The Bread We Eat in Dreams

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 center 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.”

“M’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 who 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 of 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 them 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. Sheafs 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 it was this shiver that was to blame for what followed, perhaps it was that Victoria had not included him in her largesse, perhaps it was the nagging, terrible sense that Charlotte was always running ahead of him, further and further 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 pin-head, 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 him 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 the conqueror slumped at his 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 as his Young Man fell dead and wept bitterly. Young Arthur and Charles Wellesley made work of the ninepins who, without their leader, seemed to lose all hope and fall 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,” he 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 child 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.”