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.
And Branwell did not cry out. Victoria’s papers flew and folded and slid to the floor. Crashey and Bravey stroked her hair and rubbed her shoulders which must surely ache from her work, their faces fixed in religious ecstasy, midwives to a place they would never see.
The ninepin boss, Young Man Naughty, opened his mouth, a slit in the surface of his pin-head, and let a slow flame roll out from between his lips like a woven cloth. Branwell did not cry out. He was curious. What would happen? He did not feel any worry—if the country where Victoria was Queen burned up it was no real loss. Branwell felt no loyalty to an unborn cosmos. His loyalty was with Buonaparte.
The ribbon of flame kissed the first papers of the red room and the sound of it was like taking a breath. The wooden Buonaparte exclaimed with joy upon seeing Branwell—Branwell himself, not his sisters!—and embraced him while Crashey and Bravey came out of their dreaming joy and roared with horror, while Charlotte, Emily, and Anne tried to smother the flames with the rich red curtains and sought about for water, their panic held down by Charlotte’s iron calm. Buonaparte embraced him while a world burned, and the ninepins danced in the ruin, stamping down on the papers like drumbeats.
And while Branwell held his best creation, a musket-ball splintered Buonaparte’s wooden sheep’s skull and the conqueror slumped at his feet. With a whoop and a cry and a thundering gallop the Duke of Wellington burst upon the scene, his wooden chest glowing, his white rhinoceros bleating, his sons spreading black and gorgeous ebony wings, their wooden rifles smoking still. Branwell howled as his Young Man fell dead and wept bitterly. Young Arthur and Charles Wellesley made work of the ninepins who, without their leader, seemed to lose all hope and fall one after the other in a clattering row.
“No, no, no!” cried Victoria, trying to put out the flames with her own body. Crashey and Bravey dragged buckets in from the fountain in the great hall, and coaxed the elephant into firefighting with her long diamond trunk. Damp, charred pages began to outnumber fiery ones, and Wellington prodded Buonaparte’s lifeless body with the toe of his wooden boot.
“Don’t cry, lad,” he said to Branwell. “He’ll be made alive again by suppertime, God save us all. That’s how it’s always gone. Judgment Day will come and go and still I will be fighting the man, round and around on the last piece of earth in a sea of darkness.”
Victoria clutched hundreds of papers to her breast, trying to piece some back together, trying to make them come right again. “So fast! All in a moment, less than a moment! Did you see them coming? Why did you not protect me, Captain Tree?”
Crashey looked stricken, then went ashy, as though he might pass dead away. Bravey buried his head in his hands.
“It’s all broken up now,” Victoria whispered, two heavy tears rolling down her face. “Look—my dear Albert is almost wholly burned out of the tale. My little wars of intrigue and interest have bled out and mixed together,” she grasped at a miserable black heap. “My children! All my little Kings and Queens! Now there is a black space in the midst of them, a black trench where half the world will fall and choke and break my kingdom of forever into burning shards. I wanted it so beautiful, I wanted it to be a kingdom without pain, and now it is on fire.” The child held out another slim clutch of pages to the children. “Even the part I had written for you, look now how it’s spoiled. The books are there, yes, but your lives are scorched to a few slim chapters, brittle and thin. The smoke in this room will wither you away in that country, so that even the water you drink will bring you no health, even your home will not make you whole. And the boy—” Victoria ran her fingers over a black page, her tears hissing as they fell upon it. “It’s written already, I can’t erase it. I only ever get one draft to make it right. You cannot revise a whole world.”
“Don’t worry,” Branwell said to his sisters. “It’s not our world. It’s copies of us, somewhere else, somewhere far away that will never touch us. I’m sorry, I should have sounded a warning, I will next time, I swear it. But it’s not us, it’s another place, another Branwell and Charlotte and Emily and Anne, and no harm done to us at all.”
The child Victoria pressed her forehead to the smoking floor and wrapped her arms around her belly, weeping as if her only child had been born dead and still.
Tabitha wrinkled her nose as she bustled the children in from the frosted twilight. Their clothes smelled faintly of smoke, their faces were smudged and exhausted and hollow-looking, which was not right at all for four young folk who had been playing in the sun all day! What they had been about they would not say, nor how they had been gone so long, nor how they had found their way home in the dark. In fact, all four were silent as monks. But they were not four—little Anne was missing. She sent the girls and Branwell to scrub their cheeks and dress for supper and perhaps play with their wooden soldiers a bit if being away from them for an afternoon had soured them so. The fish would not be ready for a three quarters of an hour—an eternity for minds like theirs. Tabitha drew on her woolen shawl and went out into the gloam to find the violet-eyed little wastrel that lagged behind, probably to watch some silver worm chew the earth or skip a rhythm on the cobblestones.