The Glas s Town Game

“And she was the Crown Princess of Glass Town and Angria plus heir to the throne,” Mr. Bud whined. “If one of those can up and vanish like my office keys of a morning, you won’t find a couple of nobodies stuck down the cushions.”

Charlotte pushed her hair back away from her face. It had become quite a situation, after everything. She locked eyes with her sister. Victoria? she mouthed. Anne’s Victoria? Emily shook her head. She didn’t know. Anne never shared her secret Princess with the rest of them. She played the Victoria game after they’d all fallen asleep, whispering under the blankets to herself so that Branwell could not hear and drag her perfect girl into the bigger story and murder her for the drama of seeing Anne cry.

“Well, of course we will!” Emily said, breaking off curls of the horrid tallowy stuff with both hands. Then, she had the marvelous idea of going at it with the toffee hammer she’d swiped from Bestminster’s tea service. The melted parquet did look rather like toffee. But her hammer had no more effect than asking the wreckage nicely to let her through, thank you kindly. Still, the problem, the puzzle of it, put Emily in a much brighter mood. What couldn’t they sort out together? Nothing, that’s what. “I don’t think Brunty’s much of a runner, you know. And Anne’s only little; she’ll slow them up. She always makes us late to wherever we’re going.”

Mr. Bud and Mr. Tree shook their heads.

“Nothing travels faster than bad news,” Mr. Tree said. His silver muttonchops quivered in sympathy. “And Brunty’s is the baddest news there is. Bad news hasn’t got to obey the usual laws of velocity and inertia and traffic police. It just . . . phewwwt! Arrives. Before you do. Might as well try to catch up to the sunrise.”

Mr. Bud patted Emily’s head awkwardly. He meant to be comforting, but it came out more like tapping a bell at a bank desk. “Gondal’s got tunnels and vaults and all sorts of wormy passages running under the city. It’s like old cheese down there, pet.”

“And he had that . . . that thing . . . the . . . the Thingy!” Mr. Tree shuddered, his bookend-shoulders rattling.

Charlotte stopped stabbing at the floor with Mr. Bud’s saber. “What was it? Don’t you know?”

The editors stared at their shoes, quite unaccustomed to not knowing. “I’ve never seen anything like it! It’s dash good at wrecking floors, that’s clear! Who knows what else it does? P’raps Brunts can just give it a tap and they’ll all come tumbling out into Old Boney’s privy in Regina!”

“Boney!” cried Charlotte and Emily.

“What’s Regina?” Emily added in after.

Mr. Bud and Mr. Tree frowned into their chests. “Well . . . yes?” Mr. Tree shrugged. “The capital of Gondal. That’s where old Brunty will be headed. Unless he beelines it to Verdopolis. It would be faster, I suppose.”

“But Verdopolis is in Glass Town,” Emily protested. Verdopolis was their greatest city. The one they’d planned out over and over. Anything wonderful they read about from any other city they put into Verdopolis. The pyramids of Egypt, Balmoral Castle in Edinburgh, the Alhambra in Spain, the Great Wall of China, even the Colosseum in Rome. Branwell had drawn them over and over until they really did almost look like the real ones. She knew exactly where Verdopolis lay on the map and it wasn’t in Gondal. “It’s our . . . your capital!”

“Verdopolis is . . . disputed,” Mr. Tree said darkly. “After he overran Northangerland and Zamorna and besieged the Isle of Dreams, Napoleon claimed the new border between Glass Town and Gondal ran right through Ascension Island. Right through the city of cities, the jewel in Glass Town’s glass crown!”

Mr. Bud clenched his braided jaw. “Then Wellington said: It inkin’ well does not, it runs right where it always ran, through the Calabar Wood down the Mountains of the Moon to the sea. Kindly stay on your side of it, yeah? Old Boney stuck his nose in the air and nobly replied: nuh uh. Then Wellington stuck his up there and said: does so. So then that sack of kneecaps took half the city by force, right up to the river and the Great Wall. Started building fortresses and fashionable housing down the left bank and sticking his tongue out at our limey boys on the other side, hollering: I’m building on it, aren’t I? That means c’est mine according to the ancient law entitled: You Can’t Stop Me, Ha Ha!”

“Glass Town still holds half of Verdopolis. Napoleon lords it over the other half. It’s much closer than Regina. And they’ve just finished turning the airy ancient corridors of our most sacred palace into some hulking brute of a dungeon called the Bastille. Now we’ve put our thoughts in the pot, it seems the likeliest place for Brunty to stash the little ones.”

“Caught himself some plump fishes, hasn’t he?” Mr. Bud nodded. “He’ll want to get them weighed and gutted and sold. Oh! Sorry. Not really gutted. Gutted for information, see? There’s a war on, you know!”

“But we’ve only just arrived. We don’t know anything useful. So they’ll have to let Bran and Annie go. Right, Charlotte?”

Charlotte looked as though she might be sick. Of course they did know quite a lot. They probably knew just about everything. If they could only figure out which game, which campaign, which rainy day in the room at the top of the stairs was happening on this day in Glass Town, there really was nothing Branwell and Anne couldn’t tell Brunty or Bonaparte or that demonic screaming chicken about the war. And what did men at war do to get the information they wanted? Hadn’t Branwell loved to play interrogation with the wooden soldiers?

Mr. Bud groaned. “Stop looking at me like that! I’ve told you! It’s no use trying to shame us! Nothing travels faster than bad news. It’s best if you just forget you ever had a brother or a sister and get on with whatever it is you’re doing with your lives. If they turn up—fantastic! Cake and gin all round. If not? Well, more cake for you, yes?”

Charlotte clenched her teeth. “This is your fault, Mr. Bud.”

“Isn’t!” cried the men at once.

“Is,” Emily hissed. “And yours, Mr. Tree. You were showing off, punishing Brunty right away so we could see it and tell you how brave and clever and excellent you are. You might have waited till we’d gone and all was safe, but then you wouldn’t get to hear the tourists ooh and ahh.”

The proprietors of Bud & Tree Publishing House blushed and found several rather fascinating things to stare at on the ceiling.

“You’re editors,” said Charlotte carefully, narrowing her eyes as she thought it all through. “You clean up the mess. So, the way I see it, you’ve got to clean up this mess. Take us to Gondal. Fix the story. It’s all gone wrong now; you must see that. Branwell and Anne were meant to be home on the evening express. It was a nice little fairy tale wrapped up with a bow and now you’ve got loose children running all over it and a fat spy with some kind of hideous acid-and-lightning machine and the government’s involved. It won’t do at all. So . . . so . . . make it right! Cut something or add something or move it all round until it’s a nice, tidy story again. Take us to Gondal, load us up with grog in case the worst has happened, and we’ll call it good.”

“Not us.” Mr. Bud held up his leather-braided hands again. “We’re a specialty press, lovey. Strictly criminals and criminality, in small batches. Spies and machines and Gondal? That’s too big for our blood. And we haven’t even got any grog. They don’t let just anyone handle the strong stuff. You gotta put in a request. There’s forms. Signatures.”

Mr. Tree fiddled shamefacedly with the buttons on his waistcoat. “We can’t just totter on over to enemy te

rritory and say: So sorry for the trouble, lads, but would you mind if we just popped off with a couple of prisoners of war? Perhaps a biscuit or two for the road? Won’t be a moment! My dear girls, you may think we’re powerful, glorified men, and who could blame you? Look at us! But we’re not anybody! We’re just working class Angrians! Salt of the earth and . . . that. We’d be shot!”

Mr. Bud tugged on the Coptic bindings of his jacket. “No, we can’t do a thing for you, I’m afraid. We feel terrible about it, of course. Miserable. Desolate.”

“Of course!” Mr. Tree gushed. “Just tormented.”