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“Oughtn’t you be in school anyhow?” asked Bravey, bending precisely in half at the waist to stare Charlotte down. His big oak nose butted up against her small, pointed one.
Emily shuddered. Charlotte did not.
“To . . . to hell with School,” Emily said softly, and got the very satisfying experience of hearing all her siblings gasp.
“Now, that’s what I like to hear!” crowed Crashey. “I like a girl with a little swear in her. Barely gradtriculated stickth form myself. Too much sap in me, my teachers said! Hasn’t got the smarts the good Lord gave a staircase. But I fooled them, didn’t I? Got brains coming out me ears, nose, and throat, I have. Pluslike, I can shoot true as the day you were born and my right arm could hold back the ocean so’s any one of you ladies could walk right through the world as dry as you please.” He flexed his burly muscles, in case they doubted him.
Branwell resolved immediately never to set foot in a classroom again. He squeezed his own skinny arm and hoped no one saw him do it.
“?’S’not a matter of sap, Crash. It’s a matter of having nothing between your ears but squirrels.”
“Smart squirrels,” Crashey sniffed, cleaning out his ear with one stubby finger. “Genius squirrels! Nothing but the best!”
Bravey clapped his comrade’s shoulders heartily. “Now, little masters,” he said, “if you’ve got nothing in your hands, I’m afraid the Express is running late and we’ve got to get Brunty here back home where he belongs.” Bravey patted the enormous book that had only recently been the Magazine Man.
“Where does he belong?” asked Branwell breathlessly.
Bravey winked one wooden eye. “In prison, of course! The P-House! The clink! Quite a naughty little pupper, is our Brunty.”
“And where does the Express go?” said Emily, her voice high and strangled and tight, afraid of the answer and longing for it.
Crashey threw his brawny arms up into the air. “Why, to Glass Town, my girl! The grandest town from here to Saturn, the most glorious country ever invented, home of the daring and the demanding, favorite haunt of the lawless and the beautiful, the wild glass jungle, the crystal frontier! Where else would anyone want to go? Tickets, please! Tickets or NOTHING! Tickets or TOTAL DESPAIR! Tickets or BUST!”
Charlotte cleared her throat, and asked, in her most sensible voice, which she had copied from Aunt Elizabeth on her most sensible day: “How much does a ticket cost, sir?”
This brought Crashey and Bravey up short. They whispered to each other behind knotty pine hands, eyeballing the children through their huge fingers.
“A . . . million pounds?” offered Crashey uncertainly. “Each!” he blurted. Then, feeling a bit more confident, he smiled an enormous smile, showing outsized birch-bark teeth.
“That’s a respectable money number, so you have to salute it.” Bravey sagely nodded.
The four of them hesitated. Finally, Branwell shrugged and touched his fingers to his mess of dark hair in a rather smart salute. His sisters did likewise.
“May we have a moment to . . . to . . . consult our accounts?” Emily asked, and curtsied, because it seemed they were doing silly things like that now, so she might as well get a head start on the next nonsense.
“Only a moment, miss!” warned Bravey. “We are quite, quite behind schedule, and Chuck here won’t keep!”
The four of them huddled up behind a post.
Charlotte took the lead even though Bran stamped on her toes. Let me do it for once! Father trusted me with the money!
“Time for a Thump Parliament, I should say,” she whispered.
Branwell crossed his arms over his chest. His dark eyes fumed beneath dark brows. The Thump Parliament had been his idea, and he especially liked its rhyming with Rump Parliament, which was a thing that happened ages ago and got a King named Charlie’s head cut off. A Thump Parliament meant: All three of you had better do as I say or I shall thump you like a bad, naughty King. But as usual, the girls had taken it and run off and turned it into something much nicer and less fun, which was to say, any decision the four of them had to make together.
“I don’t believe they’ve got the first idea about proper English money, really,” Emily said, as quietly as she could.
“Of course they don’t!” Branwell snapped. He rolled his eyes. “Aren’t any of you going to say
it?”
“Those are our soldiers!” cried Anne, too loud. They hushed her, and made a great deal more noise doing it than she had in the first place. “Our wooden soldiers! Crashey and Bravey! Ross and Perry will be hiding somewhere, and Gravey and Cheeky and Rogue and Goody and Naughty and Stumps! I can tell Crashey by the chunk knocked out of his leg from when Bran whacked him against the doorknob! But how could they be ours?”
“It might be a coincidence, Anne,” said Charlotte, biting the inside of her cheek. “Lots of people could be called Crashey. And . . . made of wood.”
Emily glared at her sister. “But it isn’t. Oh, other people might be called Crashey and Bravey, but they said Glass Town! Glass Town isn’t a real place. We made it up because you said it was ‘tedious’ to only set our games in countries that really existed. Stop being sensible! It’s ‘tedious’ to be sensible at a magic train and wooden men! Sensible won’t stick. Now, I say we have a very clear-cut moral problem in front of us. We can go to Cowan Bridge School and learn a lot of rot we already know and freeze and starve and probably die of consumption, or we can get on a fairy train driven by our Christmas presents.”
“My Christmas present,” insisted Bran, but no one paid any attention.
