The Glas s Town Game

The girl laughed nervously. She lifted her pretty pearl eyes to the ceiling. “Oh my, I forgot, didn’t I? I just forgot. Forgive me, please forgive me. I’ve been locked up in this room for such a long time. Forever, really. Since the beginning of time. Though Uncle Leon says time is only a trick the sun plays on you and the sun is naughty and wicked and it lies and I’ve only just been having a nice holiday and my parents will be along to collect me presently. But they never do. I don’t think the sun lies nearly as much as Uncle Leon. Oh, do come in, come in, it’s not locked, you know.” The girl opened the great heavy door as though it weighed nothing at all. Branwell and Anne stepped uncertainly into the warm, colorful room. “Uncle Leon lets me have the run of the Bastille so long as I never go out and never bother anyone and never look out the windows, only I call it the Pastille, because all that ever happens in here is the present turning into the past over and over and over and also pastilles are candies and I like it when Miss Agnes brings me pastilles because it means she loves me, really. But you must never go out! That’s the law! Never, never, never! Out is where everything bad can happen, only in is safe. Oh, I’m doing it again, aren’t I? I can’t stop once I’ve started.”

Branwell inched around the edges of the room. He didn’t want to get too close. The question of biting hadn’t been settled yet. “Are you . . . are you a madwoman?” He gave Anne an alarmed look. “Did you make her mad?” he whispered.

“No! I made her talk and talk and talk so that I would always have someone to talk to me because the three of you are always off talking to yourselves because you think I’m a baby and I had to make sure I’d always have someone to talk to if—”

“No we don’t!” Bran hissed at her. “You’re a lying liar. Charlotte and Emily are the ones sneaking about whispering; they never include me!”

“They do so!”

“I can hear you when you whisper, you know,” Victoria said nervously. “You don’t do it correctly. Other people aren’t supposed to be able to hear. If you didn’t know.”

“I’m sorry! Oh, I’m so sorry! It’s perfectly all right if you are mad!” Anne said comfortingly.

Bran shrugged. It wasn’t perfectly all right. “I’ve never met a madwoman before. Always thought it’d be frightfully interesting.”

The girl made out of a dress tried to calm herself down. She shut her eyes and counted to four. “I am not mad. I am Victoria. That’s my name, which you asked for, if you remember. You might think I’m mad—it’s understandable, anyone might think that if they met me—but mad and lonely aren’t at all the same thing. I promise I’m not mad. I always keep my promises, because I’ve got nothing else to do. I just . . . need p . . . practice with other people. Mostly . . . mostly I talk to them.” She gestured at the dolls strewn everywhere and patted the rocking-horse dog on the head. It grinned glassily at nothing. “I don’t need to introduce myself to them. I gave them all their names, everyone here, everyone in the world. And for a long while, Uncle Leon and Miss Agnes and Mr. Brunty brought me new ones every day. Until it wasn’t every day anymore, or even every week or every month or every year and I wanted something alive so badly, so tremendously badly, just one alive thing to be my friend. So I made up stories about all my toys. Did you ever make up stories about your toys?” Anne and Branwell blinked and stuttered. “Oh, I am so awfully rude! I know you’re not from Gondal. It’s so silly of me to think you know everything I know. A story is a lot of words put together one after another until you get to the end.”

“We know what a story is,” Anne said, a little offended.

The girl nodded. “A story makes a not-alive thing alive. I tell all my toys where to go and what to think about while they’re getting there and who they ought to love and who they ought to hate and what to do for an occupation and when to get born and how to die, only I bring them all back to life again at the end of the day, of course, otherwise I’d miss them so! And that’s why I never have to ask them what they’re called. Because I already know everything they’ll ever be about, and they never have to ask me because in here I’m Queen of Everything and Its Auntie and everyone knows what the Queen’s called. Queen Victoria has a nice sound, doesn’t it? So you see, my toys and I needn’t waste any time with pleasantries. We can all just get on with the business at hand. It’s wonderfully simple that way.” She picked up a wooden man in a black wool suit and stroked his yellow silk hair tenderly. “They never complain. No matter what I do to them. No matter what I make them do. If you make people up, they have to do what you say. That’s the advantage. Oh! I am being scrubby again, I am, I am, don’t deny it. You’ll start complaining in a moment. Of course, you can, because I didn’t make you up! Come along, now, soul of mine, unfurl those manners banners!”

Victoria curtsied. She wasn’t very good at it. She’d never had to practice.

“Good evening, Mister Branwell and Miss Anne. Welcome to the Pastille. My supper will be along presently. Wouldn’t you like to share it with me?”

“Oh, God yes!” Bran said, far too loudly. “Thanks for that; we’re starving!”

Anne peeked round Victoria at the stack of neat pages on her desk. “What are you doing back there?”

Victoria blushed. The orange blossoms in her hair turned pink. The maps of Verdopolis and Regina and Ochreopolis and Port Ruby fluttered behind her in the winter breeze. “Writing out my story,” she whispered shyly. “Mr. Brunty says I have to. I’ve got to stay up all night until it’s done.”

Branwell leaned in a bit. “What’s it about?”

Far down below in the courtyard came a sudden boom of thundering footsteps. A joyful, deafening crow shook the windows of their prison. It sounded just exactly like a very, very large rooster.

Victoria hugged her elbows and grinned at them, her pearly eyes bright with excitement. “Oh, this one is brand-new. It’s about a place called England. Oh! Why are you looking at me like that? I’m not used to being looked at! Oh, you don’t like it! Well, I suppose it’s not a very good name, is it? I’ll change it, if you like! It’s no trouble at all!”

PART IV

And All the Weary Now at Rest

TWENTY-TWO

A Man of Science

The towering masts and long, taut lines of the HMS Bestminster Abbey creaked and swayed in the moonless night. Black seabirds wheeled and crooned above the huge silver thimble of the crow’s nest. Dolphins leapt through the choppy sea alongside the patched leather hull. Their slick backs caught starlight whenever they broke the surface. A steady northeasterly wind filled the sails and kept the crew bustling up and down the deck. At the prow of the great suitcase-galleon, under the knitting needle that served as a bowsprit, a half-turtle, half-snail head made of scarves and hairbrush bristles and gloves and thimbles howled joyfully at the crashing waves and tried to coax the dolphins into doing a flip or two.

Emily and Charlotte had long since gotten over the embarrassment of seeing all their most personal belongings taken apart and twisted round and beefed up to take Bestminter’s newest shape. They hardly noticed their petticoats stretched into sails, or their black school dresses knotted together to make the rails and the cannons, or even the little round portrait of their mother pressed into service as the ship’s great wheel.

They strode proudly up and down the decks in the splendid sailors’ uniforms Wellington had given them. Wellington hadn’t wanted to, of course. He’d insisted they weren’t sailors. Not by any definition. And now that the game with the gold and silver paint was up, thanks to Emily’s first kiss, they weren’t even proper Glass Towners! It was all terrifically awkward, to be sure, and all anyone could do was simply keep pretend

ing they were made of gold and silver, to save everyone the stress of it all. Nevertheless, that hardly meant they were members of the armed forces. But Charlotte had given him a look that could melt iron and asked if he thought that ball gowns were quite the best thing for a clandestine military operation. Emily had pointed out, very fairly, that Bestminster was their ship if it was anyone’s. Not only were they sailors, but, strictly speaking, they were Captains. For the Genii’s sake, man, Lord Byron had shouted. I’m paying to outfit this madness; let them wear what they like!

And now they walked tall in gold braid, blue velvet, tricorns, loose hair, and best of all, white trousers. Neither of the sisters had ever worn trousers before. Both were now steadfastly convinced that trousers were the greatest invention of man. Buckled at the knee with hose and sensible black shoes! They could move so freely! They could jump on anything!

Wellington manned the wheel from the quarterdeck, which was the cover of one of Emily’s composition books. He stared into the sea with steely eyes. Copenhagen, the lion with seawater for skin, lay curled around his legs. He seemed even bigger now that they were at sea. Lord Byron spent the evenings in the crow’s nest, working on a new sonnet. Dr. Home kept to himself down below in the sick berth. Charlotte and Emily hadn’t wanted him to come at all. Lord Byron insisted that if they meant to fight so much as a thumbnail clipping, they’d need a doctor, and he wasn’t friends with any other ones.

“But why is she here?” Charlotte had asked Wellington when they boarded back in Lavendry. “Why would we ever bring her?”