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 them all in for brandy and the business at hand.