then
—they were tumbling out onto thick, sharp grass drenched in frost, into wintergreen and dead clover and a forest full of empty bare trees and high, tight clouds that promised snow by sundown, into a clearing that held nothing but an old road, a broad stone house with round windows, a fresh thatch roof, and rosy lights inside, a man shaped like a book, two children, and a giant fly lying motionless on the cold, cold earth.
“Ryecote!” screamed Anne, rushing to the creature’s side. She didn’t even notice the pool of ichor spreading into the grass until her knees were soaking with it.
“It’s no use blubbering,” Brunty sniffed. “She’s dead. Flies only live a day, and she ate up that and more getting us here. Thought you’d know that sort of thing, being such a Clever Cathy.”
“You knew all this while she’d die? And you used her anyway?” Bran’s voice shook, though even he couldn’t quite tell if it shook with anger or awe.
The Magazine Man patted Ryecote’s dull, lifeless eyes. “Why else would I treat her so nice? Poor bugger.”
Anne seethed. Her lips drew back from her teeth like a wild fox. Anne had never really hated anything before. She didn’t recognize it when it happened to her. Hatred felt like the terrible burning lye soap they used for laundry splashing up onto her heart instead of onto her hands. It tasted like hot dirt in her mouth. She wanted to tear out Brunty’s pages one by one and eat them. He’d taken them away from Charlotte and Emily. He’d called them names and dragged them around by their hair. They were going to miss the train home because of him. And he’d killed poor Ryecote and he wasn’t even sorry. He didn’t even care.
“THE END!” Anne cried hoarsely. “THE END THE END THE END!” It had worked when Charlotte had done it. She should have remembered sooner, but it had all happened so fast, and there had been the matter of the three-eyed leviathan and the chasm. . . .
But Brunty did not fold his covers up with a pop and plop to the ground as a neat and tidily shut book. He glanced back over his newsprint shoulder.
“Oh, no, no, no, my love,” he scolded silkily. “That won’t be working, not a bit. In the comfort of your own parlor, you may end a book and stop a tale anytime you don’t like where it’s headed, but we are in the wild now, I’m afraid. The story is quite, quite out of your hands.”
The Magazine Man looked up toward the thatched house. Voices tumbled out of the windows and doors like washing-water. The most marvelous smell Bran and Anne could imagine came puffing out of the place along with chimney smoke and candlelight: beef stew and brown beer. It was a pub! Branwell’s stomach growled. But Brunty rolled his great eyes and made a disgusted noise in his throat. “Fat lot of good it did, either. She didn’t even get us all the way to Gondal. Thanks for that, you old nag.” And he gave her a resentful little kick.
Ryecote wobbled and shuddered and groaned just as the black caverns had done. Her body vanished, back into the great trash heap of time that birthed her. Tears began to freeze on Anne’s flushed cheeks.
“Halloo!” came a deep, booming, oaky voice from a big round window in the public house. A handsome, finely carved face stuck itself out into the cold, still wearing a proud soldier’s helmet. “I say, is that you, Master Branwell? And Miss Anne! How extraordinary! What a bit of a thing this is! Come in, come in! This is my place, built it myself! And for my comrades, everything is on the house! Oh! Erm. Oh dear . . . who have you got there with you? No, you wouldn’t. You couldn’t. Oh, it is. Tsk, tsk, Brunty! Have you been a naughty little pupper again?”
It was Captain Bravey.
FOURTEEN
A Bath, a Bit of Paint, and a Pile of Cloth
Bestminster Abbey seemed very empty indeed without Branwell and Anne. It had turned itself back into a stallionocerosupine, hoping to make the girls smile, to share in a good memory. But Charlotte and Emily only sat together in the lounge, staring into nothing. Each wandered wild on the moors of their own thoughts as the gentle-hearted suitcase padded, as softly as it could, through the chic topaz streets of Ochreopolis, past the golden banks of Canary Wharf, beneath the shadows of a thousand amber spires. Bestminster crept so quietly, in fact, that they’d fallen fast asleep by the time it climbed up through the brilliant jeweled hardscrabble Kaleideslopes that separate the learned folk of Ochreopolis from the eternal wild party of Lavendry, where no one ever sleeps for fear of missing the next dance. They did not even wake when the suitcase re-un-packed itself into a slim town house. Nor when it settled down like a roosting hen on the fragrant purplish-pink ba
nks of the mighty Puce River, sandwiched between a hat shop and a perfume-maker’s studio. Bestminster steadfastly refused to disturb them. Emily and Charlotte had meant to finally hash it all out between their good brains—the why and the wherefore, the how and the what exactly, the which and the whether. The grog and the game. But it was all too much for a single day, the running and the shooting and the Brunty-ing and the screaming and the digging in a publishers’ floor with a letter-opener. Sleep ran them down like a gray tiger before one word could escape its claws.
When the knock came at Bestminster’s door, it startled them both awake so harshly they nearly fell off the long sofas onto the floor. For a moment, still sticky with afternoon dreams, Charlotte thought she was back at the Cowan Bridge School. She could not breathe; her heart rattled in her chest, and she reached out for her sisters—not Emily, but Maria and Elizabeth, who were so much older and wiser. Who would protect her from the Headmaster. Who could make everything all right so she didn’t have to all by herself. But then, Charlotte’s eyes scraped over the leather suitcase walls, the half-snail, half-turtle over the mantel, the petticoat windowpanes. Cowan Bridge School was very far away. Maria and Elizabeth were dead. Branwell and Anne had been kidnapped by a book. Charlotte was the oldest and the wisest one left. But she feared she was not at all old or wise enough.
The knock at the door rapped again.
“Charlotte, I dreamed we were back at School,” choked Emily, her mouth horribly dry.
“Don’t worry, Em,” Charlotte said, smiling as hard as she could while she smoothed her dress and tucked her hair back in place. “We’re only in an insane, upside-down world populated by our toys, our stories, and Napoleon riding a giant chicken on fire. Nothing so bad as School.”
The knock grew annoyed.
“Please.” Bestminster Abbey’s mighty plea. “You’re embarrassing me. Someone is being kept waiting on our account. It’s . . . it’s unbearable.”
The two of them apologized over and over to their suitcase and hurried to open the door. They peered together out into the warm, syrupy afternoon sunlight. A young lady not much older than they stood there with a large steamer trunk in her arms. She was very young and very pretty and she wore a lilac-colored dress with bits of indigo lace and real violets along the neckline. She was also made entirely of powder. Clouds of talcum powder, rouge, charcoal powder, cinnabar, snuff, and pearl powder floated in the shape of a girl with red curls and big brown eyes and cheekbones like birds’ wings.
“Oh,” the powder-girl clucked in a terribly refined voice, looking them up, down, and over. “Richard was right. That won’t do at all. Poor kittens! Who left you out in the rain? What a jolly thing you’ve got Ginny to let you in the back way and fill up your saucers with milk!”
Ginevra Bud swept into Bestminster Abbey in a mist of flowery scents and set her trunk down with a loud thwack in the center of the lounge. She left little glowing footprints of pearl dust wherever she walked. Charlotte and Emily felt suddenly like a pair of warty bridge trolls next to Mr. Bud’s daughter. No dress or paint in the world could make them look like that. Ginny was a girl from a fairy book. They were girls from Haworth. And her only a dressing maid! What would the Lords and Ladies at the Wildfell Ball look like, then? They’d stand a better chance of blending in with a pack of leopards.
Ginevra winked at them. She lowered her voice, and suddenly it wasn’t near so fancy. “I know just what you’re thinking, ’cause I thought it too, first time I clapped lash on Lady Percy. Oh, Ginny, I said to meself, you just clip-clop on home to Custardside ’cause you’re never’n nothing but a rumpy horse with flies in her hair and a bray in her mouth. You ain’t the same kind as those Lavendry Ladies. Not even the same species. As much like ’em as a badger to an angel. But lookie now!” She twirled around and her lilac dress flared out and when she finished twirling, her voice was all shine and silver again. “Miss Mary taught me proper and I’ll teach you better than that. Have you ever played a scene, girls? Swanned over a stage, even if it was only the boards of your bedroom? Recited lines as a grand old Emperor or a fairy in the wood?”
Emily and Charlotte nodded shyly. Ginevra popped open her steamer trunk.
“Well, half-done, then! The difference between the likes of us and the likes of them is nothing but a bath, a bit of paint, a pile of cloth, and a funny voice. And do you want to know the deepest, darkest secret of all? They’re playing scenes, too, each and every one. It’s the most marvelous and terrible thing in the world. Everyone, but everyone, is pretending to be someone else. Tumbling and tripping along, writing their own little play as they go. Look at your Ginny. Isn’t she fine in her gown? Lovies, this is my only dress! When washing day comes I wear an old plaid blanket with a belt round my middle. Very well!” She clapped her powdery hands together. A little cloud of scented dust puffed out from between her palms. Bestminster very helpfully made two bathtubs out of gravy boats leftover from their tea with the wooden soldiers, swelled up like flour sacks filling at a mill. He pumped them full of hot water. Bestminster had spoken with the city pipes while the girls slept and come to a very fine arrangement. Ginny politely turned around while Charlotte and Emily peeled off their gray and black school dresses. They climbed into the gravy-tubs and began to scrub all the grime of traveling between worlds away till their skin turned raw and pink.