After Alice

  Who had he become, just by menacing this jittery white girl? He felt altered, other than himself. Nothing was like it had been before. Am I even Siam? he wondered. He had not always been Siam, he’d had another name. At Dover, the minister of customs had examined his papers and then asked a question in an accent too quaint for an American boy to understand. Mr. Winter had given the tiniest nod of his head, so he’d murmured, “Yes I am.” But the officer had heard “Siam.” He’d written that down on the paper. Siam had had a ready-­made alias he hadn’t intended to choose.

  The room was so dark. He felt gone, invisible, as if he had no more presence. All for a little black toy that had no face. He went past the checkered board on its table. He ventured to the mantelpiece and found a footstool by the hearth. He climbed up, and pushed aside the purple cloth that hung over the looking-­glass.

  The light was poor. Siam couldn’t see himself at first.

  “He’s in the drawing room,” came Lydia’s sharp voice in the passage. “Go say your piece, Mr. Winter.”

  A knock at the door. “Are you in here?” Mr. Winter’s voice angry.

  The boy might have answered “Yes I am,” or “Siam,” or even “Samuel,” had he been in there. But the drape was settling across the looking-­glass. The room was empty.

  PART THE SECOND

  There are bits and pieces of the Thames all over Oxford, runnels and reaches and backwaters—­“more in number than your eyelashes,” Keats said—­and beneath the very centre of the city runs the Trill Mill stream, a gloomy underground waterway in which it was discovered, one day in the 1920s, a rotted Victorian punt with two Victorian skeletons in it.

  —­JAMES/JAN MORRIS, OXFORD, PAGE 31

  CHAPTER 27

  A noisy place and dark, the world has always seemed to Siam. A millstone working upon its quern not grain but shale, or glass, something splintery. The last light with any real warmth had been at home, long ago, in a place and a time that no longer existed, with ­people whose names he didn’t say even inside his own mind. As if by thinking of them he might betray them anew. Might put them to some further punishment beyond that which had been accorded them by the slave-­hunters.

  Now, the boy is momentarily impressed by the silence. The drape on the other side hasn’t fallen all the way back, it seems. An uncovered triangle of glass, hardly the size of his hand, remains. He climbs down onto a footstool placed in this room just where he had positioned it in the other. Curious. He is stealthy, a cat making no noise. The room is very like the one he has just left; equally dark, shrouded. It’s too gloomy to know what sort of room it is. Possibly a second parlor. He hopes this isn’t the room where Mrs. Clowd is laid. He wouldn’t want to be in a dark place with a spooky corpse.

  He puts his hand to his face, palm side in because he knows the back of his hand is darker and will reflect less. Creeping up to the mantel and keeping as low as he can, he peers through his fingers across into the room from which he has escaped. Beyond the dark room with the chessboard, out in that passageway, a vector of summery light suddenly sluices, describing a wedge of golden swimming motes. Into the glare, struck as if by fire, Miss Lydia advances, and steps a foot into the dark other room. Her ghoulish pale hair falls upon her neck. Her hand lingers on the doorknob uncertainly. She opens her mouth and says something. Her expression betrays vexation, perhaps the start of worry. She may be calling his name, but he can’t hear it.

  In the absence of sound, he hears traces of things that he heard in a handful of hidey-­holes from Georgia to Tennessee to Pennsylvania and other places. He and his party had learned to disappear in a split moment, sometimes stowed all together, sometimes separately. But he’d always been with one or the other of them, never alone. A smokehouse in the Blue Ridge steeps, a sugaring shed in Brooklyn. Smoke and sugar. And once in the gritty mouth of a coal mine, where they’d huddled in darkness, afraid to strike a match for fear of firedamp, that methane monster.

  Disembodied words from the memory of those moments attach themselves to the soundless speaking of Lydia, who is addressing someone in the corridor behind her.

  Don’t know the names they’d be using, farmer; but when you got black rats in the woodpile no need to know their names before you trap them.

  If we find you’re harboring stolen property, we’d not be averse to burning this ham house down.

  Sending cargo up north, ma’am? Ma’am? Why, you look like you near swallowed a sack of saltpeter, ma’am. Not going to harm a whisker on your old chin, ma’am. Put down your gun, it’s liable to make a row and waken the cooey-­doves.

  Behind Lydia, into the room, comes Mr. Josiah. Siam can’t see his face clearly; Lydia is in the way, and so are the tears in Siam’s eyes. He doesn’t dare wipe them; the movement of his hand would attract attention. He squeezes his lids shut. Even through closed eyes he can sense when the light has gone out of that other room. When he cautiously looks about, he sees the light has largely disappeared from this room, too.

  There is no telling when that missie will come back, hunting him. Siam doesn’t want to plot an escape route in the bright sunshine of an Oxford noon. He’ll hide here till tempers cool and his brains warm up. He has to think about what next. He hunches down to his haunches and makes his way forward, feeling the edges of tables. He brushes against the chess set. But that was in the room he just evacuated. Another set here, an identical one? Even in the anonymous dark, he can feel the forward pawn, just like the one he has just replaced. A little thing to bring him such trouble. It meant no harm—­as if things could have meanings.

  Oh, but now he’s knocked it on the carpet, and can’t make it out in the gloom. He leaves it be.

  As much out of habit as not, he backs up into the open hearth, which is clean, clear of andirons and ashes. If someone opens the door, he’ll be simply shadows, no more, the ghost of smoke.

  In Cheapside last week, in London, he’d come across a chimney sweep at dusk, fresh from his day of labor. Boy or stunted man, bowed by a hawking cough, that person stared at Siam. Bright eyes alert in his sooty face. He’d said something to Siam. Blessing or curse, neither Siam nor Mr. Josiah had known, for the fellow’s mouth seemed thick with growths that made an already difficult accent into an impossible language. But though his words had been hooded, and the spit on the paving stones viscous and bloody, the sweep’s eyes had looked full of pity and mercy. When he gathered up his brooms and his brushes and turned away, it seemed to Siam like losing another brother.

  At this memory, Siam thinks he might climb the flue. He has done this before, once, stealing through the big house with Clem the time he was loaned to pick the cotton fields of Bellefleur or Bellerive or Bellefuck or wherever it was. Clem had later been found out and beaten, but he’d never let on Siam was trespassing in there, too. Siam wonders if the chimneys here are made the same way, with protrusions for the hands to grasp. He’ll find out.

  He makes a start of it by feeling to make sure the space is wide enough for his head and his shoulders. He stands up, gingerly, into the darker dark. He raises his hands and gropes, and locates a hold. With one hand on the brick and the other pressed against the wall of the flue, he pulls himself up so his feet are not standing in the hearth anymore. He wedges himself a few feet upward, angled in the flue like a twig in the neck of a brown glass bottle. But he can’t find a second brick with which to pull himself higher. Then the first one breaks in his hand. With a mighty crash, he slips to the hearth. Somehow, against his plans and hopes, he smashes through the hearth, or maybe it opens on a hinge for the dumping of ashes into a cellar. He continues falling through the dark. Eventually I’ll reach the kitchens and fetch up in a pot of stew, and ruin their lunch, he thinks, and almost begins to laugh, as if his despair has a bright aspect to it. Still he falls. The kitchen must be a long way down, he thinks, halfway to Hell.

  CHAPTER 28

  Lydia remarked, “How curious of the ch
ild. Where has it gone?” She could hear her own voice taking a public, amused sound, as if Siam were a toddler scurrying under tabletops, and she were pretending ignorance of it, for his delight.

  “Why would he come in here?” asked Mr. Winter.

  “I sent him to replace something he had”—­Lydia hadn’t clarified for herself just how far she was going to go with this—­“collected.” She glanced first at the chessboard. Her eyes hadn’t adjusted to the gloom. She couldn’t tell if all the pieces were there. “He is playing a game on us.”

  “He’s not the type to play games. Siam, come forward, if you’re here.”

  Nothing stirred in the room. Lydia was confused. After these months, this terrible space still seemed the laying-­out room, and would remain so until her father stirred the grief out of it. It wasn’t her place to throw open the drapes. Yet she crossed to the windows and did just that, for the weasel child had got the better of her. “I can’t believe he’s slipped out a window. Look, they are latched, each one.” She turned. The two dozen chess pieces stood in their proper ranks. “Is he that stealthy that he might have slipped out behind my back? But it was scarcely turned.”

  “You under-­guess his capacity for intrigues.” Mr. Winter took the room by eminent domain. He strode to check the shadowed side of the dish cupboard, where the brown and white pieces had wakened and were winking dustily in the surprise light. The Staffordshire leech jar, its perforated lid set aside, held a clump of dead flowers set there in memoriam months ago. Brown stalks and curled petals. So little color left that Lydia couldn’t remember what sort of flowers they’d been. Rhoda must be frightened of this room, and avoided it since the occasion. What a failure of a maid she was. Lydia crossed the room. She twitched the violet drape into place around the over-­mantel looking-­glass. She smoothed the cloth.

  “I asked him about his escapades,” she said. “My, how he husbands his story. If you’re the one who has trained him to hold his tongue, you’ve done your job well.”

  “As a guardian, I can only reinforce lessons that his life has allowed him,” said Mr. Winter. “The boy has a history he would sooner forget. I know some of it, and I would let go of it if I could. Some realities are too onerous to be borne by nations, let alone by children. But we are all chained in this.” He sounded cross yet his words rolled out smoothly, as if he’d prepared his statement for a sympathetic congregation. How fond of his own sonorities, for a young man.

  “Lydia, Mr. Winter.” That was her father’s voice beyond the door to the drawing room. “I insist. Mr. Darwin requires assistance at once.”

  She was all daughter, that was all she was. “Yes, Father, of course.”

  She swept the American abolitionist out of the room. “But this is not right at all,” said Mr. Winter in a backstairs voice to Lydia. “Siam is too petrified to go off on his own.”

  “I shall find Siam playing with our Alice, no doubt. She’s about somewhere. I shall make it my chief aim to locate them, right now. Oh, but isn’t the day filled with missing children!” She spoke lightly and with a hushed voice. This focus, this emphasis required her to lean into Mr. Winter’s shoulder. She overbalanced, though. She had to catch herself on her fingertips against his broadcloth, an accident of poise. Her blood leapt in her arteries to counterweigh the advance.

  The great man was in the passage, his broad famous hands flat upon his waistcoat, thumbs touching, little fingers pointing to the floorboards. She allowed herself to sense the presence of illness, intellectual temerity, and theological scandal. He moved by in a froth of white whiskers. Fame and mystery, they are two sides of any earthbound prophet. There was a hint of sharp mustard in his wake. She pulled the door to the drawing room closed. She leaned against it, hands clasped behind her back. She watched Mr. Winter grasp Darwin’s elbow and lead him toward the side door and the privy.

  “Lydia.”

  She turned to look at her father, who raised an eyebrow. It was not her foray into the unused parlor that he was commenting on, but that she had been there with Mr. Winter. Unchaperoned. “Remember who you are,” he told her, before turning his face away.

  Ah, but that was easier said than done, she thought. In order to remember who you are, you have to have known it in the first place.

  Her father stood in the passage by the parlor door. He was distracted by both his colloquy with Darwin and his concern for Lydia. What he said next—­she could hear it quite clearly—­may have served two lines of thought at once.

  He said gently,

  “Genus holds species,

  Both are great or small.

  One genus highest, one not high at all.

  Each species has its differentia, too,

  This is not that, and He was never You.”

  He may have been talking about the Savior. Or about Mr. Winter. Or possibly about dinosaur relics in the Oxford Museum and great apes in the Congo basin.

  “Shall I tell Mrs. Brummidge to bring out the luncheon?”

  He rubbed his face. This may have been a nod, or a grimace. He said, “Alice is keeping herself quiet today, anyway.” He passed back into his parlor. He closed the door upon Lydia’s caution and her anger.

  In the kitchen, Mrs. Brummidge said, “So you’ve misplaced the visiting heathen creature, too?” She heaved the joint out of the oven and onto the butcher’s board. It was blackened on one side like a log removed from the hearth. Mrs. Brummidge chose some words unsuitable for Rhoda’s ears and the maid went rash red. But Lydia refused to flinch at the assault, which barreled on. “For Lord’s sakes! The young scamp must’ve scarpered up the front stairs whilst you was tossing your ribbons at his master. He’s playing with Alice in some quiet way, and that’s not right. Not in this house, with no Missus to remind you or Alice what’s done or not to be done. Go up at once, and if they’re around, bring them both down. I’ll dish up some scraps and milk gravy when I’ve done sorting out the platters. Perhaps a dark boy will prefer the charred bits.”

  Lydia flew up the stairs. The day seemed to be coming unstitched. It reminded her of her first and only trip to London in a railroad car. They’d crowded into a carriage with other passengers. Everyone, without considerations of privacy, talked their business across strangers. All their plans of what was doing in the City, and who was up from the country stopping in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and when someone would return, today or another, and alone or not. Lydia tried not to listen but her ears insisted. The railroad carriage rocked, at the stupendous speed of quite a few miles in an hour, and the railroad company didn’t seem to care if someone dropped a ham on the floor, and which child had forgotten to use the loo, and whether Auntie Pretzel would remember to collect them in Paddington. On lolloped the carriage, as if time would work out all concerns eventually, with remorseless accuracy, no matter how the passengers barracked about their lives. Alice had sat and looked out the window at the rushing world, and she hadn’t seemed to notice that she wasn’t alone. Lydia noticed.

  Lydia glanced in the nursery. She knew Alice wasn’t there. Lydia could feel Alice in the house as one could feel a spirit or an intruder. But Lydia might be wrong about Siam. Who knew if he was readying to make off with something more valuable? That the Clowd family had little of value but what was broken among them didn’t occur to Lydia. She sensed trickery and slippyness in Siam, as if he had evaporated in order to implicate her somehow. In something. She loathed him for it. She wanted to find him out at a greater crime, and cry foul.

  Dinah the cat and her two kittens slept in a lazy, shedding heap upon a trunk in a sunny window. Lydia nearly pitched a shoe at them. It would have felt satisfactory to let a shoe go, but she didn’t. She gritted her teeth and passed by, opening chamber doors and even wardrobes in case he was hiding therein.

  He couldn’t have climbed out upon the roof, surely? The window over the front portico was flung open, wide enough for a limber lad to scram
ble out, and woody vines around the lattice might have allowed him to climb down. But in the heat of June that window was always open.

  She went up another half-­flight to the box room under the eaves. This dusty space featured only one window. Union cloth was tacked across it. She ripped it down. The view from atop the house gave out over the heads of trees to the river and meadows. She might see Siam on the run. She could hurry downstairs with news for Mr. Winter about his miscreant.

  No boy to be seen; nor Alice; nor Ada; nor that pesky Miss Armstrong. They had all been swallowed up in their own escapades. Ought Lydia start to be anxious for Alice? It wasn’t unusual for the child to wander off, but this day was beginning to feature a comedy of absences. What Puck might be bewitching the neighborhood with metamorphoses, parliaments, evaporations and misalliances?

  She saw Mr. Winter waiting a few feet off from the privy house. He was studying the bees that hovered and swam over the snapdragons. She might have hallooed, did girls her age do that. She lifted her face in case he felt her gaze and saw her staring, so she might be caught looking statuesquely into the distance. The glassy summer noontime paused, trembled upon its long silent note of heat and anticipation. A few clouds over the Cotswolds cast upon that horizon a rich, regal grey, with a nap like Parisian velvet.

  CHAPTER 29

  The housemaid had pulled closed the drapes of the cloak of seaweed. The fronds interlaced and locked like iron mesh around Ada, the maid, and the performing troupe.

  The seaweed, though dead and dry, was still growing. It seethed and twitched densely. Soon it had filled in all the spaces among the strands. With no horizon to settle her eyes upon, without little sense of up-­and-­down or here-­and-­there, Ada was unmoored. Blood pounded in her eyelids but devoid of the orangey pulse that happens when one closes one’s eyes at the bright seaside. She seemed motionless, in an attitude like a figure in a tableau vivant intended to reprove. The Virtues of Modesty, Restraint, and Perspicacity at Play in Elysium. Though struck with paralysis in the dark, she had the uncomfortable sense of velocity. As if she and her companions were moving at a remarkable speed, and unaware of it. As if they were ignorant, decorous creatures painted around the rim of a dinner plate that had been sent hurtling through the air toward someone’s head.