There was a difference this time. Downstairs was always dingy and dull when I saw it through the ripples, but it was more than that, now. The servants didn’t look at each other. If they passed in the hall or on the stairs, they averted their faces and hunched their shoulders. The kitchen was a fiery, sullen, clanking place without the babble of conversation that should have attended the staff dinner table; but despite the uncomfortable atmosphere, no one seemed willing to take their food and eat elsewhere. It wasn’t until I saw the empty places that I realised why. They had been deliberately left empty: plates set at each and cutlery laid beside each setting. I’d heard Hatter and Hare mention a series of three executions that had taken place over the last few weeks– Underlanders who had colluded in the slowly growing rebellion against the Queen. Exactly what they’d done, I’d never been told; but though they also wouldn’t tell me what had happened, I knew each of the servants had had their heads cut off, and their families thrown in the Queen’s dungeons. Hatter had said: “Big ears in the Castle. That’s the problem. Big ears. When people had ears of a decent size we didn’t have these problems,” by which I understood that someone had not been careful enough in their talking, and had been overheard by someone loyal to the Queen. It occurred to me that the whole of the Downstairs staff were afraid of each other. The idea made me cautiously hopeful: that there was an informant in the Downstairs staff wasn’t ideal, but the general air of suspicion and discomfort also meant that most of the staff were not loyal to the Queen. I made a mental note to mention it to Hatter.
I gazed once more at the empty place settings—that was a kind of silent rebellion in itself—and moved my attention higher in the castle. I found the Queen almost immediately: she was by an open window that overlooked the garden, resplendent in her usual red velvet and white-draped golden head-dress. She reclined grandly in a quilted window seat with shiny red buttons, idly playing with her hand-mirror. It seemed an unusually sedentary position for her, and it wasn’t until I pulled back a little that I saw why. There was a painter with an easel sitting across from her, his paintbrush working in sure, certain strokes to create the sweep of the Queen’s white veiling. He seemed quite comfortable, but I saw the way her eyes flicked from the painter to the easel and back again, and I wasn’t at all surprised when she rose and stole quietly across the carpeted floor toward him. The painter’s fingers stiffened, but he kept painting as she leaned over his shoulder. Before long I saw his hands begin to shake slightly, and still she was gazing at the painting, her eyes narrow.
At last, in the pleasantest of voices, the Queen said: “Wrong colour.”
“I– pardon, your majesty?”
“Wrong colour. Surely you can see the roses are red.”
The painter looked out the window, visibly swallowed, and looked back at the Queen.
“Red, your majesty?” I could see the roses as well as he could: their petals were pure white.
“Indeed,” said the Queen. “Red. They have always been red. Do you dispute it?”
“I– no, your majesty.”
“Is that so?” The Queen’s voice was growing steadily softer and silkier, and I felt the stirring of fear in my stomach. “Then can you tell me why you thought it good to paint...them...white? Do you make a mockery of me?”
“No, your majesty! Pardon me, I beg you!”
“It strikes me that a painter who cannot mix his paints correctly is of little use. What say you to that?”
I could see the painter’s eyes. They were wild and scared and horribly unsure. He didn’t know what to say. I knew better than him: I knew that whatever he said, it would be the wrong thing. She was bored, and when she was bored there would be blood.
“Really?” said the Queen, as if he’d spoken. “I’m sure you’re right. I have some skill in mixing paints myself. Allow me to instruct you. Number Six!”
It all happened so quickly that I wasn’t sure which of us realised what happened first, the painter or me. A card shark stepped forward, his sharp nose scenting pain, and at a signal from the Queen he spread the painter’s hand wide on his palette. I didn’t see where it came from, but suddenly there was a flash of silver blade, and the Queen slashed off the painter’s pinky finger. It dropped to the floor, flinging blood as it fell, and the painter simply stared at it, his mutilated hand forgotten on the palette. He made a peculiar noise in his throat—it wasn’t very loud, but it made the Queen smile—and then stood mute as she held his injured hand over the blob of white paint on the palette. Crimson dropped into white, leaving tiny divots of red and overflowing into the other colours.
The Queen said: “I believe you mix it now.”
He picked up his brush again, face white, and rhythmically worked the crimson through the paint until it was pink– then as crimson as his blood. Then he dabbed it lightly on the edge of his palette and raised his hand to the painting again, stiffly brushing over one of the white roses until it was red. When he was done with that one, he went onto the next.
She wasn’t done with him. I could see that. But she let him keep painting and bleeding, mixing the paint with his blood. She sat back in the quilted window seat, her eyes on her tiny hand-held mirror and very nearly closed until suddenly they weren’t anymore.
“How delightful,” she said. “I see you have two daughters. Pilar and Cat, I believe?”
“My only family, your majesty,” said the painter, and I wasn’t sure if he was saying it or pleading it.
“They’re very fond of pink,” said the Queen. I saw the flash of light on her mirror as she turned it enough for the painter to see what she was looking at. She was observing a bedroom from the dressing mirror, where two little girls in identical pink dresses were leaping on a bed that was as offensively pink as their dresses. I heard their squeals of delight as they played, and looked away from the mirror just in time to see the Queen smile again. It wasn’t a nice smile.
“Very,” said the painter in something of a gasp; and I froze, because the Queen was reaching into her mirror. Her fingers touched the glass for the briefest of moments, then sank right through like they had done when I reached through the ripples to save Hatter and Hare. I saw her pinch and release, then one of the little girls hurtled from the bed and hit the floor with a crash. The painter cried out, but after a stunned moment his little girl picked herself up, briefly crinkling her chin in pain, and climbed back onto the bed with her sister.
“Little children bounce so well, don’t they?” said the Queen. She smiled at the painter and went back to her mirror. With her eyes on it, she said, softly and coldly: “You may continue painting.”
He went back to painting– what else could he do? The Queen, meanwhile, watched her little mirror and smiled. I hoped she’d had her fun, but after a few minutes of trembling brushstrokes from the painter, she called: “Number Five!” The painter started horribly, and while he desperately tried to fix the smudge he’d made, the Queen said: “Number Five, this ah, talented and hardworking artist has two little girls. Bring them to me.”
The painter made another involuntary slash of crimson across the canvas and stumbled away from his easel. “Your majesty, I beg you–!”
“Return to your painting,” said the Queen, with a terrible coldness in her voice. The Number Five card shark was gone in a flash, his eyes glistening with bloodthirsty joy, and the painter stood trembling by his easel.
I almost stepped straight through the ripples to the painter’s—and my own—doom. But there was a chilling anger eating away at the hot fury, and it told me to wait. Having waited for that essential moment, it occurred to me that it was no use going to the painter’s help, only to be caught myself. I saw him taken away by two more card sharks as he tried to dash from the room, his paints thrown aside, and knew I couldn’t help him. Not now. But I could snatch his little girls away before they went through the same thing I had gone through as a child. It wasn’t likely that they would be as lucky as I’d been. So instead of leaping into Underland in
the fierceness of my anger, I deliberately pushed away the scene I had been observing, and searched for card shark Number Five. I caught up with him in the outer court of the castle: he wasn’t taking one of the covered chairs—which wasn’t unusual for a card shark—but he also didn’t bother with a horse or a hackney. That meant he wasn’t going far. I kept my rippled view following along behind him until he turned into one of the flower-named streets closest to the Heart Castle. He stopped at the fourth house in the street, one that wasn’t very grand but was well kept, and set the knocker echoing across the street. I didn’t waste another moment. I found a reflection in the house, hoping it wasn’t a flat reflection that the Queen would be able to see, and stepped through.
I came out, gasping, in a small decorative pool in the painter’s marbled hall. Behind me, I heard footsteps echoing, and looked over my shoulder to see a servant heading for the front door. It was too late to save him: he was already opening the door as I splashed out of the pool. So I left him to die, a dry sob of fear and sorrow in my throat, and ran as fast as I could up the wide stairs that must lead to the family rooms upstairs. I tried not to listen to the noise behind me, but I heard the sound of a struggle, the servant screaming, and the thump of a body when it hit the marble floor. Then there were the soft, slapping sounds of Number Five’s wide feet as he crossed the hall. I didn’t know if he’d seen me or not, but it didn’t really matter. He wouldn’t hurry himself: he would continue at the same steady, determined pace until he caught up with me or the painter’s daughters, whoever came first. I took the stairs two at a time, and was still fumblingly checking doors when I heard Number Five’s tread on the bottom stair. The next door I tried led into the small suite I’d seen through the Queen’s mirror, and I stared at it wildly for a moment, finding it empty of children despite the toys carelessly left on the floor and the two girl’s coats lying in a puddle on the floor.
“Doors!” I panted, with a fizz of inspiration. I snatched at the big key that hung by a pink thread beside the door and darted back out to sprint from door to door, locking each one. I only had time to lock the first four doors before I had dive for the girls’ suite again, slamming the door and locking it behind me. There! I thought in satisfaction. Let him try and figure out which one it was! He would be naturally suspicious of the locked doors, and perhaps that would buy me some time to find the girls. Stepping lightly, I checked the other rooms in the suite, from the bathing room to the closet stuffed with pink skirts and big straw hats. I was crossing the room again to check under the bed when I heard Number Five break down the first of the doors in a terrifyingly loud splintering of wood. My head snapped around even though I’d been expecting it, and I caught sight of a flutter of pink in the window. I abandoned the bed immediately, and leaned out the window with my heart thumping loudly.
The girls were playing by a fountain in the garden below, floating paper boats peopled with flower petals, their hats bowling along the lawn behind them in a brisk breeze. I heard a rattle and a snap-snap of noise: Number Five must have also seen the girls, and his head was protruding from a window to my left. He saw me at the same time that I saw him, and his teeth gnashed at me. I couldn’t tell if it was in warning or promise, but either way, he seemed to be enjoying himself. I began to scramble out the window, but he was quicker than I; and when he was out he threw himself from the window with the kind of careless abandon that was only explained by the light way in which he fluttered to the lawn. He looked back up at me, with my one leg out of the window and my mouth open, and this time there was no doubting his malicious glee. He was closer to the girls: he knew it, and there was nothing I could do about it. So I did something about it anyway. I pulled my leg back through the window and hauled the window frame back down. It slammed down on the sill and my reflection shuddered at me for a wobbly moment before I pushed cleanly through the window and emerged, wet and shivering, in the fountain. The little girls were both screaming when I rose from the water. They weren’t screaming at me: they had seen the card shark approaching them, and they knew he was there for them. I wrapped my dripping arms around them from behind, which prompted more screaming and quite a bit of determined wriggling, but I pulled them back into the water with me without knowing exactly where I was going. A moment later we tumbled out of a bedroom mirror onto plush black carpet, dampening the threads around us. By the time we were rolling across the carpet, my arms around the both of them, the girls had stopped screaming and were clinging to me instead, their eyes wide and unsure. Dazed and dizzy, I looked around me incredulously. How on earth had I managed to come out in Jack’s suite? We were in his closet: a vast, many-racked room with three dressing mirrors and rail upon rail of clothing. There were his shoes, too, pointy-toed and shiny: pair after pair of the things. I felt a momentary twinge of annoyance despite our peril: why should on boy own so many shoes?
I didn’t dare leave the girls in Jack’s closet: not after coming through a mirror. I threw three of his elegant, tailed suit jackets over the mirrors and carried the girls off with me into the bathroom. They didn’t struggle. I think they may have been crying, but I couldn’t stop to soothe their tears when things could get a lot worse than tears if we were caught. I pulled up short in the bathroom, surprised and suspicious to find that there was already water in the bathtub. And as it had been the last time I was here, every mirror in the room had been covered. It almost looked like my bathroom back in Australia.
To stop the little girls being frightened again, I said to them: “We’re going to jump through again, okay? I promise the card shark won’t get you.”
One of them wiped her nose on my sleeve, but the other said: “N’yep,” and though I wasn’t sure whether that was a yes or a no, at least they didn’t scream again when I stepped carefully into the tub.
We came out in a freshly washed stew pot in the Queen’s kitchen, exploding in a clatter of lid against the lip of the pot and tumbling to the floor. It was fortunate that we’d landed in this one and not the one at present simmering stew over the fire. Our clattering and the whimpering of the little girls prompted a shuffling of feet and several Underland swear words somewhere in one of the corners. I looked around to find a couple of castle servants gaping at us, dismay in their eyes.
“You shouldn’t be here,” said the girl, her voice hushed. She was looking at me with recognition in her eyes. “She won’t like it. We’ve already lost three men.”
“I know,” I said quietly. “But she’s cut off one of the painter’s fingers and she sent a card shark for his little girls. I had to do something.”
They both looked at me with wide eyes and open mouths. At last, the boy closed his mouth and reformed it to ask: “You went up against a card shark to get them? Does the Queen know?”
“Not yet. I need–”
“Yes,” said the girl, simply.
“But you don’t know–”
“Yes,” said the boy. “It doesn’t matter.”
“What about the men who were lost?”
The boy’s face darkened. “That was something different,” he said. “That was...someone didn’t like what we were talking about and told the Queen. We still don’t know who it was.”
“If you talked anywhere that had a mirror, it probably wasn’t anyone,” I said, remembering the flashes of heart red that I’d seen sometimes when I saw the Downstairs staff. Even if the Queen hadn’t had her Mirror Hall, she would still have been able to see them in her hand-held mirror.
“Never near a mirror,” said the girl. “We know better.”
“What about flat reflecting surfaces? Windows?”
There was a sick look in their eyes. “She can see us through windows now?”
“Probably always could,” I said, with difficulty. The flame that had flared in their eyes was dying into the same kind of dead acceptance I had seen in the eyes of the rest of the Downstairs staff. “The kitchen’s safe. It’s just glass that seems to work for her. And even then, if it’s not flat, she
doesn’t seem to be able to see through.”
The boy drew in a deep breath through his teeth, and I saw the girl’s eyes flicking toward him, lighting with speculation and determination.
“What do you need us to do?” he asked. “She’ll have him in the dungeon by now. We heard someone being taken down there a little while ago.”
“Take the girls out of the castle. Find somewhere with water, and I’ll come and get you when the others are safe.”
They nodded in tandem, each of them taking a small, frightened girl from me.
I said: “I’m going to get Jack. He’ll help.” They didn’t look convinced, so I added: “And get ready to take all the staff out of the castle: we’re going to break out everyone from the dungeons.”
I’m still not sure why I did it, but I went back to Jack’s room. Maybe I thought that if he could just understand what was going on outside his velvetted and satined world, he would fight back. He would see the injustices as I did—he had to—and if anyone could do something about the Queen, it was Jack. Maybe there was a part of me that just wanted to see if he would help me if it involved any risk at all for himself. I couldn’t recall a time he’d actually done so. He’d helped me once or twice, but it had never been in such a way as to leave himself without any way of turning it into an innocent action on his own part if it went badly. I wanted to know if he would do the right thing when it came right down to it. With the darkness spreading over Underland, it seemed to me that there would soon come a time when even Jack would have to choose sides, rules or not. So when I left the kitchen, I dipped only slightly back into the ripples and climbed out of the bathtub in Jack’s suite. I stepped out onto the cool, black and white tiles, drying swiftly, and padded softly into the main room to wait for him. He was already there. He was stretched out on one of the black sofas, his crossed ankles propped against the sofa back and his fingers linked beneath his head. His eyes were on me before I noticed him: he must have been waiting for me. I checked myself, then kept walking anyway. I should have expected it.
Playing Hearts Page 7