be anyone’s favorite while he was standing right there. If the girls were getting something, he wanted it, too. Some things inside Branwell were as unchangeable as gravity, and that was one.
“Yes, Your Majesty,” he said through his teeth. “I’m sorry I said you were mad.”
Victoria inclined her head. She would give him no more than that.
Anne rocked back and forth on her heels. It was too much. The girl she invented, inventing her future. “Could . . . could you write our sisters in as well? Charlotte and Emily.”
“If it pleases you,” said the child Victoria with a gracious wave of her pen. “What would you like to be, Anne? I’ll write you all in this minute.”
“This is ridiculous!” Branwell threw up his hands. He’d tried once. That was all through now. “Did you or did you not hear that rooster crowing not ten minutes ago? We’re in the middle of a prison break and you want to play with dolls! It’s not England, it’ll never be England, England’s nothing like she says. There’s never been a Queen Victoria and there won’t be one. Prince William’s next after King George, everyone knows that! And William’s got loads of brothers all over the place, so they wouldn’t give it to a girl just for funsies. She’s just daydreaming. The England bit’s only a coincidence, Anne! Lock a monkey in a room and tell it to rearrange the alphabet or no lunch and he’s bound to come up with London and the Thames sooner or later. It’s not like what we did, not in the least like us. She’s barmy. Barmy as a bilge rat, and I’m not sorry for saying that. Just let her talk to the wall and her pile of junk by herself. Let’s get out of here.”
But Anne wasn’t listening. She was thinking hard about what she and her sisters would like to be. In another England. A perfect England. Emily and Charlotte weren’t here. She had to get it right. “Poets,” Anne said finally. “And authors. The sort that last.”
Victoria beamed. “I shall not forget when I come to that part! There is plenty of room for everyone in Barmytown.” She turned her back on Bran. “Oh, wait until you see the inventions I have imagined for my empire, Miss Anne! Every single person in my world shall be a wizard, able to trap lightning in a glass or a pot or a bit of rope and use it to do miracles whenever they wish! I’ve put in machines that can sew anything all by themselves and sweet oranges filled with a magical medicine that can heal any infection and tin ponies that run upon two wheels! I’ve written locomotives that crisscross the whole planet, even running under the ground like iron worms, and great birds that will carry my people anywhere they wish to go. I do love anything that can fly, and Albert does as well. So I’ll have flying balloons, too, and rockets you can ride in all the way to heaven! I’ve made them such a place, my darling wooden men and porcelain ladies. I’m a good mother, I am. I’ve given them candles that never burn out so they needn’t ever be afraid of the dark and pictures that talk and move so they needn’t ever feel the littlest shiver of boredom and fairs so big you have to build a whole new city just to contain them! Oh, my world will shine. And you will too! I’ll put you right in next to Mr. Conan Doyle and Mrs. Curie and Mr. Wilde and Miss Nightingale and Mr. Rossetti and Mr. Dickens and Mrs. Browning and Mr. Marconi . . . ”
And the child Victoria, her long lace 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 blue and red chair, on a narrow blue and red bed.
Bran had a terrible sick feeling in his stomach. It got worse the more Victoria talked. No, no, no, said Branwell’s mind. It’s not true. That’s not our England. It’s preposterous. It’s completely unacceptable and I will not have anything to do with it. Veins stood out on his forehead. He’d only just accepted that there were two worlds in God’s creation: the world that contained England and Yorkshire and Papa and home, and the world that contained Glass Town and Gondal and all the most secret delights of their playroom games. If Victoria had her own world—and she didn’t, she didn’t! Then it couldn’t be his world. It had to be a third one. And three was right out. No, no, no, his mind stubbornly repeated. We made Glass Town. And it came real because we’re special, somehow. Because we made the best stories. They’re the made-up ones. It’s them. Not us. They’re the toys. It’s not me. I’m nobody’s toy. I’m no one’s wooden soldier.
“She can’t do that,” he told Anne. “We can, but she’s a toy. Why would you make it so she could do that?”
“Later,” Anne begged.
“What do you mean later? What if there isn’t a later?”
“There’s always a later. When the game is done and everything’s put away and we’ve had our supper. That’s when you tell us we’re just silly girls because we didn’t work any murders in, or we tell you you’re a brute. Later is when it’s safe to say anything, because the game is over and there’s no point getting cross about it. Let’s wait until you can’t get cross with me, Bran,” Anne begged. Tears filled her eyes. “You’re already cross with me right now! And you’ll be more than cross if I say it before later comes. You’ll be ever so much more than angry. You’ll be . . . you’ll be hurt.”
“Don’t be stupid, Anne. You can’t hurt me. I promise. I’m practically a grown up already. It’s dreadfully tough to hurt a grown-up, you know. So just pretend now is later and tell me or I’ll pinch you.”
Anne trembled from head to foot. The truth burst out of her like water from a burst pipe. “I made her so that she could do anything Charlotte and Emily could do! I made her so that when they die at school I won’t be alone! I’ll have someone all mine, who will never leave and never lie and never stop talking to me and she’ll be just as wonderful as Charlotte and Emily and tell stories even better than they could and stay with me forever!”
“You made a replacement?”
“I made a sister!” Anne sobbed. “You can’t tell! You mustn’t! They won’t understand!”
Branwell was hurt, after all. He had never felt so hollow. He’d never felt so much like he didn’t exist at all. “But . . . but Anne . . . what about me?”
Anne never got a chance to answer.
A ghost drifted in through the window, silvery blue, somewhat pretty and somewhat plain. Her bare feet left frost-tracks in the air.
Any thought that did not concern ghosts fled from Anne, Victoria, and Branwell’s minds. The spirit put a thin scrap of paper in Branwell’s dumbfounded hand. Then she melted away like winter snow.
Anne read over her brother’s shoulder. She opened her mouth to cheer for Charlotte and Em and somehow Wellington and Lord Byron, too, but a savage knock at the door and a savager squawk cut her off. Bran quickly shoved the note into the pocket of his Gondalier pajamas.
“Uncle Leon! Puppy!” Victoria cried happily. “Miss Agnes! Oh, everyone, just everyone’s come to see me today! I don’t know how I shall stand it! Oh, you needn’t knock, I’m perfectly decent, come in, come in!”
Victoria pulled open the green glass door. Napoleon Bonaparte stood on the other side, all two hundred and some odd bare bones and two long rifles and one large blue hat of him. His war-rooster Marengo waited magnificently behind him, along with a tall girl made of dark gray school slates with chalk dust still clinging to them in pretty patterns. Bonaparte’s chiseled bone face took in the room, Victoria, and the two, very much out of place and out of formation, intruders, Branwell and Anne. He puffed out his chest and slid the tip of his left musket inside his richly braided general’s coat. He said nothing. The great tyrant entered the cell and sprawled out comfortably in one of the plush red and blue chairs. The gray slate girl followed with a tray full of tea and pitchers of cream and plates of dainties—and two large, ripe lemons. She laid it out on the table, clearing away the ruins of breakfast.
“Puppy!” Victoria shrieked.
Marengo crowed joyfully and barreled in to be aggressively hugged by his favorite person apart from Napoleon. The green fire they remembered roaring out of
the spaces between his broken pottery skin was no more than a pale glow. Victoria rolled on the floor with the rooster, burying her face in his neck.
“Now, Victoria Alexandrina, what have we said about guests?” the slate-girl said softly.
“?‘Guests can only cause distress and must be put under arrest,’?” Victoria answered glumly. She climbed down from Marengo and brushed his feathers off her knees. “But they’re not really guests if they have their own room in the same castle as me, you know.”