After Alice

by Gregory Maguire

  CHAPTER 16

  Ada hadn’t climbed more than a few yards up the strut-­work of the great hall before she saw that the flanking curlicues of plaster were no longer symmetrical. Now they seemed to be teased into variety. The cold molded surface fragmented in her hands as she climbed. It crumbled like old moss, revealing the suppleness of living wood. She turned to look about her. She realized that the hall had turned back into a forest. She was climbing one of dozens of trees growing so closely together that she could see no horizon.

  What about the teacup, the tag, she thought. She looked down. Perhaps she could read it from above? But she’d achieved too great a height already. The table below her had lengthened, and covered itself with a cloth, upon which several dozen teacups and quite a few pots of tea were set about in a higglety-­pigglety fashion. She couldn’t identify the original teacup among them from this vantage. Well, when I finish seeing where I am, she thought, I shall climb back down and have a spot of tea.

  It felt wonderful to climb. Her feet possessed a new and certain stepping-­knowledge that they had never had on paving stones or staircases. At home, the very pattern in the carpet could trip her up, it seemed.

  Ada wasn’t the type to analyze her moods, generally. Even now she didn’t dwell on the idea of elation. But she felt it as she climbed. A promised view often lifts the heart.

  She was reaching a point where the canopy was becoming thinner. She had to be careful to settle her foot squarely in each forking branch for fear of cracking it and tumbling earthward. The light intensified. The sky, a peerless blue, seemed very much a shire and not a London sky, she observed. She hoped she might somehow see into the garden where the Ace of Spades had been busy planting Rosa Rugosa.

  “I imagine you have the right papers for this neck of the woods?” asked a voice curtly.

  Ada craned. “I never thought of the neck of the woods as being near the top of the trees, but I suppose it makes sense.”

  “You’re approaching the crown of the tree, so of course you’re at the neck of the woods,” snapped the voice. Its owner fluttered near. “We’ve had a serpent scare recently. We can’t be too careful. We’ve hired an agent to ensure security. I imagine he grilled you right proper before allowing you access.”

  “That cat with the floating smile?”

  “Cat! Mind your tongue! Cat indeed! As if!” The bird shook her wings like a creature emerging from a birdbath. “While serpents are a menace to eggs in the nest, cats are notorious for slaying birds. No, I’m talking about the Head Egg below, the one who cleared your travel papers.”

  “I have no papers, and no one cleared them.”

  “Perhaps he saw them and cleared them away, and that’s why you haven’t got them anymore,” said the bird. “If you have­n’t got any papers, though, do you actually recall who you are and what you are doing here?”

  “If you please, my name is Ada.”

  “Adder! I knew it! And a very fat adder at that. You shall find no mercy from me!” At this the little bird began to fly in Ada’s face, beating and shrieking.

  “I’m not an adder, please! I’m a girl.”

  The bird returned to a branch and cocked her head to look with one eye, then twisted about to look with a second. “Another girl? I’m not sure I believe you. The serpent said she was a girl, too, but I never saw a girl with such a long neck. I imagine she thought she was being the neck of the woods. She was only drawing attention to herself in an unseemly fashion, if you ask me.”

  Ada had almost forgotten about Alice. “Have you seen another girl? Was she called Alice, by any chance?”

  “If I knew I wouldn’t say. You are all in cahoots, a league of serpents. Go away or I’ll call the Head Egg.”

  Ada was about to suggest that the bird do just that, as Ada rather liked the notion of a large egg in charge of domestic tranquility. She wanted to see how such a campaign might be carried out. However, just then she heard the noise, not too far off, of breaking branches. A disorganized mechanical ruckus, more or less at the same height as Ada and her interlocutor, though out of sight behind screens of foliage.

  “There it is again, that infernal groaning and thwacking. Something has been worrying itself into conniptions over that way. I would go to look but I dassn’t leave my nest, not with serpents about.”

  “You can trust me. I’m no serpent, I’m a girl.”

  “A serpent can change its skin, you know, and appear to us in all manner of guises.” This sounded like something the Reverend Boyce would declare. Before Ada could ask herself whether perhaps she was a kind of serpent without knowing it, the bird continued. “Whatever it is over there, I hope it comes and catches you. It ratchets, it creaks, it breaks branches. The Bandersnatch, for all I know. Frumiouser and frumiouser, by the sound of it. I wish it would go away. Would you care to be engaged as a Bandersnatch-­snatcher?”

  “No, thank you.” Ada shuddered. A storm of tattered leaves rose in the air a short distance away, suggesting proximity of danger. “I may have to do without the view that I’d climbed all the way up here to see. Perhaps I should have minded the instructions. The ceiling did advise me not to look up.”

  “That was my doing,” said the bird. “I thought I would advertise against craning and preening, so as to prevent serpents from noticing the eggs in my nest. A new mother would kill to protect her young, you know.” Her feathers drooped. “Of course my strategy didn’t keep you out.”

  “I’ve been advised not to take advice,” said Ada, to soothe her.

  The bird replied promptly, “Then may I advise that you stay and join me in the rearing of my latest clutch of eggs.”

  “No, thank you,” said Ada. “I’m afraid of the Bandersnatch, or whatever it is. And I may be late for tea.” She could no longer see the table laid out beneath the limbs of the trees, but she hoped it was still there, and that the tea was still hot.

  “It’s acceptable to be late for tea in this neck of the woods,” said the bird. “Indeed, it’s inevitable, as we never serve tea here. Did you mention you were leaving? If you see the Head Egg, tell him he has fallen down on the job.”

  “Oh, I hope he hasn’t,” said Ada, beginning to reverse her footsteps. “When an egg falls, well, it can’t easily be repaired, even with Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup. ‘All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.’ ”

  “You are a serpent, always on about fallen eggs,” said the bird. “We birds live above reproach.”

  “I hope I am not descending to meet reproach,” said Ada, being clever.

  “All who descend meet reproach,” said the bird, with fine moral feeling.

  CHAPTER 17

  The boy followed Lydia down the steps to the kitchens. She had no interest in exposing him to the gawps of Rhoda or Mrs. Brummidge, but what else was she to do with him?

  “More to drink, more cake,” Lydia announced as she came through, like a regular domestic. “I left the pitcher and the other glasses behind, but this little prince is ravenous.”

  “Poor tyke,” said Mrs. Brummidge, bustling. Rhoda jumped with a start. She looked as if she’d been reading up on cholera in London and the filthy well at Broad Street, and she’d become a convert to Snow’s theory of germ contagion. She inched away from the boy as if she might catch something wretched from him.

  The kitchen door stood open to cucumber frames and a few ill-­trimmed old fruit trees whose heavy arthritic limbs were supported with crutches. The light that slanted in, the taint of meadowsweet upon the aqueous breeze, the sound of doves now at their elevenses, these all conferred upon Siam an air of normalcy. He looked like a boy who might need Dinah the cat, or her kittens, to play with. For a moment Lydia hated him for his ordinariness. There ought to be a credit of the exotic about him, but his eyes looked just like a boy’s eyes, no different.

  She was tired of
playing Mother after just a few moments. She was after all hardly fifteen. Finding this novelty of humanity upon her threshold, what would Mama have done?

  But questions of that sort could have no answer. The subjunctive mood was not Logic Lane. It was no detour, only a cul-­de-­sac. Answers to the question what Mama would have done: They did not exist, for one could never know. Had Mrs. Clowd not died at the end of Michaelmas term, her husband wouldn’t have received a belated visit of condolence from the great Darwin. Some gibbering American named Winter wouldn’t have come up from London to hold Darwin’s elbow at every step. This ebony boy would be scratching the backs of his knees in some other room than this.

  “I don’t suppose you have a name,” said Mrs. Brummidge offhandedly to the boy.

  “Do too.”

  “So do I, it’s Mrs. Brummidge.” As if she talked to specimen children every day of the week, as natural as that. She lumbered about, cutting an extra large slice of cake for him. “Now you tell me your moniker, and we’ll be done with this little bit of business.”

  “Siam,” he said. “Siam Winter. Winter,” he repeated.

  Lydia couldn’t bring herself to ask how he came by Mr. Winter’s name. “Shall I get Dinah from upstairs? She’s probably dozing on Alice’s window-­bench, or on Nurse Groader’s coverlet.”

  “I’ll go,” said Rhoda, and fled.

  “Are you visiting in England or have you come to live?” asked Mrs. Brummidge.

  Siam shrugged. His neck was bony but his chin lovely and stunted. When he glanced around, Lydia slid an extended peek. She hadn’t imagined such ruddiness possible in a boy of his origins. He caught her looking. He pursed his lips, as if trying to keep his tongue from sticking itself out at her.

  “Not Egyptian, I’d guess, nor Italian,” said Mrs. Brummidge. “Would you be from the sugar islands then?”

  “Siam is in the Far East, Mrs. Brummidge,” said Lydia.

  “No, I ain’t,” said the boy.

  “Where—­do—­you—­come—­from?” asked Lydia, as if addressing the deaf.

  “The parlor,” he said, crooking a thumb over his shoulder.

  Stifling a smile, Mrs. Brummidge commenced to dicing the rhubarb for her syllabub. “Either very quick or very slow, that one,” she commented, “but luncheon wants to be ready when they ring for it. Why don’t you take the boy for a stroll, Lydia? Whilst you’re about it, you will keep an eye out for Alice. Do you hear me? Her father will notice her absence sooner or later, and you’ll answer to him if anything happens to her.” A clucking of tongues, a soft shaking of the head at the sorrows of incompetent parenting.

  It wasn’t that Lydia objected to being seen with a child of equatorial origins. It was that she wouldn’t know what to say should anyone meet her in the lane down to the meadows. While Lydia didn’t think she was insensitive to the plight of others—­the color of his skin, his curious rubicund health!—­she was careful of her own profile in the community. Anyone might note her discomfiture and take it to be for the wrong reason. “Alice would be some help right now,” complained Lydia. Alice wouldn’t bother with Siam’s race; she wouldn’t notice it. Just as she had never commented on Ada’s bracing armature.

  Mrs. Brummidge would go on and on about a thing. “Miss Alice was in your charge. It’s fine for her to be larking about all lonesome, but she’s too young to be gone for too long.”

  “I dozed and she dawdled off,” said Lydia. “She’ll dawdle back, as usual. She doesn’t go near the water, and everyone knows her, so there’s no need to fret.”

  “I worry for Miss Alice, I worry for her father. We’re taking care of him now, mind.” But before Mrs. Brummidge could work up to a fine hectoring, Rhoda came back with Dinah’s two kittens, the black and the white.

  They brought Siam up from his somnolent caution, those kittens. They capered and tottered and mewed with great fantastic faces on their frail necks. He fell on his knees to adore them. They pounced upon his thighs and bounced away again, as if everything they touched were shot through with static, the sort promised by dry air and thready cotton blankets. “They’s a pair of little demons,” he cried. Scrapping like Lucifer and Michael, the black and the white, over and over so fast they might almost have been two grey kittens.

  They paused, suddenly mature, studying. The black one deigned to lick its uneven fur. Siam took something out of his coat pocket to dangle and attract its twin. His back was turned to the room, and Lydia couldn’t make out what he had—­a toy of some sort, a worsted ball perhaps, or a scrap of rasher filched from some breakfast platter? Then a knock on the door sounded. In came Mr. Winter, less tentatively this time.

  “They’ve begun to talk on personal matters,” he said, “and it seemed proper for me to leave them in peace. I shall take a constitutional. Siam, come. It’ll do you good to stretch your legs after your long morning.”

  “I’ll come, too,” said Lydia. Mrs. Brummidge shot her quite the look. “You suggested I take the boy out, and that I collect Alice,” she continued, “so I’ll escort Mr. Winter around the path toward Parks Road and the great case of reptilian bones. Have you yet seen the University Museum, Mr. Winter?”

  Mrs. Brummidge couldn’t contain herself. “But Miss Lydia! Walking about with a gentleman you’ve just met? Not without your father’s say, and I’ll march in there and—­”

  “Oh, he can’t be disturbed. He is indisposed,” said Mr. Winter. He made a gesture, a finger at the lips, a shhhh. It was unseemly for being intimate.

  “You’ll need a chaperone then at the very least. Rhoda, off your posterior, and no jaw.”

  “We have a chaperone,” said Lydia sweetly. “Little Siam, don’t you know.”

  She stood and pressed down the front of her skirt. It was too warm to require a shawl, though a bonnet would be proper. She would get one presently. For the moment, she stood bareheaded, willing a stiff sudden breeze to come in off the water and meadow and stir her hair just so. And you might have guessed her a minor goddess, for all that, because the breeze did as she imagined it might. Her hair blew fetchingly about her pale cheeks and severe expression.

  CHAPTER 18

  Ada had climbed down to where there were no more branches. She could see the green grass below. It looked generous and soft, like feather blankets. Previously, in the world above worlds (DON’T LOOK UP), had she been able to scale a tree in the first place, she’d have been paralyzed on the descent. She’d have had to summon a gardener with a ladder to rescue her. Had she jumped, her legs would have been too rigid to provide coil and spring upon landing. They’d have absorbed the impact like ivory jackstraws, and shattered.

  Ada was, however, not above-­world, and so she jumped down.

  She landed without disaster. Indeed, it was almost fun. No, it was quite fun, pleasurable. She had half a mind to climb back up and do it again, but the other half of her mind was ready for a refreshment. The tea was laid out for a party of several dozen, as far as she could tell. She brushed herself off to make herself presentable. She pushed through ferny underbrush to approach the table set out en plein air.

  More than one table pushed together, it seemed. At various places they jutted out, at one point making a T. Unmatching chairs were arrayed, some helter-­skelter, pushed back as if guests had fled in haste. Elsewhere, chairs were neatly aligned in sequence, awaiting company. At the far end, at a particularly dingy patch of tablecloth, a ­couple of characters were nattering away. They froze when they heard her approach.

  “Don’t look now,” said a small, intense man in a top hat, “but I believe we have a burglar.”

  “When may I look?” replied his companion, who had promptly clasped paws over its eyes. It was a Hare of some variety, naked of ornament but for a key on a chain around its neck.

  “I’m not a burglar,” said Ada.

  “Clever alibi,” said the man, chomping on a bit
of bread. “Many would believe you. I, for one, am not fooled.”

  “Ooh,” said the Hare, peeking. “She is beautiful. She has stolen my heart.”

  “I rest my case,” said the Hatter, for that’s what he seemed to be, now that Ada could see a card reading 10 / 6 jauntily stuck in the silken hatband that announced the price as ten shillings sixpence. “Have some tea, but don’t steal the spoons.”

  “I would welcome some tea, but I would never steal a spoon,” said Ada.

  “So you’re a liar now, too. What’s that you’ve got in your pocket?”

  “How do you know I have anything in my pocket?” asked Ada.

  “I can see the handle sticking out.”

  Ada felt in her pinafore. She withdrew a spoon. “Oh, this. Yes, well they were dosing the baby with some corrective. I cadged a portion. I put this in my pocket to bring downstairs, but I forgot. I promise that it doesn’t belong to you.”

  “It doesn’t now,” said the Hare. “I’d recognize that pattern anywhere, though.”

  Ada laid it on the table next to the nearest spoon. “They’re as near twins as spoons can be,” said the Hatter.

  “They’re nothing at all alike,” said Ada.

  “Not all twins are identical,” said the Hatter. “I have a twin called Hatta, and he has a twin called Hatter. You can imagine the confusion when we all try to reserve a table at one of the finer establishments.” He looked about dolefully.

  “Are there any establishments around here?” asked Ada.

  “They wouldn’t dare,” said the Hatter. “How do you find the tea?”

  “It’s quite—­well, it seems quite salty, I’m afraid.”

  “It’s an awful curse to be frightened of salt. You must jump at your own tears.”

  “It’s all a matter of taste, I expect,” replied Ada. “How do you find it?”