Nothing happened.
“You’ll need to try a little harder than that,” the mouse said, its voice muffled by the cloth of her dress.
Oh, do be quiet, Elizabeth thought. All of this was hard enough without the mouse commenting on every little thing she did or didn’t do, but she held her tongue. It wouldn’t be in the least helpful to start an argument when she was trying to solve this problem of the wall.
The thing of it was that she’d never really thought of what she did as magic. It was only wishes, gentle thoughts that sort of drifted out of her and made things happen.
(Although that thought about Mr. Dodgson wasn’t gentle, no it was not at all.)
Now it was like her wishes were in a bottle and the mouse had put a stopper on it by calling her a Magician. Magic wasn’t real; it was a faraway thing done by fairy godmothers with pumpkins or snow queens with mirrors on high mountains. Magic wasn’t something that Elizabeth had at her fingertips.
She thought about asking the mouse his opinion on what to do next, but a small, delicate rumble shook Elizabeth’s pocket. The mouse had fallen asleep, and she rather thought it was snoring.
Do mice snore? It was no stranger, she supposed, than a mouse sitting up on its hind legs and talking.
She shook her head. If she didn’t stay focused on the task at hand she’d be stuck inside this tunnel forever, and the mouse would laugh and laugh at her ineptitude.
No mouse will laugh at me again, she vowed, and placed her hands flat against the brick.
I wish there was a door here, she thought, but this time she pictured the door in her mind. It was just a little taller and wider than she was herself, and it was made of wood that had been painted white. The frame all around was as blue as her dress, and the doorknob was a pretty silver color. It would open on noiseless hinges and—best of all, in Elizabeth’s opinion—no one bad would be able to see that it was there.
That man who grabbed her, or anyone else like him, would never notice the door, even if they touched it. To them it would just be another section of the brick wall.
Elizabeth felt the rough brick shift under her fingers as it transformed into the smooth painted surface of her door. And just in time too, for there was suddenly a noise coming from farther down the tunnel—from the place where the man had been.
“I’m going to get you, you little witch, and when I do you’re going to wish you’d never been born!”
Elizabeth grasped the knob of the door, which was just where she’d thought it would be, and opened it, stepping quickly out of the tunnel and slamming the door behind her.
But not before she heard the last thing the man was shouting.
“You’ll wish you’d never been born! Just like ALICE!”
* * *
Elizabeth patted the door behind her, confident that it was shut tight. If her wish was true then the man wouldn’t find the door, and even if he did, she had more opportunities to escape him out in the open. Surely someone would help her if a man ran at her and tried to take her away.
She felt unaccountably shaken by his last words. She didn’t like to think of Alice wishing she’d never been born. The Voice had made it sound like Alice was someone strong and powerful, someone whom Elizabeth should aspire to be.
Though he also said that Alice had regretted her curiosity.
Elizabeth was regretting her own curiosity very much, but now that she was out in the world again she was certain that everything would be put right.
She rubbed at her eyes, blinking. It wasn’t so terribly bright out—it seemed like there was a haze hanging over everything—but she felt like a mole that had just emerged from the ground.
Slowly her surroundings came into focus, and when they did she half wondered if she hadn’t been better off in that tunnel after all. Perhaps she should have just gone back the way she came, and never mind the man with the long fingernails who tried to grab her.
The door had opened onto a square, but it was a square like Elizabeth had never seen before. This was no Great Square, or even one of the smaller squares scattered around the New City. Those smaller squares always had parks or zoos or pleasant little fruit markets.
There was nothing pleasant about this square, and Elizabeth felt herself shrinking back against the door she’d just come through, hoping to turn herself invisible.
There were several run-down buildings that faced on the square, all of them wooden, and all of the wood was grey. The bottom floors were certainly businesses—the sharp scent of spirits wafted in the air, mixed with meat pies and something else—something that smelled like desperation.
The upper floors of every structure seemed to be apartments or bedrooms, and some of the buildings had three or four or five floors above the initial one. Elizabeth had never seen buildings so high
(except from far away, in the Old City)
(and that man said to me, “Just where do you think you are?” and I should have known when he said that, I should have known that I’ve wandered too far from home)
Some of these buildings had porches where sharp-eyed men stood in clumps, smoking cigarettes or holding small bottles or both. All of them wore the rough homespun wool and leather boots that she associated with laborers or sailors, and none of them looked as though they’d bathed in several weeks. Their laughter was a harsh and raucous thing. They seemed to do a lot of it, though Elizabeth heard no joy.
The women were something else, again. All of the ones Elizabeth could see wore bright colors—satins in jewels and stripes, feathers in their hair, petticoats and stockings exposed for all to see. Their lips were too red and their eyelashes were too black and they laughed shrill and long and loud. There was no joy in their laughs either, if you listened properly, though the men all around them appeared to be fooled.
These, Elizabeth knew, were Fallen Women. She’d never seen them before, only heard of them spoken in hushed undertones by the ladies who came to lunch with Mama. They always discussed Fallen Women and Their Offspring, and how they might perform some small act of charity to assist these women and children—though this act of charity would never extend as far as actually going into the Old City to hand out food and clothing personally. No, that was something for the servants to do.
The Fallen Women seemed to be trying to lure the men away from the pubs, and Elizabeth watched, fascinated, as they raised their skirts and flicked open the buttons of their blouses. Some of the men ignored the women, but others got a look in their eyes that made Elizabeth shrink even more, for it was a hard and predatory look. She wanted to shout at the women, “No, run away! They’re only going to hurt you!” but then she had a funny feeling that the women knew that, and were resigned to their fate.
I must get away from here before somebody sees me, though she had no notion of how she would do such a thing. She self-consciously smoothed her hair, which was so golden and bright it would attract immediate attention if she tried to move through the square. The thought of one of those hard-eyed predators catching sight of her made Elizabeth shiver.
There was an abandoned cart a short distance away—it looked like it might have once been a place where fruit was sold but now it was just a half-rotting obstacle on the sidewalk. Elizabeth darted toward it and hunched behind, keeping a sharp eye on the crowds of men all around the square. The danger, she felt, would come from there.
Not that there weren’t cruel women in the world—Elizabeth wasn’t so foolish as to think that. But the women here in the square seemed mostly the sort concerned with their own survival. They wouldn’t have the time or the inclination to chase after little girls.
“What I need,” Elizabeth muttered, “is a cloak of some sort. Then I can slide around the edge of the square and try to find a cab.”
Her eyes darted everywhere, looking for a shop, a line of laundry, anything. Not that she would steal, of course. She would leave
some money—though the only money she had in her pocket was her Giving Day coin, and she had a notion that she would need that for transportation.
She could leave a note with a promise of payment later—always assuming she could find a sheet of paper and a fountain pen to write with. Elizabeth could make her letters very nicely, and even sign her whole name with a lovely little flourish.
“Just try to find a cab in here that will take you back to the New City,” the mouse said, breaking into her thoughts.
She glanced down at her pocket. The mouse had perched its forepaws on the edge of her pocket, and stared up at her. It looked almost exactly as she’d imagined it in the tunnel—small and grey and soft looking, with pink-shell ears that turned in her direction. The only difference was the eyes. The mouse had bright green eyes, like little jewels in its face. She’d never seen a mouse with colored eyes before.
“If I managed to get into this place from the New City then I surely will be able to return there,” Elizabeth said with a conviction she didn’t entirely feel.
“That’s precisely what Alice said, but it didn’t quite work out the way she planned,” the mouse said.
“Oh, Alice, Alice!” Elizabeth snapped. “All I ever hear about is Alice. How many times must I tell you that I am not Alice?”
The mouse looked up at her, and if a mouse could look crafty then this one certainly did. “Aren’t you? Your parents only had you to replace her. Their little Alice had grown up and gone mad and they had to put her in a box so nobody could see her madness and her pain, she had so much pain but they didn’t want to know it, but they still wanted a little pet to love so they had you and pretended that Alice never was.”
Elizabeth sucked in a breath between her teeth. “That’s an awful thing to say. An awful, terrible thing to say. I thought you were a nice mouse, that you were here to help me.”
The mouse made a little movement that could have been a shrug. “Sometimes awful, terrible things are true. I always tell the truth, even if it means know-all little girls don’t think I’m very nice. I’d rather be true than nice.”
“I don’t believe it’s true at all,” she said. “I think you’re horrid.”
“Whatever you like,” the mouse said, unconcerned.
It couldn’t be true, what the mouse said. Her parents would never put any child of theirs away when that child was hurting. And they certainly hadn’t had her to replace Alice. That would be awful in more ways than one.
It would mean that she was nothing to them as Elizabeth, only a swap for another girl who’d become somehow unacceptable. Alice meant so little to them that anyone would do in exchange.
No, I won’t believe it, Elizabeth thought fiercely. I won’t.
But then why did no one ever mention Alice except by mistake?
She wouldn’t worry about it just now. She had to get out of this terrible place and back home again. Once she was safely in her room and her belly was full and her hair was clean and washed she would think about all of these uncomfortable ideas.
“Too bad I can’t turn into a mouse and dart through the square,” Elizabeth said.
“Who says you can’t, but then where would I be?” the mouse said.
“You could run along beside me,” Elizabeth said. “And guide me, of course.”
“Of course,” the mouse said.
Elizabeth thought she detected a little bite in the mouse’s tone, and she was about to speak sharply back at it—it was riding along in her pocket, after all—when it spoke again.
“But it’s terribly difficult to transform, and if you don’t know what you’re doing then I don’t think you should try,” he said. “Unless you want to have whiskers and a tail for the remainder of your life.”
“I’d rather not.”
“Well, then, you ought to think about cloaking yourself.”
“That’s what I already said,” Elizabeth said. “But there’s no cloak to be had.”
“No, no, not that sort of cloak,” the mouse said. “Didn’t I already say you were a Magician? You could cloak yourself with magic and no one could see you.”
Elizabeth frowned. Making a door in the wall had been hard enough. How was she to use her magic to keep all the people—and there were so many people—from seeing her?
“How am I to do that?” she asked.
Again, the mouse made a little movement that was like a human shrug, even though it didn’t really have shoulders.
“How am I to know? I’m just a mouse.”
Elizabeth muttered a word under her breath that she’d heard Papa say only when he was especially angry. The mouse chuckled softly.
Well, she didn’t need some silly mouse to help her. She could solve her problems all on her own, and she was not going to ask again and make herself sound foolish.
Everything she’d done so far was as simple as a wish, but it was harder to wish for something when you were cold and hungry and terrified of being caught. She wanted very much to rely on someone else (though she would never, ever admit such a thing out loud), for when you are a child that’s what you are supposed to do—let adults decide the best thing to do. But the only adults around weren’t the sort she could trust to make the best decisions for her, and so she’d gone back around to where she started. She was going to have to puzzle this one out on her own.
I wish, she thought, and then realized this thought was a very tentative thing, and that she’d have to put a bit more oomph into it if she wanted this wish to go anywhere.
I wish, she thought again, and just at that moment it seemed that one of the men across the square caught sight of her. Perhaps it was just a glimpse of her blond hair or the trailing end of her blue dress but there were definitely eyes upon her now, or at least upon the fruit cart.
Her insides seemed to squeeze together, and she hunched over in terror, whispering, “You don’t see me, you don’t see me, you don’t see me.”
She listened hard for the sound of rushing footsteps, or for the approach of laughter, or the sound of someone calling, “Hey, where are you going?”
If someone comes over here I’m just going to run, run, run and perhaps they’ll be so startled that they won’t see me.
But that someone might come with friends, friends that would surround her and snatch her up and carry her away screaming and there would be nothing she could do about it then, for she was a small and soft and frightened thing.
“So they mustn’t see me in the first place, and they don’t see me, don’t see me, don’t see me, I’m blending in with the wall and the cart and the ground and the sky, whatever they look at it will be like I’m water that you can see through and I won’t even seem like a ripple to them, no cruel eyes can see me nor cruel hands touch me, they don’t see me, they don’t see me, they don’t see me.”
And then the man was there, and she’d been concentrating so hard on her spell that she hadn’t even heard his approach. She saw his boots first, cracked brown leather with protruding nails that clicked on the cobblestones (I ought to have heard those, I really ought), and over the tops of the boots was a pair of wool trousers that had seen better days (and could really do with a wash, too, for the smell was something terrible that made Elizabeth want to gag).
Her eyes rose higher, past the brown leather belt with the silver-handled knife hanging off it in a matching brown leather sheath, and then a brown waistcoat over a blue shirt buttoned only partway. He had a long thick scar that went across his chest, and the rest of him appeared no better washed than the trousers. She was afraid to look at his face, to see his greedy eyes, but then she told herself that she wasn’t a scared little mouse—even if she felt that way—and went the rest of the way.
His face wasn’t shaved, and his eyes were a very hard blue, but they were full of puzzlement now. He stared into the place where Elizabeth huddled and his face was contorted i
n confusion.
He can’t see me, she thought, and it was a wonderful thought that filled her with glee. She could see everything about him, down to the lines around his eyes, but he was looking right at her and he couldn’t see her.
The man scratched his head with a filthy hand and circled all around the cart.
“All right there, Abe?” one of the other men from across the street called.
“Thought I saw something,” Abe replied, but though his boots passed within a whisker’s length of Elizabeth he did not realize she was there.
It worked! I did it!
“Told you that you were a Magician,” the mouse said, and he sounded terribly smug.
“But you didn’t tell me how to do the spell, so don’t think you can take credit for this,” Elizabeth said tartly. “That was all my doing.”
“If you know so much about doing something then you ought to get yourself out of this square before the spell wears off,” the mouse said.
Elizabeth would have liked to make a smart reply back, but she recognized the wisdom of this statement. She’d managed to hide herself from one man’s eyes, but it didn’t necessarily mean she could hide from them all.
I’ll have to, she thought, else I’m never going to get home again.
She felt very exhausted then, worn thin in a way that she’d never been. Home wasn’t so far away, geographically speaking, but there were so many tasks for her to accomplish in order to get there. And while she was a very clever nine-year-old, she was, in fact, only nine, and not accustomed to fending for herself in this way.
Moaning about it won’t fix anything, Elizabeth Violet Hargreaves. Get yourself up and save your own self, because no one is going to do it for you.
That thought sounded like her, but a more grown-up version of her. It was as if her future self was chiding her.
(Or maybe it was Alice maybe Alice is helping me.)
No, she wasn’t going after Alice again, even in her thoughts. She had quite enough Voices in her head already.
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