EMILY," ANNE SAID QUIETLY, "WHY EXACTLY do we want the crumbs off their table?"
Emily was rifling through the papers hidden in the secret place under the floorboard, Charlotte's tied neatly with ribbon, Branwell's in haphazard piles.
"What I mean is," Anne continued, "there is no shortage of reading material in this house. Charlotte is an excellent writer, but Mr. Shakespeare is better, and if it's Branwell's wickedness you like, Papa says we may read Lord Byron in moderation."
Emily tried to keep her features motionless. She valued her privacy, and Anne's ability to read a person's face bordered on the uncanny. "I suppose I simply want to keep abreast of our people in Verdopolis," she said. This grazed the truth, at any rate. "We helped to create them—the older ones, at least—and I want to see what those two are doing with them."
Anne pursed her lips, but Emily, not as gifted at reading people, couldn't tell if her sister believed her.
Everything had been different when they were young. Once, all four siblings had crossed to the invented lands together. Together they'd explored worlds inspired by Aesop's Fables and Gulliver's Travels and The Arabian Nights. Who could have asked for a better childhood? By the time she was ten, Emily had visited islands inhabited by giants thirty feet tall and had traveled to the moon to speak to the gentle, blue-haired folk who lived there.
True, it was Charlotte and Branwell who created these places, but they'd been happy to take their younger sisters. In those days, they crossed over by acting out a story, not by writing. All they needed were a few opening words. A door of light would open, one of them would make that mysterious hand gesture, and they would all go through. Branwell and Charlotte never explained how it was done, but Emily had always believed that it was only a matter of time before the secret was revealed to her.
Then Anne and Emily were cast out. To this day, Emily couldn't understand why. It was around the time that Charlotte and Branwell invented Glasstown, and she supposed her older siblings simply wanted it all to themselves. By the time it became Verdopolis—a more appropriate name for what was now a glittering city—Anne and Emily had to read their older siblings' writings if they wanted to know what was happening there.
"Look," said Anne, smiling. "One of our little newspapers." She reached into the spot under the floorboards and pulled out a miniature book. The Bront?s had made dozens of such things when they were children—little newspapers where they recorded the doings of their favorite made-up characters. Tabby had helped them sew the bindings out of old sugar bags.
"We'd best hurry," Emily said, glancing at the desk. "There's no telling when they'll be back."
Anne sighed and replaced the little book with tender care. She never complained about their banishment from the invented worlds; now Emily wondered if her sister missed them as much as she did.
"Isn't it remarkable," Anne said, "how one can become attached to fictional people?" She looked at Emily with large violet-blue eyes. "The feeling might become quite strong, I expect."
The thought occurred to Emily that in some other, very different life, where Anne was not a virtuous parson's daughter, she might have told fortunes out of a gypsy caravan. "Mmm."
"We are so isolated here in Haworth, with no one of our own age to befriend, and the men and woman of Verdopolis are real, in a way. It wouldn't seem strange to me if … someone … might even fall in love with one of them."
Emily kept herself as still as a rabbit on the moor, knowing that a denial would give her away.
"And I suppose," Anne went on, "that Charlotte's hero Zamorna is very compelling to read about. He's so … dashing. Is that why we're going to so much trouble?"
Emily let out a breath, repressing the urge to smile. She replaced the board over the hiding spot and stood up, clutching a selection of Charlotte's and Branwell's newer writings to her chest. With her foot she kicked the rag rug back into place.
"Perhaps," she said.