Worlds of Ink and Shadow (18 page)

At school she crossed over briefly whenever she felt lonely or homesick, telling herself that since she wasn't crossing to Verdopolis, she wasn't really breaking her promise. The story was a romance about Zamorna and his mistress Lady Helen Victorine, and it took place on the Scottish highlands. Charlotte didn't use Rogue or any of their other characters. Branwell arrived at the school around the time the poor Lady Helen was dying in childbirth.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I wish you'd told me what was happening to you.”

Her brother only shrugged and took another drink. Suddenly
she felt that his hopeless mood would infect her if she stayed another minute. She stood abruptly.

“I'm going to bed. Take the empty bottles to your room when you're finished. We don't want Tabby to find them in the morning.”

BRANWELL

S
HE WAS WAITING FOR HIM WHEN HE GOT BACK
to his room. Elizabeth. She was sitting on his bed, hair and nightdress drenched in sweat. Her cheeks were hollow, but they were pink and rosy, and he remembered how this had fooled him when he was young. Consumption often gave its victims a deceptively healthy glow. Elizabeth had the glow to the end.

Branwell stood in the doorway for a moment, candle held aloft. Then he shuffled in, shutting the door behind him. He had his two empty bottles under his arm, and he put them carefully at the bottom of the wardrobe before coming to stand in front of her.

“Have you something to say to me?” he demanded, trying to sound brave.

His dead sister took a breath, but instead of speaking, she quickly pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve and began to cough into it. Branwell's whole body tensed. A consumptive's cough was wet and deep and painful, and it never seemed to end. It came back to him now, the days and nights of listening to that sound. He remembered thinking he'd almost rather strangle his sisters in their beds than hear it a second longer—and he remembered the weight of guilt that had fallen on him for having such thoughts.

“God help me,” he said, and he sat down at his desk, setting his candle in front of him. He was dizzy and queasy and the beer in his stomach felt like lead, but he hadn't managed to get drunk, which had been his intention.

After a while the coughing stopped, but the exertion of it seemed to have left his sister tired, because for a while she bent panting over the handkerchief. Then she wiped her mouth and sat up, looking over at him. There was a smear of blood on her chin.

“Maria is the one everyone talks about,” Branwell said. “‘Maria loved to read the newspaper and spoke fluent French. Maria was like a mother to us.' If I remember you for anything at all, it is for being her sister—so why are you the one who haunts me?”

Elizabeth stared at him but didn't answer. The smear of blood on her chin made him want to look away. He wished she would wipe it off, but he couldn't bear the idea of asking her to. She slid off his bed, padding toward him on bare feet. He shrank away,
but she only took the candle from his desk and brought it to the various paintings on easels around the room, examining each one in turn.

“Please. Won't you leave me alone?” he asked. He wanted nothing more than to go to sleep, though the thought of lying in the dark listening for his sister's wheezing breath was intolerable.

Elizabeth turned to him, frowning, her large eyes sunken in hollow cheeks. Still she didn't speak. She might have been pretty before her illness, but Branwell couldn't remember. He tried to think what she had been like, but she'd been so quiet and shy. Nothing came to him. In life she had followed behind Maria like a shadow, and when Maria died she had followed then, too. He did remember that when the girls went away to Clergy Daughters' School, Papa hadn't paid the extra few pounds to have her educated as a governess. He'd paid for the others, even Emily, and she was only six, but Elizabeth hadn't been clever. She hadn't been anything. At least, she hadn't been anything that anyone would ever know now.

“I'm sorry,” he said, tears smarting his eyes. “I do wish I'd known you better.”

Elizabeth was rifling through his paint box on the floor. Some of his mixed pigments had been preserved in glass cylinders for later use, and he saw her open a cylinder and cover a brush with dark paint.

“What are you doing?”

Without a word, Elizabeth went to the group portrait and began to paint with long vertical strokes.

“Stop!” He ran to her, but it was too late.

“It's better this way,” Elizabeth said without turning around. She was covering him up, painting him out of the picture.

“I suppose . . . it is.”

He should have seen it before. Without his own figure, the painting of the three girls looked well balanced and well executed. Without him, the painting was complete. Elizabeth turned and handed him the brush.

“If history remembers you for anything at all, it will be for being Charlotte Brontë's brother.”

He gasped, stung by the words, but it was odd that as soon as he heard them, he knew they were true. Like a prophecy. Like a curse. After a moment, they made him feel . . . relieved.

“Yes,” he said.

Branwell went back to his desk and took out a bottle of ink and a sheet of paper. He began to write.

CHARLOTTE

E
MILY WAS AWAKE WHEN CHARLOTTE RETURNED
. She was sitting up in bed, holding her knees, eyes shining in the candle's light. “Listen to the wind,” she said. “Open the window, Charlotte.” At that moment, a gust shook the house, making the windowpanes rattle in their casings.

“What! I'll do no such thing, Emily Brontë.” Charlotte blew out the candle and climbed back into bed. “Open t' window, the girl says, when the whole house is a'wuthering!” Charlotte and Emily both giggled at this imitation of Tabby's Yorkshire dialect.

In the dimness, Emily's moon-white face seemed to have a faint light of its own. How pretty she was, Charlotte thought, even with her hair a mess and her nightdress slipping off her shoulder. At other times she might have felt envy, but not tonight.
Tonight all she felt was a wave of love for her odd, wild younger sister. Whatever happened to Charlotte and Branwell, at least Anne and Emily had been spared their fate. That was something to be grateful for.

“Go back to sleep, my dear,” she said, but as they lay back down, Charlotte knew that sleep was far away. Fear was pressing on her. Fear for herself and for her brother. Fear for what would come next. Branwell had said that Old Tom's harassment would grow worse, but how much worse? Would she hear things and see things all her life? Would she end her days in a madhouse, or locked in an attic somewhere, unable to tell the difference between fantasy and reality?

“Do you remember our bed plays?” Emily asked.

“In the Happy Village? Of course.”

When they were little, Charlotte would sometimes cross them over to a secret world that Branwell and Anne knew nothing about. At bedtime, she would whisper stories into Emily's ear. One minute they would be lying sleepily in each other's arms. Then Charlotte would make the smallest movement with her hand, just the suggestion of holding out her palm, and the next minute they would be falling through fluttering white sheets, down and down until they reached a funny little village populated only by fat babies.

This was around the time that Charlotte and Branwell were founding Glasstown, so during the day there were wars raging and political intrigues brewing and love affairs smoldering, but
at night, in the Happy Village, nothing very dramatic ever happened. There was a fat baby mayor and a fat baby dressmaker and a teashop where all the fat babies gathered to eat their bread and jam. They needed a lot of attention, these babies; Charlotte and Emily were often in demand to solve their disputes and dry their tears and change them in and out of their fine baby clothes. Now that she thought about it, it was a ridiculous place—Branwell would have teased her mercilessly had he known about it—but nothing bad could ever touch them there.

“I wonder what happened to all our baby friends,” Emily said.

“It's not as if the worlds go on without us when we're not there.”

“Don't they?”

Charlotte thought of dozens of abandoned babies growing sullen and resentful in her absence, hoarse from crying, tracks of dried tears on their stony faces. “What a horrid thought.”

“Oh, I expect they've simply gone to sleep,” Emily said. But that was too much like dying for Charlotte's taste. The wind picked up, wailing mournfully. “Or perhaps that's them now, crying on the wind.”

Charlotte shivered in her bed. “Don't. It's too morbid.” The howling grew louder, human but inhuman. Something wild calling for its lost mate. “Besides, it sounds more like a wolf to me.”

Emily said nothing to this at first. After a while, Charlotte
began to wonder if she'd drifted off, though it seemed impossible, with the wind so fierce. “That's not a wolf,” Emily finally said. “It's a gytrash.”

Charlotte froze, remembering the stories Tabby used to tell about the black dog with glowing eyes that roamed the moors.

“Open the window, Charlotte.” Emily's voice had a pleading tone, like the pleading of the wind. “I want to hear him better, but I don't want him to see me. I don't want to give him the satisfaction.”

Charlotte's mouth went dry. She knew it was nonsense, but she had the most illogical feeling that if she did go to the window, all her worry, all her dread, would coalesce into some black and threatening thing, howling up at them from the ground below. Another great gust battered the house, and Emily threw off the covers.

“Don't!” Charlotte grabbed her sister's wrist, but Emily pulled away and got out of bed. For a moment, Charlotte was afraid to follow, afraid of what she would see. Emily stood at the window, looking down. Charlotte rose from the bed and joined her.

And then she saw it, just beyond the stone wall, eyes red as coals. The black dog. Charlotte felt the horror of it through her body. It shouldn't be real. It shouldn't be in their world.

“I knew he'd come,” Emily said.

Charlotte couldn't take her eyes from the dark thing below. It opened its jaws impossibly wide, letting loose a bloodcurdling howl. She gasped. So much seemed to be contained in that
sound—anger, longing, sorrow—that she took a step back, but Emily pressed herself even closer against the window glass.

A chill traveled the length of Charlotte's spine.
There is something a little pagan about Emily
, she found herself thinking. If Emily had lived a thousand years ago, she might have poured out blood onto an ancient altar and been buried in a grave of heather and thistle, and her ear never would have missed hearing the word of God.

But then her sister turned to her with wide eyes, looking very young and lost, and Charlotte chastised herself for thinking Emily Brontë was anything but a good parson's daughter.

“It's Rogue. He's crossed over to find me.”

“No.” Charlotte's heart twisted as the realization dawned on her. “No, you foolish girl. That is one of Old Tom's minions, if I ever saw one. Have you made a bargain? Have you made a world and left it without my even knowing?”

Emily turned back to the window. “I'll tame you yet, old dog,” she said. “I'll put a collar around your neck. Go and bite someone else.” The eyes of the gytrash seemed to glow brighter for a moment, then it turned silently and leapt away.

“Please, Emily,” Charlotte begged. “This is a mistake, isn't it? I've worked so hard to keep you safe. It's . . . It's . . .”

Emily didn't look at her. “I should have listened. I'm afraid I have been very wicked.”

“Wicked?” Charlotte hissed, taking Emily by the arm and pulling her around. “Stealing currants from the kitchen is
wicked! Letting one's mind wander in church is wicked! This is evil, Emily. It is unconscionable. It's . . .”

Charlotte fell to her knees, and a strangled cry rose from her throat, as full of sorrow as any wolf's howling.

EMILY

C
HARLOTTE, GET UP!” EMILY CRIED. HER SISTER
was on her knees with her hands pressed over her face. “Are you ill?”

Charlotte lifted her head. “I'm trying to prevent myself from slapping you! From throwing you out this window!”

Emily backed away. She had never seen her sister so distraught. Not Charlotte. Not the girl who made such tiny perfect stitches, who never slept late in the morning, who never had a hair out of place.

“Wake Branwell,” Charlotte ordered. “Now. We must discuss this.”

Emily nodded and dashed out into the hall. There was no answer at her brother's door. She opened it and saw a candle burning on the desk, but no Branwell.

“He's not in his room,” she said upon her return.

Charlotte had lit a candle of her own and was standing at the washbasin, wiping her face with a cloth. She swore, and Emily gave a little start. Branwell swore often—mostly to shock them, Emily believed—but Charlotte never did.

“He must still be downstairs,” she said, taking up the candle. “Follow me.” Her brusque tone was somewhat reassuring. Emily had often wished her older sister would be more passionate, but now she only wanted her to be herself again. She fetched the other candle from Branwell's room and followed her down the stairs.

“He's been at the beer,” Charlotte warned, opening the door of the dining room. “Pray he's not drunk.”

The room was dark, but as they entered, the yellow glow of the candles illuminated a body curled up on the sofa, covered by a red blanket.

“Branwell Brontë,” Charlotte said sharply. “Wake up.” She turned to Emily. “Pick up the bottles, please. There are at least two.”

Emily got down on her hands and knees to peer under the furniture. She saw Branwell's blanket and a pair of bare feet hit the floor. Charlotte screeched.