My Plain Jane (The Lady Janies #2)(25)

They retreated down the hall to a corner of the library where it was less likely they’d be discovered. Then Charlotte lifted her spectacles to her face so she’d know where to punch him in the arm. “What are you really doing here?”

“I happened to be in the neighborhood, and I thought I’d surprise you,” he said. “Ow. Oh, I suppose I’ve missed you, too, Charlie.”

“Don’t call me Charlie, Branwell. You’re supposed to be at home, helping Father with the parish. However did you—”

“Actually I’ve come to tell the most marvelous news,” he said. “It’s really the best news, ever. Can you keep a secret?”

“Of course.” It was Bran who couldn’t keep a secret to save his life. As evidenced here.

He straightened his shoulders, his chest puffing out a bit. “I’ve been recruited into the Society.”

That was not what she’d been expecting him to say.

“The Society for the Relocation of Wayward Spirits,” he elaborated when she didn’t immediately respond. “It’s an elite group of distinguished persons who locate and extricate ghosts—”

“I know who they are,” she said. “But . . . why? Why did they recruit you?”

(It should be noted here that Charlotte loved her brother. He was only a year younger than she was, and he was a dear. But he was also—hmm, how do we put this nicely?—the family foozler, which was a pre-Victorian word for “screw-up.”)

“They heard about my accident,” Bran explained a bit nervously.

Charlotte frowned. “Accident?”

He blushed and pushed his spectacles up on his nose. (Bran, unlike Charlotte, actually wore his glasses on his face, instead of on the end of a wand.)

“Don’t tell me you agreed to another dare,” Charlotte chided. Just in the last six months he’d nearly died falling out of a tall tree someone had dared him to climb, he’d nearly choked to death on blackberries during an impromptu pie-eating contest, and he’d singed his eyebrows off in some incident involving a lit candle and a handful of gunpowder.

“Well, there was this old bridge, see, and this boy from the village kept saying I was lacking the proper spine to try to cross it. I was doing fine until I got to the middle. No trouble at all. But then the train came, and I had to jump.”

Charlotte closed her eyes. “You jumped from a bridge. Was it over water, at least?”

He nodded. “It wasn’t a terrible drop, and the river was quite deep, so I didn’t break my neck.”

“How wonderful.”

“But I did—temporarily, mind you—drown. For a few moments. My heart stopped beating. But then it started again,” he added cheerfully. “So I met the Society’s criteria.”

Charlotte stared at him. “What? Just . . . what?”

He laughed at her obvious confusion. “They are desperate to enlist young men who’ve been technically dead for at least a full minute, and then brought back. They learned of my accident at the bridge—it may have been in the local newspaper—” He coughed. “And now here I am, the newest initiate in the Society for the Relocation of Wayward Spirits. Why, just this month I participated in my very first relocation not far from here.”

“With Mr. Blackwood?” Charlotte couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “You were at the Tully Pub?”

He grinned. “It was dreadfully exciting, Charlie. I did make a bit of a mess of it, but it turned out all right.”

She whacked him in the arm again. “Why do all the good things happen to you?” A brilliant thought occurred to her. “Earlier I did ask Mr. Blackwood if they might take me on as an employee, and he refused, but perhaps if you were to speak for me . . .” She trailed off because Bran was shaking his head.

“The Society is comprised entirely of men,” he said. “No women allowed.”

She frowned. “But that doesn’t make any sense. I know for a fact that they—”

“Besides, even if you weren’t a girl,” Bran continued, “you wouldn’t qualify. Like I said, they’re interested in those certain persons—male persons, that is—who’ve experienced death firsthand.”

“But why? What’s so important about brushing shoulders with death?”

Bran pressed his lips together. “I really shouldn’t say.”

She waited.

“You see, when you die and come back, it can change your perspective,” he informed her gravely.

“Naturally,” she said, and waited.

“I see dead people,” he blurted out.

She blinked. “Pardon?”

“After you die, temporarily, anyway, you can see the dead and commune with them,” he said. “Well, sometimes. Seers are rare—not everyone who dies comes back with such an ability. Which is why the Society seeks us out. It’s a gift, they say, and a great responsibility.”

“Oh.” Charlotte swallowed down a lump of disappointment in her throat, both because she was a wretched female and because she had never died, not even once. It all felt so wildly unfair.

“I’m the new apprentice to Mr. Blackwood,” Bran said. “He is the star agent—”

“Yes, I’ve met him,” Charlotte said. “He is impressive. Long coat. Brown eyes.”