The Glass Town Game

  “Ghost?” Charlotte repeated, sure she’d heard it wrong.

  “Ghost,” Mr. Tree repeated, sure the child was deaf.

  “Post?” said Emily hopefully.

  “Ghost,” answered Mr. Bud firmly. “The Ghost Office. How else do you get your messages into the hands what want them? I can’t think how a post could deliver letters. It hasn’t got hands, you know. If a body dies along the highway, sometimes their spirit keeps walking or riding or driving a cart up and down the same patch of lane, back and forth, as ghosts will do. Well, back in the timey mists, the first Marquis of Douro, may the Genii bless his soul, got the inking gorgeous idea to give those poor wights a job. Every man’s happier on the gainful, yeah? As long as they were haunting this and that, why not take a sack of letters and parcels and suchlike while they’re moping on their way? A ghost doesn’t have to obey the laws of the mortal world. They can find anybody, anywhere, so long as you’ve got a name and a stamp. They just listen to the earth or the heavenly spheres or something. Can’t say I’ve ever understood it. Now, Glass Town has regular routes all up and down the county! Wonder of the modern world!”

  “Ah, but even patriots like ourselves must admit Glass Town is nothing to Gondal on that score. For”—the tall bookend-man cleared his throat politely—“obvious reasons. A Gondalier can get a letter from Elseraden to Zedora before the ink is dry.”

  “Wait! What reasons? They’re not obvious to us,” interrupted Emily, wiping the sweat from her forehead.

  The editors glanced at one another knowingly, then away guiltily, then at their hands furtively, then toward heaven at last. “There are . . . ahem . . . many more ghosts in Gondal than in Glass Town, my dear,” Mr. Tree mumbled shamefacedly. “War is such a very dreadful thing, when the singing and the marching and the hurrahs are all done.”

  “Don’t you go feeling sorry for them! Gondal attacked us! They’re getting their just desserts, and I hope there’s a fat cherry on top for each of them.” Mr. Bud stomped his foot. “Why shouldn’t there be more of them dead than us? Why have we got to feel guilty for winning? Well, I won’t! We weren’t doing a thing but minding our own business when Napoleon decided he just had to be Napoleon and shoot up the place of a Sunday. Old Boney could end it all in an instant, if he’d only inking well go home.”

  “But he won’t,” Mr. Tree sighed. “Not now. None of them will. We’re in it till the end, I’m afraid.” And he would say no more.

  “We know a man called Napoleon as well,” Charlotte said very carefully. “He was . . . much the same. Perhaps it’s the name that does it.”

  Emily wanted to tell them not to worry, that it would be all right. Their war was only a bit behind hers, you see, and once events caught up, Napoleon would die alone on a rock in the middle of the ocean like he did back home, and everyone would be able to speak French and be happy and eat vol-au-vent again. But she couldn’t be sure of that rock, not completely sure. Would there still be battles called Trafalgar and Waterloo in a place where Leftenant Gravey could come back to life a hundred times and Old Boney really was a lot of old bones with guns for arms?

  Mr. Bud waved his braided hand. “Yes, well, I hope you drowned him so thoroughly even his grandchildren never got dry. Bah! Enough of the war! I was bragging, and you shouldn’t interrupt a fellow bragging unless you want to cause a stroke.” He cleared his throat to praise the Glass Town post again. “If you think a horse can shake a leg, you’ve never seen a ghost gallop. Our local’ll be along presently. I’ve already rung the bell.”

  And indeed, down from the highest windows of the towers came a pale mustard-colored shade, all smoke and sunlight. They could see straight through him as he circled down to where they stood, especially as he had several holes through him made by some sword or other. The ghost left a trail of frost in the air like skate scratches in an ice pond. His clothes were beautiful velvet tatters, his face long and sad and noble, with a tidy beard, but his back and shoulder were oddly twisted. He wore a white rose on his tunic and tall crown on his head.

  “Em,” whispered Charlotte. Her breath fogged, though it had been warm a moment before. But Emily just stared. Her mouth hung open. She clasped her hands together in delight. She didn’t seem to notice the sudden cold at all.

  “Em!” Charlotte whispered harder, and jabbed her sister in the ribs with her thumb.

  “A ghost, Charlotte! A real ghost, do you see him? He’s amazing!”

  “Emily!” Charlotte hissed. The spirit was almost upon them. “I think that’s Richard the Third!”

  “What? Don’t be silly. He died on Bosworth Field! I don’t even think there is a Bosworth Field here!”

  “I think there’s everything here we’ve got back home, only turned around and shaken up till it doesn’t know its own name,” Charlotte sighed, but though everything was as dire as any war for any roses, she couldn’t help smiling all the same. It was Richard. She knew that face, from the woodcuts and paintings in their history books, from the illustration beside the list of characters in their collection of Mr. Shakespeare’s plays. If they had a Napoleon in Gondal, and a Duke of Wellington in Glass Town, why not Richard and the Princes in the tower and all the rest? She knew it was him, she was so sure! Dick the Bad, as big as life and twice as dead!

  Suddenly Emily knew it, too. The hunchback, the put-upon expression, the crown! She clapped her hands like they’d just seen a magician pull an English monarch out of his hat. Both girls quickly remembered themselves as subjects to the Crown, even if the Crown was in another world and stone dead. They knelt before the last Plantagenet.

  “I suppose there are roads enough through Bosworth now,” Emily said thoughtfully.

  “There you are, Dickie, my lad, there’s you set,” Mr. Bud chirped bossily. He handed a note card to the King of England as though it wasn’t the most remarkable thing that had ever happened. Richard took it without complaint. He inclined his head toward the kneeling girls, touched, perhaps, that someone would still think to do such a thing. He laid his misty amber hands upon their heads and looked down with love and a sadness as deep as the grave. When he spoke, no more than a whisper, his voice was misty and amber, too:

  “So wise, so young, they say, do never live long.”

  King Richard pressed the card to his wounded breast, and melted away like butter in summer. Warmth returned to the lobby of Bud & Tree Publishing House.

  “Rude,” Charlotte said when the King had gone.

  “What a morbid thing to say to a person you’ve just met!” Emily scoffed. “Just because you’re a ghost doesn’t mean you have to go around saying creepy things all the time. What’s the matter with how do you do, happy to take your letter, isn’t it a bit of weather we’re having? I suppose nobody raps a King’s knuckles for bad manners, even if they clearly should.” The color drained from her cheeks. “You don’t think he’s cursed us, do you? Richard is meant to be a villain, after all!”

  Mr. Bud chatted away at them, too fast and too loud, trying to outrace and outshout both his guilty conscience and any mention of ghostly curses. But Charlotte and Emily kept staring after Richard’s ghost, trying to memorize forever the vision of a King delivering their post.

  “What Mr. Bud means to say,” interrupted Mr. Tree, “and what he is not saying very well at all, is that the Wildfell Ball’s on tonight, up at Lavendry-on-Puce.”

  “Good gracious, we haven’t got time for a ball,” Charlotte scoffed. “My brother and sister have been kidnapped by a book! I’m not going to dance while they’re tied to some horrid chair in Verdopolis getting that vicious acid dripped on them till they give up everything they know.” Charlotte had begun to wobble. It started in her legs and moved everywhere, all through her, till she thought she might come apart. All she could see was poor Branwell lying on that red glass street, bleeding and bleeding and bleeding. . . .

  “I can’t be wrong again,” Charlotte whispered. No one bothered to hear.

  “Ugh, I’ll tell you twic
e for free and three times for a penny, I’d trade that whole town for a pair of wool socks.” Mr. Bud grumbled on as though Charlotte hadn’t said a word. “They’ve got a ball or a festival or a holiday or a feast for every day of the calendar. You’d think they’d get sick of it! Too much pastry spoils the beef!”

  “It’s to benefit the war hospital, Mr. Bud! Don’t be ungracious. We must all do our part.”

  “Oh, they always say it’s to benefit St. Tosh’s Home for Poncery and Blatherall. But really, it’s only ever to benefit their bellies with donations of champagne and cakes!”

  Emily clapped her hands to get the editors’ attention. “This is ridiculous! Mr. Bud, Mr. Tree, we are not going to a party. We are going to Gondal. We are going to save Annie and Branwell! What kind of person could drink champagne at a time like this? There’s no time for rouge and fans and all that nonsense. They’re getting farther away with every second and all you want to talk about is cake!”

  Mr. Bud shook his leather-lashed head. “My dearies, you misunderstand. It’ll be an inking battlefield for the likes of you. Rouge? Fans? Champagne? Yes, you will, for their sake. With all that frippery you must arm and armor yourselves. They’ll all be there, every one of those high-class ponies with silk for snot. Wellington, Douro, Byron, Elrington, the Duke and Duchess, the Queen of the Blues. You’ve got half a clever tongue between the two of you and a ripping sob story in your pockets. So play your hand. Mind you, you look like a couple of spaniels who’ve been at the mud again, but Ginevra will get you sorted out. Be big, be bright, tell your tale! Go about with hat in hand and hand on heart and make the ball benefit you.”

  Emily let the book-binding man natter. She glanced sidelong over the ledge of Mr. Tree’s desk. Her burglar’s instincts pricked up. She couldn’t help herself. They needed to press on and Mr. Bud simply insisted on talking and talking and talking. He liked talking and Mr. Tree liked listening so much neither of them saw Emily’s quick fingers disappear into the desk and then into her pockets without a sound.

  Charlotte desperately wanted to run, all the way to Gondal if she had to. Running seemed far more useful than dancing. But perhaps the publishers were right. Perhaps they needed friends. Perhaps two young girls from Yorkshire could not invade a country entirely by themselves. And perhaps, if the highest of the high were all together in one place, they would have brought enough grog with them to revive all the elephants in the Alps. The rich and the political were very partial to their own skin, after all.

  I can’t be wrong again.

  For once, Charlotte did not know what to do. She had failed. Half her family was gone. Maria and Lizzie had been the oldest their whole lives and never lost even one of them. She had been wrong when she said they couldn’t be hurt. What if she was about to be wrong again? The Wildfell Ball sounded like the right sort of thing for a girl in a story to do, and they were in a story, in a manner of speaking. But people made the wrong choices all the time in stories. Wrong choices were what made stories go. But making one for a doll was ever so much different than making one for Bran and Anne. What if the only thing to do was get into Bestminster and run for Gondal, run and never stop, no matter who shot at them, no matter whether she had any idea what to do when they got there? Someone else be oldest, Charlotte wept in her heart, without a single tear showing on her face. Someone else.

  Emily reached out and tucked a strand of loose brown hair behind her sister’s ear. She smiled into Charlotte’s frantic eyes. Emily tried to give her back a bit of that magic spell of bossiness she doled out so freely to the rest of them.

  “We will attend the ball, Mr. Bud, Mr. Tree,” Emily said with a hard brightness in her voice.

  Mr. Tree laid a hand over his bookend-heart. “Poor innocent lambs fed to Gondal’s fattest lion! Woe betide these unfortunate maidens! You know the song. Get a Duke or two on your side and I daresay you’ll have your brother and sister back by the crack of the Sunday church bell.”

  Mr. Bud and Mr. Tree beamed eagerly at them, and for a moment, Charlotte and Emily almost believed everything would be all right.

  THIRTEEN

  Sir Rotter and Lady Rubbish

  Deep down in the earth beneath Ochreopolis, an awful buzzing sound filled the dark.

  “Lay off it, you dog-ears,” grunted Brunty, the Magazine Man, Master Spy of Gondal. Inky beads of sweat stood out on his papery brow. “I’m not afraid to smack you one if you keep pulling and shoving and biting. . . . ow! You little splitter! If I drop you, you won’t land in Mummy’s lap, you know. You’ll land in a broken neck on wet black nothing, so hold bloody still!”

  “Our mother’s dead, you great glocky beast!” Anne snarled and bit their captor again savagely, though she couldn’t see where her teeth landed. “Let us go!”

  “You’ll get worse than a bite when Charlotte finds us,” Branwell scoffed with confidence. No one could beat his older sister for punishments when a game got spoiled. He couldn’t help it. His sister drove him sideways, but when he was in trouble, he turned to her as toward the sun. That’s what came of being the oldest, he suspected. Nothing more than that. All the same, Branwell wondered what it would be like to be that sun instead. “Believe me. She once sentenced a doll to vivisection. I almost feel sorry for you.”

  The Magazine Man chuckled softly. “She won’t find us, young master Lackbrains. Haven’t you heard about bad news? It travels fast and it travels invisible. And just look at me! Have you ever seen worse?”

  But they couldn’t see a thing beyond blackness. They hadn’t seen a thing but blackness since the Magazine Man dragged them underground and shoved that horrible machine with its green and blue lights back into his seemingly bottomless waistcoat pocket. At first, it was a very thick, hot blackness, a blackness you could taste on your tongue and swallow and feel very sick over, like bad treacle. Then, as Brunty plowed through lightless tunnels and caverns and catacombs at the speed of wickedness, scrambling down ladders of shadow and shade, it changed into a cool, slick blackness that ran all up and down their arms and legs like midnight rainwater. Now, wherever they were, so deep beneath the city they could no longer hear the distant, muffled, comforting sounds of their sisters arguing with somebody or other, trying to save them, surely, trying to get to them, the blackness froze them to the bones of their thumbs. It chewed at their fingertips and slashed at their noses. And this new blackness had a sound, too. It buzzed and thrummed and whirred. The buzz came from everywhere at once and nowhere at all. It bounced and echoed off invisible walls. Branwell thought Brunty was making it when it first began. Then he thought perhaps somehow he himself was doing it. Then, he was quite sure Anne was playing some silly game to annoy him. But he couldn’t tell one idiot thing in the dark, really. It might be the buzzing of a bee in South America for all he or Anne knew about their situation. All together the buzzing and the cold and the dark ground against them like the spinning gears of some terrible factory where winter and despair were made and it would not stop; it just would not.

  Brunty wheezed in the shadows. They could feel the beating of his gluey heart. His breath smelled like a burnt-down library.

  “Now listen, you little rotters,” the Magazine Man whispered, though there was no one to hear them in the deeps of the earth, “I’m going to set you down for half a tock and you might think it’s a swell idea to run off, but I promise you, you’ll get nowhere fast but dead if you do. I know these twisty-turnies like my own covers, front and back, but you can’t see in the dark any better than a blind, drunk hedgehog. Understand your old Brunto?” The creature sniffed the air. He turned right. “Postscript! There’s a chasm three inches to your left that bottoms out in a subterranean ocean just teeming with ravenous wormsharks and at least one immortal three-eyed leviathan, so root your stupid feet to the ground, right?”

  Branwell trembled, and was glad Anne couldn’t see it. Anne. Why couldn’t old Brunty have grabbed Charlotte instead? Anne was little and slow and any time he had a really good slaughter
going among the soldiers in the room at the top of the stairs, she gave them all sweet, tender burials and resurrections in Tabitha’s butter dishes. What could he do with an Anne?

  Anne looked up at him in the dark. He couldn’t see her, not really, but he could see a sliver of the shine in her big eyes.

  “Don’t leave me,” she whispered. “Don’t you run off.”

  She didn’t think he would. But she couldn’t be sure. If only the Magazine Man had snatched Emily instead, Anne would have felt much safer. At any minute, Branwell might get the idea that he could save her better by dashing off to do some foolish thing with a trebuchet, a bucket of nails, and a bloodsucking bat, or whatever other savagery came into his head. She grabbed his hand and squeezed so tight his knuckles popped.

  “Right, Mr. Brunty. We’ll be good.” But Bran felt rather small and childish saying that, and he hated that feeling more than old porridge or new shirt collars. So he added: “For now.”

  Brunty clapped his illustrated hands. Anne could hear it in the dark, dry and raspy and sneering. “Oh, very brave, Little Lord Backtalk!”

  The buzzing grew louder and more pointed while their kidnapper rummaged and rustled with some bit of presumably frightful business Bran and Anne strained to see. Finally there was a popping, sucking noise and the blackness fizzled away in a gout of greenish-blue light. Brunty had got his uncanny contraption working again, that strange and sickly hourglass frame full of weeping saucers. It glowed on an outcropping of shining obsidian stone, bubbling with acid and sizzling with tiny forks of lightning. The ghostly lantern-light flickered over the pages of Brunty’s brutal face, his scroll knob belly, his glossy evening-edition hands. It turned his spectacles to spectral green lamps. And they could see, now, that Brunty was all bad news. The newspapers on his waistcoat announced WAR! and MURDER! and ALL-DESTROYING FLOOD CONSUMES PLANET in giant headlines. The magazines that formed his meaty hands showed terrible woodcuts of famine and mayhem. The master spy raised the capital O’s of his eyes to heaven and patted his waistcoat for something—what had he forgotten? Ah! A tiny glass vial of sand, which in any other light, would have shone red.