Charlotte wrote out the note quietly on Crashey’s back so that Emily wouldn’t have to. Wellington dug up his personal seal and stamped the corner.
B & A—
Don’t worry. We are coming for you. We’ve got Wellington and Lord Byron (don’t ask!) and Crashey and Gravey and the lot with us. There’s nothing to fear. Buck up. Be Brave. You know the rest.
Look for us at dawn.
Charlotte & Emily
P.S. Stop chewing your fingernails, Bran. You, too, Anne.
Cathy took the letter and promised to listen hard to the earth until she could find the two lost children. She bent and kissed Emily’s cheek with her cold blue-silver lips and disappeared into the
starlit shadows over the depthless sea.
TWENTY-THREE
My World Will Shine
What do you mean ‘a place called England’?” Branwell said crossly.
He felt sure Victoria was making fun of him somehow. And Anne, as well, but mainly him. Branwell picked up one of Victoria’s dolls and turned it over in his hands. It was a grumpy-looking man with a big white beard. A lead turtle and a little tin goldfinch had gotten stuck to his trousers like burrs picked up on a walk through the woods. Bran shook the doll, but his burrs stuck. He set the fellow down again on an overturned model ship and stared angrily at the map of Verdopolis. His map of Verdopolis.
“That’s the capital of Glass Town,” Victoria said softly. “I don’t expect I shall ever get to see it, but I have every street memorized. That’s the Tower of All Nations there, see? And the Hall of the Fountain and the Hall of Justice and the Grand Inn of the Genii, which is really just the sweetest and most tender name for a church, when you think about it. Have you ever been to Verdopolis?”
He goggled at her. Was she making fun? Testing him? But Victoria just looked up at him with wistful, trusting eyes. Her face was all pearl. Her irises the same color as her pupils and whites and eyelids and eyelashes. Branwell could admit she was pretty, but her eyes unsettled him. He glanced meaningfully out the slim church window between the Verdopolis tapestry and the Lake Elseraden one, but she didn’t follow his gaze. She wasn’t allowed to look out windows. Uncle Leon wouldn’t let her. How could anyone be that obedient? Anne certainly wasn’t. It was unnatural. Oh, he realized. Her tower’s facing the wrong way. It’s only the cliff and the valley and the river out there. If she could pick up the place and turn it round, she’d see. That’s the saddest thing since the invention of sad.
Bran didn’t know why he didn’t tell her the truth, except that the whole business with calling her silly fairy world “England” bruised his national pride. He didn’t like her saying she had Verdopolis memorized. She hadn’t any right to their grand city. She was nothing but Anne’s old doll.
“Yes, I have,” he said, a little nastily. I invented it, you weird white rat. Well, we all did. But I did the good bits. Oh, I am being dreadful, dreadful. Why can’t I stop being dreadful to her? “It’s fine. You’re not missing much.”
Anne glared at him and shook her head disapprovingly. Branwell coughed. He prodded the doll with the big white beard again with his toe.
“Leave Charles alone,” Victoria begged him. “He doesn’t belong to you.”
“You are mad,” he declared. “I said you were and you are.”
He expected the strange girl to go pale and apologize for her very bad joke—paler, anyway. But she didn’t. She clenched her white silk fists.
“Hush, Bran!” Anne said. “You could drive a soap cake mad in five minutes flat! Manners banners!” Anne had already decided she liked that very much and would take it home with her. “Go on, Victoria. I know just what you’re talking about. We’ve made up loads of stories and games for our toys, haven’t we, Bran?” Bran looked slightly panicked. This was hardly the time to come clean or the person to come clean to! “You’re right, England is a funny name. But I like it all the same. What made you think of it?”
Victoria slowly unclenched her fists and began to pace about her room, tidying up her dolls and models and figures. “I don’t know, really. It’s my own invention. It just came to me one day out of nowhere and I thought it sounded like a real, proper name for a country—a bit stiff and stuffy but not at all scrubby, the way a country’s name should be. It’s a little, lonely, green island in a cold sea. It’s got a capital called London and oodles of rivers—I’m ever so good at naming rivers! The Thames, the Tyne, the Clyde, the Nidd, they go on and on! I’ve drawn the place a hundred times, but I’m not much at sketching and it’s so hard to get Scotland right. That’s what I call the northern bits. The whole thing together is also called Great Britain. Miss Agnes says I must choose one, but I think a place can have two names if it’s truly splendid, don’t you? And I’d wager no one’s ever thought to say a nation’s great right in the title of the thing! But it is splendid and it is great and it has heaps of colonies so it never has to stay a lonely green island in a cold sea.” Victoria twisted her fingers together nervously. “I couldn’t bear for my country to be a poor lonely little thing so I let it conquer, oh my, just every kind of place, and that way it will always have friends. Oh, I’ve imagined other places and empires and geographies for my dolls before, but England’s different. Aren’t you, darling? Yes, yes, you are.” She put her hand on the stack of handwritten pages on her desk. Her writing was so small and fine the papers looked almost all black with ink.
“How different?” Branwell asked, unsure whether or not he wanted the answer.
But Victoria’s pearly eyes filled with the very special thrill of showing a stranger your dearest possession. “Well,” she said conspiratorially, “I’ve put myself in it, for one. I’ve never done that before! It’s very daring, don’t you think? I like being daring. It feels like jumping out that window there. You don’t think it’s prideful, do you? Oh, perhaps I ought to change it. Perhaps it is wicked and stuck up. But . . . it’s only that, up here in my tower, I’m not terribly interesting, not much of an anybody at all. I’ve never ever left these walls unless it happened when I was a baby and I don’t remember, and I suppose it might have and I wouldn’t know a thing any more than I know what I sound like when I’m sleeping, because once you’ve forgotten something, it forgets you, too, and you can’t ever get it back. I get a little food every day even though it’s never enough, and I get a little lesson from Miss Agnes every week, even though that’s never enough, either, and a little visit from Uncle Leon or Mr. Brunty on holidays, but that’s all I’ve got. And Mr. Brunty and Uncle Leon . . . well, I do love them, I just wish they wouldn’t call me quite so many harsh names. Or let the guards chase me for fun and exercise. But I expect they’re right, in the end. I am just a nasty little scrubby starling nobody with nothing and that’s all right, you can’t help being born a starling, no matter how much you might like to be a hawk. But there! There, in my lovely England! There I’m not in the least a starling. I am a great Queen! Not just a Queen! An Empress! Her Majesty Victoria, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland Queen, Defender of the Faith, Empress of India! Doesn’t that sound spectacular? Doesn’t it sound like all the trumpets of heaven at once?”
Anne and Branwell shrugged. The room seemed to throb with strangeness, suddenly.
“Maybe another name,” Bran suggested. “Most Queens are Elizabeths or Marys. There’s never been any Victorias.” Anne shot him a glare. “So I’ve heard.”
“But I don’t want to be an Elizabeth or a Mary. I’m not an Elizabeth or a Mary! I’m a Victoria! And in my story, well, it’s very long and complicated and there’s just so terribly many chapters, but in my story, in my sweet little England, I rule forever and ever and ever over a great kingdom. I’ve invented a wonderful husband for myself as well.” She swooped down and scooped up the doll with the yellow silk hair she’d been fussing with before. “I named him Albert. I made him perfect. We have just the same color eyes. He’s staggeringly handsome and clever and brave—but not so brave that he will lord over me! Albert’s very dear that way. We’re never going to be parted, not even for a single moment, and he will never yell at me and he will never call me bad words and he will never think I’m scrubby, not even when I’ve just got up in the morning. Every day Albert will say to me: Victoria, you are good and kind and special and everything you do is the right thing to do. You are the hawk of my heart. Then we shall go for a long walk out of doors together in the sun. And I shall give Albert and me a shocking number of children, and all our babies will all be Kings and Queens and Emperors and Empresses as well, so that no one must feel lesser when we gather together for holidays and we will all love each other so much we never stop saying how well and truly we love each other even for a moment, and none of us will ever have to be alone, and all the laws will just be love each other and never stop, written on clay tablets and hung up where everyone can see, and that will be enough. All the other times I made up countries for my toys to live in, I invented wars and diseases and tragedies so that none of them would get bored and we’d all get a good story out of it. But this time, this time it’s going to be perfect. No one will ever get sick or suffer injustice and there will be no wars, unless everyone really wants one, but at the end of the day they must all shake hands and have a bath and be happy again. Best of all, no one will be bored, because I’ve planned a whole pantheon of wonderful poets and scientists and authors and inventors and painters and composers for my court! You’ve already met and manhandled Mr. Darwin and his poor turtles, Bran, but I’ve got scads more.” Victoria sank down at her desk again, overpowered by her vision. She touched the quill pen shyly. “I can put you in it, if you like,” she said to Anne. “I like to share. It’s only that I’ve never had any other children to share with. What would you like to be?”
“What about me?” said Branwell. This was all absurd, of course. Their games had come to life. Not hers. But he smarted all the same. It was the worst sort of feeling, to be left out.
“You called me mad,” Victoria said haughtily. For the tiniest slice of a moment, she looked every inch Queen Victoria, Her Majesty, by the Grace of God. “Anne didn’t, so she’s my favorite at the moment. You can’t call the Queen names. England’s not that kind of place. If you want to be in my story, you mustn’t say anything cruel or be vicious or argue with any single thing I say, even if it is only a little thing and you know it isn’t true, such as: Why, that Certain Clever Wren has just told me there’s a new Prime Minister! I’m afraid you cannot say: Birds don’t talk; instead you must curtsy and say something agreeable, for example: That Certain Clever Wren certainly is up to date on the most exciting doings, Mum.”
Victoria was beginning to remind Branwell of Charlotte. He gritted his teeth. But he could not bear for Anne to