The Glass Town Game

  “Oh, God!” said Charlotte sharply. “Quiet! All of you!”

  “All of us? You were talking, too!” said Anne.

  “Fine. All of us. And we’ve made a fine job of it now!”

  “What? Who?” Branwell looked about for the voice, but it had come from nowhere.

  “We’re not alone!” snapped Emily guiltily. She cursed herself. She should have spoken up sooner.

  “Brunty,” cried Anne, and pointed toward the heavy book with its long, mysterious title lying propped up on the couch and tied down with hair ribbons and wool yarn. “It says ‘scurrilous’ right on the cover! That means he’s a sneak. He’s in there . . . waiting. I don’t want a sneak to know our business, do you?”

  “But I do know it,” the book said smugly. “I know it all, now. Whisper, whisper, who likes the whispering game? Why, I do! I do so awfully.”

  The book of Brunty began to unfold. But it could not quite manage it. Charlotte and Emily had tied it too tight for that. He settled for getting his wide face and his ribbon nose out of the top of the great tome and stared them all down as though they were in his house, and not the other way round.

  “Perhaps I might even be of some help, if you mean to start your careers as thieves. I have rather an interest in grog myself. And I do love a good heist.”

  “But you’re wicked!” sneered Anne. “Everyone says so—even you say so, on your own cover! You’re going to prison, and only the very worst go to prison.”

  “You mustn’t believe everything you read, my dear. And anyway, it’s terrifically freeing to be wicked. There’s only one way to be good—the straight and the narrow! But there’s a thousand and four ways to be wicked, each longer and wider than the last. And if you want to do something wicked to Glass Town, why then, I am your servant!”

  Branwell’s eyes sparkled. “What did you do, then? It must have been something top drawer.”

  Brunty shrugged silkily. “Stole. Spied. Lied. Brawled. The usual bits of fun. Don’t tell me you’ve never heard something you oughtn’t, or said something you shouldn’t, or pinched someone you needn’t, or taken something you wanted while no one was looking.” The children blushed like four guilty roses. “Well, little ones, when you do these things at home and get yourself caught, you get sent to bed without supper. But when you get nabbed doing them for your country, they serve you up for supper and go to their beds with full consciences. It’s no different to swipe a bit of cheese from your father’s table than to swipe a bit of cheese from the enemy’s table. Better, actually, since your father never did a thing to harm you, and you took his cheese anyhow. I’m just the same as you. I was you before you were you.”

  “But you’re very sorry? And you won’t do it again?” asked Anne hopefully.

  “Not particularly. And I shall certainly do it again, and worse, and better, and more, and oftener. My story is written—why apologize for the plot? Now, let us return to our plot.”

  “We haven’t got any plot with you, sir,” sniffed Charlotte.

  “Oh, yes you have, young lady. I know your secret, after all. Never whisper in the presence of a master spy, you giggling dolls.”

  Branwell squared his shoulders. Finally, the truth was loose. The Magazine Man had heard them say they invented the world. That’s why he was being so nice all of a sudden. The only people who invent worlds are gods, and you had to be nice to gods. He prepared himself for worship. “And what’s our secret, then?”

  Brunty unfolded one newspaper-leg out from the bottom of his book body and stretched it luxuriously. They heard a knee pop. “You’re mad. Every one of you. Mad as mutton. Mad as mittens. Mad as a mink in a straightjacket.”

  “We are NOT,” hissed Emily. She could feel the blood beating in her fists.

  “I don’t mind mad! Not in the least! What would the world be without the mad? Tedious and tawdry and plodding without a cliffhanger or a twist to its name. Oh, Glass Town is full of prejudice and snobbery, but in Gondal, we do not make a fuss about whether one’s head is on straight, or whether one has a head at all. But even we would call children who think the whole universe is made up of their toys and dreams and games quite barmy. Let me go and I will be your dog, your sweet little Gondalier hound, bringing you grog in a barrel round his neck for the price of a pat and a treat.”

  “W . . . what treat?” Anne said softly.

  “Anne!” cried a shocked Charlotte. “We do not make bargains with villains!”

  “But he’s our villain! He can’t be all bad if we made him! We made wonderful creatures.”

  “I don’t remember making a Brunty at all! Unless he’s one of Bran’s,” mused Emily.

  Charlotte kept mum. She had dreamed once of a man made of books. She had thought then how lovely it would be to know a person who could be read like a story, known and loved like a perfect ending. She had not thought how books can hide their meaning, withhold their secrets, lie better and longer than any human person. Brunty was not Bran’s. He was hers. And he was a beast.

  Branwell smiled tightly. He made a smart little bow. “We shall never do anything that makes Napoleon’s man happy,” he announced loyally.

  “Oh, Bran!” exclaimed Emily. And she looked at him with such admiration and surprise that Branwell felt quite out of breath with it. Yes, that, that! His heart crowed. That’s respect, that is. He wanted to gobble it up like hot cake. He cleared his throat and deepened his voice a bit. “It’s all well and good to play Welly and Boney, Em, but we are still Englishmen, in the end.”

  “Are you now?” crooned Brunty. “Pray tell, what matters that in Glass Town? Come on, boy, we’ll make you a Prince in Gondal. You and I want the same thing, after all. Just a bit of grog to keep our bellies warm.”

  Bran and his sisters shook their heads.

  “It’s . . . it’s no good if we have to be villains to get it. We’d never be able to look our mother in the eye,” whispered Anne.

  “Fine,” sneered Brunty. His face changed in an instant, from friendly and coaxing and open to furious and cruel and hard. “Then I needn’t bother keeping up the niceties. I’ve had to listen to you swooning and sighing for hours! I thought it would be the death of me. Oh, isn’t Glass Town grand! Oh, isn’t the Duke handsome! Look at all the pretty red houses! Aren’t they precious? NO! Glass Town is hell, those pretty houses shelter demons, the Duke is the devil himself, and if, somehow, beyond all reason, you really brought all them to life, then you are the cause of all my misfortunes and I hate you like brimstone. Once I am free, I shall have you all chucked, pulped, and remaindered for the glory of Gondal and Bonaparte. Or perhaps I’ll just feed you to Marengo. I do so hate loose plotlines. And a gaggle of violent little madmen in shabby clothes and shabbier accents has no place in any respectable tale. I shall enjoy seeing you—”

  Suddenly, Charlotte had a notion, and as soon as she had it, she’d done it, and as soon as she’d done it, her mind caught up with her heart and she told herself it was too ridiculous to ever work, so sit down Charlotte, for God’s sake. But done it was. Charlotte dashed over to the sofa where Brunty sat bound and tied, bent over, and screamed in his pale face full of pages:

  “THE END!”

  Brunty promptly sucked his head back down between his covers and snapped shut. His brass lock clicked firmly.

  “That was wonderful!” Anne squealed.

  “That’s dash useful.” Emily grinned.

  “What’d you have to go and do that for?” Branwell protested. “He was going to say something really dreadful and now I’ve missed it.”

  “We can’t go listening to villains when they want to make their grand speeches and devil’s bargains,” Charlotte said, as though she’d always known it would work, never doubted it for a moment. “Best to end the story before they get their side in. Now, no more Thump Parliaments in the presence of strange books. We’ll . . . we’ll find our moment. We’ll find a way. Our way. After all, we invented Glass Town. The least they could do would be to sp
are us a cup of—”

  Charlotte did not get a chance to finish, for just then, they landed with a jolt, a tumble, and a vicious thump on the brilliant, bright earth of a new city.

  ELEVEN

  The Problem of Primarily Scurrilous Brunty

  Ochreopolis sprawled and towered and twisted in as many shades of yellow as Port Ruby had done in red. But this city had got rather bored of glass halfway through the building of it and decided to haul in a lot of other stuff to fancy up the place. From up above, it looked like pictures of Oxford that they’d pored over in Father’s books, if Oxford had run off with Vienna and got itself in trouble. Golden glass bridges arched over a branching river of bubbling champagne. Lemon and banana and golden apple and quince trees shaded slender alleys that wound through patches of saffron shadows and bright sunshine. The people walking here and there wore yellow rain slickers and ivory wigs. Burly amber glass walls closed it all in like York or Chester. Three butter-colored crystal gates let folk out and in.

  But of course, balloons need no gates.

  The towers beyond the walls were not straight and tall and proud like Port Ruby’s. They sagged tiredly, and leaned woozily, and bowed like old, old trees until their pointed roofs almost touched the ground. The buildings of Ochreopolis were only partly mortared out of good, strong yellow glass. Mostly, they were much softer stuff: great swathes of yellowed and yellowing paper, ripped from novels that must have been published in the land of giants, for any one page stood as high as a shire horse. Those same giants had folded and creased and wrapped their pages around slabs of glass to make spindly ochre belfries and squat chartreuse shops and dog-eared daffodil chapels with round topaz windows.

  Bestminster Abbey set them down in the middle of a cobble-glass square the color of honey. Two lion statues, both presumably of Copenhagen, glared down as they wheeled round and round, trying to look in every direction at once. The city was far too beautiful to have one single wicked soul living in it. But the balloon assured them that this was the right place, the P-District, where all the criminals and villains and misbehavers of Glass Town ended up sooner or later. Bestminster then promptly folded his giant balloon-body back into two ordinary suitcases, and so fast Charlotte actually felt her head spin.

  They could not see anything like a prison, no matter which direction they looked. One fat tower, bent over almost in the shape of a lowercase n, had a sign out front that read: NORTH & NOUGHT EDITING SERVICES. The round stained glass (and stained page) building next to it, shaped rather like a pineapple, advertised itself as HUME & HALFORD PRESS. Another tower, whose top leaned one way, while its middle leaned the other, to make a sort of sloppy lightning bolt, had a handsome blond-wood post that announced the owners as COOPER & LOCKHART PURVEYORS OF FINE BINDINGS. The biggest of them all was a clutch of shorter towers all bursting out of the ground in the same spot like sticks of dynamite crammed into a golden pail. The towers twisted and bulged and doddered and slumped in every which direction. The writing on their page-and-glass walls all ran together, creasing sharply or tearing gently. Someone had circled several of the larger letters in dark tawny ink so that, from the left-most tower to the right, they could read: BUD & TREE PUBLISHING HOUSE.

  “Look!” cried Emily, laughing and pointing. “It’s Romeo and Juliet!”

  “The people?” asked Branwell, who at this point was quite willing to believe anything from any story could get up in Glass Town and walk about and swoon from a balcony.

  “No, the play!” said Charlotte. She pointed just where Emily had: at the folded, mortared pages that wound round and round the glass buildings of Ochreopolis. The circled R in BUD & TREE and the O in PUBLISHING HOUSE were the first letters on the title page of some enormous edition of Romeo and Juliet. The scenes and speeches chased each other up the height of the tower, stopping at odd angles where the paper jackknifed and split to make corners, and starting up again beneath banks of windows. Suddenly, without meaning to, the children found themselves running toward Bud & Tree Publishing House. It felt so good to run after all that crouching and hiding and flying and dying. They called out all the titles they could find in the brickwork as they ran:

  “A Midsummer Night’s Dream!” Anne giggled.

  “Much Ado About Nothing!” Branwell whooped.

  “Hamlet!” said Emily as she spotted the telltale H in HOUSE. “And that’s . . . well, that bit’s a cookbook, I think!”

  “But it’s all wrong.” Charlotte frowned, standing at the base of the tower built out of Romeo and Juliet. She clutched Brunty tightly in her arms. “That’s not how it goes. Look closer!”

  And on the winding half-glass walls they read in letters two feet high:

  Two households, both alike in dignity

  In fair Angria where we lay our scene . . .

  Charlotte bit her lip. “It ought to be Verona! ‘In fair Verona where we lay our scene’!”

  Branwell pointed at the pages bent back to make a pretty curtained window. “There, too, see? That should be Capulet and Montague!”

  But the famous family names were nowhere to be found. Instead, Shakespeare’s speech now read:

  Three civil brawls, bred of an airy word-o,

  By thee, old Elrington and proud Douro . . .

  “Now, that makes no sense at all!” Emily grumbled. She loved her Shakespeare and did not enjoy seeing it mangled in the least. They’d done Romeo and Juliet Easter last for Papa and Aunt Elizabeth and Tabitha in the front parlor. Charlotte had made such a marvelous, cruel Romeo, and Emily thought she’d died as Juliet rather well. Near the pointed crystal cap of the tower, the last lines of the play flowed in golden ink:

  For never was a story of more woe

  Than this of Bertha and the Marquis of Douro.

  “Why’s it even called Romeo and Juliet if it’s about somebody named Bertha?” Emily grumbled.

  But the Marquis of Douro . . . she did know that name. It was the name they’d given to the dashing and dastardly villain of their games. It sounded dreadfully exciting, with all those vowels. But she would not say so, not in front of Brunty. “What an ugly name anyhow! Anyone called Bertha’s got no place in a romance!”

  “P’raps Juliet was only ever her middle name.” Branwell shrugged, unconcerned, when it came right down to it, about the fates of Capulets in Glass Town. He’d never much cared for Romeo and Juliet, really. He preferred Henry V or Richard III, the plays where people fought fabulous battles and died all bloody and afraid and yelling about horses.

  “This one says The Glass Town English Dictionary, Fourth Edition,” mused Anne, peering at the next tower over. “It’s the Oxford English Dictionary, everyone knows that. How can there be a Wellington here if there’s no Oxford?” She squinted in the sun. “Parson: any one of the million male offspring of Parr, the Salmon King, who ruled the Kingdom of Roe Head with a silver fin during the Sea Age. But that’s not even a little bit what it means! Papa’s a parson! That means he leads Sunday services at the chapel and . . . and . . . you know, Tabitha always says he’s the man to see for the marrying and the burying. It’s nothing to do with whose son he is. And he’s obviously not a fish!”

  A voice came whipping toward them, quite cross and quite yellowed. How a voice could have gotten yellowed, none of them could have exactly explained, but it was, and so it could be.

  “Oy! You! For Gutenberg’s sake! NO LOITERING! I’ve had enough of you inkin’ gangs of youths and hoodlums footnoting about on my property! If you’ve got no business here, kindly erase yourselves immediately!”

  A rather short, strange man came running out of Bud & Tree Publishing House. His body was made up all of book bindings, the fancy, old-fashioned kind you found on very ancient or very precious books, the kind that had lovely, mysterious names like Coptic and Bradel and Girdle and Sammelband. Leather, silk, and flaxen bindings crisscrossed, looped, knotted, and stitched themselves into the shape of a long-nosed, high-cheeked fellow in a suit with long tails and buckled shoes. T
hat dashing suit coat was fastened with row after row after row of brass book-clasps. His long leather hair was lashed back handsomely with a Coptic knot and he wore a long, fierce page-cutter with a bone hilt at his hip like a saber.

  “But we do have business!” protested Branwell. “Only we’re meant to do it at a prison, and all you’ve got here are publishers!”

  “But we’re just lost, not loitering, thank you very much,” said Anne huffily, for she only liked to be accused of things she’d actually done.

  The binding man narrowed his eyes at them. “What business is that, then?”

  “Brunty!” Charlotte and Emily said together, and Charlotte gave the book in her arms a not-too-gentle thump.

  “We’re to hand him over to Mr. Bud at the P-House,” Branwell explained, trying to sound as local and as gruff as he could. “So mind your own business, sir!”

  “Well, I am Mr. Bud, all right, and this is my house, and it is where we keep the baddies. You know, the typos and the misprints, the damaged copies and the rough drafts and the rude little boys like you, Mr. Mouth!”

  Branwell opened that very mouth and shut it again.

  “Don’t mind him, Mr. Bud,” Charlotte sighed. “He’s not a baddy, he just acts like one for fun sometimes. Is this the prison, then? Are you the warden? Mr. Brunty is rather heavy, and rather unpleasant. We’d be glad to be rid of him.”

  Mr. Bud straightened his ropy sheep-hide shoulders. “It is a publishing house, madam, and I am an editor. But for wicked, dirty, nasty books like your Brunt-Brunt there, it’s much the same difference. All right, ink it all to hell! Bring him in and we’ll get him sorted on the double sharp and the triple quick.”

  Charlotte shifted Brunty’s unabridged bulk into Emily’s arms so that she could carry both suitcases. Being the oldest sometimes meant being everyone’s boss, but mostly, it meant being everyone’s pack mule. Branwell and Anne ran on ahead, still calling out half-familiar bits of the mismatched writing on the walls. They all followed Mr. Bud into the many towers of Bud & Tree Publishing House, where they found a very pleasant lobby with a large brass desk on one end, a tall golden hat-rack on the other. Between the two spread a wide, elegant floor tiled with pages from The Canterbury Tales, only this Canterbury Tales seemed not to have been satisfied with The Knight’s Tale and The Miller’s Tale. It also had a story called The Governess’s Tale, and another called The Bluestocking’s Tale, and still another called The Case of the Missing Princess, which all four of them knew wasn’t even the right sort of thing to be in The Canterbury Tales in the first place. The walls were lined with massive, ancient printing presses like doors, their wood so old and strong it had almost turned to stone. But they could only see the backs of the great machines—the rest of their hulking bodies disappeared into thick, frosted, amber glass.