The Bread We Eat in Dreams, Page 27

  “I did not give him such an army,” he said meekly, in some defense.

  “You gave him much thirst for blood and fire, and no need to restrain himself, and gifted him with a hunger for death more fierce than for bread.” Chief Genii Tallii said sternly. Branwell’s heart swelled and stung. Charlotte’s disapproval left welts upon his spirit, and in those great adult eyes he saw himself small and vicious, when he only wished to be the master of the game—was that so terrible?

  The Chief Genii Annii went on. “But also Sir Walter Scott dwells in Glass Town, bent over his books in a wig of butterflies. So too is Lord Byron here, a bewitching warlock with hooves of gold. The anatomist Dr. Knox tends a garden of fresh corpses, as sweet-smelling as orchids, to perform his experiments upon. Though we hold the throne, our father Patrick Brontë serves as Prime Minister, his official carriage drawn by a blue tiger sent to us in gratitude from the peoples of the Nile. You would find without too much trouble a young man with a finch’s bright head living among the turtles of the south quarter, near Bravey’s Inn, answering to the name of Charles Darwin.”

  “I do not know that name,” said Charlotte.

  “Time is not a perfect copy. Yet he is there, along with the editors of Blackwood’s Magazine dipping their unicorn horns in ink, a poet called Young Soult the Rhymer selling his verses beneath the ammon trees, young Benjamin Disraeli tossing his dragon’s head at the stars.”

  A star glowed briefly upon Genii Annii’s head, blue and sere, and then guttered out as if a wind had extinguished it.

  “You are the authors of our world,” said Crashey softly, and the four of them had almost wholly forgotten he was there. “It is a mystic, decadent thing when one’s gods come home to roost. Waiting Boy did not mean for you to see him—the gentleman you chased away from your own Parsonage. Some transit must occur between our countries. It’ll be a century before he comes out of his book again. You gave him a terrible fright. Imagine if all the seraphim of heaven appeared while you were collecting the post.”

  “But we are not seraphim!” insisted Emily.

  Crashey said nothing.

  “Is Mother here?” said little Anne. The Chief Genii turned to her as one. “You said Walter Scott is here. And Buonaparte though everyone knows he is dead. Is our Mother here? She died at home. Is she in that splendid courtyard of pearls and alabaster? Or does she live, with a lion’s tail or a sparrow’s head? I shouldn’t mind if she had a sparrow’s head. I can become accustomed to anything, really.”

  The Genii did not answer, but their grave, dark faces answered Anne all the same. The child blushed. “I only thought…” But she could not finish. She buried her head in Emily’s breast.

  “Why was…Waiting Boy…mucking about on the moor to begin with?” said Branwell, trying to defeat with false cheer his own hope that their mother could somehow be waiting for them in some place they had invented, Dr. Hume’s house or the Tower of All Nations.

  “Each year,” said Bravey, “the Young Men must perform certain arduous activities, or else the world will be destroyed and all sent into darkness.”

  “You’re very matter-of-fact about it!” said Charlotte.

  Bravey nodded. “I am. But it must be done. Waiting Boy was bringing to us a certain object, that we might begin our rite. It must come from your country, for it is from your country that we come.”

  “We will take it to the Island of Dreams hereafter, and do what must be done there, and then another year may pass in which all is well and the sun in the sky.”

  “And what is to be done with us?” asked Charlotte, speaking for the worries of them all.

  “Done with you?” said kind Bravey. “Nothing. If you wish to go home you may go home.”

  “I do not!” shouted Branwell a little too loudly. “I wish to meet Buonaparte!”

  “And Wellington!” added Charlotte.

  “And the ninepin brigade, and the vivisectionist’s garden, and even this Darwin fellow if you say he is a good man and wise,” said Emily.

  “I should like to go with you to the Island of Dreams,” said Anne softly, not yet over the bright shaft of joy that had flared up and gone suddenly out in her little heart at the thought that their mother might enter the hall in as much glory as these four monarchs. “And perform the rite with you. I wish all things to be orderly and well.”

  The children clapped upon this immediately as the thing to be done, though Crashey and Bravey declined bashfully, feeling it was their private affair. But in the end no fiber of them could refuse their creators, and a great elephant was called, for this was a common conveyance in Glass Town, for those who could afford it. As the negotiations were made, Chief Genii Emmii happened to cough into her kerchief, and Charlotte saw in the silken square a spray of rubies fall like blood. The corners of Emmii’s mouth seemed to crack ever so slightly, and a glittering scarlet light escaped before the skin made itself whole again.

  “We must go quickly and with as little sound as we may,” admonished Crashey. Branwell was disappointed in him. They rode upon an elephant—not only an elephant but one whose skin was diamond, yet soft, with tiny silver hairs upon it and iron bones visible down deep beneath the millions of facets. How could they go quietly? Why should they? They would fight, if the ninepins came for them! Yet secretly Branwell hoped they would, for surely Buonaparte, his chief among the Young Men at home, would come with them, and they would be fast friends.

  “What is it that Waiting Boy brought from our country?” said Emily as the sun went down over a broad sea that foamed on a beach below the green cliff on which their road ran. It spooled out a hot, rosy light along the horizon like calligraphy.

  Bravey blushed; the birch wood of his face went the color of cedar. “To ask us to reveal these things is like asking us to discuss the details of our wedding night,” he said miserably.

  “I command you to tell us!” cried Branwell.

  Crashey removed from a pocket concealed in a patch of bark a crystal glass, stoppered and filled with a thick black liquid.

  “Ink?” said Anne, reaching out to touch it. The sunset leant the glass a molten, volcanic splendor.

  “In your country it is ink,” Crashey agreed. “Here it is a philtre which compels the truth from whomever would use it.”

  Branwell was possessed by a powerful urge to snatch it away. He would make Charlotte taste it. Then she could not lie to him when he asked the questions buttoned up into his chest. Do you still love me as you used to when Emily and Anne were too young to interest us? When you go away to school again, what will become of me? Is it me you love best, or the tale of the Young Men which you require me to tell fully? You are going so fast, I cannot keep up with you. Why will you not wait for me?

  For her part, Charlotte also wished to talk to her brother away from the others, but she did not think she needed a philtre. He would tell her the truth because he was Branwell, and if he did not she would know. I do not think the Genii really look like us, she wanted to tell him. I think they are wearing us like masks. Perhaps they are really us, but changed, like Buonaparte with his ram-face, which you know, I had only just conceived of when all this began, but now it is true! I would not have put it in the chronicles, as it is too fanciful even for our purposes. But if it is real it cannot be fanciful! Did you see the skin of the Genii when it cracked? Beneath I saw the swirling spangled lights of the heavens, like a furnace full of stars. It is not safe, the Young Men’s country. We are not safe.

  In the late evening they came upon a house in a quiet section of quite another town, a stately place with black marble porticos and a cheery light within. They dismounted the elephant and were greeted by three of the most beautiful young men the children had ever seen. They seemed, indeed, more like paintings of men than men, and Charlotte was certain she could see brushstrokes upon their hands and faces, though this made them no less lovely.

  Crashey and Bravey greeted them with laughter and claps upon the back, and the brothers invited the
m all in for brandy and the business at hand.

  “Allow me to present,” said Crashey, “Currer, Acton, and Ellis Bell, friends of the crowns and initiates of the first order.”

  “Initiates into what?” Emily said as Acton kissed her hand.

  “The secrets of our yearly rite. It is a brotherhood we maintain for all time. We have come to fulfill their portion, and also for their excellent table.”

  “I only wish you could have met our sister Danett,” sighed Currer, whose glossy auburn hair smelled of linseed. “But she died last year. Laudanum, I confess, and despair.”

  Bravey let out a woody sob, for it seemed that he loved the Bell sister all in secret and would now bury his heart in the earth. The men shared brandy around and drank in painful silence.

  Anne looked around at the house. Books lay everywhere, half in order and out. Maps hung upon the walls, of the polar regions, the Himalayas, the Yukon wilds. A great black opal desk took up the center of the room, which seemed to have been made for four people to work together upon it, though now only three manuscripts lay on its many-colored surface, each with its own quills and ivory-handled knives for making points and decanters full of rich ink. A plate of grapes, thick cheese and yellow cakes lay in the meeting place of the three stations, so any of the brothers might sample it while at work.

  Anne recalled an evening at home when, distraught over Charlotte or Branwell receiving some preference, her father had asked what she wanted most in all the world. She had been younger then, not yet achieved the seasoning of six or seven years, and had been seized with the sure knowledge that whatever she asked for then her father had the power to grant it. Everything relied upon what she said in that moment. And so she told the truth, being so small and surrounded by the older children, invincible and mighty creatures whom she could never best. Age and experience.

  And yet she had remained small.

  But the Bell house seemed to her the exact house that she would have when she possessed age and experience. A house of and for age and experience, where siblings might dwell together in peace and write upon a single great desk, recalling and inventing adventures, just as they did now, but with the impossible power of adults to do as they pleased. I shall remember this house, Anne thought. I shall remember it as I remember my own name.

  “Buonaparte has been to see us.” Ellis Bell’s voice cut through Anne’s thoughts. “He has decided his newest mischief will be to keep the rite from proceeding. What if something splendid were to happen? Destruction is a wonder, disaster a fascination. We can set it aright by supper if it should go poorly. What a creature! And the boss of his ninepins, Young Man Naughty, beat us about the head and burned our birds in their cages. But we did not give it to him. We are true.”

  “Good boys,” said Bravey, quite drunk by now but still amiable.

  Currer Bell went to the opal desk and drew out a ponderous quill, a feather of one of the flying peacocks they had seen in Glass Town. Its point was as sharp as a bayonet. He folded it into an oilcloth and pressed it into Crashey’s arms, leaving pale paintmarks on the cloth where his fingers touched it. “Godspeed, for he is faster than that.”

  Through the long night, the children fell asleep on their diamond elephant. Crashey allowed himself to stroke the brow of Charlotte and Branwell, touching the wood-knot wound on his chest with his other hand, remembering the flames of Acroofcroomb, the blood of his comrades everywhere like a hideous ocean. The wooden soldier shook his head to clear the cloud of his many deaths.

  He could not bring himself to wake them when the elephant trod into the Hall of the Fountain, so vast in its domes that the elephant was as a lowly dog in its vault. Many hours yet they marched through the long distance of the Hall, which stretched many leagues lined with statues of black and white marble as well as amethyst and peridot. He could not bear to wake them as they passed the fountain for which the place had been named, a pale snowy pool whose foaming plume reached as high as a cathedral. Only when they came to the room concealed behind a white silk curtain did he wake his charges, his small gods, and Bravey, who had sunk into sleep and brandy-fed grief over the lost Danett Bell.

  Behind the curtain stood an iron door. The children stood soundless and still, with the wide, limpid eyes of those just wakened. Crashey and Bravey took wooden keys from beneath their helmets and turned the door’s two locks at once, opening with a long creak the inner chamber.

  The square chamber was a red room. A bed supported on massive pillars of mahogany, hung with curtains of deep red damask, stood in one corner. A red table covered with a crimson cloth, a red toilet table, a red floor and red draperies that concealed only blank red wall and no windows. Standing out like a tabernacle in the center of the room was a red writing desk, its chair festooned with red cushions, and at it sat a young girl near Emily’s age, with long dark hair drawn in to cover her ears and searing, bold eyes. She wore a red dress.

  “Hullo, Captain Tree,” the girl said brightly. “Sergeant Bud.”

  “M’am,” they replied in unison, bowing.

  Bravey set the crystal glass upon her table, while Crashey set the oilcloth at her side, opening it to show the quill beneath.

  “My heart is racing, I am so eager to begin!” said the little girl. “But who have you brought with you? New recruits?”

  Crashey introduced the children in turn, without mentioning their curious history.

  “And I am Victoria,” said the child, and she smiled at them. Her smile had a strength like a blow.

  Victoria picked up the huge turquoise and emerald quill and dipped it into the ink. She began to write upon a great stack of blank pages before her, her hand easy and confident, her excitement flowing off of her in curls of red heat.

  “This year, I have a new world in mind,” Victoria said as she wrote. “In it, I shall put myself! I have never done that before! It’s very daring, don’t you think? Here I don’t have many prospects—my father was a clerk and a copy-editor; I went hungry plenty often, and had meat only when the butcher felt sorry for us. And I never leave this room anymore. My boys fill my larder but I’m never lonely, with all my histories to write! It takes the whole year to think through the next far country of my heart. But there! There I shall be a great Queen—not just a Queen but an Empress!—and rule forever and ever over a great kingdom. I have invented a wonderful consort for myself as well, and I shall name him Albert, and make him handsome and brave—but not so brave that he will lord over me! I shall give myself a number of children, and those children will all be Kings and Queens and Emperors and Empresses as well, so that no one must feel lesser when we gather for holidays. There will be wars, of course, you cannot make everything perfect or else it’s not very interesting. But I have planned a whole pantheon of wonderful poets and scientists and authors and inventors and painters and composers for my court—I can put you girls in it, if you like! I’m very generous! What would you like to be?”

  “What about me?” said Branwell, who did not even understand what he had been left out of, but smarted all the same.

  “If it pleases you,” said the child Victoria with a gracious wave of her pen.

  “Poets,” Charlotte said. She did not need to take a vote; she knew them and they her. “And authors. The sort that last.”

  “I shall not forget when I come to that part! There is plenty of room. Oh, wait until you see the inventions I have imagined! Lightning in a glass and tin ponies that run upon two wheels! Locomotives crisscrossing the world , even running underground like iron worms. Flying balloons and a fairs so big you have to build a whole new city just to contain them! My country will shine.”

  And the child Victoria, her long hair spilling down over her slim shoulders, began to write so fast that they could no longer see the strokes of her pen. Sheafs of paper flew out from the desk, falling like snow onto the floor, piling up in drifts, nesting in a plush red chair, on the wide red bed. The pages were so filled with Victoria’s tiny hand they looked nearly
black.

  “She is writing a world into life,” said Bravey softly. “Just as you did. You did it all unknowing, but it is her whole being.”

  “Which one?” said Anne, for she recalled that the Genii had said there were countless in number. “Which world?”

  “Who knows? Each year she writes a new one and sets it in motion; each year we bring the ink that will compel the world to become true and the quill to carve it out of nothing. We never see her countries, the copies of ourselves and the Genii and Sir Walter Scott and Wellington and Young Soult the Rhymer that live there. It is enough to know we have brought life somewhere, instead of death. Soldiers cannot ask for more.”

  Again Branwell felt a shiver of terrible responsibility at the numerous wars he had sent his Young Men to with glee, designing each of their deaths like suits. Perhaps it was this shiver that was to blame for what followed, perhaps it was that Victoria had not included him in her largesse, perhaps it was the nagging, terrible sense that Charlotte was always running ahead of him, further and further ahead, and Emily and Anne would catch her but he could not, that they were not like him, they did not see how silly their stories became when they did not have deaths by stabbing and massacres and horror in them, when they bore no hint of war, but thought he was ridiculous, that he was the strange, violent interloper in their interior nations when the wooden soldiers had been his, his, all along.

  And perhaps it was simply that he loved Buonaparte still, his first and best Young Man, and longed to see him come real. But when he saw the ninepins creeping in, glorious fiery designs upon their black chests, he did not cry out in warning. He only watched them, dazzled and glad after the fashion of a father upon seeing his son exceed all expectations. Buonaparte himself strode forward through the ranks of his personal guard, his ram’s head carved beautifully from blackthorn wood, astride a lizard of white pine, its tail thick and whacking, its tongue a balsam whip.