After Alice

by Gregory Maguire

  “That Queenie told us we wasn’t invited,” replied Siam, though he didn’t seem perturbed by that.

  “It’s too varied a crowd for us to be noticed. We’ll skulk,” said Ada. “I’ve never skulked before, as it requires a talent for slinking and sloping. But I’m up to trying it now.”

  “I can learn you skulking. Let’s go.”

  A hooded figure meandered by. He was made out of papier-­mâché, colored all over with dark paint, with a prominent jawline and protuberant eyes. He was studying a pamphlet. “Pardon me, has the spectacle begun, then?” asked Ada.

  “It’s begun, and then some,” replied the character. “The program seems to be a very good one today.” He took a bite of it and chewed carefully. “I do approve. A nicely varied offering, with body, heft, character, and nuance. I believe they are almost up to the trial. I don’t have any lines, but I’m trying to digest the proceedings before I’m called to do my work.”

  “What work is that?”

  “Why, I’m the executioner, of course.”

  “And what do you execute?” asked Ada politely. But he had begun to run a bone-­like finger along the margins. He was no longer listening. He veered away from them. He got his papier-­mâché axe caught in the low branches of a hornbeam tree.

  “I suppose I’m late,” said another voice behind them. “The baby was such a pig today.”

  Ada turned to see a fiercely ugly old woman tottering along in a headdress of stupendous proportions. It split in two as if it meant to disguise disfiguring horns growing out of her head. “You don’t know where they’re all gathering, do you?” she growled at them.

  “If you’re looking for the marionettes,” said Ada, “I suspect they’re over there behind the sedge-­grass.”

  “I’m looking for the trial. I believe I’m wanted as a witness.”

  “Who is on trial?” asked Ada.

  “The marionettes will be if they don’t perform up to snuff. Though I couldn’t be bothered about who is the defendant. I’m trying to stay out of court. Aren’t you dreadfully nosy for a little girl. Then again, it seems a day for it. It’ll end in tears, see if it doesn’t.”

  “I thought you said you were wanted as a witness?”

  “What made you think that?”

  “You just said so.”

  The wizened old creature frowned. “Yes, they wanted me, but I didn’t want them. A Duchess has better things to do than make a spectacle of herself.”

  “Off with her head!” bellowed the voice of the Queen of Hearts.

  “Oh, my, I hope they’re not talking about Alice,” said Ada. “We must hurry.”

  “Do you know Alice?” said the Duchess. “She was by my house earlier today. A right proper pill she is, too.”

  “She’s not,” said Ada.

  “She is so. She taught the baby to scream.”

  “A baby knows how to scream all by itself.”

  “That’s impossible. I was a baby once, and I never screamed. I was precocious. Though I was a mere abbreviation of what I would become, I was already brittle, loathsome, and fatuous.”

  “A brittle baby?”

  “That’s a contraction for brilliant and little, of course.”

  “But surely you couldn’t have been a loathsome child,” said Ada, glancing up and down at the loathsome adult.

  “Of course I was. Loathsome is a contraction for loquacious and thoroughly toothsome.”

  “And fatuous is a contraction, then?”

  “Fat and fabulous. I was simply adorable.”

  “What does adorable mean?”

  “Dull.” The Duchess fanned herself with a program folded into pleats, not unlike the one the executioner had been devouring. “You haven’t seen my Cheshire Cat or my kitchen maid, have you? They’re conspiring against me, no doubt. Sidling up to the prosecution and whispering all sorts of innuendo.”

  “Off with her head!” roared the Queen of Hearts.

  “My, the trial is proceeding at quite the clip today, or perhaps they’ve moved on to pudding,” said the Duchess. “I daren’t loiter or I’ll be called as a witness, and the only thing to which I can reliably attest is that, as a witness, I am nothing if not unreliable.”

  “Should I trust anything you say?”

  “Not all babies are brittle, loathsome, and fatuous. The ones who are deserve extra kisses. Remind me to kiss my own baby the next time he lifts his snout from the trough.” With this she gripped her skirts with hammy, washerwoman fingers. She lit out across the lawns as if wolves were after her.

  “I don’t care to go before no judge,” said Siam. “Mercy in short supply here and everywhere.”

  “We must find Alice,” said Ada, “or I must. Do you want to wait here for me?”

  “There ain’t no waiting,” he said sadly. “You leave, you don’t come back.”

  He looked as if he knew what he meant better than Ada knew. She didn’t want to pause. She didn’t want to be unkind. But it seemed that in his life Siam had seen a sort of sadness that Alice had not. Alice was younger. Untried. Alice, Ada decided, needed her more. “You can trust me,” she said to him, and reached out to his hand. But he pulled back as if she might burn him.

  All of life hinges on what one does next, until finally one makes the wrong choice. But was this that moment? “Alice, I’m coming.”

  CHAPTER 44

  Rhoda brought the tea. Lydia chose to sit at a distance. She pretended not to notice that her father indicated that she should pour. The governess took up the teapot with vigor.

  “Was the visit with Mr. Darwin what you would have hoped?” asked Miss Armstrong.

  Mr. Clowd slid his head peculiarly, describing with his chin a sort of S-­curve that had fallen into italics. It resembled neither a nod nor a negative shaking. Or perhaps it was meant to be both at once. The governess continued. “You are a brave man, Mr. Clowd.”

  “Bravery has nothing to do with times like this,” he replied. “One gets on with it. Mr. Darwin is circumspect in his remarks. But it’s clear he can’t reconcile the instability of the species—­transmutation, or evolution, as it’s now being called—­with the faith of his fathers. I believe he can no longer conceive of a benign Godhead who could allow his daughter Annie such suffering. He tried with great delicacy not to go this far in his consoling words, but I’m not a fool.”

  “If it is spiritual solace you seek, you might turn to Vicar Boyce.”

  “He is a fool.”

  Miss Armstrong tolerated this attack upon her beloved employer with alarming equanimity. Lydia sank in her chair, curving her spine in a way that would have elicited a correction from her mother.

  Miss Armstrong stirred her tea. “You must rely on your own instincts, Mr. Clowd. As the American, Emerson, wrote in his First Series, ‘Character is centrality, the impossibility of being displaced or overset.’ ”

  “I did not imagine a governess might read Emerson’s Essays.”

  “She might do. But the essayist’s point is about the urgency of not being dislodged from one’s deepest beliefs. No matter how beset one might be.”

  “Perhaps Emerson’s comment is wrong. Perhaps we are meant and made to shift our beliefs. If it is a choice between being consistent or being willfully blind . . .”

  “If we are ‘made’ or ‘meant,’ then someone must have made or meant us. But in any case, if you abandon the faith you shared with your dear departed wife, where does that leave her?”

  “It leaves her wherever she is,” he admitted, looking at the carpet. “Missing. Unaccounted for in heaven and no longer registered upon the earth.”

  This was intolerable. Lydia said, “I have no use for tea, after all. My mother died, Miss Armstrong. She is, consequently, dead. She had a big head like mine and Alice’s and it’s my opinion that it simply exploded.”

&
nbsp; “For shame,” said Miss Armstrong, but mildly. It was not her place.

  Lydia’s father said, “You aren’t welcome, Lydia, if you’re inclined to be discourteous. Go locate Alice as you ought to have done earlier. And that boy, too. It’s time they were home.” When Lydia didn’t arise, Mr. Clowd turned back to Miss Armstrong. “Darwin found Siam charming. Darwin told us that one of his first friends at Edinburgh was a black man, a former slave, who taught him how to stuff and mount birds. I believe Darwin’s deep aversion to slavery must date from this time. He had a falling-­out with the master of the Beagle over a difference of opinion on the subject, as I’ve been told.”

  “It seems inconceivable to me that there can be more than one opinion on the matter.”

  “Mr. Winter wouldn’t have had to rescue that child if everyone agreed with you. Mr. Winter’s hope in visiting Mr. Darwin was to solicit a testimony from the great man in support of Negro emancipation.”

  “I don’t know the American mind, but I should imagine that the remarks of the prophet of evolution would not be persuasive to those in the disassociated southern states.”

  “Perhaps not. Still, as Americans go, he seems a kind young gentleman, that Mr. Winter.”

  “I wouldn’t have had the chance to notice.”

  What a liar you are, thought Lydia. The room fell silent as the adults sipped their tea. Mrs. Brummidge or Rhoda must have gone to the garden well. The sound of the flywheel muttered into the windows like the whirrings of a mechanical insect out there in the slackening sunlight.

  Mr. Clowd observed, “Darwin’s professor, a certain Mr. Sedgwick at Cambridge, wrote him to say he feared that the popularization of his notions would serve to ‘brutalize humanity.’ I think those were the words.”

  “We are quite brutal enough, I fear.” Miss Armstrong hefted up the tray of scones and proffered it to her host. “Had Ada done her job, there’d be nice fresh marmalade for these.”

  Mr. Clowd shook his head as if to clear away evidence of the futility of human affairs. “How is Ada coming along, then? I haven’t laid eyes on her since the ser­vices.”

  “Frankly, I don’t hold that the iron corset and brace will succeed in correcting her posture, nor promote elegance of movement. Thus improving, eventually one must allow, her hopes for marriage and its subsequent rewards.” Miss Armstrong flushed a tempered pink at the mention of marital satisfactions. She sat a bit more upright upon her cushion, perhaps without being aware that it looked as if she were taking pride in the architecture of her own uncorrupted spine.

  “She’s an odd little clod, from what I’ve seen.”

  “The arrival in the Vicar’s household of a beloved infant boy has, I fear, delighted the Vicar and exhausted his inattentive wife to the point that correct governance of Ada has gone into arrears. I have spoken too freely, perhaps.”

  “I thought it was your job to govern Ada.”

  “Indeed it is.” Miss Armstrong settled her teacup. “I have allowed myself to be delayed out of respect for your grief, Mr. Clowd. No opportunity to acknowledge your loss had hitherto presented itself to me. I am indeed a governess. I shall be off at once. Perhaps we might walk together, Miss Lydia?” She stood. Mr. Clowd stood. They both turned to Lydia Clowd.

  “I’m not walking with a governess, I have no need of one, myself,” said Lydia with a doomy and suggestive intonation meant to wound, and wound it did. But Mr. Clowd put his hand out to comfort Miss Armstrong’s elbow. “Oh, is there no end to the bonnyclabber of it all?” asked Lydia. Expecting no answer, she proceeded out the door of the parlor, leaving her father inappropriately alone with the governess of the Boyce household, and to Hell with them both.

  CHAPTER 45

  Without Siam, Ada hurried around a stand of creamy viburnum. The sound of the assembly grew faint. It became distant, screened off, the way the sound of the sea at Sandown was hushed when Miss Armstrong closed a window, complaining of the breeze. Ada felt as if a great glass box had descended from the sky to muffle the proceedings of the trial, if trial it were. Or the performance. Or, she thought, to muffle her.

  A great glass box upon her! Ada noted that lately her thinking had gone colorful.

  The viburnum formed a sort of closed grove. A wind turned itself over in the canes. The flowers lifted and settled in succession, as if they were whitecaps churning upon a shore. Poking out from them was a beached bathing machine, its steps descending to the grass. A figure in great black robes was sitting on the top step looking disagreeable. Ada knew at once who it must be, but she had no idea how Her Majesty might have got here. She was far too substantial to fall down any hole.

  “We are lost,” said Queen Victoria. “Wherever we meant to be, we are not there.”

  “I beg your pardon, Your Majesty. Is there any way I might help?”

  The Queen of England said, “We doubt it very much indeed. Go away. Come back. Where is the Solent, do you suppose?”

  “I’m not very good at maps, Your Majesty.”

  “We find our-­self in a garden among a set of lunatics and one-­offs. Amusing, and novel to be sure, but we are disturbed by the diversion from protocol. Have you a sweetie?”

  Ada had nothing to offer the Queen. “This is a garden party, not a bathing strand. Still, I believe you would find something to eat shortly if you came down.”

  “We don’t hunt for food like commoners. Food is brought us. Though perhaps we ought not to partake, for fear this is an underworld of some sort and we should be detained for seven years, or at least until springtime. We are like unto Persephone. We don’t suppose—­that is, it would be too much to hope for—­you haven’t by any chance seen the Prince Consort among this rabble?” To herself she mumbled, “We should be very cross indeed to find the Prince Consort had condescended to join this motley host.”

  Ada knew that Prince Albert was dead, and the widowed Queen was steeped in mourning. “I have no reason to think that dead ­people are at large,” said the girl cautiously. “That is to say, I haven’t seen any. Unless you’re dead yourself.”

  “We never would. We have obligations. We carry on.” The Queen’s rolled shoulders were like balls of yeasty bread that wanted punching down. Her intelligent eyes in their pouches regarded Ada warily. “We imagine we are indulging in some regrettable dream, provoked perhaps by a suspicious element in last night’s prawn bisque.”

  “I don’t believe this is a dream,” said Ada, “but if it is, you’d hardly be in my dream. I don’t even know you. Shall I try to go find the Hatter? Perhaps he managed to cadge some cakes from the table after all, and he’d be willing to share.”

  “We saw some mad creature go by arm in arm with a rangy hare. We would care for no confections discovered in those pockets. But what have you in your pinafore pockets?”

  Ada was glad she had put the seaweed packet in her shoe. “My pockets are empty,” she said truthfully.

  The Queen sighed, and then brightened up. “But did you see the Tweedle twins, Dum and Dee? Oh, they made us laugh. We were amused.”

  “I haven’t had the pleasure.” Ada didn’t want to be rude, but the need to intercept Alice seemed to be more urgent with every moment that she dallied. “Would you excuse me?”

  Queen Victoria put one elbow on her knee and rested her set of chins in her fist. She looked every inch the potentate in her waxy black bathing skirts, a crown of diamonds and pearls pinned into her greying tresses so it wouldn’t float away in the event of a surprise submersion. She was thoughtful and sad. “I had no childhood,” she said to Ada. “I was groomed to be Queen from the time I was five. No one read stories to me, only tracts of English history. I sometimes have the urge to go back and study childhood from inside it, so that I might be a better mother to the younger ones. Now the Prince of Wales has grown into a man, and I didn’t know so much as a patty-­cake rhyme to teach him. No one had taught it to me.”


  “I could teach you that. It’s a quick one, and very satisfying.” Ada climbed upon the lower wooden step and took hold of Her Majesty’s hands, which were clammy and not quite as clean as she would have imagined. Ada said, “Repeat after me.”

  “Repeat after me,” said Queen Victoria obediently.

  “Patty Cake, Patty Cake,

  Baker’s Man;

  That I will Master

  As fast I can;

  Prick it and prick it

  And mark it with a V—­”

  (Ada edited as she went, in deference to the Crown of England.)

  “And there will be enough for Her Royal Majesty Queen of England, Supreme Governor of the Church of England, Defender of the Faith, and so on and so on, and me.”

  “You?” said the Queen. “I wasn’t imagining I would share. I have become hungrier than ever.” She shook her head. Ada could hear the wattles on her cheeks softly wuffing. “Even in our dreams, it seems, the Prince Consort is gone. What satisfaction is left to us?” She stood up with determination and effort. “We shall retire into private life even in our dreams.”

  “You have your nation to govern. And your children to raise. And it’s not too late to read the books you missed in childhood,” said Ada.

  “Have you anything to recommend?”

  Ada considered The History of the Fairchild Family. Unrewarding and macabre. What about those uplifting tales of child martyrs that her father was always pressing upon her? Perhaps not for a widow. “You want something nonsensical,” said Ada. “Keep looking. It will come along.”

  “We need something to return our stolen childhood to us,” said Queen Victoria sadly. “We do hope it is not too late for that.”

  “It’s very late,” said the White Rabbit, appearing just then by the wheels of the bathing carriage and looking at his watch. “You’ve missed the marionettes entirely. They’ve all been executed and are pausing for a refreshment before the second show. But the trial is about to start, and I must be there, as I have important evidence.”