“There’s nothing to be done,” Emily said. “Unless we should sneak back. Let us see if we can’t find the mushroom patch again and make believe there are fairies there. I’m sure you can explode the fairies if you like, Branwell, though since they have the power of flight you won’t get quite so many brains dashed on the earth, but perhaps you can arrange a duel to make up the difference. Duels are superior to battles anyway.”
“I shall have a duel with Tabitha if she puts us to bed without our writing hours this evening,” Branwell said, kicking the hardened black earth with the toe of his boot. “I shall whack her with a biscuit.”
“If there are to be fairies,” said Charlotte imperiously, “the Duke of Wellington will have to be their King.” Anne ventured that her own favorites, Ross and Parry, the great polar explorers and namesakes of two of the smaller wooden soldiers, might be fairy lieutenants, perhaps wed to sensible fairy maids. But her sister, chief of the tale and engine of the game, did not hear her. The Duke stood always at the center of their pretended worlds, for Charlotte adored him as fiercely as Branwell worshipped Buonaparte. They had called their favorite wooden soldiers after the mortal enemies, and insisted on their inclusion in every adventure. And what a dashing crystal image it was that rose in Charlotte’s heart then—Sir Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington and King of the Fairies, with long black wings and a crown of lightning, astride, not a white horse this time but a white rhinoceros, his sword a blue, lamplit flame! The beauty of the dream expanded like a silk balloon in her chest, almost painful in its familiar sweetness, the pricks of a tale, and as ever, she felt as though she could never be big enough for even one of the stories that stormed inside her. It would drown her entirely and or burn her up from within and leave no part of Charlotte behind. She could see him in ruby clarity, really see her Duke, putting a lance of rose-colored ice through the forehead of the pig-footed, ram-headed, lizard-mounted Emperor of France.
A cracking, rustling thump down in the wintry hollow broke Charlotte’s vision into pieces. The sun dug down into a trench of clouds, casting the vale into shadow, sending a brute wind to rattle the thistle-heads. Something moved between the long, sharp trees.
“Look,” Emily whispered, her breath strangled and squeaking.
“I don’t see anything,” said Branwell, peering through the shade.
“Look.”
And they did see something—a man, a hugely fat man, in fact, tottering just below them, his collar turned up to the cold. But his collar was not a collar: it was a fine, illuminated page from some strange manuscript, folded crisply. His waistcoat was fashioned from a coppery book spread out along the spine; his cravat a penny dreadful folded over many times. But queerest of all, the enormous belly that protruded from beneath his coat of printed pages was the carved ebony knob of an ancient scroll, his legs were dark hymnals, and his enormous head was an open book longer than the Bible itself, glasses perched upon the decorated capitals of the pages: two handsome Os which served for eyes. The lower parts of the pages formed a mustache, and his nose crowned it alclass="underline" a long, blood-scarlet ribbonmark.
After a moment of shock in which no one breathed and everyone clutched hands as tight as murder, all four children burst out of their stillness and tumbled down the hill after the book-man, calling out to him and demanding his name, his family, his business. He began to run from them, his breath whistling fearfully through the hundred thousand pages of his body.
“Go away!” he shouted finally as they ran together, leaping over frozen puddles and knotted roots. “If Captain Tree hears of this I’ll be remaindered for certain!”
“We’re dreaming!” cried Anne. “It’s all right, it’s a dream and we’re dreaming!”
“You can run forever in dreams,” panted Branwell, “and I think if I don’t stop soon I shall throw up!”
But finally the man of books did stop, skidding to a halt before two tall soldiers, their rifles leaning on their shoulders, their gazes clear and bold, made entirely of rich brown wood.
The fat man looked back at them in terror, then folded up his face, his collar, his cravat, his waistcoat, and his long hymnal legs. He folded up so completely that between the children and the soldiers no longer stood a man at all, but a great fat book firmly shut, lying on the moorland. One soldier with painted black trousers, bent and retrieved it, tucking the volume under his strong arm.
“Hullo,” said the other soldier. This one had a wood-knot over his heart as though he had been shot there long ago. His mahogany mouth turned up in a sad little smile that seemed to say: well, we had better make the best of things. “My name is Captain Tree, and this is my comrade Sergeant Bud. But you may call us Crashey and Bravey.”
Long afterward, Charlotte would try to remember how it happened, but her mind could not quite clamp down upon it. It had already had to struggle mightily with a man made out of books, and was not at all prepared to record how one managed to lift a foot off the ground in Yorkshire and put it down in somewhere else altogether. They did not pass through a door, of that she was sure, nor was there a mystic ring or pool. Yet Crashey and Bravey—their own stalwart soldiers, their miniature toys!—had taken them up and now the sun battered down hot and sultry through viridescent fronds and great pink hothouse flowers as tall as streetlamps, bobbing over a long glass road which lead to a palace of such grandeur it burned their eyes. All along the boulevard strange obelisks rose, tipped with fire or ice or balls of blue lightning, and between them great birds of marvelous size and countenance, like peacocks given the gift of flight, bobbed and darted, crying out like mournful loons.
“What is that place,” said Emily, her voice trembling. “That place you are taking us? It is too dazzling! I fear it will catch fire, the sun dances upon it so.”
“That is the Parsonage,” said Crashey. His voice was deep and pleasant. “It is where the Chief Genii of Glass Town live, and many other wonderful fine folk besides.”
“That is not the Parsonage!” protested Anne, who could bear very much fancy, being so young, but could not abide a lie. “We live in the Parsonage, with Papa and Aunt Elizabeth and Tabitha! It looks nothing like that!”
Indeed, this Parsonage was an edifice all of diamonds, its stately pillars sparkling emerald and ruby illuminated with lamps like stars. A sapphire hall opened up like a blue mouth in its exquisite face, and the light of the warm Glass Town day filtered through all these gems as through water, throwing up fountains of fitful reflections. A little churchyard lay just beside it, just as it did at home, but here the gravestones were perfect alabaster stippled with black pearls.
“Sir, I must insist you admit this all a dream,” Branwell said crossly. “If you are my Crashey indeed you must do as I say. I have had quite enough silliness!”