The Glas s Town Game

“Are you sure you got that from our world?” Anne said dubiously. “We haven’t got anything like that, even a little like that. It hardly seems fair.”

Napoleon shrugged. “In your world I am a dumb, crude doll. Here I am Emperor. There, the Voltaic Pyle is a dumb, crude lump. Here, it is everything. And is grog fair? Is war ever fair?”

“Uncle Leon is crying,” Victoria marveled. “He’s crying and he’s sniffling and he’s scrubby.”

“You said you’d take us home,” Branwell said. “But I know you. When we play Wellington and Bonaparte, I am always Bonaparte. You won’t do it for nothing.”

Bonaparte looked up cannily from his unhappiness. Bone gleamed behind bayonet. “Tell me their plans. I know that you know. You must know. Wellington has some trickery brewing. They are your toys, too. Tell me everything, to the last detail. I will spare your sisters, you have my word. And when I have ended Glass Town, I will show you the way back to Haworth and you will swear never to return.”

“Bran, don’t you dare,” breathed Anne. “It’s not a game. This is a real place. This is a real war. They can die. We can die here. Did we ever invent Port Ruby? Or Brunty? Or Victoria? Did we ever imagine them made of bookends and ball gowns and bones? We’ve no control. It’s got away from us.”

Miss Agnes cleared her slate throat.

“May I suggest,” she said gently, “that no child of God stays a child forever. They grow, and change, and get away from their parents. They do other than they are expected. They run off and misbehave and look nothing in their old age like they did when they were born. Perhaps worlds, the kind you speak of, the kind of world that is also a story, or a game are much the same way.” She cleared her throat. “As the tree becomes the violin, so nothing ends how it begins. There,” she finished with a smile, wiping her hands on her stone apron. “Now it’s true.”

Perhaps it was not the worst thing, to be a governess, Anne thought as Agnes kissed Victoria’s hair. Though it was certainly not the best thing, either, her heart hurried to add.

“We cannot,” Branwell sighed.

“Then rot here, my maker,” snarled Napoleon. “I never needed you before and I don’t need you now!”

Marengo crowed like the dawn had come.

Miss Agnes allowed them to spend the night in Victoria’s room. New beds were brought in, three suppers were served, three lullabies sung by a Lady made of stone. As they rearranged the furniture along the walls, Victoria’s papers blew here and there. They chased; they caught. A thin white moon came up. The candles were put out.

Anne turned onto her side in her new bed. She could hardly breathe for excitement.

“Victoria?” she whispered.

“Yes?”

And Anne talked to Victoria before bed, just as she always did. In whispers, in soft laughs, in a voice just a little too soft to hear. Victoria listened, rapt, just as Anne always dreamed she would. When she could think of nothing more to tell her friend, Anne rolled onto her back again. A crinkly, rustly sound echoed in the dark.

“Victoria!”

“Yes?”

“What’s this?”

Anne held up a scrap of paper with a sketch on it. The moonlight turned it blue.

“Oh! That is the Pastille of course! From the outside. I copied it from a history book. It is so hard to think of the outside of a place when you are stuck inside it just the way a soul is stuck inside a body!”

Anne shook her head. She smiled, then choked on her own smile. “This isn’t the Pastille. Or the Bastille. This is the Parsonage.” A brilliant, gigantic, diamond-encrusted version of the parsonage where they all lived with Papa and Aunt Elizabeth and Tabitha and Snowflake and Diamond and Jasper and Rainbow. She’d forgotten they put their house in Verdopolis, but of course they had. But once you move in the Great Wall of China, it is easy to forget the first building ever raised in the city. The most sacred building of all. “Bran! Bran, look! We’re home.”

But Bran did not move on his cot. He was a black shape in the black night.

When the girls were long asleep, Branwell crept silently out into the long black halls of the Bastille. He walked like a ghost. All that talk of worlds and doors and wars mattered not at all. All Branwell could think was: A doll is better than me. I count for less than a doll. He retraced his steps, carefully, carefully, all the way to the great strategy room, still full of candles and torches. I will protect them. Even if I am less than a doll. Even if I am nothing. I will protect them somehow.

Bonaparte sat on a rich, high chair in the long, polished hall. Almost a throne.

“I knew it. You could not have made me if you were not like me,” the tyrant of Gondal chuckled.

“Look,” Bran said gruffly. He stared at the floor. “I’m a man now, so I know if you want something, you’ve got to pay for it. Nobody does anything nice for no reason.” Tears started hotly in his eyes, but he refused to let them fall. He bent down and dug in his sock for something. “Here!” He shoved it at Napoleon. Aunt Elizabeth’s shilling and sixpence. It had seemed so powerful when she gave it to him. It was still powerful. It had to be. Just like the buttons that had paid their way here in the first place. “That’s a fortune where I come from. A hundred million pounds. It’s everything I have. You take it and you swear to spare Charlotte and Emily and me and Anne, too. You said you would. I want to buy your word on it. Fair and square.”

“Of course,” Old Boney shrugged. The way the Emperor shrugged looked so much like Branwell’s father, he could hardly bear it. “It is nothing to me. Easy.”

Bran took a deep breath. It would be a glorious battle. Everyone who mattered would live. And he would see it all from safety. And perhaps . . . perhaps afterward they did not have to go home right away. Perhaps they could stay and Boney would give them thrones and titles of their own. And when it did come time to leave, the Emperor would give them caskets of grog as a reward, bottle after bottle of the stuff, so t