The Glass Town Game
Page 34
Lord Byron kissed Emily’s hand. He had a bit of mortar on his lip. It came away on her skin, clinging there grayly.
“Good-bye, Crash,” Charlotte said.
“Good-bye, miss.” The Sergeant kept up his side bravely and did not cry. “Do try to keep cozywarm. And eat three square meals a day. And get lots of rest. And only drink freshbright water. And . . . well, dash it all, I am sorry about our man Wellington. I think he might have made a real Lady of you if it weren’t for getting shot and that.”
Suddenly, Charlotte remembered the note Wellington had given her. She’d meant to keep it to read when she was alone, but she could not be sure what would happen to it between worlds. She reached into her skirts and pulled it out, popping the black wax seal with one fingernail.
My Dear Lady of the Sensible Eyes and Rational Lips,
It was quite a dance after all, don’t you think? And you were right, the steps were rather beside the point. You will have my gratitude forever. And one day, when you are very old indeed, perhaps you will come and meet me on the rich fields of County Nothing, and we will dance again under the Ridsummer sun.
Yours,
Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington
“No,” Charlotte said with a mysterious smile. “I don’t think military men are for me, in the end. Sooner or later, he will want to give me an order, and where would that leave me?”
“Farewell, Gravey,” Emily cried. “Farewell, George. Farewell, Crashey. Farewell, Glass Town!”
Victoria clung to Anne and kissed her cheek. She whispered in her ear: “I’ll make a new story. I’ll start it tonight. I’ll make you whatever you like.”
The stairs went a long way down into the shadows. On the other side, they could smell heather and wintergreen already.
After they’d vanished into the wall of their own house and all had gone quiet for a moment or two, a dark head poked out from behind the tapestry once more.
It was Branwell.
“Go away,” hissed Victoria Alexandrina.
Branwell strode to her side. He lifted her up and kissed her hand in such a gentlemanly manner that it would break your heart to see it. He took her ruined, tattered pages from her.
“Let me fix it,” he said softly. “I can fix it. I’m good at stories. Well, not good, but all right. I shall cut and glue and arrange, just like Mr. Bud and Mr. Tree said back in Ochreopolis, until it all comes out as clear and neat as rain. Oh, there might be a burnt schoolhouse or two left over in the cuttings; editing’s a messy business. But when I’m done, I’ll bring it all back to you, and your England will be as green as mine. I promise.”
Victoria clung onto her pages and shook her head. But little by little, as the moonlight drifted in, she let go. Branwell bowed to her like a true soldier, and slipped away like a shadow.
TWENTY-SIX
Home
Tabitha and Aunt Elizabeth scrubbed and soaked and wrung out the week’s linens in the old washing tub. Their eyes were red and sunken with worry and with lye fumes. Papa stood in the doorway, smoking his pipe, but his heart wasn’t in it. All the other children had arrived home from Cowan Bridge School already. He could only think that Branwell and Anne had gone along with the girls in the carriage from Keighley to see them properly settled in and all four had been lost in the blaze that destroyed Cowan Bridge School. Branwell had always been thoughtful that way.
The children came stumbling into the kitchen garden from the frosted twilight. Their clothes smelled faintly of smoke. Their faces were smudged and exhausted and hollow-looking, but the color was high in their cheeks. They were hungry and bickering and alive.
Tabitha and Elizabeth fell upon them like hens on autumn apples.
“Where have you been? My darlings, my darlings, you frightened your auntie so!”
“You are just the worst children,” Tabitha said fondly, runing her fingers through their tangled, filthy hair.
Papa could not bring himself to join in the smothering. He stood his ground and held out his arms, waiting. His son flew into them and he held the boy tight.
“We feared the worst,” he said gruffly. “When word came about the fire, and no sign of any of you. But it’s all right now. It’s all right. We’re all here.”
Charlotte and Emily exchanged glances. What fire?
“There are other schools,” Papa whispered into Anne’s hair as he picked her up. “Better schools. You’re all safe and you’re all mine.”
“Buck up, Papa!” Anne laughed.
“Be brave,” Branwell said into his father’s coat.
“Busy hands.” Emily leaned against her aunt.
“Make bright hearts,” Charlotte finished, and lay her head on her sister’s lap. She had never been so tired.
What they had been about they would not say, nor how they had been gone so long, nor why Branwell and Anne had not just let the girls go in the carriage as they were told, nor how they had found their way home in the dark. In fact, all four were silent as monks.
Aunt Elizabeth sent the girls and Branwell to scrub their cheeks and dress for supper.
“There’s a bit of time to play with your wooden soldiers, if you like,” Tabitha called after them. “The fish will not be ready for three quarters of an hour!”
In the playroom at the top of the stairs, four solemn judges stood before their wooden soldiers.
“Crashey’s got to be punished somehow,” Emily said. “Everyone who took Josephine’s hair. It’s too awful to let them off scot-free.”
“Go on, Charlotte,” said Branwell, “you’re best at punishments.”
Charlotte thought for a long time. “In the morning I shall take him down to the kitchen gardens and leave him there, where he will wander in exile, being set upon by mice and cats and foxes and badgers, and at the end of a month, I will collect him again.”
“In Glass Town, that will be the most awful and extraordinary tale of penance,” Emily breathed.
“It’s not enough,” Anne mumbled. “Not really. Not when you think it all through as hard as you can.”
When three quarters of an hour had passed, no one came to the table.
“They can’t do this to me again!” Tabitha cried. “My heart won’t take it!”
Aunt Elizabeth and Tabitha drew on their woolen shawls and went out into the gloam to find the little wastrels while Papa tried to calm his breathing in the parlor. They would not stop running off, those four. Just like their mother. Probably watching some silver worm chew the earth or counting cobblestones. They could not have gone far. The women would find them. It would be all right. Buck up, he told himself.
It would be spring soon. Green snapped in the air though the yews in the churchyard gave no hint of bud.
Aunt Elizabeth and Tabitha turned down the path to the churchyard without saying a word to one another. They knew where the little ones would be. They spied four dark heads down among the gravestones. They’d been through so much—of course they’d run to their mother, and to their sisters, too. Anne and Charlotte, Emily and Branwell stood before three headstones on the slope next to the open moor. The middle one, Lizzie’s, shone gray in the moonlight beside Maria’s. Their mother’s marker was half-sunk in heath and moss.
Little Anne had something in her hand. A vial wrapped up in leather and strips of fur. All the other children were staring at it.
“You really are the best thief of all of us,” Emily marveled. “Good show. But it won’t work, you know. It’s the bravest idea imaginable, but it won’t work.”
Anne nodded. Tears fell off her cheekbones. She knew. She’d guessed since that awful day at Bravey’s Inn, and she’d mostly given up all hope when Wellington had begun to rust, and she’d been certain when her toffee hammer with ANNE etched on it turned into a birch branch halfway down the stairs from one Parsonage to another and all their wonderful medals had turned into chips of rock and pinecones. But she had to try anyway.
“I’m sorry,” Anne’s voice started to hitch
a little, full of tears to come. “I should have let you have it for poor Welly after all. You knew I had it, Charlotte. I saw. I saw you knowing it. It was only that—”
“Don’t be silly, Annie. All of us being six again is ever so much more important than the Duke of Wellington. And even if Emily’s right . . . there was a hope, you know. It was always little. But it was big enough.”
Anne squared her shoulders.
“It will work like it did in Glass Town,” Anne said. “And . . . and . . .”
“And everyone will wake up and start talking all at once and kiss us like mad,” Branwell took up the game. “And . . . and . . .”
“And we’ll all turn into birds and fly away into the stars,” Emily said, her eyes wet. “And . . . and . . .”
“And nothing bad will ever happen, because we will be all of us together forever until the very, very end of time,” Charlotte whispered.
Anne opened the vial and turned it upside down. A single red rose petal fell out, bright and vivid and stark against the graves.
“We brought you flowers, Mummy,” said Anne, and leaned over to kiss the fading headstone.
She smiled at her brother and sisters. Her eyes were dry. You couldn’t ever really fix a sad story. You could only make another. And another. And another, until you found the right one at last, the one that ends in joy.
The children lingered under that benign sky, watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass.
“How anyone can ever imagine unquiet slumber for our dear sleepers in that quiet earth I shall never know,” Aunt Elizabeth said finally, and went down the path to coax the four tired, sweet things up toward the warm candlelit house.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book owes many, many debts, too many to ever repay. It will just have to toddle along in life with patches on its coat and a humble heart, poor dear. But one must always try, so here are a few coins toward the capital.
First, and foremost, and forever, and always: I beg the forgiveness and approval of Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and Branwell Brontë, who I have loved for nearly all my life, and by whom I hope I have done well. The Glass Town you have found here is not their Glass Town precisely, for that would be burglaring, and perhaps the Charlotte, Anne, Emily, and Bran you have followed through these pages are not the Brontës precisely, either, but shadows of them, moving through a dimension just slightly different from our own. But there is not a road in my tale in which they did not lay the first stone. As with all children, once you have set it going, a world gets away from you quicker than you can imagine, and my Glass Town was always meant to be theirs if only it ran off to join the circus and got confoundedly lost along the way. But quite obviously, there is no book without them, and very probably without them I would never have been a writer anyhow, so please think of this as my thank-you gift laid upon their graves with hope and love and not a little trepidation. It is my deep hope that the children, young and old, who wander through this Glass Town may find their way from it to Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey, and all the other glorious works of the Brontë sisters.
I have, perhaps, been allowed to visit and sit in the playroom at the top of the stairs for one beautiful afternoon, and permitted to join their game, still going on and going on forever. I’ve but made a wooden soldier or two walk and talk clumsily across the floor before being called away home for my supper. Thank you so, all four of you, for the wonders of your hospitality.
I cannot thank the Brontë Parsonage in Haworth enough for the incredible and tireless work they have done to preserve and make available every detail of the Brontës’ lives, from the tiniest and loveliest to the greatest and grandest. Additionally, Fannie Elizabeth Ratchford’s The Brontës’ Web of Childhood, Inside the Victorian Home, and Daphne Du Maurier’s The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë were utterly invaluable to my research. All remaining mistakes, infelicities, anachronisms, liberties, and all other assorted foolishnesses that the text is heir to are my own and I shall take my scoldings without complaint.
Thank you to Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow for commissioning the short story that wanted to be a big grown-up book from the moment the first word hit the page. Thank you to Jane Yolen for appearing in my inbox one day, as if by magic, to reassure me that the big grown-up book was a good idea, after all. And to Kaite Welsh, for enthusing all these years over the whole mad notion of the thing. Thank you also to Rebecca Latimer, Nicholas Tschida, and Shawna Jacques.
Thank you to Howard Morhaim, my beloved agent; to Annie Nybo, who only edits things in the very nicest of ways and is nothing at all like Mr. Bud or Mr. Tree; and to Kristin Ostby, for setting the wheels in motion.
Thank you to Heath Miller, who read and read these chapters as they evolved, told me off when I was being too awfully American about things, and kept me fed and watered like the weedy little harebell I am.
And one final, small apology to Jane Austen, for being more loyal to another’s opinions on her work than my own—after all, when in Glass Town, one knows who butters one’s bread.
About the Author
Catherynne M. Valente is a New York Times bestselling author of fantasy and science fiction novels, short stories, and poetry. She has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards and has won the Locus and Andre Norton awards. She lives on a small island off the coast of Maine with her partner, two dogs, one enormous cat, a less enormous cat, six chickens, a red accordion, an uncompleted master’s degree, a roomful of yarn, a spinning wheel with ulterior motives, a cupboard of jam and pickles, a bookshelf full of folktales, an industrial torch, and an Oxford English Dictionary.
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Text copyright © 2017 by Catherynne M. Valente
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ISBN 978-1-4814-7696-6 (hardcover)
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Table of Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Part I: A Sound Called Wuthering
Chapter One: The Bees
Chapter Two: The Beastliest Day
Chapter Three: A Game of And
Chapter Four: To Glass Town, My Girl!
Chapter Five: Passage, Stashage, Gnashage, and Splashage
Part II: In This Imperfect World
Chapter Six: Out of the Train and Into the Fire
Chapter Seven: Such a Little Thing
Chapter Eight: A Refreshment of Spirits
Chapter Nine: The Tragical Romance
Chapter Ten: Ochreopolis by Air
Chapter Eleven: The Problem of Primarily Scurrilous Brunty
Part III: I Am No Bird
Chapter Twelve: Gone, Gone, Gone
Chapter Thirteen: Sir Rotter and Lady Rubbish
Chapter Fourteen: A Bath, a Bit of Paint, and a Pile of Cloth
Chapter Fifteen: Me and Mine and Bonaparte
Chapter Sixteen: The Wildfell Ball
Chapter Seventeen: The Only Onions in the World
Chapter Eighteen: The High Ground
Chapter Nineteen: Dulce Et Decorum Est
Chapter Twenty: The Vivisectionists’ Garden
Chapter Twenty-One: The Princess in the Tower
Part IV: And All the Weary Now at Rest
Chapter Twenty-Two: A Man of Science
Chapter Twenty-Three: My World Will Shine
Chapter Twenty-Four: The Storming of the Bastille
Chapter Twenty-Five: The Door in the Wall
Chapter Twenty-Six: Home
Acknowledgments