“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.”