The World Within Read Free Page B

supposes, Aunt probably won’t even notice. Everything is out of the ordinary.
    She finds the right page, but she can’t concentrate. She’s listening for sounds from Papa’s room overhead. At one point she hears Aunt’s iron-soled pattens clicking across the floor. Papa coughs occasionally, but it doesn’t sound too bad. Maybe Tabby’s telling the truth. Maybe he just needs a day’s rest in bed and tomorrow he’ll be up and about as usual.
    Branwell starts humming a tune under his breath. He sounds too happy for Latin, so Emily cranes her head to see what he’s doing. He’s drawing something on the inside of the front cover of the New Testament. He becomes aware of her watching and holds it up so she can see: two muscular soldiers fighting with swords and shields. She smiles her admiration, then turns to see if Charlotte’s noticed. But Charlotte, holding her geography book close to her face, is busy decorating its margins with her own sketches.
    “Charlotte!”
    Charlotte looks up and blushes.
    “This is silly,” says Emily. “We might just as well go on with our play.”
    Charlotte puts down her pencil. “All right. But we mustn’t make too much noise.”
    Delighted, Emily jumps up and deposits Tiger on the floor. “I’ll fetch the books.” As stealthy as a cat herself, she runs upstairs to the room she shares with Charlotte, retrieves the old case from under the bed, and is back in a minute.
    She kneels down on the worn rectangle of carpet in the middle of the floor and the others gather round. As soon as Emily raises the lid of the case, the miniature books with their blue or brown sugar paper covers spill out.
    “We’ll need somewhere else to keep them soon. This is getting full.” Emily touches the battered leather case lightly, almost reverentially. It’s the one Papa carried when he left Ireland for England, to take up his place at Cambridge University. She never sees it without thinking of how he came to this country with nothing, but was determined to make something of himself. It’s just the right container for the little books.
    Here is all their writing, scads and scads of it, the result of hours of playing and acting out their ideas and arguing about what should happen next, neatly printed in separate dated volumes, as if they were real authors. Just looking at them gives Emily a full, satisfied feeling. And she loves the fact that no one else apart from themselves, certainly no adult, can read the minute print they all use for their writings, so they’re wonderfully secret.
    “Right,” says Charlotte, sitting back on her heels, “if you remember, the marquis, Arthur, has just met Lady Zenobia Ellrington.”
    “ ‘A bluestocking of deepest dye,’ ” Emily quotes, earning the flash of a smile from Charlotte.
    Branwell shifts restlessly. “He’s not going to fall in love, is he? Because, if he is, why don’t you go on with that by yourself, Charlotte, and I can start something else.”
    “Such as?”
    “Well, I think my chief man, Alexander Rogue, should lead an expedition across the desert to suppress an uprising in the far west. Then we can have a great battle with cannon and muskets and heaps of corpses.”
    Charlotte groans and Emily looks at Anne and rolls her eyes.
    “No, listen,” says Branwell, waving his hands, “Arthur can go as well, if he can tear himself away from the alluring Lady Zenobia, and he can be horribly wounded in the battle, near death —”
    “No!” Charlotte is distraught.
    Branwell gives her a radiant smile. “But you, as Chief Genius Tallii, can appear and restore him with an incantation!”
    Emily frowns. This has been happening too much lately — Branwell and Charlotte getting so caught up in the story that they forget they’re not the only ones in this play. It’s hateful of them to leave her and Anne out.
    When they first started the plays, ages ago when they were small, they always made them up together . And it wasn’t just that it