The Bread We Eat in Dreams (33 page)

“I am your Crashey,” said the solemn soldier. “And so I must obey you, but I wish you would not compel me in this way. I will say it is a dream, if your will is set. But I am an honest nut, and I do not like to lie. I will show you my wounds if you require evidence—you may already see the place where the Marquis of Douro put his musket-ball during the African campaign, but here,” and Captain Tree showed his thigh, which had a scorch mark upon it, “you may find proof of the explosion of the citadel of Acroofcroomb. Witness also my flank, whereupon Buonaparte stuck me with his knife, and my throat, slashed in the battle of Wehglon. If it will not make the ladies too faint, I can show you the scar over my liver, where the cannibal tribes made a lunch of Cheeky, Gravey, Cracky and my humble self.”

Branwell at last relented and drew into the protective circle of his sisters. Charlotte held him tight about the waist and warmth spread through him as he put his hand upon little Anne’s shoulder as he had seen their father do when their Aunt suffered a spell of grief.

“Those are
our
battles,” whispered Emily, utterly ashen. “We sent the Young Men to Acroofcroomb. We set the cannibal hordes upon them. We invented Glass Town, and Gondal, and the Marquis. He is talking about Our Work.”

“Indeed, fair Emily, you did send us into service,” spoke up Bravey for the first time. “Well do I recall our suffering and many deaths—but also I remember gentle hands which restored us to life, fit and hale to strive again for the sake of our nation.” Handsome Bravey put his hand over his heart and bowed. Branwell flushed, remembering his own plans for the afternoon, which had included dropping Bravey from a great height onto sharp rocks.

Charlotte shook her head. “It is not possible. Fiction counts no casualties! The Young Men are playthings, made by a gentleman in Leeds and purchased fairly—they cannot simply
become real
.”

“I believe you will find all this easier on your stomachs if you join us within,” said Bravey uncomfortably. “For the whole of reality is not easily explained by a couple of old veterans with splinters still stuck in their bones.”

The children allowed themselves to be lead into the long blue hall. They seemed to pass underwater, through green and turquoise shadows pierced by pins of sunlight. The hall opened into a great room with a floor like midnight, full of still more jeweled pillars of rose and silver and white. Four golden thrones arrayed themselves at the north end, and upon them sat four figures. Three ladies there were, two dark and one light, their glossy hair gathered at their necks, their pale faces calm and perhaps amused. They wore long, gauzy dresses of spectacular colors: crimson, blue so bright it seemed to crackle, and glinting garnet-black. Beside them a young man sat with one leg crossed over one knee, his face craggy and not unhandsome, his brow furrowed, his lanky hair coal-colored and loose. The four bore a similarity of feature, of seriousness and of long familiarity.

Of all of them, little Anne, hardly turned seven, understood and ran toward the thrones.

“She is myself!” Anne cried. “All grown, and beautiful, and that is you, Charlotte, and you, Emily, and you Branwell, your very scowl! Oh!” Anne put her hands to her face. “So that is what I will be. I have wanted to be grown-up all my life.”

“How small I once was,” marveled the older Anne. A lock of her bright hair came loose as she put her own hand to her cheek.

“Welcome,” said the older Charlotte. “We are the Chief Genii of Glass Town. You may call me Tallii, and they Annii, Emmii, and Brannii.” The great lady dropped her formal demeanor like a fan. “You’ve caught us quite off guard! We are in the midst of our annual rite, and to be perfectly frank we did not think we should meet you here, or ever.”

The younger Charlotte approached the throne shyly. She extended her hand, still gloved from the distant, cold moorland, marveling at this woman who was herself but not herself, herself older and wise and somewhat sad, herself whole and complete. The Chief Genii Tallii laced her fingers through the child’s and smiled.

“How strange,” she said.

“You must explain!” cried Branwell fearfully. “Or I will call the Young Men! Crashey said he would obey me!”

The older Branwell glowered, his dark eyes flaring red and smoky—and then his face smoothed over and grew kind again. “They are my Young Men as well, my boy. But they will serve as a lesson. You call that one Crashey, but also Captain Tree and Hunter and John Bull depending on the tale that possesses you. And that is Bravey, but also Sergeant Bud and Boaster and Mr. Lockhart.”

“We have only twelve,” said Charlotte. “They must stand in for whomever we need.”

“Indeed,” nodded Brannii. “And likewise, a soul must stand in wherever it is needed. In the universe, there is no such thing as a single soul. Where there is one in Yorkshire, there is a copy in Glass Town, where there is a maid in Angria, there is a copy in Paris. Where Wellington sheaths his sword, so do the many Wellesleys in many cities in many Englands in many worlds, all folded together like the pages of a book. You exist in Haworth, and we exist here, connected but not the same. Nothing happens merely once. The world repeats, like a stutter.”

“But the Young Men are not souls, they are not alive!” protested Emily.

The Chief Genii Emmii folded her hands. “But you gave them stories and histories, names and marriages. You loved them and gave them breath. In your world that is not enough to do anything at all except eventually break them to pieces from use. But here, they stood up out of some distant forest and began to live. Glass Town does not obey the rules that Yorkshire must.”

All along Chief Genii Emmii’s skin, a golden crackle seared and then vanished.

“Then Wellington is here?” said Charlotte wonderingly, and Anne laughed at her, a little cruelly, for she had tired of the Duke’s primacy in her sister’s affections long ago.

“Of course,” said Chief Genii Annii. “And Buonaparte too, I’m afraid. Everyone you have known and heard of has a copy here, and I daresay more and others in places we know not of. Wellesley and his sons with their wings of onyx and loyal rhinoceri defend us against the depredations of the ram-faced French genius with his saddled lizard and his terrible army of fire-breathing assassins, a clan of dastardly ebony ninepins.”

Branwell considered that a ninepin who was also a fire-breathing assassin was quite the most marvelous thing he could think of. He had pressed their Aunt’s ninepins into service as enemy battalions many times, but never thought to give them power over the fiery elements. Even Wellington would certainly fall to such warriors—though it disturbed him that his Buonaparte should live still, and yet the real one had died lonely on a rock in the sea.

“I did not give him such an army,” he said meekly, in some defense.

“You gave him much thirst for blood and fire, and no need to restrain himself, and gifted him with a hunger for death more fierce than for bread.” Chief Genii Tallii said sternly. Branwell’s heart swelled and stung. Charlotte’s disapproval left welts upon his spirit, and in those great adult eyes he saw himself small and vicious, when he only wished to be the master of the game—was that so terrible?

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?