The Glas s Town Game

Aunt Elizabeth drew two small coins out of the wrist of her glove.

“You’ll have to buy supper for you and your sister once the girls have gone,” she said in her reedy, wobbly voice. “Here’s a shilling and sixpence; give it to the man at the Lion and Rooster and he’ll give you a pair of fish pies. You may have one hard toffee each at Mrs. Reed’s shop on the high road. Bring the change safely home, agreed?”

Branwell took the money with a trembling hand. He felt unsteady on his feet, his head spinning, practically drunk. Finally, he had been given mastery over his sisters! He had the money; he had position! He was a man now, and the duty of a man was to care for soft, gentle girls and guide their soft, gentle minds. He would be their Lord, their general. But, Bran decided, a generous one. Mostly. His brain began working on wild plans at once. After the beastliest business was done, of course he would cry and feel terribly sorry, but he and Anne would still be in Keighley. And Keighley had a brand-new train station. And at a train station, you wi

ll almost always find trains. Lovely, filthy, smoking, booming, shrieking trains the size of dragons! The most incredible inventions ever devised! No one he knew had ever seen one. He would be the first. He and his sisters, of course. But mainly him. Bran’s heart started to beat hard and fast in his chest like an engine chugging down the tracks.

Papa clapped his hand against his only son’s shoulder, much as his own father had done, when he was Branwell’s age. “Think you can do the day proudly, boy?”

“Yes, sir,” said Bran stoically.

Aunt Elizabeth wept a great deal and kissed them all over. She hated this whole business. Even when they were safe at home, Elizabeth could hardly bear to leave the children alone, and rarely let them out of doors, lest they catch their death of damp. She watched them like little clocks, as though, if she turned her back even for a moment, one of them might wind down and stop just as her sister had, just as Maria and Lizzie and all the rest of the souls who were ever born into this vale of tears. But she must bear it now.

Emily tugged at her father’s sleeve. Anne had already run out the door, holding up her arms to the sunshine they’d missed so. Charlotte called after her, dashing down the path.

“Papa,” Emily whispered. But Papa was busy fussing with Branwell’s coat and blaming himself silently for everything that had ever gone wrong in their lives. Finally, the boy untangled himself from all that paternal attention and strode out into the day like a peacock.

“Papa, listen,” she whispered harder, almost a hiss, almost a groan.

“What is it, my dear?” the great, grown, gruff man said at last. He looked down into the lonely gray eyes of his daughter.

“Don’t send Anne away to School,” Emily begged. “Please, Papa. You can teach her here like you teach Bran, can’t you?”

The parson sighed. His breath smelled of pipe tobacco. It fogged in the morning air. “Now, Emily, young ladies oughtn’t to go about telling their fathers what to do, you know.”

Emily watched Anne stand in the sun, soaking in the warmth and the gold and the light. Branwell pinched her, and the little girl screamed very satisfactorily. They could never understand, those two. They’d never know. Emily felt that little needle-stab of hate in her stomach. They couldn’t even stay decently sad for five minutes, even on the Beastliest Day. She shut her eyes and said: “I know, Papa. I shall never do it again. But . . . cannot one of us be spared from that place? One of us should escape. One of us should have no . . . no horrors hanging on her heart. Please, Father. If you will make me go, let her stay.”

Emily kissed her father’s bearded cheek and ran out of the Parsonage to join her sisters. He blinked after her, his own heart as heavy as a church bell, never to be rung again.

“Mind your Bees,” Aunt Elizabeth called to them as they walked down the hill, away from home. And they did. Buck up, be brave, busy hands make bright hearts.

Good-bye, Aunt Elizabeth.

Good-bye, Tabby.

Good-bye, Papa.

Wild, stiff tangles of withered gorse and heather and wintergreen burst underfoot as the little tribe took to the day.

The wind had got up out of bed very early indeed to see them off. It blew busily all about the moors, catching at braids and coats and scarves and noses, making that peculiar howling, sighing, grumbling sound Tabitha called wuthering. The sunlight looked warm and delightful, but it was all a trick. Those fitful scraps of sunshine were hard and cold as a Headmaster’s heart. They marched after the light all the same, up and out onto the little hills and hollows of the moorland, their cheeks whipped red and hot.

Charlotte trudged silently up a worn purple path through the January hills. Bran quickened his pace to keep up.

“I ought to walk in front, Charlotte!” he yelled after her. “Papa said I was your chaperone! I ought to lead the way! Charlotte? Charlotte! Are you listening? I am in charge!”

Charlotte was not listening. Bran’s long curls whipped across the bridge of his great arched nose, his brow, as ever, furrowed and fuming. He would have been shocked if he knew how perfectly his face reflected his sister’s own frown and grump. But he could only see the back of her, her woolen dress prickled with bits of twig and old, withered thistle burrs. Emily and Anne did not care who went first. They’d all get where they were going and no one could do a thing to stop it. Why rush? They hung back, holding hands and picking their path carefully so as not to crush any sweet plant that might wake up again in the spring. Emily looked up at the frozen sun, her brown ringlets crowding a narrow, sharp face that somehow looked already quite grown.

THREE

A Game of And

Down into the bruised, smoky valley they went. The carriage was to come to meet them at the hay market gate at a quarter of three in the afternoon. They would know it from the other black carriages drawn by black horses by the seal of the Cowan Bridge School on the side. It seemed the School had money to paint carriages, Emily thought darkly, but not to feed the students anything but watery porridge and a fortnightly slice of ox fat. Branwell had been preparing his farewell speech as they walked. He would take his sister’s hands and tell her that he did love her, after all, and not to be frightened, because she was Charlotte, and Charlotte could take on anything and beat it until it turned into just what she wanted it to be. Even a whole School. Even him. Then, he’d tell Emily something nice as well. Perhaps: If they give you one bit of pain, you just write to your brother and the men of the house shall ride out to protect you like a Lady with dragon troubles in a book. He hadn’t worked out Em’s bit yet. He’d been too busy working on Charlotte’s. Charlotte and Branwell were barely a year apart. Underneath all the shoving and jostling and rowing over who ruled over whom, he felt they understood each other. They liked the same things: war, stories, frowning, bossing others about. Em and Annie were so bafflingly female. If only Charlotte had been born a boy, there would only be understanding between them, and none of the shoving. He would have an older brother, and wouldn’t have to lie awake at night worrying about how to wear the iron cap of being somebody’s only son. He would say it all, except for the wishing she was a boy part, without crying or wobbling. The girls would look at him with such powerful love and gratitude that he would turn into a different person, a better person, the perfect person. All he needed was that one look and he could live forever.

Charlotte’s furious pace had dragged them all across the moors and into the sooty Keighley streets early. The hay market gate clattered and echoed with horses and voices and smelled of many less wholesome things than hay, but no carriages waited there to collect two unhappy girls. Emily looked up to a bank’s brassy clock tower. It wasn’t near time for speeches yet.

“It’s only half past one,” she sighed.

“We’d have made it here by noon if Charlotte would be a proper Lady and let me lead on,” groused Branwell, shoving his hands deep in his pockets. He still had Aunt Elizabeth’s shilling and sixpence. In shillings and sixpences were the real power. Even Charlotte had to know that.