not make you whole. And the boy—” Victoria ran her fingers over a black page, her tears hissing as they fell upon it. “It’s written already, I can’t erase it. I only ever get one draft to make it right. You cannot revise a whole world.”

“Don’t worry,” Branwell said to his sisters. “It’s not our world. It’s copies of us, somewhere else, somewhere far away that will never touch us. I’m sorry, I should have sounded a warning, I will next time, I swear it. But it’s not us, it’s another place, another Branwell and Charlotte and Emily and Anne, and no harm done to us at all.”

The child Victoria pressed her forehead to the smoking floor and wrapped her arms around her belly, weeping as if her only child had been born dead and still.

* * *

Tabitha wrinkled her nose as she bustled the children in from the frosted twilight. Their clothes smelled faintly of smoke, their faces were smudged and exhausted and hollow looking, which was not right at all for four young folk who had been playing in the sun all day! What they had been about they would not say, nor how they had been gone so long, nor how they had found their way home in the dark. All four were silent as monks. But they were not four—little Anne was missing. Tabitha sent the girls and Branwell to scrub their cheeks and dress for supper and perhaps play with their wooden soldiers a bit if being away from them for an afternoon had soured them so. The fish would not be ready for a three-quarters of an hour—an eternity for minds such as theirs. Tabitha drew on her woollen shawl and went out into the gloam to find the violet-eyed little wastrel that lagged behind, probably to watch some silver worm chew the earth or skip a rhythm on the cobblestones.

It would be spring soon; green snapped in the air though the yews in the churchyard gave no hint of bud. Tabitha spied a golden head—and no bonnet, the lamb!—among the monuments and went to the half-frozen child, who had gone where love bade her, to the sisters lost before she’d ever known them. Anne stood before three headstones on the slope next to the moor, the middle one, Elizabeth’s, grey and half buried in the heath; the children’s poor mother’s only harmonized by the turf and moss creeping up its foot, Maria’s still bare.

Tabitha and Anne lingered around them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass.

“How anyone can ever imagine unquiet slumber for our dear sleepers in that quiet earth I shall never know,” Tabitha said finally, and drew Anne in to the great candlelit house.

About “We Without Us Were Shadows”

“We Without Us Were Shadows” came out of my fascination with the Brontë family and their imaginative lives, with the fantasy kingdoms they invented before becoming much more famous for realist work. I wanted to explore those countries as real places, as strange mirrors of England, and the connection between literature and reality. The Brontës had tragically short and troubled lives, dying one by one from wasting illnesses. I wanted to embody the sorrow of that, of that loss, and also to treat their fantasy stories with the seriousness that is so often given to their adult work. I think many of us wish we had had childhoods with such like-minded friends and siblings, that we could have created a world such as Glass Town—so in this story, briefly, I got to do just that.