The Bread We Eat in Dreams (32 page)

It seemed as if I were a non-existent shadow—that I neither spoke, ate, imagined, or lived of myself, but I was the mere idea of some other creature’s brain. The Glass Town seemed so likewise. My father…and everyone with whom I am acquainted, passed into a state of annihilation; but suddenly I thought again that I and my relatives did exist and yet not us but our minds, and our bodies without ourselves. Then this supposition—the oddest of any—followed the former quickly, namely, that WE without US were shadows; also, but at the end of a long vista, as it were, appeared dimly and indistinctly, beings that really lived in a tangible shape, that were called by our names and were US from whom WE had been copied by something—I could not tell what.

—Charlotte Brontë

There was every possibility of taking a walk that day. Great dollops of sunshine melted on the moors; clouds and shadows cut the bare winter-sleeping land into a checkerboard. The servant Tabitha had gotten a whole egg, a wedge of bread, and a bit of her damson jam into each of the four children, bundled them in bonnet and gloves and extra stockings, and set them out of doors into a blue Yorkshire morning so cold it seemed ready to snap in half at the slightest touch. She thought absolutely nothing of turning them loose on the moor that day of all days—they needed a helping of the out of doors, such children as these, with their canny tongues and stubborn tempers. Judgment Day would come and go before those four would look up from their pens and papers otherwise.

Stiff gorse tangle burst underfoot as they took to the day. Charlotte, the oldest, a serious child with thick hair parted through the center of her skull like a dark sea, a round, pallid face, and a fearsome scowl, trudged resentfully up a worn purple path through the bruised February hills. “I do not see in the least why we must leave Our Work just to satisfy Tabby’s obsession with fresh air,” she sniffed to none of her siblings in particular but all of them generally, her nose beginning to run in the hard crystal air.

Branwell quickened his pace to keep up with her, his long curls whipping across the bridge of his great arched nose, his brow furrowed and fuming, frowning as if to reflect Charlotte’s expression as perfectly as possible though he could only see the back of her, her woolen dress prickled with bits of twig and old, withered heather.

“I had intended to explode the castle on Ascension Island today, with Crashey and Ross and Bravey and Stumps and Buonaparte and all the rest trapped inside!” he groused, his breath puffing ellipses ahead of him. “With much splendid blood and fire and leaping out of windows and dashing brains out on the earth! The heavens would have wept at my slaughter! Now Tabby has sabotaged me with her
eat your eggs, there’s a lad
and
fasten up your coat good and tight
; they’ll be safe and sound for
ages
yet. Until evening, anyway.”

Emily and Anne hung back from the older children, holding hands and picking their path carefully, so as not to crush any sweet plant that might erupt in spring with blossoms to cheer them. Emily looked up at the frozen sun, her brown ringlets crowding a narrow, sharp face that looked already quite grown, though she had only nine years. “We would have made them alive again by supper, Bran,” she snapped, tired of her brother’s thirst for the blood of their favorite toys, a set of twelve fine wooden soldiers their father had given as a present to his only son—but the girls had made a quick end to
that
. No sooner had Branwell got them but his sisters had colonized the kingdom of the soldiers, named them and claimed their favorites. The Young Men ever after ruled their hearts and idle hours.

Little Anne, the youngest, laughed. The prettiest child in Haworth, her hair almost reaching the blonde shades of girls in lovely paintings, she watched everyone with her wide violet eyes as though spying upon them, with the necessity of making future reports to some unseen master. “It’s a wonder Crashey doesn’t get dizzy, with his forever falling down dead and getting up again!”

Charlotte stopped short at the flat top of a little hill that kept watch over a low leafless valley full of the starving prongs of black yews and thorn trees and tumbling colorless grasses, thistle and old ivy, worn stones near as high as Anne. Every branch and blade was limned with glassy golden light, which gave the scene a strange affect, as though the children were seeing it from much further away than they really stood, and through a frosted pane besides. Charlotte put out her arms and her young sisters huddled into them, for the wind bit at their cheeks and made rosettes of their dimples. Branwell did not partake of their cup of affection, though he wanted to. But he felt Crashey would not, and certainly Buonaparte would have the head of any lad of his who behaved in such babylike fashion. Branwell had of late begun to feel his sisters were not quite serious about the game. They had romantic notions and did not submit to his pronouncements of death and disaster by flood or spectral conflagration, but went about healing everyone with phials until all his fun was spoilt.

“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 all: 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!”

Crashey and Bravey stopped and turned smartly to them, saluting. They stood on the porch of the bright Parsonage, and Charlotte heard her heels click on the diamond floor. That click, somehow, sounded deep in her and convinced her of the reality of this summer country as the birds and pillars and heat could not. The floor beneath her was real, and its facets yawned below her like mirrors. She drew her sisters in close and her heart battered madly at her ribs.