The Glas s Town Game

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.

A stout man stood behind the desk, watching them with a raised eyebrow. His body, like everyone’s in Glass Town, it seemed, contained not one bit of flesh or skin. He looked like someone had stacked up all their spare bookends until they were as tall as a man and then given it two bronze magnifying glasses for spectacles. The handles of those detective’s glasses stuck out from the sides of his head at wild angles. Carved wooden hawks, fairies, griffins, trees, even miniature stacks of ceramic books made up his whole self: big ones for his ribs and his neck and his arms, thin, delicate ones for his fingers. His face was a huge, proud, jowly silver bust of a man with leafy hair and a mossy cravat etched into the metal. What held it all together? Charlotte wondered. The bookends, Napoleon’s bones and rifle-arms, his rooster’s pottery, the frogs’ armor, Mr. Bud’s leather string? What was inside? The idea made her skin prickle.

“Ready the presses, Mr. Tree!” cried Mr. Bud with gusto, unclasping his coat and hanging it up on the rack. “We’ve got a right rough drafter here! Just riddled with errors! I don’t know how he gets up in the morning!”

“Is that who I think it is?” said Mr. Tree, peering over his glasses at the still-closed volume of Brunty. He did not seem like the sort of fellow who worried much over anything, no matter how alarming that anything might be to everyone else.

“Dunno,” answered Mr. Bud. “Do you think it’s Brunty the Inking Liar? Brunty of Godforsaken Gondalier, Can’t-Take-Him-Anywhere Brunty, Brunty the Spying Sack of Slime? Brunty the Miserable Fat Folio?”

Even Charlotte was taken aback by such mean names for their prisoner. He hadn’t seemed that altogether horrible. Well, until he got to the part about feeding them to the rooster.

“I do,” answered the bookend-man. “I do indeed.”

Mr. Bud laughed and whacked the front desk with his leather-bound fist. “Then a happy inking birthday to you, Mr. Tree!”

“Well, this is very exciting,” said Mr. Tree in the same calm, friendly voice. “A banner day for Bud and Tree! Four real live breathers as sure as I’m standing, a glorious victory for Glass Town, and here’s us wasting paper chatting with each other! Miss . . . ?” He indicated the book’s guardian with his silver eyebrows.