The Glass Town Game

  NINETEEN

  Dulce Et Decorum Est

  Bran could hear his sister whispering in her narrow red and blue bed. She’d drawn the blankets all the way up over her head and curled her body into a tight ball. And she was whispering. It drove him mad when she did it at home, but in the silence of the Bastille, the sound was like rusted nails dragged up and down his spine.

  “Who are you talking to, Annie? If you don’t button your lips to your teeth in a half second I’m going to leap out the window.”

  “I’m sorry,” sighed Anne. Her head popped up from beneath the covers. “I can’t help it. I always talk to Victoria before bed. Can’t sleep if I don’t.”

  “Victoria is lying on the floor in the room at the top of the stairs with a crack in one eye. Maybe they’re right about us. You’re mad anyhow.”

  Anne’s eyes blazed in the dark. “Don’t you talk about her. She’s mine. Go to sleep. Maybe if you’re lucky, you’ll dream about frogs pulling out your fingernails and wake up in a good mood.”

  But Branwell did not wake up in a good mood. He woke cold and stiff and out of sorts. He rose long before Anne and sat at the lonely little wooden table, watching her breathe, her blond hair sticky and sweaty against her forehead, the space between her fine eyebrows wrinkled with dreaming worry. Branwell was filled with such a desire to paint her that he felt he could very possibly die of it. He hadn’t drawn anything since they came to Glass Town and it made his fingers ache like winter cold. He hadn’t any pen or any paper and the whole thing was hopeless. But there little Anne lay, with her left arm thrown up above her head at such an artistic angle. . . .

  Branwell picked up one of the bowls of cold gruel leftover from yesterday or the day before. He had no notion of how long they’d been there, really. None at all. But after the tray of brown bread and brown soup and brown tea, they could never face that gluey gray stuff. So he dumped it out on the table and smeared it all round till the wood was covered in a fine, thin, even silvery film of gruel. He used his fingernails to outline Anne’s arm, the tendrils of her hair, the way her brow bone joined the top of her nose, her pointed chin. He warmed up as he worked, until he felt like he had a hearth inside him, full up of scalding embers, and as long as he kept drawing, he would never be cold again, not ever.

  Branwell looked down at the Anne he’d made. It was beautiful, he thought. His fingernails had made the whole thing so delicate and fragile, like patterns in ice. The best work he’d ever done, and he could never hang it on a wall, unless he nailed up the whole table.

  “Bran?” Anne said groggily, coming round to the waking world. “What are you doing?”

  Branwell smeared his hand through the gruel-painting. Beautiful? It was nothing, just like everything else he ever tried to do. He did try. He tried to make stories as good as Charlotte’s and Emily’s, but his only ever shone when he killed somebody or blew up a castle or bled a spy for secrets. He did it as often as he could, chasing that shine. But even his best murder never sparkled quite like one of Charlotte’s scenes of strolling through the gardens with Zenobia Elrington, or Emily’s making Mary Percy run across the windswept moors to meet her lover. Branwell supposed that even Anne’s stupid, secret Victoria game glowed in the dark under her blankets. Put his slop-painting next to anything they did and it looked just like what it was: gruel.

  “And I’ll be grueling my whole life, won’t I?” he grumbled darkly to himself. It seemed a very Glass Town thing to say.

  Anne rubbed her eyes and yawned. “Are you ready?” she said.

  “All right, Anne. Let’s bust ourselves out of jail. What do you say?”

  Anne nodded eagerly, sniffling. Down below in the courtyard, a bullfrog shouted at a tree frog for marching slower than the rest of them.

  Branwell bolstered his sister up on his shoulders so she could peek through the little window at the top of the door. Bonaparte and his rosy lady-friend seemed to glare at them from the painting like strict parents. Not angry, just disappointed.

  “There’s nobody there!” Anne whispered. It was a very loud whisper.

  Bran grunted under her weight. “What do you mean there’s nobody there? That’s not possible!” It bruised his newfound sense of importance to think that they weren’t being guarded by at least two enormous, muscular, battle-hardened frogs.

  Anne hopped down. “Well, it is possible, Bran. I’m not lying. Why would I lie?”

  “Why wouldn’t they leave a guard? The whole reason Brunty took us in the first place was because he heard us talking about how maybe, somehow, probably we sort of made this place happen. That . . . well . . . I haven’t had a chance to really thoroughly philosophize the whole business yet, but that . . . that makes us a bit . . . a bit like a King and a Queen, doesn’t it?” That didn’t feel right. But it didn’t feel so wrong, either. “I should think they’d want to keep an eye on the Crown.”

  But Anne wasn’t listening to her brother pondering whether or not she was a goddess. She was staring at the big black lock in the door with her hands on her hips and the tip of her tongue poking out of the corner of her mouth, thinking. The lock was the size of her head. It had extremely serious-looking bolts all over it.

  “You can’t stare it open, you know,” grumbled Bran. “There’s no key in here. I checked while you were pretending to be asleep. And nothing to pick with either. Unless you want to have a go at picking a lock with a handful of cooked porridge.”

  “No,” Anne mused. “I shouldn’t think porridge would work.”

  She looked up at her brother and grinned mischievously. All her tears were gone now. She waggled her thin, little fingers at him. Then, Anne stuck her forefinger and middle finger into the huge black lock and turned her hand. It hurt very much. She strained. Her face turned red.

  “Good Lord, Anne, you are thick. I never wanted to say, but out of the four of us . . .”

  The tumblers groaned. The lock creaked. The door opened.

  “What? How?” Branwell spluttered.

  Anne pulled her hand back. She giggled as quietly as she could, but her voice echoed into the hallway beyond. She wiggled her fingers again.

  “Skeleton key!” she crowed.

  Branwell cursed himself for not thinking of it. He stomped out into the hall and started off in a direction. Any direction, as long as he got to choose it. Anne skipped along behind him, explaining herself proudly.

  “Skeleton key! Get it? It just came to me! I thought if time really flies here, and spirits are really spirits, and Brown Bess musket balls really are brown and called Bess, I thought: Well, I’ve got bones, haven’t I? I’ve got a skeleton! And nobody else here does except Napoleon, so that’d make a pretty excellent kind of sense for Old Boney’s personal prison.”

  “Yes, yes, you’re so clever. Now, be clever quietly, or we shall be caught and it’ll be fingernails for the both of us.”

  Anne blanched. They crept silently down the long, stone hall. There were other doors punched into the rocky wall, but all the barred windows were dark and empty. In fact, everything in the Bastille was rather dark. They hadn’t any candles, so there was nothing to be done about it, but Anne shuddered anyway. At least there didn’t seem to be any cobwebs or spiders lurking about. The endless halls and staircases were brutally clean, and that made Bran shudder. Every place in the world had cobwebs. What demonic power would it take to keep a place this big and deep and unhappy clean?

  They stumbled and snuck and tiptoed for hours. Branwell hadn’t really any idea which way to go, but he’d chosen this way, and he meant to stick to it. This way was his way. It would lead them true. Eventually. He realized he was viciously hungry. How long had it been since porridge? How long had they been here? How long had they slept?

  “Bran, look!” Anne pointed up ahead.

  A dark golden light spilled out into the hallway. They hurried after it. They were so thirsty for light!

  The light was coming from the floor below them. It shone up through a little
row of alcoves and pillars in the endless, blank stone wall. It wasn’t endless and blank at all. They stood on a long balcony overlooking a room filled with candles, torches, and three hearths at full blaze. Branwell and Anne tucked themselves behind two pillars and peered over the edge.

  “That’s Napoleon!” Bran hissed excitedly.

  “Shush!” Anne hissed back.

  Napoleon Bonaparte hunched over his war table in that glowing room. The firelight reflected on his long, white bones. It must have been his office, or at least his strategy room. Miniature models of the cities of Glass Town covered every table and chair. Papers littered the floor. Marengo, his loyal rooster, roosted by one of the hearths, his own green flames banked and quiet, snoring his high, trilling chicken snores. One of the armored frogs stood at attention. His poleax glittered by candlelight.

  Brunty was there, too, sitting at Old Boney’s side. He looked exhausted. His pages hung limp. The headlines on his waistcoat read: IS THIS THE END FOR BRAVE BRUNTY? and THE INDUSTRY OF WAR GRINDS ON, and DULCE ET DECORUM EST PRO PATRIA MORI. The wooden scroll-knob of his belly lay open. The bat-tree burbled away weakly inside. Napoleon poked at the machine that powered Brunty now. He lifted up a few of the thick saucers with the barrel of his rifle-arm and let them fall again.

  “Is all very well and good, mon ami, but what am I meant to do with it? How shall we make more? We can’t even take it out of you. You just fall down. At first, it was a bit funny, my best spy going up and down and up and down like a windup Brunty. But now what? One of these does me no good. I need one for every beautiful toad in Gondal. And then a few more. And a few more after. And what are we calling it? Bat-tree? That’s awful. Misérable. No style to it.”

  “It’s a Voltaic Pyle,” Brunty wheezed. “It’s devilishly simple, really. The discs are copper, zinc, and silver, wrapped in scraps of a housewife’s dress or something, soaked in brine. Back where it came from, it makes an electrical current, and the wires conduct it, and it stores the energy for you. It’s their magic. Their only magic. But once I got it across the borderlands, it perked up some. It woke up. Our bouncing baby Pyle is”— the Magazine Man coughed—“a little more interesting over here.”

  “Voltaic Pyle. Too long,” Napoleon grunted. “Monsieur Grenouille, come up with something better!”

  “Right away, sir,” the bundle of cast-off armor shaped like a frog answered. He sunk his chin into his chest, deep in thought.

  Brunty closed the scroll-knob. He wiped dried ink off his papery mouth.

  “Our man in Glass Town is handling the rest,” the Magazine Man said. “I sent him a ghost with a letter that explains all the technical rubbish that weakling Volta said to me. It must be terribly sad to be a breather. They break so easily. At any rate, it won’t be a problem. Our boy’s infiltrated the army. No shortage of supplies in Wellington’s tents. The first shipment will be arriving tonight. Twelve. They’ve got three of everything over there while we’ve got one or none. Isn’t that always the way?”

  “Not for so long, mon frere,” Bonaparte said affectionately, and patted Brunty on the shoulder. He wiped the grimy ink off on his coat.

  “I’m tired, Boney,” Brunty rasped. “I think it’s running down. It would appear that bat-trees don’t last. I don’t know how much longer I can stomach it all.”

  Napoleon held a rifle-barrel hand to his forehead. He yanked off his bicorne hat and threw it across the room. “I am also, my boy! Do you think I’m not? But what else was I made for, if not this? With these arms, who else could I have been? I don’t even remember anything else but this. This war, and Josephine. I miss her so, Brunty. I miss the smell of her rosy hair and the way she stabbed me with her thorns whenever I held her.” He held up his rifles to the fire. “What else is there in the world but thorns and gunfire and tiredness?”

  “See?” Bran mouthed. “We should be helping them!”

  “Help them make an army of acid lightning bat-tree bombs like Brunty? Are you mad?” Anne whispered back. “If he’s so tired he ought to have a nap!”

  “Well, what’s Leftenant Gravey, then? He’s been brought back loads of times.”

  “Leftenant Gravey doesn’t shoot green electric rubbish out of his nose! Doesn’t that seem like an awfully big difference? Bran! Stop gawping at that nasty old tyrant. We have to keep on!”

  Branwell dragged his feet. In all their games and stories, in all the times he’d led their toy army, pretending he was Napoleon, that he was conquering Europe and the downstairs parlor, he never could have imagined he’d be so close to the man he could smell his cologne. He didn’t want to go back to the black maze of the Bastille’s halls. He was meant to be in charge now. But what was Bran in charge of? Trudging along in the dark? That wasn’t any kind of a thing to lord it over.

  Down more staircases. Through more corridors. Past more empty rooms.

  Until one of the rooms wasn’t empty. Twilight and candlelight streamed through the bars of another heavy door like all the other heavy doors. Only this one was cut out of thick green glass. The window was bigger, too. They didn’t need to stack Anne on top to see inside. They looked at each other, trying to talk it over without talking out loud. Should we keep moving? It’s just some poor soldier or something, I expect. But there’s no one else in these cells. Maybe we should let the poor fellow out, too.

  They raised their eyes above the stone sill of the barred window.

  Napoleon had locked up a mountain of toys in a prison cell. Anne had never seen so many all in one place. And no two the same! Dolls in dresses, soldiers of wood and tin and porcelain and lead, woolen babies in swaddling clothes, delicate Princesses of silver and gold, glass angels and clay devils, even a taxidermied dog fitted with runners like a rocking horse.

  “Must be some very bad-tempered toys.” Bran laughed softly.

  Something moved in the heap of playthings. Something thin and small and white and quiet.

  One of the dolls was a girl.

  TWENTY

  The Vivisectionists’ Garden

  The glittering assembly of the Wildfell Ball swarmed out into the gardens like a school of silver fish. The moon rode so high in the sky it seemed as distant and remote as the stars. Charlotte and Emily stepped out onto a rich green lawn gone black with moonlit shadows and dew. They didn’t need Crashey to find their way now. Everyone seemed to know where to go. The press and swell of bodies carried them along down the path, through indigo stone arches and tall braziers full of violet coals. They finally got a moment alone in the crush. Crashey and Byron and Gravey and Rogue 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 Emily lightly as he passed by and stepped on her hems. She felt certain that if she had been carrying a purse, she wouldn’t be carrying it any longer. “I’m not sure,” she said quietly. “George may help us, though 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 name, you know. He’s . . . well, he’s completely as I thought he’d be, but at the same time, not at all.”

  “Wellington is much the same. Like, and not like. Though I don’t expect he’d think much of me calling him Arthur just yet.” Charlotte looked down at the deep, shadowy lawn. “He turned me down flat, Em.”

  “He’s hardly the only fellow here with a good arm and a good 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 companions into battle and save everyone from everything. But that wasn’t the story. Emily was riding, too. And she was feeling bold enough 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 glum and barely saying a word even at a party! I can’t imagine what you see in him. I much prefer George. 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 were moonstones set into the rock to trace out medieval-looking letters that read:

  The Vivisectionists’ Garden

  “I am slightly concerned, Emily,” confessed Charlotte. “Ellis, I mean, I am slightly concerned about what exactly a Vivisectionists’ Garden might be.”

  “It does sound gruesome, doesn’t it?” Emily said.

  A flush rode as high on her cheeks as the moon in the sky and though her stomach churned at the thought of what might lie beyond this last archway, her heart thrilled at the possibility of seeing something she really, really oughtn’t.

  “You know vivisectionists cut up corpses and study them, don’t you? It might be all kidneys and lungs among the rosebushes. You won’t be squeamish?” Charlotte asked.

  “I read just as many books as you, Currer,” Emily snapped. She’d been dancing with Lord Byron! No one could have much to teach her about anything after that! “I’m not an idiot! I know what words mean, even if they have more syllables than Bran says they should.”

  At the thought of Branwell, they grew somber. Such a lot of fun it had been, dancing and meeting famous and magical and mythical people and bantering with clever men. Almost marvelous enough to make them forget how badly they were needed elsewhere, how desperately they had to find a way home now that the evening train had long gone. They clasped hands and laced their fingers together, gold and silver, and began to say something to one another about how shamefully they’d been laughing while poor Anne was probably still wedged under Brunty’s armpit. Then, they stopped. Was it such an awful crime to enjoy one minute of this strange day? They’d come on purpose, hadn’t they? They’d wanted to come. Wanted to run away. They’d escaped the maw of School so narrowly—wasn’t that worth one laugh, one smile, one spin in the arms of a poet or a Duke? But then, they couldn’t bear to say that out loud, either. What if it was not worth that, and they were being terrible sisters by not focusing every fiber of their beings, every single second, on finding their family?