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TWENTY

The Vivisectionists’ Garden

The glittering asseardens like a school of silver fish The h in the sky it seemed as distant and remote as the stars Charlotte and Eone black with moonlit shadows and dew They didn’t need Crashey to find their way now Everyone seeo The press and swell of bodies carried theo stone arches and tall braziers full of violet coals They finally got a moue and Wellington and all the rest streamed on ahead

Charlotte pulled a lock of Emily’s hair over a little spot on her forehead where the silver paint had begun to fade

“Did you have any luck?” she whispered

Robin Hood jostled Ehtly as he passed by and stepped on her he a purse, she wouldn’t be carrying it any longer “I’h I’m not entirely sure what he can do, other than write a poem about the whole mess”

“George?” Charlotte arched her golden eyebrow

“Yes, George Lord Byron That’s his naht he’d be, but at the same time, not at all”

“Wellington is h I don’t expect he’d thinkhim Arthur just yet” Charlotte looked down at the deep, shadon “He turned me down flat, Em”

“He’s hardly the only fellow here with a good arood head,” Emily said “We’ll find someone else”

But she could tell by Charlotte’s face that no one else would do Her sister had a story in her head, and the story went: Charlotte and the Duke of Wellington ride together as equals and co But that wasn’t the story Eh to dismiss a Duke with a flick

of her hand “He’s rather a stodgy thing, anyway, isn’t he? All brooding and distant and cold and gluine what you see in hie And Crashey”

Over the jeweled heads of the revelers, they could see one last stone archway It was set into the scarlet prickles of a long, winding holly hedge wall This one was obsidian, shining like a black mirror There wereletters that read:

The Vivisectionists’ Garden

“I ahtly concerned, Ehtly concerned about what exactly a Vivisectionists’ Garden ht be”