After Alice (16 page)

 

CHAPTER 38

S
iam,” said Ada. “What sort of a name is that?”

“It is like Lazarus,” said the boy.

“Biblical?” asked Ada. Not for nothing was her father a Vicar.

Siam didn't reply.

Ada didn't understand Siam's point. Had he been put in a grave, like Lazarus? Or raised up from one? “I always wondered if Lazarus
wanted
to be raised up from the grave,” said Ada. “He had two sisters who were always arguing over whether to sit and listen to the Savior or whether to do the washing up. Martha and Mary, do you know about them? I always think there must have been a third sister, perhaps named Maggie, who didn't want to join either of her sisters in their worthy tasks, but preferred to get dressed up and go out dancing like a Jezebel. The noise in that house must have been ferocious. The sleep of the dead must have some advantage, don't you think?”

“Where are we at?”

Ada had been so accustomed to the peculiarity of her day that it took Siam's question to remind her of her circumstances. “I wonder. It's a very strange land, wherever we have strayed to. I assume you've just arrived, or you wouldn't be asking.”

“We came by London,” he said, “but so gritty and foul. Not like here.”

“Are you alone?”

“Now I am,” he said. Then he corrected himself. “Now I'm not.”

They looked about themselves. The White Queen seemed to be made of salt. She was blunting and softening in the wind. A bit of salt made itself at home in Ada's eye. She had to blink. She liked the White Queen quite the best among all the denizens of this place, but the poor creature was eroding fast. Now she was like a spool and now like a spindle. Now she was a pile of white sand tracked in from a foreign strand. As the miniature dune changed shape in rising winds, shrank to a mere pile as from a broken hourglass, something like a scrap of palmetto leaf revealed itself.

“Why,” said Ada, “I do believe I know what that is.” She leaned down and plucked the item out of the salty sand or sandy salt. She shook it out.

“This is a cloak made of seaweed,” she told Siam. “Come, let us try it on together.”

“That's not permitted of me,” he replied.

“Everyone else always makes the rules,” she said. “Just now, no one else is here. Come in.” She slipped the seaweed over her shoulders. “It's a capacious cape, with room for all. I have known it to be useful.”

“It smells like the air from Boston Harbor to Portsmouth,” he said, ducking under. “It smells like all beginnings.”

As Ada began to draw the cloak closed over their heads, she looked about to see how the world had changed, for surely it had. It always did. She noted a perforated set of images coming through the cape. Glowing and insubstantial, as if thrown by a magic lantern, or several magic lanterns operating at once. She saw the mouse with the marmalade jar, and the great hall with the glass-­topped table. She saw the seashore and the scraping roses. She saw the tired old Knight and the singing pig and the looping gravel walk and the troupe of liberated marionettes. The difficulty was in assembling such contrary information into coherence. Whenever she thought she might have begun to manage it, the images slid and shifted. The material meant something different. How very like a dream this all is, she finally said. Just like the song, merrily merrily, and so on. Like a boat on the Cherwell out for a summer picnic, and the Thames, and seeing what went past, and making up a tale that connected it all, while past it slid past it slid past. And life was just a dream.

Then darkness.

 

CHAPTER 39

L
ydia and Miss Armstrong came onto the property of the Croft through the shortcut. The lone cow in her corner looked ruminatively at them, but offered no testimony about whom she may have seen pass, and in which direction. The main walkway led to the portico, though a path forked off around the side of the house. Lydia intended to lead Miss Armstrong that way, through the kitchen garden to the back door. Another spontaneous encounter between Mr. Winter and Miss Armstrong would only make Lydia feel more sour in herself, and unsettled. But the front door stood wide open. Voices were heard in the steep midday shadows within. The choice was taken from her.

Mrs. Brummidge was wringing her hands and wiping her eyes. Oh, no, they've been found, and it isn't good, thought Lydia. A sunk boat on the Isis, a rotting beam in some hayloft hideaway . . . The instinct toward panic, once experienced, cannot be unlearned. “What is it, Mrs. Brummidge?”

“It's the bloody Begum of Banbury Cross, that's what it is. I'm set to get what for, and no mistake,” said Mrs. Brummidge.

“Whatever—­?” Before Lydia could speak further, voices rose in the hall behind the cook.

“This is intolerable.” Pater sounded pained. “Madame, I must insist that you take your leave at once.”

A volley of musical syllables flew forward from the hallway. A woman's accented voice, an oboe descant originating in the mysterious flyspecked Raj. Cajoling, syrupy. She appeared at the door hauling a straw hamper of some sort. A veil of blue and gold angled across her brow. From beneath a respectable tartan shawl cascaded several contrapuntal swags of glorious and unreasonable skirting. The woman was slim though more full of figure than most of the good wives and maiden aunts that Lydia had ever met. And dark, dark of complexion, though in a different way from Siam—­dark persimmon—­and glamorous beyond contemplation. But she was a nuisance, clearly. Mr. Winter was obligingly seeing her out.

“The great man, his interest in the wide world, it must include my shells from the sea; it will finish his work,” she was claiming, as near as Lydia could hope to understand.

“Mr. Darwin is in no condition to entertain impromptu guests. He came here under promise of privacy,” explained Mr. Winter. “You've been misinformed, Miss Gurleen. Miss Mittal. Madame Gurleen Mittal, whatever is proper to call you, Mr. Darwin has no wherewithal to examine your collection.”

“She's here to show more than her seashells,” said Mrs. Brummidge, brazenly. “I ought never have opened the door to her. Off with you, milady, and tell your brother he has overstepped, gossiping like that.” She waved the exotic woman down the walk with a flap of her apron. Gurleen Mittal disappeared at an uneven gait, her parcel of seashells bumping against her thigh. The bland English air in the garden was, momentarily, stained with incense of sandalwood.

“
What
was all that about?” asked Miss Armstrong as Pater appeared beside Mr. Winter.

“It's my fault, sir,” said Mrs. Brummidge, addressing both the gentlemen. “I made a misstep. I only barely hinted at the name of today's guest, you see, to my sister, in ser­vice in the buttery at Balliol, don't you know. She may have chirped it to someone who chirped it to someone else. And Miss Mittal has a brother stopping at Balliol over the summer months to do research in maths and suchlike. But I had no idea the hussy would hear of this. Any excuse, and there she is at the door again. Setting her ribbons to charm the widower. This time I take the blame.” She lowered her head as if she fully expected to be struck, though Mr. Clowd would not strike the top of a table.

“She's been here before? Those ­people, they don't know their manners.” Miss Armstrong fairly flashed outrage.

“They don't know our manners,” corrected Pater quietly. “She may think she's doing a kindly thing for me, to appear with a basket of specimens and hope to lift the burden of conversation off my shoulders. I wish I'd never stepped up to help her brother find his materials in the Bodleian. But no matter now. She's gone. It's a mercy she didn't come earlier or our esteemed guest would have found us lacking in honor as well as hospitality. Mrs. Brummidge, we
did
promise him anonymity.”

“Curse the day the Lord put a tongue in my mouth,” mumbled the cook.

“Mr. Darwin requires to visit the facilities again before we set out,” said Mr. Winter soothingly. “Mr. Clowd, would you kindly call for the carriage while I see to his needs? He's decided to stay in London tonight after all. He's too wrung out to get all the way to Down House in one day. Miss Lydia, Miss Armstrong, summon the boy, if you would. It is nearly time to go.”

Lydia opened her mouth, but no words came out.

Miss Armstrong spoke to Mr. Winter's back as he headed inside. “If Siam hasn't returned, then we have no earthly idea where he is. The boy has fled this house and its surrounds.” But Mr. Winter, hurrying down the passage, didn't catch her remark, what with his concern for Mr. Darwin.

“The young lad will be with Alice, no doubt,” said Pater, peering along the lane with an expression that suggested he was afraid Miss Gurleen Mittal might be huddled in the hedges, ready to pounce. “Lydia, where is Alice?”

“Off with Ada,” Lydia said, she hoped. She hadn't the heart to say more.

“Oh, Mr. Clowd,” said Miss Armstrong. She swept upon the portico and caught his arm. “To be pestered by well-­meaning towns­people of every stripe, common and exotic. Let us see your guests to their carriage without alarming them, if possible. Then, dear Mr. Clowd, I fear we shall have to send for the constable.”

 

CHAPTER 40

T
he darkness in which Ada and Siam had stood was both close and echoing. There had been time, a lot of time, in which to characterize it, but Ada hadn't been inclined to sort out the wool from the warmth of it. A sort of sleepiness had come over her, a balmy complacency. It hadn't been so bad.

None of this occurred to her, really, until the husk of seaweed fell away from them. My, what was that, was really all she managed to think, before the insistent demands of
here
and
now
barked in her direction once again.

Siam was blinking in the light. Ada thought it was daylight, but then she realized that ever since she'd tumbled into the foyer of the rabbit warren, she'd found herself in a place with a light that was, somehow, not expressly sunlight. Shadows on the ground positioned what she was looking at, but they were insincere, sloppy things. They tended to wobble if she looked at them through the sides of her eyes. As if they were trying to get away with something. The sky was blue, but vapidly, evenly so. It didn't seem to thin at the edges or deepen at the apex. I wonder, thought Ada, if ­people ever see the overland sun in their dreams.
I
don't believe I've noticed the actual sun once since my descent.

“Where are we?” asked the boy.

“Well, a bit of here and there, it seems,” said Ada. They were standing on a square lawn that had been recently rolled in very even stripes, back and forth. It resembled a checkerboard with lighter and darker squares. A thin and undernourished sort of woods grew up to the edges on three sides. Off center upon the lawn loomed that same old pedestal table with a glass top. And upon the tabletop was a key.

Where there was a key there must be a keyhole, thought Ada. Turning around, she realized that the fourth side of the forest-­room was a high stone wall in the uneven colors of scones and fresh farm eggs. The wall had a familiar look, as if it might edge a cloistered walk or a Fellows' garden in Oxford. A painted door that could use some touching up was set directly in the wall. “I have a strange feeling I've seen this door before,” said Ada.

“I never,” said Siam. He picked up the seaweed cloak. He began to fold it up. When it was the size of a Cornish pasty he handed it to Ada. She didn't want to eat it.

And to put it in her pinafore pocket might look like stealing. So she slipped it in the heel of her left shoe. It wedged there without complaint.

“A keyhole,” he said. “In the door. But I don't see no key.”

“There's a key on the table,” said Ada, “though this is a table for a dreadfully lofty member of society.”

“We never do climb that mast.” Siam put his hands on his hips and leaned far back. “It's a forbidding sky.” He meant the glass tabletop.

It is, thought Ada. As she looked, it seemed that reflections of something else steered and slid across the top surface. There was movement up there, soundless alarum of some sort represented in pale flickering shapes. But there was no way to tell what it might pretend to mean.

“The key, up there,” he said, pointing.

“I see it. Will it work in this door, do you think?”

“I known some keys and their habits.” He cocked his head toward the door. Through it, sounds of merriment and abandon. It was the brightest garden party of the season. It was where everyone would be. Ada guessed that she hadn't been invited because of her deformity. But maybe, now that she was not alone, Siam might find a way in. He was clever.

For a while they took turns peering through the keyhole at a festive affair neither could quite bring into focus. Ada thought she spied a recumbent Cat floating through the air, though perhaps that was a superior cloud in a feline formation. Then she imagined she saw Alice, at last, but a buxom grandee in a tortured headdress swept up and grabbed the child by the arm and concealed her from view. What Siam saw, when it was his turn, Ada could not say, for he didn't tell her.

“We want in there.” He said it neutrally. Perhaps he meant it as a question.

“I
do,
” Ada replied. “I've been searching for my friend Alice since I got here, and everyone says she was inclining toward a garden party. Have you been looking for anyone?” she continued, remembering her manners just in time.

“No one to look for,” he mumbled. “No one left.”

Ada had a hard time being sure what he meant. “If they didn't leave, then they must be here,” she said encouragingly. “Maybe in there.”

“Won't be. So it don't matter none. But we get in if you want to.” He looked at the key. Because the glass was invisible, the key appeared to float in the sky. “Can't climb that big old table but I do maybe break the glass.” He hunted around for something to throw. He found a few small white rocks. When he tossed them they turned into blackbirds and flew over the garden wall. “Contrary stones,” he said.

“How about your boot?”

He took it off. He pitched it as hard as he could. It banged against the underside of the glass tabletop, quite hard. The key danced, making a sound like tin thunder. The glass was resolute. The shoe fell down. It hit Siam on the head.

“Must be something to use. Some stone or other thing to throw. Nothing's unbreakable,” he told her. He went about on his hands and knees feeling in the grass. “Hell's doorbell, what's this?”

“Show me.”

He opened up his hand. It was a small black game piece, perhaps from a chess set. “Let me see,” she said, looking at it more closely. Then she said, “Siam. What happened to your hands?”

He pocketed the item and put his hands behind his back. She said, “Show me. Tell me.” He did not want to do that.

She would not let it go. Finally he opened his palms again. The skin on the inside of his hands was paler than the rest of him, a private sort of color one might keep to one's self, for it looked vulnerable to Ada. But that was not what she needed to see. There were round marks on his hand, red and raw, all the same size, some of them overlapping. Each one about the circumference of a grape.

The sounds of the party on the other side of the wall may have carried on and they may have gone away; she was no longer listening. There was a terrible feeling in her insides. “I want to know,” she said.

He relented at last. “Back when we was all together still, they play a game one night. They planning to take us upcountry for loaning to another overseer, for the otherly cotton was ready and they needed hands. They'd some liquor the night before we was to leave.” She reached out and held his hands. “It nothing worth saying now.” After a long pause: “So, they tell us young ones iffen we want to buy our freedom, come on here. I din't like it but—­” Another pause. “—­but our own said, Maybe this your chance, it only gets worser when you get on in years. Maybe they knowed what going to happen to them somehow. Maybe they could see into days ahead. I put myself up for freedom. The bosses say it cost a dollar and I says I ain't had money paid me afore. We give it to you, they go. You collect a hunderd pennies in one minute by Master's timepiece and you bought yourself free. Then they shakes a jar of coppers onto the belly of a shovel and holds it over the campfire long time. When they think it fun enough, they say, get yourself ready, and now you go, boy. The pennies go in the dirt around the fire and I got to pick them up and keep hold on them.”

“Oh,” said Ada, with a sound like a kind of punch in the air, or out of it.

“I gets forty-­two hot cents before that minute up,” he said, holding out his hands again. “Here's the proof.”

“Oh,” she said. “And no freedom.”

“Nothing next, but that we left,” he said. “One by one, and not on the same path, turns out.”

“And here you are.”

“And wherever this be, I don't know. Some mystery or t'other.”

She lifted her shoulders and dropped them. “Well. With me I suppose.”