Ginevra busied herself in the depths of her steamer trunk. Every once in a while, she tossed a little vial of oil or a cake of soap or a sachet of mysterious powders over her shoulder for the girls to catch. They applied whatever it was to whatever bit of body or bathwater the picture on the packets showed and hoped for the best. Ginny talked like Tabitha did—as though, if she stopped, she’d just wind down completely like a pocket watch and never spin up again.
“You’ve auditioned, and I’ve cast you as two Angrian Ladies visiting from your country estates. Just Ladies, I think. Any higher in rank and we’ll run right into trouble. They expect Baronesses to be rather the life of the party, you know. But a Lady can just flutter her fan in the corner. Of course, you’ll have to have new names! The wild foxes at the Wildfell Ball know all the noble families down to half-cousins and lesser hunting hounds.” She looked at them appraisingly over her shoulder, her charcoal-dust eyebrows furrowing. “Best to put you far away from the action. So . . . let’s see. I think you grew up on family lands in Smokeshire, in the wild counties north of Verdopolis, our fair capital. Before the occupation, naturally. Lord Linton Bell runs those counties from his estate at Thrushcross Grange. He’s got more grandchildren than grapes on his vines. What’s another two, more or less? You’ll be Bell girls, just introduced to society. You’ve got inheritances, but nothing so posh that the boys would come tripping over themselves to dance with you. A word to the wise: May I have this dance? never means may I have this dance. It means: May I scheme with, for, against, or, at least, near you? Whether that’s scheming for marriage or money or a ride home in your carriage so the fellow doesn’t have to walk, you’ll have to snuffle out for yourselves.” Ginevra began to lay out hairbrushes, combs, bottles of mysterious somethings, scissors, puffs, and pots all in neat rows on the luncheon table. All laid out together, it looked like an armory full of rifles and swords. Ginevra twittered on. “Of course, we must give you good, Angrian names. I’ve never met a Charlotte or an Emily in my life, and no one would believe Linton Bell would allow such modern-sounding names to land on any of his little grapes. Something strong and heavy and fashionable about a thousand years ago, that’s his speed! I think . . . Lady Currer and Lady Ellis Bell will hang very nicely on you both.” She clapped her talcum hands together. “Now for the best part! The best mask is fitted precisely to the wearer’s face!” Ginevra Bud rocked back on her heels between the two gravy-tubs and sparkled at them. Her eyes shone with interest and merriment. “Tell me about yourselves. What do you like best in the world? What do you dream of having for your own that you cannot touch just yet? And I don’t mean having your brother and sister back safe. That’s too easy.”
Emily clasped and unclasped her hands in the foaming bathwater. She felt like she was standing under a waterfall, getting her head soaked by Ginny’s gushing talk and her new history and her new name. How could you think in a waterfall?
“I like dogs with white ears, and half-blind old ravens, and extremely tidy rooms, the opposite of arguments, and thunderstorms on the moors, and . . . and ghosts,” Emily breathed out all at once, adding the last without quite meaning to. “I . . . I suppose . . . I should like to love someone who makes me feel the way I feel when the thunder storms on the moors. And to not be a governess ever.”
Charlotte dunked her head in the bath and bobbed up again. “I like books, and—”
“Books!” protested Emily from her gravy boat. “Well, I would have said books, too, you know, but books are just obvious. That’s like saying you like air!”
“Books,” Charlotte repeated firmly, “and pheasants at the kitchen window, winning arguments, plum cake, and the room at the top of the stairs. I want . . . I want everyone to be all right, to know they’re all right, forever and ever. And . . . oh, I suppose I should like to love someone, too, but not someone who will be a storm on a moor, for he would put out all my fires with his nasty wet downpours.” She paused and flicked at the water and then whispered: “Fire is so fragile, sometimes, you know.”
Ginevra Bud narrowed her cinnamon-dust eyes. “Is that really what you want most of all, my girls? Come now, a dressing room’s as good as a confessional. Just love, and all that rot about fires and storms? Even kittens want more than that.”
Charlotte and Emily blushed and looked down into the water and until it started happening, they’d no idea really that th
ey were about to say much the same thing.
“I want to write down—”
“All the things in my head—”
“All the stories and poems from the room at the top of the stairs—”
“The way Mr. Shakespeare or Mr. Chaucer or Lord Byron did—”
“Or Mrs. Shelley or Miss Austen—”
“And know people have read them—”
“Other than Papa and Tabitha and Aunt Elizabeth—”
“To know everyone’s read them—”
“So that everything inside me is outside me at last.”
The sisters looked sidelong at each other. Their ambitions hung in the air like Christmas garlands. They had said the most true thing in their hearts, and it had been the same thing, which is very nearly a miracle between sisters. There was nothing for it but to dry off and slip into their shifts and get after the future as fast as they could.
“Excellent!” said Ginevra. “These things are crucial. No Lady would wear a dress to a ball that she did not love, and no Lady could love a dress that did not speak to some secret desire she daren’t reveal any other way. The secret language of gowns is the language of the soul, my darlings! I think I’ve got something for both of you. Don’t tell anyone, but I raided Miss Mary’s third wardrobe for the occasion. She has so many dresses she’ll never notice, believe me. Now . . . dogs with white ears and ravens and moors and thunderstorms and no governesses, yes?”
Ginny pulled a gown out of her trunk and laid it on the sofa. It was so lovely Emily gasped out loud—and so did Bestminster. He blushed above the mantel, all the way back under his shell.
“I never thought in all my life I’d get to carry a garment so fine,” Bestminster confessed, and bashfully drew his head back into his half-shell and even the wall itself. But his eyes still glinted in the shadows as Ginny held the dress up to Em’s shoulders. “I’m so proud,” the suitcase whispered. “I could die.”
The gown was pure white silk with a long ruffling black train. Wild whips of heather blossoms ran all round the neckline and down the skirt, and the lace was knotted up out of the tiniest, most delicate thunderclouds, as thin and wispy as the rags of ghosts. Emily reached out her fingers to touch it, sure that it would curl up and turn brown like a lily if she did.
Ginevra turned to Charlotte. “And pheasants and plum cake and un-put-out-able fire and books?”
This time Ginny lifted a dress so bright it hurt to look at. The bodice was all the colors of pheasant feathers except the plain brown bits. The skirt was deep, deep violet with a red petticoat, like plum skin and plum fruit, like a fire burning underneath a night sky. Charlotte’s lace crackled orange and black around her neckline, tatted from real, burning embers that did not burn her skin, which was impossible, but happening all the same.
The dresses were windows into a world they had never known in Haworth, in the little house above the churchyard, in the orbits of Papa’s universe, where there wasn’t enough money to save all four of them at once from cold and hunger and the long life ahead. They didn’t even know how to put them on. You’d need an instruction manual—or a Ginevra. The powder-girl moved like Tabitha in the kitchen, every step perfectly placed for the task. Step in here, button up there, tuck in and smooth out and lace tight and bind down. Finally, Ginny put belts round their waists, swiped from Bud & Tree Publishing, no doubt: two sturdy leather book spines, stitched in gold and stripped from some poor lost novels. The gowns were so tight Emily and Charlotte felt as though their hearts would explode or they’d throw up or both. But somehow, the clothes felt very like the arms and armor Mr. Bud said they’d want.
Ginny was frowning. She pursed her powdery lips.
“I was putting off this bit,” she admitted. “I knew it was coming, but the dresses were ever so much more fun. It’s only that I wanted to see you two happy. Miss Mary is never happy with her dresses. She’s too rich for anything so simple as a dress to make her smile. And it’s a sad lady’s maid who never gets one single joyful gasp for her efforts. But . . . you must see, don’t you. They’d never let a pair of . . . of . . . breather girls into a Lavendry ball. Oh, I know that’s a dreadful way to put it, but it’s just not done. Wildfell Ball is for loyalists, and you’re the foreignest of the foreign.”
“Well, if it helps any, I think I’ve stopped breathing.” Emily laughed. The laugh turned into a cough partway through.