Worlds of Ink and Shadow (16 page)

“Let the toast pass. Drink to the lass. I'll warrant she'll prove an excuse for the glass.”

“Exactly,” Rogue said with a laugh as the song continued. “He's the very thing.”

“A bit
too
on the mark, if you ask me,” S'Death murmured.

“Don't be such a crosspatch.” Rogue reached into his jacket, pulling out a pistol that hadn't been there a moment before. “Look, the lady's thought of everything.”

“No!” Emily cried, grabbing his arm.

Rogue furrowed his brow, not understanding her displeasure. “I'm going to shoot him. Isn't that what highwaymen do?”

“Not in cold blood,” she insisted. But wasn't he right? Wasn't that exactly what highwaymen did?

Rogue lowered his pistol. “Well, S'Death, we are on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, I am becoming rather fond of this fetching little goddess. On the other, it seems a bad precedent to set, letting her get her own way so early in our acquaintance.”

S'Death sucked his teeth, nodding. “Add to that, the cully is so clearly meant to be shot.”

“Here's to the wife with a face full of woe! Here's to the damsel that's merry!”

S'Death winced at a sour note. “If only to stop that caterwauling.”

“I've got it,” Rogue said to her. “Tell me the name of one of the elder Genii—who he is in Verdopolis and how I may recognize him—and this cully may go on his way.”

“Certainly not.”

“But you yourself said that they have abandoned Verdopolis. What does it matter now?”

That was true enough, and Emily didn't want the cully to die. She didn't know why the idea of shooting him bothered her so much. It simply didn't seem right. There was something innocent about him, in his white tunic on his white donkey. It would be murder, the first murder in her pristine new world, and that would be a grave thing, not to be taken lightly.

“All right,” she said with a shrug. “Since it doesn't matter.” She smiled. “Tell me, Rogue, didn't you ever suspect that Lord Thornton Witkin Sneaky was more than he seemed?”

“Thornton? Never!” said S'Death in amazement. “And he a fellow redhead!”

Rogue said nothing, but as Emily watched, his face hardened to a look of pure malice. It frightened her. He looked more like the old Rogue, the one soured by drink and wickedness. “I counted him among my friends,” he said.

“Never trust anyone, that's the lesson here,” said S'Death.

“Well, that's that, then,” said Rogue. He turned and lifted his pistol. A shot cracked. The singing ended. The cully slid off the donkey and fell to the ground with a thud.

“You've killed him!” Emily cried.

The white donkey brayed pitifully. All around her, the leaves on the tree grew brown. Red apples shriveled and shrank.

“For a Genius, she's a bit dim,” S'Death said, chuckling.

Rogue turned to her, his face no longer quite so hard. A curl of smoke rose from the pistol in his hand. Rotten apples fell from
the tree, splatting at her feet. “Poor little girlie,” he said, and there did seem to be genuine pity in his voice. “I told you you'd get your fingers bit.”

S'Death's chuckle had turned into a full-blown howl of laughter. He pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his eyes. “Oh, the look on her face.”

Emily backed away. She wanted to scream. She wanted to tear both their eyes out. But hadn't she said she would make a world as wild as the fox?

She held out her hand, palm up. “Take me back,” she said. And then she was sitting on her stone by Sladen Beck again, cold and shaking, a heavy rain pelting down.

BRANWELL

I
T MIGHT HAVE ONLY BEEN THE RAIN
.

It droned against the roof above him, against the window glass, sometimes harder, sometimes softer. Like breathing. In, out. In, out. Branwell glanced at his reflection in the mirror propped against the chair, then lifted his paintbrush.

In, out.

It might not have been the rain, though. It might have been someone breathing. It might have been someone breathing just behind him, just outside the mirror's frame.

No.

Yes.

The breath was labored. Rattling. It hurt. It was fought for. Last breaths.

In, out. In, out. The rain grew harder. He didn't turn around.

Every stroke he added to the canvas was a disaster. The figures of his sisters were all right—Charlotte looked rather pretty—but his own face was distorted. Bloated. His brush made staccato jabs against the palette.

A cough.

Was it a cough?

In, out. In, out.

“If I turn around, will you be there?” His voice shook.

Thunder rumbled in the distance. The rain was like fistfuls of shot hurled against the house.

“Thirsty,” someone said—or didn't say. Branwell winced.

In the mirror, a flicker of movement. Without thinking, he wheeled around.

His paintbrush dropped to the floor. All sound stopped, even the rain.

“Elizabeth.”

She wore a white shift. The urge to take her in his arms was as strong as the urge to run, and so he did nothing.

“You are so small.” She had been his older sister once, but he had grown. She had not.

Elizabeth's shoulders rose and fell. Her mouth gaped. She could barely stand.

“Why is it always you and not Maria?” he asked, tears in his eyes. “She's the one I want to see.” It occurred to him that perhaps his question contained the answer.

“Banny.”

Her hand, heartbreakingly small, reached out to him. He'd forgotten the smell of a dying person. Sweet. Horrible.

“Would you get me a drink of water, Banny dear?”

His heart lurched. It was the last thing she'd ever said to him—her dying words.

“Branwell,” said a voice through the door. Charlotte's voice. “Will you go and look for Emily? She's out on the moor in this rain. Papa is growing worried.”

Branwell didn't take his eyes from Elizabeth's face. “Coming,” he whispered.

ANNE

W
E HAVE BEEN FRANTIC,” ANNE SAID
, holding open the back door. “Papa and Branwell are out looking for you.”

In the doorway, Emily looked hunched and small. She wore no cloak, and her clothes were wet through.

“Heavens above!” Tabby said, coming into the kitchen. “Get her in. Get her in!” Tabby bustled Emily toward the stove. It had already been stoked for the eventuality of wet people and for the making of beef tea, which Tabby believed could cure all ills. “Where's her bonnet, I ask you? In her hand, where it does no good.” Emily's bonnet was, in fact, dangling by its strings from her fingers. “Now don't you touch her, Anne. You'll get those bandages wet.”

“I'd like to help,” said Anne, who was standing aside while Tabby peeled off Emily's clothes.

Tabby only blew out her cheeks and shook her head. “Why, Jasper Pheasant's got more sense 'an you chicks. One gets herself burned, t' other don't know enough to get out of the rain.”

Anne felt a little stung by this. Tabby had treated her like a baby since she'd come back from Verdopolis, hardly letting her near the stove. Charlotte had told everyone that Anne burned her fingers while making gingerbread. No one questioned this, even though there was no gingerbread to be seen, and none of her siblings seemed to give the lie a second thought. It was only Anne who felt mortified by it, who hung her head whenever anyone asked after her hands. She remembered how shocked she had been when Papa had called Charlotte a liar at the breakfast table, but now she began to wonder if lying hadn't become a bit too easy for her siblings. They were beginning to remind her of the stories in her Sunday school book about wicked children who came to bad ends.

“Rub yourself all over with them towels, now,” Tabby said to Emily, “while I tell Charlotte and Miss Branwell you've returned.”

“I don't want to see them,” Emily said. She was down to her shift now, and she hugged herself in front of the stove, her head lowered, a curtain of wet hair obscuring her face. “Tell them I am going to my room.”

“Not dripping all over my floor, you're not.”

When she was gone, Emily grabbed Anne by the arm. “I've done something terrible,” she said. She lifted her face, and Anne was shocked by how very pale and harried she looked.

“Are you ill? What's happened?” But even as she asked, the truth began to dawn on her. “Oh, Emily. What have you done?”

“Something is gone!” There was anguish in her sister's voice and in her eyes. “Something was ripped away from me. Oh, Anne, am I ugly? Is my eye still blue?”

“Calm yourself!” Anne fumbled with a towel, managing to wrap it around her sister's shoulders. “I don't know what you're saying. You look exactly as you did before.”

“Take care of your bandages.”

“Never mind that. Sit down. You're shivering.” She steered her sister toward a chair.

Emily sat in silence for a few moments, staring straight ahead, her breath in shallow gasps. “I felt well when I was in Gondal,” she said after a while, “but the moment I crossed back home . . .” She took Anne's bandaged hand, looking up at her. “When I crossed back home, I felt something leaving me, draining away from me. I was so tired, I could hardly make the walk from Sladen Beck.”

Anne forced herself not to wince in pain as her sister squeezed her fingers tight. “You've done it, then? You've made a world?”

“Yes. And I paid a price. I paid a price, but I don't know . . .” She blinked back tears and looked to the floor. “He wasn't worth it, whatever it was.”

“Rogue? You saw him?”

Emily nodded, and her story spilled out. Old Tom. Her bargain. Her world. Anne could hardly believe her sister's foolishness.

“I shall never go back,” Emily said. “I can't. Rogue was too wicked.” She looked up at her again. “But what did I pay? It was something, something important, I know it. Oh, Anne,” she cried. “What if it was my soul?”

CHARLOTTE

C
HARLOTTE'S MIND WANDERED ALL THROUGH
evening prayers. She jumped at every sound and twice caught herself chewing her nails, a habit she had broken herself of years before. Even Tabby remarked on her nervousness, and, before Charlotte went upstairs, made her down some of the beef tea she had made for Emily.

She'd heard the laughter once more that afternoon, but a fierce wind had arrived with the rain, battering the house and whistling around the chimney, and she told herself it was only its blowing she had heard. If it weren't for the broken mirror in the bedroom, she might have been able to convince herself she had imagined that awful woman as well, but every time she saw its empty frame, she knew with a sinking feeling that it wasn't true.
When she tried to tell Branwell what had happened, he only snapped, and Charlotte didn't wish to burden the girls. And so, with no one left to confide in, she found herself standing in front of her father's door.

“Come in,” he called, when she had worked up the courage to knock. He was sitting in a high-backed wooden chair loading his pistols for the night. “And how is dear Emily?”

Emily. Wandering about in a rainstorm. Making everyone sick with worry.
Dear Emily is as selfish and thoughtless as always
, Charlotte thought. “Recovering well.”

He motioned her toward the chair opposite, and she sat down. Beyond him was a small mirror over a chest of drawers. She dreaded seeing a glimpse of that woman's face in its depths, and yet Charlotte's eyes were drawn to it again and again throughout their conversation.

Papa looked up at her expectantly but resumed his task when she didn't speak. He detached the ramrod from the barrel of one of his guns and used it to tamp down a round ball and some paper wadding, the pistol's one shot. Then he primed the pistol with powder from his horn and set it carefully on a side table next to its mate. He looked up once more, but still Charlotte couldn't find words.
I am hearing voices. I am afraid of mirrors. I made a bargain with a creature out of one of Tabby's stories, and now I might be lost.
How did one begin such a conversation?

“Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.”

Charlotte froze. The windows rattled like something trying to get in.

“There are demons on the wind tonight,” Papa said. He didn't mean this literally—he was a modern man—and yet he touched the nearer pistol when he said it, as if part of him believed there was something real to fear.

Charlotte made an attempt at a smile. “Yes. Aren't there.” The awkward silence dropped over them again.

Papa gestured to the two weapons. “You know, every night I load these, and every night they go unfired. And yet in the morning when I awake I feel as if I have left my family unprotected, as if something has been taken in the night.”

Charlotte blinked in surprise, sure he had divined that all was not well in his home. Guilt sliced through her. She and the others kept so much from him.

“I worry,” he continued. “About you and the girls. About Branwell. He took it very badly when you were away at school, you know. His nerves. Soon you will leave us to make your living, and I fear for what will happen to him when he is parted from your influence.”

“My influence?” Charlotte gave a short laugh. “He pays no heed to me, I assure you.”

“He worships you—no, do not frown. He might not show his feelings, but they are there. Remember when he walked all that way to visit you at Roe Head School?”

Charlotte had to stop herself from rolling her eyes. “Yes, yes. Forty miles. A very long way.” Papa often brought up this incident as proof of Branwell's affection for her.

“But you are not here to speak of him,” he said, as if reading her thoughts.

“No.”