Worlds of Ink and Shadow (6 page)

God almighty
, he thought,
I cannot wait to leave this place.

He put a pea-sized dab of bone black on his palette and mixed it with a dot of white. Since his models had abandoned him, he had switched to another painting, a vast biblical scene with marble staircases and stone columns and dozens of gaudily dressed sinners swooning. It was a copy of
Belshazzar's Feast
by John Martin, an engraving of which leaned on a chair beyond his easel. Branwell was working on the central figure, Belshazzar, the Babylonian king who points in alarm as he sees God's writing on the wall. Tentatively Branwell dabbed at the king's flowing robes, but his fingers were stiff and the paint smeared.

He sighed and wiped the paint away with a rag, wondering where inspiration had gone. Why was this so difficult? He had copied
Belshazzar's Feast
before. Of course, that was in pencil, not in oils. And it was when he was younger, when art was just a pleasant pastime, before it was decided that painting would
be his profession. How strange, he thought, that the moment his father agreed to support his painting career, laying out vast sums of money for Branwell's pigments and his canvases and his lessons, all the joy drained out of the activity, like blood from a slaughtered lamb.

He closed his eyes. “I call forth Inspiration,” he said aloud. “Guide my hand, sweet Muse, and . . .”

“Banny!”

Branwell jerked around, and again found nothing. The wind rattled at the window. He tried to shake the feeling that he was not alone.

“I haven't done anything,” he said aloud. “It was Charlotte. I learned my lesson before.” No one answered, of course.

He chose a new brush. There were already flesh tones on his palette; he'd mixed a lot of those for the group portrait. Perhaps he could try to capture Belshazzar's face. After a while he began to paint in earnest, loathing every stroke, but pressing on. He hated that difference, that horrible difference, between what he wanted to make and what he was able to make, but he told himself that this was simply how it was: The more he worked, the further his creation would get from his ideal. In Verdopolis if he wanted to make something, all he had to do was imagine it, but it was no use wishing that painting could be like that.

Then, suddenly, there it was. A face. King Belshazzar's face was looking at him from out of the canvas. The king was only a small part of a much larger work, and his robes were still a
little stiff, but the face . . . the face was good. Branwell had made something that had life.

Behind him, someone coughed.

Branwell froze, brush in hand. It was such a dreadfully familiar sound, the cough of someone who is dying. This time, he didn't dare turn around.

“I don't believe in ghosts,” he said to the room.

Two more long coughs, wet and painful, closer now. Branwell shivered as if a breath had touched the hairs on the back of his neck.

“Banny,” said a voice, a child's voice. “Could I have a glass of water?”

He shut his eyes tight. “Don't. Please.”

“Branwell!”

He turned to find Charlotte standing in the doorway. There was no one else in the room. They were alone.

“Are you all right?” she asked. “I heard . . . something.”

“Blast, Charlotte!” he shouted, letting his fear escape as anger. “Can't a man have a scrap of privacy in this house?”

The concerned look on his sister's face turned sour. “Man? What man? I just see a carroty-haired lump of boy!” She slammed the door again.

Branwell turned back to his painting and cursed. Belshazzar's face was gone, ruined. He must have brushed it with the sleeve of his smock when he turned around.

He lifted his brush and began again.

EMILY

E
MILY BENT OVER THE DRAWING IN HER LAP
, a pencil clutched tightly in her hand. She was sitting on a favorite stone, feet not quite touching the ground. The cold and damp seeped through her petticoats, but she was used to that. Behind her, Sladen Beck gurgled pleasantly. A low mist clung to the ground. It hadn't rained, but droplets of water weighted the tall grass, and the lichen-spotted boulders that jutted up out of the heath were all glazed with dew.

With precise strokes she formed the cheeks of her subject, smudging with a finger to shade the cheekbones. She sat back for a moment to examine her work, but the portrait wasn't right yet. With her pencil, she darkened the whiskers, adding a crueler turn to the lips, a wider flare to the nostrils. There. There he was.

“Rogue,” she whispered.

Charlotte had once let it slip that creating a story—either by writing or by telling—put her in the right frame of mind for crossing over. Did it work for drawing, too? Was Emily in the right frame of mind now? She held out her hand, palm up, as she had seen her brother and sister do. There was no question of where she would go. Emily had been dreaming of the world she would make for practically her whole life. Gondal. A mysterious island in the middle of a dark sea.

“A door,” Emily said, squeezing her eyes shut. “I call for a door to Gondal.”

Sound carried far across the moorlands, but all she could hear were the bleatings of a few sheep and the distant call of a curlew.

“Please. I've been waiting so long.”

Emily thought that she could feel how close Gondal was, how close it always was. She could nearly see it. She was nearly there. Gondal yearned for her just as she yearned for it. The only thing that separated them was a gauzy film, so thin she could almost pierce it with a fingernail.

“Hello!” a voice called over the hills. Emily winced. Grasper had been sitting quietly by her feet, but now he ran a circle in the wet grass, barking a greeting.

“Hush,” Emily cautioned. Grasper cocked his head at her, then shook the water from his coat. Emily squealed and drew her notebook up out of the way of the blast.

“Emily!” The voice was closer now. “I know you're there.”

Emily blotted the portrait with her sleeve and sighed. She loved her family dearly, but she'd often thought that if she could see Charlotte and Branwell once a day for an hour, Papa and Tabby once a week, and Aunt Branwell at Christmas, she might be much happier. Usually Anne was the exception.

“Hello,” Emily called reluctantly.

“There you are!”

She watched as Anne picked her way down the path that ran along the water. She had changed back into her everyday dress, and her skirts were wet to the knee. All around her, purple foxglove swayed on long stalks. As she drew closer Emily could see that her cheeks were rosy, and the strands of hair escaping from her bonnet were curled from the damp.

“You look like a heroine out of a book.”

Anne smiled shyly at this and looked to the ground, making her even prettier in Emily's opinion. She gave the dog a pat on the head. “Charlotte is quite vexed with your mistress, Grasper.”

“Irregular verbs?” Emily asked.

“Of course. We couldn't find you.”

“I couldn't face lessons today. I'm sure I would have said something very rude. Did you hear her? She and Branwell think they can simply stop writing—but they mustn't! All their characters would wither and die. It's murder!”

Anne hesitated. “I'm not certain it's exactly murder . . .”

“It's the next thing to it!” Emily edged over, letting Anne sit
next to her on the stone. “Those two are so irritating. I've tried to forgive them for keeping us out of Verdopolis—you know I have—but every time something new happens, like today, I grow angry with them all over again.”

Anne smoothed her skirts, then clasped her hands over her knees. “They must have their reasons. You mustn't let anger get the better of you.”

“Reasons,” Emily scoffed. “You are far too charitable.”

But she took Anne by the arm and looked out over the hills, trying to let their beauty soothe her, give her the same calm grace that seemed to be her sister's natural state. For a while they sat quietly, feet dangling. Grasper capered around them, snapping at underwings in the grass.

“I miss crossing over, too, sometimes,” Anne said. “I miss being able to talk to other people as easily as I talk to you.”

Emily had always suspected that the reason Anne was able to speak to people in Verdopolis was because she never quite believed they were real, not the way Emily did, but if this were true she didn't want to know. She gave her sister's arm a squeeze. “We'll get there again. I promise.”

“Goodness!” Anne said, noticing the notebook in Emily's lap. “Is that Rogue? You've made him look like Lord Byron.”

Emily had drawn
her
Rogue, not Branwell's. He had the same face, but it was younger and rougher, and he was burly instead of lanky, with jet-black curls. “Wonderfully wicked, isn't he?”

“How ever did this happen?”

Emily knew what she was asking. “I don't know, exactly. I've always liked Rogue as a character—he's much better than Zamorna—and then one day I began to make up stories about him in my head. And then . . .” She smiled at her own foolishness. “Before I knew it, the arrow had struck.”

“I suppose it's your age,” Anne said sagely. After a moment, they both burst into laughter. Now that Emily had turned sixteen, “I suppose it's your age” was Aunt Branwell's response to any moodiness or forgetfulness on Emily's part. “If we knew any gentlemen outside our own family, I expect you'd fall in love with one of them instead.”

“No. I wouldn't,” Emily said, turning serious again. “No one's like Rogue.”

“Thank heaven!”

Emily shifted on the stone to face her. “Anne, if we could make Gondal, then Rogue could live there, even if Verdopolis were left to ruin.”

Anne pursed her lips. “But Gondal is just a game, something we made up. It's not a real world like Verdopolis and the Glasstown Confederacy.”

“It's more than a game,” Emily insisted. “It was meant to exist. They've tricked us out of our world by hoarding their secrets for themselves, but before you got here, a door was about to open—I'm sure of it! Hold out your hand and we shall try together. Come, Anne.”

“No.”

Emily took her hand and tried to hold it out with her own, palms upward. “I know we shall be able to now.”

“Stop it!” Anne pulled her hand back so forcefully that Emily's notebook fell onto the grass.

“What is the matter with you?”

“I don't want to cross over—not to Verdopolis, not to Gondal, not to anywhere!” Emily was surprised by the intensity of Anne's words. “I miss the invented worlds, yes, but . . . I don't want to go back.”

“I don't understand.”

Anne slid down from the rock. “At breakfast, when Charlotte said she was renouncing her worlds, I felt . . . relief.”

“What? Why?”

“I felt that we had escaped something. Narrowly escaped.” She bent down to pick up Emily's notebook, brushing it off as she spoke. “Emily, if Tabby were telling us a fairy tale about some parson's children who could make the worlds they imagine become real, do you know what I'd ask myself?” She didn't wait for an answer. “I'd ask myself, what price did they pay? In all the tales, when people are given such gifts, there's always a price.”

“If there's a price,” Emily said firmly, “I shall pay it.”

CHARLOTTE

A
LL HER STORIES WERE FINISHED NOW. ALL
Charlotte's beautiful characters were to be put away in a box like toy soldiers—the lords, the ladies, the innocent maidens, the heroes, and the villains. Mary Henrietta. Zamorna. She sighed.

“Stop,” she said aloud, as if she could halt a scene in real life the way she could in Verdopolis. “You are falling prey to self-pity, Charlotte.”

She pushed up her spectacles and tried to concentrate. She was sitting on the sofa in the dining room, knitting a stocking for Anne. Knit, knit, purl, purl, making ribbing. Usually she found the clicking of the needles and the complex movement soothing. Knit, knit, purl, purl. Snowflake, Emily's evil cat, purred at her side.

A hundred new ideas flew through her mind, a hundred new stories for Zamorna. Her poor hero. He deserved better than to be abandoned. She could cross over to him now without anyone knowing. Emily and Anne were still out walking, Papa was at a baptism, Aunt Branwell was in her room. All Charlotte had to do was write or speak a few sentences, and then reach out her hand when a door appeared.

“No,” she said aloud. “No, no, no. I promised Papa.”

Scents from the kitchen wafted in. Beef, potatoes, apple pudding—all the things she liked best. More temptations. Emily ate all she wanted and never grew stout, but Charlotte had to be vigilant. Knit, knit, purl, purl. Being plain was bad enough, she reasoned; she would
not
be plain and plump.

“No temptation has seized you except what is common to man,” she said, quoting from Corinthians. “And God is faithful; He will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear.” She couldn't help but wonder if the temptation to cross to magical worlds was truly “common to man.”

At that moment, Branwell flung open the door like an actor making an entrance, his red blanket around his shoulders. Charlotte felt she could almost kiss him for taking her mind from her troubles, but she didn't intend to show it.

“There are things we must discuss,” he said portentously. He came up in front of her as she knit, bending to give Snowflake a pat on the head. The cat snarled and raked at Branwell with his claws. “Ow!”

“That always happens,” Charlotte said, not looking up from her work, “and yet people continue to do it.”

“That thing will kill us all someday!” Branwell cried, clutching his hand.

“Yes. And leave our bodies on the doorstep as little presents for Emily.” She came to the end of a row and put her knitting aside. “What did you wish to speak about?”