The Bread We Eat in Dreams

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,” nodded Brannii. “And likewise, a soul must stand i

n 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 marvelous 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 him that his Buonaparte should live still, and 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 defense.

“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, and 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.