After Alice

  “Does that mean that at night it takes longer to get from London to Oxford than it does to get from Oxford to London? Or shorter?”

  “Oxford is the beginning and the end of all nonsense. Don’t be foolish,” said Miss Armstrong. “I don’t know what it means, I’m just jabbering.” On they pressed, toward Cornmarket. In the heat, the Saturday morning market was already disbanding. The streets were emptying as luncheons were being laid, cheese slapped upon the boards, shutters going up for an afternoon break and perhaps a slumber in the back room or a little something nicer if the wife felt overheated enough to remove her skirts. A dog padded across the junction at Carfax with all the insouciance of a gypsy tinker at the gates of a bishop’s palace.

  They turned into the Broad. In the light and dust the street looked as if lined by buildings made from skillfully carved oat bread. The spirits of Miss Armstrong and Lydia Clowd lifted at the sight of two girls emerging from Blackwell’s, but those girls started to run away. “Oh, Ada could never lift her limbs like that,” said Miss Armstrong. She slackened the pace that had quickened in hope. An older woman, a grandmother sort, next emerged from the shop. Her squawkeries were lost in the breeze. The girls paid no heed. They rushed on, laughing merrily.

  Miss Armstrong and Lydia Clowd pushed east. The colleges, barricaded against the two females in favor of faith and reason, stood stolid in the strengthening wind. A squidge of something got into Miss Armstrong’s eye, or so she said. She dabbed at her face with a cloth. Lydia turned to examine the reddening eye with a gallows mercy. “A bit of grit, a midge, a fly, a plank, a mote, what does it matter?” Miss Armstrong snapped at Lydia.

  “Whatever it is, blink quickly to flush it out, for if I’m not mistaken—­”

  Lydia was not mistaken. The Vicar was bearing down upon them from across the Broad. He was heading in the same direction they were, but faster. Miss Armstrong flinched. “Reverend Boyce, sir,” she began as they seemed about to collide upon the pavement.

  “You’re far afield, Miss Armstrong, but I daren’t stop to pass the time. The doctor has sent me to collect a new bromide suitable for the infant. We expected you back to help when you’d collected Miss Ada from the Croft. Have you given yourself leave for a perambulation? It won’t do, Miss Armstrong! And in this heat! Watch out, weather’s coming. Or, forgive me, perhaps you are on an errand for Mrs. Boyce, did she send you out for—­?” The Vicar caught himself in time. Family secrets stayed within the household. He pivoted. “Good day to you, Miss Lydia. I hope you and your family are keeping as well as can be expected in this season of sorrow.” He didn’t pause to see if his hopes were being met; he cannonaded away. The various demands of Mrs. Boyce and the Baby Boykin got the better of him. Apparently he didn’t know that his clumsy Ada was lumbering about God’s good creation without the benefit of a chaperone. Lydia elected not to summon him back to clarify. For this she received a wordless moue of gratitude from the beleaguered governess. In a moment the Vicar had disappeared beyond where the Broad became Holywell.

  In a low voice, Miss Armstrong said, “Oh, what are we failing to consider, Miss Lydia? Where can they be? If they are lost, I am lost, too. I shall never get a position supervising children again. I shall have to go below-­stairs.”

  “How sad for you,” said Lydia. “And of course, they may be dead. That’s even more below-­stairs than household staff.”

  “You are cruel and then you are kind and then you are cruel beyond compare. I do not understand you, but there is no time to try. I ought to have told the Vicar. But he sends me into such a tizzy. He doesn’t know the half of it!”

  “Which half does he know? That you are incompetent, or that you are sentimentally excitable? Or is there a third half buried in there somewhere that even I can’t detect?”

  “Who taught you to bruit words about like a barrister? It is unnatural and unbecoming in any female. In a girl of your slender years it is demonic.” Was that a spatter of rain, or drops from a mop shook out an upper window? “I do not put my heart onto a table in the operating theatre so that a young voyeuse like you can dissect it and see how it works or fails to thrive.”

  Lydia fell silent. Not wanting to follow the Vicar, they took an alternate route, and turned into the Parks Road. Before long the University Museum gathered its stone haunches in the distance and grew larger as they approached. “If you are let go, you could get a job dusting the bones of the great lizards dug up in the desert. Dinosaurs,” said Lydia. “Those creatures are already dead, so you could do them no harm.” But perhaps she had only thought those words, as Miss Armstrong did not rise to her own defense. Lydia tried again. “Did you ever see that claw of a dodo, and the painting some Dutch master made of it?”

  “The Vicar does not approve of his household visiting such a place. It only strengthens the temptation to doubt. I understand the painting is famously vile, in any case. Such a creature deserves to be extinct.”

  “Were ugliness the criterion for extinction, we’d be freed of a great many matrons stopping to call and to console my father. Dodos, the lot of them.”

  On they passed, across the University Parks, toward the Cherwell, toward home, past Park Town, where the university’s dons, forbidden marriage, were said to lodge their female companions. Once or twice Lydia thought she saw the hastening figure of the Vicar emerging from the plunging shadows of an elm, becoming faint in the light. But from this distance that could be anyone hurrying home before the storm.

  Were a dark boy standing in those shadows, thought Lydia, we might not even see him.

  Then through the lane this time, hoping that the lagging girls and the stray boy might have turned up under their own authorities. But Lydia knew how everyone lingered under a death sentence. Postponing it with prayers and promises was as ineffectual as pleading upon a star, or throwing a copper into a wishing well. You lost your copper as well as your faith in wishes, and prayers.

  CHAPTER 38

  Siam,” 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 an
d 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

  Lydia 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

  The 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, slop
py 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.”