The Glas s Town Game

“I’m sorry,” sighed Anne. Her head popped up from beneath the covers. “I can’t help it. I always talk to Victoria before bed. Can’t sleep if I don’t.”

“Victoria is lying on the floor in the room at the top of the stairs with a crack in one eye. Maybe they’re right about us. You’re mad anyhow.”

Anne’s eyes blazed in the dark. “Don’t you talk about her. She’s mine. Go to sleep. Maybe if you’re lucky, you’ll dream about frogs pulling out your fingernails and wake up in a good mood.”

But Branwell did not wake up in a good mood. He woke cold and stiff and out of sorts. He rose long before Anne and sat at the lonely little wooden table, watching her breathe, her blond hair sticky and sweaty against her forehead, the space between her fine eyebrows wrinkled with dreaming worry. Branwell was filled with such a desire to paint her that he felt he could very possibly die of it. He hadn’t drawn anything since they came to Glass Town and it made his fingers ache like winter cold. He hadn’t any pen or any paper and the whole thing was hopeless. But there little Anne lay, with her left arm thrown up above her head at such an artistic angle. . . .

Branwell picked up one of the bowls of cold gruel leftover from yesterday or the day before. He had no notion of how long they’d been there, really. None at all. But after the tray of brown bread and brown soup and brown tea, they could never face that gluey gray stuff. So he dumped it out on the table and smeared it all round till the wood was covered in a fine, thin, even silvery film of gruel. He used his fingernails to outline Anne’s arm, the tendrils of her hair, the way her brow bone joined the top of her nose, her pointed chin. He warmed up as he worked, until he felt like he had a hearth inside him, full up of scalding embers, and as long as he kept drawing, he would never be cold again, not ever.

Branwell looked down at the Anne he’d made. It was beautiful, he thought. His fingernails had made the whole thing so delicate and fragile, like patterns in ice. The best work he’d ever done, and he could never hang it on a wall, unless he nailed up the whole table.

“Bran?” Anne said groggily, coming round to the waking world. “What are you doing?”

Branwell smeared his hand through the gruel-painting. Beautiful? It was nothing, just like everything else he ever tried to do. He did try. He tried to make stories as good as Charlotte’s and Emily’s, but his only ever shone when he killed somebody or blew up a castle or bled a spy for secrets. He did it as often as he could, chasing that shine. But even his best murder never sparkled quite like one of Charlotte’s scenes of strolling through the gardens with Zenobia Elrington, or Emily’s making Mary Percy run across the windswept moors to meet her lover. Branwell supposed that even Anne’s stupid, secret Victoria game glowed in the dark under her blankets. Put his slop-painting next to anything they did and it looked just like what it was: gruel.

“And I’ll be grueling my whole life, won’t I?” he grumbled darkly to himself. It seemed a very Glass Town thing to say.

Anne rubbed her eyes and yawned. “Are you ready?” she said.

“All right, Anne. Let’s bust ourselves out of jail. What do you say?”

Anne nodded eagerly, sniffling. Down below in the courtyard, a bullfrog shouted at a tree frog for marching slower than the rest of them.

Branwell bolstered his sister up on his shoulders so she could peek through the little window at the top of the door. Bonaparte and his rosy lady-friend seemed to glare at them from the painting like strict parents. Not angry, just disappointed.

“There’s nobody there!” Anne whispered. It was a very loud whisper.

Bran grunted under her weight. “What do you mean there’s nobody there? That’s not possible!” It bruised his newfound sense of importance to think that they weren’t being guarded by at least two enormous, muscular, battle-hardened frogs.

Anne hopped down. “Well, it is possible, Bran. I’m not lying. Why would I lie?”

“Why wouldn’t they leave a guard? The whole reason Brunty took us in the first place was because he heard us talking about how maybe, somehow, probably we sort of made this place happen. That . . . well . . . I haven’t had a chance to really thoroughly philosophize the whole business yet, but that . . . that makes us a bit . . . a bit like a King and a Queen, doesn’t it?” That didn’t feel right. But it didn’t feel so wrong, either. “I should think they’d want to keep an eye on the Crown.”

But Anne wasn’t listening to her brother pondering whether or not she was a goddess. She was staring at the big black lock in the door with her hands on her hips and the tip of her tongue poking out of the corner of her mouth, thinking. The lock was the size of her head. It had extremely serious-looking bolts all over it.

“You can’t stare it open, you know,” grumbled Bran. “There’s no key in here. I checked while you were pretending to be asleep. And nothing to pick with either. Unless you want to have a go at picking a lock with a handful of cooked porridge.”

“No,” Anne mused. “I shouldn’t think porridge would work.”

She looked up at her brother and grinned mischievously. All her tears were gone now. She waggled her thin, little fingers at him. Then, Anne stuck her forefinger and middle finger into the huge black lock and turned her hand. It hurt very much. She strained. Her face turned red.

“Good Lord, Anne, you are thick. I never wanted to say, but out of the four of us . . .”

The tumblers groaned. The lock creaked. The door opened.

“What? How?” Branwell spluttered.

Anne pulled her hand back. She giggled as quietly as she could, but her voice echoed into the hallway beyond. She wiggled her fingers again.

“Skeleton key!” she crowed.

Branwell cursed himself for not thinking of it. He stomped out into the hall and started off in a direction. Any direction, as long as he got to choose it. Anne skipped along behind him, explaining herself proudly.

“Skeleton key! Get it? It just came to me! I thought if time really flies here, and spirits are really spirits, and Brown Bess musket balls really are brown and called Bess, I thought: Well, I’ve got bones, haven’t I? I’ve got a skeleton! And nobody else here does except Napoleon, so that’d make a pretty excellent kind of sense for Old Boney’s personal prison.”

“Yes, yes, you’re so clever. Now, be clever quietly, or we shall be caught and it’ll be fingernails for the both of us.”

Anne blanched. They crept silently down the long, stone hall. There were other doors punched into the rocky wall, but all the barred windows were dark and empty. In fact, everything in the Bastille was rather dark. They hadn’t any candles, so there was nothing to be done about it, but Anne shuddered anyway. At least there didn’t seem to be any cobwebs or spiders lurking about. The endless halls and staircases were brutally clean, and that made Bran shudder. Every place in the world had cobwebs. What demonic power would it take to keep a place this big and deep and unhappy clean?