The Glas s Town Game

Suddenly, Charlotte had a notion, and as soon as she had it, she’d done it, and as soon as she’d done it, her mind caught up with her heart and she told herself it was too ridiculous to ever work, so sit down Charlotte, for God’s sake. But done it was. Charlotte dashed over to the sofa where Brunty sat bound and tied, bent over, and screamed in his pale face full of pages:

“THE END!”

Brunty promptly sucked his head back down between his covers and snapped shut. His brass lock clicked firmly.

“That was wonderful!” Anne squealed.

“That’s dash useful.” Emily grinned.

“What’d you have to go and do that for?” Branwell protested. “He was going to say something really dreadful and now I’ve missed it.”

“We can’t go listening to villains when they want to make their grand speeches and devil’s bargains,” Charlotte said, as though she’d always known it would work, never doubted it for a moment. “Best to end the story before they get their side in. Now, no more Thump Parliaments in the presence of strange books. We’ll . . . we’ll find our moment. We’ll find a way. Our way. After all, we invented Glass Town. The least they could do would be to sp

are us a cup of—”

Charlotte did not get a chance to finish, for just then, they landed with a jolt, a tumble, and a vicious thump on the brilliant, bright earth of a new city.

ELEVEN

The Problem of Primarily Scurrilous Brunty

Ochreopolis sprawled and towered and twisted in as many shades of yellow as Port Ruby had done in red. But this city had got rather bored of glass halfway through the building of it and decided to haul in a lot of other stuff to fancy up the place. From up above, it looked like pictures of Oxford that they’d pored over in Father’s books, if Oxford had run off with Vienna and got itself in trouble. Golden glass bridges arched over a branching river of bubbling champagne. Lemon and banana and golden apple and quince trees shaded slender alleys that wound through patches of saffron shadows and bright sunshine. The people walking here and there wore yellow rain slickers and ivory wigs. Burly amber glass walls closed it all in like York or Chester. Three butter-colored crystal gates let folk out and in.

But of course, balloons need no gates.

The towers beyond the walls were not straight and tall and proud like Port Ruby’s. They sagged tiredly, and leaned woozily, and bowed like old, old trees until their pointed roofs almost touched the ground. The buildings of Ochreopolis were only partly mortared out of good, strong yellow glass. Mostly, they were much softer stuff: great swathes of yellowed and yellowing paper, ripped from novels that must have been published in the land of giants, for any one page stood as high as a shire horse. Those same giants had folded and creased and wrapped their pages around slabs of glass to make spindly ochre belfries and squat chartreuse shops and dog-eared daffodil chapels with round topaz windows.

Bestminster Abbey set them down in the middle of a cobble-glass square the color of honey. Two lion statues, both presumably of Copenhagen, glared down as they wheeled round and round, trying to look in every direction at once. The city was far too beautiful to have one single wicked soul living in it. But the balloon assured them that this was the right place, the P-District, where all the criminals and villains and misbehavers of Glass Town ended up sooner or later. Bestminster then promptly folded his giant balloon-body back into two ordinary suitcases, and so fast Charlotte actually felt her head spin.

They could not see anything like a prison, no matter which direction they looked. One fat tower, bent over almost in the shape of a lowercase n, had a sign out front that read: NORTH & NOUGHT EDITING SERVICES. The round stained glass (and stained page) building next to it, shaped rather like a pineapple, advertised itself as HUME & HALFORD PRESS. Another tower, whose top leaned one way, while its middle leaned the other, to make a sort of sloppy lightning bolt, had a handsome blond-wood post that announced the owners as COOPER & LOCKHART PURVEYORS OF FINE BINDINGS. The biggest of them all was a clutch of shorter towers all bursting out of the ground in the same spot like sticks of dynamite crammed into a golden pail. The towers twisted and bulged and doddered and slumped in every which direction. The writing on their page-and-glass walls all ran together, creasing sharply or tearing gently. Someone had circled several of the larger letters in dark tawny ink so that, from the left-most tower to the right, they could read: BUD & TREE PUBLISHING HOUSE.

“Look!” cried Emily, laughing and pointing. “It’s Romeo and Juliet!”

“The people?” asked Branwell, who at this point was quite willing to believe anything from any story could get up in Glass Town and walk about and swoon from a balcony.

“No, the play!” said Charlotte. She pointed just where Emily had: at the folded, mortared pages that wound round and round the glass buildings of Ochreopolis. The circled R in BUD & TREE and the O in PUBLISHING HOUSE were the first letters on the title page of some enormous edition of Romeo and Juliet. The scenes and speeches chased each other up the height of the tower, stopping at odd angles where the paper jackknifed and split to make corners, and starting up again beneath banks of windows. Suddenly, without meaning to, the children found themselves running toward Bud & Tree Publishing House. It felt so good to run after all that crouching and hiding and flying and dying. They called out all the titles they could find in the brickwork as they ran:

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream!” Anne giggled.

“Much Ado About Nothing!” Branwell whooped.

“Hamlet!” said Emily as she spotted the telltale H in HOUSE. “And that’s . . . well, that bit’s a cookbook, I think!”

“But it’s all wrong.” Charlotte frowned, standing at the base of the tower built out of Romeo and Juliet. She clutched Brunty tightly in her arms. “That’s not how it goes. Look closer!”

And on the winding half-glass walls they read in letters two feet high:

Two households, both alike in dignity

In fair Angria where we lay our scene . . .

Charlotte bit her lip. “It ought to be Verona! ‘In fair Verona where we lay our scene’!”

Branwell pointed at the pages bent back to make a pretty curtained window. “There, too, see? That should be Capulet and Montague!”

But the famous family names were nowhere to be found. Instead, Shakespeare’s speech now read:

Three civil brawls, bred of an airy word-o,