After Alice by Gregory Maguire
Ada did not know if he was addressing the Queen of England or herself, but the Queen had disappeared into the cabin. The sound of soft snores had begun to issue out on little clouds that smelled like prawn bisque. “Take me with you,” Ada said, and grabbed his proffered paw.
CHAPTER 46
It did not seem as if they ran at all, but merely that the leafy viburnum parted. The white blooms fluttered away like moths. They stood at the back of a paneled hall. It must be the one that had turned into a forest and back again, as to the left of the judge’s bench stood the pedestal of the overgrown glass-topped table. Ada craned to see if the key was still there. It was, farther away than ever. Whatever advantage this key promised—a key to all understandings or a key to the larder—it was still out of reach. The table was a living thing and its central post was a tree trunk, growing by inches like Jack’s beanstalk. Soon the key would be out of sight in the clouds above her head, and Ada would never escape. “I am required at the bench,” said the White Rabbit. “If you need me, shout and scream and jump up and down. I may not deign to notice you, mind. You’ve become common.”
“According to Miss Armstrong, I’m ungovernable,” said Ada. “But I won’t shout and scream, thank you very much. I’ve learned not to follow advice.”
“Very sensible, too,” said the White Rabbit. “I never would.” He looked her over with a twitch of his whiskers. “I think I like Alice better than you.”
“I do, too,” she said, “but I’m not on trial, am I?”
“Not yet,” he said. He bounded away.
Now, at last, over the shoulders of various animals and other creatures, Ada caught sight of Alice. She was standing before the bench in a very Alice-like way. Her elbows were neatly drawn in at her waist. Her hands were calmly cupped, one in the other. She seemed neither alarmed nor bored, just attentive. Ada wanted to wave and catch her friend’s attention, but she didn’t dare.
The judge was the King of Hearts. The Queen of Hearts was marching back and forth in front of the members of the jury, hitting each one on the head with a flamingo. The flamingo and its chosen victim both squawked upon impact. Perhaps Ada could sidle around the various raucous creatures and collect Alice quietly, when no one was looking? Then they might make their escape.
The only thing that stopped Ada was the presence of Siam back in the garden. If she stood just so, she could still see the door in the wall, which was now the door not a door, but ajar. The light inside the garden was glamorous and fresh. Siam was waiting, somewhere. If she could only position Siam within her sight, she might manage to apprehend both Siam and Alice at once. Though what they three might do when joined together against the world!—for all the education this day had afforded, she could not yet imagine.
“Call the first witness,” said the King of Hearts.
“First witness,” shrilled the White Rabbit.
The White Queen’s head emerged from a pile of chattering oysters near Ada. “Oh, my, you’re alive,” said Ada gratefully. She reached over and helped the White Queen climb out of the mêlée.
“It’s nearly time to get back to the Duchess’s kitchen,” said the White Queen. “I imagine the baby has turned into quite the little hog by now. It will need its hoofs trimmed. Babies want tending, you know. And there’s supper to put on.”
“Would you like your cloak back?”
“You need it more than I do, dearie. Save it as a souvenir, if you get out of here alive.”
“Oh, I’ll manage that,” said Ada. “I do think using it as a lift in my heel has evened me up. I feel quite the new person.”
“So do I. I think I may be a Lady Clothilde, or perhaps a cockle vendor named Mopsy Maeve.” The White Queen shook Ada’s hand with formality and feeling. “I never give advice, but were I you, I should go through the ceiling.” She didn’t lift her head but just pointed with one ivory finger. “It’s the only way out of this madhouse, you know. Coming, I’m coming,” she called to the White Rabbit when he’d begun to shriek for her. “And I have testimony that is going to blow the lid off this affair, believe me.” She shook the last remaining oysters from the folds in her garments. She walked forward, a little bit of unorthodox regency. Very sure of herself, and content because of it.
“Good-bye,” whispered Ada. She imagined, if she did manage to escape, that the ones she would miss were the White Queen and the White Knight. Generally adults were a failure, but these two managed failure well.
But should she find a way to take the Queen’s advice, when advice around here was regularly unreliable? In any event, it seemed that the chances to escape were drawing in. She must find Siam and urge him to come with her.
She ducked through the door into the garden. The place was still and beautiful, but the only life it had was of the inanimate sort. No caterpillar upon the rose made nasty comment, no rose replied. The sunless shadows were deepening. The trees had grown extra boughs. Great drooping swaths of greenery, like theatre curtains, came folding in. Nothing could be heard from the courtroom behind her, though the door was still open; it had not yet swung closed. All was as still and silent as the world in the slowed growth in a photograph. Though the leaves swayed, they made no rustling.
“Siam,” she said, almost frightened to break the silence. “It’s time to go.”
He was there beside her. At first he looked at the ground. “I ain’t going,” he said in a mumbly voice.
“You can’t stay here, Siam, because I can’t stay. I have to get Alice back to her father. He would suffer so if she didn’t return. He’s had too much to bear already this year. You must come with me, or you’ll be left here all alone. I mean, with them.”
“They cain’t hurt me any strength. I been hurt enough elsewhere.” His chin poked up, his eyes were guarded and brave. “Whatever mind I got, it made up.”
“You’ll miss the world.”
“Little left to miss.”
“Your memories, though. Siam! They’ll haunt you.”
“Thought of that. I don’t want those memories. I going back to the Wood of No Names. I do make myself a hut in there, I know the how-to.”
Ada didn’t feel she could do everything that needed to be done. Who was she, anyway, to say that he was wrong? But she had no time to argue. “I must return to the courtroom, if it hasn’t drifted away already. Siam. If you change your mind, come through the door.”
His expression was wry and unreadable. Maybe if she were an adult she might interpret it. She couldn’t grow up on command though, finish the job while he stood there looking like—like that. It was getting late.
“I won’t say good-bye, in the hopes you’ll have a change of heart.”
“Change of mind, change of heart. What I need, change of skin.”
She threw her arms around him, wordlessly. She ducked away.
For once the transmuting world had not revised itself, at least in no way Ada could tell. She tiptoed behind a tea-cart piled high with celery and boot-laces. She peered about. A pack of playing cards was assembling at the front of the room. At the bench, the King of Hearts was trying to win at noughts and crosses, using a salamander as a pen and a slice of bread as a paper. He poked the salamander’s tail in a vaguely familiar pot of marmalade, but the salamander kept twisting about and licking the juicy compote off its tail before the King could make a mark on the bread. “Very tricky game, this,” he was muttering to himself, “but I’ll master it yet.”
“I’ve so enjoyed myself, we must do it again sometime,” the White Queen was saying to the King of Hearts. “I especially enjoyed the recitation and the Highland Fling. I never saw a Highland flung so far as that! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have one very tired little piggy at home who needs some mash slung his way. It’s not his fault, you know. That he is such a little brute. Being birthed is hard work.”
“So is being dead,” replied
“Call the next witness,” whispered the Queen of Hearts to the White Rabbit.
“Alice!” cried the White Rabbit.
“If you please,” said Alice. “I won’t come. I have nothing to say today.”
“But you must,” said the King of Hearts, absentmindedly sucking the tip of the salamander’s tail. “Otherwise we’re all at sixteens and sevens.”
“That’s sixes and sevens, I do believe,” Alice corrected him.
“No, we left the sixes in the larder, and we brought the sixteens by mistake. Nothing adds up. Do you see what I am up against? Now come here and take your place like a good girl, and do as you’re told.”
“I’ll come,” said Alice, “but I can’t promise to be useful.”
“Little girls often lie,” said the King of Hearts helpfully. “You may be useful despite yourself.”
Ada found herself thinking, Alice, don’t fuss; just go there and do their bidding. No one can pay attention for more than a few moments in this place.
“Do as he says, or your head will spin,” roared the Queen of Hearts.
“Stuff and nonsense,” said Alice with what, to Ada, seemed uncharacteristic insolence. But who knew what sort of a day she had had?
The Queen of Hearts turned crimson. “Hold your tongue!”
“I won’t,” said Alice.
“Off with her head!” shouted the Queen.
“Who cares for you?” asked Alice. “You’re nothing but a pack of cards.”
An upheaval, a commotion, a seism shuddered the room. The standing army brought several suits against Alice. Ada watched Alice raise her arm to her eyes to fend them off. She fell backward against a marble statue of a dodo. She slumped against it, limp, rag-like. Her eyes were closed and didn’t open.
“Call the next witness!” said the White Rabbit to himself, and did so. “The Jabberwock!”
CHAPTER 47
Miss Armstrong reclaimed her gloves from the table in the passage. It was time to put folly behind her. She had taken a false step somewhere early in the day, and she would pay for it for the rest of her life. She only hoped it would not come to pass that someone had seen her pursuing Ada, catching up with her, and tumbling the girl into deep water. If Miss Armstrong had done that—had acted on her dreadful fantasy—she could not recall it, and that much was true. The amnesia of the hysteric. She would say so to the magistrate, or the warden of the gaol at Oxford Castle. For now, there was nothing left awaiting her in the benighted Vicarage but the accusations and recriminations of a hard-lived day. Another one. She left the Croft by the front door, unable to imagine she might return, and soon.
Lydia wandered out, too, through the kitchen garden. Darwin had been right; there would be no downpour. The afternoon was pulsing with the last energy of daylight, which had turned dry and flecked. It was the time of year when English evening can take three hours being absorbed into night-time. But dusk was out there, ferrying in from Low Countries, halting and hovering off the coast of Essex, picking up strength from dark waters, gathering its moods and forces.
For the first time Lydia began to wonder, seriously, if she should be frightened for Alice. It would be a novel exercise, both because Lydia’s capacity for raw emotion had been so overwhelmed in recent months that, until today, she’d imagined she could never feel anything deeply ever again; and also because, well. Alice.
Alice was immortal. Alice was immortal in a way their mother had not been. It had to do with Alice’s strange gravitas, her unerring solidity. Death wouldn’t come near her. It wouldn’t dare. And mind, this was not the immortality that children demonstrate, blindly, children who, because they do not know they will die, behave as if it cannot happen. Sooner or later we grow into deserving our own deaths, somehow.
Alice was different. She was rectitude and curiosity and bravery; she was stubbornness and tolerance. Something of her childhood always seemed to slip out of her—as if through permeable membranes—as if she were one of Darwin’s anomalous specimens. Alice was an ordinary child whose unordinary childhood seemed an infectious condition to those who came near. Lydia often felt like a bit player, a common sort of business, her own existence merely some adumbration ornamenting the life of her weird sister. The spider under the table at the Last Supper, the cat who looked at a King. The King is history; where the cat went next is not recorded.
And yet—Lydia had been pacing along the path as she mused, and now she had reached the place on the riverbank where she had stopped earlier that day. Look, she’d dropped her book of commentary on Shakespeare’s midsummer dream, and she’d never noticed: There it still lay in the meadow-grass—and yet, and yet. Who else to play the part of a bit player in the life of a child? What is a parent but a sort of valet to the royalty of innocent youth? With Mrs. Clowd gone, and Mr. Clowd lost in grief, Alice had no one else. And Lydia was all she had, and not enough.
Lydia paused and sat down, and leaned against the tree. She put her hands to her face. She didn’t care to think about her mother. She wasn’t ready. Unwelcome, indeed forbidden, a memory rose up through the flooring of the day, a memory of Jane Clowd. Lydia tried to resist it but memories are anarchic.
Some winter morning. A few years ago. Jane Clowd had come back from London. A visit to a surgery in Harley Street. Alighting from the carriage onto the glossy, ice-slicked cobbles of the lane. Leaning to thank the driver and turning to greet her girls. Her hair had fallen out of its pins on one side. The bonnet was askew. Forsaking their December wear, the girls had pummeled down the path from the Croft, meaning to throw themselves in her arms. Against the cold, one hand was still immersed in a white muff of rabbit fur. The other hand, gloveless, was reaching toward her girls.
CHAPTER 48
Ada began to lunge toward Alice, to make sure she was not badly hurt, but a sound behind her made her turn. Everyone else was swiveling and pulling back at the same time. The playing cards built themselves into a kind of pyramid. The Queen of Hearts flew to the top, claiming the advantage. The Tin Ballerina and the Tin Bear tossed their kites into the air, and climbed the ascending strings like circus roustabouts. The Cheshire Cat allowed his tail to appear, flicking viciously and offering no doubt as to its owner’s disapproval. The White Queen was gone, having retired into domestic service. The Duchess was trying to hide behind a fan made of a splayed hand of Clubs, a royal flush, who were objecting though to no avail. Having hopped upon the bench of the King of Hearts, the White Rabbit circled madly, crying, “Beware the Jabberwock, my son!” No one in the room, as far as Ada could tell, had a son or was a father. All told, this seemed a rather parentless set of circumstances. So she couldn’t imagine whom he might be addressing.
Indeed, the only person not contorting or shrieking in alarm was Alice, because she was insensate against the plinth of the marble dodo.
“I do hope you don’t mind,” said Ada to the White Knight, who had risen creakily to his feet. “I would like to climb upon your shoulders.”
“Fancy serving the likes of you. Mind your bony knees, sir. But be my guest.”
She scrabbled up and peered over the heads of various hedgehogs, lollygagging sarsen stones, gossiping potatoes, a walrus, and some roses that looked vaguely familiar but turned snootily away. The back of the room, as if unable to shake off a habit of recidivism, had returned to forest. The wall was junglefied, hung with vines, lurid with unseemly fruits and lascivious flowers. Shrieking gibbons and toucans conversed in an unfamiliar patois. The floor of the forest remained tiled in black and white squares, but those tiles were being tossed forward like flotsam on a storm-hurried tidal surge. Soil from beneath the floor spat up. The Jabberwock was approaching from below.
“An underworld beneath this one?” said Ada to the White Knight. “Has it no shame?”
He answered, “Did you seriously believe you would ever understand all
Then a roar shook the room. It was like the collapse of a textile mill into a dry riverbed. The King of Hearts replied, “Silence!” in the most timid, mouse-like voice he could manage. “If you please.” The Jabberwock, sandy dirt streaming from its iron jaws, clawed its way up from some unimaginable tomb.
“Oh, you,” said Ada. “I might have known.”
“You are on speaking terms with this monstrous threat?” cried the Queen of Hearts.
“In a manner of speaking. I mean, in a manner of non-speaking.”
The Jabberwock finished dragging its clawed grips from below. It stood flexing its skeletal wings. There was rather little head, so one had to be impressed that it could manage to roar at all. The circlet of neck brace, which buckled in front, seemed to serve as the mouth, for as it contorted in slits and ovals, an assortment of enraged industrial sounds was heard. The rib cage had grown iron extensions. They unfolded into pinions, like the skeleton of a bird. Where its knuckled, prehensile feet had come from, Ada could not imagine. They looked something like bundles of fish forks.
“You’ve had yourself quite the adventure, I see,” said Ada.
The Jabberwock developed a couple of grommets on its upper brow and blinked them at her. She wondered if it would recognize her now it had grown so grand.
“I’m afraid the excursion is over,” she told it. “It’s time we returned.”
“If you mean to take your little pet home, now would be the proper moment,” said the King of Hearts, quaveringly.
“Off with its head,” added the Queen of Hearts, though without conviction, as it really didn’t have much of a head.