(Re)Visions: Alice ((Re)Visions)

by Kaye Chazan

  The Queen tapped her fan upon the edge of her chair again, and the King jumped with every smack. "Does this little straw-haired girl use a name?"

  The Otter cocked its head. "What does one use a name for? I mean, doesn't one just have it? It's given to one, right? Like a gift. Does this make it one's very first birthday gift?"

  "It should," the King replied, "although it's not wrapped."

  "The best birthday gifts never are," added the Knave as he licked his fingers. "How does one wrap a puppy?"

  "Very carefully," the Otter added. "And with a few bones in there so he doesn't get hungry."

  "Silence!" shouted the Queen. All this conversation muddled her head. "This little girl-possibly-a-balding-duck, what does she call herself?"

  The Otter paused, lowering its shell. "Well, I don't know that she told me, but she might have told someone else, and if I overheard it, I mightn't remember for fear of stealing—"

  "WHAT WAS IT?!"

  The Otter opened the shell and hid its face. "It was Alice, Alice I am sure. Like a list of A's."

  The Queen hadn't noticed that she had dropped her fan until her knuckles banged the edge of her chair. The King stared at her, one of his eyes more open than the other. The Otter continued, though what was coming out was gibberish. In fact, it'd resorted to lying on its back and doing cute human things with its hands.

  Alice.

  "Off with his head!" the Queen roared, standing and stomping down the stairs, toward her privy chamber. She dealt several threes and fives out of the room and slammed the door, slumping into the chair in front of the bunting-draped vanity. The lamps around the mirror flashed and their flames flickered perilously. She glared at them and they steadied.

  "A little girl," she whispered, "a little blonde girl."

  And then she sicked up all over the floor.

  Who are you?" Samuel called through the open window, and Mary Ann almost dropped the jam jar. Her fingers fumbled the sticky pot and flicked red on the white roses Mrs. Liddell had arranged in the centre of the table. She reached out and plucked the smattering of marred petals from the blooms, tucking them into her apron.

  "What is wrong with you?" she hissed, reaching over to shut the window.

  Samuel stuck one hand in the closing frame. "Meet me downstairs."

  It was all fine and well for Samuel to be coming and going any time he pleased. Most of his jobs took him outside the house, and if he stopped in at the pub for a pint in the evenings, no one was the wiser. Mary Ann wasn't sure if she was jealous or angry with him on the nights when his tea boiled dry on the hob.

  "Don't ever start me like that again," she told him, smacking his arm when he plodded through the back door into the kitchen.

  "Everyone's saying it," Samuel countered. "It's a joke, yeah? From London."

  Mary Ann handed him an apple. "No one in London makes any sense, you know," she grumbled. "Making things up all the time."

  "It's a joke," Samuel repeated. He set the apple back into the bowl and opened the jam jar on the tea tray, peering in. "Is this marmalade?"

  Mary Ann capped the jam jar and replaced it on the shelf, then wiped her hands. "Don't touch." Something in the semi-dark kitchen felt off, smelled odd.

  "Got you something," Samuel mumbled, picking up a bucket by the door. "Caught them this morning, they did."

  Mary Ann peered into the bucket. "Oysters?"

  "Too right. Clive had 'em over at the pub. Gave 'em to me for a pint."

  Mary Ann set the bucket on the table. "What do I do with them?"

  "Shuck them like—" Samuel pulled out a small penknife and jammed it into an oyster seam. He wiggled the knife all the way around, twisted, and the shell cracked open a bit. The smell wafted across the table and Mary Ann shook her head as Samuel prised the thing open with his fingertips and held it out to her. "Right out of the shell, you eat 'em."

  Mary Ann took the shell and stared at the grey and brown mass of pulp inside. It was far from the worst thing she might ever eat, but something about it was unappetising all the same. She tipped the shell. "It's still in here."

  Samuel stared at the oyster. "I think you cut the bottom, too, yeah?"

  Mary Ann sat at the table and found her paring knife, sliding it under the moist oyster and severing something. Samuel opened another and held it up to his mouth, dumping the meat and liquid down his gullet all in one go. There was nothing for it then.

  "How did Clive get these? I thought he was a carpenter?" she asked after they had ripped open ten or eleven more, sitting at the table, a pile of pearly brown shells between them.

  Samuel twisted the knife and tossed the started shell to Mary Ann, who finished the job, slurping the meat down in one bite, the liquor in the shell trailing down her chin. "I dunno. Think he has a deal with a bint down at the oyster-parlour. She gives him to him all the time."

  "You don't mean that he...?" Mary Ann gestured blandly with the empty shell in her hand.

  Samuel opened another oyster and shrugged. "I didn't ask." He handed her the shell. "But why not? There's plenty of oysters in the sea."

  "Is he going to marry her?"

  Samuel glanced into the bucket. "One left. You want it?"

  "No," Mary Ann said, something turning in her gut. Maybe those oysters had been bad. She sniffed her hands. They smelled like moldy cheese.

  A little later found them both outside in the dark, breathing in the smell of damp grass. Samuel threaded her arm in his and took her for a turn about the grounds, the smell of moldy cheese and rotten oysters forgotten and only a light salty taste lingering on her tongue. Mary Ann tapped her fingertips on Samuel's arm as they walked, beating out a little ditty she'd heard a few days ago from the children's lessons, something about a busy bee.

  If there had been more servants in the house, a stricter structure of being in service here, she might have thought twice about following Samuel into the hayloft. But the wind licked through her hair, tugged her towards the doors, and sinking into the piles of fresh straw felt like tumbling down a never-ending hole.

  Her tired legs twitched, like a horse kicking in its stall. The straw scratched her face when she turned away from Samuel's kisses, waiting for him to finish. His oyster-smelling fingers thrust into her mouth and she sucked, shucking the salt from his skin with her tongue.

  "Love you," Samuel groaned with one last thrust. Mary Ann felt one of her heels hit the hanging harness, and the last of his whispers was drowned out by the jangle of sleigh bells.

  Trousers and skirts were tightened and tied, aprons and shoes were laced, and they found themselves out in the cool night, still reeling. Samuel pulled a flask from his pocket, and they sat on the rail overlooking the back pasture.

  "I was thinking that I might go back to the farm," he said. "Take over when Tad gets too old." He offered her the flask. "Something to be said for having a bit of land, y'know."

  "It's not his land," she told him. "It's some other person's land."

  Samuel took the flask from her. "He's got the deed and everything. We've been on that land for years."

  She kicked the fence under her heel until the wood shook and rattled in the posts. Over by the treeline, something squealed when caught by something larger.

  "Ah, well, coals to Newcastle, anyway," he said then, shrugging, "I'm useless at farming."

  Mary Ann watched a light in the distance move down the road; Mister John's brougham returning from a venture in London. He would be wanting tea, probably, maybe a bit of cold ham and bread. Something else, she couldn't remember. Mister John made her wonder about cheese. Did they have any?

  "Do you ever find yourself doing the same thing again and again and forgetting that you've done it again and again before remembering?"

  Samuel handed her the flask again. "You need this more than I do."

  Mary Ann jumped down from the fence as the brougham came around the bend towards the front of the house. She tipped the flask back and let the whiskey slide down her t
hroat, eyes still searching the dark holes of the coach's windows when it came to a full stop.

  The Queen tried not to run as she made her way across the flat expanse of green. The rest of the court was far behind her, talking excitedly about the best techniques for hitting the hedgehog, and the spades were out gathering the flamingos. She slipped through the maze of hedges and out of the garden, along the path down closer to the water. Off in the distance she heard the beginnings of the Lobster-Quadrille, and that just made her run faster.

  She found the Gryphon sprawled on the grass in the sunshine, exposing its downy belly to the sky. One of its paws twitched as if it were chasing something in its sleep.

  "Wake up!" the Queen demanded in a harsh whisper, though why she was whispering was beyond her. She wasn't sneaking. She didn't sneak. She snacked, and she snucked, but sneaking was right out for a queen.

  The Gryphon simply yawned, snapping its beak, and then it waved one paw in the air as if batting a giant ball of string. The sun moved just a little.

  "Get up, lazy thing!" she said again, poking the Gryphon with her toe.

  The beast finally flopped over to one side and opened an eye. "Oh, you."

  "Alice is here," she said to the Gryphon.

  "No one has a lisp," the Gryphon mumbled.

  "Alice," the Queen said, stamping her foot. No one was ever serious here, and while they were very very serious about not being serious, they were rarely serious about things that might have been serious. Such as now. At this time. Here.

  The Gryphon scratched behind one front knee with its back toes. "Didn't we just get rid of her?"

  The Queen stared out to the water and tried to hear the song. It was faint and impossible. She wondered if she would be able to feel him coming. "You have to find her. You must fly her out of here."

  The Gryphon flicked an ear. "You know, I wonder; why have I never not flown you out?"

  The Queen rapped her fan on the beast's head. "Now is not the time," she told it.

  "Not enough 'nots'," the Gryphon replied, standing and stretching, its tail wagging not unlike a dog. "You're tangled enough, though, I wager."

  The Queen watched the Gryphon, wondering where she had come up with it. "Please," she whispered. "If I find her, I shall bring her to you. She cannot stay."

  "Why can't you do it?" the Gryphon grumbled.

  "He will come, and he will kill everything," the Queen said.

  The Gryphon yawned. "Not me. I'll just wake up three days later.”

  There hadn't been any more ground-shaking, but that didn't mean that there wasn't a right mess to clean up. The gravedigger scratched his head and waved to the man passing on the road. "Ho there, Clive," he said. "What are you doing out here?"

  Clive hefted his tools in their box. "Mrs. Liddell asked for some new shelving in the pantry and the like. Thought I'd head out there and start, see if I can't convince her to replace the crown molding, as well." That was Clive, always out to make a few crowns.

  "I got summat to show you," the gravedigger said, waving a hand towards the cemetery.

  Not long after, they stood in front of the hole, staring down at the cave under the ground that seemed to have appeared spontaneously.

  "What do you make of this?" he asked Clive. "Sunk in, right?"

  Clive circled the grave and whistled low. "What did this?"

  The gravedigger shrugged. "Don't quite know. Not dug up, just fallen in. Coffin's all broke, but no body in there."

  "No body?" Clive lit a cigarette and leant back against the monument behind him. Like the gravedigger, he was a man who couldn't care less for institutions or superstitions.

  "Looks like some clothes, a suit, I think," he told Clive. "Not even part of a body. Not that he's been in the ground that long."

  Clive looked up at the headstone and read the name from the monument. "Huh. I remember that." He offered a bit of tobacco to the gravedigger, who waved it away. "They tried to pinch you for it, right?"

  "Weren't me, though," the gravedigger said, wiping his brow and sitting on a stump of a stone that was all but unreadable.

  "Oh yeah, that bint," Clive said. He stared down and then off out of the cemetery. "Oi, look."

  The gravedigger followed Clive's pointing finger along the ground that furrowed, the soil sinking in a straight line right out of the cemetery, up to the Liddell estate.

  The Queen picked up her petticoats and rushed down the winding path, past the mome wraths and along the way to the edge of the forest. Through a clearing, there was some sort of commotion with a sooty lizard named Bill, but that was none of her concern. She brushed through the shrubs unnoticed, tucking the cake that had made her small into her pocket.

  It wasn't hard to find him. The Queen rounded a rock shaped like an enormous shoe and tripped over a few comfit seeds the size of small turtles. The trail of smoke was pungent, almost visible as a plume of pink and blue wending through the stalks of grass, thick as a field of hanging sheets in the summer sunshine.

  "You are old, father William," the young man cried,

  "Your back is as boughed as a bow

  Perhaps it is time that you gave up and died

  And we'll bury you 'fore the first snow."

  "In the days of my youth," father William replied,

  "We'd have beat you for saying such things;

  Now get me a pinch and a bottle of gin

  And a strumpet that comes when she sings."

  The Queen rounded the mushroom and found the Caterpillar slumped against the stalk, loading the stand of the hookah with fresh hash. "Have you seen a little girl? Has she been here yet?”

  The Caterpillar shrugged as best one could with that many legs, every twiggy limb a-twitching. "I don't know who she was. She wouldn't say," it replied. "Perhaps she couldn't say. Perhaps she shouldn't say." It twirled the hash damper. "After all, you haven't said who you are. Or who I am."

  The Queen tapped one hand against her thigh. "I don't have to say who I am. Everyone knows who I am."

  "True," said the Caterpillar. "Just not I."

  "The girl," the Queen pressed. "You saw her?"

  "Was it a her?" The Caterpillar finished loading the pipe and lit the basin, sucking gently and then sighing as it leant back into the exhale, smoke swaddling its shoulders. "She was very small for a girl." It blinked. "You are very small for a queen. Were you born this way?"

  Sometimes the best way to deal with the things here was to ignore what came out of their mouths unless it followed a direct question. "What did she say? What did she tell you? Why is she here?"

  "She's gone about her lessons all wrong," the Caterpillar told the Queen.

  "How doth the little servant girl

  Ensure her Master's love,

  And bending over on the chair

  Whilst he looks on above!

  "How fetchingly she sweeps the floor,

  How sweetly she replies,

  As Master gently shuts the door,

  Then roughly spreads her—"

  "That's enough!" the Queen roared, slapping the side of the mushroom so that it wiggled and wavered like a plate on a stick. "You are useless."

  "One never has to be useful," the Caterpillar told her, puffing away on its hookah. "Unless one is useless to begin with, and then perhaps one might simply have to put in some work."

  The Queen grabbed the pipe, wrenching it from the Caterpillar's little stick-hands. "What did you say to her?"

  The Caterpillar yanked the pipe back and cradled it in its legs. "You shouldn’t lose your temper," it said. "You all lose your tempers. If it's gone, then where will you find it?"

  The Queen lifted one hand and stared at the wedding ring on her finger.

  "Not there," the Caterpillar told her. "You shall never find it there."

  The sun filtered through the curtains of the day room. Frau, the house-cat, lolled in the one painted strip of light on the floor. Mary Ann nudged it with her foot on her way to the window seat, where Mrs. Li
ddell sat, her hands limp on the blanket in her lap.

  "Ma'am," Mary Ann said, trying to catch her attention without startling her. "Ma'am, will you be wanting something sent up?"

  Mrs. Liddell didn't say a word, merely blinked a few times and wound a bit of loose thread around a finger until the skin turned purple. Mary Ann mentally told herself to prepare some light cakes and fresh butter, some Devon cream or lemon curd. The lady would need small meats, things for her blood, liver, and kidney, foods to replace what she had lost in the night. A hot pot of tea. Boiled compresses. Tonics. Mary Ann had the doctor's bottles in her pockets.