After Alice by Gregory Maguire

  “Why, I look down in my cup, and there it is. If it were a bear it would bite me.”

  At this the lid of a teapot fell off. A Dormouse poked its nose up. Its whiskers twitched. It said drowsily, “Is she gone?”

  “She’s right here,” said the Hare, waving a spoon of its own toward Ada.

  The Dormouse craned its thick furry neck. “That’s not Alice. That’s a different one.”

  “Must be her twin,” said the Hare. “Don’t touch the brioches, darling, we’re saving them for the Duchess, if she ever arrives.”

  “You’ve seen Alice,” said Ada. “She’s been here!”

  “She marched through a little while ago,” said the Hare. “How long ago was that, Hatter?”

  “Not as long as all that,” said the little man, munching on toast.

  “Were you already in the middle of your tea?” asked Ada.

  “We don’t know, do we,” said the Hatter. “Until we’re done, we don’t know when the middle might be. We may be just beginning. Eternity is grueling—­not that we’re serving gruel, mind. But this tea party may go on for hundreds of years. Right now, I couldn’t possibly say.”

  “I could,” said the Dormouse. “But I won’t.” It clamped the lid on top of its head like a little beanie and sunk into the teapot. However its friends cajoled, it would not come out again. It whistled a popular melody through the tea-­spout, though, which unsettled Ada. It sounded ghostly.

  “I had forgotten that I was looking for Alice,” she said. “Which way did she go, do you know?”

  “She went forward,” said the Hare decisively, “for no one has yet found a way to go back.” He began to sing to the tune of the Dormouse.

  “Though many would reclaim their youth,

  They soon must learn the dreaded truth

  That even should they homeward stray

  They’d find their youth had been stolen away.”

  “If their youth had been stolen and they found it, they’d have it again,” said Ada.

  “Cleverness becomes a thief. I suspect she’s up to mischief.” The Hatter pointed his spoon at Ada and turned to the Hare. “I’d keep my thumb upon the Kuchen, mein Hare. Remember what happened to the tarts. A messy business, that. We haven’t seen the end of it yet. Child, why are you looking for Alice?”

  “Because she is lost,” said Ada.

  “She did not look lost to me,” said the Hare. “All the while she was here, she was as solid a little janissary as you’d care to see. Every time I looked over at her, there she was. With that alarming forehead. You could hardly miss her. It was like having Gibraltar to tea.”

  “Did she say where she was going?” asked Ada. “She has a tendency to wander about, you see. Someone will be worrying about her.”

  “No doubt,” said the Hare. “I can’t say I noticed where she went, Hatter, did you? We were deep in conversation when she left.”

  “We were talking about where she might go if she ever got up from the chair,” said the Hatter. “Then, we looked up, she was gone. So we never found out.”

  Ada felt a twinge of impatience. “This is important. If I could just steal a moment of your time and ask you, please, to try to remember—­”

  “Stealing again. And time is all we have, really,” said the Hare sadly.

  “Time for tea,” declared the Hatter. “The madeira cake beckons. Shall we?”

  They moved a few places to the right, where new cups were set cleanly upon unmatching saucers. Farther along the table, the ornamental cake stand got up. It humped itself a few places away and squatted again.

  “All this talk about stealing,” said Ada. “Have you stolen her?”

  “I stole a glance at her,” admitted the Hare. “So shoot me.”

  “She was an honest soul,” said the Hatter, “if a bit dim.”

  “That’s not a very nice thing to say.”

  “No, it isn’t,” he agreed. “Nor is it very tufted, or chartreuse, or miasmic, or palindromic. It’s actually quite a dim thing to say, but that’s what she was. Dim.”

  “You are making me quite cross,” said Ada. “I’m leaving.”

  “She’s trying to steal away,” whistled the Dormouse through the spout.

  “She’d take anything that isn’t nailed down. The damson gâteau is at grave risk of abduction. After her,” said the Hatter, pouring a new cup of tea.

  “After you,” said the Hare politely.

  “After all is said and done,” said the Dormouse, “there is nothing to be done. Or said.” It fell silent, a little wistfully.

  The Hatter lifted his cup and examined the dregs intently. The Hare took advantage of its companion’s abstraction to spring from its chair. In a few bounds it had caught up with Ada. It pulled the chain from around its neck and put it around Ada’s. “Here,” said the Hare. “I shall give you this in exchange for the spoon you left behind. I wouldn’t like anyone to think I had stolen it. The Queen maintains the stiffest penalty for stealing. The death sentence. You will find this key uncommonly poor for measuring out treacle, but perhaps you can learn to do without treacle. Many do.”

  Before Ada could thank the Hare, she heard a loud crashing in the woods behind her, as if a piece of the Hythe Bridge had fallen out of the trees. An iron sound, dangerous. She didn’t ask the Hare where Alice might have been heading, but ran in the opposite direction of the crash. When she looked back, the Hare had returned to the table and was tying the edge of the tablecloth around its neck like a sort of bib. The Hatter was weeping bitterly. Ada thought she heard him say, “She has stolen the Stollen.” She didn’t pause to object, but pressed on through the forest, which was growing darker.

  CHAPTER 19

  Out of doors they assembled, a most uncommon grouping in Lydia’s experience. This child in his easy loping amble, his splendid coffee-­bean skin not exactly a novelty in these lanes, but not so common as to go unnoticed.

  This boy, this Siam; and Lydia, in her own weeds of mourning. How well her fair hair showed as it spilled upon the dark shoulders of her summer shawl.

  And then this American reed, quicksilver and grave at once, this Mr. Winter. He must have a Chris­tian name, though Lydia had no idea if it might be proper to ask about it outright. With the death of Lydia’s mother had come, alas, the loss of maternal guidance. Mrs. Brummidge groused and grumbled, of course; a cook doesn’t count. Old Nurse Groader had opinions, and shared them. Still, a nurse can be relied upon to be old-­fashioned, raised up, as such termagants always are, to promote the mores of a hundred years past.

  Other nearby female influences? Disconcertingly few. The wives of some neighbors, who found Alice less winsome than weird, and treated Lydia like a Cerberus, skirting her as they approached the Croft with platters of cold sliced roast something or buckets of summer pudding, meant to console and attract the poor widower. Also an elderly spinster cousin in Cumnor, whose dislike for Lydia was returned in spades. Of other relatives there remained none except Lydia’s maternal grandmother. Upon the death of her only child, though, the dame had been struck with an affliction binding her tongue to silence. For her own good care she’d been removed to a lying-­in home up the Banbury Road. If she had opinions about Lydia’s deportment, ailment required the scold to keep her thoughts to herself.

  And so I’m on my own, Lydia thought, as they passed through the gate and into the lane toward the river meadows and, eventually, the University Parks and the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. If conversation lagged she could take Mr. Winter and young Siam through and show them the claw of the dodo, so sensibly extinct.

  In silence she began to assemble what she knew of the Museum. It wasn’t much. The construction had been funded by the sale of Bibles, a strategy intended to console those who found the close study of nature unseemly if not heretical. Nature is the second book of God, she reminded h
erself, preparing a defense in case Mr. Winter was religious to a fault, like so many Americans as she’d heard it told. Or was God the second book of Nature? She couldn’t remember. Perhaps she’d better avoid the Museum altogether. They’d keep to the riverbank.

  She needn’t have worried. Once free of the scholastic silence of the old Croft, Mr. Winter became expansive. His heels scuffed at the gravelly track with such force that stones skipped about. He talked of the excitement of being in London for the first time, so far from home, so warmly welcomed thanks to the letters of introduction he had carried.

  “But where is your home, when you are at home,” Lydia asked, and even more bravely, “where is his?” Siam was skipping ahead down the path, eager as a beagle to see what lay around the next turn.

  “Here, and thereabouts, and wherever,” said Mr. Winter. “We move as we might. Those in allegiance to abolition show boundless courtesy.”

  “I’d thought that slavery matter settled, what with your proclamations and amendments and such. I mean, I know about your war, but isn’t your Lincoln the local Lord Mansfield?” Lydia hoped they wouldn’t become bogged down in a discussion of the times. The only current affair that mattered was the death of her mother. “Our nation gave up the slave trade forty years ago, when Bishop Wilberforce’s father made a forceful case against it.”

  “The law says one thing, and custom another,” replied Mr. Winter. “What the assemblies legislate and what happens on the back roads of small towns are not always in agreement. Put another way, history takes a long time to happen.”

  “I have always lived here,” said Lydia, trying to draw him back to the subject. “When you go home, where will you go?”

  But he appeared not to hear her. “Will you stay on in Oxford, now that your mother has passed on?”

  She felt impatient. “Of course. We are not tinkers in caravans. And my father has his work.”

  “What work is that, besides support to the defenders of Darwinism?”

  “Pater crawls back and forth in underground corridors, retrieving books requested by scholars in the Bodleian.” She didn’t want to talk about her father. “Have you a Chris­tian name, Mr. Winter, or are you so deeply Darwinist that you have become a pagan?”

  “You shock me, as you intend.” His tone was mocking.

  She considered behaving as if chastised. She dropped her eyes to her hands, which were clasped at her waist. He took mercy, though. He said, “Yes, I am Josiah Winter. I do not know if local practice permits you to call me Josiah, but I would permit it, if I may address you as Lydia.”

  “Americans take liberties,” she acknowledged. “Josiah.”

  How far down the primrose path will I stray today? she wondered.

  “He is in my care, is Siam,” said Josiah Winter. “He has been so, Lydia, ever since a member of our New England congregation received a packet containing the severed ear of a recovered slave.”

  “I don’t understand.” She hoped he would recognize in her voice a request for restraint. He carried on, as Americans will, deaf to certain subtleties.

  “Have you heard of the Underground Railroad?” he asked her.

  “I presume you are not talking about those tunnels being dug about Paddington and such.” She was trying to be light-­hearted.

  “Siam and some of his kin were headed for Canada West, where slavery has been outlawed several decades now,” he said. “But bounty hunters caught up with them. Siam alone escaped. He has been under my protection since. He is likely to remain with me until his liberty can be promised by civil law. And so I’ve brought him abroad, for his own safety.”

  “He has taken your name,” she said.

  “I have given it to him.” A mild correction, saying much she could not interpret.

  It was nearly as far as she felt prepared to go on the matter. Siam Winter was leaping about, laughing at bovinity. “I cannot imagine his ordeals, but he has survived them well,” she said. “I assume Mrs. Winter has skills in the kitchen, or she has engaged a cook who knows what boys require to thrive.”

  “Oh, there is no Mrs. Winter,” replied Mr. Winter.

  CHAPTER 20

  Ada stopped a short way into the forest. She could no longer hear the Hatter and the Hare. The light was low, but it was a green gloaming rather than a dusky one. The woods grew dense. Huge clusters of flowers of a pale soapsuds color, almost lavender grey, drooped from aged vines. “They are something like wisteria,” she found herself saying aloud, “and something not.”

  “A gentleman out strolling in the meadow!” cried an eager voice. “Just what I hoped to see.”

  It took Ada a few moments to locate the source of that remark. An elderly man in a rusty coat of chain mail was rooted to the earth by thick ropes of vine. They had grown up around him, coiling woody tendrils around his legs and waist and arms. Even as Ada watched, new fingerlets of green stretched to explore his ears and the wispy white hair upon his pate.

  “I’m hardly a gentleman,” she replied, “and this is hardly a meadow.”

  “And I am hardly surprised,” he replied. “I tend to muddle. Dear sir, would you be so kind as to untwist this vine from me? I fear I shall be late for the occasion.”

  Ada went to work with a will. She tugged at the newest shoots because they were most supple. When they snapped, she began struggling with the more rigid coils. “How did you come to be entrapped?”

  “I’ve always been susceptible to the beauties of nature,” he replied. “Nature knows it, and takes advantage. I heard your utterance—­that the hanging blossoms were something like wisteria and something not—­and I was trying to decide what they were most not like. It was either a raven or a writing desk. As I paused to decide, nature got the better of me. There, you are a brave young gentleman. I’m sorry for any damage to your skirts. Your wife must send the bill to my accountant. My solicitors will counter-­sue. The whole merry game will begin again. I am the White Knight, by the way.”

  “I am Ada. I am looking for my friend, named Alice. I have no wife. I am no gentleman.”

  “Oh, you protest, but quality will out, sir. Look what a comfort you’re being.”

  Ada had freed his arms. He helped her pick at the thickest parts of the vine around his legs. Eventually he was able to pull his feet out of his metal shoes, leaving them trapped. His stockings were in need of a good rinsing. But he wrenched two bunches of drooping flowers from the nearby vines. He thrust a foot into the midst of each of them. They looked like festive, silvery lilac footwear, more suitable for a visit to the baths than to a court of arbitrage.

  “Given your armor, I assume you’re a knight with a K.”

  “Sometimes,” he said, “though I have lost my helmet and visor. For all I know I have misplaced the K in my name, too. But I would answer to a White Night, sans the K, without blushing.”

  “Night as in night-­time? I never heard of a White Night.”

  “The more common name of that animal, I believe, is Noon.”

  “But there is no night-­time in Noon.”

  “Ah yes,” he said, sadly and kindly, “the elderly militia know that there is, there always is. One can die at any moment, you see. Noon is a disguise of whiteness put on by the eternal Night behind it.”

  He was old. She didn’t want him to talk about death. “Here is your helmet.” As she picked it up from the ferns, a feathery white plume at its crest detached. It flew itself away, looking for all the world like an escaping moustache.

  “My love to your devoted mother,” cried the Knight to his plume. To Ada, he said, “That’s a fine valet I have, none better. But you’ve been a good lad, too. I shall put in for a promotion to the Queen. Very likely you shall be made Sergeant-­at-­the-­Lower-­Extremities, as you helped release my legs and feet.”

  “I doubt it,” said Ada.

  “Well, they already have a Se
rgeant-­at-­Arms, as far as I’ve heard. In any case, the Queen will decide. She always does.”

  “Are you on your way to see the Queen?” asked Ada.

  “In a manner of speaking,” said the old man, looking about dubiously. “That is, I go out of my way not to see the Queen, as she has quite a temper, but I am rarely successful.”

  “I had heard the Queen was temperate,” said Ada.

  “Ill-­tempered, temperate, a distinction without a difference,” said the Knight. “As illiterate can refer to a cat who refuses to deliver a litter of kittens and instead delivers newspapers it has no capacity to read.”

  “Ill-­tempered and temperate are most certainly different states. They are opposites.”

  “The Queen has become quite raveled over the theft of her tarts,” insisted the Knight. “And you know what that means.”

  “No.”

  “It means unraveled. I rest my case.”

  Ada did not care to be rude. Still, she insisted, “Opposites cannot mean the same thing.”

  “Do you cleave to your belief about that?”

  “Of course, or I shouldn’t have made the remark.”

  “Then cleave yourself from your beliefs. It’s much of a muchness, or such of a suchness.”

  “Well,” said Ada, “in any case, I’ve never known an illiterate cat!”

  “Don’t become raveled or unraveled over it. Sir, shall we go?”

  Ada took his arm, as he seemed a bit wobbly on his pins. They made their way through the underbrush. “I have always heard that Queen Victoria was moderate in her tastes,” ventured Ada.

  “I never heard that at all,” replied the Knight. “Then, I have never heard of Queen Victoria.”

  “But you mentioned the ill-­temper of the Queen.”

  “I was referring to the Queen of Hearts,” he replied. “Ever since her tarts were stolen clean away, she’s been in a foul disposition. No one wants to attend her fête today, but if everyone sent in regrets she’d be left alone on the playing ground. She’d have to call for her own head to be cut off.”