The Glas s Town Game

“The puppy man,” Victoria said, wiping her eyes. “He’s still in there.”

The crowd of them stuck their heads round the doorjamb to Victoria’s lovely little room. It was just as Branwell and Anne had left it—the roof torn off, table overturned, dolls strewn everywhere, tapestries torn and tattered by musket-fire on the walls.

And George Gordon, Lord Byron, crouching in the corner with a trowel and a pile of stones picked out of the rubble. His long hair was a nest of tangles; his sleek fur was all rumpled and smelled of fear. He slapped down his trowel onto a new slab and smoothed out a thick icing of mortar.

“What in the world are you doing, George?” Emily said coldly, even though it was plain to see. She wanted to hear him say it.

Byron startled at the sound of her voice and leapt up guiltily, knowing he couldn’t hide but trying valiantly anyway to disappear into the tapestry like a chameleon. He tossed the trowel ridiculously out what remained of a window.

“Nothing! Just . . . preparing everything for you, my love! It’s all . . . here . . . you see. Your door in the wall. Just like your charming brother and sister said. All splendid! All just perfectly splendid!”

Charlotte frowned at the little door behind the tapestry. Byron had nearly finished bricking it up. He’d done a dashingly good job, too. Who would have thought a Lord could lay stone like that? It blended into the wall perfectly. Another few minutes and they might never have found it.

“You little devil,” Leftenant Gravey marveled.

Emily’s face was hard and unyielding. But her insides felt like they were tumbling into empty space. “You were trying to keep me here,” she said. “You were trying to keep us from leaving.”

“I wasn’t! Well, only for a little while longer. And only because I love you! I shall wilt and perish without you!”

“You won’t.” Anne snorted.

“We’ve only just found each other! You cannot condemn me to live without you! Would you really go so soon, and leave me? Never to return, or if you did, only after an agony of waiting you should wish on no man! And how should I greet thee, after long years? With silence, and tears! My heart will break, yet brokenly live on!”

“Stop quoting yourself!” Emily snapped. “You were! You were going to trap me here in Glass Town all for yourself! You’d steal my father and my aunt and my home away! You would make this whole beautiful world into a cage to hold me fast.”

“No, Ellis—Emily! I would love you! I would be your husband!”

“I’m ten!”

“So?” shouted Lord Byron desperately. “I’m eleven! Emily, my darling, don’t be so dramatic. You would be a Baroness, and dance every night, and never want for a single thing! Is that so dreadful? You told me how much you feared that vile place called School, and that you didn’t want to be whatever a governess is, and how quickly fevers come in your world! Am I truly such a villain? Is it really a cage if it’s the size of the world?”

“Yes,” said Emily, Charlotte, and Anne together, rather more loudly than any of them expected.

Crashey, Gravey, Branwell, Anne, Emily, and Charlotte fell to Lord Byron’s brickwork, tearing it to pieces. The mortar was still soft, and it came away easily in their fingers. In a few moments, they were all panting and red-faced. The white silk curtain over the door was quite ruined, stained and torn. But the iron door beneath was still whole.

“You will come backturnagain, won’t you?” Sergeant Crashey said hopefully, eyeing the door and mopping his brow. “?’Course you will. Over there’s boring. Here’s much better. Here there’s me.”

“If we can,” Charlotte said, and hugged him tight. “If Papa ever lets us out of his sight again. But Crash . . . will you be here if we do come? The age of grog is over. Josephine is gone and if you look a thousand years, you’ll never find her. It was . . . it was never right to begin with. You must know that.”

“You thought different when Wellington was laid out. Tip out the bottles and scrape out the bowls, you said.”

Charlotte looked away, for she knew he was right, and she knew that the trouble with grog was that everyone had such a very good reason to want it. You couldn’t blame a single soul for wanting it.

“Anything that requires a cage isn’t right,” she said in a low voice, with a pointed look at George from beneath her lashes.

“Death isn’t right,” Crashey said resentfully.

“No, but at least it belongs to everyone equally,” Emily answered him, and as there was no answer to that, everyone fell quiet. Charlotte glanced at her clever, clever Anne with her hand thrust in her pocket. They said nothing, which said everything.

Branwell stood up and brushed off his hands on his trousers. He knew it was time. They were stalling now. All of them saluted Leftenant Gravey. “Did I do well, sir? In the final tally. Mostly well?”

“Mostly well, lad,” said the wooden soldier. “Mostly well indeed.”

Victoria bared her small teeth at Bran.

“Er. Bit of a spot there with the Lady’s stationary, I gather?”

A small leather cat padded into the room. He crouched low on copper paws and looked miserably up at everyone, his tail dragging on the floor. Emily and Charlotte cried out in glee.