The Glass Town Game

by Catherynne M. Valente

  Crashey let the oceanic lion gnaw on one wooden hand a bit. He knocked on the bottom of the cage with the other. “That there is what you call spoils of war. Our most precious prize-oner—Old Boney’s own wife, Josephine! We nicked her right out of Reversailles while she was sleeping! Capital operatiomission. Had her locked up ten years now, and don’t plan to spring her any time soonlike.”

  “Drop dead, mes chers diables!” Josephine said cheerfully, and waggled her pink fingers at them.

  “Now, Josey, you’ll prickle my feelings if you’re not careful,” Crashey said solemnly.

  “Don’t be silly,” Emily said. “She couldn’t be a day over sixteen. You couldn’t possibly have kept her in there since she was six!”

  The wooden soldier scratched his head. He counted on his fingers. Then, he got lost, shook out his hands, and counted again. “Dunno, kittens. Maybossibly when you say a year and I say a year we don’t meandicate the same thing. Sometimes a day in my own room thinking my own thoughts feels just like a year. Sometimes, when I tell a long, complicatory story, years go by in a word or two. If I had the right fork I could probably spear one to the plate, but they’re slippery as oysternails, the little snots. I don’t like numbers. Not good for me waistline. Don’t feel too badly for her, mind you. We only went Josey-fishing after Boney’s spies snatched our Victoria and locked her up in the Bastille when she weren’t nothing but a baby! ’Course it wasn’t the Bastille then. Those’re her parents, there, the Duke and Duchess of Can’t.” He pointed to a tall, slim couple standing in a corner. He was made of soft ermine; she, mother-of-pearl. “Come on, then, I’ll intropresent you! Strap your best curtsy on and scrub up your vowels. We’re going in headfirst!”

  The Duchess of Can’t wept softly when she saw Charlotte and Emily.

  “Forgive me,” she said in a weak, high, breathy voice. “I can’t help but see my own lost daughter in every grown-up girl. Perhaps she would have looked like you. Perhaps she would have danced . . . ” Shimmering tears poured down her delicate, pearly face. Her husband patted her shoulder absentmindedly, staring off into the distance at nothing.

  “May I presentroduce to you Misses Currer and Ellis Bell of Thrushcross Grange?” Crashey said, and very prettily.

  The Duke of Can’t bowed stiffly, his ermine face yellowed and spotted with grief. His wife held a lace handkerchief to her silvery mouth.

  Sergeant Crashey bowed grandly and kissed the Duke’s hand. “Perhaps you two could show the young folk how real dancing’s done? I’m told they’ve been very well brought-upducated, despite living in the dullery of the countruralside, but there’s no substitute for watching the masters at work!”

  “Terribly sorry,” whispered the Duke, too deep in his sorrow to speak up. “We can’t.”

  Crashey bowed low. “Then, mayhappenation the Duchess is picking over the market stalls for a new Lady in waiting or two?”

  “Oh, darlings,” sighed the Duchess, feeling horribly faint, “I would like to take you on, ever so much. You seem perfectly exquisite. Truly, as lovely as my Victoria would be if she were here before me as you are. But I simply can’t.”

  Charlotte tried to remember something about Anne’s Victoria. She’d never much cared about her youngest sister’s tiny little story of a Princess no one had ever heard of. Let Annie have something of her own. Something that didn’t get blown up in glorious sieges of the pantry every other afternoon. Every girl needed a story of her own.

  “Doesn’t your daughter have a second name?” Charlotte asked innocently.

  “Why, yes!” sniffed the Duchess of Can’t. “But I can’t bear to say it. It burns my tongue like ice.”

  Emily combed back through every night she’d heard Annie whispering to her doll under the blankets. “Alexandrina?” The Duchess nodded in mute misery. “And she had a spaniel or something, didn’t she? Dash?”

  The Duke clamped down on Emily’s silver arm like a sword-blow. “Do you mean to say you’ve seen her? I can’t believe it. Darling, I can’t feel my cheeks. Who are you, child?”

  “No, no, not at all, sir, you’re hurting me!” What could Emily say? My sister named one of her dolls Alexandrina Victoria and after we’ve all gone to bed she makes her dance with all the wooden soldiers, one after the other? They’d put her away and all would be lost.

  “We’ve only heard the stories, like everyone else in Glass Town who mourns the loss of her most precious jewel,” Charlotte said without the slightest hesitation, in a voice like cool water. She even lifted the Duke’s hand from Emily’s elbow, which was frightfully familiar.

  “Oh,” sighed the Duke and Duchess. They sagged together, their fine clothes wrinkling. “We can’t thank you enough for your kind words. Carry on, sally forth . . . whatever the young folk say nowadays.”

  Emily stared. She’d only ever seen Charlotte lie to Tabitha about stars falling to earth and spilled salt and the occasional tear in her stockings. But now Charlotte’s lies spooled out like perfect, silken thread, and whatever they touched stuck together fast.

  The Sergeant swept them away, rolling his eyes once the royals couldn’t see him do it. “There you have it!” he laughed, shaking his head. “Does what it says on the tin. Just the most dreadppalling people! I don’t care what rank they’ve pasted on. You’d think it might be different if they hadn’t lost their girl? Nope! Goes with the Duchy and the ring and the rest. They can’t do a bloody thing. Well, I can’t imagine them trying to order supper. Now! This here is Dr. Home, physician to the Crown and damnably fine vivisectionist. You know what that meanifies?”

  “An anatomist. Someone who studies the human body by examining the dead,” Charlotte said eagerly.

  “And a smashing chemist, and naturalist, and cricketer. As well as a personal friend to yours trulyself. See? You wouldn’t think a lowly Sergeant in the lowly old army would know such fine people, but I do. So what else don’t you know, hm?”

  Charlotte and Emily laughed a little and admitted that their old toy soldier could be the Sultan of the Moon and they wouldn’t have the foggiest idea. Only wouldn’t we know? thought Emily. We never played Sultans on the Moon, so he oughtn’t be one. Then again, we never played Wildfell Ball, either.

  A tall, thin man folded out of the sort of black leather that doctor’s satchels are made of straightened up and looked them over. He had been feeling the forehead of a lovely young lady whose skin was patterned over with a thousand bronze coins. A fountain of penny-curls crowned her head and tumbled down her slender back.

  “I hope you’re both very well?” the doctor said in a voice like stitches sliding neatly through a needle. But somehow, when he said it, Dr. Home sounded more excited at the prospect of what might happen if they were not well, rather than anxious that they should be in good health.

  “And here we have Miss Mary Percy.” Crashey kissed the penny-girl’s hand. “Heiress of Angria and paramour of the Marquis of Douro.”

  “That’s not a very nice word,” Emily said, embarrassed for the beautiful Mary. “You shouldn’t call people things in French without their permission.” Her heart beat faster. Ginevra Bud was lady’s maid to this gleaming copper woman. Emily and Charlotte were wearing her gowns. She felt terribly exposed. Mary Percy raked her gaze up and down the pair of them. She narrowed her eyes and started to say one thing, but ended on another.

  “Oh, don’t be silly, dearheart, I don’t mind a bit.” Mary Percy laughed and patted Emily’s gloved hand. When the heiress touched her, Em felt the weight of real metal on her painted silver arm, and shivered. “Truth in advertising! I prefer everyone to know everything. That way, no one has to suffer any nasty whispers in the powder room. Don’t you agree?”

  Crashey shrugged and took Mary at her word. He plowed on within earshot of everyone. “They say Douro explained it all patientsweet to his wife Marian. How he loved Miss Mary and couldn’t live without her, how if she held him back he’d only grow to hate her, that sort of rubbishnrot. And after he’d
said his piece, being the obliging sort Marian always was, the Marchioness up and killed herself dead so as not to be a bother.”

  “Marian always was such a lamb.” Mary smiled humbly. Everything she said sounded careless and free, yet taut as a violin string, all at once. “A true Lady always knows when to make her exit. Though I prefer to focus on the entrance.” She turned her pretty bronze head to one side like a bird. She lifted one coppery eyebrow half an inch. “What utterly charming dresses you both have! You must give me the name of your girl.”

  Emily coughed.

  Charlotte did not miss her cue. “Geraldine Branch,” she said distractedly, as though a mere dressmaker was far beneath her notice. “Out of Smokeshire.”

  “My stars! I don’t know her,” said Mary in that same careless-but-careful tone. “I do believe I know the name of every seamstress in Angria and I have never heard those syllables together in all my days!”

  Emily dove in with both feet. She would not be shown up. “I daresay you don’t adventure out to our part of the world very often! Poor Geraldine is well and good for us, but she’d lose her wits trying to make anything fit for you, my lady.” Her voice wobbled a little and Charlotte’s never did—yes, but not much, not much at all.

  “Douro was supposed to be here tonight, the cad,” Crashey said loudly, veering the conversation off its cliff. “I don’t see his deviliandsome face anywhere—no! There he is, over by the dice tables, wouldn’t you know it? He’s a dash hand at just about everything, but I could swear the dice are all in love with him, the way they carry on when he turns up. S’not fair, if you ask me. I always say you can be rich or talented or handsome but all three’s just obnoxious.” Crashey pointed out a boy of fourteen or fifteen, made all of blackened wood and ash. Ancient flame glinted under his cheekbones. Mary beckoned lovingly to him with one long bronze arm. Her bicep and elbow were stamped with a victorious griffin rampant and rather a lot of roman numerals. The Marquis of Douro swept across the hall, straight through the line of dance, ignored Mary entirely, caught up Charlotte’s hand, and kissed it all in one smooth motion, without breaking stride.

  “Madam,” he said in the deepest and most charming voice Charlotte had ever heard.

  “The Marquis of Douro,” Crashey announced with a flourish of his hand that told both sisters he really didn’t think too terribly much of the man he was about to praise. “Conqueror of the Realm, Father of Glass Town, King of the Pioneers! Ladies Currer and Ellis Bell, of Thurshcross Whereverandever.”

  “Don’t be a cow, Sergeant,” purred Douro without taking his burning eyes from Charlotte’s. “All that was my grandfather, eons ago and good riddance, and you know it. I must insist you call me Adrian, young lady. The glory’s all gone, but the money’s left, as they say. Which emboldens lesser men to try to pull at my tails, but in the end forces them to be satisfied with holding my coat. What a world we live in, wouldn’t you say, Miss Bell?”

  Charlotte did not like the way the Marquis—the way Adrian—was looking at her. It felt as though he were watching her through a window, like the raven in the tree outside the room at the top of the stairs. Only she had never fed this bird a single crumb, and didn’t think she’d dare. The way he said her false name made her think he knew quite well that it was false. She tried to imagine him talking his wife into killing herself to set him free, and found she could, quite easily. Charlotte shuddered, but she did not let it show. She smiled instead. It seemed a good trade. Shuddering rarely got you anywhere. But behind her smile she was thinking furiously: I invented you. It was autumn and it was sunny when I had the idea of you. I know every little thing you are because I thought every little one of them up. Except the parts Bran did. Which rather makes me your mother, and you really oughtn’t look at your mother that way.

  Charlotte’s imaginary Douro always respected a little defiance, so she did not hold back her annoyance. “I think everyone ought to stop asking me if I agree and isn’t it just and wouldn’t I say. Isn’t it enough that you’ve said it? Or don’t you believe much in yourself, Adrian?”

  Emily dug her nails into Charlotte’s wrist. Too far, too far! But Douro just chuckled in that infuriating way that grown-ups did whenever they thought Charlotte was being precocious. It was the same way she chuckled when one of their birds did something particularly sweet. I am not a bird, she thought angrily. I am Charlotte. No one here has any right to talk to me like an amusing child up past bedtime. We’re all the same age, for God’s sake!

  She opened her mouth to say so. But Crashey felt the storm coming and quickly dragged Emily and Charlotte out of the shadow of Douro’s stare toward merrier folk. He steered them right into a crowd milling round a card-table. A pair of boisterous young men were calling bets. The one made of crushed green peppercorns choked on his brandy and hurried to shake their hands. Then he seemed to remember that one ought not to shake young ladies’ hands as if they were friends at a pub, even if they were from the middle of nowhere. He blushed, wiped his hands on his suit jacket, and bowed properly, though not half so prettily as Sergeant Crashey. The other kept chatting to a girl all of bluebells.

  The Sergeant took in the crowd at a little velvet-covered table with a grand arm. “This jumpedupstart boy is Young Soult the Rhymer, who fancies himself the greatest poet of the age, though he’s more than a bit rubbish. He’ll be performing tonight, the Genii save us all. And this is my preferfavorite soul in the Glasser, excepting Captain B, of courseviously, Georgie Gordon, Lord Byron, who actually is the greatest poet of the age.”

  Charlotte and Emily startled, nearly jumped out of their skins, for they knew that name. They loved that name. The most famous poet in England! Though surely the one whose poems they read so eagerly back in Haworth was much older than this Lord Byron, and much more, well, dead, not to put too fine a point on it. Time and history as they knew them seemed to have never so much as nodded to Glass Town as they passed on the street. This Byron was very much alive, and smiling, and pretending to laugh at Young Soult’s joke. And surely the poet they knew wasn’t made of a hundred different animal pelts flowing smoothly and beautifully together into one glossy coat.

  “Aw, Crash, you might let them think well of me for a minute,” Young Soult pouted.

  Lord Byron took in Charlotte and Emily with sloping, sleepy, wolfish eyes.

  “She walks in beauty like the night, of cloudless climes and starry skies—”

  Emily and Charlotte burst out laughing. Byron looked quite hurt, and quite like a kicked dog.

  “Oh, I am sorry,” Charlotte said, wheezing a little as she tried to laugh in her corset. “But it’s too good! It’s perfect!”

  Emily remembered to put up her fan at the last moment and hide that she was mocking the great man. She wondered suddenly if that’s what fans were always used for. “It’s only that you would quote yourself, you know,” she giggled helplessly. “It’s just all over you. But thank you kindly, we are rather nice-looking!”

  Crashey hurried them away from the stricken look on Lord Byron’s face. After a moment, the poet called after them:

  “You know my work?”

  But they were already on to a new throng.

  “Now the short bluestone fellowman tilting at the punch bowl is King George, but he’s only King George today, you see. On other days of the week he fancies himself a crawfish, an oyster, a heather flower, a blue flame, and a soldier called Captain Flower. Mad as a carpet, that one. But best call him His Majesty King George or else he’ll bite you. No use judging! I once had an uncle who thought he was a cricket bat, and I’ve got the paddle-marks to prove it.”

  “Who is King if not him?” Charlotte said suddenly. It seemed such a logical thing to ask that it had completely escaped her mind until now.

  Crashey stroked the faint beard lines etched into his pine chin. “Well, that is the questionorium, wouldn’t you know it. See, it ought to be Douro, if you go strictly by bloodgeniture. But after the first Boneyonic War, Adrian’s Papa go
t himself slapped down. Kicked out. Deposdicated.”

  “The first Boneyonic . . . Napoleonic War?” Emily interrupted. Of course there had been two of them at home, as well, she supposed.

  Sergeant Crashey nicked a biscuit from a passing maidservant and popped it into his mouth, talking around the crumbs. “Yeah, love, look, it’s been a fiery mess around here for an eon and a half, but that’s history, innit? I daresay yours don’t look any better after a rough night. So then we had Parliament running the place from Greenhall in Verdopolis, until all the badtacular business with Gondal started up again. That’s when Miss Zenobia’s brother, Lord Elrington, rode in on a rhinoceros and told them all to go get hung. Lucky Rogue! When he marries her, he’ll be the richest man in Glass Town. If he ever gets around to it. But then Elrington diedinated himself with no babies, so, this, that, and the other far too complicated thing to do with half-cousaunts marrying barn doors or summat: It’s meant to be little Victoria now. She had brothers, but they all got killed by frogs back in the Ugly Ages before we inventixperimented up the rhodinus secundi vitae, which the boys call grog and Gravey calls morning tea. But no one’s had a peep out of Vicks since she were ’napped in her nappies. Anyway, it’d be dash hard to rule from a prison in enemy territorizones even if she hadn’t got reared up by who-knows-who. So technicalliwise, it’s Vickie’s Papa, the Duke of Can’t, but he’s only a Regent. I’ll bet you can imagine how that’s going.” Crashey put on a reedy, aristocratic voice. “Terribly sorry, I just can’t run the kingdom. I just can’t decide which troops go where! I just can’t wipe myself of a morning ho, ho, ho!”

  The Sergeant stopped them, and his history lesson, beside a tall lady with only one leg, clad all in the brightest blue damask. “But here’s a monarch with none of that baggageosity! This fetching young maidcreature is Wollstonecraft, Queen of the Bluestockings.” Crashey seemed to have an idea. “Perhaps, your Graceroyal Highmajesty, we might have a word with you later, regarding . . . er . . . a sensitive matter?”