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CHAPTER ELEVEN

The dark little boy had stood beside Branwell’s bed, bending forward and, hardly noticeably at first, inhaling. Branwell hadn’t resisted when he’d felt his own breath begin escaping between his slack lips—he had been shaken to hear that Emily was dead, but if she were truly gone there was no reason why he should go on clinging so painfully to his wasted soul—when he had heard crashing and loud animal roars from downstairs.

His immediate thought had been that Emily could not be dead—he couldn’t imagine such clamor going on down there without her active participation.

He had blinked—and he had been staring into his own pale face inches away; the eyes had been wide, fierce, and he had known that as the breath left that body it was being replaced there by Welsh’s identity.

This was really happening! In a convulsion of unreasoning vertigo he snapped his mouth shut and felt his own jaws click together. He saw the boy’s swarthy little face crowding up again, openmouthed and hungry, and Branwell managed to fill his own lungs and empty them in a despairing scream.


Emily forced her aching legs to race up the stairs, past the landing and the clock to the upstairs hall, and she was panting as she lunged to Branwell’s bedroom door and wrenched it open. Her pulse thudded rapidly in her temples.

By the light of the candle on the bedside table she saw two figures standing in the middle of the floor. One was Branwell, disheveled and pale, and the other—she bared her teeth in dismay but flexed her fingers on the grip of the dioscuri—the other, barefoot in tattered shirt and trousers, was the dark little boy, the Welsh ghost, in the house.

Keeper stood tense beside her, growling, his great head swinging from one figure to the other.

The little boy clutched his ragged shirt with his right hand and wailed, “Emily! Get him out of me!” She saw that his left arm ended at the wrist, in a smooth stump.

The Branwell body waved toward the boy. “Set your dog on that discarded husk, if you like.”

Emily took a deep breath and stepped forward so that her face was close to Branwell’s. The curly ginger hair and the receding bearded chin were her brother’s, but it wasn’t Branwell who looked back at her from the blue eyes.

She slashed her brother’s shirt with the edge of one of the paired blades, then leaped back to avoid a swung fist; but the attempted blow had been weak, and wouldn’t have hurt her if it had connected. Welsh wasn’t yet fully in control of her brother’s body.

She caught the loose fist and spoke into the alien eyes: “Branwell! Take my hand!”

Both bodies spoke in unison then: “You can’t—”

She racked her memory for a line from one of Branwell’s poems, then recited, “‘But I forgot to ask for youthful blood . . .’”

Branwell’s mouth opened, and said, haltingly, “‘The thrill divine of feeling unsubdued, the nerves that quivered to the sound of fame . . .’” And the hand she was holding tightened on hers.

But the dark little boy grabbed Branwell’s elbow, and Branwell’s hand was slack again, and his face tightened.

“You,” her brother’s mouth said to her now, “were to be dead.”

“Do you want me dead?” she asked.

“No,” choked the figure of the boy.

She stared into her brother’s alien eyes. “Answer me, Branwell.”

The dark boy began panting rapidly, and Branwell’s hand clutched Emily’s. “No,” he said. “No.” He shook off the small clinging hand and stood up straighter. “I’m . . . Branwell, not Welsh.”

And the figure of the boy began to change. At first Emily thought it was approaching her, but then she realized that it was growing taller. Within seconds it was nearly as tall as she was, and it no longer appeared to be a little boy—what stood there now was the semblance of a swarthy, middle-aged man in a cloak, gasping. The expansion might not have been voluntary, and seemed to pain the thing. It raised its arms, and Emily saw that it was still missing its left hand.

The separation of Branwell and Welsh was, at least for a moment, distinct; and Keeper sprang at the man in the cloak. The big mastiff’s jaws closed on an upflung arm, but there were two dogs occupying the same space, and the other one tore at the man’s throat.

And the man seemed to explode.

Emily was knocked backward off her feet by heavy bundles of thrashing black feathers and scratching claws, and as she hit the floor on her hip and shoulder she heard the window break in a racket of beating wings.

Crows! she realized, and then the last of them had collided and fluttered away through the empty casement, and a night wind from out over the moors was cold in her sweat-damp hair.

The candle on the bedside table had been knocked over and extinguished, but the glow of a quickly approaching lamp brightened in the hall, and Anne stepped cautiously through the doorway into the room holding an oil lamp. Tabby was peering over her shoulder.

By the lamp’s relative glare Emily saw that in fact not all the crows had fled. Keeper was once again just one dog, and again he held a limp black form in his mouth, one wing drooping.

Branwell had collapsed across the bed on his side, with his legs trailing on the floor. His eyes were closed and snores hitched from his slack mouth.

Emily got up from the floor and sat on the bed beside Branwell, panting. She gave Tabby a questioning look.

“The gytrash you stabbed turned all the way back into a man and crawled out of the kitchen,” Tabby said sturdily, “and out onto the road.” She stepped into the room and pulled the heavy curtains across the broken window. “There’s blood and fur, and broken glass and dead wasps, all over the kitchen floor.”

Thank God that Papa isn’t here, Emily thought. “Don’t let Keeper tear that dead crow to bits. I think it’s a piece of death for Welsh.”

Tabby gave a judicious nod.

Anne walked over to where Keeper stood. The dog still held the crow in his mouth, but relinquished it when Anne tugged gingerly at its dangling wing.

Emily shook Branwell’s shoulder until he stirred and blearily opened his eyes. He stared at her for a moment, then thrashed around and sat up to peer into every corner of the room. He flinched when he saw Anne holding the dead crow’s wing between her thumb and forefinger.

Emily interrupted him as he started to speak. “You’re to keep that by you,” she told him. “The ghost dog . . .” She looked up at Anne. “Our grandfather’s dog was named Keeper too, remember?”

Anne nodded. “It killed Welsh in 1771, even as Welsh killed it.”

“The ghost Keeper,” Emily went on, “reenacted it here, tonight. I don’t know how badly that might have weakened Welsh’s ghost, but”—she turned to Branwell—“if he should come back, that dead crow was expressed in his remembered death—it might repel him.”

“I—what, a dead bird?” Branwell touched the volume of Coleridge on the blanket beside him. “Like an albatross? It’ll smell . . .”

“We can dry it in the stove,” Emily said, “and then steep it in sal volatile or something.” She tried to smile. “It would probably fit in a coat pocket.”

“That’ll smell worse—”

“It’ll smell medicinal. You’re known to be sickly.”

Branwell just shook his head.

Emily looked at the ceiling and ran her fingers through her damp hair. “I’m told,” she said, “that restless dead souls—ghosts, vampires—can only enter a house after they’ve been invited in.” She lowered her head and nodded toward his book. “As in Coleridge’s ‘Christabel.’ ”

“Did Tabby tell you that? And a horseshoe over the door will catch good luck, and . . .” Branwell felt his shirt with his right hand. “My shirt’s torn, and I’ve got a scratch on my stomach. Did Keeper . . . ?” His voice faltered, and he wasn’t looking at Emily.

“When?” she asked.

“You and Anne were there too,” Branwell muttered, “on that day at Ponden Kirk when we—signed promissory notes in blood. Why must it have been me?”

Anne inhaled sharply, but Emily just repeated, “When?”

Branwell waved his left hand, but it flopped limply; with the fingers of his right hand he brushed her question aside. “What happened here tonight—” He paused. “I say, what did happen? I heard the most frightful row from downstairs.”

Emily just looked curiously into his eyes.

“Could I,” he said, “talk to you privately?”

“Promissory notes?” burst out Anne.

“To what end?” Emily asked him. “Anne and I—and Tabby!—have no secrets from one another.”

Branwell pounded the book on the bed with his right hand. “I was fourteen! It was a year after that day at Ponden Kirk, and Charlotte had gone off to that horrible school at Cowan Bridge, twenty miles away—I couldn’t write properly without her, if it wasn’t us two—on my own I could only write about Northangerland—” Tears were running down his gaunt cheeks. “I saw the dark boy in the churchyard in the snow, and he was barefoot! How could I not invite him in?” Emily started to speak, but he went on, “But he didn’t come in, then! Why would he wait all these years to”—Emily felt him shudder—“come inside the house, physically?”

Emily wanted nothing so much as a cup of tea and bed, but there was a mess to clean up downstairs. “Oh,” she said absently, “there were obstacles, I suppose. Keeper, Papa’s banishing gunshots, perhaps even the buckets of holy water.” She looked at the dead crow dangling from Anne’s fingers, and her attention sharpened. “But the nightfolk lost their . . . their lycanthropic king not long ago, and since then their efforts to—to what, restore their power?—have pretty much stumbled.”

She stood up. “I believe tonight was the big effort, meant to settle everything at last. Welsh was here to take full possession of you, and Mrs. Flensing—she was part of that row in the kitchen, wasn’t she, Tabby?—had a bag that surely held a replacement head for the thing under the ledger stone in the church.”

Branwell’s eyes were wide. “He—the Welsh ghost—told me you were killed, and that your ghost was finding a . . . ‘a new and unpleasing head to occupy.’ ”

Emily had not flinched during the events of this terrible night, but she recoiled now, remembering the monstrous skull she had seen partly reassembled on the church altar six months ago; they had intended to put her soul into something like that? Why? Even as she asked herself the question, she guessed at the answer: as a placeholder for Welsh’s twin, awaiting revival under the ledger stone.

“Promissory notes?” said Anne again. “You told us that day that we’d see Maria.”

“Oh . . .” Branwell shifted his feet on the floor but didn’t stand up. “You want to see Maria?” he snapped. “Have Emily give you my old spectacles with Gehenna mud smeared on them, and look at the churchyard some evening! You’ll see her, or things indistinguishable from her.”

“I have,” Anne told him. “I’ve seen them. And Maria would not be one of them. What did we promise when we left our blood on the stone in that cave?”

Branwell looked away. “We—I was thirteen, and simply doing what I’d been told in a dream! But—very well!—we marked ourselves for attention, but also for protection. The ghosts are particularly aware of us—you must have noticed that your breath is sometimes snatched when you walk by the churchyard?—but at the same time we can resist them, they can’t force themselves on us.”

“And,” pursued Anne, “what is the debt?”

“Ah, well—ceded control of oneself, I suppose.”

“Emily has defaulted on that. So have you, tonight.”

“I believe,” said Branwell with evident reluctance, “it means control of oneself after one’s death.”

“We will default on that too,” said Anne sternly.

“Yes,” Emily agreed. “And I think you’ve now revoked your old invitation.”

Branwell was prodding his left hand with the fingers of his right. Emily noticed that his left hand just rocked limply. And she recalled that the Welsh ghost, in the appearance of a boy and then a man, had been missing its left hand.

Perhaps, she thought with a chill, the invitation hasn’t completely been withdrawn; perhaps Welsh still has one hand over the threshold.


Under a hedge a mile away, Mrs. Flensing was rolling back and forth in the dirt, grunting and sweating as her wounds reknit. Evan Saltmeric couldn’t see her very well in the deep shadows, but it was clear that most of her dress had been torn away in the fight with the other werewolf, and her silk chemise was dark with blood.

He had tied a strip torn from his shirt around his forehead, and the knife-cut Curzon had given him had apparently stopped bleeding.

The satchel with the big grotesque head in it sat beside him on a flat stone. Mrs. Flensing had not succeeded in killing the Brontë girl, and the head would soon begin to decay if some ghost weren’t implanted in it. Saltmeric knew the procedure, and he knew that Mrs. Flensing would not let it rot.

It was a summer night, but the wind from over the infinite quiet hills and valleys was cold, and he ached to be back in smoky, noisy, bright-lit London.

He had made his living as a pantomime street magician for ten of his twenty-five years, and early on he had come to the conclusion that some of the celebrated magic shows made use of real supernatural effects. He had eventually followed one of the popular magicians to the abandoned-looking church in St. Andrew Street, and had met Reverend Farfleece and Mrs. Flensing, and been judged worthy of submitting to the dioscuri baptism.

Dioscuri! He sat back against the hedge and touched the angular bulk that distended the pocket of his coat and had probably shredded the lining. He had still not sufficiently gained their trust to be given one of the double-bladed knives, but half an hour ago he had picked up the one Curzon had dropped when the change overcame him.

Farfleece and the Flensing woman had shown Evan Saltmeric some small ways to tap into the supernatural warping of reality that was generated by these frightful Yorkshire atrocities—genuine magical effects that could be achieved with silver coins and fire and a bit of blood—and his pantomime street performances had gained in wonder and glamor. But there were grander things to accomplish.

His ambition had not moved beyond being a performer, but he dreamed now of abandoning his squares of urban pavement and presenting extravagant magic shows in such venues as the Oxford Music Hall and the London Pavilion, and even the theater that Robert-Houdin had established at the Palais Royale in Paris.

He needed to maintain his alliance with the Oblique order, at all costs. Mrs. Flensing had told him of all sorts of wonders—of remote moonlit fairs where ghosts danced; and Celtic temples where old gods still survived; and a mundus loci, a tree in a magical grove in Yorkshire that was the center of that region’s supernatural whirlpool, with arches that opened onto places of power. But for the last couple of weeks she had recruited his aid in less glamorous and sometimes illegal undertakings: robbing graves in Highgate Cemetery, poisoning holy water fonts in Catholic churches, and—weirdest of all—having this werewolf head grown in a pot by a madman who lived on a skiff on the Thames!

And now that awful head lay beside him in Mrs. Flensing’s satchel. She had meant to put into it the ghost of that Brontë girl, but her gunshot had somehow missed, and then everything had gone to hell. Saltmeric had followed the badly wounded werewolf that was Mrs. Flensing until it had collapsed out here in a field and begun to change back.

The head in the satchel would need a ghost put into it damn quick, and as soon as Mrs. Flensing recovered she would see that it was done. And Saltmeric himself was the only other person within a long dark mile in any direction.

On the turf in front of his boots Mrs. Flensing had stopped writhing. Even in the shadows he could see that her legs had regained human form and shed the bristly pelage, and her face was visible as a pale oval—only patchily darkened with fur now.

Quickly he unbuckled the satchel and tilted the horrible head out onto the grass. The neck had been cinched shut with wire and tarred, and it still had no hair, but it was recognizably the head of something like a very big canine. The open eyes were milky white, and he shuddered at the thought of his own spirit locked behind them.

He tugged the dioscuri knife free of his pocket and looked at the two long blades—conflicted wound response!—and he leaned forward to rest the points against Mrs. Flensing’s bloodstained throat.

She opened her eyes, but they didn’t yet show alertness, so with one fearful spasmodic thrust he drove the knife in to the hilt.

Immediately he was horrified at what he had done, doubting his memory of what had happened in the Brontë parsonage kitchen and praying that he might be allowed to undo these last few seconds; but Mrs. Flensing’s bare feet scuffed in the grass and the hand he could see—her normal one—clenched in a fist; and then her hand opened and her body sagged, limp and clearly dead.

Desperate to counter the dreadfully accusing sight in front of him, he pictured himself standing on a bright-lit stage in evening clothes, facing an audience that receded into far shadows and filled tiers of galleries on either side . . . 

Working quickly, as she had meant to do with the lifeless body of the Brontë girl, he picked up the raw, damp werewolf head with both hands and laid it beside Mrs. Flensing’s slack face. Her ghost would, he understood, soon relinquish its hold on the killed human-form body and settle in the vacant bestial head.

He sat shivering for several minutes, and when he was sure the transfer must have occurred if it were ever going to, he rocked the knife back and forth until he was able to pull it free of Mrs. Flensing’s throat. With distracted care he thoroughly wiped the parallel blades clean on a still-white corner of her ragged chemise, then tucked it into his coat pocket and rolled the heavy head back into the satchel—nervously dismissing his suspicion that it had twitched under his hands.

He fastened the buckles and hoisted the strap over his shoulder. He would blame her death on the Curzon werewolf, and surely in her absence he would be invited to take a higher place in the Oblique order.

He took a quick look up at the stars, then struggled to his feet and set off walking south, toward the Keighley Road.


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Framed