The door of their cell swung inward with a horrid scrape and crunch of wood against flagstone. Anne’s hand froze. She put it back at her side. A tall girl entered with a smile on her face like a birthday candle—merry, but oh, how it burned. She was made all of cake from top to bottom. Cake and whirls of icing, swirls of icing, rosettes and pipettes and ribbons and twirls of vanilla, strawberry, pistachio, lemon, and lavender icing. She wore a great buttercream gown with a hoop skirt that barely fit through the door. Her hair rose up from her head in clouds of meringue, toasted at the tips. Her eyes were bright blue, her mouth bright pink, and she moved like a nervous ballerina. She was carrying a silver tray that steamed with lovely, hot smells Branwell had almost forgotten existed. She closed the door behind her with a sweet, creamy foot. She looked fifteen at the outside, but carried herself very proudly.
“Bonjour, children!” she said, and very sweetly. “You will be Monsieur Branwell and Mademoiselle Anne, and I? Je m’appelle Marie, d’accord!”
Branwell looked at Anne. Anne looked at Branwell. An awkward silence ticked by.
“G . . . good morning, Miss Marie,” Anne stammered. She knew that face. She knew her. But it was too impossible. She couldn’t force herself to ask.
“Terribly sorry, but would that be Marie Antoinette?” Bran cut in.
“But of course, my darling! I am the one and the only, all other Maries are stealing from me, yes? It is a sin to call a shop girl by the same name as someone as marvelous as myself!”
“But . . .” Anne sunk her chin into her chest. She raised it again. She lowered it. “But aren’t you quite dead?”
“Deader than the Sunday roast, I’d say,” Branwell scoffed. “You can’t have Napoleon and Marie Antoinette in the same city, it’s just . . . it’s just wrong! They killed you! Long before Boney got his crown! They cut your head off!”
Marie Antoinette stroked her vanilla throat with a frosted hand. Beneath the thin frosting they could see the red velvet cake of her famous neck. “Pssh! Is nothing a little icing cannot fix! My cherie, Monsieur Bonaparte, allows me to stay on as maidservant so long as I never, never touch the crowns in the cupboard, or even think about them.”
Branwell goggled. “Maidservant? You were Queen of France!”
“Is not so different as you think, young man,” the Queen said ruefully. “At least a maidservant only uses the guillotine to chop carrots, no?”
Something slid into place in Anne’s mind. “Are you our interrogator?”
“I said maidservant, did I not? You heard me, loud and clear and loud again? I am here to clean up after M. Brunty’s petite mess. But first, you must eat! Eat bread, bread, all the bread you can stuff in your adorable faces. You see? Enough bread for all. I learn my lessons.”
Marie Antoinette had brought a silver tray piled high with food. Branwell blinked, confused. He saw no pots of fire or flutes of champagne or dishes full of hardtacks, just simple brown bread and brown soup and brown tea, no different than if Tabitha herself had served them up. Where had they gotten all this?
“There is nothing for the heart like the taste of home,” Marie said in a singsong voice. “That’s what I always say.”
A moment later it was all gone, and Anne had no memory at all of eating. She just opened her starving mouth and then Branwell was licking his fingers like a wolfy pig.
“I thought Boney would come.” Bran pouted through the crumbs. “I thought he’d want to meet us. Very well, then!”
Branwell sat up straight. He stuck out his chin. He could feel himself getting courageous. He would be courageous.
“Do your worst!” he shouted.
“Please don’t!” cried Anne. “I like my fingernails!”
Marie turned her head to one side. Her meringue curls tottered. “And how do you imagine that you are at all important enough for the Emperor to trouble his time with? Are you Wellington’s son? Douro’s heir? Silly me, I thought you were the two wee little mad children Brunty brought in! With two mad sisters running whizz and wild out there, scheming with bad elements, stirring up trouble?”
“Charlotte and Em!” Anne cried.
“At least they are not locked up tight, yes? I think they are maybe cleverer than you, Monsieur Branwell. If you had not put out Brunty with your wonderful bucket, he would have died—kack!—and you would not be here with me! But no! What a fool am I! That is not you! You are someone important. I am so absent of mind! Why, I’d lose my head if it weren’t attached. Who are you then, my darlings? You have my full attention.”
“We . . . we are . . . I mean that Brunty did bring us in, and I am Anne and he is Branwell, but we’re not mad. And we’r
e not little.”
Marie Antoinette made a mocking pout with her pretty iced mouth. “Oh, you are just precious. Precious like a lost earring! Did you not babble in the presence of the Brunty and say something about having made us all up like Cinderella? Did you not call Wellington and Napoleon your toys and make wild claims about having gotten them from a shop in Leeedz?”
“It’s the truth,” mumbled Branwell. She was so beautiful. He hated her beautiful mocking mouth. He wanted it to smile for him.
“Well, that is rather awfully mad, non? Insane. Crazy as cake! You did not make me up! If anyone made me up, it was myself! You said I was the Queen of France. How can I be Queen of France and a little boy’s toy all at the same once?”
Anne blushed. “Sometimes we . . . sometimes we used real people in our games. To make them more exciting. Because sometimes the real people were terribly interesting or beautiful and . . . and we wanted to meet them and show them the moors behind our house and feed them eggs from our chickens, but we couldn’t, you see, because they were very dead or very famous, so we called our toys by their names and invented stories for them, stories that brought them to us.”
Marie Antoinette wrinkled her delicate powdered-sugar nose. “Disgusting. Rude. You ought to be spanked. But, then how do you know I am your toy-Marie, and not the real-Marie?”