by Lena Coakley
“What?”
“If you can’t invent suitable characters for yourselves, I’ll have to do it for you.” Charlotte closed her eyes. “lady Anne and Lady Emily, cousins of Charles and the duke, were visiting from the provinces.”
“Oh!” she heard Emily cry.
“These naive young sisters had never seen anyone like the countess, whose blood-red velvet contrasted greatly with their simple but elegant, and perfectly appropriate, attire.”
Charlotte opened her eyes warily. The Countess Zenobia was still in front of her, looking exactly as she had before, but now, to her relief, there were two young ladies on the sofa instead of one. Emily was looking down at her body in disgust, her face pink with anger. Anne was frowning, too, which struck Charlotte as ungrateful. She had a lovely dress now—tiered blue muslin trimmed with flowers. Emily wore the identical ensemble in yellow. Granted, their dresses weren’t as revealing as the prevailing Verdopolitan fashions, but Lady Anne and Lady Emily were from the provinces, after all.
The Countess Zenobia looked around the room as if wondering how she got there. She blinked disdainfully at the three of them. Then, seeming to realize that they were nobody in particular, she swept out of the room.
Emily stood. Her hair, Charlotte had to admit, might have been a mistake. It was intricately done in plaits that circled back on themselves in six or seven loops, each loop affixed to her head with a large yellow bow. One of Charlotte’s friends from school had described this style in a letter, but Charlotte had never actually seen it.
“Come, Lady Anne,” Emily said darkly. “We’ve monopolized our dear cousin Charles for long enough.” She pulled Anne toward the door. “I believe we will find more engaging company elsewhere.”
BRANWELL
BRANWELL STOOD ON THE BALCONY OF Sneaky Hall in his evening clothes, looking out at his beautiful city. All was well again. Charlotte’s threat to quit Verdopolis was an empty one; he’d seen to that. He didn’t believe that this would be their last story. She’d find some reason to keep coming back. She always had. The setting sun tinted the towers and the church spires, and the colors reflecting off the buildings reminded him of something. When he recalled what it was, he smiled.
One of Branwell’s earliest memories was of colored light playing on a white wall. His sister Maria knew the trick of it. If he cried or if anything upset him, she would sit him on her lap and take out a little looking glass that had been their mother’s. Then she would shift it back and forth to catch the window light, making the reflections dance. The beveled edge of the mirror acted as a prism, turning the white light to garnet and blue and amethyst. Maria could always enchant him this way. It was his first experience of beauty.
When he and Charlotte created this world, Branwell had insisted on calling it Glasstown. He told her it was because the great bay was like a looking glass, but it had been another mirror he was thinking of. In truth he wanted his city to be named for that first perfect memory of color and light—and for Maria, who shared it with him. When they were older, he and Charlotte rechristened Glasstown with its more elegant name, Verdopolis, but Branwell never forgot that his sister Maria was at his city’s heart.
“Thornton!” a voice called. Rogue was standing at the gate, a black carriage behind him. “Ready for a night of crime and mayhem?”
Branwell raced down the stone steps and crossed the gravel drive at a run, letting the iron gate bang behind him. It wasn’t until he was in the carriage and it had started moving that he noticed Rogue’s appearance. “What in Lucifer’s name . . . ?”
Rogue raised an eyebrow. “Explain yourself.”
Branwell hardly knew where to begin. It was undoubtedly Rogue who sat across from him, wearing his typical black, but he was too young, too handsome to be the callous scoundrel who had wasted his best days with drink and debauchery. “You’re . . . you’ve . . . gained weight.”
“Have I?” Rogue shrugged languidly and stretched out on the seat. “It’s the high Verdopolitan living.”
It was more than that. Branwell himself was thin and slight, and he’d always liked the idea of such a powerful man as Rogue being built the same way. This Rogue was positively strapping—not fat, but burly as a black bear.
“Your . . . curls,” Branwell said.
Rogue touched his hair. “What the devil is the matter with them?”
“You look positively windswept. You look . . . like Lord Byron.”
Rogue frowned darkly. “Intolerable. Has my appearance truly changed?” He patted his upper body, looking down at himself. “I can see no difference.”
Branwell’s fists tightened in anger. If Charlotte was responsible for this, he would turn the Duke of Zamorna into a ninety-year-old man with false teeth and a digestive disorder. She must know that. What was she thinking?
“This is their work, of course.” Rogue stared out the window of the carriage with a furrowed brow. They had entered the most fashionable part of the city and were passing the main square. “Never a good sign when they show their hand.”
“They?”
“You know.” Rogue glanced around as if someone might be listening. He lowered his voice. “Them. The Genii.”
Branwell started. Rogue was talking about his siblings and himself. The Genii was what they called themselves in the old stories, back when all four Brontës used to walk through the invented worlds as little gods, creating and destroying. At one point—it was in their Arabian Nights phase—they flew about on satin cushions solving disputes and passing judgments. But when they got older, he and Charlotte decided it was better to hide themselves more deeply in the story, to play characters. They hadn’t used the term Genii in a long time.
“Oh, one doesn’t hear so much about them anymore,” Branwell said with forced casualness. “I expect they’ve gone away.”
Rogue leaned forward. “Don’t be fooled. I see evidence of their meddling occasionally. I tell you, Thornton, the very idea of them chills me to the core.”
“You sound as if you’re afraid of them.”
“Who wouldn’t be?” Rogue idly rubbed his whiskers. “Sometimes, after a hard night of drinking, I have a moment where everything becomes clear, and I realize we are nothing more than puppets dancing on their strings.” He slapped his hand down on his thigh. “Oh, to cut those strings, Thornton.”
This was very strange. Branwell had long believed that Rogue was more than just a character in a story. In point of fact, he considered Rogue his dearest friend and had confided many secrets to him over the years. But now Rogue was exhibiting a self-awareness that Branwell never could have guessed at.
“Have you always thought this?” he asked. “Why have you never told me?”
Rogue stood, holding onto the ceiling of the moving carriage to balance himself, and pulled thick curtains across each window. He sat down again on the edge of his seat, knees touching Branwell’s, and crooked a finger, beckoning him close. Branwell leaned in.
“This is something I’ve never told another living soul,” Rogue whispered. “Two other times in my life I’ve felt their interference. You know that I sometimes feel . . . confined by Verdopolis. I’ll warrant you’ve heard me say a hundred times that I was happier in my pirate days.”
Branwell nodded.
“But here’s the strange thing. A part of me knows that I have always been Alexander Percy, Earl of Northangerland, and that I only became a pirate to escape my debts, and yet . . . another part remembers a time when I was not a nobleman, when S’Death and I were cutthroats and nothing more. Does that not seem odd to you?”
“Indeed it does,” Branwell breathed.
Odd and very close to the truth. Rogue had started out as a pirate, but as Glasstown grew and became Verdopolis, and as Charlotte and Branwell’s plots became more and more about the highest tiers of Verdopolitan society, Branwell had decided to make Rogue a nobleman. It wasn’t a revision, more a filling in of backstory, one that allowed Rogue to fit with the glamour of his
new setting.
“Are you saying that you were changed? Altered by the Genii?”
Rogue nodded. “A terrible thought, but one I’ve come to believe.” He pulled a cigarette case from his breast pocket, lighting a cheroot.
“What is the second incident?”
Rogue puffed thoughtfully, taking a while to answer. “You will think me quite mad.”
“I’m sure I won’t.”
“Do you recall the time when I stood before a firing squad for plotting against the government? It was a few years ago.”
“Of course.”
Three and a half years earlier, Charlotte and Branwell had decided to end crossing over for good, as they had always promised to do someday. Charlotte was leaving for school, and it seemed the perfect time. They devised a long, convoluted plot that took all of Charlotte’s last months at home to play out. The firing squad was to be their final scene.
“I was meant to die that day.”
Involuntarily, Branwell gave a little gasp. It was true. Rogue had been meant to die. The scene was to have ended with three words: Ready. Aim. Fire. Branwell wrote the first two, but he could never bring himself to write the third. Charlotte left for Roe Head School, and still he could not write it.
In the end, Branwell was very glad he hadn’t killed his hero. Charlotte broke her promise. At school, she began writing sugary love stories about Zamorna before the month was out. Rogue had come a hair’s breadth from being dead for good. Branwell and Charlotte had tried many times to resurrect a character, but they had never succeeded.
“I heard the last words that I would ever hear,” said Rogue, staring straight ahead as if he saw the scene before his eyes. “Ready. Aim. And then . . . nothing. The world stopped. I seemed to hang for an eternity between the words aim and fire. Days, it seemed. Weeks. Oh, how I longed to break free of that moment that held me like a bug in amber. I swear I almost did. I swear that in that strange dream I became aware of some other place where time was passing, some place where the Genii lived. I knew that if I were only a little stronger I could go there—and I swore that if I ever did, I would tear those gods apart with my very teeth.”
Rogue shook himself from his reverie and looked down at his cheroot, seeing that it had burnt down unsmoked. He crushed it under his shoe. “Then, all at once, the world began again. My sentence was reprieved at the last moment, as you know—but no one will ever convince me that the Genii did not have me marked for death that day. Why they changed their minds I cannot tell you, but I’m damned if I’ll be beholden to them.”
The carriage came to a halt, and Branwell drew back the curtain on his side, happy for an excuse to look away from Rogue’s dark and brooding gaze. “This isn’t Wellesley House,” he said.
Rogue shook his head. “No. We’re picking up S’Death.” Branwell hadn’t planned on this, but he told himself that that’s what came of letting his plots wander where they would.
The carriage door opened and the old man entered. He was wearing a suit of mossy green, which made his wrinkled face look even more like the knot of a tree. Obviously he had taken trouble with his appearance, in honor of the grand party, and his outlandish red hair was smoothed down with grease.
“Those are some dark expressions,” he said. “What have the two of you been plotting?”
“Discussing the Genii,” said Rogue.
S’Death looked from one to the other, and if he noticed any difference in Rogue’s appearance, he didn’t mention it. “Genii? Don’t believe in ’em. Mythical beings riding around on pillows? What sort of mode of transport is that, I ask you?” He banged his cane on the roof of the carriage. “Drive on, Bertram!”
“I expect I’ve sounded very foolish, preaching my sermon against the old gods,” said Rogue, when they were once more bumping over the cobbled roads. “In fact, most days I am able to convince myself it’s all in my imagination. Other days, of course . . .” He broke off and suddenly—inexplicably—began to smile.
Something in the pit of Branwell’s stomach knotted in fear. Rogue’s teeth were far too white and too plentiful, like an animal’s, like a wolf’s. No. Charlotte was not responsible for these physical changes in his favorite character. She was far too sensible for this, too prudent.
“Other days?” Branwell asked.
“Other days I hope the Genii do exist—because if they do, it is not the Duke of Zamorna who is my true enemy.” Rogue sat back, his jacket opening so that Branwell could see the revolver at his waist. “Mark my words, Thornton. If I ever meet those cursed beings, I shall paint this city red with their blood.”
ANNE
SOME TIME BEFORE THEY WERE BANISHED from the invented worlds, when Anne was about eight and Emily was about ten, Charlotte invented a game for them. It had been to get rid of them, Anne now realized, something to occupy the younger ones while Charlotte and Branwell created their Glasstown adventures without interruption—but Anne had loved it anyway. After helping them to cross over, Charlotte would make Anne and Emily a room with nothing in it but a window and an empty wooden chest.
“This is a magic chest,” Charlotte told them the first time. “It will give you anything you want.” She closed the lid. “Like this: One, two, three . . .” She opened the lid again, reached inside, and pulled out two crowns, which Anne and Emily dutifully put on their heads.
When she was gone, Anne had no trouble making the chest work. She asked for a pencil to draw with and got it; she asked for thread to sew with and could make whatever color she pleased. But when Emily asked for emerald thread, she got a chest full of emerald green beetles that swirled around her when she opened the lid and then flew out the window. When Emily asked for a pencil, she got a long, red snake—pencil thin—that coiled around her wrist and up her arm. She called the snake Jack and cried when she realized she couldn’t bring him home.
After a while they learned not to ask for anything, but to see what gifts the chest would give to Emily on its own—brass doorknobs of different shapes and sizes; a pair of lime green gloves, both for the left hand; chipped teacups with scenes from their favorite books painted on the sides; a beautiful set of mourning jewelry made from the braided hair of a dead person. Anne and Emily had played with that last gift a long time, marveling at the intricacy of the fine plaits and trying to imagine who the dead person might have been.
Anne had known from the start that the “magic chest” wasn’t truly magic—or at least it was no more magic than anything else in the invented worlds. She and Emily themselves created what was inside. It was odd, though, that Emily never knew what would be there before she opened the lid. Anne reasoned that there must be a part of Emily’s mind that Emily herself was unaware of, a part of the mind that flowed unseen like a subterranean river, thinking its own thoughts and making its own decisions without consulting Emily at all. Anne wondered if she, too, had such a river inside her—but whenever she asked the chest for nothing, counted to three, and opened the lid, nothing was exactly what it gave her.
“Look what she’s done to my hair!” Emily exclaimed, looking in the mirror. “She obviously hates me.” She lifted a loopy plait and let it fall. “What other explanation could there be?”
She had pulled Anne through room after room of Wellesley House—galleries and gaming rooms and salons—until the noise of the party was far behind them. Finally she must have decided that they were far enough away, and they had stopped in what seemed to be a lady’s private sitting room.
Emily flopped down on a plump sofa. “Do you think we made this little chamber, or did Charlotte?”
Anne looked around. It was a comfortable room—smaller and slightly less ornate than many of the others they had seen. There was a chair by the window for sewing and a desk in the corner for writing. The sofa sat in front of the fire—fireplaces were always lit in Verdopolis, she had noticed, regardless of the weather. “Why, Charlotte made it, of course. She makes everything in Wellesley House.”
“Yes, but she can�
�t be imagining all of it at once, can she?” Moments earlier Emily had been livid, but now she seemed quite at ease, with her arm draped over the sofa’s back. Perhaps she had decided not to ruin what might well be their last visit to Verdopolis.
Anne sat on the sofa’s edge. It was so overstuffed that it seemed to sigh underneath her, a disconcerting feeling. How strange, Anne thought, that Emily should be so accustomed to luxuries she had never known in life.
“Are you suggesting that we made this room without realizing it?” Anne asked.
“Well . . . perhaps Charlotte makes the room, but we fill in the details based on our ideas of what Zamorna’s mansion should look like.”
Anne’s eyes fell to the mahogany claws on the feet of the writing desk, the green tassels on the curtain sash. She remembered that they had always been able to make small changes in the invented worlds, and there did seem to be a little bit of Emily in these things. The pattern on the wallpaper, when she examined it closely, was one of heather and foxglove.
Abruptly, Emily sat up. “And here’s another question. That hall we just came down.” She pointed to the closed door. “Is it still there?”
“Of course it is.” Anne stood and opened the door, revealing the rather nondescript hallway.
Emily turned her eyes to the ceiling. “Well, of course it’s there now, but perhaps it simply appears when you open the door and will disappear the moment you close it.”
Anne laughed. “That is an unprovable hypothesis.”
“In fact, all those rooms we passed—do they exist when no one is there, I wonder? Does Verdopolis itself?”
Anne had always thought of the invented worlds as places to be visited, but of course they were made by her siblings and wouldn’t exist without them. She looked around, seeing the room anew.
“I wonder how much power we have to change this place,” Emily mused. “I wonder if she banished us so we’d never find out the scope of what we can do.”
